Hammond's eyes fell upon the astronomical charts on the wall, and a thought came into his mind. He went unsteadily toward the charts. Most of them seemed to be star-maps of various regions of the galaxy, but one was a diagram of the Solar System with all the planets depicted in their orbits. Hammond picked up a pencil and hastily drew a small picture on this chart. He drew a tiny rocket-propelled satellite speeding away from Earth, with the crude figure of a single man visible inside the sphere.
He pointed to the satellite and the little figure in it, and then pointed to himself. It did not seem to lessen the hostility of the crowd.
"How the devil can I tell them I slept in the satellite for centuries?" Hammond wondered groggily.
Then he saw that one of the charts depicted the northern constellations as seen from Earth, with the crossed lines of the celestial pole at the star Delta Cygni. He reached up and drew new crossed lines at the star Polaris. He pointed to that, then pointed again to the picture of the satellite leaving Earth and to himself. He hoped they would understand that he meant he had left Earth when Polaris was the pole star, but if they did not understand he did not know what else he could do.
Some of them understood at once. Jon Wilson, the leader, did. The hostility on his gaunt face faded into an expression of incredulity. He looked at Hammond and seemed about to voice his skepticism, but something in Hammond's appearance stayed him. There came into his deep eyes a hint of dawning awe.
"Do phrann?" he said. There was disbelief in his tone, but it was not violent, not sure.
He and the girl Iva and the others stared at Hammond, more startled now than suspicious. The man Lund spoke up with harsh denial strong in his attitude, and Quobba answered him loudly and excitedly, but Hammond did not care any longer what they said. The cumulative effects of his ordeal were closing down upon him and the whole room seemed to darken and move slowly around him.
Quobba ran toward him. He and the dark-haired girl supported Hammond. With Jon Wilson leading, they helped him down a corridor and into another room. This was a small sleeping chamber, cut from the solid rock like the other rooms of this strange underground refuge. Hammond was vaguely aware that they were stretching him out on a narrow bunk and covering him with something. Then sleep overwhelmed him.
A nightmare came to him. It seemed to him that he was not sleeping at all, but frozen and lifeless. With the strange duality of dreams, he looked and saw himself, Kirk Hammond, sitting in icy dignity inside a metal sphere as upon a throne. And the throne upon which this frozen Hammond sat was far from Earth, moving out through the great darkness between the planets in vast and sweeping curves. The frozen eyes stared without seeing at planets and moons that rose up from the darkness and then fell behind him, and at the pallid glory of comets streaming light, and at the blaze and splendor of the distant stars. And then the fierce radiance of the sun fell upon those blind eyes as the throne-sphere he sat upon turned and came back. He was a king indeed of space and of time, for what was time to the dead? For year upon year, age upon age, he held his icy royal state and all was well until he heard a despairing voice say, "Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." And then the nutshell-satellite crumbled away around him and he was alone in space and not a king at all but a dead man who must live again. And Hammond woke yelling aloud that line from Hamlet and fighting hands that tried to hold him down, until there was a sharp needle of pain in his arm and sleep came that had no dreams.
He half-awoke again, and again, and then there came a time when he awoke completely. He had a feeling that many days had passed. He was weak and limp but he no longer felt that sickening dizziness. He lay for some minutes, looking up at the smooth rock ceiling in which one bright globe shone softly. It had been no mere dream, then, that nightmare. It had been a deep memory carried by his physical body, the very texture of his being, of something his mind could not remember.
A whimpering dread came upon Hammond at the thought. He looked down at his hands and thought of those hands frozen and lifeless, resting on the arms of the ejection-chair while the satellite whirled him on its endless orbit until it fell into the gravitational field of Earth and was drawn down. Years, decades, centuries, piled one upon another, and how could a man go through all that and awake and still be human? How could he ever get the cold of space out of his bones, how could he keep the nightmare vision out of his soul? It would come again, and again, and he would go mad with it, and . . . .
He did not know that he was sitting up on the bunk and crying out until Quobba ran into the room, with the girl Iva close behind him. The blue man forced him back down with his big hands, speaking to him loudly and cheerfully as one might to a frightened child. Iva peered at him, startled and distressed.
Hammond quit struggling and lay back. He said dully, "All right, I'm okay." Then he realized that they could not understand, and forced himself to smile and nod his head.
They both looked relieved. Quobba said emphatically, "Ez nun do Vramen." He went to a corner of the room and brought back things he held up for Hammond to see, exhibiting them with the air of a defense attorney who has won his case.
Hammond recognized his own zipper-jacket and a few small things that had been in his pockets—a book of astrogational tables, a small slide-rule, a vial half full of the stimulant tablets that had been supposed to get him through the blast-off shocks more comfortably. Quobba grinned all across his massive face as he showed them, and Iva smiled at him too, though with a touch of awe in her clear dark eyes. And when Jon Wilson hurried in a minute later to inject something into Hammond's arm, he seemed reservedly friendly.
They believed him, Hammond realized. And suddenly he understood. Those simple objects—the textile fabric of the jacket, the book printed in a long-dead language, the other things, would be in this age relics of an ancient past. Everything about him, from the fillings in his teeth to the buttons on his pants, would be proof to a scientific mind. No words on his part could have been a tenth so effective in convincing them that he was what he claimed, and not one of their enemies the Vramen.
He thought he might as well make the point again, though, and he said "Vramen", and touched himself, and shook his head as vigorously as he could. Then he pointed to them and asked on a rising note, "Vramen?"
Iva shook her head fiercely, her blue-black hair brushing her shoulders. Her eyes flashed.
"Nun! Sin do Hoomen."
Hoomen? Was that what these people called themselves? It sounded very much like "human". He would have liked to learn more, but Iva pressed him back down on his pillow with firm hands. She spoke to him and he guessed that it was a command to sleep. He was afraid to sleep, afraid that the nightmare would come again and that he would be swept out through the dark in the cold loneliness of the dead. But he could not fight the drug that had been given him. He slept, and he did not dream.
Time passed, measurable to him only as sleeping and waking periods. In the waking times, he felt strength slowly returning to him. He had no appetite, and the rather insipid nutrient jellies they gave him were not such as to tempt one, but nevertheless he gained. He wanted to get up, but Jon Wilson and the girl Iva who was Wilson's daughter would not let him. Nor would they at first let him talk much, so that Hammond had little to do when awake but lie and look at the ceiling and think. He thought of friends dead for ages, of all the customs, languages, nations and races that had been his own world and that had now gone forever, and a terrible loneliness came over him. There were times when he felt that only one thing held him back from madness.
That thing was his curiosity. He wanted desperately to know more about this strange future Earth into which he had been catapulted. He wanted to know who the Vramen were and who these Hoomen were and why they hid, and what they were doing down here, and why some of them had the look of men never born on Earth. He wanted to know, especially, if that had been a space-ship that he had seen climbing the night on wings of thunder. He wanted to know everything about everything and there was only one way to know and that was to learn the language of these people.
Iva spent long hours teaching him, when he was able to sit up. She worked with pictures and gestures, building up his vocabulary patiently. There were a few haunting resemblances to the languages of his own time and general structure seemed the same, and that helped. But Quobba and the little yellow man Tammas helped not at all. It seemed that they talked a different dialect or used some form of slang, and finally Iva forbade them to teach him words.
But when Hammond was able to frame simple questions to Iva, he found they got him nowhere. She only looked uncomfortable and said, "My father will tell you."
"When?" he demanded. "How soon?"
"Soon," she evaded. "You can not speak well enough yet. You need more words."
It tantalized Hammond's curiosity. He was here in a world that appeared to be totally changed from the one he knew, and yet the simple barrier of language kept him ignorant of what it might hold. He felt like swearing.
Two sleep-periods later he lost all patience and demanded to be let out of his underground cell.
"I want some sun," he said. "I want to go out."
Iva looked grave. "Wait," she said, and left the room. She did not come back. Jon Wilson came instead.
He stood looking down at Hammond, and Hammond again got that chilling feeling that it was old John Brown of Pottawattamie whose deep eyes inspected him. He had a conviction that this was a man to whom ideas were important and that he would not hesitate to sacrifice any man, least of all himself, to an idea.
"You cannot go out yet," he said. "You are fortunate to be living. For a time, we did not think you would survive."
Hammond asked, "How long—" And then he stopped, his mind and tongue unable to frame the question.
How long was I dead? How many centuries did my frozen body ride through the darkness and the silence?
How could a man ask such a question? But Jon Wilson understood. He said, "All the physical evidence of your body and your possessions puts your origin in a remote period. By the old chronology, the 2oth or 2ist Century."
"I was born in the year nineteen forty-nine." whispered Hammond.
Wilson thought for a moment. "Then by that chronology, though we no longer use it, this would be the year twelve thousand oh-nine-four."
Then it was true, and the star-clock had not lied, but still it was a truth too vast and terrible for Hammond to accept. He fought against it.
"But how could I live again? I've heard of hypothermia experiments, but a thing like this—"
Wilson shrugged. "I can't give you all the science of this age in a few sentences. Most of the terms, the words, you would not even understand. But—we found long ago in the first days of the conquest of space that a man stricken suddenly into deep hypothermia by the cold of space could be revived. Ordinary cold, ordinary freezing, shuts off circulation of blood to the brain so there is damage to the delicate brain cells before the full hypothermia can take hold. The cold of space freezes even the brain cells rigid before any damage can take place. The heart stops, everything stops, but without any ventricular fibrillation or cellular impairment. It was learned that the gradual application of heat to a body frozen in this way would in most cases start up the vital processes again."
Jon Wilson paused and gave Hammond a thoughtful glance. "In the old days they would have said that you were singled out by Providence. For in falling back into Earth's atmosphere in the satellite, the increasing warmth of frictional heating closely approximated the necessary curve of thermo-revival that brings a man out of deep hypothermia."
Hammond put his head between his hands and shut his eyes. Then after a moment he took refuge from this staggering revelation in a side issue.
"You said, 'Long ago in the first days of the conquest of space'. Then space is conquered?"
"Yes." said Wilson.
"The stars, even?"
"Yes."
"Then Quobba, and Tammas—"
"Quobba was born on one of the worlds of Vega. Tammas comes from Mizar. The men of Earth have colonized some far worlds since your day, Hammond."
Hammond felt a heavy leaping of his pulses. Then the dream of his own time had come true and the first foredoomed little attempts like his own had been followed up, and the oceans of space were open to all men.
He said that, and on Wilson laughed. It was a harsh and shocking sound, and Hammond saw a deep hot spark in the man's eyes.
"Oh, no," said Wilson. "You're wrong. Space was conquered, by men like you and by men like my own ancestors. But it does not belong to us, not to you nor to me and mine. Space belongs to the Vramen."
Hammond said, "Who are the Vramen?"
"They're why you can't go out," said Wilson. "They're our enemies, and they're your enemies too. They're still hunting over this whole coast. Their radar installations would have caught your satellite as it fell back to Earth and their fliers must have found your parachute in the sea. They're hunting for you, Hammond."