Rod grimaced. "I spoke too sensibly," he said. "Now I'll make a prophecy. When we land we'll wait. And presently some survivors of the race of the next planet out will come to us. And I think they'll be friendly."
Joe blinked. "Ghosts?"
"No. Real people," Rod assured him. "People that happened not to be home when their world was murdered but perfectly real people. You saw what they were like in the televisors."
"How'll they come?" demanded Joe skeptically. "Spaceships?"
"More likely aeroplanes," said Rod, working the ship down with infinite pains. "Maybe ground-vehicles. But they'll come!"
In this, though, he was wrong. He let down the Stellaris with the utmost of painstaking care. There was air outside, and winds. There was a vast sea of cloud and streamers of mist that writhed up from it.
Sometimes the mountain-top was hidden by white stuff. Sometimes it was laid bare. But at long last the Stellaris settled with a noticeable jolt upon the barren rock of what appeared to be an upward-slanted small plateau rather than a pointed peak.
Rod pointed out a port. There, in plain view from where the ship touched ground, was a shining, mirror-like surface. It had been a liquid once. It was solid metal now. A quarter-mile away there was a shattered carcass which was only a quarter of the Stellaris' size but surely had once been a nearly spherical space-ship.
But Rod was mistaken about waiting, about having people of the supposedly dead race come to them.
They didn't have to wait. The people were already there on the mountain-top, waiting for them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the Cards
THE Stellaris settled again through thick and swirling mists. Slowly and cautiously, and slowly and cautiously, she moved down toward the white oblivion the clouds promised and produced.
There were strange people in the control-room of the Earth-ship. The tallest was no more than four and a half feet tall and they were distinctly rotund, all of them. They made clear high-pitched sounds to each other, and now and again one of them put urgent hands upon Rod at the controls and made the same clear sounds to him.
At such times the sounds made sense. When there was physical contact there was meaning in the musical tones of the small people. At other times they were only sounds—very musical, more or less pleasant, but only sounds.
But of course the same could be said of any unfamiliar Earth language.
Rod had been prepared for it. After all, he'd had a highly useful hunch in a dead city and he'd been obsessed with the thought of coming to this planet, and he'd had a dream which ignored information he possessed.
Had his own subconscious mind dictated that dream, it would surely have pictured a metal pyramid on the cloud-wreathed world as the origin of the pool of metal. But the dream did not picture that at all.
When the other facts were taken into consideration it added up to limited, incomplete information from somewhere, from a source which had some knowledge that Rod did not possess and lacked some data that he did.
Explanation was complete, now. The dream was accurate as far as it went. The little people now in the ship's control-room had been very brave indeed. They'd come out of the mist to meet the Stellaris as it landed and they'd made gestures obviously intended as a welcome.
And Rod had gone out to them. He carried a flame-weapon taken from the captured pyramid-ship but he left it in his pocket. He had no uneasiness about the air because the small people breathed it and the air of their home planet was suitable for humans.
So the group of half a dozen rotund figures and Rod—inevitably grim—had met on the top of the one mountain to rise above the planet's clouds. There was not exactly tenseness in the air. Rod felt an anxious, an actually desperate sensation of hope and fear together, communicated to him in the odd fashion of a hunch.
He spoke. His tone was dry. "We're all in the same jam, it seems. And with a community of dislikes we ought to be friends."
Flutelike notes filled his ears. Then a short round figure approached, very hesitantly, and held out two hands. They were not human hands but they were empty. Rod put out his own. The round figure almost apologetically moved closer and very tentatively offered to touch hands with Rod.
"I'll try anything once," said Rod. "Go ahead!"
The hands touched. The round man's flesh was warm and firm. But instantly the high-pitched sounds were language. Urgent, apprehensive words. It was even reasonable that comprehension should follow physical contact but Rod did not wait for theoretic discussion. He spoke himself and his words were understood.
Minutes later he led the way to the air-lock.
"These people," he said crisply inside the ship, with the small group clustered behind him. "These people are members of a colony from the planet we visited. They know the rest of their race is wiped out. They've every reason to be our friends.
"If you hold hands with them you can talk. We'll work out explanations later. Right now we're going to shift the Stellaris down out of sight beneath the clouds. Get talking to them and find out all you can."
And then he went to the control-room with the rotund man who had first touched hands with him. He prepared to shift the Stellaris. Here, atop the mountain, at least sometimes it could be sighted from space and bathed in a deadly push-pull beam.
The ship rose on her pressor-beams. She moved. But navigation in a world of mist was ticklish. Rod had to feel his way cautiously. More, the small people had come a long way to greet the Earth-ship. It was necessary to ease the unwieldy space-craft through many passes among high and unseen mountains.
There were moments when he was absorbed in the task and the trilling speech of the little folk was a disturbance. And there were many times when warm hands touched him irritatingly—but at each such contact the twitterings became intelligible—and he received useful knowledge about his immediate problem. He was beginning to feel more tolerant.
When the mountains were cleared there was a long flight of some hundreds of miles over unseen level stuff which might have been either flat land or sea. Rod did not like it He liked to see what he was doing. But in snatches between the more practical data on course and height he caught fragments of twittering not meant for his ears. And they were reassuring.
When at long last he set the ship down—it was actually the third time he had brought her to ground since her lunatic departure from Earth—when at long last he landed again he was reasonably satisfied about the small folk. But he was wholly dissatisfied with the picture of the future as they saw it He was not even very much pleased with the ship's surroundings when he cut off the power.
The Stellaris lay in a forest of gigantic trees, with trunks from ten to fifty feet in diameter. There was everywhere a gray twilight. Huge wide-spreading branches at once shut out a view of the clouds and seemed to form a roof which kept out the mist, so that the space beneath them was clear.
Later one of the biological assistants told Kit that the order of things in vegetation was reversed in these trees. Instead of taking moisture from the ground and losing it through the leaves, these trees absorbed water through their foliage and sent it down to their roots.
But under their protection the colony from the third planet had set itself up to survive. There was a tiny power-house, quaintly like the architecture of the dead cities in its details. There were small houses. And everywhere, some fifty to a hundred feet up on the tree-trunks, there were light-projectors to throw light down on the colony and its inhabitants and their cultivated fields.