“Yes,” Odin answered.
“Good. You hear me. We are those who have been driven out of the city. We would visit you in peace. We are called Lorens.”
Within a few minutes, a dozen of the strangers had been brought aboard The Nebula. Ato summoned Nea and the rest of the captains.
The leader of the visitors was a man by the name of Val. He was a tall, lean man with a Norman nose and his dark skin was drawn so tightly about his face that he looked a bit like a mummy. Val was over sixty, Odin judged, and though his wrists were skinny the tendons and muscles on his arms stood out like taut lengths of cable. He and his men were dressed alike—a sleeveless shirt of walnut-brown plastic, dark peg-bottomed trousers of corduroy, and footgear that looked like engineer’s boots with rippled soles. The tops of the boots were tight-fitting and the peg-bottomed trousers were drawn snugly over them. Odin learned later that what had appeared to be green moss out there on the weathered plain was a kind of thistle with cat-claw thorns.
Each man wore a heavy black belt about his waist. Attached to the belt were at least a dozen weapons: several grenades, a pistol, another pistol with a flaring muzzle, a long knife, a glassy looking tube fitted to a pistol-butt, and a blue-black ugly thing which was shaped like an over-sized toadstool.
In addition to this odd assortment of gear, each man carried something in his hand which greatly resembled the frame of an old-fashioned umbrella—except that half a dozen vari-colored buttons were set into the handles.
“It was nearly thirty years ago,” Val was explaining, “that the voice of Grim Hagen began to interfere with our broadcasting system. Some said it was a god. Some said it was a devil. It came from space. It came from almost anywhere. We have been an intelligent race, but we were sore beset. Our sun was dying. All that we had was our sun and a huge dust-cloud in the distance. In times past, our astronomers had seen the glow of millions of suns, millions upon millions of miles away. But we were never able to perfect a telescope that could bring a single sun into view.
“Nor did we ever have a chance to do this. The dust-cloud surged out toward us every twenty years, and our scientists were able to use a gravitational beam to deflect a part of it toward our sun. In this way we kept it alive and might have been able to do so for ages. But now the dust-cloud is gone.”
Val paused to sigh, and then resumed his story. “The voice—I mean the voice of Grim Hagen—promised my people that if they would accept him he would take them forth into the stars. They would plunder thousands of worlds and they would live for centuries while generations died. Also, he said, he was on the brink of discovering eternal life—”