Time and space have a tendency to dilute truth, and it is the job of the honest historian to distill the essence from the mixture.
The story proper begins nearly a century ago, just before Leland Hale landed on Cardigan's Green, but in order to understand exactly what happened, it is necessary to go back even farther in time—a full three centuries. It was at that time that the race of Man first came to Cardigan's Green.
Exactly what happened is difficult to determine. It is likely that the captain of the ship that brought the colonists to the planet actually was named Cardigan, but there is no record of the man, nor, indeed, of the ship itself. At any rate, there was a ship, and it carried five hundred colonists, if the ship was representative of the colonial ships of the time. Evidently, they tore the ship down to make various other equipment they needed, which, of course, marooned them on the planet. But that was what they wanted, anyway; it is usual among colonists.
And then the Plague struck.
The colonists had no resistance whatever to the disease. Every one of them caught it, bar none. And ninety per cent of them died while the rest recovered. Fifty people, alone on a strange planet. And, as human beings always do, they went on living.
The next generation was on its way to adulthood when the Plague struck again. Seventy-five per cent of them died.
It was over a hundred years before the people of Cardigan's Green received another visit from the Plague, and this time less than twenty per cent died.
But, even so, they had a terrible, deep-seated fear of the Plague. Even another century couldn't completely wipe it out.
And that was more or less the way things stood when Leland Hale snapped his ship out of infraspace near the bright G-2 sun that was Cardigan's Green's primary.