Gordon shook his head. "I'll go with Varren. One of us has to stay to complete the mission if something happens to the other... and the one who stays had better be the one who can navigate the ship back out of here."
When Gordon and Varren stepped out of the ship they wore the suits that did double duty as space suits and defensive armor, complete with helmets. They carried guns.
Looking uncertainly around, Gordon began to feel a bit foolish. Nothing moved except the golden foliage high above, waving in the breeze. His helmet sound-pickup brought no sounds except the faint sounds of a forest.
"Where was this thing you saw?" asked Varren. His voice was very polite.
"Over this way," Gordon said. "I don't know... it could have been a leaf blowing..."
He suddenly stopped, looking upward. Twelve feet above the ground, fastened solidly inside a crotch of one of the trees, was a curious structure vaguely resembling a squirrel's summer nest. Except that this was no ragged thing of twigs and leaves but a solid little box of cut wood, with a door in its side.
"It was going toward this place," said Gordon. "Look."
Varren looked. He looked up for a long time and then he remarked quietly that he would be damned.
"I'm climbing up there to take a look," said Gordon. "If it's what I thought I saw, it won't be too dangerous. If not... cover me."
The climb would not have been difficult if it had not been for the clumsy suit. But he was sweating by the time he reached a crotch on which he could stand with his face level with the little box.
Gently, Gordon pushed at the little door. A faint snapping told of a tiny catch breaking. He continued to push but it was difficult... something, someone, was holding the door on the inside.
Then the resistance gave way, and Gordon looked inside. At first he could see nothing but a purple gloom. But the hot orange sunlight pouring in through the open door revealed detail as his eyes adjusted.
Those who had been trying to hold the door against him now cowered in terror at the far side of a little room. They were not much more than a foot high and they were quite human in shape. They were naked, one man, one woman, and the only strange thing about them apart from their size was the fact that their bodies were semitransparent, as translucent as plastic. He could see details of the wall-surface right through them.
They cowered, and Gordon stared, and then he heard the man speaking in a tiny voice. He could hardly hear, but it was not a language he knew.
After a long moment he slid back to the ground. He pointed upward and said to Varren, "Take a look. Maybe you can understand their language."
"Their what?" said Varren. He looked at Gordon as though he doubted his sanity. Then he too climbed up.
It was a long time before Varren came back down. When he did, he looked sick.
"I talked with them," he said, and then repeated that as though he didn't quite believe it. "I talked with them. Oh, yes, I could understand them. You see, a few thousand years ago they were our own people."
Gordon looked at him incredulously. "Those creatures? But..."
"The colonists," said Varren. "The ones Captain Burrel read about in the log, who were driven away from here by harmful conditions. They didn't all go away. Some had already become victims of the danger... a chemical constituent in either the air or the water here which, after a few generations, makes the human body evolve toward smallness."
Varren shook his head. "Poor little beggars. They couldn't tell me that but I could guess it from the few scraps of legend they did tell me. It's my guess that they mutated toward that semi-transparency as a camouflage defense against other creatures here."
Gordon shivered. There was beauty and wonder in the stars, but there was also horror.
"One thing I learned." Varren added. "They're terribly afraid of something out there in the west. I got that out of them, but no more."
When they went back to the ship, it was the last statement that interested Hull Burrel the most.
"It checks," he said. "We've been making a sweep with the sub-spectrum radar and it definitely showed large metal constructions several hundred miles to the west. On this world, that can only be the place we're looking for."
The Antarian thought for a little, then said decisively, "We'd never make that distance on foot. We'll have to wait until night and move the ship closer. If we hug the treetops, it might fool their radar."
Night on Aar was a heavy darkness, for this world had no moon. The phantom purred along over foliage glistening in the light of the stars, the scattered, lonesome stars of the Marches. Hull Burrel had the controls. Gordon stood quiet and watched through the viewer-window.
He thought he saw something, finally, something far ahead that glinted a dull reflection of the starlight. He started to speak, but Hull nodded.
"I caught it. We'll go down."
Gordon waited. Instead of going down at once, the little ship slipped onward, he supposed in search for a clear opening for descent into the forest.
He put his eye to the 'scope and peered. The glint of metal ahead sprang closer, and now he could see that the vague metal bulks were the buildings of a small city. There were domes, streets, walls. But there was not a single light there, and he could see that long ago the forest had come into this city's streets, and its ways were choked with foliage. Without doubt, this would have been a center of that tragically doomed colony of many centuries ago.
But there were a few hooded lights beyond the city. He touched the 'scope adjustment. He could see little, but it appeared that the old spaceport of the dead city had lain beyond it, a dark flat surface that the forest had not yet been able to overwhelm.
Gordon could just descry the glint and shape of a few ships parked there. They were small Class Five starships, not much bigger than the phantom scout. But there was one ship that had something queer about its outlines.
He turned to say so to Hull Burrel, and as his eye left the 'scope, he saw that their craft was still gliding straight forward and had not begun to descend.
Gordon exclaimed, "What are you doing? Do you figure to land at their front door?"
The Antarian did not answer. Gordon took hold of his arm. Hull Burrel yanked it free and knocked Gordon sprawling.
But in that moment, Gordon had seen Hull's face. It was stony, immobile, the eyes vacant of all emotion or perception. In a flash, Gordon knew.
He bunched himself and launched in a desperate spring at the Antarian. He knocked Hull away from the controls, but not before the Antarian had managed to give them a hard yank in his desperate attempt to cling to them. The phantom scout stood suddenly on its head and then dived straight down through the foliage.
Gordon felt the metal wall slap him across the temple, and then there was only darkness in which he fell and fell.
11
In the darkness Gordon heard the voice of a dead man speaking.
"So that's what he looks like," said the voice. "Well!"
Whose voice was it? Gordon's pain-racked brain could not remember. Then how did he know that it was the voice of a dead man? He did not know how he knew, but he was sure that the man who spoke had died.
He must open his eyes and see who it was that spoke after death. He made an effort. And with the effort, the pain and blackness rolled back across his mind more strongly than before and he did not know anything.
When he finally awoke, he felt that it was much later. He also felt that he had one of the biggest headaches in galactic history.