Grote was in a biosuit, and no one else was aboard the skimmer. The engineer jabbered about Stek’s work on the instrument all the way back to the ship.
Just before they arrived, Grote suggested, «Uh, Sid, you do want to put on some coveralls, don’t you?»
Two biosuited men were setting up some electronics equipment at the base of the ship’s largest telescopes, dangling in a hoist sling overhead, the fierce glow of Sirius glinting off its metal barrel.
«Stek’s setting up an experiment,» Grote explained. Lee was bundled into a biosuit and ushered into the physicist’s workroom as soon as he set foot inside the ship. Stek was a large, round, florid man with thinning red hair. Lee had hardly spoken to him at all, except for the few hours at the cave, when the physicist had been encased in a powersuit.
«It’s a tracker, built to find a star in the sky and lock onto it as long as it’s above the horizon,» Stek said, gesturing to the instrument hovering in a magnetic grapple a few inches above his work table.
«You’re sure of that?» Lee asked.
The physicist glanced at him as though he had been insulted. «There’s no doubt about it. It’s a tracker, and it probably was used to aim a communication antenna at their home star.»
«And where is that?»
«I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m setting up the experiment with the telescope.»
Lee walked over to the work table and stared at the instrument. «How can you be certain that it’s what you say it is?»
Stek flushed, then controlled himself. With obvious patience, he explained, «X-ray probes showed that the instrument contained a magnetic memory tape. The tape was in binary code, and it was fairly simple to transliterate the code, electronically, into the ship’s main computers. We didn’t even have to touch the instrument physically except with electrons.»
Lee made an expression that showed he was duly impressed.
Looking happier, Stek went on, «The computer cross-checked the instrument’s coding and came up with correlations: attitude references were on the instrument’s tape, and astronomical ephemerides, timing data and so forth. Exactly what we’d put into a communications tracker.»
«But this was made by a different race of people—»
«It makes no difference,» Stek said sharply. «The physics are the same. The universe is the same. The instrument can only do the job it was designed to do, and that job was to track a single star.»
«Only one star?»
«Yes, that’s why I’m certain it was for communicating with their home star.»
«So we can find their home star after all.» Lee felt the old dread returning, but with it something new, something deeper. Those people in the caves were our enemy. And maybe their brothers, the ones who built the machines on Titan, are still out there somewhere looking for them—and for us.
Lee ate back at the Sirius globe, but Pascual insisted on his remaining in a biosuit until they had thoroughly checked him out. And they wouldn’t let him eat Earth food, although there was as much local food as he wanted. He didn’t want much.
«You’ve thinned out too much,» Marlene said. She was sitting next to him at the galley table.
«Ever see a fat Sirian?» He meant it as a joke; it came out waspish. Marlene dropped the subject.
The whole ship’s company gathered around the telescope and the viewscreen that would show an amplified picture of the telescope’s field of view. Stek bustled around, making last-minute checks and adjustments of the equipment. Rasmussen stood taller than everyone else, looking alternately worried and excited. Everyone, including Lee, was in a biosuit.
Lehman showed up at Lee’s elbow. «Do you think it will work?»
«Driving the telescope from the ship’s computer’s version of the instrument’s tape? Stek seems to think it’ll go all right.»
«And you?»
Lee shrugged. «The people in the caves told me what I wanted to know. Now this instrument will tell us where they came from originally.»
«The home world of our ancient enemies?»
«Yes.»
For once, Lehman didn’t seem to be amused. «And what happens then?»
«I don’t know,» Lee said. «Maybe we go out and see if they are still there. Maybe we re-open the war.»
«If there was a war.»
«There was. It might still be going on, for all we know. Maybe we’re just a small part of it, a skirmish.»
«A skirmish that wiped out the life on this planet,» Lehman said.
«And also wiped out Earth, too.»
«But what about the people on this planet, Sid? What about the people in the caves?»
Lee couldn’t answer.
«Do we let them die out, just because they might have been our enemies a few millennia ago?»
«They would still be our enemies, if they knew who we are,» Lee said tightly.
«So we let them die?»
Lee tried to blot their faces out of his mind, to erase the memory of Ardraka and the children and Ardra apologizing shamefully and the people fishing in the morning …
«No,» he heard himself say. «We’ve got to help them. They can’t hurt us anymore, and we ought to help them.»
Now Lehman smiled.
«It’s ready,» Stek said, his voice pitched high with excitement.
Sitting at the desk-size console that stood beside the telescope, he thumbed the power switch and punched a series of buttons.
The viewscreen atop the desk glowed into life, and a swarm of stars appeared. With a low hum of power, the telescope slowly turned, to the left. The scene in the viewscreen shifted. Beside the screen was a smaller display, an astronomical map with a bright luminous dot showing where the telescope was aiming.
The telescope stopped turning, hesitated, edged slightly more to the left and then made a final, barely discernible correction upward.
«It’s locked on.»
The viewscreen showed a meager field of stars, with a single bright pinpoint centered exactly in the middle of the screen.
«What is it, what star?»
Lee pushed forward, through the crowd that clustered around the console.
«My God,» Stek said, his voice sounding hollow. «That’s … that’s the sun.»
Lee felt his knees wobble. «They’re from Earth!»
«It can’t be,» someone said.
Lee shoved past the people in front of him and stared at the map. The bright dot was fixed on the sun’s location.
«They’re from Earth!» he shouted. «They’re part of us!»
«But how could …»
«They were a colony of ours,» Lee realized. «The Others were an enemy … an enemy that nearly wiped them out and smashed Earth’s civilization back into a stone age. The Others built those damned machines on Titan, but Ardraka’s people did not. And we didn’t destroy the people here … we’re the same people!»
«But that’s—»
«How can you he sure?»
«He is right,» Charnovsky said, his heavy bass rumbling above the other voices. They all stopped to hear him. «There are too many coincidences any other way. These people are completely human because they came from Earth. Any other explanation is extraneous.»
Lee grabbed the Russian by the shoulders. «Nick, we’ve got work to do! We’ve got to help them. We’ve got to introduce them to fire and metals and cereal grains—»
Charnovsky laughed. «Yes, yes, of course. But not tonight, eh? Tonight we celebrate.»
«No,» Lee said, realizing where he belonged. «Tonight I go back to them.»
«Go back?» Marlene asked.
«Tonight I go back with a gift,» Lee went on. «A gift from my people to Ardraka’s. A plastic boat from the skimmer. That’s a gift they’ll be able to understand and use.»
Lehman said, «You still don’t know who built the machinery on Titan.»
«We’ll find out one of these days.»