"Where am I?" asked Archy, far stars in his eyes and the darkness and vastness between them, in the cold of three degrees Kelvin freeze-burning his imagination.
"You are here, now, " answered Purple, a warm, calm voice. "Don't struggle or you will set yourself spinning and simply make it harder for us to guide you through this. You are about a week's journey from the earth in Dark-stone's travel-time, or about ten million miles away. Hold still. I mean... just relax."
Archy couldn't help grinning at Purple's lapse of self-confidence. It seemed so human, and friendly-cute in this alienating bleakness of dazzling pinprick lights and blackness which was wheeling round slowly towards the sun. But something moved in his suit, cannily to block out its disc entirely. Where its blinding light should be on his faceplate was a bigger disc of blackness; and to the left of that he saw two bright planet-like lights, the bigger one a definite blue and the small companion white-grey.
"There's your home, Archy."
Archy could hear the long intake of his breath in the suit and his heart beat too, pulsing rather faster than usual but steady, in his neck perhaps. But he was wheeling slowly still until the earth-moon was more to his right and the anti-sun blackness on the edge of his faceplate above his right eyebrow.
"Yes!" said Purple, emphatically. We are travelling towards your planetary system at approximately sixty thousand miles an hour, but, gladly, there is nothing to tell us that is so, except perhaps our dark neighbour, to our left. Ah ha. Stay still. We will guide you in."
Looking left, Archy saw against a star-field, an occlusion, a dark outline which glinted a little on this and that irregular edge but was mostly a dusky matt-grey where it wasn't sooty.
"Going In?" He breathed back to Purple, incredulously?
"We thought you might appreciate the ride for a little while? You be brave like humans can be, Archy, and you will go where no one has ever been or will be, at least for thousands of years."
A tear came into Archy's eyes at that little slip of the future assurance for and development of humankind - although the Infinite Ones had said, quite distinctly, the future was still up for grabs.
He wondered at himself, because he had always simply considered that oblivion would eventually claim him and everyone in time as it had all the dead of the past. Though lives were lived in differing windows of time and space, maybe all over the universe, wherever pockets of life had blossomed - there would be no memory of anything in the end.
But fatalism, in this fantastic desert of stars, was replaced by an unaccountable mysticism. Hope burned in him which was also a love for humankind and concern for it's survival and delight in experience. Love held no logic. It cared nothing of eventual consequence - only what it could nurture. He had not had children, though he had made a specialty of tall, elephant-eared begonia plants. Suddenly he had a vision of a daughter, a little girl, trusting and growing.
"Keep focused, Archy. You are slipping a little. Concentrate now. Help us guide you down."
The occluding darkness grew and the dusky grey too, glimmered up, boosted by his super-suit's visual apparatus, Archy concluded.
"OOOhhhaaah!" he saw the ground balloon up; and then jets fired forward from the forearm and knee regions of his suit, and he drifted, ghosted up/down to the rocky surface.
Salad Face chose the moment of this soft, grey, petaled landing to sharply inform: "The Arrow Missiles will be approaching within a couple of minutes and will attempt to detonate shock waves within the path of Dark-stone. Please belay yourself to the surface with the explosive spike provided and observe the outcome."
