Hunter sheepishly raised his own mug. “It was more by chance than bravery,” he replied. “It was hard to miss your rather spectacular entry.”
“Courage and luck go hand in hand,” Berx said — he was the more boisterous of the two, his mustache was longer, and he was slightly taller. “We’re fortunate you were in the right place at the right time — so let that be our toast.”
They all drank heartily.
“There will probably be a reward in this for you,” Erx said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “I believe a bag of aluminum coins may soon be yours, Mister Hunter.”
Hunter was baffled. Aluminum coins? This was not a familiar term.
“What would I do with a bag of aluminum coins?” he asked, looking around the house. “Unless — well, I could melt them down and…”
“Melt them down?” Erx cried. “Good sir, aluminum coins are currency — you can go just about anywhere in the Galaxy on their value.”
“You do know that,” Berx asked him. “Don’t you?”
Hunter just shook his head. These men would probably be shocked by how much he didn’t know.
He quickly changed the subject. “What happened to your ship?” he asked them. “Do you know?”
Both men shrugged and after some more sniffing, began nibbling at their stew.
“We haven’t the faintest idea,” Erx said between mouthfuls. “One moment we were cruising along, the next thing we know, we’re losing power, we’re losing speed, we’re losing our propulsion core.”
“We popped out of Supertime,” Berx said. “And headed for the first place we saw. This place.
Apparently we are not the first to choose it as an option to blowing up in space.”
Erx drained his mug and nudged it toward the flask. Hunter poured both men another full mug.
“And what about you, Mister Hunter?” Berx asked. “How long have you been marooned here?”
Hunter hesitated again. Many times he’d wondered just what he would do when this moment came.
When he would finally meet another human being and be asked the question.
“I don’t think ‘marooned’ is the right word,” he finally told them. “The truth is, I’m not really sure what I’m doing here.”
Both men stopped eating for a moment.
“What do you mean by that, sir?” Berx asked.
Hunter just shook his head again. “It sounds strange, I know, but I didn’t crash here. At least I don’t think I did. It seems as if one day, I was just here. Standing on the side of this mountain, wearing this uniform, with not a clue as to where I came from.”
Erx and Berx just stared back at him. This was an unfamiliar concept to them. Everyone in the Galaxy knew where they came from.
“Well, obviously you were part of the crew of this shipwreck nearby — and suffered amnesia as a result,” Erx said.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Hunter said. “That wreck happened way before my time.”
As proof, he pointed to the wall next to the fireplace. It was lined with electron torches, small, tubelike device capable of assembling or disassembling just about any form of matter in nature. Trillions of them could be found throughout the Galaxy.
Berx took one of the torches from the wall and examined it. “It is an old design,” he confirmed. “Three hundred years, at least.”
“I built my aircraft with those tools,” Hunter told them “Melding parts I took from the crashed ship and putting them together from a sketch I made one night. Believe me, I’ve been over every inch of that wreck and it is in an advanced state of decay. It was certainly here long before me.”
Berx retrieved a small handheld device from his belt. This was known as a quadtrol. It could do just about anything, from reading a planet’s atmosphere, to scanning of piece of machinery for defective parts, to doing a complete physical examination of a human being. Erx passed the device across Hunter’s forehead and began reading results.
“There’s no indication that you’ve suffered any trauma,” he announced. “Strangely enough, you’re in perfect health. And it says here that you are thirty-three years old, Earth time.”
Erx leaned forward a little. “And you really have no memories of childhood? Parents? Siblings?” he asked. “No evidence of your past?”
Hunter just shook his head. “All I have are these,” he said.
He reached into his left breast pocket and came out with a small piece of fabric. It had a strange design on it, a series of red stripes with a square blue block in one corner containing a field of stars.
“Foreign to me,” Erx said, examining it.
“Me as well,” Berx agreed.
Hunter unwrapped the cloth to reveal a small piece of wrinkled material inside. On this was the faded image of a woman’s face, but not much more could be told from it.
“I found these two things in my pocket the day I realized I was here,” Hunter said, carefully folding everything back up and returning the small bundle from where it came. “Along with the fact that the name ‘Hawk Hunter’ was written inside my boots, they are my only clues — if they are clues at all. I have constantly racked my brain, trying to remember how it is that I got here — but it seems to be impossible to recall.”
He took a long drink of wine.
“I mean, I’m not without a brain,” he said softly. “I know how to speak, how to breathe, how to take care of myself. I figured out how to use the electron tools. I know how to fly—”
“That might be the strangest thing of all,” Erx interrupted. “Even the Master Pilots on Earth cannot fly like you. The best fighter pilots in the Space Forces would be amazed by your ability — as well as envious.”
Hunter poured them more wine.
“The name ‘Earth’ sounds familiar,” he said. “This is your home planet?”
“It’s everyone’s home planet,” Berx said. “It is our mother world, the place from which every person in the Galaxy is descended.”
Hunter looked across at them. “Even me?” he asked.
The two spacemen nodded.
Hunter thought about this for a moment, then said: “I was able to get into the logs of that shipwreck as well. About half of them were undamaged. About half of them I could understand. I know the crashed ship was part of the ‘Fourth Empire.’ Do you know where that is?”
Erx and Berx laughed. “The Fourth Empire is everywhere,” Erx told him. “It is the Galaxy. This Galaxy.
This planet, its stars, everything around it. Even you, my friend. You are part of the Fourth Empire.”
Hunter almost seemed proud. “Well, at least it’s good to know I belong here…”
“You are happier than some upon hearing that news,” Berx said under his breath.
“And as our greatest astronomers are certain that in the entire universe our galaxy is the only one that’s inhabited,” Erx went on, “the possibility that you are not from here is, well, impossible. Therefore your home world must be Earth. So there — one part of your mystery is solved.”
More wine was poured. Erx intentionally spilled some of it into his stew. So did Berx.
“Could I be from a different time, then?” Hunter wondered aloud. “From somewhere in the past? Or even the future?”
Erx and Berx screwed up their faces in identical frowns.
“Well, actually, we’re not into time,” Berx said, his voice dripping. “No one is anymore, not really.”
“He means the term itself is outmoded,” Erx explained. “Ancient words like ‘weeks’ and ‘months’ are still used in charting travel through space as a passage of time. But like other archaic words we all use, they are merely convenient and part of tradition. Something for the quadtrols to recognize. At least that’s my understanding of it.”