Except that one day on Sagania — at a time when the first civilizations were being formed in the Valley of the Two Rivers on Earth — somebody had made a mistake. It may have been a politician who overplayed his hand, or a scientist who dealt the wrong cards, but the result was that Sagania lost its atmosphere, and its life, in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction which surged around the planet like a tidal wave of white fire.
Archaeologists from Earth, arriving seven thousand years later, had been able to discover very little about the final phase of Saganian civilization. Ironically or justly, according to one’s point of view, the beings who had represented the peak of the planet’s culture were the ones who removed virtually all trace of their existence. It was the older, humbler Saganian culture which, protected by the crust of centuries, had been uncovered by the electronic probes. Among the artifacts turned up were fragments of star maps which excited little comment, even though a few researchers had noticed that some of them showed a star which did not exist.
“This is the earliest fragment,” Garamond said, setting the photoprint on a table beside Napier. He pointed at a blurry speck. “And that’s the sun we’ve christened Pengelly’s Star. Here’s another map tentatively dated five hundred years later, and as you see — no Pengelly’s Star. One explanation is that at some time between when these two maps were drawn the star vanished.”
“Maybe it got left out by mistake,” Napier prompted, aware that Garamond wanted to go over all the familiar arguments once more.
“That can’t be — because we have two later maps, covering the same region but drawn several centuries apart, and they don’t record the star either. And a visual check right now shows nothing in that region.”
“Which proves it died.”
“That’s the obvious explanation. A quick but unspectacular flare-up — then extinction. Now here’s the fourth map, the one found by Doctor Pengelly. As you can see, this map shows our star.”
“Which proves it’s older than maps two and three.”
“Pengelly claims he excavated it at the highest level of all, that it’s the youngest.”
“Which proves he was a liar. This sort of thing has happened before, Vance.” Napier flicked the glossy prints with blunt fingers. “What about that affair in Crete a few hundred years ago? Archaeologists are always…”
“Trying to win acclaim for themselves. Pengelly had nothing to gain by lying about where he found the fragment. I personally believe it was drawn only a matter of decades before the Big Burn, well into the Saganians space-going era.” Garamond spoke with the flatness of utter conviction. “You’ll notice that on the fourth map the star isn’t represented by a simple dot. There are traces of a circle around it.”
Napier shrugged and took the first sip of his whisky. “It was a map showing the positions of extinct suns.”
“That’s a possibility. Possibly even a probability, but I’m betting that Saganian space technology was more advanced than we suspect. I’m betting that Pengelly’s Star was important to them in some way we don’t understand. They might have found a habitable world there.”
“It wouldn’t be habitable now. Not after its sun dying.”
“No — but there might be other maps, underground installations, anything.” Garamond suddenly heard his own words as though they were being spoken by a stranger, and he was appalled at the flimsiness of the logical structure which supported his family’s hopes for a future. He glanced instinctively at the door leading to the bedroom where Aileen and Chris were asleep. Napier, perceptive as ever, did not reply and for a while they drank in silence. Blocks of coloured light, created for decorative purposes by the same process which produced solid-image weather maps, drifted through the air of the room in random patterns, mingling and merging. Their changing reflections seemed to animate the gold snail on Garamond’s desk.
“We never found any Saganian starships,” Napier said.
“It doesn’t mean they didn’t have them. You’d find their ships anywhere but in the vicinity of a burnt-out home world.” There was another silence and the light-cubes continued to drift through the room like prisms of insubstantial gelatin.
Napier finished his drink and got up to refill his glass. “You’re almost making some kind of a case, but why did the Exploratory Arm never follow it up?”
“Let’s level with each other,” Garamond said. “How many years is it since you really believed that Starflight wants to find other worlds?”
“I…”
“They’ve got Terranova, which they sell off in hectare lots as if it was a Long Island development property in the old days. They’ve got all the ships, too. Man’s destiny is in the stars — just so long as he is prepared to sign half his life away to Starflight for the ride, and the other half for a plot of land. It’s a smooth-running system, Cliff, and a few cheap new worlds showing up would spoil it. That’s why there are so few ships, comparatively speaking, in the S.E.A.”
“But…”
“They’re more subtle than the railroad and mining companies in the States were when they set up their private towns, but the technique’s the same. What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to agree with you.” Napier punched his fist through a cube of lime-green radiance which floated away unaffected. “It doesn’t matter a damn where we go in this year, so let’s hunt down Pengelly’s Star. Have you any idea where it ought to be?”
“Some. Have a look at this chart.” As they walked over to the universal machine in the corner Garamond felt a sense of relief that Napier had been so easy to convince — to his own mind it gave the project a semblance of sanity. When he was within voice-acceptance range of the machine he called up the map it had prepared for him. A three-dimensional star chart appeared in the air above the console. One star trailed a curving wake of glowing red dashes in contrast to the solid green lines which represented the galactic drift of the others.
“I had no direct data on how far Pengelly’s Star was from Sagania,” Garamond said. “But the fact that we’re interested in it carries the implication that it was a Sol-type sun. This gives an approximate value for its intrinsic luminosity and, as the dot representing it on the earliest Saganian map was about equal in size to other existing stars of first magnitude, I was able to assign a distance from Sagania.”
“There’s a lot of assuming and assigning going on there,” Napier said doubtfully.
“Not all that much. Now, the stars throughout the entire region share the same proper motion and speed so, although they’ve all travelled a long way in seven thousand years, we can locate Pengelly’s Star on this line with a fair degree of certainty.”
“Certainty, he says. What’s the computed journey time? About four months?”
“Less if there’s the right sort of dust blowing around.”
“It’ll be there,” Napier said in a neutral voice. “It’s an ill wind…”
Later, when Napier had left to get some sleep, Garamond ordered the universal machine to convert an entire wall of the room into a forward-looking viewscreen. He sat for a long time in a deep chair, his drink untouched, staring at the stars and thinking about Napier’s final remark. Part of the invisible galactic winds from which the Bissendorf drew its reaction mass had been very ill winds for somebody, sometime, somewhere. Heavy particles, driven across the galactic wheel by the forces of ancient novae, were the richest and most sought-after harvest of all. An experienced flickerwing man could tell when his engine intakes had begun to feed on such a cloud just by feeling the deck grow more insistent against his feet. But a sun going nova engulfed its planets, converting them and everything on them to incandescent gas, and at each barely perceptible surge of the ship Garamond wondered if his engines were feeding on the ghosts of dawn-time civilizations, obliterating all their dreams, giving the final answer to all their questions.