<h2>4</h2>
<p>Fire, mankind's oldest ally, weapon, tool, leaped high before the naked
stone of the mountain side. Men sat cross-legged about it, fifteen of
them. And behind, guarded by the flames and that somber circle, were the
women. There was a uniformity in this gathering. The members were
plainly all of the same racial stock, of medium height, stocky yet fined
down to the peak of stamina and endurance, their skin brown, their
shoulder-length hair black. And they were all young—none over thirty,
some still in their late teens. Alike, too, was a certain drawn look in
their faces, a tenseness of the eyes and mouth as they listened to
Travis.</p>
<p>"So we must be on Topaz. Do any of you remember boarding the ship?"</p>
<p>"No. Only that we awoke within it." Across the fire one chin lifted; the
eyes which caught Travis' held a deep, smoldering anger. "This is more
trickery of the Pinda-lick-o-yi, the White Eyes. Between us there has
never been fair dealing. They have broken their promise as a man breaks
a rotten stick, for their words are as rotten. And it was you, Fox, who
brought us to listen to them."<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>A stir about the circle, a murmur from the women.</p>
<p>"And do I not also sit here with you in this strange wilderness?" he
countered.</p>
<p>"I do not understand," another of the men held out his hand, palm up, in
a gesture of asking—"what has happened to us. We were in the old Apache
world.... I, Jil-Lee, was riding with Cuchillo Negro as we went down to
the taking of Ramos. And then I was here, in a broken ship and beside me
a dead man who was once my brother. How did I come out of the past of
our people into another world across the stars?"</p>
<p>"Pinda-lick-o-yi tricks!" The first speaker spat into the fire.</p>
<p>"It was the Redax, I think," Travis replied. "I heard Dr. Ashe discuss
this. A new machine which could make a man remember not his own past,
but the past of his ancestors. While we were on that ship we must have
been under its influence, so we lived as our people lived a hundred
years or more ago—"</p>
<p>"And the purpose of such a thing?" Jil-Lee asked.</p>
<p>"To make us more like our ancestors perhaps. It is part of what they
told us at the project. To venture into these new worlds requires a
different type of man than lives on Terra today. Traits we have
forgotten are needed to face the dangers of wild places."</p>
<p>"You, Fox, have been beyond the stars before, and you found there were
such dangers to face?"</p>
<p>"It is true. You have heard of the three worlds I saw when the ship from
the old days took us off, unwilling, to the stars. Did you not all
volunteer to pioneer in this manner so you could also see strange and
new things?"</p>
<p>"But we did not agree to be returned to the past in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></SPAN></span> medicine dreams and
be sent unknowingly into space!"</p>
<p>Travis nodded. "Deklay is right. But I know no more than you why we were
so sent, or why the ship crashed. We have found Dr. Ruthven's body in
the cabin with that new installation. Only we have discovered nothing
else which tells us why we were brought here. With the ship broken, we
must stay."</p>
<p>They were silent now, men and women alike. Behind them lay several days
of activity, nights of exhausted slumber. Against the cliff wall lay the
packs of supplies they had salvaged from the wreck. By mutual consent
they had left the vicinity of the broken globe, following their old
custom of speedily withdrawing from a place of death.</p>
<p>"This is a world empty of men?" Jil-Lee wanted to know.</p>
<p>"So far we have found only animal signs, and the <i>ga-n</i> have not warned
us of anything else——"</p>
<p>"Those devil ones!" Again Deklay spat into the fire. "I say we should
have no dealings with them. The <i>mba'a</i> is no friend to the People."</p>
<p>Again a murmur which seemed one of agreement answered that outburst.
Travis stiffened. Just how much influence had the Redax had over them?
He knew from his own experience that sometimes he had an odd double
reaction—two different feelings which almost sickened him when they
struck simultaneously. And he was beginning to suspect that with some of
the others the return to the past had been far more deep and lasting.
Now Jil-Lee was actually to reason out what had happened. While Deklay
had reverted to an ancestor who had ridden with Victorio or Magnus
Colorado! Travis had a<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></SPAN></span> flash of premonition, a chill which made him
half foresee a time when the past and the present might well split them
apart—fatally.</p>
<p>"Devil or <i>ga-n</i>." A man with a quiet face, rather deeply sunken eyes,
spoke for the first time. "We are in two minds because of this Redax, so
let us not do anything in haste. Back in the desert world of the People
I have seen the <i>mba'a</i>, and he was very clever. With the badger he went
hunting, and when the badger had dug up the rat's nest, so did the
<i>mba'a</i> wait on the other side of the thorny bush and catch those who
would escape that way. Between him and the badger there was no war.
These two who sit over yonder now—they are also hunters and they seem
friendly to us. In a strange place a man needs all the help he can find.
Let us not call names out of old tales, which may mean nothing in fact."</p>
<p>"Buck speaks straightly," Jil-Lee agreed. "We seek a camp which can be
defended. For perhaps there are men here whose hunting territory we have
invaded, though we have not yet seen them. We are a people small in
number and alone. Let us walk softly on trails which are strange to our
feet."</p>
<p>Inwardly Travis sighed in relief. Buck, Jil-Lee ... for the moment their
sensible words appeared to swing the opinions of the party. If either of
them could be established as <i>haldzil</i>, or clan leader, they would all
be safer. He himself had no aspirations in that direction and dared not
push too hard. It had been his initial urging which had brought them as
volunteers into the project. Now he was doubly suspect, and especially
by those who thought as Deklay, he was considered too alien to their old
ways.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>So far their protests had been fewer than he anticipated. Although
brothers and sisters had followed each other into the team after the
immemorial desire of Apaches to cling to family ties, they were not a
true clan with solidity of that to back them, but representatives of
half a dozen.</p>
<p>Basically, back on Terra, they had all been among the most progressive
of their people—progressive, that is, in the white man's sense of the
word. Travis had a fleeting recognition of his now oblique way of
thinking. He, too, had been marked by the Redax. They had all been
educated in the modern fashion and all possessed a spirit of adventure
which marked them over their fellows. They had volunteered for the team
and successfully passed the tests to weed out the temperamentally unfit
or fainthearted. But all that was before Redax....</p>
<p>Why had they been submitted to that? And why this flight? What had
pushed Dr. Ashe and Murdock and Colonel Kelgarries, time agents he knew
and trusted, into dispatching them without warning to Topaz? Something
had happened, something which had given Dr. Ruthven ascendancy over
those others and had started them on this wild trip.</p>
<p>Travis was conscious of a stir about the firelit circle. The men were
rising, moving back into the shadows, stretching out on the blankets
they had found among other stores on the ship. They had discovered
weapons there—knives, bows, quivers of arrows, all of which they had
been trained to use in the intensive schooling of the project and which
needed no more repair than they themselves could give. And the rations
they carried were<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></SPAN></span> field supplies, few of them. Tomorrow they must begin
hunting in earnest....</p>
<p>"Why has this thing been done to us?" Buck was beside Travis, those
quiet eyes sliding past him to seek the fire once more. "I do not think
you were told when the rest of us were not——"</p>
<p>Travis seized upon that. "There are those who say that I knew, agreed?"</p>
<p>"That is so. Once we stood at the same place in time—in our thoughts,
our desires. Now we stand at many places, as if we climbed a stairway,
each at his own speed—a stairway the Pinda-lick-o-yi has set us upon.
Some here, some there, some yet farther above...." He sketched a series
of step outlines in the air. "And in this there is trouble—"</p>
<p>"The truth," Travis agreed. "Yet it is also true that I knew nothing of
this, that I climb with you on these stairs."</p>
<p>"So I believe. But there comes a time when it is best not to be a woman
stirring a pot of boiling stew but rather one who stands quietly at a
distance—"</p>
<p>"You mean?" Travis pressed.</p>
<p>"I say that alone among us you have crossed the stars before, therefore
new things are not so hard to understand. And we need a scout. Also the
coyotes run in your footsteps, and you do not fear them."</p>
<p>It made good sense. Let him scout ahead of the party, taking the coyotes
with him. Stay away from the camp for a while and speak small—until the
people on Buck's stairway were more closely united.</p>
<p>"I go in the morning," Travis agreed. He could slip<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></SPAN></span> away tonight, but
just now he could not force himself away from the fire, from the
companionship.</p>
<p>"You might take Tsoay with you," Buck continued.</p>
<p>Travis waited for him to enlarge on that suggestion. Tsoay was one of
the youngest of their group, Buck's own cross-cousin and near-brother.</p>
<p>"It is well," Buck explained, "that we learn this land, and it has
always been our custom that the younger walk in the footprints of the
older. Also, not only should trails be learned, but also men."</p>
<p>Travis caught the thought behind that. Perhaps by taking the younger men
as scouts, one after another, he could build up among them a following
of sorts. Among the Apaches, leadership was wholly a matter of
personality. Until the reservation days, chieftains had gained their
position by force of character alone, though they might come
successively from one family clan over several generations.</p>
<p>He did not want the chieftainship here. No, but neither did he want
growing whispers working about him to cut him off from his people. To
every Apache severance from the clan was a little death. He must have
those who would back him if Deklay, or those who thought like Deklay,
turned grumbling into open hostility.</p>
<p>"Tsoay is one quick to learn," Travis agreed. "We go at dawn—"</p>
<p>"Along the mountain range?" Buck inquired.</p>
<p>"If we seek a protected place for the rancheria, yes. The mountains have
always provided good strongholds for the People."</p>
<p>"And you think there is need for a fort?"</p>
<p>Travis shrugged. "I have been one day's journey out<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></SPAN></span> into this world. I
saw nothing but animals. But that is no promise that elsewhere there are
no enemies. The planet was on the tapes we brought back from that other
world, and so it was known to the others who once rode between star and
star as we rode between ranch and town. If they had this world set on a
journey tape, it was for a reason; that reason may still be in force."</p>
<p>"Yet it was long ago that these star people rode so...." Buck mused.
"Would the reason last so long?"</p>
<p>Travis remembered two other worlds, one of weird desert inhabited by
beast things—or had they once been human, human to the point of
possessing intelligence?—that had come out of sand burrows at night to
attack a spaceship. And the second world where the ruins of a giant city
had stood choked with jungle vegetation, where he had made a blowgun
from tubes of rustless metal as a weapon gift for small winged men—but
were they men? Both had been remnants of that ancient galactic empire.</p>
<p>"Some things could so remain," he answered soberly. "If we find them, we
must be careful. But first a good site for the rancheria."</p>
<p>"There is no return to home for us," Buck stated flatly.</p>
<p>"Why do you say that? There could be a rescue ship later—"</p>
<p>The other raised his eyes again to Travis. "When you slept under the
Redax how did you ride?"</p>
<p>"As a warrior—raiding ... living...."</p>
<p>"And I—I was one with <i>go'ndi</i>," Buck returned simply.</p>
<p>"But—"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>"But the white man has assured us that such power—the power of a
chief—does not exist? Yes, the Pinda-lick-o-yi has told us so many
things. He is busy, busy with his tools, his machines, always busy. And
those who think in another fashion cannot be measured by his rules, so
they are foolish dreamers. Not all white men think so. There was Dr.
Ashe—he was beginning to understand a little.</p>
<p>"Perhaps I, too, am standing still, halfway up the stairway of the past.
But of this I am very sure: For us, there will be no return to our own
place. And the time will come when something new shall grow from the
seed of the past. Also it is necessary that you be one of the tenders of
that growth. So I urge you, take Tsoay, and the next time, Lupe. For the
young who may be swayed this way and that by words—as the wind shakes a
small tree—must be given firm roots."</p>
<p>In Travis education warred with instinct, just as the picture Redax had
planted in his mind had warred with his awaking to this alien landscape.
Yet now he believed he must be guided by what he felt. And he knew that
no man of his race would claim <i>go'ndi</i>, the power of spirit known only
to a great chief, unless he had actually felt it swell within him. It
might have been fostered by hallucination in the past, but the aura of
it carried into the here and now. And Travis had no doubts that Buck
believed implicitly in what he said, and that belief carried credulity
to others.</p>
<p>"This is wisdom, <i>Nantan</i>—"</p>
<p>Buck shook his head. "I am no <i>nantan</i>, no chief. But of some things I
am sure. You also be sure of what lies within you, younger brother!"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>On the third day, ranging eastward along the base of the mountain range,
Travis found what he believed would be an acceptable camp site. There
was a canyon with a good spring of water cut round by well-marked game
trails. A series of ledges brought him up to a small plateau where scrub
wood could be used to build the wickiups. Water and food lay within
reach, and the ledge approach was easy to defend. Even Deklay and his
fellow malcontents were forced to concede the value of the site.</p>
<p>His duty to the clan accomplished, Travis returned to his own concern,
one which had haunted him for days. Topaz had been taped by men of the
vanished star empire. Therefore, the planet was important, but why? As
yet he had found no indication that anything above the intelligence
level of the split horns was native to this world. But he was gnawed by
the certainty that there <i>was</i> something here, waiting.... And the
desire to learn what it was became an ever-burning ache.</p>
<p>Perhaps he was what Deklay had accused him of being, one who had come to
follow the road of the Pinda-lick-o-yi too closely. For Travis was
content to scout with only the coyotes for company, and he did not find
the loneliness of the unknown planet as intimidating as most of the
others.</p>
<p>He was checking his small trail pack on the fourth day after they had
settled on the plateau when Buck and Jil-Lee hunkered down beside him.</p>
<p>"You go to hunt—?" Buck broke the silence first.</p>
<p>"Not for meat."</p>
<p>"What do you fear? That <i>ndendai</i>—enemy people—have marked this as
their land?" Jil-Lee questioned.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>"That may be true, but now I hunt for what this world was at one time,
the reason why the ancient star men marked it as their own."</p>
<p>"And this knowledge may be of value to us?" Jil-Lee asked slowly. "Will
it bring food to our mouths, shelter for our bodies—mean life for us?"</p>
<p>"All that is possible. It is the unknowing which is bad."</p>
<p>"True. Unknowing is always bad," Buck agreed. "But the bow which is
fitted to one hand and strength of arm, may not be suited to another.
Remember that, younger brother. Also, do you go alone?"</p>
<p>"With Naginlta and Nalik'ideyu I am not alone."</p>
<p>"Take Tsoay with you also. The four-footed ones are indeed <i>ga-n</i> for
the service of those they like, but it is not good that man walks alone
from his kind."</p>
<p>There it was again, the feeling of clan solidarity which Travis did not
always share. On the other hand, Tsoay would not be a hindrance. On
other scouts the boy had proved to have a keen eye for the country and a
liking for experimentation which was not a universal attribute even
among those of his own age.</p>
<p>"I would go to find a path through the mountains; it may be a long
trail," Travis half protested.</p>
<p>"You believe what you seek may lie to the north?"</p>
<p>Travis shrugged. "I do not know. How can I? But it will be another way
of seeking."</p>
<p>"Tsoay shall go. He keeps silent before older warriors as is proper for
the untried, but his thoughts fly free as do yours," Buck replied. "It
is in him also, this need to see new places."</p>
<p>"There is this," Jil-Lee got to his feet, "—do not go<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></SPAN></span> so far, brother,
that you may not easily find a way to return. This is a wide land, and
within it we are but a handful of men alone——"</p>
<p>"That, too, I know." Travis thought he could read more than one kind of
warning in Jil-Lee's words.</p>
<hr style='width: 45%;' />
<p>They were the second day away from the plateau camp, and climbing, when
they chanced upon the pass Travis had hoped might exist. Before them lay
an abrupt descent to what appeared to be open plains country cloaked in
a dusky amber Travis now knew was the thick grass found in the southern
valleys. Tsoay pointed with his chin.</p>
<p>"Wide land—good for horses, cattle, ranches...."</p>
<p>But all those lay far beyond the black space surrounding them. Travis
wondered if there was any native animal which could serve man in place
of the horse.</p>
<p>"Do we go down?" Tsoay asked.</p>
<p>From this point Travis could sight no break far out on the amber plain,
no sign of any building or any disturbance of its smooth emptiness. Yet
it drew him. "We go," he decided.</p>
<p>Close as it had looked from the pass, the plain was yet a day and a
night, spent in careful watching by turns, ahead of them. It was
midmorning of the second day that they left the foothill breaks, and the
grass of the open country was waist high about them. Travis could see it
rippling where the coyotes threaded ahead. Then he was conscious of a
persistent buzzing, a noise which irritated faintly until he was
compelled to trace it to its source.</p>
<p>The grass had been trampled flat for an irregular<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></SPAN></span> patch, with a trail
of broken stalks out of the heart of the plain. At one side was a
buzzing, seething mass of glitter-winged insects which Travis already
knew as carrion eaters. They arose reluctantly from their feast as he
approached.</p>
<p>He drew a short breath which was close to a grunt of astounded
recognition. What lay there was so impossible that he could not believe
the evidence of his eyes. Tsoay gave a sharp exclamation, went down on
one knee for a closer examination, then looked at Travis over his
shoulder, his eyes wide, more than a trace of excitement in his voice.</p>
<p>"Horse dung—and fresh!"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></SPAN></span></p>
<hr />
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />