Pereira gestured to the helmsman, and with a muffled roar the engine started. The launch pulled lightly against its lines.

‘Connolly!’ Ryker’s voice was shriller now, his bellicose shout overlaid by a higher note. For a moment the two men looked at each other, and in the eyes above him Connolly glimpsed the helpless isolation of Ryker, his futile attempt to identify himself with the forest.

Picking up the manual, Connolly leaned forward and tossed it through the air on to the pier. Ryker tried to catch it, then knelt down and picked it up before it slipped through the springing poles. Still kneeling, he watched as the lines were cast off and the launch surged ahead.

They moved out into the channel and plunged through the bowers of spray into the heavier swells of the open current.

As they reached a sheltering bend and the figure of Ryker faded for the last time among the creepers and sunlight, Connolly turned to Pereira. ‘Captain — what actually happened to Colonel Spender? You said the Indians wouldn’t eat a white man.’

‘They eat their gods,’ Pereira said.

The Time-Tombs

One

Usually in the evenings, while Traxel and Bridges drove off into the sand-sea, Shepley and the Old Man would wander among the gutted time-tombs, listening to them splutter faintly in the dying light as they recreated their fading personas, the deep crystal vaults flaring briefly like giant goblets.

Most of the tombs on the southern edge of the sand-sea had been stripped centuries earlier. But Shepley liked to saunter through the straggle of half-submerged pavilions, the ancient sand playing over his bare feet like wavelets on an endless beach. Alone among the flickering tombs, with the empty husks of the past ten thousand years, he could temporarily forget his nagging sense of failure.

Tonight, however, he would have to forego the walk. Traxel, who was nominally the leader of the group of tombrobbers, had pointedly warned him at dinner that he must pay his way or leave. For three weeks Shepley had put off going with Traxel and Bridges, making a series of progressively lamer excuses, and they had begun to get impatient with him. The Old Man they would tolerate, for his vast knowledge of the sand-sea — he had combed the decaying tombs for over forty years and knew every reef and therm-pool like the palm of his hand — and because he was an institution that somehow dignified the lowly calling of tomb-robber, but Shepley had been there for only three months and had nothing to offer except his morose silences and self-hate.

‘Tonight, Shepley,’ Traxel told him firmly in his hard clipped voice, you must find a tape. We cannot support you indefinitely. Remember, we’re all as eager to leave Vergil as you are.’

Shepley nodded, watching his reflection in the gold finger-bowl. Traxel sat at the head of the tilting table, his highcollared velvet jacket unbuttoned. Surrounded by the battered gold plate filched from the tombs, red wine spilling across the table from Bridges’ tankard, he looked more like a Renaissance princeling than a cashiered PhD. Once Traxel had been a Professor of Semantics, and Shepley wondered what scandal had brought him to Vergil. Now, like a grave-rat, he hunted the time-tombs with Bridges, selling the tapes to the Psycho-History Museums at a dollar a foot. Shepley found it impossible to come to terms with the tall, aloof man. By contrast Bridges, who was just a thug, had a streak of blunt good humour that made him tolerable, but with Traxel he could never relax. Perhaps his coldly abrupt manner represented authority, the high-faced, stern-eyed interrogators who still pursued Shepley in his dreams.

Bridges kicked back his chair and lurched away around the table, pounding Shepley across the shoulders.

‘You come with us, kid. Tonight we’ll find a megatape.’

Outside, the low-hulled, camouflaged half-track waited in a saddle between two dunes. The old summer palace was sinking slowly below the desert, and the floor of the banqueting hall shelved into the white sand like the deck of a subsiding liner, going down with lights blazing from its staterooms.

‘What about you, Doctor?’ Traxel asked the Old Man as Bridges swung aboard the half-track and the exhaust kicked out. ‘It would be a pleasure to have you along.’ When the Old Man shook his head Traxel turned to Shepley. ‘Well, are you coming?’

‘Not tonight,’ Shepley demurred hurriedly. ‘I’ll walk down to the tomb-beds later myself.’

‘Twenty miles?’ Traxel reminded him, watching reflectively. ‘Very well.’ He zipped up his jacket and strode away towards the half-track. As they moved off he shouted ‘Shepley, I meant what I said!’

Shepley watched them disappear among the dunes. Flatly, he repeated ‘He means what he says.’

The Old Man shrugged, sweeping the sand off the table. ‘Traxel he’s a difficult man. What are you going to do?’ The note of reproach in his voice was mild, realizing that Shepley’s motives were the same as those which had marooned himself on the lost beaches of the sand-sea four decades earlier.

Shepley snapped irritably. ‘I can’t go with him. After five minutes he drains me like a skull. What’s the matter with Traxel? Why is he here?’

The Old Man stood up, staring out vaguely into the desert. ‘I can’t remember. Everyone has his own reasons. After a while the stories overlap.’

They walked out under the portico, following the grooves left by the half-track. A mile away, winding between the last of the lavalakes which marked the southern shore of the sand-sea, they could just see the vehicle vanishing into the darkness. The old tomb-beds, where Shepley and the Old Man usually walked, lay between them, the pavilions arranged in three lines along a low basaltic ridge. Occasionally a brief flare of light flickered up into the white, bonelike darkness, but most of the tombs were silent.

Shepley stopped, hands falling limply to his sides. ‘The new beds are by the Lake of Newton, nearly twenty miles away. I can’t follow them.’

‘I shouldn’t try,’ the Old Man rejoined. ‘There was a big sand-storm last night. The time-wardens will be out in force marking any new tombs uncovered.’ He chuckled softly to himself. ‘Traxel and Bridges won’t find a foot of tape — they’ll be lucky if they’re not arrested.’ He took off his white cotton hat and squinted shrewdly through the dead light, assessing the altered contours of the dunes, then guided Shepley towards the old mono-rail whose southern terminus ended by the tomb-beds. Once it had been used to transport the pavilions from the station on the northern shore of the sand-sea, and a small gyro-car still leaned against the freight platform. ‘We’ll go over to Pascal. Something may have come up, you never know.’

Shepley shook his head. ‘Traxel took me there when I first arrived. They’ve all been stripped a hundred times.’

‘Well, we’ll have a look.’ The Old Man plodded on towards the mono-rail, his dirty white suit flapping in the low breeze. Behind them the summer palace — built three centuries earlier by a business tycoon from Ceres — faded into the darkness, the rippling glass tiles in the upper spires merging into the starlight.

Propping the car against the platform, Shepley wound up the gyroscope, then helped the Old Man on to the front seat. He prised off a piece of rusting platform rail and began to punt the car away. Every fifty yards or so they stopped to clear the sand that submerged the track, but slowly they wound off among the dunes and lakes. Here and there the onion-shaped cupola of a solitary time-tomb reared up into the sky beside them, fragments of the crystal casements twinkling in the sand like minuscule stars.

Half an hour later, as they rode down the final long incline towards the Lake of Pascal, Shepley went forward to sit beside the Old Man, who emerged from his private reverie to ask pointedly, ‘And you, Shepley, why are you here?’