Krake turned and looked at her. She was in the shadow of the redfruit grove now, and her face was shaded by the tall rows of trees, the big leaves dark maroon and thick as leather. The air was sweet with the scent of the yellow, bell-shaped blooms, edged with the odd, sharp odor that drifted from the Taurs across the road.
She said apologetically, "Excuse me for being so nosy, but you look kind of lost. Is there something I could help you with, besides finding that old town?"
He shook his head, forcing his eyes to focus on her face again, to make sure that it was not the face he had dreamed of finding again. It wasn't. This young woman was the present, alive and vital in this strange new now.
"That's all right," he said. Then he took the plunge: "I'm on vacation from space, Miss Bunderan. I'm a waveship captain."
She stared at him. "You're what? I didn't know that was possible! I thought only Turtles could fly the interstellar ships."
"Almost always," he agreed, "but I'm a special case. This particular ship is chartered to me, for my own use. I earned it, too. The Turtles leased it to me to operate on their behalf, so I could do the things they don't like to do themselves. They don't like actually going down to the surface of planets much, you know, unless the planets are a lot colder and drier than Earth. I suppose that's because of what their home planet is like, but as to that I don't have a clue. I've seen the place from space, but that's all."
"But you've seen a lot of other planets?"
He grinned at her. "Eleven," he admitted. "At least, altogether there were eleven that I actually landed on. If you count the planets I've seen in the ship's screens, from orbit, probably a couple of hundred. They're not all worth landing on, you know."
"Eleven!" she breathed.
He said, "Well, that was over a lot of years. Not that many subjective years; most of my travel was at pretty nearly light speed, so time dilation made it go fast. You understand about time dilation—?"
He looked at her inquiringly. She nodded to show that she knew what time dilation meant. "You look young to have done all that," she observed.
Krake managed another grin. "I was born in 1923."
She blinked at him. "I beg your pardon?"
"1923. That's a date," he explained. "It's the year I was born, the way human beings used to count the years before the Turtles came. 1923 was what we called a vintage year for boy babies; I was born just in time for the war."
"War," the girl repeated flatly. It was a word out of the dim past.
"Oh, yes, we had wars then. This was a big one—we called it World War Two—and I was right in the middle of it. The Turdes must have been cruising around the area, checking us out from a distance. Then, when everybody's attention was on the war, they came in for some sampling missions. That was when they picked me up. 1945. I was twenty-two years old. I'd been flying combat for nearly a year, and the war was almost over. I was a fighter pilot, you see. I got shot down in the Coral Sea, strafing a surfaced Japanese submarine."
He paused, remembering that time. "It didn't scare me much right at first," he said. "I thought there was a good chance that somebody from a carrier might pick me up—"
He shrugged. "They didn't, though. Nobody came near me. I drifted a week in a rubber boat before I saw anything but clouds and waves, and then the thing I saw didn't belong to human beings. It was a Turtle scout craft exploring the planet. I don't think saving me was exactly intended as an act of mercy. Turdes don't really operate that way. What they wanted was to collect a specimen of the human race without attracting attention. But they did save my life while they were doing it."
He stared into space. "That was centuries ago by Earth time—not quite fifteen years by my watch and my diary. I guess you know what happens to time when you're traveling near the speed of light—oh, sorry. I asked you that already, didn't I?"
Moon looked at him sympathetically. The man was troubled, she could see. She wanted to touch him reassuringly, but, after all, he was almost a complete stranger.
He thought for a moment, brooding. Then he shrugged. "I tried to learn their language, but that took a long time. They had to develop the transposer first, you see. You know how it is with Turtles and Taurs. Nobody can make the sounds of their languages."
"I can, a little. Taur, I mean, not Turtle," she offered. "Thrayl's a Taur, and he understands me, and I understand him."
He looked at her blankly. "That's nice. Anyway, the Turtles are smart. I finally worked out enough language so I could understand most of what they said in their language, and they could figure out my English. They interrogated me. They— put me to work." He grimaced. "That was the first work I did for them. Helping them understand the human race. I told them all I could about the Earth, because I figured they couldn't make things worse than the war already had." He paused for a somber moment before going on. "And I worked on their ship, and after they saw I could run it well enough they made me a deal. The Turtles are honest traders. They do pay for services. So when they had tested me out and they were quite sure I could handle it they leased me a starship of my own. I've still got it. I've been running it on charters for them ever since, me and my crew."
His voice trailed off. To break the silence, Moon offered, "I never met anybody who'd been in a 'war' before. I think in some ways that's the best part of the Turtles coming—at least we don't have those terrible wars any more. The Turtles don't approve of them."
Krake laughed sharply. "And do you know why? Have you ever heard of the Sh'shrane?"
Moon Bunderan thought for a moment. "N—no, I don't think so—"
"Well, they're why the Turtles don't believe in war," he declared harshly. "Don't think it's some kind of moral superiority for the Turtles. They fought the Sh'shrane when they had to, all right. They just don't need to go to war when they're dealing with people like us."
Under the curly beard, Moon Bunderan could see that his jaw was pulsing. "Haven't you noticed?" he cried. "You don't have your freedom any more, either. That's a little detail they didn't bother to tell me when they picked me up—that they were going to take over the planet—and the whole human race along with it!"
Behind them there was a worried, warning rumble from the Taur, and Francis Krake realized he was frightening the young woman. "Oh, hell, Maddy," he mumbled, "I'm sorry. I just got a little over-excited. Tell your Taur I didn't mean any harm."
"Thrayl knows that," she declared. "It's all right." And then, after a moment, "Who's Maddy?"
He blinked at her. "What?"
"You called me Maddy. Is that someone you know?"
He looked away unhappily. "Not anymore," he said. "Not for a very long time now . . . and not ever again."
What Moon Bunderan wished was that she could spend the whole day with this exciting stranger. But it was impossible; she and Thrayl were supposed to be going into town for supplies for her mother, and finally, reluctantly, she let the man from space go about his search for the old town of Portales.
Then he was gone.
Moon didn't want that to happen. On her way to town, she made a conscious effort to keep her mind on him. That wasn't hard, at least at first, for Captain Francis Krake was certainly the most interesting thing that had happened to her in a long time. But that didn't last, and then the nagging worries at the back of her mind, that she had managed to suppress for a brief time, began insistently to come back.
Worriedly, she glanced into the rear-view mirror. She saw Thrayl's purple-blue eyes gazing soberly and insistently into her own. And, sickly, she knew that there couldn't be any doubt about it.