He crash-landed the ship—on Worta, the lone planet of the unlisted, dying red star. The ship landed in a snow-bank, and the heat of the landing turned tons of snow into steaming, boiling water. By the time they had inventoried the situation, there was a smooth lake of ice around them and the ship was frozen in up to the edge of the airlocks.
Rex said shakily, "We'll have to use the auxiliary engines."
Which was a bit optimistic. The auxiliaries weren't etheric warpers. They were rocket engines. The fuel a ship like this carried would take it a few billion miles, but what was that in the vastness of interstellar space, with the nearest solar system two light-years away?
Carl's long slim fingers bit mercilessly into the palms of his hands. His voice was a thin cry of protest, drifting out over the sterile vistas of Worta, the ice planet.
"Rex, we're done for. We can't get back. We're marooned."
They were marooned, but not done for. The Wortans found them one day and took them to their city a thousand feet under the planet. These Wortans, the few of them that remained, were quiet, kindly people. Ages ago, they had fought their last retreat from the bitter surface cold. They had dug beneath the crust. They were savages now, their former mighty civilization forgotten, and were unlearned, save in agriculture and the skillful breeding of such fur-and-meat-producing animals as the col, the friga, the hask-nor. And, since they were human in form, themselves, they accepted these strangers that came among them.
They never came to the surface of Worta, but that unexplainable sense of theirs which enabled them to perceive disharmony, much as one flinches at a sour discord, brought them up to investigate.
Carl was grateful to them for their simple wisdom, their understanding. From the first, however, Rex was a "sour chord" among them. An inner conceit, perhaps growing out of a race consciousness, painted him with an unmasked hostility.
But it was all of a year after their arrival before M'hort, chief of the Wortans, revealed his feelings to Carl. He drew Carl into his meegan—his rock-dwelling—one day. M'hort was tall as Carl, but his eyes were faceted and insect-like, great horny reptilian lumps stood out on his bony-joints, and his smoothly-scaled skin reflected the eternal fluorescence of this underground land like a polished mirror.
Carl's smile was rueful when M'hort explained about Rex. "Rex never was one to get along with people. He told me you people don't like him."