The volume of noise dropped until Caradine could feel and hear the incessant throb of machinery in the marble beneath his feet.
A fanfare rang out. Brilliant, coruscating notes that battered at all ears. Through that mammoth archway appeared the alien envoy.
He was a tiny black figure, there at that enormous distance away down at the other end of the room.
“Humanoid, at least,” said Harriet in a breath.
The tiny figure approached slowly, the focal point of every eye. He looked like a man. He wore black shoes and striped trousers of black and silver and gray, and a tight black coat fitted snugly, making him look like a beetle. In his left hand, cocked up, he carried a cylindrical black object with a round brim. His white shirt was fastened at the throat by a white butterfly-shaped strip of cloth. He walked very slowly because he was old and fragile and his face was brown and lined, with deep-set eyes of gray that pierced forth beneath tufty white eyebrows. His hair was immaculately silver.
A very small and very old and very dignified gentleman walked carefully all that enormous distance across the flamboyant marble floor, between the flanking rows of guardsmen, beneath the hanging crystal chandeliers.
Harriet and her husband and all the other moguls tensed up.
This was not what they had expected.
The old gentleman stopped at last before them. He bowed very slightly, looking about, the shadow of puzzlement on his face.
Lafonde, big and burly and domineering, stepped a pace forward. “Here we are, to await you,” he said. “Can you understand me?”
“Yes.” The envoy was looking about. Then he glanced at his wrist.
“We await your terms. All the might of our suns, and the power of our allies, will fight you to the bitter end if we find your terms unnacceptable. You are alive and admitted here merely because—”
“Because there are half a million battleships out there, which are the forerunners of the main fleets.”
Lafonde, all of them, accepted that. Lafonde swallowed and tried to speak again.
“Please be quiet,” said the little old man. “I did not come to see you.” He glanced up from his wrist and made a half turn. “All these fancy uniforms,” he grumbled to himself. He walked forward.
He stopped directly before Caradine.
“Hi, Dave,” he said. “I’ve come for you.”
“Hi, Dick. I might have known you couldn’t get on without me.”
“Terrible mess. You shouldn’t have done it. Ready?”
“Yes.” Caradine felt a new man. “Oh, I’m taking a couple of friends back, if they’ll go. One, at least.” He smiled at Allura. “Care to go to Earth with me, Allura?”
She put one hand in his. Something else settled, then.
The moguls were staring. They could not speak. All then-might, their pomp, their barbaric splendor—it had not even been noticed. Just that it was a long walk for a man from the door. That was all.
Harriet put a hand to her mouth. “You mean,” she whispered, “there is an Earth? An Earth that can put’ half a million battleships out as a scouting force? My God. My God!”
No one took much notice of her.
Walking back to the overpowering doorway with the rulers of Horakah ignored, Caradine said conversationally, “I suppose young Carson Napier saw through me, Dick? Figured that I was sick of this aimless wandering, and so he called you in.
“Something like that. A commonwealth of Suns may not be ran by one man; but having the right man directing overall policy is a—well, we just need you back, Dave. That’s all there is to it.”
“But why—?” said Allura holding to his arm.
“Earth went through a rough time way back. Man called Caradine—remote ancestor, they tell me—decided she needed to recover without being subjected to extraterrestrial pressures. So the word was spread that the Earth had been destroyed, and that developed into the fairy story everyone here believed implicidy. Now, the Commonwealth Suns of Terra consists of a million solar systems.”
Dick looked apologetic. “Nearer one and a half, now, Dave.”
“And that’s where we’re going. We may come back here beyond the Blight, one day, and clean up all these little groupings. I’ve seen the mess they’re in. That sort of pecking-order pseudo-civilization is not for Earth.”
They left the palace and the barbarians. The space-tender took them to the waiting armada. Ahead lay a commonwealth of over one million stars—and the legendary world of Earth.