* * *

  On Sibylla it was always hot. Cumae glowers half again as great in the sky of that world as Sol does on Earth, and pours down nearly twice the energy. Those wavelengths are poor in ultraviolet but rich in infrared. The sunlight is orange-tinted, not actually furnace color though it feels that way.

  I asked Brenner why the colonists didn’t move upward. Peaks shouldered above the horizon. Their snows were doubly bright against the purplish heaven, doubly beautiful against the gray-green bushland that stretched around us, murmurous and resinous under a dry wind. I saw that timberline, or whatever passed for it, reached almost to the tops. The dark, slightly iridescent hues suggested denser growth than here. Yonder must be a well-watered country, fertile in soil, and cool, cool.

  “Not enough air,” he said. He spoke English, with a faint American twang remaining after generations. They were chiefly Americans who went to Sibylla. “We’re about as high on this massif as we can go.”

  “But…oh, yes,” I recalled. “The pressure gradient’s steeper than on Earth. Your planet’s got fifty percent more diameter, a third more surface gravity.”

  “And less air to start with.” Brenner cleared his throat. I recognized the preliminary to a speech.

  “We leave the lowlands be because they’re too hot, not because of too thick an atmosphere,” he said. “Remember, this is a metal-poor globe, lowish density in spite of its mass. So it didn’t outgas as much as it might have, in the beginning. Also, on account of the slow rotation, it don’t have any magnetic field worth mentioning. Cumae may not be the liveliest star in the universe, but it does spit plenty protons and photons and stuff to thin out an atmosphere that hasn’t got a magnetic field to hide behind. We get a pretty strong radiation background too for the same reason; gives medical problems, and it’d be worse higher up. Furthermore, when you got an extra ought-point-three gee on you, and manual labor to do, you need lots of oxygen. So the long and the short of it is, we can’t colonize the real heights.” He cocked his head at me. “Didn’t they brief you ay-tall, son?”

  I looked back at him hard, feeling I rated more respect as the first officer of an exploratory ship. His leathery features crinkled in a slow grin. The President of Sibylla was no more formal than the rest of his ten thousand people.

  He wore the usual archaic kilts, blouse, boots, sun helmet set rakishly on his grizzled head, machete at hip. But my uniform was less neat than his garb, ten minutes after we had left the buggy by the roadside and started climbing. The gravity didn’t bother me; we use rougher accelerations on a craft like the Bering. I was aware of my flesh and bones dragging downward, nothing worse. The heat, though, the booming and thrusting wind, the scanted lungfuls I breathed, dryness afire in nose and throat, malignant grab of branches and slither of sandy soil, something faintly intoxicant about the plant odors, had entered me. I was sweat-drenched, dusty, a-gasp and a-tremble, and gladder than I should be of a chance to rest.

  I decided not to stand on the dignity I didn’t have. Besides, I thought, we were men together in the face of the not human. It had killed, it could kill again, it could smite Earth herself. I felt lonelier in that wide grim landscape than ever between the stars.

  “They gave us what information was available,” I said. “But it was simultaneously too ample—for one head to contain—and too little—for the totality of a world. Hard for us to guess what’s significant and what’s incidental. And you’ve been isolated from us for nearly two centuries. Nothing but a thread of laser contact, with a third of each century needed to cross the distance between. Our fleet took longer still, of course; the big ships aren’t meant to go above one gee, so they need a year to approach light speed and another year to decelerate. Inboard time at minimum tau factor isn’t negligible either. We experienced several months in covering those parsecs. And we were wondering the whole way if we’d arrive to find the aliens had returned—arrive to find you dead here and a trap set for us. Under the circumstances, sir, we were bound to forget some of what we’d learned.”

  “Well, yes, I reckon you would at that,” Brenner said. “Getting back to why we’ve settled this Devil’s Meadows district, I can tell you we haven’t got any better place, and most are not as good. Sibylla is not Earth and never will be.”

  “But you have colonized the polar regions, haven’t you? The original expedition team suggested it, and my briefing said—”

  “We abandoned them a spell back. They do have higher air pressure and lower background count, at a reasonable average temperature. But that’s only an average. Don’t you forget, the rotation period is locked to two-thirds of the year, we being so close to the sun. Sixty-five Earthdays of light are tolerable, though it gets too hot toward evening for us to work. We can grow crops, sort of, with lamps to help through the sixty-five-day night. But at the poles, a thirty-seven-degree axial tilt, the seasons are too flinkin’ extreme. What with everything else they had going against them, our poor little terrestrial plants kept dying off there. We haven’t the industry or the resources to practice greenhouse agriculture on the needful scale.” Brenner shrugged. “Finally we gave up and everybody moved equatorward.”

  I glanced down the crater slope. The road from Jimstown was dirt, a track nearly lost to sight, rutted, overgrown in places, little used since the destruction of New Washington. But traffic had never been heavy along it; no community on Sibylla was ever more than an overgrown village, and most were less. Tiny at this remove stood Brenner’s buggy. The lank horse sniffed discouragedly at the brush it could not eat.

  We might have taken a flitter from one of the relief ships. But that would have meant waiting until it could be unloaded and fetched down from orbit. Besides, I had wanted some feel of what Sibylla and its people were really like.

  I was getting it.

  High hopes, two hundred years ago. People who were going to an uncrowded unplundered world, a whole new world, and this time build things right. They understood there would be hardships, danger, strangeness, on a planet for which our kind of life is not really fitted. But there would be nothing that men had not encountered and overcome elsewhere. The explorers had made certain of that beforehand.

  Economics was a stronger motive than decency for being sure. The Directorate takes a bit of political pressure off itself with each colony it establishes, but does not really solve any physical problems at home; and the cost of sending the big ships is fantastic. The aim is to make Earth’s people look up through the dust and smoke and say, “Well, at, least somebody’s doing all right out there, and maybe we’ll be picked to go in the next emigration, if we stay in favor with the authorities meanwhile.” Failures would be very, very upsetting. Only the news of outright attack had justified organizing the Colonial Fleet to evacuate the Sibyllans.

  The investment in them was so huge. Their ancestors came with tools, machinery, chemicals, seeds, suspended-frozen animal embryos, scientific gear…the basics. Of course, they brought a full stock of technical references too. As population expanded, they would build fusion power stations, they would replace the native life forms in ever larger areas with terrene species, they would at last create Paradise. To judge from their laser reports, they had been following out the plan. It was going slowly, because Sibylla was uncommonly hostile, but it was going.

  Now—the reasons why they had not rebuilt were plain to see. The lean ships that appeared in the sky, sixty-eight years ago, bombing and flaming, had knocked the foundations out from under the colony. Too much plant was wrecked, too many lives were lost, too few resources were left. For a lifetime, the people could merely hang on, keep their economy stumbling along at a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century level, cling to the hope that we would answer their appeal. And all the while they knew fear.

  I looked again at Tom Brenner. Before he was born, the enemy aliens had destroyed from pole to pole. In days—Earth-days—their fleet had departed back into unknownness. At any instant they might return, and not be content with blowing his toy towns off the map. I wondered how deep the weariness went that I read upon him. Yet he stood straight, and he had a squinty-eyed grin, and two of his children had survived to adulthood and one grandchild was alive and healthy.

  “Come on,” I said in a harshened voice. “Let’s get this finished.”

  We didn’t stop till we mounted the rim and looked down into the fused black bowl where New Washington had been. A few skeletons of buildings jutted from the edges, but only a few, their frameworks grotesquely twisted. I estimated that the blast had released fifty megatons.

  * * *

  The star became a taxi. It glided to a halt across the deck from me and balanced while the stocky figure climbed out. I wondered how he paid it. They had told me the Sibyllans were interned on a military reservation while the Director and his cabinet decided what to do about them. Well, when d’Indre demanded a live conference with the old man, perhaps the colonel had taken pity and slipped him some munits so he could arrive like a citizen, not a consignment.

  The taxi took off. Brenner started toward the door. At home he had walked with a rolling, ursine gait. Here he flowstepped, light and easy as an Earthdweller on Mars. His cloak flapped loose, his singlet was open on the broad hairy chest. The unaccustomed cold didn’t seem to bother him, rather he savored it.

  I moved to intercept him. “Good evening,” I said.

  Shadows barred our faces. He leaned forward to peer at me. The cigar dropped from his jaws. “Holy hopping Judas—Nick Simić!” He shook his head in bewilderment. But you, your ship, you stayed behind.”

  “Your settlement was out of touch with astronautics,” I said. My tone was sharper than intended; I really wanted to gentle the shock for him. “The Colonial Fleet accelerates at one gee. But in an exploratory vessel like the Bering, we’re selected professionals; and the motors have a lot less mass to act on. We load ourselves with gravanol and crank her up as high as ten gees. In five or six weeks we’re close to light speed and can ease off. I’ve been home for a year.”

  “You, uh, didn’t stay long on Sibylla then.”

  “Long enough.”

  “Well.” He straightened. The remembered chuckle sounded in his throat. “Quite a surprise, son, quite a surprise. But pleasant.” He thrust out his hand. I took it. His clasp was firm. “And how are your shipmates?”

  “Very well, thank you, the last I saw. The Bering has left again. Further study of the Delta Eridani System. The third planet looks promising, but its ecology is peculiar and—” I realized I was chattering to avoid speaking truth. “I stayed,” I said, “since I was in charge of our investigation on the ground and drafted our report. Citizen d’Indre wanted me for a consultant when you arrived.”

  “I’m sorry if you missed going on account of us.”

  “No matter. I’m in line for a command of my own.” That was true, but I said it merely to cheer him a little. “How are your people doing?”

  “Okay to date.” Brenner didn’t seem in need of consolation, now that he had gotten over his surprise. I don’t suppose anyone grew old on Sibylla who couldn’t land on his feet when the floor caved in. He drew a breath and gave that straight-in-the-eye look which he had once described as Horsetrader’s Honest Expression Number Three. “ ’Course,” he said, “we wonder a wee bit why we’re held incommunicado and till when.”

  “That has to be decided,” I said. “What happens tonight could be pivotal.”

  “Don’t the proles know we’re here?”

  “Nothing except rumors. Your story has to be handled like fulminate. You can’t imagine how restless those billions there are.” My hand swept an arc around the city. It growled and grumbled. “The original news, nonhuman vessels attacking Sibylla, was let out with infinite care, and only because it couldn’t be suppressed. Considering that they seemed to have faster-than-light travel, and something like gravity control, the way you told it, the photographs you transmitted—Panic can bring riot, insurrection.” I paused. “So can rage.”

  “Um. Yeh.” The lines deepened around Brenner’s mouth, but somehow he kept his tone easy. “Well, what say we get on with it?…Oh, almost forgot.” He stooped to pick up the cigar. “Soldier gave me some o’ these. Friendly taste. No tobacco on our planet, you recall. We’d everything we could do to raise enough food to keep alive.”

  My gullet tightened. “Put that thing away!” I exclaimed. “Over the side with it! Don’t you understand who we’re about to see? Jules d’Indre, Minister of Extraterrestrial Affairs. What he recommends be done about you, the Director is almost sure to decree. I warn you, Brenner, be careful!”

  He regarded me a while before he obeyed. His next words were astonishing. “Did that girl who traveled with you, Laurie MacIver, did she ship out in the Bering?”

  “Why yes.”

  “Too bad.” He spoke softly, and for a moment laid his hand on my shoulder. “I think you want to help us, son, according to your lights. But she had something extra. You know the word simpático?”

  I nodded. “She is that,” I agreed.

  * * *

  We went ranging about, she and I, after a ground-effect car had been brought down and assembled. My thought was to interview as many Sibyllans as possible before they left. None were alive who had experienced the attack, but older ones might recollect what the generation before them had said, and might have noticed significant things in the bombed-out towns before salvage and erosion blurred the clues. Laurie accompanied me for several reasons. We didn’t need a computer officer here, and you don’t travel alone on another planet. But primarily, she understood people, she listened, and they talked freely because they sensed that she cared.

  It is not true what the alleydwellers snigger, that spacewomen are nothing but a convenience for spacemen. They hold down responsible posts. And in the black ocean between stars, among the deaths that lair on every new world, on return to an Earth grown strange, you need someone very special.

  Just the same, we had thin luck. Sunset handicapped us. Cumae hung low and went lower, casting an inflamed light that was hard to see by across the plateaus. But the air had cooled sufficiently for outdoor work, and everyone on those pitiful farms toiled till he dropped in his tracks. They must complete their daylight jobs—discing and sowing at the present season, plus hay harvest, livestock roundup, and I don’t know what else—largely with muscle power. They could only illuminate a limited part of their holdings after the moonless dark came upon them, truck gardens and such that would fail otherwise. Metal and manpower were too scarce to produce the factories which could have produced the machines and energy sources they lacked.

  To be sure, this was the last round for them. They were going to Earth. But you can’t spaceload ten thousand human beings overnight. The Fleet was barely able to carry the rations they would need on their journey. They must feed themselves meanwhile, and they had no reserves. I was appalled at the wretched yields, the scrawny animals, the stunted timber. And, while most of the individuals I saw were whipcord tough, they were undersized, they had few living children, the graveyards were broad and filled.

  “Terrene life is so marginal here,” Laurie said as we drove. Her voice was muted with compassion. We had no logical need for a recital of the facts. We had known them since before we left Earth, when we studied the reports of communications from Sibylla. But those were words. Here she met the reality. She needed to put it back into words for herself, before she could reach beyond the anguish and think about practical ways to help.

  “Not simply that the native species are poisonous to us,” she said. “They poison the soil for our crops. You have to keep weeds, bacteria, everything out of a field for years before the rain’s leached it to the point where you can begin building a useful ecology. And then it’s apt to be attacked by something—new poisons seeping in, diseases, stormwinds—and at best, it never gets strongly established.”

  I nodded and listed the causes, to hold off the idea of a personally evil cosmos. “Long nights, weird seasons, shortage of several trace elements, ultraviolet poverty coupled with X-ray and particle irradiation, gravity tending to throw terrene fluid balances out of kilter, even the geological instability. Some of their best mines collapsed in earthquakes in the early days, did you know?—and never could be reopened. Oh, yes, it’s a hard world for humans.”

  My fist struck the control panel and I said with a barren anger: “But so are others. There’s nothing wrong here that men haven’t found, and beaten. The wildlife is worse on Zion, the weight is heavier on Atlas, a full-fledged ice age is under way on Asgard, Lucifer is hotter and has a higher particle count—”

  She turned in her seat to face me. Sundown light, streaming through the turret, changed her gold hair to copper against purple shadows. “But none of those were attacked,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “At least, as far as we know.”

  We should not have mentioned it. The thought had haunted us since we returned from our last voyage and got the news. It dwelt in the back of every mind on Earth. Perhaps it had done so since man first ventured beyond the Solar System. Our few score parsecs of exploring are no trail whatsoever into that wilderness which is the galaxy. Who can doubt that others prowl it, with longer legs and sharper fangs?

  Why had they struck? How? Where else? Who’s next?

  The Sibyllans did their best to answer Laurie’s questions and mine. But not only were they hard-pressed for time and dull-witted with exhaustion, their information was scant. I had now inspected the ruins, some photographs of ships in flight, eyewitness accounts, compiled histories. The basic narrative was in my brain.

  The raiders could not hit everywhere at once. Josiah Brenner, Tom’s father, President in his day, got most population centers evacuated before they went up in fireballs. A majority already lived on isolated farms, it took so many hectares to support one person. For the same reason, the former townsfolk scattered across the whole habitable planet afterward.