Ronny looked at him.
The captain cleared his throat. “It was what seemed to be an altar, and on it, a man.”
“A Dawnman?”
“An Earthman. Or, to be more accurate, I suppose, a Phrygian. But, at any rate, a member of the human race, not a Dawnman.”
Ronny sucked in air. Finally, he said, “All right. Drop me. Then take off again. I’ll keep in touch, through Agent Birdman. If anything happens to me, he’s in command.”
“Right,” Volos said. There was a certain respect in his voice now, which had hardly been there in his early dealings with the Section G operatives.
When Ronny Bronston had gotten a good thousand yards from the Pisa, he turned and waved; and seconds later, it lifted off. He watched it fade away, upward and out.
He turned and looked about him.
It was still a park. A garden.
He shook his head in disbelief.
And not ten feet from him, some sort of door opened in empty space. For the briefest of moments, he could see into what seemed to be living quarters of a man-type being. Chairs, tables, decorations…
But then a body blocked his view. A Dawnman came out and began walking toward him. The door, or whatever the opening was closed again.
Ronny was gaping, his jaw sagging. He shook his head for clarity.
The Dawnman, walking briskly and looking to neither left nor right, passed him by no more than three feet.
He could have stepped off a pedestal in a Greek temple devoted to the god Apollo. He was approximately six and a half feet tall and would have weighed approximately one hundred and ninety. His skin was golden, his hair dark cream. His eyes were blue and very clear, and there was the slightest of smiles on his lips.
He wasn’t ignoring Ronny Bronston blindly, he was ignoring him enthusiastically, avidly, even vigorously, if that made sense.
He walked right on by and went about his business.
Ronny stood there for a long moment, blankly.
Perhaps the other was blind.
No. Ridiculous. A man didn’t stride along as carefree as this young man was doing, without benefit of sight. He was about to top a slight hill, and would be lost to view. On an impulse, Ronny ran after him.
He called, “Say!”
The Dawnman either didn’t hear, or didn’t bother to answer. He strode on. Back from him floated a trill of song. Well, not exactly a song. Sort of a happy cross between song and whistle. It had a beautiful lilt.
Ronny called, realizing that the use of Earth Basic was ridiculous, “Wait! I want to talk to you!”
But the Dawnman passed over the rise and, by the time Ronny Bronston got to the top of the hillock, the Dawnman had disappeared.
Ronny looked about him, bewildered. There was no place for him to have gone in such short order. But then he remembered how the Dawnman had emerged from what had seemed open space. Without doubt, he had disappeared into another such… such… What was it?
And even with these thoughts in mind, Ronny walked full into… what was it? He smashed, at full pace, into an invisible barrier. He sat down, abruptly, his hand to his nose, which, he at first thought, must be broken. It wasn’t. In a couple of minutes, still sitting, he got the nosebleed under control.
Then he stared accusingly at… at what? At nothing. Immediately before him seemed a beautifully kept lawn leading to a small grove of trees. Beyond the grove he could see a stream of unbelievably clear water.
He reached a hand forward, tentatively.
He could feel… what? A glass-like substance? He supposed so. He traced it from the ground up as far as he could reach, and then he walked slowly along it, ever feeling.
Seemingly, it was a wall. But he could see through it perfectly. No matter how close he brought his eyes, he could not see it, however.
He could hear his communicator hum in his pocket. He took it out and flicked open the lid. Phil Birdman was on the screen.
He said, anxiously, “For a minute, there, we thought we saw one of these Dawnmen right near you.”
“You did.”
“Well, what happened to him?”
Ronny said sourly, “He evidently came out of one house, walked down the street aways and into another.”
Phil said, “Are you all right?”
“Except for a busted nose, I’m all right. This planet isn’t depopulated. They evidently just don’t like the idea of cluttering up the scenery with a lot of buildings, so they camouflage them. For all I know. I’m in the middle of a big city right now. No, I guess I couldn’t be, or I’d see more people out here in the open.”
“Camouflage? We don’t see any camouflage.”
“Oh, knock it,” Ronny told him. “It’s perfect camouflage, of course, you can’t see it. Have you got in touch with Earth?”
“Right. I talked with Sid Jakes. He said to play it by ear.”
Ronny grunted. “Tell him I’m playing it by nose, instead.” He flicked the communicator off.
With no other idea of what to do in mind, he walked in the direction of the city, or religious buildings, or whatever they were.
He rounded a bend and came upon what could only be a picnic. A group of the Dawnpeople, about ten of them, were seated on the bank of a stream. There were both men and women, all seemingly somewhere between the ages of twenty and thirty: All absolutely perfect physical specimens. If anything, the perfection was its own drawback. They were, Bronston decided, too perfect.
Not a woman nor a man among them but wouldn’t have met the highest standards of Tri-Di sex symbol back on Earth, or any of the other planets that continued the fan system of theater. No Greek goddess could have rivaled a single of these women in pulchritude. Paris would have had his work cut out, choosing whom to give his apple.
Ronny hesitated. Obviously, these people were at their leisure, enjoying themselves. He disliked to intrude.
But then it came to him, that given fusion power and matter converters, they must have considerable in the way of leisure. Besides, they would be interested in him as a complete alien. He might as well take the plunge.
He stepped nearer and said, “I beg your pardon,” feeling like a flat at the words, but the ice had to be broken somehow. He assumed that a race this advanced would have some method of communicating with him. Some technician who…
But then, Baron Wyler’s words came back to him: these Dawnpeople are not intelligent.
Nonsense! On the face of it…
But on the face of it, they didn’t even see him.
He stepped closer.
They went on with their picnic, if that’s what it was. They ignored him, completely, enthusiastically. He stepped so close that they couldn’t possibly have missed his presence.
And it wasn’t as though they were blind. He could see them performing actions that obviously required the coordination of hand and eye.
One of them, an absolutely perfectly formed girl wearing nothing but sandals and a colorful kilt, picked up a handful of sand and gravel from the stream’s bank and turned with it to a low table. There was, on the table, a device that reminded Ronny of nothing so much as a primitive coffee grinder he had once seen in an Earth museum. She poured the dirt into a funnel-shaped hole on the top and touched a switch or stud.
She opened a small door and brought forth what was seemingly a piece of fruit, though unrecognizable as to type by the Section G agent. She began to munch it.
Ronny Bronston closed his eyes in surrender.
He said, in sudden exasperation, “Look, won’t somebody give me a steer?”
They still didn’t notice him.
He looked at the gathering more closely. There were several of the coffee-grinder devices. Evidently, they were in continual use. Some of the Dawnpeople were drinking from intricately shaped glasses, some eating various unidentifiable foodstuffs. They laughed. One or two sang, from time to time, in that strange trilling manner Ronny had heard earlier from his first contact.