“Naverly Tol.”
“Whatever. When you get there, you will be contacted by someone.”
“Human or alien?”
“Don’t ask questions. You’ll know when they make contact. When they do, they will give you something. Something very valuable. That’s all you need to know right now. You are to bring it back to me. Understand?”
“Simple enough. If nothing goes wrong.”
“Nothing can go wrong, Harry. Trust me. This has all been worked out. There’s no room for error.”
Harry kept his doubts hidden. The more he went along with her, the more skeptical he became. Obviously there was much going on here that Victoria wasn’t telling him.
There was a lot going on that he wasn’t telling her as well, so in a way he felt they were even. But he was beginning to realize that just as there was no reason for her to trust him—whether she knew it or not—there was no reason for him to trust her.
“Is that a promise?” he asked.
“You have my word on it,” she said, with a glint in her eye that left Harry certain that her word was worth about as much as Harry Widener’s ticket to the Titanic.
While the Rik had arrived in Earth orbit in great starships that burned in the night like distant beacons, their preferred mode of travel was the transit line: instantaneous transmission of matter across the vast emptiness of interstellar space. It was much easier once you had a transmitter and a receiver in place at each end.
The station for Boston was out in Riverside, at the far end of the Green Line on the T. And in a way, Earth itself was like that trolley stop—the last station on the end of this line for decades to come.
It took nearly an hour to make the ride to that last stop. And it took a couple more to pass through the succession of transit stations between Earth and Naverly Tol.
Eventually, Harry stood a hundred meters from the edge of a great canyon under a flawlessly clear blue sky. The gash in the ruddy desert plain dropped away from him, yellowish brown around the edges and rusty red in its depths. A dry channel carved its sinuous course through the bottomland, its twists and turns magnified and amplified into the wide expanse of the canyon walls.
A single twisted skeleton of a long-dead tree clung to the stone in front of him. The plastic structure of the transit station stood behind him.
This was Naverly Tol.
An automated aircar appeared from behind the Rik building, collected its single passenger, and flew off over a stark and lifeless plain. It deposited Harry after a short flight on a piece of gravel and sand that appeared as arbitrary as it was colorless.
According to the book he’d bought at the Globe, the inhabitants of this world had done this to their planet themselves.
“An ecological disaster of the first order has occurred here within historical time,” Professor Melville Grant had said. “All their subsequent culture is a reaction to this disaster, which must have occurred over a very brief interval. The shock waves of planetary destruction can be found in the patterns of the Tolian culture, in the pathologies of the Tolian character, and in the constant, ceaseless trek that the Tolians have set themselves upon since the collapse of their natural habitat and the consequent destruction of their technological civilization…”
Harry had gone over that part of the book six times, starting over and over again each time he was interrupted. He’d never gotten much farther.
The arid wind sucked the moisture out of his body despite his rik-suit, and the windblown grains of sand stung his face:
The Tolians began to appear within a few minutes.
The first one came alone. It wore a tunic over a spherical body with a wide belt around its middle. A conical head sat atop a long, flexible neck—with large, bulging eyes at the end of straw-colored stalks that sprouted from the top instead of hair. The thing had no chest, just an abdomen. Its legs bent backwards at the hip and knee joints, which were as large as grapefruit—either it had some form of arthritis or a complete set of ball-and-socket joints from one end of the limbs to the other. The elbows and shoulders looked the same. Its wide splayed feet were wrapped in rough-spun cloth. Its oversized hands had too many digits to count.
“Hello,” Harry said.
The Tolian stopped twenty meters away, tilted its eye stalks up and down to inspect the tourist from Boston, then continued on its way without making a sound.
A second Tolian arrived a few minutes later, pulled a tube from a pouch, put one eye to it, and scanned the horizon. A moment later, another To-lian ran up from the south and gobbled loudly.
“Water hole four kilometers to the southeast,” said the voice in Harry’s ear.
“Thank goodness for small favors,” Harry said to no one in particular, grateful for the Rik translation program.
“Blessed eating,” said the first Tolian.
They ran off towards the west.
The next to appear was a group about a dozen strong. Every tew meters, they would stop and one of them would dig in the sand with what looked more like a large spoon than a shovel. After a bit of intense work, the digger would make a loud exclamation and leap up holding a bit of vegetation or a wiggling bit of wildlife, then rush over to one of the large baskets they carried.
They, too, ignored Harry, but by now he’d gotten used to it. At least they didn’t try to put him in a basket.
“You all must have gone to the same school,” he called after them, softly so as not to attract their attention.
At long last, after a couple of obvious hunting parties came by, carrying their game lashed on long poles, the main party appeared.
The cloud of dust was as wide and thick as the distant mountains and climbed to the sky.
First came a line of bearers, then teams of draft animals pulling sledges that floated a meter off the ground. Finally the centerpieces of the procession appeared out of the red clouds of dust: nine great floating platforms carrying tents and canopies and mounting green and blue flags, with pennants snapping smartly in the wind.
And hundreds of Tolians, large and small, young and old, all joined in the great parade, some pushing the great platforms along, others leading animals hitched to them in harness, and many riding in the luxurious shade.
Harry stood slackjawed as they passed.
He had been standing that way for a long time when an oddly shaped creature appeared in the midst of the caravan—tall, slender, with shrunken joints, a nearly bald head, and a ridiculously small mouth. It was a man.
“I’ll bet you’re Harry Simpson,” he said. Harry blinked in surprise—partly because there had been no translating voice in his ear.
“Yes, I am,” he stammered. “And you’re—”
“Dr. Melville Grant, at your service,” he said, taking a deep bow. “I believe we have a mutual friend—Victoria Dickinson. Did she tell you that I’d be expecting you?”
Harry laughed, snorting through dust-caked nostrils.
“She told me that someone would be expecting me,” he said. “But she didn’t tell me who.”
Grant smiled. “I’m not surprised. I’m not accustomed to these games of secrecy.”
“That’s all right, neither am I.”
That drew another smile. “I assume you haven’t eaten. You wouldn’t want to spoil the experience, now would you? Come along with me. Dinner will be ready in a couple of hours. We can take care of our business afterwards.”
Harry nodded and fell into step alongside the exo-anthropologist. He still didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on, but he wasn’t about to let it show.
The great alien parade strode off across the desert, and this time he was a part of it.
When the sun was still a few degrees above the horizon, the Tolians slowed to a halt. Several of the largest, heaviest, and most overdressed members of the entourage came down off the floating platforms and assembled at the head of the parade. They talked, quietly at first, then with more vigor and volume, and finally with flamboyant gestures and abrupt movements, until they appeared to reach some kind of agreement, marching as a group to a point about forty meters to the north of the site of the discussion.