Occasionally one would move its mouth at the other, and a fraction of the real communication would be understood.

There was a wandering in them. They were never at rest. Their lives were meshes of step and run and scamper. Never at peace, never at rest, always driven on, always driven on…

Father, the thought blossomed. I want to follow them, I want to listen more to them.

Thought returned: Be careful, my son.

They caught him in the village. They had been studying the thatchy hutches, when the First Mate had seen him. He had been watching them from the edge of the forest, and the First caught the movement of his green fur from the comer of his eye.

He had dispatched men to circle the thing, and they had closed in on it carefully. It had started to scamper away when they were a good twenty feet from it. But the enmeshing action of the power-driven elasticord in their Molasses-guns had trapped it.

The little thing lay still, as they picked him up, warped into a small furry ball, with the adhesive elasticord wound about him in many twistings. They carried him out of the forest, and laid him before the First Mate. It lay still even as they surrounded him. It stared up out of saucer-sized yellow eyes, and the green smooth fur of its flanks quivered under their gaze.

“Is it animal, vegetable, or…” one of the noncoms began, but the First Mate cut him off with a wave of the hand.

“Do you feel anything?”

The others shook their heads, but the First noticed one man whose eyes had clouded, whose brow was furrowed with lines of concentration. As though he were listening for a sound, far off. “Queer lookin’ little thing,” one of the men said. “Wonder what it eats. Or if we can eat it!” He began to chuckle.

The First cut him off hard.

“Shut up!” His face had an odd shine to it, as though a thin film of perspiration was about to break through. “I—I—” the words only half-formed. He knew what he wanted to say, but he could not. The thing before him was a beast of the woods; a dumb thing with neither mind nor manner. Still…he was certain it was—he could hardly form the thought—speaking to him!

Strange words with a strange tone. Words and thoughts of a million years. The thoughts of an entire race; a race that had never left its world, that had never climbed from the dirt, and yet was sublimely happy. Tied to its world, and at peace with the universe.

The First Mate had been in space eighteen years. He had grown hard fighting for the Mapping Command, and it had been many more years than he could remember since he had cried.

But he felt the tears beginning. The thoughts were too sweet, too clear, too demanding in their picturing.

“Take him to the ship,” he said, turning toward the forest. “We’ll let the Captain have a look at him.” The men lifted the little beast and carried him back through the foliage.

The First Mate followed a few feet behind, his head lowered.

They wanted to take Wummel to Earth. He could hear them saying it in the caverns of their minds. The thought came strongest from the man they called the Captain. He thought, and the thoughts came to Wummel, and Wummel listened, but he could only listen at first.

To Earth, the thought said. To Earth, and the Command is saved. And the wandering won’t be stopped, and we can go off across the Rim and find the last planet ever. Then we can come back. But tin they find the last planet, there will be movement.

These were thoughts lower than thoughts. They were buried deeper, deeper than the fibers knew they reached. Buried down where this Captain could never really see them, only feel the burning of their message in his legs. And he moved, always moved—without rest.

Constantly driven on, with no sleep, with no rest, no ending. Wummel felt the heart in him go out to these strange beasts of the eternally nighted sky. They were terrible in their everlasting wandering. Even the home world was to them merely a base to which they could return occasionally.

Now they wanted to take him from his home.

Wummel considered it, the chill spreading up from his spine. He knew he was as deeply rooted to Ruska as the sewlan or the gnarl-bushes. Could it be conceivable that he might go, and never return?

Wummel found it difficult to live on his world, sometimes. The land beasts were huge, hungry and fearsome. The prowl-cats and the sytazill were always on the hunt, and Wummel’s people had never quite learned to avoid them. For the land beasts were not precisely ignorant brutes. They had minds, and souls, Wummel imagined, and their actions could not always be predicted. It was better that way.

Then too, there was the sucking valley, where the mud ran up over the walls of the canyon and dragged down those unlucky enough to be blown there during the Time of Winds. There were many things that made life hard for the Ruskind. But it was good, too.

It was good when the triple moons rose in blue and fire-red and white. Then the coolness came. When the long magenta blossoms of the aloo broke forth and shot many feet into the air, showering all the hills till they were carpeted bright and happy with the color. And most of all, Wummel loved the sighing, whispering, chortling winds that blew to him from beyond the mountains. He had often wanted to go there, beyond the stark black mountains, and see the Wind Lord who made the happy puffs that became the wind.

They wanted to take him from that, all that, and send him hurtling through a black and a dead and a night so deep that no man and no Ruskinda would ever see to its far end.

He knew of the stars. He had seen them. His people spoke of them. But not to go there. Never that! They wanted to make a wanderer of him. They wanted him for show and study on their own base world, their Earth.

They wanted to cast him from his home and set him—as they did—wandering on that star-road that never ended, but twisted and wound in among the eternal graves of the beings that had wandered to their deaths. The tears, thick and oily, started to Wummel’s eyes, even as the Earthmen let the big plug-door sigh shut, blocking away the light of Ruska. And the bolts thrust home.

Then he felt the shivering, and the roaring, and the hungry urgency of the metal itself, as the ship pleaded to the men, thundered its desire to go. Go, and never return.

Never stop again on this world of the three moons and the blue, blue seas, and the razor-toothed mountains, and the winds blowing from beyond those mountains. Never come again. And never!

The takeoff was a sloppy one. Somehow the tapes had been fed in with a bit too much fervency, as though the Drivemaster had wanted away from the tiny world.

Captain Kovasic stood with his back to the little cage. He stood watching through the viewport as the multicolored world dropped away under them, till it was a picture drawn on a blackboard.

He felt the thoughts bubbling up in him, and he turned, reluctantly.

He stared at the little green creature, huddled into a ball, its huge eyes staring. The creature was shivering, mocking the quivers of the ship itself. Kovasic felt that had the being possessed eyelids, it would surely have had them screwed tightly, painfully shut.

The thoughts roiled and swirled, like dirty oil on an angry sea, and he felt the rising of his own longing in his throat. A longing he had never actually known he possessed.

He knew, with a startling burst of clarity, the writing in the Book of the Ancestors. He knew of the Ruskind and of the roots that grow deeper, far deeper, than the mere roots of race. He knew he was a wanderer, that all his people were wanderers, and how they would end. He knew, too, what he had done to Wummel.

He watched as the little creature’s golden eyes frosted over, and its fur ceased quivering.