Chapter XI

Dusty awoke to find the sunshine streaming in through a small porthole and lighting the cabin cheerfully. The smell of fresh air was in his lungs, a pungent, pleasant smell faintly of cinnamon or nutmeg but not quite either. He recalled that he had folded out on the divan in the salon, now he was in one of the cabins below the salon level. He wondered how he had arrived.

He stretched his muscles, the cool sheets felt pleasant against his back. Then he wondered who had undressed him and how anybody had been gentle enough to do the job without waking him. He looked around the cabin expectantly and as he looked, his door opened and a woman came in.

She was wearing white from cap to slippers and Dusty pegged her for a nurse at once. She was wholesome enough, but neither her face nor her figure would have stopped any traffic on Fifth Avenue. She carried a book with a finger slipped between pages to mark her place and in her other hand she held the Marandanian equivalent of a cigarette. A pleasant curl of smoke rose from the lighted end.

"Hello," she offered brightly. "And how do we feel this morning?"

"We feel fine," grunted Dusty. "And we'll feel better after a shower, a shave, and some of that smoke you're using. I'd also enjoy a change of clothing."

"We took the liberty of having your uniform cleaned. The shower and shaving gear is in the bath--there--and as for the cigarette, I can offer you one right now."

"Give," said Dusty with a grin. She handed him a case and snapped a lighter for him. He puffed and found that the stuff, while far from tobacco, was tasty enough. He took a deep puff and let the smoke filter out through his nose.

The nurse said, "I hope you don't resent sleeping in the--ah--"

"The raw? I do it all the time." Dusty took another puff and swung his feet overboard onto the deck. It was not deliberate, Dusty was just uninhibited and the question of wandering across a cabin dressed in nothing did not even occur to him. The nurse said, "I'll be waiting for you in the salon." She left, not precipitately, but with a certain air that removed all embarrassment.

Dusty showered and shaved and dressed in his cleaned uniform. When he got to the salon, Barbara was there already, also freshened and cleaned.

"So this," she said, "is Marandis."

The nurse nodded cheerfully. "This is Marandis. You'll have to tell me how your Terra is; I've never been anywhere near that far from home, you know."

"Sure," nodded Dusty. "But now that we're on Marandis, what do we do next?"

"Oh. I'm to escort you to a formal meeting of the Bureau where you'll meet Gant Nerley face to face."

"How's Scyth Radnor?"

"Why, he's doing very well. He's hospitalized and he'll be out and howling for the skin of the man that shot him in about a week."

"He'd better take a month off for practise, first," grinned Dusty.

"Or," chuckled the nurse, "leave other men's women alone."

"Yes," agreed Barbara.

* * * * *

The nurse nodded. "You're very attractive," she said with no trace of jealousy or envy. "I can see Scyth getting side-tracked along your direction. I am a little disappointed in Scyth--seems to me he could do better than a frauland for you."

"Better than a what?"

"Frauland. That bauble he gave you. You wouldn't know, of course, but it comes from Selira, a stellar colony not far from here. It's incredibly cheap."

Barbara tore the chain getting the bauble away from her. "Next time," she promised sharply, "I'll plug Scyth Radnor myself!"

The nurse shuddered a bit. Dusty merely laughed and said, "So now we know where we stand. And now knowing, I'm hungry."

"Of course. We'll all dine at the meeting."

"Oh?"

"Naturally. You're here, aren't you? Marandis is not going to send you back without a chance for you to present your case. There is a joint meeting of the Bureaus of Galactic Navigation and New Colonial Affairs. It will start with a formal breakfast during which no business will be conducted. Then, once you are all acquainted with one another, the business of the day will be discussed and a decision rendered."

She led them to the spacelock and Dusty Britton had his first glimpse of a Marandanian spaceport. There was precious little to see, which made it even more stunning to the senses.

The size of the place was completely obscured by spacecraft which stood like the trunks in a pine forest. Most of the craft were larger than Dusty's and so obscured his vision. Between those nearby (which were rather wide-set) there were others at a little distance, and beyond them there were still others, and behind those others were more and more and more until all that could be seen were the tips of the upthrust noses. The horizon was an irregular pattern of pointed shapes that was somewhat reminiscent of the Greek egg and dart moulding of ancient architecture.

Through some of the more distant lines of sight, the far spacecraft had a haze around it, as though it were miles and miles away.

There was not a building to be seen, only spacecraft.

Dusty gave up trying to penetrate the forest to the edge of the 'port and directed his attention to his nearby surroundings.

A road wound around in a zigzag manner, meeting and dividing around each ship. There was an empty landing block not far from them, and after a bit of puzzled interest--the shape of the block caught Dusty's memory--he decided that the landing block was hexagonal. So were all the rest of the landing blocks. Hexagonal pattern, like the well-known hexagon tile floor; the road was the marker-lines between the hex-shaped landing blocks. Those that were empty showed the effect of heavy masses parked on them; a bit of char now and then; a chip or a crack, probably made by a rough landing; a deep seam repaired with some sort of cement or concrete (or whatever the Marandanians had devised or discovered as a superior material) and at least one place where the edge of the block had been chipped deeply as though the pilot had missed his landing point and come down on the edge of the hexagonal block.

* * * * *

As they looked, a muted whir attracted their attention and they turned to see a ship lowering itself out of the sky to come down in a slowing vertical drop that ended at the edge of a curtain of nearby spacecraft. The landing ship inserted itself in the pattern behind ships until only its nose was visible. Then to one side--and apparently with no warning, a ship nosed upward, gaining speed rapidly until it disappeared in the bright blue sky above.

The nurse said, "We land a ship every thirty seconds. There's a take-off every thirty seconds, too."

"That is a lot of activity," said Dusty, swallowing the daily figure with some amazement--7,200 ships landing--a like number taking off--every hour, night and day. The traffic added up to a rather monumental figure. No wonder they required a huge spaceport.

"Marandis is the center of Galactic culture," said the nurse proudly. "And this is only the spaceport that handles affairs of the Space Administration Department. Each of the many Departments of Galactic Government has its own spaceport. The one at the Department of Space Commerce is the largest because that is the one that takes care of incoming transports carrying the necessities of living."

"Don't you do anything for yourself?"

"We have no room. Marandis is an urban planet. The only parts that are not built-up are preserves, parks and recreation-forestry. There is nothing on the entire planet that does not serve directly toward Galactic Administration, in one manner or another."

Dusty nodded. He could grasp this even though the magnitude was great. By simple proportion, if it took one complete city to administer the government for a country, it should take one planet to administer the government of a galaxy. He wondered even then how they managed to get it all in.

He smiled and made a wave at the landing ramp. He had seen everything he could see from the little platform outside of the spacelock.

At the bottom, in the zigzag road, was a lone, low-slung vehicle with a man in a simple uniform leaning indolently against the wheel. He was smoking a cigarette which he tossed onto the landing block as they came down. He fired up the thing under the nose of the car after they were inside, and as soon as the door slammed, he let the clutch out with a rap and the car jack-rabbited into motion. They took off from a standing start like a frightened deer at about five degrees lift so that by the time Dusty and Barbara had pulled their heads forward from the jerked-back angle, the car was about thirty feet in the air and arrowing forward above the road. The speed climbed rapidly until Dusty estimated something near to a hundred miles per hour.

The driver was, of course, cutting the tips of the corners between the hexagonal blocks in a die-true line of flight and naturally paying no attention to the zigzag road below them. Since the spacecraft were all standing in the center of their particular blocks, like a bunch of chessmen parked on a tile floor, there was plenty of space between the ships themselves for such passage. Even at their thirty-foot altitude, which raised them to a point on most ships where the bowed-out flanks were quite wide, there was room to spare.

And now that they were in one of the aisles, distant buildings could be seen dead ahead. It must have been ten miles from their landing block to the edge of the spaceport.

The driver barreled along this aisle with the self-assurance of any taxi-driver, hooting his horn now and then as they came to what seemed to be a major intersection of the zigzag road below. Dusty wondered worriedly what happened when two of these characters met in a draw, because the man seemed to pay no attention to any other noise but his own, which he made with great confidence, in the other guy.

Dusty was beginning to wonder about the need for any road below when his question was answered by a caravan of heavy trucks making their way along the road. They zipped over the caravan and were gone by the time Dusty realized that air-travel was not for heavy cargo.

* * * * *

The buildings at the end of the aisle between the spacecraft loomed larger. The driver whipped along at his thirty-foot altitude, making no attempt to climb over the buildings which were growing taller and more massive at a frightening rate. Dusty's palms went wet; the buildings had seemed minute when they turned into the aisle, but now they were tall and massive and millions and millions of windows could be seen, with magnificent arches between the buildings spanning the gaps.

The aircab whipped across an empty perimeter about the hexagonal-pattern of landing blocks, sped above a low building, and howled into the tiny space between two buildings with an arch above and a roof below, and then went into a flat climb. The car rose slowly in the canyon between the buildings that lined the street below. There were people working in those buildings, men and women that sat at their desks behind windows and paid no attention to the passage of a hundred-mile-per-hour skycab within forty feet of them.

Then the car was above the roof-level but it kept to the street-lanes. Below them were the streets, and in the valley was slow-moving traffic, ground cars and air-cars that ran at different levels to avoid intersection-collisions. Up in the higher strata were the fast-moving aircabs, each moving in its lane, and each lane for a different direction. Even with separate lanes the traffic was a turmoil; constant jockeying to gain position, to avoid trouble, to move a level higher or a level lower so that a corner could be turned without entering the intersection at the wrong level.

To make a right turn the driver jockeyed himself to the top of the altitude allowed that line of traffic, and in the block before his turn he rose above his lane, made his turn, and then entered the right-bound traffic pattern from below, mingling with the speeding aircabs. To make a left turn, the driver dropped to the floor of his lane, fell below, made his turn, and mingled with the left-bound turmoil from above their upper limit of altitude.

They raced along in the middle-altitude at high speed; cars above them, below them, to the left and right, before and behind.

"My God!" breathed Dusty, "New York at rush hour--in three dimensions."

Their driver turned and winked at them. He flicked a lighter with one hand and lit the smoke that was hanging from one corner of his mouth. "Yeah man," he drawled. "Some of them guys should ought to take lessons."

Then he turned back to his job with a shrug, lost a hundred feet of altitude in three hundred feet of run, and whizzed around a corner and fitted his aircab into a space between traffic that was just large enough to let him in without scratching paint. The other cars moved up, aside, down or sped or slowed to give him elbow room. He fought them for position, dropping on a descending run through this cross traffic until he whipped out of traffic on a spiral over the roof-top of one of the buildings.

* * * * *

Here the driver phlegmatically put the aircab into a tight corkscrew that dropped them onto the roof. Dusty got out slowly, testing the stiffness of his knees after the ride. He helped Barbara out next and the nurse came out on the other side at the same time.

Then they were almost roofed as the aircab took off on a flat, screaming '_U_' turn that lofted him no more than ten feet, whipped across the street between levels and swooped him down on the opposite side, where he hit the other roof without a bounce and came to a fast braking stop beside a man who had flagged him.

The man got in and the aircab whiffled off the roof in a crazy climbing turn and burrowed into the fast traffic lane above. It forced its way into the mass of traffic and was lost in a matter of seconds.

"Holy Rockets!"

Barbara wiped her damp forehead with the back of a shaking hand. "Oh--for a film of this!"

Dusty grinned weakly. "Shucks, Barb. What's a fender for if you don't fend with it?"

Quietly their nurse turned from the spectacle and led them to a roof kiosk and down some steps into an elevator....

The operator cut the ropes and let them drop slightly slower than the free-fall constant of the planet Marandis, leaving their stomachs somewhere up on the hundred and ninety-first floor. He braked the elevator somewhere down below-below-below, and their innards caught up with them in such a sudden rush it buckled their knees.

Along a magnificent corridor and through massive carved doors opened for them by men in uniform, and then they were ushered into a vast ornamented room with a vaulted ceiling, tapestried walls, and a polished floor. Deep armchairs were waiting around a huge table that glistened with polished metal and blinding white cloth, the severity broken by color of dish and fruit and fluid. Soft stringed music filled the air that was also lightly scented.

As they entered, the music bridged from the stringed fugue to a magnificent orchestration and the scent changed subtly from languid sweetness to a pungent aroma that compelled the senses to pleasant attention. The soft-key lighting swirled across the vaulted ceiling and changed into a colored brilliance that made the blood leap high.

The music slid into a soft passage and a vibrant voice announced:

"Dusty Britton, Commander in Chief of The Junior Division of The Terran Space Patrol. Barbara Crandall, Thespian and Vocal Musician of Terra. In attendance, Lela Brandis, Mistress of Extra-Marandanian Medicine."

The music crashed, the scent came heavy and sharp, and the lights flashed like the licking of summer lightning and came to rest outlining them brilliantly.

Gant Nerley crossed the huge room and held out his hand to Dusty Britton.

"We need no introduction, Dusty Britton," he said in a ringing tone. "I say 'Greeting' to you with all my heart!"

Another stab of music, a touch of cinnamon-scent, and a play of lights.

Gant Nerley turned. "Stop the dramatics," he commanded. "What are we, children to be impressed by theatrical tricks?"

The music shifted back to the string ensemble, the scent smoothed out to something pleasant and pungent, and the lights faded back to their neutral medium-key. Dusty thought that if this lights-and-music stuff was strictly off the cuff, ad-lib, someone was a past master at the art of extemporaneous composition. He liked it. And if it took Marandanian children to appreciate it, you could give him ten years in school and call him the Marandanian child.

Gant Nerley was holding out an elbow to Barbara. She took it and the Marandanian led her towards the head of the table. Dusty looked around; then he offered his own elbow to the nurse--Mistress of Extra-Marandanian Medicine, Lela Brandis.

It was many years before Dusty identified the things he had for breakfast. It was exotic and well-prepared; none of it was remotely familiar but all of it was good.

Then over the after-dinner drinks and smokes, Gant Nerley rose, rapped the table with his knuckles, and proposed the problem for the day.

* * * * *

"What are we going to do about Sol?" asked Gant Nerley seriously. Dusty eyed the Marandanian soberly. "Leave it alone, I hope."

"You realize what you are asking?"

"My God! Do we have to go through all that mishmash again?"

"Again?"

Dusty slammed the table with his fist hard enough to make the glassware jump. "Again and again. I'm getting sick and tired of explaining all the many reasons why none of us want to move to another star and lose a thousand years. And then being told that after all it won't hurt a bit, and besides this move is necessary--and if we don't move willingly we'll be moved anyway forcibly."

"Why are you so angry?"

Dusty looked at Gant Nerley and sat down wearily. "Because," he said patiently, "all of us know that no matter what, you're going to go on and do it anyway--but not until you've forced yourself to believe that you have convinced us that we should accept this kick in the pants gracefully."

"It isn't that simple."

"No?"

"No, it isn't. You see, we are bound by our own laws to hold to certain programs under certain conditions. It is the conditions which prevail that we are attempting to define, outline, determine, and pin down so that we know what lawful action may be taken."

"You sound like a bureaucrat explaining away an awkward situation. Just what do you mean by conditions and programs?"

Gant picked them off on his fingers. "There are the following," he said. "First would be a race--remember I am talking about all the races of mankind strewn across the galaxy; the races that are us, you and we and all the rest that stem from a single source, the origin of which is lost in the antiquity of a hundred thousand years. So, first would be a race which was still in the growing-up stage, say the mound building, early agricultural, perhaps later, in early metal. An age of no true scientific grasp; what little of science they know has come by guesswork, blundering discovery and hit-or-miss experiment. Such a race could be moved across space without a qualm, because it would only bring about a rather deep period of superstitious horror and a religious fear. A few hundred years later the tale would be completely discounted, because the astronomers would be rising and stating flatly that no agency in the universe could change the constant stars. The old sky would be wiped out of men's memory in a couple of generations, although it might remain in myth and fairy tale for a long time. Such a set of conditions would permit the moving program without a qualm."

Gant looked at Dusty. "Understand?"

"Sure," replied Dusty indifferently. "Go on."

"Then on the other end of the scale we have the advanced race. They have discovered the phanobands, know about space flight and perhaps have colonized the planets of other stars say within ten to fifty light-years. A race of this stage of development would understand and grasp the problem quickly. Then having been shown the problem, they would make the move willingly and no doubt help, because they would understand that their destiny is a part of the Galactic Destiny."

"Oh, yeah? You mean to say that if Marandis were found to lie across the road like a stone wall you would all happily toss Marandis into a barytrine field for a thousand years?"

* * * * *

Gant smiled serenely at his objection. "Well, doubt it as you will, but we would. Of course, we know that no such case would ever come up. But if it did--"

"Y'know what you remind me of," snapped Dusty. "You remind me of a parent explaining to his kid that this castor oil is good for the kid, and that if the parent needed it he would take it with a happy smile--excepting of course that the parent does not need anything of that nature. We have an old adage: he dies well who never faced a sword! I think it applies here. Well, go on, Gant. Tell me where Terra lies in your scale of values."

"That's what we are trying to determine. You are obviously not of the pre-aware stage. You have your limited space travel and your historical records which will preclude any attempt at forcing the affair upon you and causing you to put the change as superstition that would be wiped out."

"Thanks."

"On the other hand you are not of the advanced stage which could accept a change in your night sky without trouble, nor will you accept it willingly."

"How true. Now this brings us to the impasse, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

From across the table a man waved for attention. "It's more than that. The moment Dusty Britton opened the distress phanoband, the secret of the galactic rift was let out. Like everybody else, we put direction finding equipment on the signal and have it located rather well. Then we went back through our files and found that as far as we can tell, Sol was mentioned as a possible beacon by one of our early exploratory parties. One that disappeared. One that--"

"So what?" barked a man down the table from Dusty. "Seems to me that Intercluster sits on its duff and waits for us to find rifts for them."

"Transgalactic isn't the only outfit with a spacecraft," snarled the man from Intercluster angrily. "We've done our share."

"Not on my books," said the Transgalactic representative.

Intercluster eyed Transgalactic sourly. "What's the matter?" asked Intercluster softly, "Are you mad because Intercluster happens to have records on the rift you re-discovered?"

"Re-discovered my--"

Intercluster turned to Gant. "I leave it up to you," he said. "Our records show that we, too, have rights to this rift."

Transgalactic hammered on the table. "Like hell!" he roared. "If you have rights, why aren't you using them?"

"Because you and your gang concealed them from us until Scyth Radnor got into trouble. A fine bunch of incompetents you are! A fine group to be representatives of our culture. You can't even keep your hands off native females--"

Barbara rose with a single lithe motion and hurled the contents of her glass in the Intercluster man's face. He staggered back, floundered back into his chair, landed hard and tilted it back on hind legs to go over backward in a crash.

"Native female?" spat Barbara.

The room went breathlessly silent; the music stopped on a flubbed note; the scent soured in a brief wave as though the man at the valves had miscued. The lights flickered awkwardly.

Barbara stood there tense and ready. Her breasts were pushed against the nylosheer of her dress; her stomach was flat and hard. She was poised like a healthy wild animal daring any onlooker to try to tame her.

Dusty rose lazily and pushed her back into her chair with a hand on her shoulder. No other man in the room would have dared to lay a hand on her except Dusty. This he somehow realized, and it gave him personal gratification to know that he had once more done that which the Marandanians would not have dared.

Then he went over and picked up the Intercluster man with one hand, standing the man on his feet like a puppet.

"We apologize for reacting to your unfortunate choice of words," he said smoothly. "We admit to being a bit primitive and impulsive. I came unarmed," and he pointed to the band across his hips where the Dusty Britton Blaster belt had protected the whipcord from the sun, "because we are advanced enough to realize that we are impulsive and perhaps a trifle inclined to act before considering the matter fully."

* * * * *

He turned away from the man and sauntered over to Gant Nerley. "I apologize again," he said. "But I do suggest that our nerves are a bit short. After all it is hard to sit here and listen to your friends and fellow-citizens discuss the ways and means of making use of that rift through the galaxy without once recognizing that we poor devils have to move out whether we like it or not."

Gant smiled nervously. "I am trying to appreciate your position," he said. "And in a way I do. But you must try to appreciate ours. We are not taking anything away from you that you will miss. After all, Dusty, what do you stand to lose, really?"

Dusty swallowed. It dawned on him what he was doing and why. And also how he had managed to get away with it so far.

And in these fractions of a second, Dusty probably matured more than he had grown during the great part of his life.

He realized suddenly that he was only Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol and as phony as The Space Patrol itself. To date he had done as good a job of wool-pulling as the best statesmen or scientists, but only because he was an actor. He had succeeded in convincing the whole bunch of them that the cultural level of Sol was higher than it was. A scientist would have admitted his lack because that was the way scientists operate. A businessman would have been baffled, and a statesman would have tried to cover his indecision in a gout of flowery language that would be known for what it was by this bunch of high-brain characters.

But Dusty was an actor, blunt and not too smart. Modesty is not part of an actor, while the ability to submerge himself is. He had become Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol and the hero of a hundred adventures in space among a people who were hard and fast because they were still in struggle against their environment. He was tall and strong and young and handsome, and he was Dusty Britton, fast on the draw, hard on the trail, and the bes' dam' cabba-yero in all Mehi-co and he had them all convinced that he and his friends spent their time racing around in dangerous, imperfect spacecraft powered by reaction motors.

He was Dusty Britton who had plugged Scyth Radnor for playing games with his woman. Then Dusty Britton had taken the controls of a completely foreign spacecraft and had driven the ship halfway across the galaxy through danger and God-knew-what (Dusty did not) horrors and possible fates. The fact that Gant Nerley and a corps of engineers and a bank of computing machines had supervised Dusty's every motion and move did not detract from the feat in their eyes. It added, because of the sheer guts of a man who would enter an alien ship and have the self-confidence to touch the tiniest push-button.

He sauntered over to Gant Nerley and said, "Well?"

Gant Nerley was impressed with Dusty's swagger and self-confidence. So were the rest of the men in the room, with the exception of the representatives of the two shipping companies, and they had chips on their shoulders. So Gant Nerley looked around from face to face and then said, in an official tone:

"It would appear that Terra is of a level of development that mitigates against immediate action. Therefore we shall declare a recess, during which time we shall study the Terran people. If Terra measures up, other steps must be taken."

There was a chorus of "Aye!" and the sound of chairs being pushed back and the noise of feet on the floor. The babble of voices arose as the members broke into little groups and began discussing the problem.

But Dusty did not hear them. The self-confidence had oozed out of him and he slumped in his chair, staring at some shine on a bit of the table silver, trying to think of something other than the horrible certainty. For while Dusty Britton had bluffed the Marandanians, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that his bluff was being called and it would not stand up. All it would take was the Marandanian Investigating Committee scouring Terra to find one single man who had one shred of reason to believe that matter could exceed the velocity of light. Oh, there were such people. But the man who professed such opinions believed it because he wanted to believe it; because he hoped someday that it might be accomplished. He was the man who shrugged off experiments that followed the rules and acted according to the equations. He was the man who had faith but no proof.

* * * * *

Beyond a doubt, the report of any such committee would recommend that Terra be bundled into its barytrine field with no delay, and that Sol be nudged into the three-day variable needed for the beacon on this particular dogleg of the journey across the galaxy.

Dusty had succeeded in his own way, but now he knew that it was not enough. He, himself, had convinced them that Terra was worthy of notice. The rest of Terra would let him down. Still lost in his own unhappy thoughts, he became vaguely aware that the babble of discussion was stopping and that one man was raising his voice to get an audience.

It was the Transgalactic representative. He was standing by his place at the table, talking in the tone of voice used by a professional lecturer hammering home an unpleasant fact:

"--obvious by the animal ferocity of this Terran, his threats and his willingness to plunge into physical combat, that he and his kind cannot be of high culture. I am asked whether or not we may judge an entire race of people by one man, and I agree that we cannot. But then view the reaction of his companion who flares up in a fit of red, raw anger, taking offense at being properly catalogued. I ask you, gentlemen, is there any excuse for this? Am I not a native male of Marandis? Is she not a native female of Terra?

"And so by their actions, both violent in nature and unpredictable in direction, they have shown themselves to be uncouth. Who knows what offense they will take next? Does a man among us dare to speak freely with either man or woman of Terra alone and unprotected? No, because no one can ever know beforehand what peculiarity of their own limited semantics will be rubbed the wrong way, setting them into a violent fury. Dusty Britton has boasted that he can take any of us out and wipe up the street with us. This cannot be denied. But what does it prove? Only that his shoulders are broad and his back strong and his fists hard. And that he has been trained in violence.

"Now, gentlemen, consider this next argument: What has Terra to lose? No more than a familiar night sky, really. The time under the barytrine field will pass without their notice. As for the time lost in respect to the rest of the galaxy, since they have had no contact with it, they cannot be affected by the loss. They prate about losing a thousand years of advancement. Consider how soon they would be taking to space if we had not found them. Might it not be yet a thousand years before contact with the galaxy took place? Yet as it stands now, this man and this woman will live to see galactic commerce, whereas they would be dead and gone without ever knowing of the galaxy if Marandis had not found them. And having been granted that, they still show the ignorant rebellion of children.

"They have not the foresight to understand that so far as they are concerned, less than a week of their apparent time will pass before the ships and men of Marandis will land on Terra in its new surroundings, to treat with them, to lead them, to educate them, to bring to Terra all of the glories and benefits of galactic civilization--no, gentlemen, _to return to Terra its galactic heritage, lost so long ago. Its birthright returned!_

"And yet what response do we get? Objection and rebellion and threats of violence. So I ask you, are we to be frightened by this small primitive world that lies like a barrier across our path? Are we to be cowed by a show of force? Are we? And if we are, shall we run in fear from a race of men who bear missile-propelling weapons?

"Look at Dusty Britton and his companion. They sit there angry, possibly planning their own form of revenge to take place if we have the temerity to proceed. Then let me ask you, supposing they do object? Suppose they do resent our meddling in their small lives? Are we to be frightened of bomb and gun--we who can put them back into their barytrine field and keep them there until they are willing to agree? _And without the loss of a life?_ Gentlemen, this whole meeting reminds me far too much of parents who try to argue logically with children over bedtime instead of packing the infant off. Who knows what is best? Child or parent?"

* * * * *

The man from Transgalactic paused a moment to let this point sink in. Then he said, "Gant Nerley, I object to your proposal. We need no more investigation. We know what these Terrans are and how they react. They offer little to Marandis at present. They are no more than a responsibility to us and as such they owe us our superior rights. Therefore, unless I am ordered at this moment to cease and desist, I am going to proceed. Do I hear such an order?"

A babble of voices rose.

"Gentlemen," said Transgalactic, suavely, "I offer you a short and quick route to the Spiral Cluster."

He stood there for fully a minute listening to the clamor of individual discussions going on in the smaller groups around the table. Then he hit the table with his fist, bowed sardonically to Dusty and Barbara, and strode out.

Dusty looked at Gant. "Can't we do something about this? Can that guy go do as he pleases?"

Gant shrugged. "We are a government that guides but does not rule, suggests but does not demand, recommends but goes not force. I can and will put a stop to his activity providing that you show direct evidence that Terra and Sol are of importance in their present location, that Terra has something to offer Marandis, that you are not what he claims. However, if what he said is true, then what he is about to do is acceptable."

"But we--" and Dusty stopped short. He had no argument strong enough to convince this Marandanian that Terra would lose anything but its own jealous prestige.

Dusty stood up slowly. "Come on, Barbara, let's go home. At least we can be among friends. I'd hate to be marooned here while Terra was smothered in the barytrine field."

Barbara stood up and leaned against his side. "Yes, Dusty," she said in a throaty contralto.

Gant smiled wanly. "I'll see that you get home," he said. "Forgive us, Dusty. You'll really lose little and gain much. I--"

Dusty looked at Gant. Then he looked down at Barbara. Then up at Gant again.

"So I've failed," he said in a low voice. "I've tried and failed. And I am aware of the fact that Terra will not lose much. That isn't the point. It's just that I, Dusty Britton, am a personal failure. I should like to be able to say that I don't give a damn what other people think, but I can't. I care a lot what other people think, because for the next forty or fifty years or more I've got a living to make, and making a living is a lot easier if the entire world is not convinced that I am a no-goodnik. But then, who am I to stand in the way of galactic progress."

"Dusty, I regret that the rest of your people will not be able to see the thing I am going to show you. Maybe you can describe it when you return. Come with me."

Gant led them from the hall, then to a moving walk that hurled them out and across one of the flamboyant arches between buildings. Here Gant stopped to display his credentials to a man in uniform, and to sign a register that also listed Dusty and Barbara and their home planet Terra.

They went along a corridor that curved gently; through a heavy metal door that opened on response to a signal sequence delivered against a button.

The room inside was vast, truly vast. It was a vertical cylinder and it must have been more than a thousand feet in diameter and three or four hundred feet tall. They stood inside of the door on a narrow metal catwalk that ran completely around the circle, its far side lost in the distance and the dimness, for the room was not lighted from above, but from below.

It was a pleasant glow, a flat, hazy, wispy glow from a gas-like cloud that floated in the room a hundred feet below the catwalk ... a scale model of the galaxy.

* * * * *

It looked like any photographs of one of the galaxies taken through a telescope except that this model was dotted here and there with winking pinpoints and stringed through and through with thin lines that glowed in many colors, some solid colors and some in two-color spirals, like coded wire cable. Here and there were faintly glowing spherical volumes containing many stars, or rectangular volumes confined by planes of faint color-glow. Certain of these clusters were linked with other clusters by the zigzag lines that wound and interwove around and through in a tangled skein.

Gant Nerley picked up a small cylinder from a rack on the railing of the catwalk. A narrow pencil of light pointed out, and he aimed it towards the center, some five hundred feet out to the middle of the hall. "Marandis," he said. Then he brought the pointer-light across towards them slowly, to stop a hundred feet from their position. "Sol," he said. "The lines are courses surveyed and registered by the various companies, you can gather that the colored stars are our inhabited systems and the volumes register certain clusters. That faint greenish-yellow course that ends out there by Sol is the Transgalactic course set up to reach from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster which lies almost at our feet."

The magnificence of the spectacle was enhanced by the silence in the room. The galaxy, it seemed, lay at their feet and with no irreverence, and only awe, the viewer felt as though he were standing by the side of God, looking down at his Work.

In a hushed voice, Dusty asked, "Is this where they survey the courses? Couldn't figure out a way around Sol?"

Gant laughed sympathetically, breaking the hushed awe. "Look at it and think, Dusty Britton."

Dusty looked, and Barbara looked, both in awed silence as Gant Nerley went on:

"In that model, which looks like a wisp of gas, there are fifteen billion individual pinpoints. Think, Dusty. One-five, comma, zero-zero-zero, comma, zero-zero-zero, comma, zero-zero-zero stars in one galaxy. Across the breadth of this room it lies, scaled down to represent the hundred thousand light-years of its diameter at the rate of a hundred light-years to the foot. Eight and one third light years per inch, Dusty Britton, so your Sol and your Sirius lie about an inch apart. Now, Dusty, in order to make the stars visible, they must be above a certain intrinsic size, and in the size of the stars the scale of the model is violated. Each tiny glowing point is about one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. That makes the scalar size of the stars about a half light year in diameter. The diameter of the colored lines that represent courses is of the same magnitude, so as we go into the model--as we may--we will find that the courses touch, intersect, and lie tangent to stars that are actually far from the flight in real space.

"What I am saying, of course, is only a new concept of something that you already know, but pertaining to another subject with which you have every right to be more familiar. Take a globe of your Terra. It is excellent for locating areas, finding cities, lakes, oceans, mountain ranges; anything gross enough to find physical size upon the map. But you cannot use it for a road map to direct you to the home of a friend, because the details of such a trip are much too fine. So we use it for large-scale mapping, but could not possibly use it for the delicate business of course mapping."

"But if you enlarged a section?"

Gant Nerley nodded. "It has been tried. No good. You see, Dusty, this was made by going deep into space and making stereograms from all angles. The transparencies are used in projectors all around the hall. But as you may know, the finest photogram loses definition when it is enlarged too much. As for delicate operations, Dusty, just to prove our point we are going to enter the model."

Gant led them to a control panel in the railing and from a sheet of paper in his hand he set the dials.

* * * * *

The vast circular runway lowered all around the hall and the galaxy-model rose, giving the appearance of turning upward past them. "We are coming down toward and below the plane of our galaxy at the scalar rate of about a hundred thousand light-years per minute," said Gant. Then a segment of the catwalk detached from the wall and went forward on a long girder.

The bright pinpoints leaped out at them, giving Dusty the same feeling as he had had in the space flight, except that the model lacked the waves of heat as the little pinpoints passed. He looked at Barbara and watched the tiny points plunge into her skin to disappear, then reappear behind her, as if they passed through her body harmlessly. He looked at his hand as the points streamed through, and he waggled his fingers around a cluster and watched them twinkle. They penetrated clusters and dark-cloud areas, placed where fifty stars occupied a volume of less than a couple of cubic inches, spots where dusky, shapeless masses represented globs of fifty light-years in diameter. Rusty caught on. Thoughtfully he looked at Barbara and made a rough computation that he and she were a couple of hundred light-years apart. His eyes, he thought, must be about thirty light-years apart, and the diameter of his head, at eight-and-a-third light-years per inch--

Dusty began to feel light-headed.

Through and through the model ran the colored lines, tangled and skeined and then they were facing the point where the greenish-yellow course-line ended.

Above the control panel was a faintly glowing sphere about two inches in diameter.

"Sol?" asked Gant.

Dusty shrugged. "Sol? How can we--"

He leaned forward and set his right eye close to the pinpoint of light and looked outward. Was it--could it be--familiar. He changed his angle of sight. Was Galactic North aligned with Terrestrial North? Dusty could not remember. The center of the Galaxy? Somewhere in or near Sagittarius, he believed, but Dusty was not familiar with the constellation. There! Was that the Belt of Orion? It looked strange, distorted. The constellation as he remembered it of old, was not like that. Pinpoints, of course, could not begin to look like these tiny discs, or vice versa. Was it this that made them seem unfamiliar or was it that he was displaced in scalar space by enough light-years to distort the constellation? Was that--there--Polaris and the Dippers, large and small and Andromeda? Or, thought Dusty with wry self-disgust creeping into his mind, was that _W_-shaped thing Cassiopeia? He wished that he had paid more attention to astronomy.

Pleiades? He shook his head. That was a cluster and unless one remembered very carefully the configuration as it looked from Sol, the conglomeration of stars would probably look about the same from the same number of light-years from the opposite side.

Sol--if that sprinkle of glow were Sol--must be near bright Sirius. An inch away and a double star. And Alpha Centauri should lie about a half inch from Sol and it should be a fine trinary; two bright ones in a binary and a less bright one making the triple. And Procyon--or was that only a single like Sol? He ran through his sorry list of stars remembered as being within fifteen or sixteen light-years of Sol, and was appalled to see the number of pinpoints that were surrounded by that tiny sphere that represented the sixteen light-year diameter. His mental catalogue had holes in the listings--more hole than listing, he considered truthfully.

* * * * *

Confused thoughts and vague remembrances plagued him. Wearily Dusty shook his head. For here, up close to the sprinkles themselves, he knew that they were not scaled. How could the scale show a binary when the size of the stars was scaled at a half light-year in diameter? If that bright one were Sirius as he supposed, it was a single blob because Sirius and its companion were quite lost in the half light-year diameter of the glowing spot that represented the system. And so, of course, was Centauri. No, one could not scale a hundred-thousand light-years down to a thousand feet and hope to retain enough detail to calculate a course.

He nodded unhappily and looked along the green-yellow line that ended at Sol and realized that at least at one place in the course there was a change of direction that was so shallow that the diameter of the line representing the course was so wide that the ship, in actuality, only traversed space from one side of the line to the other, changed course, and returned to the first side.

Dusty leaned forward again, looking along the yellow-greenish line that marked the Transgalactic course. At the far end he noted the wink ... wink ... wink of the star-beacon, not much different than it had appeared in Scyth Radnor's spacecraft. "Where," he asked, "does their course lead from Sol?"

"The prospectus, of course, is not shown as finished," said Gant. "But we can show it momentarily." He pressed a button and a dotted line of yellow-green flashed into view, extending from the end of the solid line out and out until it was lost to their view through the star-field toward the outward Spiral Cluster.

Dusty looked at the line. "I suppose it isn't to scale or anything," he said. "But I can't help hoping--Gant, look, suppose this model were truly to scale, couldn't they save themselves a beacon here?"

"Save a beacon?"

Dusty nodded and the little spreckles blinked at his eyes. Gant shook his head. "This model was built in the hope that we could play gods standing in our galaxy with a measuring stick. We failed because we are no nearer to the stature of gods than this model is to the stature of the galaxy itself. We cannot play gods, Dusty Britton."

"I'm not trying to play God," said Dusty solemnly. "I'm just thinking that if you can move a planet away from a star you want to convert into a three-day variable, you might be able to take your barytrine field and slap it around this star here," Dusty pointed to one with a forefinger, "Then you move it aside and that gives you a long run from this beacon to that beacon--missing Sol by a full inch, or--eight-and-a-third light-years."

Gant blinked. Slowly, he said, "Move the star--" and let his voice trail away into a mutter. "Move the interfering star--" he repeated again. "Then--my Lord!"

"What's the matter?" asked Dusty.

"Yours is the glimmer of an idea that makes for the birth of a new concept!" breathed Gant. "Take it from there, Dusty. Don't you see? Move a star and straighten out one dogleg, move two and iron out the course even more. Maybe we could drill a free channel completely through from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. Maybe from Marandis to Star's End, to Vannevarre, to Rescrustes--perhaps from Laranonne to Ultimane across the whole galaxy, a hundred thousand light-years of free flight without a change in course. I--"

A tiny spot of light came crawling along the yellow-green course to disappear into the tiny pinpoint of light that represented Sol.

Gant said, "That must have been Transgalactic, returning to Sol to--" then Gant jumped. "Dusty! Come on! There's no time to waste!"

He hit the buttons on the control panel viciously and the little flying catwalk swung noiselessly back across thousands of light-years of scaled distance to fit into its niche once more. The circular catwalk rose high above the wispy model to its former position.