his hostility for what it was, that did not
bother her. Once more she whistled to the dolphins, waved a casual
farewell with one hand, and headed up the beach toward the base camp.
Ross chose a more rugged path over the cliff.

Suppose they did not find what they sought near here? Yet the old taped
map suggested that this was approximately the site starred upon it.
Marking a city? A star port?

Ashe had volunteered for Hawaika, demanded this job after the disastrous
Topaz affair when the team of Apache volunteers had been sent out too
soon to counter what might have been a Red sneak settlement. Ross was
still unhappy over the ensuing months when only Major Kelgarries and
maybe, in a lesser part, Ross had kept Gordon Ashe in the Project at
all. That Topaz had been a failure was accepted when the settlement ship
did not return. And that had added to Ashe's sense of guilt for having
recruited and partially trained the lost team.

Among those dispatched over Ashe's vehement protests had been Travis Fox
who had shared with Ashe and Ross the first galactic flight in an
age-old derelict spaceship. Travis Fox--the Apache archaeologist--had he
ever reached Topaz? Or would he and his team wander forever between
worlds? Did they set down on a planet where some inimical form of native
life or a Red settlement had awaited them? The very uncertainty of their
fate continued to ride Ashe.

So he insisted on coming out with the second settlement team, the
volunteers of Samoan and Hawaiian descent, to carry on a yet more
exciting and hazardous exploration. Just as the Project had probed into
the past of Terra, so would Ashe and Ross now attempt to discover what
lay in the past of Hawaika, to see this world as it had been at the
height of the galactic civilization, and so to learn what they could
about their fore-runners into space. And the mystery they had dropped
into upon landing added to the necessity for that discovery or
discoveries.

Their probe, if fortune favored them, might become a gate through time.
The installation was a vast improvement over these passage points they
had first devised. Technical information had taken a vast leap forward
after Terran engineers and scientists had had access to the tapes of the
stellar empire. Adaptations and shortcuts developed, so that a new
hybrid technology came into use, woven from the knowledge and
experimentation of two civilizations thousands of years apart in time.

If and when