WORKING VERSION to use by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

2

“Hello, Suuki. How’s the boy?”

“Johnny! You have returned so fast.” Suuki was not a boy. He’d been middle-aged when, together with John Hastings, Sr., he’d reached the Black Asteroid. Now he was an old man with dry, parchment-like skin and big round eyes. “And is your news good?”

Johnny shook his head. “No. Nothing, Suuki—there was nothing there.”

“Sometimes a man fails to see what was not meant to be obvious…

“I didn’t miss anything. There was nothing to miss. Only the Chalice and that machinery, and the murals on the wall. Those damned murals. How did they know what we’d look like?”

“They planted a seed on the three planets, Johnny. If you place a tree-shrew on the ancient Earth, in the natural course of things a man would develop. A highly advanced biological science could do that.”

“Where are they from, Suuki? Where?”

“Ahh—that we do not know! pace-travel, interstellar travel In the crypt, Suuki, only I didn’t find it”

“I think you did well. Your examination was thorough, and it proves my point. There’s nothing further to be found, nothing at all.”

“I don’t get it.”

“We already have the secret of star-travel, if we could recognize it. That’s all I will say, Johnny Let me think.”

“Okay. Hell, I’d better run up the street anyway and say hello to the folks. I’ll bet they were worried.”

“Worried? Aren’t you the son of your father? What do they have to worry about? No, Johnny, they only worry about the future. We all worry about the future, since the Chalice…but I said I want to think.”

Smiling, Johnny left the porch of Togoshira Suuki’s neat little cottage and climbed the steep slope toward his folks’ house. All the cottages were similar—neat and trim and inexpensive. Some seemed to hang precariously over high embankments, but the while city had been engineered well, for many of the Children spent their entire lives there. Of all the inhabitants—other than wives or husbands of the new breed—Suuki alone was not of the children. Yet it was Suuki who had planned the city, and Suuki, along with John Hastings, Sr., who governed the city.

Further up along the slope, Johnny saw a crew of laborers clearing away some debris. Glass sprinkled the rocky road for twenty yards, rocks and timber were strewn everywhere. Half a dozen panting men shoveled the ruined building material into waiting wheelbarrows, and one tall man, broad across the shoulders and thick through the chest, seemed to work harder than the rest.

“I’m back, Pop,” Johnny said.

“Son! We didn’t expect you for—how did it go?”

“Lousy.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, at least you returned safely, and a lot of us doubted you’d do that.” John Hastings leaned for a moment on the handle of his shovel. A cool wind swept down from the higher slopes, but he was bare-chested and sweating. “They came up from the valley again last night,” he said. “More of them than ever before, about a hundred. This time they had guns and a woman was wounded in the shoulder before we could drive them off.

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