They all sat in the dark, forming a semicircle around the transport doors. No one lit a flash—too dangerous a lure.
"Think about it," Eveleen said. "I mean, I'm scared of them, and I know the horrible things they did. But we came here on their ship, and we know that the crews on these globe ships all died. How would we feel to get a signal from one of our craft, and follow it up to find a lot of aliens on it—and our crew gone, presumed dead?"
"They brought the war to us," Ross said.
"We don't know if it was a war. Oh, they seem to be shoot-happy, but then so have we been in the past, and we've always seen ourselves as the good guys."
"So we're the villains?" Misha's voice came out of the darkness, cool and amused.
"To them we are," Eveleen said, her voice steady. "We don't know anything about the Baldies' motivations. Boris— everyone—thought that the globe was a scoutcraft. That argues that at least some of their missions were not war-related. Their encounters with us have involved their deaths as well as our own."
"So their action on Dominium—the old timeline—was self-defense?" Ross asked.
"No," Gordon said. "That was warfare, all right. But we don't know when those Baldies appeared from. Their cultures might vary as much as ours have. All we really know about these people is that they are hairless humanoids, that they have interstellar travel, that some of their foods can be ingested by us, and that they have time-travel capabilities. We don't know what their grand strategy is, we don't know their motivations, emotions, loyalties, or what they consider threats. Nothing."
Just then a hum filled the air, lights flickered on the transport—and the doors slid open.
In the dim light, Valentin stepped out. "Ah! Did we manage well?" he asked.
Voices talked, laughed, whooped, a spontaneous expression of relief—and release. Neither Gordon nor Zina said anything about maintaining silence as they helped Saba in first.
Ross squashed his primitive but urgent instinct to shove his way forward and make sure he was next. Instead, he waited, and Irina and Vera were sent next; after that he and Eveleen stepped inside.
As soon as the doors closed, Eveleen sighed and leaned against Ross. "I just want to go home," she said.
He tightened his arm around her.
The vertigo seized him then, and a moment later the doors opened. He stumbled out, Eveleen with him, and there, in a lit clearing, were other members of the team. The acrid scent of burned vegetation singed his nose; he sneezed as the doors closed behind him.
"What happened?" he asked, finding Case Renfry standing nearby. "Baldies hit you guys first?"
"Wait," Renfry said, sounding as tired as any of the agents. "We'll brief everyone at once—and we'd better hurry, because more of them might show up at any time."
"I take you to ship." That was Gregori.
Ross and Eveleen fell in step behind him, letting him lead—and make all the decisions. Suddenly Ross felt exhaustion grip his head, and he forced himself to walk at a smart pace.
Still, it seemed forever until they reached a clearing, and there was the ship. The Baldy ship. With a weird mixture of emotions skittering through him, Ross walked up the ramp and straight to the galley.
The weird mysteries of the universe could wait—first order of business was some hot coffee.
The welcome aroma of fresh brew made him realize someone had been ahead of him here, too; he looked up to see Gordon pointing silently to a row of mugs, just set out, judging from the steam curling up lazily.
Grateful beyond words, Ross grabbed the nearest and slurped, not caring that his tongue scalded. Tears sprang to his eyes, but the coffee made its warm way down inside him, imparting a sense of well-being that he hadn't felt for an eternity.
He was partially aware of the others crowding in behind, and the row of mugs diminished to just one left over.
"Are we all here?" Gordon leaned in the doorway, trying to count heads. The galley was crowded with bodies, but no one seemed to want to move. "Case, why don't you fill us in on what happened?"
"They landed at the space station, luckily," Renfry said. "Elizaveta was over that way doing a last check to make certain we'd collected all our analyzing gear, and saw them come down. She hightailed back here and we shut the ship down so they couldn't get whatever homing device had brought them. Unfortunately, they must have some kind of signal on the time devices, because they found ours, and of course we had the time set to your year. There was no way to warn you."
"Well, they won't be following us back," Irina said, her eyes wide and dark with strain.
Ross frowned. Eveleen was not looking at him. She stared down at that one last mug of coffee, her lips parted.
Ross realized then that someone was missing.
Quick glance—Misha was missing.
Irina said in her precise voice, "Mikhail Petrovich reset the time to the First Team. He said he was going to destroy it when he got there. The Baldies—those the Yilayil don't get—will be trapped back where we were."
Ross whistled. "He went back? To the First Team?"
Irina's nod was short, her face now blank. "With Colonel's permission."
Zina turned to Boris. "We are here, and since the transport is ruined, there is no need for a last equipment run. Let us take off."
Gordon looked at Zina, his face strained. Then he turned to the crew. "You heard. Coffee break is over—strap down in your bunks."
Ross retreated, taking his coffee with him.
Gordon was apparently going to stay in the control cabin, as Ross found himself alone. He climbed into his bunk and gulped the rest of his coffee before strapping in.
A short time later came the unpleasant sensations associated with takeoff, but this time he thoroughly welcomed them. His mood was so good it must have made him get over the effects faster, because as soon as they had reached null-grav, he unstrapped and launched himself out of the cabin.
He was not the first, though.
He found Irina at the screen, her face turned away, her shoulders hunched, and her hands gripping her arms as she hung in the air, watching the planet dwindle into a tiny point of light.
Finally she said something in Russian, her voice broken, and Ross hastily pushed himself back, glad he had not made any noise.
He found Eveleen at his shoulder—and Gordon.
"What did she say?" Eveleen asked when they reached the rec room.
Gordon winced. "I have lost them," he said slowly. "I have lost them both."
CHAPTER 30
ROSS WAS SURPRISED when Gordon offered to room with Viktor—and Viktor accepted. This left Ross alone, but only for a short time. Eveleen appeared, duffel floating beside her, half an hour later.
She grinned as she tossed her bag in the direction of the bunk. Ross watched it gyrate in midair, then bump gently against the cabin wall as he said, "Not that I'm not glad to see you, but what about Saba?"
"She's the one who needs the most sleep. We just talked, and although she's so invincibly polite I thought we were going to go around and around forever with the 'Whatever you prefer,' no, 'Whatever you prefer' routine, I finally got the impression she'd just love to have the cabin to herself so she can sleep, sleep, and then sleep some more." Eveleen wrinkled her nose, and sniffed. "Your sinuses clear? Mine almost are. When I think of those spores…" She mimed a shudder—and since she wasn't holding on, she accidently began spinning gently in the air.
Ross laughed, and grabbed her in a hug.
A little later, he went out in search of food. He was ravenous almost all the time—and he wasn't the only one, he noted.
After he got his meal (and he was determined to eat as wide a variety as possible, if for nothing else but to get rid of the taste of that one food they'd eaten for weeks), he cruised directionlessly.
Hearing voices from the direction of the old study cabin, he paused. There he heard Gordon—and Viktor.
The conversation was a mixture of Russian and English, with an emp
hasis on the former, but in it Ross heard Misha's name several times—and once the name Travis Fox.
It was Gordon talking. Has he finally made his peace with Travis's disappearance? Ross thought. Because one of the scenarios the big brains back at HQ had come up with was that Travis had not suffered any kind of traumatic death, but had chosen deliberately not to return. Gordon had seemed to take this personally—as if he were responsible, as if he had failed the Apache agent.
Now another agent—a part of Gordon's team—had deliberately made the same choice. His motivations were different, but the effect was the same.
Misha had chosen never to return home again.
* * *
MISHA'S CHOICE KEPT coming back to bother Ross from time to time as the ship days slid measurelessly into one another.
He slept, ate, played games, and watched videos. The entertainment stuff brought along had been used minimally on the way out, but on the way back, they all seemed to have the same idea. It wasn't just the lack of a mission to focus on; they were all soul-hungry for scraps of home, even stupid movies. Ross found himself watching action flicks over and over, just to listen to English.
The return trip passed without incident.
They landed, refueled, and no one was waiting to attack them. The globe ship lifted again, obedient to the mysterious tape that unknown minds had designed and programmed, and arrowed them unerringly straight for Earth.
When they landed, it was still winter in Russia—deep winter. The journey back was the same, only in reverse: a truck to the cargo plane, a cargo plane (this time it was heated) back to the landing strip, then a train to St. Petersburg, where they were quarantined until Russian and American scientists had determined that the spores were gone from their bodies. During their time in quarantine they continued to eat voraciously, and their recovery progressed fast. And it was true that Saba had suffered the least alterations; her damage had been to her immune system. About the time that Ross began to feel desperately restless they were released from quarantine.
And Zina came through on her promise of a celebratory tour. They spent a couple of days visiting historic Russian sights. Ross looked at some of those ancient Byzantine mosaics and wall paintings. The strange eyes that gazed down at him from those old paintings somehow reminded him of the Jecc.
What had happened to them? Weird to think that whatever it was had already happened by the time these paintings had been made.
Ross wanted to go home.
He kept his mouth shut. Eveleen clearly appeared delighted with everything; Gordon was interested, and Saba, who still tired quickly, insisted on not missing a single tour. She gazed about her, those intelligent, far-seeing eyes sometimes going diffuse. But she never stopped smiling.
Ross found the baroque palaces and fabulous art collections interesting, but what he really enjoyed was seeing human beings all around him—hearing a human language, even if he couldn't understand it. Normally impatient of crowds, he now welcomed humans all about him.
He did get unexpected reminders, though; seeing children darting about in a snowy park, his thoughts were drawn yet again to the Jecc.
And to the present timeline, which Ross, Gordon, and Renfry had first discovered.
In the present timeline, there were those three races: the flyers, who knew they had to stay. The humanoids, who were probably the Baldies caught back in time. And those Yilayil who—for whatever reason—refused to leave the planet. Or had been forced to stay?
So many unanswered questions! At least for now, he thought one night, after they returned from a ballet. He sat down and opened his laptop, resolving—now that their return to the States was mere hours away—he'd better get started on his report.
The first note that popped up was his surmise about the feathered cats.
Feathered cats.
Who brought the cats? he thought. We never saw any, and we know the two teams never brought any. It argued yet another expedition, for whatever reasons. And the planet's great entity would start altering these little predators into, what, the birds that they hunted?
He closed the laptop, grimacing. No, he'd deal with reports—and memories—when he had to. For now, he was on vacation.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, they stepped off the plane in Washington, D.C. All around them were people speaking English!
Ross's euphoria lasted well into the expected battery of debriefings, medical and psych tests.
During the interview portion of his reports, he startled himself by frequently resorting to Yilayil to express certain ideas. He realized that one cannot completely shed one's experiences; good and bad, they shape one permanently. In conversations he—and Eveleen, Saba, and Gordon—frequently resorted to whistle/drones for certain words and verbs that really were better expressed in Yilayil.
"It's a habit we're going to have to drop," Ross said to Eveleen as they prepared for bed that night. "Unless we want to be talking a secret code."
"Not in front of other adults," Eveleen said, smiling. "But in case we have kids—so much better than spelling the crucial words out, don't you think?" She grinned in fun.
"Kids," he repeated. "Is that what you want to do?"
"Don't you?" She still smiled, but her brown eyes were serious.
He shrugged, a little helplessly. "I don't know—I hadn't thought. Is this something you want right away?"
Eveleen shook her head. "No. We've invested too much time in our training, and the Project needs us. And the work we do, even when we fail, is good work, I believe. I've been thinking about this a lot, ever since we lifted ship. I think we need to stay with the Project, at least until they don't need us."
Ross considered. "I had such a bad childhood," he said slowly. "I just never considered kids… But I do know how I'd raise them, which would be the opposite of how I was raised. Or not raised," he finished, laughing ruefully.
Eveleen grinned. "Well, we have plenty of time to consider our options." Then she narrowed her eyes in that familiar assessing look, and added, "There is something. Did I upset you with the idea of kids?"
"No," he said. "Surprised, yes. I was so used to thinking about us being stuck on Yilayil—and if we were stuck there, would we eventually have mutated offspring…"
"Yes, me too," she murmured.
"It's Misha," Ross said. "And his staying behind—"
Eveleen waited as Ross struggled to articulate.
"I—am I warped somehow? Has my background done something to me—" He shrugged. "This is stupid. I don't know if I can express it, or even if I should."
"Talking things out is good, we agreed on that," Eveleen said. "You can't shock me—I've seen too much in my own single years."
"It's Misha," Ross started again.
"Misha? Go on."
"Not him, but what he did."
"Ah!" Sudden enlightenment widened her eyes. "Is it that you don't think you could have made the same decision, given the same circumstances, only if I were on the First Team instead of Svetlana?"
Ross grimaced. "If I found out you were prisoned there for the rest of your life I don't know if I could willingly join you, knowing there were no options. Does this make me—"
"It doesn't make you anything," she said fiercely. "Stop it. Stop. You can't torture yourself with 'what if questions because the circumstances are not the same. For one thing, both Saba and Gordon are convinced he meant to go back and stay, if he found Svetlana, and further that choice was made from the git-go. I guess they talked a lot about it. Not surprising, considering they both lost agents to past timelines."
"How do they see that?" Ross asked. "Because Misha wangled his way onto the mission?"
"That could have just been his sense of adventure." Eveleen laughed. "I don't know all their reasons. One thing Gordon brought up was Misha's own psychological state. He was so much like a man suffering from combat fatigue. Too much violence, too many dead companions, after all those Baldy attacks on the Russian stations. It makes peo
ple see life differently."
Ross nodded. That he could understand.
"There were other things, though I didn't ask for them. Here's what convinced me. All that flirting before we left, and on the ship. It was so… so empty. I really think it was his way of blinding us all to what he meant to do if he could. After all, once we got to the planet, he could have carried on with both Vera and Irina. Each of those women would have welcomed him. But he didn't. He'd closed everyone off by then, and he was angriest when he thought that Irina had closed off his access to Svetlana. But at the end—" Eveleen shrugged. "He finally saw the way he'd looked for, and the fact that Zina let him do it meant not only that she'd seen how the destroyed machine would keep us safe, but that he'd refuse to come back. He'd thought it all out ahead. It was not a moment's decision, made in anguish."
Ross sighed, and cut right to the real issue. "Would you go back?" he asked.
She turned her head away, her brow furrowing slightly. "I don't know," she said finally. Then she smiled at Ross. "It works the same for me as it does for you. Unless I knew all the circumstances—unless they were real—I have no idea what I'd do."
He kissed her. "Then let's drop it, and move on," he said.
She grinned, and they finished getting ready for sleep.
Later on, when he thought over the conversation, he suspected that she did indeed know what she would have done, but she was wise enough, and generous enough in spirit, to at least pretend to match his ambivalence.
That's real love, he thought sleepily. She's a couple steps ahead of me—but I can learn. And it will grow, and change, and make new people of us both.
All we need is time.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
FOR MORE THAN sixty years, Andre Norton, "one of the most distinguished living SF and fantasy writers" (Booklist), has been penning bestselling novels that have earned her a unique place in the hearts and minds of millions of readers worldwide. She has been honored with a Life Achievement award by the World Fantasy Convention and with the Grand Master Nebula award by her peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America. Works set in her fabled Witch World, as well as others, such as The Elvenbane (with Mercedes Lackey) and Black Trillium (with Marion Zimmer Bradley and Julian May), have made her "one of the most popular authors of our time" (Publishers Weekly). She lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.