“Their root stock must have adapted back on Earth, too,” said Shira.
“Yes,” Ame said “If the human race was never able to exterminate rats, and the rats developed into an intelligent species after man was gone, the same might be true for the proto-Cuddlies. They might be the longfoots’ successors back on earth by now. After all, they occupied a similar ecological niche.”
“What a delicious thought, Ame!” Shira exclaimed. “A world ruled by cousins of the Cuddlies! But would a six-foot intelligent Cuddly be as huggable?”
Ame laughed. “I can hardly wait to get to Sol and see. But Bram-tsu, we mustn’t leave till we finish our work here.”
“That won’t be for a while,” Bram said. “We had an all-tree meeting before I left. You’ve been voted an extra year.”
The long plain was dotted with depots of crated material, each with a little band of partisans gathered around it vying for priority. Processions of cargo walkers, roped together in long caravans led by space-suited drovers, plodded across the starlit diskscape toward the staging areas where the rocket-assisted pallets were being loaded. All the wheeled vehicles had been pressed into service, too, and they could be seen bumping lazily across the flat vista, some of them achieving temporary flight.
Bram, helping Jun Davd to cinch a saddlebag full of astronomical data in place on a kneeling walker, paused in his work to watch a shower of sparks lift above the horizon and rise toward the blob of silver light that was Yggdrasil, hovering just to the right of the pendant moon.
“That’s the third in an hour from the other side,” he said. “The museum’s launchpad, it looks like. They must be working overtime.”
“They’re overloading their pallets,” Jun Davd said. “I’m surprised some of ’em got off the ground. I was over there yesterday helping the dispatcher to figure weights and balances, and we had to make them take off a big statue of three naked men wrestling a snake. Would have spoiled the trim—had the platform tumbling end over end. Had one of those art fellows almost in tears.”
“I’m sure they got it off later.”
“They’ve had a year and a half to loot that museum. I thought the idea was to take a small representative sample and leave the rest for the ages—or for whenever we can get back this way.”
“You know how it is. All of a sudden we’re about to leave, and they start having second thoughts. There’s this last-minute rush. Everybody’s suddenly discovered that there are things they just can’t bear to leave behind—the historians, the archaeologists, the agronomists, everybody.” He laid a hand on the saddlebags. “You, too, it looks like.”
Jun Davd grunted. “It just occurred to me that it might be a good idea to abscond with part of the backlog of original plates—do you know, their astronomers were still recording images on light-sensitive paper for centuries after they had more advanced methods available? Oh, I’ve got all the electronically stored data I need, but it’ll take years—decades—to go through it all, and I started worrying about accumulated signal errors.”
“Have you made any more progress in locating Sol?”
“There are four candidates in the immediate stellar neighborhood. I’ve all but ruled out three of them—but I want to refine my mass estimates a bit further before I set a course out of this system.”
“Waiting until the last minute, are you?”
Jun Davd hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the red-rimmed world-edge that overlooked the masked sun.
“I think I’ve identified our hidden friend, though. It must have been the star they called Delta Pavonis.”
Bram tried not to show his disappointment. “Well, it’s a possible reference point, I suppose. Though the relative positions of the stars in the neighborhood will have changed a lot in seventy-four million years.”
“Delta Pavonis was almost Sol’s twin,” Jun Davd went on serenely. “It was a G-type star with ninety-eight percent of Sol’s mass. It was about nineteen light-years distant. The other nearby G stars had masses of eighty or ninety percent of Sol, except for one called Beta Hydri—that was about one and a quarter solar masses—and one other exception. So the invisible star we’re circling almost has to be either Sol or Delta Pavonis—and I think we’ve already agreed that Original Man would hardly have dismantled his own system for a radio station.”
“Or it could be an interloper. A wanderer they used.”
“In that case, the proper motion of all the nearby stars would be much greater than we’ve observed during our stay.”
“Oh, right.” Bram blushed like an apprentice. After more than five centuries of subjective time, Jun Davd could still make him feel like the little boy whom Voth had sent to the observatory to take astronomy lessons.
“The interesting thing is that the other exception is also almost a twin of Sol—a G-4 of one point oh eight solar masses.”
“So we still can’t tell which—”
“Except for the fact that it was part of a triple star system that went by the name of Alpha Centauri. Which also happened to be Sol’s closest neighbor—just a shade over four light-years away.”
With mounting excitement, Bram began, “That means—”
Jun Davd nodded. “On the assumption that stars that close might have been gravitationally bound—however tenuously—I searched for matching G stars about that distance apart, one of which was part of a triple system.” A grin spread slowly across his dark face. “They’re still there, drifting hand in hand through the spiral arms, and they haven’t changed position much with respect to Delta Pavonis, either.”
“Jun Davd, you’re incorrigible! I’ll never forgive you for keeping me in suspense like that. How far?”
“Less than twenty light-years. Boosting at one gravity, we can be home in seven subjective years.”
Home. The word had a strange ring to it. Bram slapped Jun Davd on the back. “Let’s hurry and get started, then.”
The walker, misinterpreting the slap, rose to its full height. The drover came over and said, “Are you ready to go?”
“In a minute,” Jun Davd told him. He turned back to Bram. “There’s one more datum.”
“What’s that?”
“The G star that seems to be Sol happens to be at the exact center of the sphere of radio clicks that’s growing our way. As if it were the focal point.”
“Original Man!” Bram whispered. “He has come back!”
Jum Davd shook his, head. “That doesn’t seem likely. We’ve had the longfoots in between. We may be about to meet the next contender on the evolutionary treadmill. Or Smeth may be right. It may be a natural phenomenon. In any case, we’d better go. see.”
He picked up the remaining pair of saddlebags and slung them over his own shoulder. The other walkers in the caravan, feeling the tug of the rope, struggled to their feet. In a few minutes, Bram and Jun Davd were following the swaying line of biotransports down the well-scuffed trail to the staging area.
There were plenty of willing hands at the other end to help the caravan unload. Ame was there, supervising the lashing of some bulky crates to an enormous wooden frame whose booster rockets, bolted to the corners and along the sides, must have added up to a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. Bram also spotted his son, Edard, clambering around at the top of a mountain of freight, unfurling a cargo net. Edard saw him and took a nicely calculated leap that brought him floating down to within a foot of where Bram and Jun Davd were standing.
“Hello, Father. Hello, Jun Davd. What have you got there? Documents mostly? If you have anything fragile, I’ve got room for it with my stuff. I’m riding with the supercargo this load, and I can keep an eye on it for you at the other end.”