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Preliminary semantic analysis suggests their abstractions and constructs aren't quite like ours, but do fall
well inside the human psych range. All in all, then, you'd assume they're explorers from distant parts."
"Except for the primitive ship," Jaccavrie chimed in. "One wouldn't expect such technological
backwardness in any group which had maintained any contact, however tenuous, with the general mass
of the different human civilizations. Nor would such a slow, underequipped vessel pass through them
without stopping, to fetch up in this border region."
"Right. So ... if it isn't a fake . . . their gear bears out a part of their story. Kirkasant is an exceedingly old
colony . . . yonder." Laure pointed toward unseen stars. "Well out in the Dragon's Head sector, where
we're barely beginning to explore. Somehow, somebody got that far, and in the earliest days of
interstellar travel. They settled down on a planet and lost the trick of making spaceships. Only lately have
they regained it."
"And come back, looking for the companionship of their own kind." Laure had a brief, irrational vision of
Jaccavrie nodding. Her tone was so thoughtful. She would be a big, calm, dark-haired woman,
handsome in middle age though getting somewhat plump ... "What the crew themselves have said, as
communication got established, seems to bear out this idea. Beneath a great many confused mythological
motifs, I also get the impression of an epic voyage, by a defeated people who ran as far as they could."
"But Kirkasant!" Laure protested. "The whole situation they describe. It's impossible."
"Might not that Vandange be mistaken? I mean, we know so little. The Kirkasanters keep talking about
a weird home environment. Ours appears to have stunned and bewildered them. They simply groped on
through space till they happened to find Serieve. Thus might their own theory, that somehow they
blundered in from an altogether different continuum, might it not conceivably be right?"
"Hm-m-m. I guess you didn't see Vandange's accompanying letter. No, you haven't, it wouldn't've been
plugged into your memory. Anyway, he claims his assistants examined that ship down to the bolt heads.
And they found nothing, no mechanism, no peculiarity, whose function and behavior weren't obvious. He
really gets indignant. Says the notion of interspace-time transference is mathematically absurd. I don't
have quite his faith in mathematics, myself, but I must admit he has one common-sense point. If a ship
could somehow flip from one entire cosmos to another . . . why, in five thousand years of interstellar
travel, haven't we gotten some record of it happening?"
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"Perhaps the ships to which it occurs never come back."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps the whole argument is due to misunderstanding. We don't have any good grasp of
the Kirkasanter language. Or maybe it's a hoax. That's Vandange's opinion. He claims there's no such
region as they say they come from. Not anywhere. Neither astronomers nor explorers have ever found
anything like a ... a space like a shining fog, crowded with stars-"
"But why should these wayfarers tell a falsehood?" Jaccavrie sounded honestly puzzled.
"I don't know. Nobody does. That's why the Serievan government decided it'd better ask for a Ranger."
Laure jumped up and started pacing again. He was a tall young man, with the characteristic
beardlessness, fair hair and complexion, slightly slanted blue eyes of the Fireland mountaineers on New
Vixen. But since he had trained at Star-borough, which is on Aladir not far from Iron-tower City, he
affected a fashionably simple gray tunic and blue hose. The silver comet of his calling blazoned his left
breast.
"I don't know," he repeated. There rose in him a consciousness of that immensity which crouched
beyond this hull. "Maybe they are telling the sober truth. We don't dare not know."
When a mere few million people have an entire habitable world to themselves, they do not otten build
high. That comes later, along with formal wilderness preservation, disapproval of fecundity, and
inducements to emigrate. Pioneer towns tend to be low and rambling. (Or so it is in that civilization
wherein the Commonalty operates. We know that other branches of humanity have their distinctive ways,
and hear rumors of yet stranger ones. But so vast is the galaxy-these two or three spiral arms, a part of
which our race has to date thinly occupied-so vast, that we cannot even keep track of our own culture,
let alone anyone else's.)
Pelogard, however, was founded on an island off the Branzan mainland, above Serieve's arctic circle:
which comes down to almost 56°. Furthermore, it was an industrial center. Hence most of its buildings
were tall and crowded. Laure, standing by the outer wall of Ozer Vandange's office and looking forth
across the little city, asked why this location had been chosen.
"You don't know?" responded the physicist. His inflection was a touch too elaborately incredulous.
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"I'm afraid not," Laure confessed. "Think how many systems my service has to cover, and how many
individual places within each system. If we tried to remember each, we'd never be anywhere but under
the neuroinductors."
Vandange, seated small and bald and prim behind a large desk, pursed his lips. "Yes, yes," he said.
"Nevertheless, I should not think an experienced Ranger would dash off to a planet without temporarily
mastering a few basic facts about it,"
Laure flushed. An experienced Ranger would have put this conceited old dustbrain in his place. But he
himself was too aware of youth and awkwardness. He managed to say quietly, "Sir, my ship has
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