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Chapter 7

Inward, homeward bound sped the old Quest, boring through the warped Continuum, dragged down the dark dimensions by the tumbling, ever-precessing rotors of her interstellar drive. Inward she ran, in from the Rim, in from the frontier of the ultimate dark—and yet, paradoxically, inward to the Unknown. Past suns—yellow, and white, and blue, and ruddy, dwarfs and giants—she scudded, driving through the stellar maelstrom like a bullet through a snowstorm. Planetary systems she passed in her flight—and on none of them, so far as could be determined, had intelligence yet engendered advanced technology. There was life, said Mayhew, on most of those worlds—and intelligent life on some of them. There was life, intelligent life, but, so far as he could determine by his monitoring of stray, random thoughts, none of those races had yet progressed beyond the level of the nomadic hunter, the primitive agriculturalist—and none of them had yet produced a trained telepath. Daniels, the Electronic Communications Officer, was less definite than his psionic rival. He was able to say that nobody in the worlds that they passed was using the Carlotti Communications System or its equivalent but told Grimes that the Quest's Mannschenn Drive would have to be shut down before any NST—Normal Space-Time—radio signals could be received. Mayhew, however, had been so firm in his opinions that it was obvious that such an investigation would be only a waste of time.

And so we're the first . . . thought Grimes. The first spaceship . . . A fragment of archaic poetry came into his mind.

We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea . . .

Then he remembered the fate of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. There had just better not be any shooting of albatrosses, he told himself firmly.

Inward sped the Quest, and the Commodore realized that her voyage would soon be over. He could feel, in his bones, that Earth was getting close. Not the next sun, nor the next, but the one after that would be Sol. He didn't know how he knew—but he knew.

Nonetheless, he wanted to be able to rely upon more than a hunch. He told Carnaby to have all of Faraway Quest's surveying instruments in readiness. "Look for nine planets," he said. "Or possibly ten . . ."

"Ten, sir? I thought that the Solarian System had only nine planets."

"So it does—in our time. But this is not our time. The so-called Asteroid Belt, the zone of planetary debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, was once a sizeable world. Perhaps, when we are now, it is still a sizeable world . . ."

"Nine planets, then, sir. Possibly ten. Any other special features?"

"You've never been to Earth, have you, Mr. Carnaby?"

"No, sir."

"As you should know, the sixth planet—or possibly, the seventh—is one of the wonders of the Universe. Saturn is not the only gas giant, of course, neither is it the only planet with rings—but it is the most spectacular."

"A ringed planet, then. And earth itself? Any special thing to look for?"

"Yes. One satellite. One natural satellite, that is. A big one. More of a sister world than a moon."

"Should be easy enough to identify, sir. But there's just one more point. There aren't any charts of Earth in the ship's memory bank."

"We didn't know that we should be coming this way, did we? But I think that I shall be able to draw some maps of sorts from memory. How much use they'll be depends on how far back we are in the Past . . ."

"Surely the effects of erosion shouldn't be all that great, sir."

Grimes sighed. Carnaby was a good spaceman, an excellent navigator—and a trade-school boy. He was qualified, very well qualified to guide a ship between worlds, but knew nothing of the forces that had shaped, that were still shaping, those worlds. His specialized education had taught him his job and no more. Of what use to a navigator was knowledge of cataclysmic epochs of mountain building, of the effects of climatic change with consequent variation in sea level, of continental drift?

He said, "We might be able to recognize Earth from the maps that I draw. If we don't, it just might not be my fault."

But Earth was, after all, quite recognizable.

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Framed