“The idea is sound, of course. We’ve followed it in other instances, without success. The moon men of Jupiter were no help. Neither were the Venusians. The Martians, of course, were out of the picture to start with. We don’t even know what they were like. Not even a skeleton of them has been found. Maybe the race they were afraid of got them after all—did away with them completely.”
Chambers smiled bleakly. “I should have known it was no use.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kemp. “I have to go to Sanctuary. I’ve seen some others when it happened to them. Johnny Gardner and Smith and Lempke. It’s not going to happen to me that way if I can help it.”
Chambers matched his fingers carefully. “You’ve been in the service a long time, Kemp.”
“Ten years,” said Kemp.
“During those ten years you have worked with scarcely a thought of yourself,” said Chambers quietly. “There is no need to be modest. I know your record. You have held a certain ideal. An ideal for a better Solar System, a better human life. You would have given your right arm to have done something that would actually have contributed to the betterment of mankind. Like finding out what life is, for example. You came here now because you thought what you had to tell might help.”
Kemp sat without speaking.
“Isn’t that it?” insisted Chambers.
“Perhaps it is,” admitted Kemp. “I’ve never thought of it in just those words. To me it was a job.”
“Would you do another job?” asked Chambers. “Another job for mankind? Without knowing why you did it? Without asking any questions?”
Kemp leaped to his feet. “I’ve told you I was going to Sanctuary,” he shouted. “I have done what I can, all I can. You can’t ask me to wait around for—”
“You will go to Sanctuary,” said Chambers sharply.
“But this job—”
“When you go to Sanctuary I want you to take Hannibal along.”
Kemp gasped. “Hannibal?”
“Exactly,” said Chambers. “Without asking me why.”
Kemp opened his mouth to speak, closed it.
“Now?” he finally asked.
“Now,” said Chambers. He rose, lifted Hannibal from his shoulder, placed him on Kemp’s shoulder. Kemp felt the sharp claws digging through his clothing, into his flesh, felt one tiny arm pawing at his neck, seeking a hold.
Chambers patted Hannibal on the head. Tears welled out of his sightless eyes behind the large dark glasses.
Sanctuary was a place of beauty, a beauty that gripped one by the throat and held him, as if against a wall.
Once, a few years ago, Kemp realized, it had been a barren hunk of rock, five miles across at most, tumbling through space on an eccentric orbit. No air, no water—nothing but stark stone that glinted dully when the feeble rays of the distant sun chanced to fall across its surface.
But now it was a garden with lacy waterfalls and singing streams arched by feathery trees in whose branches flitted warbling birds. Cleverly concealed lighting held the black of space at bay and invested the tiny planetoid with a perpetual just-before-dusk, a soft and radiant light that dimmed to purple shadows where the path of flagging ran up the jagged hill crowned by a classic building of shining white plastic.
A garden built by blasting disintegrators that shaped the face of the rock to an architect’s blueprint, that gouged deep wells for the gravity apparatus, that chewed the residue of its labor into the basis for the soil in which the trees and other vegetation grew. A garden made livable by machines that manufactured air and water, that screened out the lashing radiations that move through naked space—and yet no less beautiful because it was man and machine-made.
Kemp hesitated beside a deep, still pool just below a stretch of white-sprayed, singing water crossed by a rustic bridge and drank in the scene that ran up the crags before him. A scene that whispered with a silence made up of little sounds. And as he stood there a deep peace fell upon him, a peace he could almost feel, feel it seeping into his brain, wrapping his body—almost as if it were something he could reach and grasp.
It was almost as if he had always lived here, as if he knew and loved this place from long association. The many black years on Pluto were dimmed into a distant memory and it seemed as if a weight had fallen from his shoulders, from the shoulders of his soul.
A bird twittered sleepily and the water splashed on stones. A tiny breeze brought the swishing of the waterfall that feathered down the cliff and a breath of fragrance from some blooming thing. Far off a bell chimed softly, like a liquid note running on the scented air.
Something scurried in the bushes and scuttled up the path and, looking down, Kemp saw Hannibal and at the sight of the grinning face of the little creature his thoughts were jerked back into pattern again.
“Thank goodness you decided to show up,” said Kemp. “Where you been? What’s the idea of hiding out on me?”
Hannibal grimaced at him.
Well, thought Kemp, that was something less to worry about now. Hannibal was in Sanctuary and technically that carried out the request Chambers had made of him. He remembered the minute of wild panic when, landing at Sanctuary spaceport, he had been unable to find the creature. Search of the tiny one-man ship in which he had come to Sanctuary failed to locate the missing Hannibal, and Kemp had finally given up, convinced that somehow during the past few hours, Chambers’ pet had escaped into space, although that had seemed impossible.
“So you hid out somewhere,” Kemp said. “Scared they’d find you, maybe, and refuse to let you in. You needn’t have worried, though, for they didn’t pay any attention to me or to the ship. Just gave me a parking ticket and pointed out the path.”
He stooped and reached for Hannibal, but the creature backed away into the bushes.
“What’s the matter with you?” snapped Kemp. “You were chummy enough until just—”
His voice fell off, bewildered. He was talking to nothing. Hannibal was gone.
For a moment Kemp stood on the path, then turned slowly and started up the hill. And as he followed the winding trail that skirted the crags, he felt the peace of the place take hold of him again and it was as if he walked an old remembered way, as if he begrudged every footstep for the beauty that he left behind, but moved on to a newer beauty just ahead.
He met the old man halfway up the hill and stood aside because there was not room for both to keep the path. For some reason the man’s brown robe reaching to his ankles and his bare feet padding in the little patches of dust that lay among the stones, even his flowing white beard did not seem strange, but something that fitted in the picture.
“Peace be on you,” the old man said, and then stood before him quietly, looking at him out of calm blue eyes.
“I welcome you to Sanctuary,” the old man said. “I have something for you.”
He thrust his hand into a pocket of his robe and brought out a gleaming stone, held it toward Kemp.
Kemp stared at it.
“For you, my friend,” the old man insisted.
Kemp stammered. “But it’s … it’s an Asteroid jewel.”
“It is more than that, Harrison Kemp,” declared the oldster. “It is much more than that.”
“But even—”
The other spoke smoothly, unhurriedly. “You still react as you did on Earth—out in the old worlds, but here you are in a new world. Here values are different, standards of life are not the same. We do not hate, for one thing. Nor do we question kindness, rather we expect it—and give it. We are not suspicious of motives.”