He slumped in a chair. Pam frowned at him. Sandy sat perfectly still, her hands clenched.
Burke came back twenty minutes later. His expression was studiedly calm.
"I've found out where the garrison went," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm afraid we can't get any help from them. Or anybody else."
Sandy looked at him mutely. He was completely self-controlled, and he did not look like a man resolutely refusing to despair, but Sandy knew him. To her it seemed that his eyes had sunk a little in his head.
"Apparently there's nobody left on the world the garrison came from," said Burke in the tone of someone saying perfectly commonplace things, "so they didn't go back there and there's no use in our trying to make a contact with that world. This was an outpost fortress, you know. It was reached from somewhere far away, and carved out and armed to fight an enemy that didn't attack it for itself, but to get at the world or worlds that made it."
He continued with immoderate calm, "I believe the home world of that civilization has two moons in its sky and something off at the horizon that looks like a hill, but isn't."
"But—"
"The garrison left," explained Burke, "because it was abandoned. It was left behind to stand off the Enemy, and the civilization it belonged to moved away. It was left without supplies, without equipment, without hope. It was left behind even without training to face abandonment, because its members had been trained by black cubes and only knew how to do their own highly special jobs by rote. They were just ordinary soldiers, like the Roman detachments left behind when the legions marched south from Hadrian's Wall and sailed for Gaul. So when there was nothing left for them to do but leave their post or starve—because they couldn't follow the civilization that had abandoned them—they left. The cube in the box was a message they set up for their former rulers and fellow-citizens if they ever returned. It's not a pretty message!"
Sandy swallowed.
"Where'd they go? What happened to them?"