We sat on the broad porch and a servant appeared, carrying delicate bowls on a tray. The bowls, cool to the touch, held a dark liquid that was better than any good thing I had ever drunk, without being in any way recognizable.
I sent a thought of thanks to the servant, an old white-haired man with a lighter skin than Jones', but he did not reciprocate it. For an instant, when the old man was facing me with his back to Jones, I caught a curious expression in his eyes, a combination of warning and beseeching. There was also the beginning of a message, I felt, but instantly it was swept away and Jones' thoughts came.
"You are wondering why we went so far in our star journey—from Uru to Earth."
I had wondered about that earlier, when Jones showed me the mind-picture of the vast rushing through space.
"Yes," I said, and the old servant, his face impassive again, trudged back into the house.
Jones showed me another picture of travels from Uru to the other four worlds of Uru's blue-white sun. I could not make out the type of craft, if a craft was used. The older worlds seemed the same, but death was on them. Man could never live there, Jones showed me, because of poisonous atmosphere, or unstable boiling land, or forbidding ice-locked vastness, or impenetrable fog. Only Uru, of the five, had evolved in a way harmonious to man.
Then I traveled with him farther from Uru's sun to other suns and explored their planets. But they held only desolation and potential death for a colonizer. Again the stars ran together in that glittering display of luminescence that I was allowed to understand now was the effect of crashing through the barrier of hyperspace. Only then did Earth's sun come into view. And then her planets. And then Earth herself.
I felt a foreboding now and tried to communicate it to my companion, but Earth came inevitably closer.
A moment later I was again in Jones' dingy room, lying on his bed with the jade-green cigaret holder in my fingers.