Carol gripped his arm and he looked off in the direction of her extended finger. Seeping in through the entrance, the gathering light of day was dimmed by a dark form descending silently to the surface.
He lunged up. "The Tzarean ship!"
But it wasn't until several seconds later that he realized he had used twoclicksof his teeth and ahissto pronounce the strange word between "the" and "ship."
Chancellor Vrausot was even more imposing in his home-environment suit. The helmet made his head seem twice as large and the clear-plastic snout cup enormously magnified his craggy teeth.
Just inside the main hatch, Assemblyman Mittich regarded the other and swallowed a strong taste of neglected opportunity. He had soaked awake all night, trying desperately to muster the will to accuse Vrausot of malfeasance and assume command.
But he had to face the bitter fact that he lacked sufficient courage. And, even more distressing, his cowardice was something he would have to live with for the rest of his life—as he watched the destruction of many worlds and billions of their inhabitants.
Odd, he thought, how so much could hinge on a single twist of circumstance. Vrausot would return to the Shoal and become a symbol around which Tzarean determination would rally.
On the other hand, if he, Mittich, were leader of this expedition, he too would receive a hero's welcome. Only, his praises would be hissed in the same breath with glorious tribute to the concepts of peaceful contact.
Vrausot turned to check the readiness of his landing party.
"All stun weapons loaded and set?" he asked, his voice sounding coarse both in Mittich's earphones and through a bulkhead speaker.
He received twenty affirmative tail flicks.
Of the pilot, standing by the hatch control switch, he demanded: "Status of the aliens' robots?"
"They areallimpotent," Kavula reported back into the bulkhead speaker. "The last one used up its remaining power as we descended."
Vrausot stepped toward the hatch, but hesitated again. "Kavula, you will double check the detention compartment and see that the proper protein nutrient is being synthesized."
The pilot acknowledged with a thump of his tail and opened the hatch.
A short while later the landing party was making its way across the plain toward the area strewn densely with boulders and the cave in the cliff beyond. Formality was strictly observed. Vrausot went first. Twenty paces behind him came Mittich; then, at intervals of ten paces, the remainder of the detail.
For Minnie, impotence was a strange and bewildering sensation as she stood paralyzed out among the boulders.
Equilibrium gyros spinning too slowly to accomplish their function, she had tilted over against a rock. In a final and desperate spasm, her drill head had swung upward, toppled over, fallen a few centimeters and come to rest precariously against a ridge.
Frantically, she fought relentless inertia. She opened special circuits that would ordinarily have flooded her balancing system with emergency current. But servomechanisms failed to respond and her chrome-plated neck remained thrust toward a sun now well up in the sky.
Gears whirred faintly and her head turned ever so slowly on its axis, bringing its video sensor to bear on the cave entrance.
It had been her determined efforts to reach the non-Totemic mobiles, she reasoned, that had drained off all her energy. She had been aware of the imminent power failure even during her last, frantic blows at the rocks. Then, retreating, she had struggled desperately against terrifying paralysis.
And now she stood almost powerless, whereas before her forced ascendancy she had imagined she would beAllPowerful. It was an ironic turn of fate indeed. Oh, how she longed now for the telemetric voices of the clan, the crisp orders from Bigboss, the obedient, sometimes plaintive responses of Screw Worm to her own directions.
Incapable of movement, she sensed finally and with much distress that her rationalization processes themselves—were becoming—sluggish, weak. She could hardly—think coherently—or with rapidity—any longer.
Slowly her head responded to the pull of gravity and turned once more on its axis, the weighty chuck arcing down like a pendulum. It reached the nadir of its swing and momentum carried it up in the other direction. In a desperate effort, she locked the servo unit.
In that position, her video lens took in the huge, new symmetrical form that had come to rest out on the plain.
It was—another Totem! And approaching—in her direction now were—many other non-Totemic creatures—somewhat different in form—perhaps, from—the ones Bigboss had—pursued. But—still insolent, despicable—things, nevertheless.
Was it—possible that she—could still—discharge her—function as—Supreme Being? If they—passed—close enough, it—would require—only one—final—desperate—impulse—to—
With the others, Stewart crowded into the cave entrance, careful not to let Carol press too far outside where she would no longer be in the stream of oxygen flowing from the bowels of the satellite.
"They're coming!" McAllister exclaimed, withdrawing. Mortimer retreated with him, striking out for a small passageway that fed from one of the side walls.
Stewart strained forward, shading his eyes against the glare of Aldebaran. The landing party's advance was half concealed by the mass of rocks and outcroppings that hid most of their ship. Only occasionally could he see part of a space-suited Hyadean form as its clumsy, swaying stride brought it more completely into his line of sight.
And vision was further complicated by the glint of sunlight off the Mineral Analyzer's up-thrust drill head, which had finally come to rest against the rock.
Carol tilted her head attentively and frowned. "I'm picking up theoddestradio stuff. The modulation breaks down into nothing more than clicking and hissing sounds. I can't seem to get any meaning. It's too—alien!"
Randall reached back into the cave for his hostile-atmosphere sheath. "I'm going out there and see what happens. After all, I'm responsible for our predicament."
But just then the first alien figure pulled into view, coming around the boulder and pausing. Apparently sighting Randall's movement in the cave entrance, the Hyadean raised a stubby arm that held a gleaming metal instrument.
Randall pulled Carol back into the subterranean chamber. But Stewart only stood there frozen in bewilderment.
Then the Mineral Analyzer's ponderous drill head slipped from its perch and came plunging down. It shattered the Hyadean's helmet and almost tore his grotesque head off, sending his weapon flying out across the plain.
The creature lay there writhing for a moment, then was still, its hideous crocodile head turned lifelessly toward Aldebaran.
Stewart, his eyes locked hypnotically on the prostrate form, could only watch with shocked fascination as the other members of the landing party appeared from behind the rocks. They stood silently around the body, then turned back toward their ship.
"Tzareans"—"Tzarean Shoal"—"Curule Assembly"—"Vrausot"—"Mittich"—"uraphi"—
Strange words and phrases whirled about in Stewart's thrashing thoughts as a great flood of deeply buried experiences rushed with cyclonic fury into the conscious levels of his mind. And he realized that, just as the sight of the Hyadean ship had swept aside the conditioning Randall had imposed upon him, so was the sight of Hyadeans—Tzareans—hurling aside another, denser curtain of conditioning.
He staggered back into the cave and fell sitting against the wall as all the suppressed knowledge and memories engulfed him.
Stewart and Harlston were seated beside the table in the Great Hall of the Curule Assembly. They were having some difficulty making themselves comfortable in chairs designed to accommodate Tzarean buttocks and tail, rather than support the human form. They were manacled, but only symbolically—with flimsy crepe paperlike handcuffs.
"Our problem," Mittich, the Hisser of the Assembly was saying, "has been clearly defined. We have captured the expeditionary ship of an alien culture that appears to be expanding in the direction of the Tzarean Shoal. We have taken pain to teach its two crew members the rudiments of our language. And we have found that the official alien response to this situation may or may not be hostile."
"Kill them! Kill them!" one of the Assemblymen clicked out as he sprang up on his tail.
The Great Hall resounded with click-hisses of approval and disapproval—an equal measure of each, it seemed to Stewart.
He watched Mittich smile—at least, it passed for a smile in the Tzarean Shoal—tolerantly at the excited Assemblyman.
"Killing our prisoners," he chided, "will not alter the fact that alien expansion is under way in the direction of our Shoal."
Chancellor Vrausot lumbered down the central aisle, defying the independence of the legislature as he had during all sessions which Stewart and Harlston had attended as Exhibits A and B of the "Alien threat" issue.
Whacking his tail against the floor for attention, he stood before the table and hissed vehemently, "We must arm to the limit of our potential. We must dispose of these prisoners. We must attack their centers of civilization before they attackours!"
Another Assemblyman rose imploringly. "But how can we do that? We haven't fought a war in countless millennia! Once we were many and mighty, astheyare now. But while they have grown, we have shrunk. Why, our entire Shoal consists of only two civilized worlds. All the others have long been in decay."
"Oh, we could take them by surprise and inflict much damage on their worlds," Hisser of the Assembly Mittich agreed with Chancellor Vrausot. "But they would recover. And we would be annihilated."
"Then what," the Chancellor asked scornfully, "would you propose that we do?"
"Our choices are enumerable:
"One—we kill these captives and prepare a surprise attack. Two—we condition our captives to return to the center of their civilization and report that they found no worlds worth possessing in this sector."
Vrausot reared erect in protest. "But eventually the conditioning will break! They will remember! And their race will then fashion an attack!"
"If we are to assume that they would attack in the first place," Mittich pointed out. "Our prisoners themselves aren't certain whether their race would or would not.
"Three—we could try instilling fear in them. Condition our captives to go back home and report a powerful, vast Tzarean Shoal culture. But that, I suspect, would only drive the aliens into a frantic arming effort. And, once a formidable striking potential is accumulated, use will be found for it—believe me.
"Four—we could let them return and tell the truth—that the Tzareans are a declining culture on its last tail, so to speak."
Again Chancellor Vrausot erupted in a series of violent hisses and clicks. "But that might only encourage them to attack!"
"Precisely. So the only course left is Number Five. That is to condition our prisoners to reportindicationsof an interstellar culture in the Tzarean Shoal—nothing precise, nothing definite. Our prisoners will say they made no visual observations. We thus present the aliens with neither the temptation of our actual weakness, nor the fear of our pretended strength.
"At the same time we interrupt communications between them and the robots they have stationed in the system halfway between their center of civilization and ours. We shall hope they interpret that action as signifying we have discovered their automatons and desire to meet them in peace on that satellite.
"We shall go there prepared for friendly contact. If they comeunarmed,we shall know there will be no fighting; that perhaps they will even provide the stimulus and inspiration for regeneration of the Tzarean culture. After all, it's a pretty big galaxy and there's plenty of room fortwointerstellar races."
"But," Vrausot hissed grimly, "what if they comearmed?"
"Then we shall know what fate holds in store for us. We will prepare to the limit of our resources and acquit ourselves honorably."
Stewart watched Vrausot thump his tail on the floor in an expression of displeasure.
"The administration," click-hissed the Chancellor, "will agree to that plan with two modifications: one—that the Tzarean ship we send to contact the aliens will itself be armed so that the lives of our brave men will not be jeopardized; two—that the highest administrative authority be appointed to lead the expedition."
"Dave! Oh, Dave! What's wrong?"
He opened his eyes and stared up into Carol's solicitous face. "I'm all right," he said numbly.
Randall was tinkering with the transceiver, while Mortimer and McAllister were moving about excitedly in the cave entrance.
"Come see what those Hyadeans are doing!" the latter exclaimed.
Stewart went over. In front of the cave, obscuring the formation of outcroppings and boulders beyond, was a pile of shining, metal instruments that looked like—
"The linear intensifiers off their laser guns!" Mortimer revealed. "They've been stripping them off the ship for the past half hour. And look!"
He pointed off to the side, indicating another mound of weapons that were quite obviously of the class the landing party had worn as side arms. In between the two piles and lying directly in front of the cave's mouth was the body of the Tzarean who had been slain by the fall of the Mineral Analyzer's drill head.
Even as Stewart watched, other Tzareans brought more weapons to add to the two stacks.
"Dave!" Randall's voice sounded excitedly back in the cave. "Come listen to this. I've tuned in on their frequency!"
Stewart accepted the earphones and listened to the clicks and hisses that translated readily into:
"How many gun batteries left?"
"Two more and they will have all been dismantled."
"And the stun weapons?"
"There isn't a single one left on the ship."
Stewart tensed. The questioning voice—it couldn't be—
Anxiously, he picked up the microphone and ignored the bewilderment on Randall's face as he hissed, "Mittich! Is that you?"
And the Tzarean who had practically been his companion during the Curule Assembly hearing phase of his captivity answered with a series of startled clicks:
"Friend Stewart? It's notreallyStewart, is it?"
THE END