“Morning,” a voice said, behind him, startling him out of his reverie.
Bernard turned. “Morning,” he said to Dominici. “You surprised me.”
“Been up long?”
“Only a little while, Dom. Ten minutes, maybe. I just walked out to have a look-see.” Bernard’s eyebrows scooped into a frown; Dominici’s sudden blurt of sound had shattered the dream for good.
“You sleep well?” Dominici wanted to know.
“Middling.” Bernard knelt and ran his hand over the cool dewy grass. “I was bothered by dreams.”
“Dreams? That’s funny. So was I.” Dominici laughed quietly. “I dreamed I was honeymooning again. Took me back fifteen, eighteen years. The two of us in a watercar, skimming over the waves. My arm around her waist. Her hair billowing out in the breeze. And casting a line, pulling a big thing with teeth out, Jan afraid of it and asking me to throw it back, into the water…” Dominici paused. “I used to wake up drenched with sweat when I dreamed about Jan. Not now, though. I suppose I’m starting to forget. She was killed in a transmat discontinuity,” he added after a brief pause.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Bernard flinched at the image of a young woman smiling goodbye, stepping into the radiant transmat field, then vanishing forever into the void in a one-in-a-trillion accident. The transmat was not perfect; yet this was the first time Bernard had ever spoken to someone directly involved in any sort of transmat accident.
“If you have to die,” Dominici said, “I suppose that’s the best way of any. You don’t feel a thing, not even for a quarter of a second. One minute you’re alive, the next you don’t exist. I didn’t have a funeral for her. I kept hoping she’d turn up, you know. There was always that element of doubt. But the transmat people said no, there definitely had been a slipup in the coordinates, she was gone forever. They gave me two hundred thousand in damages. And you know something? When I held that check in my hands I broke down and cried for the first time since it had happened. Because then I believed it.”
“What a terrible thing to happen,” Bernard muttered.
“We were going on vacation,” Dominici said quietly. “Everything was packed, I was standing there with the suitcases in my hands. She kissed me, stepped through…”
“Don’t go on. You’re hurting yourself.”
“I don’t mind,” Dominici said. “Some of the pain is dying down now. After ten years. Look, I’m not shaking. I’m talking about her, and I’m not shaking. That’s a step. I’m just slow to get over it, that’s all.”
They talked on for a while, as the others of the group began one by one to awaken within. It occurred to Bernard that he liked Dominici more than any of his other fellow wayfarers; Havig, though not the stereotyped fanatic Bernard had originally pictured him as, was far too austere and unbending to make a close friend, while Stone, for all his superficial diplomatic guile, was much too open and simple a person. But Dominici had an agreeable complexity, this vitriolic little man who blasphemed irreverently at Havig and yet, in times of genuine stress, bowed himself to utter a Latin prayer and make the sign of the Cross.
One at a time, now, the others were coming out, stretching their legs after the short night. Stone joined them first, then Nakamura with his cheery greeting, then Havig, nodding brusquely in that neither-friendly-nor-hostile way of his, and then Laurance, lost in his own private bitterness. After him came Clive and Hernandez, with the taciturn Peterszoon strolling out last and glaring at the group in general as though each one, personally, bore the direct responsibility for his current predicament.
“What are we supposed to be doing?” Clive asked. “We just stand here and wait, eh?”
“Maybe they’ll feed us,” Stone said. “I’m starved. Is there any sign of breakfast?”
“Not yet,” answered Bernard. “Maybe they were just waiting until we were all awake.”
“Or maybe they won’t feed us at all,” Dominici suggested. “We’re just a pack of filthy lower beings, after all. And if they decide…”
“Look there!” Hernandez sang out suddenly. “I’ll be damned! Look!”
Every head turned as one to look in the direction of Hernandez’ tautly pointing arm.
“No,” Bernard gasped in flat disbelief. “It just isn’t so. It’s a hoax—an illusion…”
For an instant, a nimbus of radiance had settled lightly to the meadow some fifty yards from the group of Earthmen, having drifted down from far above. The light had glimmered briefly, then flickered out.
And in the glowing afterimage of the light, two burly figures could be seen—two massive dark-skinned figures, not precisely human, that staggered uncertainly over the moist grass, looking about them in bewilderment and—perhaps— fear.
Skrinri and Vortakel.
The kharvish.
The haughty Norglan diplomats.
“We have brought you companions,” said a Rosgollan voice of invisible source. “The negotiations may now proceed once more.”
The big Norglans looked as though they were drunk, or else just badly disorientated. They came to a halt, though, seemingly collecting their wits, and made a swift recovery from their attack of the blind staggers. Then all their recovery went for nought as they recoiled in astonishment upon catching sight of the Earthmen.
“Are they the same ones as—as we talked to before?” Dominici asked.
“I’m sure of it,” Bernard said. “Take a look. See, the bigger one is Skrinri, the one with the scar on his shoulder is Vortakel.”
It was so hard to tell alien beings one from another, Bernard thought. Their very alienness served to draw the attention away from any minor differences of appearance that would aid in distinguishing them. But unmistakably these were the two Norglans who had come as kharvish to the Earthmen.
The Norglans drew near, seemingly making an attempt to master their total bewilderment. In a tone that was harsh, guttural, quite unlike his mellow and confident boom of old, Skrinri said, “You—Earthmen? The same Earthmen?”
Stone was supposed to be the spokesman of the Terran group. But Stone was gaping in dumbstruck wonderment. After an instant of cold silence Bernard called out, “Yes. We have met before with you. You are Skrinri—and you, you are Vortakel.”
“We are.” It was Skrinri who still answered. “But—why have you come here…?”
“We were taken here, not of our own will.” Bernard illustrated the process by graphically snatching up a blade of grass. “Our ship was captured and taken here. But what of you?”
Skrinri, apparently still overwhelmed by the enormity of what had been done to him, did not reply. It was Vortakel who spoke, in an unsteady voice. “There was—there was light all around. And a voice said, Come, and the world was not there any more. And—and we are now here…” He stopped, as though abashed at his admission of the ease with which they had been yanked across the universe.
It was discomforting, and yet in a way strangely satisfying and pleasant, to see how completely shaken the two Norglan emissaries were. Not surprisingly, Skrinri and Vortakel seemed thoroughly demolished by the abrupt discovery that they did not represent the pinnacle of evolution in the universe after all.
“Where are we?” Skrinri asked.
“Far from home,” Bernard said. He groped for the words he wanted; how was it possible to explain in communicable terms the concepts “galaxy,” “parsec,” “universe”? He abandoned the effort. “We are—so far from home,” he said after a moment’s thought, “that neither your sun nor ours can be seen in the sky.”
The Norglans looked at each other in a way that seemed to connote simultaneous suspicion and distress. The two aliens spoke with each other for a long while, in their own consonant-studded, vastly involuted language. The Earthmen stood by, listening without comprehension, as Skrinri and Vortakel discussed the situation.