Hammond lay unsleeping, still stunned by the impact of a thousand centuries. It was the middle of the night, though in these rock catacombs one knew it only because the ceiling bulbs were dimmed and the murmur of activity from the other chambers quieted. He lay in the dimness and the silence, his mind feverishly going over all that Wilson had told him, and he felt all the vast events of those ten thousand years thunder down on him like an avalanche.
Jon Wilson had talked a great deal. For the first time he had answered fully and carefully every question Hammond put to him. Now Wilson slept because all this was old familiar stuff to him, the norm, the status quo. But Hammond could not sleep. His brain was a bright kaleidoscope and the visions evoked by Wilson's words went round in it, and round again until he was dizzy with them.
Fantastic, splendid visions. Earth sending out her ships and mourning them and stubbornly sending out more until one of them returned and the Big Step had been made—Someone, Hammond thought, was luckier than me—and then the ships going out proud and confident, taking the children of Earth to the empty planets and filling them with life, and after that like strong swimmers leaving the shallows of their youth behind, plunging into the black seas that run cold and tideless across the universe, girdling ten billion stars, until the children of Earth were spread across the galaxy. They were born now under the light of alien suns, on countless alien planets, and they had changed as Quobba and Tammas were changed to suit their environments, but still they were the children of Earth, and space belonged to them.
By every rule and right space belonged to them. Only they did not possess it. The Vramen did.
It was odd, Hammond thought, that already he was beginning to hate that name. He had never seen a Vramen. He had only a story Wilson had told him to go on, and for all he knew that story might be, if not exactly a pack of lies, at least so colored by fanatical prejudice as to be anything but true. He kept reminding himself how easy it would be for him to acquire a whole set of biases from these people simply because they had been good to him and he liked them, and because he had no other data by which to evaluate what they told him. Even the name they called themselves, Hoomen, was a semantic trap, aligning him automatically with them and against the non-human Vramen.
But no matter how judicious he tried to be about this, telling himself that he would reserve judgment on this or that point until he knew more about it, he could not help feeling a twinge of blind emotional hatred whenever he thought of the Vramen. Part of that, he knew, was transmitted to him from the intense feelings of everyone around him. But a good percentage of it was entirely his own, and he thought he knew why. It was because of space. He had taken his modest part in that conquest, he had given his life for it. And now that that life had been miraculously returned to him, it infuriated him to learn that a new, strange breed of man had sprung up as a direct result of that space-conquest and had pre-empted it, stepping arrogantly between human man and all he had worked for. Hammond had a very possessive feeling about space and space-flight. These had always been a personal dream and a personal challenge. And it was one of his personal tenets of faith that space ought to be just as free as it was wide.
The Vramen, according to Wilson, did not think so.
And who were these Vramen who arrogated to themselves the lordship of space? They were men and women of the same old Earth stock as the Hoomen, the ordinary humans. There was only one basic difference between them and ordinary humanity.
The Vramen did not die.
Hammond went over the story Wilson had told him for the hundredth time. It was an incredible story but he supposed that if an ancient Roman had awakened back in his own Twentieth Century he would have found atomic energy just as incredible.
The Vramen had happened; it seemed, more or less by accident. Some two thousand years before, while Hammond in his satellite was an unnoticed fleck of meteoric debris engrossed in his blind cold journey to nowhere, some scientists were exploring a region called the Trifid that was located in the densest, least-known part of the galaxy. It was a vast region of double and multiple stars involved in far-flung nebulosity; which Twentieth Century astronomers had called the Trifid Nebula. And somewhere in the stellar wilderness of the Trifid, upon a world they had named Althar; they had found the secret of indefinitely prolonged life.
"What kind of a secret?" Hammond had demanded, half-skeptically. "What could do a thing like that?"
"It's generally believed," Wilson told him, "that they found on that world a deposit of super-radioactive matter with emanations unlike anything we know. Even you must realize the deep effects of radiation upon life. But we don't really know what they found."
Whatever it was there on Althar, it did confer indefinite life on the normal perishable organism. The Vramen were not impervious to injury, but they were to disease and age. Nobody knew how long a Vramen could live because nobody had known one to die of old age.
The first Vramen were the discoverers of that secret hidden in the Trifid. They had enlarged their numbers by taking other carefully selected men and women in there to the mysterious world called Althar. When there were as many Vramen as they thought suitable, that was the end of it. No one else was allowed to go to Althar, or even into the Trifid. The mass of humanity remained as it had always been, most cruelly short-lived. The Vramen became a caste apart, living on and on.
"But is their super-longevity hereditary?" asked Hammond. "Do their children inherit it?"
"The Vramen have no children," Wilson answered. "Neither do they marry, in our sense, though I believe they have long companionships between themselves that may be matings."
Because all the Vramen were picked scientists, with no arbitrary period put to their learning power, it had not been difficult for them to evade the disorganized attempts of the Hoomen first to force their secret out of them and then to destroy them out of sheer jealousy. They made themselves impregnable with powerful weapons and defenses, and then over the decades they began quietly to assume a background control over the whole galactic civilization. They did not take any official part in the government—the Federated Suns, Wilson had called it, a fine ringing phrase—but their scientific knowledge was so great and so constantly growing and their contributions to the general welfare so important that the Hoomen were grudgingly forced to submit to this shadowy dominance, granting to the Vramen through the council of the Federated Suns the one privilege they required—the privilege of keeping indirect control over all interstellar ships.
This was the one that set Hammond's back to bristling.
"According to the law." Wilson had explained to him, "every star-ship has a secret, tamper-proof device of the Vramen built into it. This can be used to explode the whole ship if it goes into the Trifid, which is closed to all but Vramen ships. Also, in every solar system there are Vramen stationed to keep constant radar check on every star-ship that comes or goes. That's why they're so hot after your craft, Hammond. They won't rest until they find it, and you."
Hammond found this a sufficiently disturbing thought. The one brush he had had with the Vramen power in the form of the hypno-amplifier, which would have forced him to give himself up like any suggestible imbecile if Quobba hadn't saved him, still frightened him to remember. And that, too, was part of his growing hatred of the Vramen. He had an old-fashioned ingrained notion that a man's mind, and the freedom thereof, was an inviolable right. In his own historical past some very great wars had been fought for the sake of that right. He was not prepared to surrender it meekly to these self-made supermen.
It was then that Wilson had dropped his final shattering bomb.
"There is one more thing I have to tell you, Hammond, and then you must make up your own mind what you want to do about it. To be brutally honest, you won't have a great deal of choice, but I would like to tell you as much as I can.
"You've been very curious about what we're doing down here in these dismal catacombs—why we're in hiding, afraid to show our heads above ground. It's very simple. We're engaged in an illegal activity, and if we're caught at it we'll get the extreme penalty."
He paused and then said quietly,
"We're building a star-ship."
Hammond stared at him. He did not know why he should have been so stunned by this revelation. Perhaps it was because the idea of a star-ship, legal or illegal, could still stun him.
"A star-ship?"
"Yes. It will not have the Vramen device in it. It will fly with a picked crew—all of us here are spacemen and volunteers—and it may eventually reach its destination."
Hammond's pulses began to hammer. He leaned forward. "Althar?"
"Althar. The hidden world of the Vramen. It's a suicide attempt, Hammond. We all know it." Wilson's eyes had that John Brown look again, ruthless and exalted. "But if we should succeed, we will have given all mankind indefinitely long life, freeing them forever from the tyranny of the Vramen and the vastly greater tyranny of time. We think it's worth the risk."
He stood up, looking down at Hammond.
"I don't know whether you will think so or not. We hope that you will join us. But that's a decision you must make yourself."
Hammond looked up at him incredulously. "Why would you want me? It doesn't make sense. Granted that all this is true, and I still can't half believe it, why me? I don't know star-ships or stars. I don't know your technologies. I'm a primitive, compared to you people. What use would I be?"
"There's a big struggle ahead." Wilson said. "Even if we reach Althar and expose the Vramen's hoarded secret to the whole galaxy, that will only begin the fight. The peoples of the galaxy are used to the Vramen dominance and it will be hard for them to shake it off. And that's why we'll need you, Hammond. Once we prove to everyone you're what you are, one of the first of the oldtime spacemen, you'll become a symbol of the oldtime freedom of space we're trying to win back."
Hammond grunted. "I see. Propaganda value—I might have known."
"Don't decide now," Wilson had concluded. "Think it over. Talk to Quobba and Tammas and the others. Then decide."
Hammond was thinking it over now, lying awake and restless in the little dim rock-cut chamber. His head ached with thinking of it, but he had to decide what he wanted to do.
What did he want to do? He wanted to go back to his own time and the hell with all this crazy time and talk of star-ships and people that didn't die. No use thinking about that. He couldn't go back. He was in this time to stay and he had to make the best of it. But how was he to know what was best?
To begin with, on Wilson could be lying. These people might be no more than fugitive criminals hiding out from the law. No, he couldn't believe that. They were building something here, he had seen them at work. But even if it was a star-ship, that didn't prove that it was for any such farfetched purpose as making a forbidden attempt to find the secret world of the Vramen. How could he be sure?
He groaned to himself. Why the devil had men ever gone to space anyway? They had really started something, back there in the Twentieth Century.
There was a heavy step and Quobba came into the little room and bent over him, his big head outlined against the dim light.
"You feel bad?"
"I'm all right," Hammond said. He sat up. He asked, "Tell me, Quobba. Are you my nurse or my guard?"
The blue man shuffled his feet. "Well. Both, I guess."
"Meaning I'm still not trusted?"
"Not till we're sure you're with us. We're sure now you did drop out of the past, the way you said. But you could still turn against us and try to reach the Vramen."
"I see." Hammond thought for a moment, looking at Quobba. He felt that the big blue man was a fairly simple soul and would not be too good at deception. He said, "What do you think of the Vramen?"
Quobba said promptly, "They're——" The word he used meant nothing and Hammond said so. Quobba explained at length.
"So you think they're bastards," Hammond said. "Why?"
"Who wants to die?" Quobba asked reasonably. "Nobody. We wouldn't have to, if the Vramen would let us in on their secret. They keep right on living while we grow old and get weak and sick and die. They tell us, 'It's better for you not to live so long as us, you wouldn't like it and it wouldn't be good for you.' They say it's for our own good they won't tell us the secret. Our own good! That's a lot of—"
Here again he used a word that Hammond had not learned, but he thought he knew about what that word meant. And looking at Quobba it was impossible to believe that he was lying, so that meant that at least part of what Jon Wilson had told him was true. It came to Hammond that these Vramen really grabbed in a big way, if they had monopolized both the control of space and the secret of indefinite life.
Quobba had sat down on the corner of the bunk, which creaked under his massive weight. Looking at him, Hammond asked suddenly,
"You're really from Vega?"
The blue man seemed surprised by the question. "Sure. Vega Four."
"What's it like?"
Quobba shrugged. "A nice world. Different, of course—I've never yet really got used to yellow or red sunlight, or green grass, or things like that. I was a fool to leave it but I went space-crazy. Followed the ships for ten years, and then Shau and I got acquainted with Jon Wilson and decided to follow him."
Hammond tried to imagine what it would have been like to be born on the world of a blue sun, and to spend one's life along the starways. It was hard to imagine. And yet—he felt a small thrill of pride when he thought about it—he had helped pioneer the way to all this, long ago.
And his pride increased as he talked to Rab Quobba in these dim night hours, of the starways and the men who followed them. His head spun with the Vegan's tales of spaceman's life, tales of the vast glooms of cosmic clouds that ships rarely dared to enter, of wrecks and castaways in the vast unexplored fringes of the galaxy, of the strange autochthonous races that colonizing Earthmen had found on faraway worlds when they first landed. The thinking rocks of Rigel Two and the amphibious cities of Arcturus' inmost watery world, the uncanny tree-wizards of Algol Nine, and more information floating through Quobba's casual talk. Hammond was unable to tell which of them were fact and which were mere spaceman's legend, but through them all came the sense of the vast galactic web of commerce and travel in this latter age. And he, Hammond, who so long ago had dreamed of being the first man to go out around Earth's little moon, might voyage instead to the shores of the universe.
But there were the Vramen. Always they came back into Quobba's stories, and the Vramen had not let a ship go this way, or the Vramen had ordered shipping to go that way, until Hammond got the feeling of what it was like to have a superior caste over you, a super-long-lived oligarchy who held the starways as their rightful realm, and to whom the passing human generations, the Hoomen, were mere ephemerae. Hammond began to share Quobba's detestation of the Vramen quite fully.
Next morning when Jon Wilson came, Hammond told him, "I'm with you, if all you've told me is true."
Wilson said gravely, "It is true. But before I can welcome you as one of us, the others must approve. Until then, please stay here."
When Iva Wilson came a little later, bringing a breakfast of the insipid nutrient jellies that Hammond had come to hate, he looked at her quizzically. "Are you my guard too, Iva?"
"Of course not," she said. "I never did believe you were a Vramen spy. I told Gurth Lund that first night that the Vramen would never use such a weak, helpless person as a spy."
Hammond laughed—the first time for how many ages?—and the dark-haired girl flushed quickly.
"Oh, I didn't mean it that way. You couldn't help being weak after all you went through."
After a little while Quobba came along and grinned at Hammond. "Well, you've just put your neck in it. Come along."
Hammond went with the Vegan, with Iva following them, to the small rock room that was Jon Wilson's study and the heart of the underground project. The Hooman leader was there with Lund, the sandy-haired man Hammond well remembered, and two other men.
Lund came forward promptly with his hand extended and with all hostility gone from his square young face.
"You've been accepted and that settles everything," he told Hammond bluntly. "I hope you don't hold my caution against me?"
"Of course not," Hammond said, and added, "If anyone had dropped in on me with a story like the one I told, I wouldn't have believed it either."
"So you become one of us," Jon Wilson said to Hammond. "I can't help thinking that it is fate that sent you to us so strangely from the past, as though you had been saved until just this time when you might be the most useful."
Lund said, "Of course we needn't warn you that you'll share our punishment if we fail."
"You mean the Vramen will kill us if we're caught?" Hammond asked.
Wilson answered him. "The Vramen hold no official position. Their domination is through their scientific prestige. They would turn us over to the nearest court of the Federated Suns, which would have to sentence us for breaking the star-ship laws."
He and Lund took Hammond through the workshops, showing him the amazing activity that was going on. After venturing a few questions, Hammond gave up asking and merely stared and listened. He had not the technical vocabulary yet, let alone the technical knowledge, to understand a tenth of what he saw. He was able to gather that atomic energy was the power-source for all the work down here, but the shielded machinery he saw was no more comprehensible to him than a radio would have been to a Hottentot.
He had supposed he would see the framework of a star-ship and he was eager for that sight. But the project was not that far along yet. The ship was being built in small sub-assemblies. Metal was secured from deep workings below the cavern refuge, the site having been chosen for that reason. When it was time to assemble the ship, the walls of the different chambers would be cut away carefully by some agency or energy that was not explained, and all would be converted into one large underground hangar.
"And when the ship is ready to go, we will simply cut away the rock roof and take off by night," Jon Wilson added.
"But won't the Vramen radar in Rurooma pick you up?" Hammond asked.
Gurth Lund said, "That's taken care of. We'll arrange to sabotage a legitimate ship and take off on its time. The Vramen won't suspect anything until we're in deep space-on our way to the Trifid and Althar."
Jon Wilson's deep eyes shone. "For the first time in ages, a free ship will fly space again—a ship that the Vramen can't destroy with a touch."
Hammond met all the members of the band. There were thirty-two men and thirteen women and all of them were technicians or space-men carefully chosen for a definite part in the project. Beside Quobba and Tammas, who had gone on duty in the lookout, there were four natives of other star-systems—two red-skinned engineers from Betelgeuse, a swarthy little pilot from Altair, and a hollow-eyed, gray-skinned and gloomy-looking technician of some sort from Algol. Hammond looked in a kind of unbelieving wonder at these men who were evidence of how far humankind had spread from Earth. It was only after a time that he noticed how all of them stared at him with even more interest and awe.
"To all of us," Wilson said, "you're rather incredible. The time from which you came is the dawn of history to us, and few records of it have survived at all."
They were interrupted by the hurried appearance of Shau Tammas. The little Mizarian had come down from the camouflaged lookout-post.
"Quobba's getting worried," he said. "There's a Vramen flier cruising overhead, and he thinks they may suspect our location."
Wilson's gaunt face became instantly anxious. "I don't see how they could. But I'll go up."
He and Lund started up the spiral stair with Tammas. Hammond was hungry for a look at the sky and he followed them, without anyone objecting. Looking back, he saw that the Hoomen were stopping work as the alarming report passed from one to another. They were beginning to gather in anxious little groups. Up in the room inside the fake boulder were Rab Quobba and another man. The lookout was so small that Hammond had to squeeze against the pedestal of the telescope-like instrument to get in at all.
"Take a look at the way that flier keeps circling back over this area." said Quobba to Jon Wilson.
Wilson bent to one of the cleverly concealed peepholes. So did Lund. After a minute Hammond located another of the peepholes and peered through the lens of the tiny aperture.
The lens was cleverly designed to give a wide field of vision. It was a bright, sunny morning out on the rocky coast. He could see blue waves creaming into white against the distant beach. It all looked remarkably familiar to Hammond, very lovely, very peaceful.
Until he saw the Vramen flier.
It came suddenly into his field of vision, a long shimmering torpedo without wings or jets and partly transparent. It was flying slowly and rather low, in steadily tightening circles.
"They surely can't have found us," Wilson said. "Their spy-rays wouldn't penetrate our shield."
He sounded worried just the same, and Hammond understood why even if he did not understand much about spy-rays and shields. The Vramen flier was coming ever closer in its circling. Finally it poised motionless in mid-air, only a few hundred feet above the masked look-out post. Wilson groaned.
"No doubt about it now. We've got to bring that flier down fast before they can call more Vramen here."
Rab Quobba's massive face flamed with excitement. "I'll bring it down. Open the ceiling, Tammas!"
With eager quickness the little Mizarian swung aside the movable section in the ceiling of the fake boulder. Quobba was already at the base of the telescope-instrument, and Hammond realized suddenly that the thing was a weapon.