They worked on doggedly for three days more. Ferad had flatly refused to help them, claiming that his marriage to Lari made him a citizen of Vanir and had ended his need to work under Derek. It was a point the captain had no desire to test while his knowledge of things was so uncertain. Maybe Ferad was a citizen now, and any force exerted on him would antagonize the whole village.

It was hopelessly slow going, but they were making more progress than Siryl. She finally admitted that she was getting nowhere.

There was one explanation for everything-and that was their G.o.d.

"They're the most superst.i.tion-ridden race I've ever heard of," she concluded in disgust.

Derek had his doubts. So far, every bit of superst.i.tion he had run into had proved sound empirical sense. It didn't matter whether they called it G.o.d or magic or anything else. It worked. And they were no worse than many of the civilized people who used the tools given to them and had no other explanation than the fact that science somehow made them work.

If men lived on a world where the only cats were leopards, where black leopards were all man-eaters, and where the cats avoided men unless looking for food, it would be extremely bad luck to have a black cat cross one's path.

In such a case, the only superst.i.tion would be a denial of the facts and a belief that there had to be some other explanation of why men disappeared.

Siryl's faith in hypnosis and primitive ignorance might be the real superst.i.tion here. Belief in G.o.d and the tools probably wasn't.

He went out into the rain that was falling again, looking for the house of Skora. There were a few people around and he recognized one as Wolm, the brother of Lari. The man directed him toward a house that was somewhat bigger than the others, with stonework that seemed to have mellowed with time. Derek had pa.s.sed it before, when a group of children from six to nine were seated silently on couches across an open porch, and had been told it was the school where they learned G.o.d's knowledge. He should have guessed that the priest would handle the schooling here.

Skora emerged from an outbuilding that boasted the huge chimney of a kiln and invited Derek in. The walls of the building were lined with amulets of all kinds and sizes, and there was a big workbench along one wall that was covered with tools for shaping clay. It was obviously the source of the amulets.

Derek went through the formula of greeting and accepted a bottle of surprisingly good beer.

"I'm getting ready for a new baking," the priest said. "This village has to supply some of the smaller places with tools. My usual helper married into another village. Why don't you and Kayel join me, Derek? It beats farming, and I understand your friend knows a good deal of science. Maybe he can show us better methods of making the tools."

"He isn't exactly a ceramicist, but we'll think about it," the captain promised. He had been turning over every indirect approach to his question.

Now he discarded subterfuge. In spite of SiryPs warnings, the only way to learn anything here was to risk stepping on their taboos. "Skora, I came here to ask about your G.o.d."

Skora put aside the molds he had been cleaning and perched on the edge of the workbench. "That's asking a lot," he said, but there was no offense in his voice. "It takes our children several years to learn all about him, thoughwe've speeded things up in the last couple of centuries. And there are some things I can't tell you properly, for your own good, though I'll be as honest as I can. Ummm. He's a man-a very wise and very stupid man. He saved us after the sun was exploded in the great war and taught us how to survive. He still teaches our young people."

Thirteen hundred years had pa.s.sed since the solar explosion. Derek whistled.

"He sounds like a pretty remarkable man, Skora. No other man has found the secret of immortality. Or do you mean that he dies, but a new G.o.d replaces the old one each time?"

"Neither one. No man is immortal. And there is only one G.o.d. Sometimes I used to wonder about him when I first learned to use the power. I even thought of investigating, of going to see him. But I was always too busy."

Derek could see no evidence of deceit on Skora's face, and there was no way he could twist the words to make them mean anything but an impossible contradiction. "Suppose / wanted to visit your G.o.d, Skora-could I talk to him?"

The priest laughed and dropped off the bench to fetch two fresh bottles of beer. "You'd have a hard time of it, Derek. G.o.d died over a hundred years ago."

"Then when you say G.o.d helps you, I suppose you mean that you still follow his advice, using what he taught you before he died. Is that right?"

"Not exactly. Partly, I suppose. Tradition kept the use of the tools under the false, emotional label of prayer for hundreds of years before we could root it out. I suppose we still use some of the terms in ways that aren't literally true." The priest shrugged. "But we still need his help when some new problem comes up. We couldn't have found where the fruit grows in time without asking him. And he still teaches the children directly."

"But he's dead?"

"Quite dead," Skora a.s.sured Derek. "Sometimes I think we're headed for trouble because of that, and it makes things a little difficult at times. But what's a little trouble? When I first had to bring rain, it took all my thought to control it. Now I can sit here talking to you and enjoying myself, without losing control of the tool."

He pulled his hand out of a pocket and showed a quartz amulet in his palm, where his fingers had been fondling it. "When I was younger, I had trouble enough without any distractions. Once I forgot to remove only pure water and nearly ruined the crops with natural sea water. The planet where the rain comes from has a lot of copper salts, and that doesn't help the land."

Derek stared at the priest with sudden shock, the bottle still tilted to his lips. He forgot to swallow and gagged as beer ran down his throat and into his windpipe.

It was the complete logic of it that hit him. The rain had to be controlled, since it fell most heavily where it was most needed. Lari had already told them that the planet here had been almost barren of water after the solar explosion. Water didn't create itself. It had to be brought from somewhere.

He coughed up the beer, forcing some measure of calmness into his mind. The pieces began to fit, even though there was still no explanation.

They could draw water across s.p.a.ce, without letting it freeze or evaporate-or even grow chilled in its pas- sage. The only answer to that had to be some form of nearly instantaneous teleportation!

"You!" he said thickly. "Your people! It was you who threw my Waraok all the way to Sirius. And you were the ones who threw part of the Sepelora somewhere else this time!"

Skora nodded. "That was a mistake. When I learned about your ship and the others with it, I'd never worked through a field like the one around your ship, and had little time in which to operate. Yours was the first ship Itried to handle alone, and I bungled it. But no harm was done. I put your crew on a livable planet and set the other ships beside them-the battleships, too.

Working with a tool which wasn't made for just that use was quite tiring, or I'd have landed you with the others instead of letting you nearly crack up here. After you saw us, it was too late to move you, of course. I'm sorry, Derek, but we had to do it that way."

The bottle dropped to the floor and smashed as Derek stared at the old man. He should have guessed. With his type of luck, it was inevitable. He'd chased out after the enemy and been caught-by this! He staggered to his feet with shock waves of pure fear rippling through his shoulders and chest. One man against.

a whole flight of ships! One solitary old man . . .

5.

His memory was unclear the next morning. He'd been nearly raving when he'd sworn and pleaded with Skora to send them back. He could remember being denied by the suddenly worried and unhappy old man, but the reasons were no longer clear. All that was left was a picture of the priest putting his rain-making amulet aside and pulling down another, before taking Derek's arms in firm, strong hands.

"You're sick," Skora had said. "I had no idea. I should have known you weren't ready to discover the truth. Well, I hope your psychologist is a better doctor than healer of minds!"

And suddenly Derek had been in his own bed here, with his clothes following him out of nowhere to drape themselves over a chair. The covers had come up over him and the door had opened itself. He had been shouting something. Siryl had come in a few seconds later , and there had been a shot of some drug. ...

He gave up trying to remember, knowing it was safer not to think on it now. He had been too close to insanity. After all the years of fighting against the jinx, he had developed more strength than most of his people, but there were limits. Maybe he should have let them drive him insane! What was the use . . .

The door opened and Siryl came in, carrying another hypo. She grabbed his arm and he felt the bite of a needle. For a moment his heart pounded and cold sweat popped out all over him. Then some of the misery lifted. Whatever she had used the night before must have been a depressant that had needed counteracting.

"Pull the covers up!" She had been staring at him with a mixture of shock and concern, but some of the worry was leaving her. "Have you no sense of shame?"

"No strength. You pull them up." The drug was nearing the end of its first physical impact, but he could barely talk. "Didn't you ever see a nude man before?"

She made a face of disgust. "I-we didn't take that kind of medical course. And I'm-I'm not defiled, if that's what you're thinking!" She bent slowly and forced herself to cover him, carefully avoiding all contact with his body. She winced as he laughed.

Her reactions had done him more good than the drug. The thing he had learned went back into its proper place in his mind. There was nothing horrible about the teleporting of a ship across a quintillion miles of s.p.a.ce; he'd accepted the fact when it had happened to the Waraok. If Skora had shown him a huge machine using megawatts of power, he could have accepted that. The shock had come from discovering that it had been done with nothing but a piece of clay for power. Also, he'd been sent to find an enemy secret and had found the secret where he had least expected it. That was all.

"I'm all right now," he told her. "But I wonder if you can take it. Call Kayel in here." He swung out of the bed and grinned as she began backing out of the room, unable to tear her eyes off him until she blundered into the edge of the door.

He was dressed when the two came back. Ferad had declared his citizenship here, and he could rot in it! But the other two had to know. He gave it tothem as fully as he could.

"Tommyrot!" Siryl said automatically, though her voice was uncertain, as if she were trying to remember how he'd returned to his room. "You were just delirious. Some disease here ..."

Once, Derek thought, men had developed a science of psychology, according to the old reports. But it had been lost during the Collapse, with only the mechanical tricks for relieving neuroses remaining. No wonder the worlds were filled with sick minds, if Siryl was typical of her profession.

Kayel emptied his pipe, looking at her as if he were thinking the same, with the woman-adulation gone from his eyes for the moment. He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing grotesquely. But his voice was as clear as when he discussed physics. "It fits. Oh, not the stuff about the G.o.d. That's probably mumbo-jumbo to cover some master power source and the men who run it. Maybe it's a' mechanical educator, too, with a library saved from before the Collapse. The machine must have prevented the Collapse here, and they've gone right ahead while we fell back. We're just working on theories about immense fields of energy in s.p.a.ce that can be tapped for antigravity, ident.i.ty exchange control-all that. They use it already! Derek, we've got to get this back to the Federation."

"But the way they live?" Siryl protested.

"Why not?" Derek asked. "With power like that, they don't need the usual heavy science and gadgetry. There's no reason not to live the simple life."

Kayel was pacing about, sucking on an empty pipe, and wearing a flush of excitement. Normally, it was easy to overlook his mental powers, but a good physicist had to have mental flexibility; he was supposed to be one of the best. "We can't conquer them-not when one man can handle a fleet.

But we look enough like them to pa.s.s among them, once we know what to expect.

We'll drop a few small fliers into the wastelands. With any luck, they'll find the G.o.d machine. Derek, do you think they'll still let us work on the Sepelora, now that you know?"

It had been bothering the captain. He shrugged uncertainly.

"I told you not to break their taboos!" Siryl reminded them. "I also told you this had to be a h.o.m.ogenous culture! Now maybe you'll listen to me. They have to have some neuroses; any isolated group has. What we've got to do is to find their weakness. Kayel, they think you're smarter than they are. Let's . . ."

Derek had heard enough. She still had a genius for remembering only when she'd been right and a.s.suming she always would be infallible. He turned toward the door. ^Coming, Kayel?"

The little man hesitated, obviously swayed by the chance to work closely with her. Then he smiled apologetically at her and followed Derek.

She sat in offended dignity through breakfast. Luckily, Wolm was there and Lari kept up a steady stream of talk, trying to get Ferad to join the boy in some project or other. Nothing was noticed by the two natives. And n.o.body tried to stop the two men as they headed toward the ship.

Michla was busy seeding something on the harrowed field. He'd already added nitrates and other fertilizer- probably from the same planet as the water, carefully selected and dissolved in it. He called out a greeting as they pa.s.sed, and they waved back. It was all friendly and normal. Derek breathed a sigh of relief as they swung around a pile of boulders.

Where the s.p.a.ce ship had rested there was nothing but a depression in the ground. And coming toward them from that was the graybearded priest, the serape over his shoulders whipping about him in the breeze that was blowing.

His face was serious as he drew near them.

Derek stepped toward him, trying to force anger to replace the fear that was thick in him. "Where's our ship, Skora?" '

"Safe. Up there." The old man pointed toward the sky above them. "In an orbit around Vanir.""So we're prisoners?"

Skora sighed, and he seemed embarra.s.sed. "Not exactly. We feel obligated to you for bungling the way we handled the return of your ship to Sirius, Derek, and we'd like to return you. But that must wait for further study. You have full freedom here, though. And if you are permitted to leave, the ship will be ready."

"And I suppose you'll make up all the time when we should be repairing it?"

Derek asked grimly.

"We have already done that. We repaired it last night, before we sent it up.

Not the s.p.a.ce-denial generators-that is beyond our understanding. But from G.o.d we learned how to use what was there to set up the much better time-negation drive that was used before your Collapse."

"But-time-negation . . ." Kayel swallowed, stumbling. Derek hadn't known that the little man understood Cla.s.sic. From the accent, he must have only a reading and weak hearing knowledge of it. But he obviously had understood enough.

"Yes, time-negation works." Skora smiled at the man's amazement. "It's simpler in application, but much more difficult in theory, I believe, than s.p.a.ce- denial. It was discovered by accident when our common ancestors had no right to find it. Fortunately, G.o.d knew how it worked. And your ship will be ready for you if we find we can let you return."

He was heading back to the village, and they were following without thought.

Kayel caught Derek's arm, pulling him back out of earshot. He spoke in hasty Universal. "We've got to forget the ship. Now it's up to G.o.d and his charms.

Derek, I've got to see how those amulets are made."

"But they were nothing but baked clay. We took one apart," Derek protested.

The physicist shrugged. "A transistor works because of a few parts per millions of impurities. A detector works because of its crystalline structure. Take his job!"

Skora had noticed that they weren't with him and had slowed his steps. Derek caught up, trying to look somewhat cheerful. "I guess we'll have to get ourselves a house of our own and stop bothering Lari until you decide, then.

And since we can't use the power of your G.o.d, we'd make pretty poor farmers around here. Is the job in your kiln still open?"

"Is it?" The old man chuckled. "Do you think I like doing it by myself? And since we'd have to feed you and care for you even if you did no work, your help will be pure profit to me."

Derek had little hope for any great revelation from the work. Either there wasn't much of a secret to the tools, or there was something so tricky that they felt sure Kayel and he couldn't discover it.

The work seemed to confirm his doubts. Any child could have handled it, with no more than five minutes of instruction. Skora had teleported in a big tub of soft white clay from a bank of the stuff beyond the village. They had to pack this inside metal molds, press them down firmly and let them rough-dry until they would hold their shape. Then they went into the kiln to be baked.

Finally, Skora inspected them, throwing out the defective ones along with his own hand-formed failures.

The priest answered Kayel's stumbling questions without any hesitation. The material wasn't important, so long as the final product had the right shape and the markings on it were clear. They had a few metal tools, but these were rare and too heavy for normal use.

"You can think of them as instructions," he suggested. "There is too much to remember easily, and these help. They-well, they describe a stress in s.p.a.ce, more or less."

"Then plastics would work? Because if they would, there are a thousand pounds of thermoplastic in the ship's stores, and we'd save a lot of time here,"

Kayel suggested.Skora apparently thought it was a fine idea. He ques- tioned the physicist about what to look for, and the stock of plastic was suddenly in front of them. They began boring small holes in the molds for pouring the plastic to make unbreakable amulets, and the work went faster after that.

On the way back to Lari's that night, Kayel shook his head positively.

"Nothing, Derek! Nothing can be concealed in our own plastic. The secret has to be in their G.o.d."

A G.o.d who wasn't immortal, though he had lived for at least twelve hundred years; a G.o.d who taught the children somehow, though he had been dead for a hundred years. A G.o.d who could fling a seventy-thousand ton ship quintillions of miles instantly!

Derek lingered after the second day of work. He took the bottle of beer from the priest and dropped to a seat. "Skora, I'm still curious about your G.o.d.

And this time, I'll try to behave myself. How long did:he live?"

"Since before the sun exploded. Let's see." The priest tipped the capped bottle up without thinking. Beer seemed to appear just beyond the seal and run into his mouth. "He was about sixty of your years old then. He came here to see us about five years before the trouble, I think. I could find out, if you like."

Derek took his eyes off the other's drinking habits and swallowed his own drink, trying to find some point of exploration. "I haven't heard any stories about his creating the world or your people, at that. No legends of that?"

"Of course not. We evolved on Terra, like your people; and this planet grew from the usual s.p.a.ce whorl." The old man chuckled. "This isn't a religion- though I'm afraid sometimes it's beginning to degenerate. G.o.d had some strange ideas that are getting distorted lately. Many of us have a belief in some divine spirit, Derek, but we try not to confuse that with G.o.d. He was just a man. Kayel knows more than he did, though not the same-and all of us are stronger than he was."

"He didn't teach you to worship him, then?"

"He didn't know." Skora shook his head sadly. "He thought we would, mostly be dead. He didn't care and couldn't know what happened to us. He was unconscious. And when he revived, he was sure we were dead. With his stores all ruined and n.o.body to save him, he went crazy. He began blasting his way out and brought down a rock on his skull. Naturally, with his medulla crushed, he died. It was just as well. He couldn't move the rocks to get out and he'd have been afraid of the world we'd made."

It made no sense at all. Their G.o.d couldn't even move rocks out of his own way. Yet the rains fell, in spite of the fact that the amulets were nothing but symbols. The power had to come from some source. "So he was destroyed. Yet you say he still is!"