Smiling gently, he backed out the door.
But when he closed the door between himself and Cimon, his smile vanished. He hadn’t liked to do this. Now that he had done it, he wondered if it were worth the enemy he had made.
Seven tents had sprung up near the site of the original settlement on Junior. Nevile Fawkes could see them all from the low ridge on which he stood. They had been there seven days now.
He looked up at the sky. The clouds were thick overhead and pregnant with rain. That pleased him. With both suns behind those clouds, the diffused light was gray-white. It made things seem almost normal.
The wind was damp and a little raw, as though it were April in Vermont. Fawkes was a New Englander and he appreciated the resemblance. In four or five hours, Lagrange I would set and the clouds would turn ruddy while the landscape would become angrily dim. But Fawkes intended to be back in the tents by then.
So near the equator, yet so cool! Well, that would change with the millennia. As the glaciers retreated, the air would warm up and the soil would dry out. Jungles and deserts would make their appearance. The water level in the oceans would slowly creep higher wiping out numberless islands. The two large rivers would become an inland sea, changing the configuration of Junior’s one large continent: perhaps making several smaller ones out of it.
He wondered if the settlement site would be drowned. Probably, he decided. Maybe that would take the curse off it.
He could understand why the Confederation were so anxious to solve the mystery of that first settlement. Even if it were a simple matter of disease, there would have to be proof. Otherwise, who would settle the world? The “sucker bait” superstition held for more than merely spacemen.
He, himself—Well, his first visit to the settlement site hadn’t been so bad, though he had been glad to leave the rain and the gloom. Returning was worse. It was difficult to sleep with the thought that a thousand mysterious deaths lay all about, separated from him only by that insubstantial thing, time.
With medical coolness, Novee had dug up the moldering graves of a dozen of the ancient settlers. (Fawkes could not and did not look at the remains.) There had been only crumbling bones, Novee had said, out of which nothing could be made.