“You were an Away Man,” Rick said. “You weren’t wrecked here. You volunteered to stay?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Terney said. He hugged himself. “It was fine.”

  His voice sounded rusty, but he’d gotten enough control to speak normally. “I always liked to keep to myself, so I took the end place across the water from the rest. The others, I don’t think they got together much neither. People who do don’t take a job like that. And the ship came back, I guess in a year, I couldn’t be sure. Only they forgot me, the other side of the water, you know. And when I saw they were closing up the hatches, I ran to the other side but nobody saw me. And they never came back, but I kept cropping the weed.”

  He started crying. He was wearing a piece of sacking; probably from the bales of food that had been left with the algae crew.

  “You’re all right,” Rick said. “Don’t worry. They’ll find a place for you in the Power Room. Riggers need skills you probably don’t have, but you’ll do for lift and carry in the Power Room.”

  * * *

  When we got back to the Far Traveller, Rick took Terney to the first lieutenant while I went to the Annotated Charts. I was looking not for information on Elkin (bare mention of the pools around Pool Bay is all there was) but to see what there was about Hermogenes, which turned out considerable trade in the region, both on its own bottoms and outside carriers. The Brotherhood—the regional combine which had provided the Goliath with the charts which almost wrecked her while I was aboard—was strong, but so were the Shinings and ships from a dozen other planets.

  Hermogenes had light industry. It provided equipment which was cheaper and sometimes better suited to undeveloped planets than what was available from sophisticated worlds within the Alliance. There was no penetration of the region by Cinnabar manufactures, though that might change if the Far Traveller’s soundings were successful.

  Hermogenes did export cosmetics. A rejuvenating creme was even sold on Pleasaunce as a cachet product. No information I could find went into the composition of the creme, but that note seemed to support Terney’s story.

  I went looking for Doctor Veil. Mahaffy told me that she was in her office with Lieutenant Grenville, which was a considerable surprise. I’d been at a work station, so lost in my researches that I hadn’t heard Rick come in.

  The office door was ajar. I tapped on the jamb and Veil called, “Bring him in, Grenville.” They must’ve heard me talking to Mahaffy.

  “Sir,” I said to Doctor Veil, “I’ve found some support for Terney’s story.”

  “Very good, Harper,” Veil said. “And Grenville here has some other information from Terney.”

  Rick nodded. “He started talking about the dreams he’d been having ever since he found ‘the room,’” Rick said. “I guess they were nightmares. He says animals were turning into fish, which doesn’t sound so awful—but it was scaring the bejabbers out of him even to talk about it. But I figured Doctor Veil would want to know about this room, which he said is made of glass. It’s about a day’s walk inland.”

  “Glass?” I said. “Moissanite would look like glass if it was dirty.”

  “Yes,” Veil agreed, nodding. “Do you suppose Terney can show us where it is?”

  “Don’t see why not,” Rick said. “Besides, we can look for gullies from the air if we have to.”

  * * *

  Captain Bolton had approved Rick accompanying Doctor Veil in the aircar. That meant he and Harry could be together in the back of the vehicle with Terney. Any husky enlisted spacer could have done the strong-arm part of the job, but there might have been more to it than that. Besides Rick got along well with the Bio Section and it would clearly please Lord Harper if the Captain allowed him to come.

  Terney began to tremble when they brought him down to the transport bay. He didn’t fight them when they helped him into the back of the truck, but he wrapped his arms around his torso and shook from the time they took off. He faced out the rear of the compartment, but it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t really looking for the site he’d described to them.

  Doctor Veil shouted through the cab window, “We’re going to set down here. It’s the ravine closest to Terney’s hut, so it seems likely.”

  Kent eased us in perfectly, as usual. The cloud of dust settled quickly. Doctor Veil got out of the cab. Harry said, “Come on, Terney. You’re going to guide us.”

  Terney huddled around himself, weeping again. He mumbled something which could’ve been, “Don’t leave me.”

  Harry was murmuring in a reassuring voice, but Rick dropped the tailgate and gripped Terney by the shoulder, not harshly but firmly. He said to Harry, “Don’t let him jump back,” and pulled Terney from the truck. Terney yelped but again didn’t fight.

  Harry jumped down and took the other arm. They walked the Away Man—since he wasn’t a castaway after all—toward the edge. The gully was about twelve feet deep and maybe forty feet wide. The clumps of cane growing on the gully floor were shorter than those on either side, so it must channel heavy downpours on occasion. Neither lieutenant knew where it drained, but it certainly wasn’t to Pool Bay.

  “Is this where you found the room?” Doctor Veil asked.

  “It looks like it,” Terney said. For some reason he responded to the woman’s voice better than he did to the males. “It’s on this side though so you gotta look over the edge to see it.”

  Harry walked over to the edge and looked in both directions. Something glinted on the inland side. “There it is,” he called. “About a hundred yards is all.”

  Doctor Veil said something about getting the truck, but Rick let go of Terney’s arm and the two lieutenants strode briskly toward the object. “It’s not much to look at, is it?” Rick said as they peered down at the corner of something smooth sticking out of the side of the ravine.

  “Well, it’s not natural,” Harry said. He had only minimal testing apparatus with him in the pockets of his equipment belt. Rather than jump directly to the ground, he hopped down to the visible corner and used it as a step midway, then hopped to the ground.

  It might well be a room as Terney had called it. Much of the smooth crystal facade had been exposed.

  “There’s a shadow inside!” Rick said as he came down the steeply sloping wall to stand beside Harry. The shower of pebbles and grit he’d stirred up rolled along the gully floor beyond him.

  Harry had an optical reading already but he tapped the crystal with a bit of stone to see what sound waves within the material told him. He said, “It’s moissanite. That doesn’t prove anything, I suppose. And it’s a hollow cube just over seven feet on a side. I can’t tell if there’s anything inside, but maybe if we get powerful lights they’ll be able to show us more than a shadow. If there is more than a shadow.”

  The aircar had lifted and landed beside them, blowing a blinding scud of grit down onto them. Doctor Veil walked over to the edge and looked over at them. “I’m not going to jump down,” she said, “but can you send me imagery, Lord Harper?”

  Harry linked his handheld to Veil’s and scanned the front of the crystal for as far down as it was exposed. “Ma’am,” he said. “I’ve already sent a full optical and sonic scan to the ship. As full as this little unit can do. I didn’t see anything except there’s a chip out of one of the corners at the bottom where it’s still buried.”

  “This soil’s so light we can lift it with a suction pump,” Rick volunteered.

  Doctor Veil considered for a moment, then said, “All right, we’ll go back to the ship and get the equipment we’ll need. Especially proper recording gear. I’ll have Kent bring the car down to pick you up.”

  “No need,” Rick said. He bent his knees slightly and made a stirrup of his hands. He nodded at Harry, who nodded back and stepped into the stirrup. “Ready,” he said. He jumped and caught the upper edge of the crystal and hung there. With additional boost from Rick, he scrambled to the clear top, then bent and reached back down to catch Rick’s hand as he jumped. They stood together panting at the top of the room.

  “You know,” Harry said, “I was willing to wait for a ride.”

  “And get sandblasted again?” Rick said. “Naw.”

  Together they scrambled up the steep slope to ground level. At the top, Rick said, “You’re in pretty good shape, Lord Harper.”

  “I could’ve told you that,” Harry said.

  “Yeah,” said Rick. “But now I know it, which might be important to me one of these days.”

  Laughing, they joined Doctor Veil at the aircar.

  * * *

  It was midafternoon before a crew set up a modified reaction-mass pump from one of the pinnaces. The crew running it was a mixture of Power Room techs and riggers who guided the suction mouth with long booms.

  Doctor Veil and I watched, initially from nearer than we should have been. The output end of the rig put out an enormous plume of dust and grit. The crew serving it wore helmets, not for communication as I’d thought but because of the built-in filters. The grit fell out quickly, but the dust mounted high in the air and a shift in the breeze was likely to bring it onto anybody within a half a mile.

  The howl of the fan, echoing to us from the opposite side of the gully, cut off. Veil was wearing a pocket communicator. It beeped. She checked it and said, “We can go down now. They say they’ve cleared the Room.”

  We joined Kent in the cab of the truck. Kent looked at Doctor Veil and said, “I’d rather wait a bit and let the dust settle. That stuff’s like stone polish. It’ll eat the fan blades in no time.”

  “Go on,” said Veil. “We’ll replace the fan blades, then. Don’t you see how important this is?”

  We lifted to a hundred feet instead of just swooping over the lip of the ravine and down to the work site. It struck me that Kent really was giving the dust as long as possible to settle, and was also trying not to fan what had fallen to the ground into the air again.

  We dropped to the gully floor very close on the other side of where the suction pump had been working. It was probably as grit free as any site within a mile. Our lift fans shut off the instant we touched, though they continued to rotate slowly on inertia.

  The crew had set up a coarse screen on the output end of the suction pump. It didn’t catch items flung out of the pump, but it reduced their velocity so that larger items fell to the ground just beyond it. At first glance there was just a mound of dirt there, but we—probably I—would sift it soon.

  The Room—Terney’s word was as good as any—was a moissanite cube. Uncovering it hadn’t really told us anything that my handheld apparatus hadn’t. The cube was hollow with walls about five inches thick. Light into the cube wicked along the walls, but didn’t illuminate the object inside. It was simply a blur standing three or four feet high.

  The chip out of the bottom made no more sense when we could touch it than it had in imagery. It was about six inches long and wasn’t a chip—it was more similar to a casting flaw or perhaps a mold. The complex shape was perfectly smooth and showed no sign of fracture.

  I handled it after Doctor Veil had. I was quite careful because the edges could have been razor sharp, no matter what the imagery had indicated. I didn’t want to lose a fingertip.

  I helped Doctor Veil set up recording apparatus from three angles. Neither of us had any idea of what it might show, but the data was copied to the Far Traveller so we didn’t have to be here in the dry wind to view it; if there should be something to view, which seemed unlikely.

  Back at the ship I tried to talk to Terney about his dreams, but he didn’t offer any details beyond what he’d said to Rick just after we found him. “They’re just dreams!” he said when I pushed. “I dreamed that moles were changing into whales. I don’t know why, I don’t like to talk about it! I don’t know!”

  That was probably true. I didn’t know why the business so interested me.

  I did whatever work Doctor Veil set me, but Mahaffy was really much better using the sequencer than I was. Using a skiff, I serviced our traps set out in the bay. None of the catches were particularly interesting.

  From orbit we’d seen that the interior beyond a range of hills to the east was much better watered than where we were on the coast, so Kent took Joss off in the aircar with her collecting equipment. The pinnaces were taking route soundings, the main purpose of the expedition; Rick had taken command of the third after the reaction-mass pump had been put back together and refitted after we’d used it to clear the Room.

  I walked from the ship back to the Room, checking each of the pools along the way. Nineteen more of the sites had simple structures like the one where we’d found Terney. They were built of structural plastic, welded at the seams. All were in disrepair and a couple of them had blown away except for the base flange which anchored them into the ground. Terney had heaped additional sand around the one he inhabited, the only reinforcement he could make without tools or materials.

  I looked frequently at the Room. Nothing had changed—of course.

  Finally I hiked back to the ship. I probably could have made the request by communicator, but it seemed simpler to speak directly to Doctor Veil and the captain. Veil was delighted at the idea, as I’d expected, so I went up to Captain Bolton in his cruising cabin off the bridge.

  “Sir,” I said. “I’d like to spend the night at the structure we’ve uncovered. Doctor Veil has given me permission on her end, but to carry a tent and bedding and I guess a couple meals, I’d like to borrow a cyclo like the one Rick ran us around in on Medlum. I can bring it back in the morning. Or at once if you send a driver.”

  Captain Bolton laughed and said, “Well, I don’t see what harm it can do. Sure, you’ve got my permission. It’s certainly not a duty I envy you, though.”

  * * *

  A tech from Transportation carried me to the site and helped me set up the little tent in the recently dug area between the Room and the remaining gully wall. I could check the cameras on my handheld, but there wasn’t any more to be seen that way than there was with my naked eye, looking over at the back of the construction.

  I hadn’t come here to see anything, except possibly in dreams.

  Pool Bay must be equatorial. Sunset was as sudden as a mousetrap closing.

  I normally don’t remember my dreams, but tonight I was ready to record them on my handheld the instant I awakened. I’d learned that if I got the information out before I was fully alert, I could review it at leisure. Of course the dreams I’d recorded for about a week in a row—five years earlier—had been banal. For example, standing in a line which moved very slowly and appeared to have no destination—frustration dreams of that sort.

  This time was different. I began to see colonies of small quadrupeds living in woven structures in the treetops. They were communal and had a complex language which involved not only sound but color changes in the bare skin of their wattles.

  They ranged a forest of trees with foliage dangling like ribbons from the branches. Their fruit grew at the base of the limbs, pulpy globs of varied color.

  A population of the creatures suddenly froze in my awareness. The forest in which they had been scrambling grayed out, as though it existed on the other side of a thick crystal barrier.

  The creatures changed gradually as though they were being squeezed into a subtly different mold. Then skin under their forearms bagged and grew into flaps attached along the sides of their bodies, becoming wings. At first they climbed and glided, but they began to fly with arm motions. Their skulls shrank and they no longer built structures together.

  The flyers and the climbers coexisted for a time—there was no measure of duration in the dream—but the flyers reached the ripe trees more quickly than the climbers did. The treetop nests became less common, then uncommon, and finally vanished from the forest.

  The flyers expanded their range. So far as the forest was concerned, there was no difference. The flyers spread seeds in the same fashion as the climbers had…but they weren’t intelligent and never would become intelligent.

  I awoke as dawn was breaking as abruptly as last night’s sunset. The recorder was ready, but I didn’t need it. The dream was as crisply real as the moissanite cube.

  The Room was suddenly horrible to me.

  I struck my tent and left it with the bedroll and the two meal packs I hadn’t eaten. I didn’t wait for a tech to arrive with the cyclo, but he could pick up my gear. I hiked toward the ship myself.

  Getting away from this place.

  * * *

  I asked the tech 4 in the transport bay to detail somebody to pick up the tent. I’m not sure I had the authority to do that, but I got along with the enlisted spacers. They took common courtesy to be something remarkable from a gentleman. Goodness knows I’ve met some of my peers who felt courtesy was a needless burden.

  Then I looked up Terney who was off duty in the Power Room sleeping section. As a survey ship, the Far Traveller had a much smaller crew than the warship it had been, so there was plenty of room. Only one other spacer shared Terney’s eight-person bay and she wasn’t in it at the moment.

  Terney tightened when he saw me. He said, “Yeah?” in a half-frightened, half-hostile voice.

  “Relax, Terney,” I said. “I just want to talk.” Then I said, “We’ll be lifting off in a couple days. Then we’ll never have to see this damned planet again.”

  Terney had jumped up when I entered the bay. Now he sat down again on the edge of his bunk. “You saw something too?” he said.

  “I slept beside the Room,” I said. “Monkeys turned into bats, more or less. It isn’t anything awful, is it? But it was.”

  “I know,” Terney said. He clasped his hands tight together and was shivering. “It shouldn’t happen. It isn’t right.”

  “No,” I said. “But it won’t happen again. The people, the things that did it, they’re all gone thousands of years ago.”