Marden seemed puzzled for a moment, and then he nodded his understanding. "You mean the fruit we picked. We sent that to Inland this time." He pointed at the massive planet just coming up over the eastern horizon. "They've had a poor crop in—" He named a locality the name for which Clane didn't catch. Then he nodded with an air of "Is-that-all-you-wanted-to-know?" and picked up the pail.
"Want the rest of this fruit?" he asked.
Clane shook his head.
Marden smiled cheerfully and, pail in hand, walked off briskly. "Got to get to work," he called over his shoulder.
Clane let him go about twenty feet; and then called afer him, "Wait a minute!"
He climbed hastily to his feet, and as the wondering Marden turned, he walked over to him. There was something about the way the man was swinging the pail that—
As he came up, he saw that he had not been mistaken. There had been about eight of the fruit in the bottom of the pail. They were gone.
Without another word, Clane returned to his chair.
The afternoon dragged. Clane looked up along the rolling hills to the west with their bright green garments and their endless pink flowers. The scene was idyllic, but he had no patience. He was a man with a purpose; and he was beginning to realize his problem.
There was a solution here; and yet already he had the conviction that the human beings of Outland and Inland were obstacles as great or greater than he had found in Linn.
Unhappily, he bent down and picked a pink flower, one of the scores that grew all around him. Without looking at it, he broke it into little pieces, which he dropped absently to the ground.
A faint odor of chlorine irritated his nostrils. Clane glanced down at the broken pieces of flower, and then sniffed his fingers where the juice had squeezed from the flower's stem.
The chlorine was unmistakably present.
He made a note of it in his journal, stimulated. The potentialities were dazzling, and yet—he shook his head. It was not the answer.
Night came. As soon as the lights were on in all the houses, he ate his own evening meal. And then, accompanied by two of the barbarians, he started his rounds. The first window that he peered in showed nine people sitting around on couches and chairs talking to each other with considerable animation.
It seemed an unusual number of occupants for that house. Clane thought: "Visitors from Inland?" It was not, he realized seriously, impossible.
From where he stood, he was unable to see the source of the room's light. He moved around to the window on the far side. Just for a moment, then, he thought of the light as something that hung down from the ceiling.
His eyes adjusted swifly to the fantastic reality. There was no cord and no transparent container. This light had no resemblance to the ones aboard the Riss ship.
It hung in midair, and it glowed with a fiery brilliance.
He tried to think of it as an atomic light. But the atomic lights that he had worked with needed containers.
There was nothing like that here. The light hung near the ceiling, a tiny globe of brightness. He guessed its diameter at three inches.
He moved from house to house. In one place a man was reading with the light shining over his shoulder. In another it hovered over a woman who was washing. As he watched, she took the clothes out of the tub, shook the tub as if she was rinsing it, and then a moment later put the clothes back into steaming
water.
Clane couldn't be sure, but he suspected that she had emptied the dirty water from the tub, refilled it with scalding water—possibly from a hot spring somewhere—and all in the space of a minute resumed her task.
He couldn't help wondering what she did with the clothing when she finished. Did she step "through" to where the sun was shining, hang up her clothes, and have them beautifully sun-dried when she woke up in the morning?
He was prepared to believe that that was exactly what would happen.
She seemed in no hurry, so he moved on. He came presently to the home of Marden. He walked to the door slowly, thinking: "These people are friendly, and without guile. They have no government. There's no intrigue. Here, if anywhere, an honest approach will win us what we want."
Oddly, even as he knocked on the door, it seemed to him there was a flaw in his reasoning.
It made him abruptly tense again.
15
Marden opened the door. He looked relaxed and easygoing, and there was no doubt about his good nature, for he did not hesitate. He smiled and said in a friendly, half humorous tone:
"Ah, the man who does not work. Come in."
There was a suggestion of tolerant superiority in the comment, but Clane was not offended. He paused in the center of the room, and glanced around expectantly. When he had looked through the window, a woman had been present. Now, there was no sign of her.
From behind him, Marden said: "When my wife heard your knock, she went visiting."
Clane turned. "She knew it was me?" he asked.
Marden nodded, and said: "Naturally." He added, "And, of course, she saw you at the window."
The words were simply spoken, but their frankness was disarmingly devastating. Clane had a momentary picture of himself as these villagers must see him. A slim, priestly peeping Tom who prowled around their homes in the dead of night and who asked stupid questions.
It was not a pleasant picture, and it seemed to him that his best reply was to be equally frank. He said: "Marden, we're puzzled by you people. May I sit down and talk to you?"
Marden silently indicated a chair. Clane sank into it and sat frowning for a moment, organizing his thoughts. He looked up finally.
"We're from Earth," he said. "We're from the planet where all human beings originally came from, including your people."
Marden looked at him. His gaze was polite. He seemed to be saying, "If you say so, that's the way it must have been. I don't have to believe you, of course."
Clane said quietly: "Do you believe that?"
Marden smiled. "Nobody here remembers such a connection; but it may be as you say."
"Do you have a written history?"
The villager hesitated. "It begins about three hundred years ago. Before that is blankness."
Clane said: "We're both human beings. We speak the same language. It seems logical, doesn't it?" Marden said: "Oh, language." He laughed.
Clane studied him, puzzled. He recognized that the villager could not accept an abstract idea which did not fit in with his previous concepts.
Clane said: "This method you have of moving yourself and your goods from Outland to Inland, and anywhere else on either planet— have you always been able to do that?"
"Why, of course. It's the best way."
"How do you do it?"
"Why, we just—" Marden stopped, and a curious blankness came over his face; he finished weakly—"do it."
That was what Clane had thought. Aloud, he said: "Marden, I can't do it, and I'd like to be able to. Can you explain it to me simply?"
The man shook his head. "It's not something you explain. You just do it."
"But when did you learn? How old were you the first time you did it?"
"About nine."
"Why couldn't you do it before then?"
"I was too young. I hadn't had time to learn it."
"Who taught you?"
"Oh, my parents."
"How did they teach you?"
"It wasn't exactly teaching." Marden looked unhappy. "I just did what they did. It's really very simple."
Clane had no doubt of it, since they could all do it, apparently without even thinking about it. He eyed the other anxiously, and realized that he was pressing the man harder than appeared on the surface. Marden had never had thoughts like this before, and he did-n't like them.