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He wore gill-pack, weighted belt with its sheathed tool and knife, flippers, and the pair of swimming trunks which had been suitable for the Hawaika he knew; but this was a different world altogether. Dare he use his torch to see the way out of here? Ross watched the lights to the north, deciding they were not too unlike his own beam, and took the chance.
The stars, for Loketh, were the doorways and windows of the Shades, and he treated the suggestion of space travel as perhaps natural to those all-powerful specters, but certainly not for beings like himself. There was no hint that Hawaika had been openly visited by a galactic ship. Though that did not bar such landings. The planet was, Ross thought, thinly populated.
"Then you did come through " Ross understood. Gordon Ashe must have feared that he was the only one swept through the time door by that freak chance. "And Karara and the dolphins!" "Here now?" In this black bowl of the citadel bay Ashe was only a shadow with voice and hands. "No, out with the Rover cruisers. Ashe, do you know the Baldies are on Hawaika?
The prow curved up in a mighty bowsprit where was the carved likeness of the sea dragon Ross had fought in the Hawaika of his own time. The eyes of that monster flashed with a regular blink of light which the Terran did not understand. Was it a signal or merely a device to threaten a possible enemy?
Ashe had volunteered for Hawaika, demanded this job after the disastrous Topaz affair when the team of Apache volunteers had been sent out too soon to counter what might have been a Red sneak settlement. Ross was still unhappy over the ensuing months when only Major Kelgarries and maybe, in a lesser part, Ross had kept Gordon Ashe in the Project at all.
"Because ... because I feel.... No, I can not really put it into words, Gordon. It is that feeling one has on the eve of some important event anticipation, fear, excitement. You'll let me go with you tonight, please! I want to see it not the Hawaika that is, but that other world with another name, the one they saw and knew!"
And he was right, Ross was forced to admit, remembering what had happened when the galactics had discovered the Red time gates and traced them forward to their twentieth-century source, ruthlessly destroying each station. The original colonists of Hawaika had been as giants to Terran pygmies when it came to technical knowledge.
Those tapes returned to Terra after their chance discovery, were studied, probed, deciphered by the best brains of his time, shared out by lot between already suspicious Terran powers, bringing into the exploration of space bitter rivalries and old hatreds. Such a tape had landed their ship on Hawaika, a world of shallow seas and archipelagoes instead of true continents.
Ross remembered Ashe's comparison made the evening before, likening Hawaika to a legendary Terran island where the inhabitants lived a drugged existence, feeding upon the seeds of a native plant. Hawaika was fast becoming a lotus land for Terrans. "Through here, then westward...." Ashe hunched over the crate table in the mat-walled house. He did not look up as Ross entered.
Now possessed of a working vocabulary of clicked words, he was able to follow Loketh's speech so that translation through the dolphins was not necessary except for complicated directions. Also, he had a more detailed briefing of the present situation on Hawaika. Enough to know that they might be embarking on a mad venture.
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