It didn't. Within the hour he had returned, coming up so silently that Tjond, intent on listening to the language lesson, did not notice him until he stood next to her.
"Your face," she said. "What is wrong? What did you discover?"
He smiled dryly to her. "Nothing terrible, I assure you. But things are very different from what we supposed."
"What is it?" Hautamaki asked from the screen. He had heard their voices and turned towards the pickup.
"How has the language progressed?" Gulyas asked. "Can you understand me, Liem?"
"Yes," the alien said. "Almost all of the words are clear now. But the machine has only a working force of a few thousand words so you must keep your speech simple."
"I understand. The things I want to say are very simple. First a question. Your people, do they come from a planet orbiting about a star near here?"
"No. We have traveled a long way to this star, searching. My home world is there, among those stars there."
"Do all your people live on that world?"
"No, we live on many worlds, but we are all children of children of children of people who lived on one world very long ago."
"Our people have also settled many worlds, but we all come from one world," Gulyas told him, then looked down at the paper in his hands. He smiled at the alien in the screen before him, but there was something terribly sad about this smile. "We came originally from a planet named Earth. That is where your people came from too. We are brothers, Liem."
"What madness is this?" Hautamaki shouted at him, his face swollen and angry. "Liem is humanoid, not human! It cannot breathe our air!"
"He cannot breath our air, or perhaps she," Gulyas answered quietly. "We do not use gene manipulation, but we know that it is possible. I'm sure we will eventually discover just how Liem's people were altered to live under the physical conditions they do now. It might have been natural selection and normal mutation, but it seems too drastic a change to be explained that way. But that is not important. This is." He held up the sheets of notes and photographs. "You can see for yourself. This is the DNA chain from the nucleus of one of my own cells. This is Liem's. They are identical. His people are as human as we are."
"They can't be!" Tjond shook her head in bewilderment. "Just look at him, he is so different, and their alphabet — what about that? I cannot be wrong about that."
''There is one possibility you did not allow for, a totally independent alphabet. You yourself told me that there is not the slightest similarity between the Chinese ideographs and Western letters. If Liem's people suffered a cultural disaster that forced them to completely reinvent writing you would have your alien alphabet. As to the way they look — just consider the thousands of centuries that have passed since mankind left Earth and you will see that his physical differences are minor. Some are natural and some may have been artificially achieved, but germ plasm cannot lie. We are all the sons of man."
"It is possible," Liem said, speaking for the first time. "I am informed that our biologists agree with you. Our points of difference are minor when compared to the points of similarity. Where is this Earth you come from?"
Hautamaki pointed at the sky above them, at the star-filled sweep of the Milky Way, burning with massed stars. "There, far out there on the other side of the core, roughly halfway around the lens of the galaxy."
"The core explains partially what must have happened," Gulyas said, "It is thousands of light-years in diameter and over ten thousand degrees in temperature. We have explored its fringes. No ship could penetrate it or even approach too closely because of the dust clouds that surround it. So we have expanded outwards, slowly circling the rim of the galaxy, moving away from Earth. If we stopped to think about it we should have realized that mankind was moving the other way, too, in the opposite direction around the wheel."
"And some time we would have to meet." Liem said. "Now I greet you, brothers. And I am sad, because I know what this means."
"We are alone," Hautamaki said, looking at the massed trillions of stars. "We have closed the circle and found only ourselves. The galaxy is ours, but we are all alone." He turned about, not realizing that Liem, the golden alien — the man — had turned at the same time in the same manner.
They faced outwards, looking at the infinite depth and infinite blackness of intergalactic space, empty of stars. Dimly, distantly, there were spots of light, microscopic blurs against the darkness, not stars but island universes, like the one at whose perimeter they stood.
These two beings were different in many ways: in the air they breathed, the color of their skins, their languages, mannerisms, cultures. They were as different as the day is from the night: the flexible fabric of mankind had been warped by the countless centuries until they could no longer recognize each other. But time, distance and mutation could not change one thing: they were still men, still human.
"It is certain then.” Hautamaki said. "We are alone in the galaxy."
"Alone in this galaxy." They looked at each other, then glanced away. At that moment they measured their humanness against the same rule and were equal.
For they had turned at the same instant and looked outward into intergalactic space, towards the infinitely remote light that was another island galaxy.
"It will be difficult to get there," someone said.
They had lost a battle. There was no defeat.
Speed of the Cheetah, Roar of the Lion
"Here he comes, Dad," Billy shouted, waving the field glasses. "He just turned the corner from Lilac."
Henry Brogan grunted a bit as he squeezed behind the wheel of his 22-foot-long, 8-foot-wide, 360-horsepower, four-door, power-everything and air-conditioning, definitely not compact, luxury car. There was plenty of room between the large steering wheel and the back of the leather-covered seat, but there was plenty of Henry as well, particularly around the middle. He grunted again as he leaned over to turn the ignition switch. The thunderous roar of unleashed horsepower filled the garage, and he smiled with pleasure as he plucked out the glowing lighter and pressed it to the end of his long cigar.
Billy squatted behind the hedge, peering through it, and when he called out again, his voice squeaked with excitement.
"A block away and slowing down!"
"Here we go!" his father called out gaily, pressing down on the accelerator. The roar of the exhaust was like thunder, and the open garage doors vibrated with the sound while every empty can bounced upon the shelves. Out of the garage the great machine charged, down the drive and into the street with the grace and majesty of an unleashed 747. Roaring with the voice of freedom, it surged majestically past the one-cylinder, plastic and plywood, 132-miles-to-the-gallon, single-seater Austerity Beetle that Simon Pismire was driving. Simon was just turning into his own driveway when the behemoth of the highways hurtled by and set his tiny conveyance rocking in the slipstream. Simon, face red with fury, popped up through the open top like a gopher from his hole and shook his fist after the car with impotent rage, his words lost in the roar of the eight gigantic cylinders. Henry Brogan admired this in his mirror, laughed with glee and shook a bit of cigar ash into his wake.
It was indeed a majestic sight, a whale among the shoals of minnows. The tiny vehicles that cluttered the street parted before him, their drivers watching his passage with bulging eyes. The pedestrians and bicyclists, on the newly poured sidewalks and bicycle paths, were no less attentive or impressed. The passage of a king in his chariot, or an All-American on the shoulders of his teammates, would have aroused no less interest. Henry was indeed King of the Road and he gloated with pleasure.