The girl kneeling beside him laughed, her voice like the music of rill waters. She turned to her elder companion, said in strange, accented English, "See, I was right, father! He is from over There. I recognized the garments; severe and ugly. Not at all like ours—"
She touched the flowing hem of her own brief, silken kirtle with fingers equally soft and white. Both she and the graybeard were dressed in clothing of classic simplicity. No stiff military harness like that worn by earthlings of Dirk's era, but something resembling the chiton of ancient Greece.
Dirk said wonderingly, "You ... you're human!"
"But, of course, stranger."
"This ... this isn't Earth, though. Nor any planet of the System!"
Dirk gestured toward the landscape, smooth and gaily gardened, stretching from horizon to horizon with no ornament save the natural adornments of Nature. Here were no grim and ugly buildings towering to the skies, blocking the sun's warm rays from view; no shining mansions flanked by filthy hovels; none of the cheek-and-jowl splendor and squalor of the world whence he had come. Here was only gentle, untrammeled beauty in a quiet, pastoral existence.
No planet of the Solar System was so organized, Dirk knew. But were a second, convincing proof needed, he had but to glance at the sky. There shone not the lone, familiar Sun of Earth ... but two suns! A binary system. One golden-yellow like Sol, the other a bluish-white globe of radiance.
"No," answered the elderly man, "this is neither the Earth from which you came nor any planet of its system. This is the planet Nadron, satellite of the twin suns, Kraagol and Thuumion, in the fourth galactic level."
Triumph was a bursting bomb in Morris' heart.
"Then it was a success, after all!" he cried. "Then Townsend was right! If only he had lived to see this day! A success ... and all because Garroway's scientists, playing with an instrument they did not understand, succeeded where we had failed for years!