An awe fell on Birrel as he looked out the port with them. The ship, in normal space again, was sweeping in a curved pattern toward a sun whose diamond incandescence eclipsed the stars.
Almost lost in that overpowering glare, three points of light swung far on the other side of this system. It was toward the biggest of the three that Thile and Kara were gazing.
"Ruun," whispered Kara. "If they only knew, if we could only get a message to them—"
Thile said bitterly, "What good would it do even if we could send a warning? Our cautious government would merely say, as they did before, 'You have no proof that the Irrians mean war, and without proof we cannot act'."
The ship swung on in its landing-pattern and now, below, Birrel saw a planet coming up toward them.
It was a scarred world of black-and-green. He thought at first that these were land-and-water divisions, but as they went lower he saw that they were not—that the green were fertile plains but that the ominous black areas were utterly lifeless lands, black and blasted and barren.
"That's what the oligarchs of Ir have made of their world," said Kara. "Those burned-out regions are the scars of their wars between themselves. And now, with no fissionable matter left, they must go to space for the means of destruction!"
The ship went down toward one of the wide green areas. There was a city here—a far-stretching grimness of gray, massive buildings, with a movement of hoppers and ground-cars over and through it. A spaceport lay outside the city, with the silver towers of many ships there flashing back the diamond sun.
They felt the landing. Then there was silence. They waited for Vannevan to come, but he did not. Instead, armed Irrian guards came and marched them out of the ship onto a blackened concrete apron. They stood there for a few minutes, in a chill wind.
Birrel thought, shivering, "Not Earth, this world I stand on. Not my own world—"