“Then how did you get here?” The leader of the Committee spoke, and Alvin could tell that he at least had begun to guess the truth. He wondered if he had intercepted the command his mind had just sent winging across the mountains. But he said nothing, and merely pointed in silence to the northern sky.
Too swift for the eye to follow, a needle of silver light arced across the mountains, leaving a mile-long trail of incandescence. Twenty thousand feet above Lys, it stopped. There was no deceleration, no slow braking of its colossal speed. It came to a halt instantly, so that the eye that had been following it moved on across a quarter of the heavens before the brain could arrest its motion. Down from the skies crashed a mighty peal of thunder, the sound of air battered and smashed by the violence of the ship’s passage. A little later the ship itself, gleaming splendidly in the sunlight, came to rest upon the hillside a hundred yards away.
It was difficult to say who was the most surprised, but Alvin was the first to recover. As they walked-very nearly running-towards the spaceship, he wondered if it normally travelled in this abrupt fashion. The thought was disconcerting, although there had been no sensation of movement on his first voyage. Considerably more puzzling, however, was the fact that the day before this resplendent creature had been hidden beneath a thick layer of iron-hard rock. Not until Alvin had reached the ship, and burnt his fingers by incautiously resting them on the hull, did he understand what had happened. Near the stern there were still traces of earth, but it had been fused into lava. All the rest had been swept away, leaving uncovered the stubborn metal which neither time nor any natural force could ever touch.
With Theon by his side, Alvin stood in the open door and looked back at the three silent councillors. He wondered what they were thinking, but their expressions gave no hint of their thoughts.
“I have a debt to pay in Shalmirane,” he said. “Please tell Seranis we’ll be back by noon.”
The councillors watched until the ship, now moving quite slowly-for it had only a little way to go-had disappeared into the south. Then the young man who led the group shrugged his shoulders philosophically.
“You’ve always opposed us for wanting change,” he said, “and so far you’ve won. But I don’t think the future lies with either of our parties now. Lys and Diaspar have both come to the end of an era, and we must make the best of it.”
There was silence for a little while. Then one of his companions spoke in a very thoughtful voice.
“I know nothing of archaeology, but surely that machine was too large to be an ordinary flyer. Do you think it could possibly have been-”
“A spaceship? If so, this is a crisis!”