Now he walked straight up to Calurmo and said, peering anxiously through the vibrating wall that separated them: ‘I am very sorry we have not made you more welcome here, but we are at war.’
‘Please don’t apologise,’ said Calurmo. ‘It must be very upsetting for you to have a difference with someone. How long has this been happening?’
‘Thousands of years,’ said Deeping bitterly.
‘March that man to the disintegrators,’ Rhys-Barley bellowed. Two guards moved smartly toward Deeping.
‘If you will pardon my venturing to suggest it,’ Aliens Officer said, wobbling at the knees as he spoke, ‘but just possibly, sir, this new approach might … might be effective.’
Faint with his own temerity, he saw Rhys-Barley’s hand flicker and stay the guards.
‘ – a difference we can never settle until we vanquish the enemy,’ Deeping was saying. He was still pale, but stood stiff and resolute, almost as if he drew strength from these strange beings.
‘Oh yes, you can settle it,’ Calurmo said. ‘But you’ve been going about it the wrong way.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Rhys-Barley chimed in. ‘You don’t know the problem – unless you are a race of Boux we have not met before.’
‘My friends are learning of the problem now,’ murmured Calurmo, glancing at Little Light and Woebee, who were unusually quiet. But the Grand-Admiral went ruthlessly on.
‘The enemy has inestimable advantages over Man. It has only been by exerting his military might up to the hilt, by standing continually on his toes, by having one finger perpetually on the trigger, that Man has kept the Boux out of his systems.’
‘That really is the truth,’ said Deeping earnestly. ‘If you have a super-weapon you could let us know about we would be very grateful.’
‘Don’t humour me, please,’ Calurmo said. He turned to Little Light and Woebee, who smiled and nodded. At the same time Aprit opened his eyes and stood up.
‘I had such a funny dream,’ he said. ‘Do we go home now?’
‘We want to readjust these people first,’ the Preacher said. The five of them conferred together for a minute, while Rhys-Barley walked rapidly up and down and Deeping sneezed once or twice; R-rays had that effect on his nose.
Finally Woebee motioned to Deeping and said: ‘You must forgive me if I say your people appear full of contradictions to us, but it is so. One contradiction, however, we could not understand. You pen us in here with impenetrable R-rays, as you term your inertia field, and also with duralum bars. The bars are quite superfluous unless – they are not what they seem; they are another of the machines you so delight in. They are, in fact, categorising grids that transmit almost comprehensive records of the five of us back to your nearest planet. An excellent device! Entire blueprints of us, psychologically and physiobiologically, are fed back to your biggest brain units. You really need complimenting on the efficiency of this machine. It is so good, in fact, that Little Light and I have explored Main Base by it, have sent the rest of your fleet packing, and have broadcast directions to your vice-captain or whatever you call him up in the controls; as a result of which, you are now travelling where we want you to go and this Interrogation Bay is cut off from the rest of the ship.’
He had not finished speaking before Rhys-Barley had flung himself behind a shield and given the Emergency Destruction order. Nothing happened. Buttons, switches, valves, all were dead.
‘You merely waste your time,’ Little Light said, pointing at the Grand-Admiral and stepping through the dying R-rays. ‘The power has gone. Did I not explain that clearly enough?’
‘Where are you taking us?’ Deeping whispered.
‘You are taking us,’ Woebee corrected.
‘Not – not to Earth?’
Woebee smiled. ‘I feel that the word ‘Earth’ has some emotional value for you.’
‘Why, yes, of course. Don’t you see, it’s the only planet we ever lost to the Boux, right at the beginning of our troubles with them. But Man came from there. Earth is Man’s birth planet, and when it fell – that was the end of the First Empire. Since then we’ve grown stronger – but all that old peripheral region of space is dead ground to us now.’
Woebee nodded carelessly. ‘We learned that from our investigation of Main Base. The area is now abandoned by the Boux too.’
‘How awful to think of it stagnating all this time!’ Deeping said.
‘Really, you are as foolish as the rest,’ said the Preacher reprovingly. ‘The stagnation has been here. Why, you’re still clinging to machinery to support you.’ He led his four friends back toward the Regalia. ‘We’ll do the rest of the journey on our own,’ he told them. ‘These soldiers will want to go back to their duties. It’s really none of our concern to hinder them!’
In the lock they paused. The personnel trapped in the Interrogation Bay looked bemused and helpless. Rhys-Barley sat on a step staring at the wall. The Captain bit his nails in an absorbed fashion.
Aliens Officer came forward and said: ‘You have so much you could have taught us.’
‘There’s one piece of knowledge, unlike most of our kind of knowledge, that might be useful to you,’ Aprit said casually. ‘In Man’s hurry to leave Earth because one or two Boux had arrived, some few men and women were left behind. They had no defence against the Boux, so the Boux had no need to attack them. In other words, there was an opportunity for – intermarriage.’
‘Intermarriage!’ echoed Aliens Officer.
‘Yes,’ the Preacher said solemnly. ‘Neither you nor your machines seemed able to diagnose that. So you see our origins are a mixture of Man’s and Boux’s …’
‘That is a priceless piece of knowledge,’ Deeping reflected.
Calurmo smiled a valedictory smile that included even the deflated Admiral.
‘I’m delighted if it proves so,’ he said, ‘but it is only a just return for Man’s priceless gift to the Boux who were our distant ancestors: the gift of rigid form. Fluidity has proved a curse to the Boux. Intermarriage has recommendations for both sides. May I suggest you arrange – a love-match?’
This time he remembered to close the airlock doors. The Regalia slid, apparently of its own volition, into the great lock of the Pointer and out into space. By the time it was heading home, the flagship’s captain was busy roaring at his bridge officers and Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley was speaking apologetically to Base.
Deeping was staring at something that had materialized in his hand: wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella. A flower from Earth.
They never went out of the house.
The man whose name was Harley used to get up first. Sometimes he would take a stroll through the building in his sleeping suit – the temperature remained always mild, day after day. Then he would rouse Calvin, the handsome, broad man who looked as if he could command a dozen talents and never actually used one. He made as much company as Harley needed.
Dapple, the girl with grey eyes and black hair, was a light sleeper. The sound of the two men talking would wake her. She would get up and go to rouse May; together they would go down and prepare a meal. While they were doing that, the other two members of the household, Jagger and Pief, would be rousing.
That was how