“Uh…I thought of a cluster, heavily hazed, somewhat like the young clusters of the Pleiades type.”

“So did many Serievans,” Vandange snorted. “Please use your head. Not even Pleiadic clusters contain that much gas and dust. Besides, the verbal description of the Kirkasanters sounds like a globular cluster, insofar as it sounds like anything. But not much. The ancient red suns are there, crowded together, true. But they speak of far too many younger ones.

“And of far too much heavy metal at home. Which their ship demonstrates. Their use of alloying elements like aluminum and beryllium is incredibly parsimonious. On the other hand, electrical conductors are gold and silver, the power plant is shielded not with lead but with inert-coated osmium, and it burns plutonium which the Kirkasanters assert was mined!

“They were astonished that Serieve is such a light-metal planet. Or claimed they were astonished. I don’t know about that. I do know that this whole region is dominated by light elements. That its interstellar spaces are relatively free of dust and gas, the Dragon’s Head being the only exception and it merely in transit through our skies. That all this is even more true of the globular clusters, which formed in an ultratenuous medium, mostly before the galaxy had condensed to its present shape—which, in fact, practically don’t occur in the main body of the galaxy, but are off in the surrounding halo!”

Vandange stopped for breath and triumph.

“Well.” Laure shifted uneasily in his seat and wished Jaccavrie weren’t ten thousand kilometers away at the only spaceport. “You have a point. There are contradictions, aren’t there? I’ll bear what you said in mind when I, uh, interview the strangers themselves.”

“And you will, I trust, be wary of them,” Vandange said.

“Oh, yes. Something queer does seem to be going on.”

* * *

In outward appearance, the Kirkasanters were not startling. They didn’t resemble any of the human breeds that had developed locally, but they varied less from the norm than some. The fifteen men and five women were tall, robust, broad in chest and shoulders, slim in waist. Their skins were dark coppery reddish, their hair blue-black and wavy; males had some beard and mustache which they wore neatly trimmed. Skulls were dolichocephalic, faces disharmonically wide, noses straight and thin, lips full. The total effect was handsome. Their eyes were their most arresting feature, large, long-lashed, luminous in shades of gray, or green, or yellow.

Since they had refused—with an adamant politeness they well knew how to assume—to let cell samples be taken for chromosome analysis, Vandange had muttered to Laure about nonhumans in surgical disguise. But that the Ranger classed as the fantasy of a provincial who’d doubtless never met a live xeno. You couldn’t fake so many details, not and keep a viable organism. Unless, to be sure, happenstance had duplicated most of those details for you in the course of evolution…

Ridiculous, Laure thought. Coincidence isn’t that energetic.

He walked from Pelogard with Demring Lodden, captain of the Makt, and Demring’s daughter, navigator Graydal. The town was soon behind them. They found a trail that wound up into steeply rising hills, among low, gnarly trees which had begun to put forth leaves that were fronded and colored like old silver. The sun was sinking, the air noisy and full of salt odors. Neither Kirkasanter appeared to mind the chill.