It stuck at first, groaned open rustily.
A man’s head thrust out—shrunken, white-bearded, old.
Sunken eyes peered out at me, warily alert.
“Lars Ulnar?” Ken Star’s voice was rasping at me, queerly thin, queerly aged, queerly unbelieving.
“You are still waiting here?”
“Of course we are.”
I caught his parchment hand.
“Let me help you, sir.”
Queerly dwindled, queerly bent, he let me help him through the hatch.
Old Habibula followed. Even he was thinner, though his skin still looked smooth and pink as Lilith’s.
His pebble-colored eyes rolled wildly at her and me.
“Lars!” His voice was a wheezy, unbelieving croak.
“Lil!
We’re mortal glad to find you here—and still alive!
When we saw the station not repaired we thought it must have been abandoned.”
Squinting strangely at us, he shook his hairless head.
“Did they maroon you here?” he gasped.
“Alone in this wicked wreck?
Or did the relief ship never come?
Have you been trapped out here all this mortal time?”
Leaning on Lilith’s arm, as if he needed support even here where gravity was nearly null, Ken Star stood peering with those bright, sunken eyes at her and me.
“How long—” His old voice quavered and broke. “By your tune, how long have we been away?”
“Two hours.”
I studied my watch.
“Perhaps a little longer—”
“Two mortal hours!” old Habibula bleated unbelievingly.
“You’re joking with us—when we’ve suffered too much and toiled too long and endured too many mortal disasters to be met with silly jokes.”
Flushed with indignation, he sobbed for his breath.
“We’ve just got back from beyond the anomaly.
We’ve fought through perils that would freeze the precious brain in your skull.
We’ve existed for desperate years on synthetic gruel and iron determination.
We’ve set our precious wits against the grimmest riddles of a foreign universe.”
He wheezed again, as if gasping for life itself.
“And now you greet us with a silly joke!”
“I don’t understand—but it’s no joke, Giles.”
I looked from him to the bent old man who had been Ken Star.
“We’ve been watching the time, because we have so little left.
The station is still falling into the anomaly.
I don’t think we have an hour left.”
The old man nodded with a birdlike alertness.
The bandage was gone that Ken Star had worn, but I saw the thin blue line of a zig-zag scar across his yellow parchment forehead—an old scar, healed long ago.
“Time is different where we’ve been,” he said.
“I hadn’t realized just how different—though my theory does explain it.
With the shift in space-time coordinates, instants here can be ages there.
Most of the time we had no better clocks than our own bodies, but since we left here we have experienced months of time—”
“Mortal years!” old Habibula wailed.
“So long I can’t recall the precious taste of caviar or wine!”
“If you got through the anomaly—” Stark urgency caught my voice. “Did you find a defense?
Did you find any way to stop the invaders?”
“We learned tremendous things!”