“If you will come to our leading ship,” said the voice, “we will answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide you.”

Hoddan said to himself:

No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But they should offer something!

He waited. There was a sudden, huge eruption of vapor in space some two hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosion had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive’s gases. A cauliflower-like shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger and thinner.

Hoddan drove toward the spot. He swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading ship was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing. Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly closed.

One of those doorways gaped wide. It would have admitted a good-sized modern ship. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan directions for getting the spaceboat inside what was plainly an enormous hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe. Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work havoc if hostilities began.

The great door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came on. Then figures appeared through a door leading to some other part of this ship.

Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was even primitive, but not in the fashion of the soiled, gaudily-colored garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray shirts. There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats — in a spaceship!

Hoddan opened the door and said politely:

“Good morning. I’m Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me.”

The oldest and most fiercely bearded of the men said harshly:

“I am the leader here. We are the people of Colin.” He frowned when Hoddan’s expression remained unchanged. “The people of Colin!” he repeated more loudly. “The people whose forefathers settled that planet, and made it a world of peace and plenty, and then foolishly welcomed strangers to their midst!”

“Too bad,” said Hoddan. He knew what these people were doing, he believed, but putting a name to where they’d come from told him nothing of what they wanted of Darth.

“We made it a fair world,” said the bearded man fiercely. “But it was my great-grandfather who destroyed it. He believed that we should share it. It was he who persuaded the Synod to allow strangers to settle among us, believing that they would become like us.”

Hoddan nodded expectantly. These people were in some sort of trouble or they wouldn’t have come out of over-drive. But they’d talked about it until it had become an emotionalized obsession that couldn’t be summarized. When they encountered a stranger, they had to picture their predicament passionately and at length.

This bearded man looked at Hoddan with burning eyes. When he went on, it was with gestures as if he were making a speech. But it was a special sort of speech. The first sentence told what kind.

“They clung to their sins!” said the bearded man bitterly. “They did not adopt our ways! Our example went for naught! They brought others of their kind to Colin. After a little they laughed at us. In a little more they outnumbered us! Then they ruled that the laws of our Synod should not govern them. And they lured our young people to imitate them — frivolous, sinful, riotous folk that they were!”

Hoddan nodded again. There were elderly people on Zan who talked like this. Not his grandfather! If you listened long enough they’d come to some point or other, but they had arranged their thoughts so solidly that any attempt to get quickly at their meaning would only produce confusion.

“Twenty years since,” said the bearded man with an angry gesture, “we made a bargain. We held a third of all the land of the planet, but our young men were falling away from the ways of their fathers. We made a bargain with the newcomers. We would trade our lands, our cities, our farms, our highways, for ships to take us to a new world, and food for the journey and machines for the taming of the planet we would select. We sent some of our number to find a world to which we could move. Ten years back, they returned. They had found it. The planet Thetis.”

Again Hoddan had no reaction. The name meant nothing.

“We began to prepare,” said the old man, his eyes flashing. “Five years since, we were ready. But we had to wait three more before the bargainers were ready to complete the trade. They had to buy and collect the ships. They had to design and build the machinery we would need. They had to collect the food supplies. Two years ago we moved our animals into the ships, and loaded our food and our furnishings, and took our places. We set out. For two years we have journeyed toward Thetis.”

Hoddan felt an instinctive respect for people who would undertake to move themselves, the third of the population of a planet, over a distance that meant years of voyaging. They might have tastes in costume that he did not share, and they might go in for elaborate oratory instead of matter-of-fact statement, but they had courage.

“Yes, sir,” said Hoddan. “I take it this brings us up to the present.”

“No,” said the old man. “Six months ago we considered that we might well begin to train the operators of the machines we would use on Thetis. We uncrated machines. We found ourselves cheated!”

Hoddan found that he could make a fairly dispassionate guess of what advantage — say — Nedda’s father would take of people who would not check on his good faith for two years and until they were two years’ journey away.

“How badly were you cheated?” asked Hoddan.

“Of our lives!” said the angry old man. “Do you know machinery?”

“Some kinds,” admitted Hoddan.

“Come,” said the leader of the fleet.

With a sort of dignity that was theatrical only because he was aware of it, the leader of the people of Colin showed the way. The hold was packed tightly with cases of machinery. One huge crate had been opened and its contents fully disclosed. Others had been hacked at enough to show their contents.

The uncrated machine was a jungle plow. It was a powerful piece of equipment which would attack jungle on a thirty-foot front, knock down all vegetation up to trees of four-foot diameter, shred it, loosen and sift the soil to a three-foot depth, and leave behind it smoothed, broken, pulverized dirt mixed with ground-up vegetation ready to break down into humus. Such a machine would clear tens of acres in a day, turning jungle into farm land ready for crops.

“We ran this for five minutes,” said the bearded man fiercely as Hoddan nodded. He lifted a motor hood.

The motors were burned out. Worthless insulation. Gears were splintered and smashed. Low-grade metal castings. Assembly-bolts had parted. Tractor treads were bent and cracked. It was not a machine except in shape. It was a mock-up in worthless materials which probably cost its maker the twentieth part of what an honest jungle plow would cost to build.

Hoddan felt the anger any man feels when he sees betrayal of that honor a competent machine represents. “It’s not all like this!” he said incredulously. “Some is worse,” said the old man, with dignity. “There are crates which are marked to contain turbines. Their contents are ancient, worn-out brick-making machines. There are crates marked to contain generators. They are filled with corroded irrigation pipes and broken castings. We have shiploads of crush-baled, rusted sheet-metal trimmings! We have been cheated of our lives!”