IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS:TO CHIEF J. VILLAINOWSKI. URGENT. ORDERS CANCELLED. TURN BACK TO EARTH WITHOUT DELAY. ALL FIVE COPIES OF STELLAR DRIVE STOLEN. GOVERNMENT CANNOT RISK YOUR LIFE IN DEEP SPACE UNTIL YOU CAN REPLACE PLANS.MUSTAPHA IX.
IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS:
TO CHIEF J. VILLAINOWSKI. URGENT. ORDERS CANCELLED. TURN BACK TO EARTH WITHOUT DELAY. ALL FIVE COPIES OF STELLAR DRIVE STOLEN. GOVERNMENT CANNOT RISK YOUR LIFE IN DEEP SPACE UNTIL YOU CAN REPLACE PLANS.
MUSTAPHA IX.
Saxon realized the machine was still clicking off the message over and over again.
Murdock had pushed himself to the bulkhead, where he kicked off, gliding through the door. Saxon followed cautiously, conscious of a yellow mist collecting in the control room.
The T.I.S. agent got just beyond the doorway when he floated unconscious to the deck.
Saxon made it to the head of the ladder. Then he, too, lost control over his muscles.
Saxon made it to the head of the ladder. Then he, too, lost control over his muscles.
Saxon made it to the head of the ladder. Then he, too, lost control over his muscles.
Saxon made it to the head of the ladder. Then he, too, lost control over his muscles.
The mist was like soup, thick yellow pea soup.
His last conscious thought was, "So this is the Little Death!"
"Here! Why are you crying?" asked the big white giant. His voice was gentle, compassionate, and he was naked except for a kilt of a strange gleaming material like woven light.
"But I don't want to go," Saxon protested in a reedy, childish tone. He realized in dismay that the giant wasn't a giant at all, but normal and man-sized. "I don't want to go," he heard himself tearfully repeating.
They were in a room, the little boy that had been Saxon and the big white man, and a door across the room was opening. The little boy that was Saxon shrank against the man.
A woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall and beautiful and dressed like the man in a gleaming kilt. She smiled at Saxon, but he was not reassured. He hung back from crossing the threshold.
Saxon saw a troubled look pass between the two. Then the man steeled himself, picked up the squirming boy, carried him through the doorway.
It was a strange sensation that possessed the mature Saxon, stretched on the cold deck at the head of the ladder to the engine room. He wasn't dreaming. He was the little boy, and yet he seemed to be outside himself, watching his own actions, appraising himself like the detached half of a dual personality.
He was in the time field, Saxon realized. That was it! He was reliving a segment of his life span that had taken place before he was eleven!
His heart leaped spasmodically. At last the curtain was being raised on those blank years of childhood!
The room into which the man carried him, Saxon saw, was larger that the anteroom and cluttered with strange machinery, ugly machinery. The far wall was a solid bank of windows, through which he could see a green meadow rolling gently away to blue foothills in the distance. Light poured through the windows from a blazing sun high overhead and a second orange sun was just rising.
The man deposited him in a chair. Saxon quit thrashing, as the woman fitted a skull-cap over his head, making minute adjustments. A cable led from the peak of the skull-cap to a frightening machine which the woman bent over next, and set in operation.
Saxon could feel a rush of thought pouring into his brain. Queer thoughts couched in semantically obscure words.
One stood out. "Earth." It was repeated many times before he began to comprehend the import of the alien symbols. "Earth is the third planet of a star known to its inhabitants as Sol!"
With a feeling of strangeness the Saxon who observed realized that the boy was being taught to speak English!
Saxon shook his head groggily, pushed himself to his hands and knees and found himself floating six feet in the air. He had forgotten that the jet drive was still off.
It came back with a suddenness that flung Saxon to the metal deck.
He scrambled to his feet, his mind in a whirl. Forgotten temporarily were the emergency orders commanding them to return to Earth. If Villainowski had been right, then Saxon had actually relived an event which had transpired before he was eleven.
Then who the hell was he?
He returned to the control room, stepping over the unconscious body of Murdock, who had not yet recovered from the effects of the time field.
The dial on the control board read 1.3 parsecs!
He jumped for the scanner, clamped his eye to the aperture, and immediately jumped back!
Dead ahead was a huge blazing sun!
It looked so close that theShooting Starappeared to be falling straight into the maw of erupting atomic energy.
But reason returned, and he knew they must still be millions of miles away. He went back to the scanner, spotting first a second sun not so close, then a third, small and red like a fiery coin.
The ternary system of Alpha Centauri! They were out of the Solar System!
"Please," said a girl's voice behind him. "Stand back from the scanner! Don't try for your gun, Saxon, or I will be forced to shoot!"
Saxon whirled around.
Ileth Urban stood in the doorway, a dart gun leveled at his stomach. Behind her, he saw the shame-faced Murdock surrounded by the crew. Murdock was helpless, his arms in the air.
"The crew have mutinied," said Ileth. "The ship is now under the control of General Atomic."
Saxon's jaw sagged. He said, "So you are Q62." It wasn't so much a question as a statement. He knew. He could read it in her thoughts. But why hadn't he been able to see it there before?
It wasn't possible, but there could be no doubt. Ileth Urban was Q62.
Then the thoughts of the men in the corridor made themselves felt. Every man jack of them had gone over to General Atomic, not recently, but weeks and months ago, before they had ever left Earth.
He dropped into a chair, his head in his hands. How had they been able to disguise their thoughts all this time?
He looked at Ileth in her chartreuse green short-waisted jacket. She held the dart gun leveled at his chest. Her patrician features were set in grim unhappy lines.
"Something!" Saxon thought wildly, "Something has gone terribly wrong!"
VI
The T.I.S. agent, his bony fingers locked beneath his head, was stretched face up on his bunk. There were five of them in the ship's brig—Saxon, Murdock and Villainowski, Mercedes, the anthropologist and Brand, the bio-chemist.
"Jon, that girl's crazy about you."
"What?" Jon Saxon swung up his head, regarded Murdock coldly.
Without moving, the T.I.S. agent repeated, "She's in love with you, Jon. Though what Ileth can find to love in that ugly granite mug of yours is beyond comprehension."
Saxon said, "So what?" Everyone was watching him speculatively.
They had been cooped together for nine days now, the four men and the woman. Yesterday the ship had landed. But none of them knew where.
"So what?" Murdock echoed breaking the silence. "My Lord, man, play up to her. She's eating her heart out for you. Can't you see it's our only chance?"
"No," said Saxon stiffly and blocked out their thoughts. "No, I don't. You know as well as I do, that the crew and the officers, even the staff, except Mercedes and Brand here sold out to General Atomic. Suppose I did persuade Ileth to let us out. Suppose she comes over to our side—which I tell you right now she won't—but suppose she did. What possible chance would the five of us have against sixty armed desperate men and women? Hell, Murdock, we couldn't even get the ship back to Earth by ourselves!" He hesitated. "Besides it strikes me as a contemptible stunt...."
Murdock's cold blue eyes flashed. He sat up, swinging his feet to the deck. "Do you think we're playing a game?"
Mercedes, the gray-haired woman, interrupted, "Don't nag him, Murdock. Everyone isn't a cold-blooded monster like you."
The T.I.S. agent grunted his disgust, lay back down and rolled to his stomach.
Mercedes was a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman with bright black eyes like a parrot.
"I don't see yet," she continued imperturbably, "how General Atomic could contact everyone before we sailed." She smoothed her skirts, sitting primly on the brig's only chair, and cast a sly look at Murdock. "Not with the vaunted T.I.S. on guard."
"Humph!" came Murdock's muffled voice from the pillow. "What's so damned impossible about that? We couldn't watch the beggars all the time." He rolled back and sat up again.
"No. What bothers me is why they didn't give themselves away. They were investigated. All of them were reputable Government men, their fathers Government men before 'em."
"It's hard to refuse a million credits," Saxon pointed out.
Murdock's pale blue eyes jerked to Saxon. "How do you know?"
Before Saxon could reply, Mercedes said, "General Atomic offered us all a million credits. They did to me and Brand, I know. We reported it to the T.I.S."
"Yeah," said Murdock with a frown. "Yeah, and we questioned them with the lie-detector. Not once, but every time they left the building. They were psychoanalyzed and searched. And every damned one of them was certified loyal to Government. They never gave a sign that they'd sold out to General Atomic, not a sign. Why, the bums acted as if they didn't know it themselves."
"They didn't!" put in Saxon.
Their eyes swung back to the burly nuclear physicist. He read scepticism, doubt, curiosity in their minds.
"What do you mean??" Murdock exploded.
"I mean just what I said. They actually didn't know that they had sold out to General Atomic until after the Little Death. It's simple enough. I'm surprised no one's thought of it before. Ever since Charcot back in the nineteenth century....'"
"Hypnotism!" Villainowski burst out. "That's it, of course! Post-hypnotic commands!"
Saxon nodded. "I wasn't sure. I'm not sure even yet." But he was. He had known it the moment he had looked into Ileth's mind the day of the mutiny.
Murdock frowned, said "Post-hypnotic commands? I don't follow you."
"There's nothing mysterious about it, actually," explained Saxon. "When the men sold out to General Atomic they must have submitted to being hypnotized by GA's neuro-psychoanalyst. They could be given orders while in the hypnotic state, then commanded to forget them, forget in fact that they had sold out to General Atomic until after the Little Death. The Little Death was to act as a post-hypnotic command, recalling their memories and instructions."
"By Pluto!" ejaculated Murdock. "I believe you've hit it!" He regarded Saxon with increased respect.
The slight, homely Villainowski rubbed a nine day's growth of beard, musing, "It was a beautiful scheme. Then men couldn't betray themselves. They couldn't be tripped up by the lie-detector because they honestly believed they were still loyal to Government."
Again Saxon nodded. "I was trying to find Q62," he said, "when Ileth was Q62 all the time, although she didn't know it until she woke up from the Little Death."
Brand, the bio-chemist, who had been lying on an upper bunk silently listening, broke into the conversation. "But why did General Atomic wait until after the Little Death before having their men seize the ship? It doesn't make sense. I should think they'd want to get the drive to one of their laboratories, where it could be examined as soon as possible."
It was Murdock who replied. "That's not difficult to explain either. General Atomic couldn't afford to take a chance. If they'd grabbed theShooting Starwithin reach of Government's space navy, they would have been apprehended sure. Remember, every observatory in the System had us in view until we went into the time field.
"No one but Villainowski knows how to use the stellar drive, so they couldn't have used that to escape. But after we reached Alpha Centauri we were beyond reach of the electronic telescope on Luna, even beyond radio contact. Their engineers would have a chance to examine the drive and learn enough to operate it, at least. They could return then. Nothing can catch theShooting Starwhen she's operating in the Little Death."
Saxon listened with somber eyes to the T.I.S. agent's explanation. It was right, he felt, as far as it went. But it didn't account for the aliens, nor for Saxon's strange experiences during the Little Death, nor the death of that N.P.A. before they sailed.
He heard the door to the brig click and glanced up just as it slid aside.
Ileth Urban stood in the entrance.
Ileth's green jodphur-like trousers emphasized her long legs and slim waist. Her black shoulder length hair had been pushed back, disclosing small peaked ears.
She came inside, with a look of determination, and the guard closed the door behind her, but didn't lock it.
"I ..." she began, caught Saxon's eyes and blushed furiously. Unconsciously her chin went up and she squared her shoulders. "I don't know how to say what I've come to tell you." Again she hesitated, biting her lip. "I think it'll be good news...."
"Good news?" echoed Murdock sarcastically. "Have the crew been massacred by Centaurians?"
"There's no sign of living Centaurians yet," she replied. "Not on this planet anyway."
"Living Centaurians?" asked Murdock. "What do you mean 'living' Centaurians? What have you found?"
The silence was alive. Saxon could feel the intangible fear of deep space grip every one of them. There was, he realized, a decided pathologic quality about it, as if every one of them were not quite sane on the subject.
"A city," said Ileth in a suppressed voice.
There was a quick intake of breaths.
"Yes," she went on, "a city. About twenty-five kilometers northeast of here. A perfectly huge city without a single inhabitant."
"What planet is this?" Villainowski asked suddenly.
"There's no harm in telling you, I suppose," said Ileth, "because we haven't the faintest notion. Our astronomer says that it belongs to Alpha Centauri A, although he hasn't figured its period yet. He says it's about midway between Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. It's a little larger than Earth but not so dense. Gravity is about four fifths what it is at home." Her face sobered at the word "home." "Oxygen content a little high, but not much. The rest of the atmosphere is composed principally of non-poisonous inert gases. Now you know as much as we do."
Jon Saxon became aware of a thought emanating from Murdock: "Seize the girl. Dictate terms to the others." The same thought, Saxon realized, was forming in their bio-chemist's mind as well.
Ileth must have suspected something, because her hand crept up to her small high breasts and she said, "Before I go on, you'd better know that I'm not so unprotected as I look. We were all hypnotized back on Earth and our orders given to us in that condition. Then we were commanded to forget them until after the Little Death. I'm telling you this so you'll understand."
The prisoners exchanged glances.
"General Atomic," Ileth continued hurriedly, "prepared for any eventuality. If anything happens to me, Q63 will take over. I don't know who he is, and he doesn't know it himself, but any accident befalling me will be the post-hypnotic signal for him to remember. There's also a Q64, Q65—all the way to Q70. So you see it's useless to think that by doing anything to me you can get the upper hand."
"Rather like queen bees," suggested Saxon. "Secret order with a vengeance."
"Even from you, darling!" he caught Ileth's irritating thought.
He saw Murdock relax on his bunk, intercepted his furious frustration. The T.I.S. agent, he realized, was like cold flame on the inside.
"But that's not my news," Ileth said. "I've come to offer you your freedom—within limits, of course."
"Eh?" said Villainowski in surprise, and the rest tensed expectantly.
Ileth said, "General Atomic believed that it would be to their advantage to go ahead with the expedition as soon as we got control of the ship. We would be on the spot, and any information relating to Alpha Centauri's planetary systems, natural resources, inhabitants (if any), possibilities of colonization and trade—that sort of thing—is of the utmost importance.
"I feel...." She hesitated, and Saxon caught a glimpse again of that same intolerable fear gnawing at her mind.
"I feel that we should stick together—while we're here at least. If we're fighting among ourselves...."
"In other words," Murdock interrupted in a voice without inflection, "you're asking us to go on with the expedition as if nothing's happened?"
"Only while we're here," she hastened to assure him. "You won't be given arms, of course. There are only five of you. What earthly chance would you have against the entire crew and the rest of the staff? And this way you won't have to stay locked in the brig. You can carry on with your investigations. We—we don't know what alien form of life inhabits this planet. But the city...."
She bit her lip again. "The city was peculiar."
A short uncomfortable silence greeted her statement; then Mercedes, the gray-haired anthropologist asked, "What do you mean, child?"
"I don't know how to define it. Wait until you see it."
But Saxon had intercepted an image in Ileth's mind—a distorted glimpse of a vast beautiful city stretching for kilometer after kilometer without a soul anywhere. A sobering chill prickled up his spine. He said, "I, for my part, am willing to call a truce, Ileth."
The girl glanced at him gratefully. Saxon became aware of a passionate thought: "Oh, the darling stiffnecked bear!" The girl's color heightened suddenly. She began to think furiously: "Two times two is four; three times two is six; four times two is eight...."
Saxon grinned at her knowingly, to her added confusion.
"I hate you!" she thought.
Villainowski jumped to his feet, saying, "Of course we accept. We all accept. But let me warn you, young woman, aliens or no aliens, I don't care if we spend the rest of our lives in the Centaurian system, I'm not going to explain my stellar drive to your scoundrels!"
Ileth turned to him almost gratefully. "Oh, that doesn't matter. Our engineers are examining it. They've assured me that they can take us back to Earth."
Villainowski looked crestfallen.
"Tomorrow," said Ileth in a firm voice, "we're starting to investigate the city. Mercedes is the anthropologist. I particularly wanted her and Saxon along."
"What about the rest of us?" Brand the bio-chemist, asked.
Ileth ticked them off on her fingers. "Dr. Villainowski is an astro-physicist, I believe. We have the telescope mounted. He and our men are to locate any other planets in the system. You, Dr. Brand, are to go with Loar, the Martian, on an expedition into the hills to the south. Mr. Murdock will be stationed temporarily with the emergency crew aboard theShooting Star."
Saxon realized that she had cleverly separated them. At the same moment he recognized that leap of fear in Ileth whenever she thought about outside. It was pathologic.
"My Lord!" he thought, "was their fear of deep space driving them insane?"
Ileth was saying, "You can have your old cabins back. I won't see you again until tomorrow. We—we're still on Earth time because of the peculiar daylight hours. Until tomorrow."
She turned, head bent and hurried abruptly through the door.
The prisoners looked at each other in vague alarm, unconsciously drawing closer together. In each of their minds, Saxon read the same thing—the blind unspoken terror of deep space!
The helicopter whispered scarcely a hundred feet above the rolling plain, while Saxon stared hungrily out of the windows, unable to satisfy his eyes.
Alpha Centauri A, a scintillating yellow orb like Sol, stood in mid-sky. The orange disc that was Alpha Centauri B, the second half of the binary, was just rising. Proxima was not in sight.
Directly below he could see a flock of plants that looked like tumble weeds except that they were a weirdly mottled yellow and green. They rolled along in a herd pausing to nibble at new shoots of the pale green grass. "Cannibal Plants," their botanist had named them because of their feeding habits.
Herbivorous plants!
Their botanist, Saxon thought, was going quietly insane trying to classify the staggering complexity of utterly alien forms of plant growth.
"Weird, isn't it?" A woman's rich husky voice addressed Saxon. "It sends goose flesh up my spine." Saxon tore his eyes away from the window.
The person sitting beside him was Clo-Javel, a black-eyed woman with cadmium-yellow hair. There was a sleek disturbing fullness to her breasts and hips that was echoed in her red lips and magnificent eyes. She must be thirty-five but no one except possibly the T.I.S. knew her exact age.
Clo-Javel's first passion was archaeology, Saxon knew. Her second was men. He asked, "How many pieces of silver did General Atomic give you?"
Clo-Javel regarded him with an amused tolerant smile. "Don't be rude, Jon."
Saxon, looking into the woman's mind, realized that his thrust hadn't disturbed her in the least. Clo-Javel apparently had no more honor than morals.
There was no question, though, about her archaeological ability. Her reconstruction of the New York skyscrapers, which had perished early in the Atom Age, were famous.
Saxon was appalled. He had expected to uncover a sense of shame among the crew and staff for their treachery. But, if they felt any remorse, they never let it rise into the realms of conscious thought. He had probed their minds one after another, his hope of persuading some of them to return to the Government fold diminished with each one.
At one stroke they had received wealth and better positions with General Atomic's research bureau. They were determined not to lose them. Furthermore, to a man they were convinced that General Atomic would be the next government.
He glanced about the cabin. There were nine of them accompanying Ileth to the deserted city. He allowed their thoughts to wash across his mind, eager, excited, fearful thoughts like half spoken words.
"Look!" Ileth cried suddenly and pointed ahead. She was piloting the helicopter and spoke over her shoulder. "Look! There's the city!"
Saxon saw a maze of towers scintillating like jewels in the combined light of the twin suns. He saw endless avenues and squares and parks. It was all bright and raw like a city seen in a shimmering mirage.
He swallowed a lump in his throat. He felt.... Why, damn it, he felt as if he were coming home after a long time.
Home?
He thought suddenly of his extra-human senses. Maybe thiswashome! Could it be that he was not of Earth at all? Not a mutant of whom his parents had been ashamed and who had deserted him at the Institute, as he had always believed?
Then Ileth was dropping the helicopter safely into a beautiful square ringed with vari-colored translucent buildings.
Nothing moved. Not the faintest echo of a sound reached Saxon's ears. He found himself holding his breath as the 'copter landed with a faint jar.
Saxon's scalp began to prickle warningly, and such a feel of alienism swept over him, exciting his extra-human sixth sense that he felt giddy.
The city wasn't deserted. It was densely populated.
All around him, everywhere, were aliens. He could sense their movements along the streets, inside the buildings. Hundreds of them.
He heard Ileth's strangely chastened voice. "It's so uncannily deserted. No one. Absolutely no one. What do you suppose happened to the—the things who built this city?"
Saxon had to clench his jaw to keep from shouting, "They're here! You fools, let's get away while we've still got a chance! They're all around us!"
Instead, he kept silent, little beads of perspiration breaking through his prickling skin.
VII
Jon Saxon was the first man out of the helicopter. He stood stock-still while the others climbed out, his scalp tingling, his eyes sweeping the magnificent panorama. The faces of buildings like the sheer fracture of tinted ice walled in the square, with here and there a canyon street slicing off from it.
Ileth scrambled out last, asked, "Jon, what's wrong? You're pale as a ghost."
"I don't know." The tingling in his hair roots was becoming less pronounced as his extra-human sixth sense adjusted. He was still aware of the aliens but not uncomfortably so.
"You—you don't feel anything?"
He started. "How did you know I could feel things?"
"I didn't!" Ileth's hazel-green eyes were enormous. "Good Lord, Jon, I only thought you could sense their thoughts, maybe, if anything was around. I didn't.... Can you feel things? You can, can't you? I should have guessed it."
Saxon's expression had grown grimmer with each word. When Ileth asked, "What are you?" in a hushed voice, he snapped,
"Homo Superior!"
"Homo Superior?" She looked startled, then raised her eyebrows. "You don't fancy yourself much, do you?"
They had drawn gradually away from the others. He looked back. Basil, the geographer, and his helper had set up their instruments. They were taking readings, making swift notations. They had the three-dimensional camera recording impressions, and the automatic mapper was beginning to scratch a few tentative lines on its plastic rolls.
"I think we ought to stick together," Saxon volunteered. "I know it'll be impossible to keep the geographers by us, but the rest had better hang together."
Ileth shivered and asked, "Then there is something here?"
The silence was absolute. Not a breath of air stirred anywhere. Saxon hesitated, said at last, "Yes, I think so."
"What?"
"I don't know."
Clo-Javel, approached them, straightening her short kilt-like skirts. The archaeologist's costume was brief and practical, but of more importance to Clo-Javel's way of thinking, the red skirt disclosed a goodly length of her really remarkable legs. Clo-Javel was even more proud of her legs than of her reconstruction of the New York skyscrapers. She said, "Did you ever see such buildings? What makes them look so weird?"
Saxon wrinkled his brow, his eyes returning to the glittering facade of cliff-like structures as they waited for the rest of their party to come up.
"I think," he said hesitantly, "it's because, it's because everything looks so new. As if the city was only finished yesterday and had never been used."
"That's it," Ileth burst out.
Mercedes joined them. She too, was wearing kilts, but hers were longer than Clo-Javel's and gray and her jacket was a commodious affair with many pockets. "What's that?" she asked catching the tail end of the conversation.
"The city looks as if it has never been lived in," Ileth explained.
Mercedes lit a cigarette, said, "Nonsense, whoever heard of building a city and then not using it."
"No." Clo-Javel agreed with the gray-haired Mercedes. "It's not that altogether. Possibly it's built of some material impervious to decay. Saxon's a physicist." She gave him a brilliant smile. "He would know more about that than I do."
Clo-Javel pursed red lips. "It—it looks familiar."
There was a silence, then Mercedes said, "So it does. Though I can't put my finger on it. But that shouldn't be so strange. The creatures who built it might have been very similar to us. If I could lay my hands on some of their bones...." She laughed good humoredly. "I could tell you in a minute what they were like."
"Were?" Saxon thought, but he didn't express it aloud. He was conscious all the time of the presence of the aliens. It was like being in the midst of a crowded city street.
The semantics expert, the psycho-historian, and the ethnologist joined them in a body. They headed for the nearest building, a towering windowless structure of yellow crystal.
Saxon glanced back uneasily.
The helicopter stood silent and deserted in the center of the square. The geographer and his helper were disappearing down one of the canyon-like streets with their equipment.
"Look!" commanded Ileth pointing toward the face of the yellow structure. "Letters of some sort! There on the building. Maybe it's a sign."
They quickened their pace until they could describe the letters clearly.
Ileth gasped, "Oh!" and stopped uncertainly.
The rest of them came to a confused halt beside her, staring up at the sign in utter bewilderment. Saxon felt a chill creep up his spine. The sign read:
TIMES SQUARE
For as long as it takes to draw a startled breath there was silence; then they all began to babble at once. Clo-Javel made herself heard suddenly above the others. "I recognize it!" she cried in her ringing husky voice.
"What?"
"It's an exact reproduction of New York II! I knew the city looked familiar! I knew it!"
"New York II?" Saxon echoed. He was not strong in history and had only a faint recollection of a city by that name having once occupied the great Manhattan waste lands.
"Yes," Clo-Javel repeated. "It was the world capitol before Adirondaka was built. I had to study it when I was doing the reconstruction of New York I. There's a scale model of it in the Institute's museum. Isn't that right, Rufus?"
The psycho-historian nodded in a bemused fashion.
"Yes," he agreed. "New York II was built over the ruins of New York I which had been destroyed by the first atomic war. The second atomic war completely annihilated New York II as well as all the other big cities on Earth. Cities weren't built after that for almost five hundred years. Not until the Empire, in fact." He paused uncertainly. "I don't understand this."
Ileth asked, "You mean that this city is an exact reproduction of New York II, Clo?"
The woman nodded, her black eyes curiously frightened. "This is the amusement center. The yellow building housed the Tri-World Theatre."
"But I don't understand...." Ileth gazed helplessly at Saxon. "What is a reproduction of New York II doing here on a planet in the Alpha Centaurian system? We're over four light years from Sol. No one's ever been here before."
Saxon was conscious of bewilderment and fear muddling the girl's thoughts. His own mind couldn't quite grasp the fact that here was an exact replica of a Terran city. It was inexplicable. It didn't make sense. And, more than that, it was impossible!
He could read the same thoughts struggling against the fact in the minds of the others. He said, "Let's see what the buildings are like inside."
"Yes," agreed Ileth. She had edged close to Saxon. "Maybe we can find the answer inside."
They started for the impressive entrance of the Tri-World Theatre, halted again in near-panic as the doors swung wide.
Ileth gasped, clutched at Saxon's arm, hanging onto it in desperation.
Before any of them could say anything, a voice blared forth. "... a thousand Ganymedian natives in the primitive ritualistic orgy of that Weird little satellite. Hamura in the mating dance of the Ganymedians. Seats: three hundred and seventy-five dollars."
Clo-Javel's voice had lost its rich huskiness. It was a frightened quaver when she said, "It's a working model. Automatic, don't you see?" She giggled nervously, and paused.
"But the voice?" protested Ileth.
"Advertising," explained the archaeologist. "It's a mechanical voice, like the doors."
"Well, I'm not sure how much a dollar was," said Mercedes, "but three hundred and seventy-five for a seat seems rather exorbitant."
Rufus, the psycho-historian, was pale as a corpse. He swallowed, managed to splutter, "Inflation that followed the first atomic war. Inflation...." His voice trailed off as he stared beyond the gaping doors into the foyer of the empty theatre.
"Well, I'm not going in that place!" said the ethnologist suddenly. He was a goat-bearded little dandy. It was his first speech in some time.
Rufus, the psycho-historian, said, "I don't think I care to either."
"Nonsense!" exploded Mercedes. "There isn't anything in there. You can see for yourself. I'm going in."
"I think we should explore the city a bit further," Rufus protested. He glanced uneasily toward the helicopter. Basil and his helper were nowhere in sight.
Mercedes said, "Humph," gave her plump shoulders a shake, disappeared with short sturdy steps through the door.
"She shouldn't go in there alone," said Saxon starting after her. Ileth clung to his arm. "I'm coming along." They left the others standing huddled outside, watching them nervously.
The foyer was carpeted ankle deep in mauve. Life-like, three-dimensional photographs of actors and actresses in every conceivable costume from none at all to the cumbersome furs of Titan lined the walls.
The magnificent foyer gave the startling impression that just the moment before, crowds of theatre goers had been surging across it. Saxon could feel the hair lift on the back of his neck.
"Where's Mercedes?" asked Ileth in a small voice.
Saxon glanced around, realized that the anthropologist wasn't in the foyer. "She must have gone into the theatre." He lifted his voice, called, "Mercedes. Mercedes!"
His voice echoed hollowly. There was no answer. Saxon and Ileth exchanged worried glances.
"Our voices probably don't carry beyond the foyer," Saxon reassured the girl. "The ancients were clever with sound."
They crossed the floor, their steps cushioned noiselessly in the thick mauve carpet. They went through the doors, past the automatic ticket taker and paused.
A vast amphitheatre with curving rows of empty seats fell away below them like the terribly ancient Roman theatre at Pompeii. The walls by some trick of construction trapped the light, shedding it softly over the seats, concentrating it in a glowing pillar of illumination on the stage.
Suddenly, Ileth brought her hand to her mouth, a look of horror springing into her features. "Oh, my Lord!" she whispered. "Look!" and pointed at the floor at their feet. Saxon glanced down, caught his breath.
A puddle of clothes lay on the floor as if the middle-aged, gray-haired anthropologist had just stepped out of them.
Saxon dropped to his knees beside the garments, turned them over. Sturdy leather walking shoes and heavy gray socks. Gray skirt and jacket. A stout brassiere and practical mannish shorts. They were so typically Mercedes, that Saxon felt a lump in his throat.
The socks were still in the shoes, brassiere inside the jacket. He stood up, feeling his palms begin to sweat. It was as if Mercedes had been suddenly dissipated into thin air, her clothes falling in on themselves.
He heard Ileth give a dry sob, realized suddenly that he felt no alien presence. He and the girl were alone in the theatre, alone as they'd been in the street that night in Adirondaka.
Saxon clenched his fist. "Let's get out of here. Quick!"
"But Mercedes?"
"She's gone! We can't help Mercedes now. The others! Hurry!"
They ran through the doorway back across the carpeted foyer, halting at the street.
Four little mounds of clothes met their eyes.
Saxon could feel his stomach knot inside himself. He felt the clothes. They were still warm from contact with the men's bodies. He stirred the brief red kilt that Clo-Javel had been wearing, saw with a macabre flash of humor that where Mercedes' underthings had been eminently practical, Clo-Javel didn't wear any at all.
Ileth suppressed a scream. "The helicopter! Look! It's gone, too!" Saxon glanced up in consternation.
The square was empty. The twin suns riding high in the sky beat down on bare plastic blocks where the helicopter had stood.
"We're hiking back to the ship—now," Saxon said to the frightened girl.
"But it's twenty-five kilometers."
"So it's twenty-five kilometers. We can average four an hour or better. That's six hours. How many more hours of daylight have we?"
Ileth bit her lip, studied her chronometer. "The days are short. The planet rotates in a little over fourteen hours. Alpha Centauri A sets first, in about an hour, I think. Then Alpha Centauri B about three hours later. Proxima rises about ten minutes after that but it doesn't cast much light."
"Never mind," he said almost roughly. "Come on. We'd better find the geographers quick."
They did, a few minutes later, in one of the side canyons. That is, they found implements and two small piles of clothes. "I was afraid of this," said Saxon, his heart lowly sinking into his boots.
Ileth began to cry half in fright, half hysterically.
"None of that!" He shook her shoulders, until she stopped with a hiccup. Turning her loose, he bent over the instruments, secured a compass.
"We're northeast of the ship," he said, "that means if we travel in a southwesterly direction, we should hit it square on the nose. Let's hike!"
But they found it impossible to keep a true southwesterly course through the city. They walked along the deserted, resounding streets, their eyes filled with the fantastically lovely architecture of New York II, the flowing lines and gleaming planes of apartment houses built of a thousand substances from crystal to somber-veined black marble.
"To think," said Saxon, "that a people, any people, could have found it in their hearts to destroy a work like this."
"I'm glad I've seen it," Ileth replied queerly, "even if I did have to come to Alpha Centauri. It's lovely." She shivered.
Saxon said in perplexity, "Why did they let us escape? I don't understand it."
"We were in the foyer, alone, when it must have happened," she suggested. "Maybe they overlooked us."
"Maybe," agreed Saxon doubtfully and paused.
They had come to the end of the city which stopped abruptly as if it had been set down in the middle of the green rolling prairie. Beyond the last building, a herd of cannibal plants rolled by, browsing as they went.
"It's going to be damned tricky keeping a straight course across this," he said. "There doesn't seem to be a tree on the planet." He sighted the compass, picked out a round hill like the dome of a building, to the southwest. "We'll keep a little to the left of that hill."
Alpha Centauri A was setting. By the time they had advanced a kilometer across the prairie it was gone. The orange light of Alpha Centauri B lent a queer unearthly complexion to the scene. It became perceptibly cooler, and a breeze sprang up from the east, bringing the faint scent of bitter almonds.
Saxon lengthened his stride. "We're not keeping to schedule," he said; then, "Look at that!"
A fawn colored creature like a large cat but with four pairs of legs, broke from a draw and went undulating across the grass.
"I'm getting tired," said Ileth in a small voice.
He took his eyes from the strange animal, studied the girl. The emotional turmoil which they'd been through had drained her of strength. Her features were white, drawn, her lids drooping over her hazel-green eyes. Her lashes, he thought, were the thickest curliest lashes he'd ever seen and black as her lustrous hair. He felt a tenderness well up inside him and banished it.
"We've got to make the ship. Walk until you drop. Then I'll carry you. But we have to get back as soon as possible."
Her features stiffened at the harshness of his words. He caught a weary flash of anger in her thoughts, then she turned and began to plod again toward the southwest.
"Faster," said Saxon.
Alpha Centauri B was setting when they reached the domed hill which Saxon had lined up with the compass. He left Ileth stretched exhausted at the base and climbed to the summit. His eyes swept the horizons with the last orange rays of the sun, but theShooting Starwas still not in sight.
By the time he rejoined Ileth, it was dark. "Did you see it?" the girl asked in a sleepy voice.
"No. We haven't come far enough, I suppose. We'll have to wait until Proxima rises before we can go on. That'll give us a chance to rest. How long before Proxima comes up?"
"Ten or fifteen minutes." She hesitated. "I'm cold."
Saxon put his arms around the shivering girl, pulled her against him. She gave a little sigh, laid her head on his shoulder. He caught her sleepy thoughts, "Two times two is four. Three times two is six," and chuckled to himself.
The darkness was not dispelled very much when Proxima rose above the hills like a sullen red hot drop of metal. The light was red and wavering like the shimmering heat waves above a brush fire. Saxon could not see very well or very far. Nevertheless he wakened Ileth.
She rubbed her eyes, glanced about her in consternation. The change in light had brought about a startling change in the scenery. It looked as if it were bathed in blood.
She said, "Oh, Jon, I wish we were home. I wish we'd never come on this horrible expedition."
He didn't look up from his compass. "The ship can't be much further." He spotted the black gash of a gully a hundred yards ahead. "We'll walk to the gully, then pick out another object."
"I'm still tired. I don't feel as if I'd slept at all."
"You didn't—much. Only about ten minutes. Come on."
They reached the gully and Saxon found a cone-shaped hill looming up redly almost a quarter of a mile further on. They set out for it, Ileth holding his hand.
Their progress was necessarily slower because Saxon had to stop often and consult the compass. Even so, he began to be afraid that they had overshot the ship in the dark.
Slowly Proxima Centauri blazed its blood red path across the night sky.
Not far from Proxima a star twinkled faintly, steadily. It was about in the position that Sol should be. He wondered if it was.
"It's growing lighter," said Ileth.
Saxon glanced toward the east, recognized the graying darkness that heralded the dawn. He said, "Alpha Centauri A's rising. Maybe we can see where we are."
The light was quickening fast with dawn. Saxon climbed to the crest of a ridge, stared off into the southwest.
All at once his heart stood still. He called, "Ileth! Ileth! Come up here!"
The girl ran up the ridge, the urgency in his voice dispelling her weariness. "What is it, Jon?"
He pointed ahead. "Aren't those the hills south of the ship?"
She narrowed her eyes, studying the blue outlines in the dawn light. "Yes. But, Jon, where is the ship?"
He pointed at a blackened circle in the grass not an eighth of a kilometer distant. The circle was almost a thousand yards in diameter.
"That's where our jets burned the grass when we landed. That's where theShooting Starwas yesterday!"
In ten minutes they were tramping back and forth across the blackened circle of grass, kicking up little puffs of ashes. The mark of the jets were there, pressed deep in the soft soil. But those and the charred vegetation were the only signs that a ship had ever rested there.
Ileth flung herself dejectedly to the grass at the edge of the circle. "I'm so hungry and bone weary and thirsty and disappointed, I could cry."
Saxon sat down beside her. "I don't understand it," he said for the hundredth time. "I don't understand any of it."
All at once, his scalp began to prickle its warning and Saxon recognized the alien feel. At the same instant Ileth screamed, leaping to her feet. Saxon felt his mouth go dry, his stomach contract as he stumbled erect beside her.
Not ten yards distant, in the path of the rising sun, a naked man was materializing before their eyes. Saxon could see the grass and the hills and a segment of Alpha Centauri A through the man's body.
A thought struck into Saxon's mind. "So there you are." It emanated from the Alien. "We were afraid you might have gotten clean away."
Saxon realized the man was quite solid now, standing with bare feet planted in the pale green grass. There was an instrument like a watch strapped to his wrist. He was holding a small shiny cylinder.
Saxon caught an echo of Ileth's thought. "Oh Lord, he's naked as a grape!"
The man leveled the cylinder. There was a brief flash.
Saxon felt an instant's giddiness, a rapid dissolution, then nothing.
VIII
Jon Saxon couldn't have been unconscious but a fraction of a second because he didn't have time to fall. He came to himself swaying dizzily, nauseated as if with space sickness.
He opened his eyes. He was blind!
The shock left him numb. Then gradually, like a flower unfolding its petals to the light, he felt his extra-human sixth sense assume control.
He became aware of the grass and the sun and the distant hills. Everything registered in varying degrees of grayness. It wasn't grayness exactly, but the word came as near to describing the peculiar impressions that external objects were registering on his sixth sense as his vocabulary could supply.
He didn't picture his environment; he realized it. The burned circle of grass, the naked alien....
A second shock rocked Saxon to his heels. The Alien!
Tentatively, almost timidly, he examined the strange figure confronting him. The man, for man he appeared to be, stood quietly several paces, sizing up Saxon with an equal degree of caution. The analogy to two strange dogs eyeing each other belligerently, but each afraid to make the first move, was so ludicrous that Saxon chuckled although no sound issued from his lips.
He sensed his opponent relax. The fellow was big the way Saxon was big, and the same virility radiated from him like a physical force.
The impressions received via his sixth sense were gaining in vividness. Saxon had never fully appreciated its scope before.
Then with the force of a blow, Ileth's terrified thoughts penetrated sharply to his mind.
"I must be dead! Oh God, I'm dead!"
Saxon could perceive the girl cowering above a small pile of clothes, frightened, helpless, blind. She didn't have his extra-human sixth sense to substitute for sight. She was trembling violently, a slim-naked wraith without substance.
The little pile of clothes at her feet made it suddenly clear what had befallen Mercedes and the crew, what had happened to Ileth and himself. In some fashion, the Aliens had transmuted them into a space where their three-dimensional organs of perception no longer registered.
He moved to the girl, touched her arm.
Saxon was not conscious of a sense of contact, but a vague shock like a weak electric current ran up his arm to his brain. Ileth flinched back in terror.
Again he touched her arm, thinking, "Ileth, am I getting through? Ileth, am I getting through?" over and over again.
"Yes," came the unexpected answer. "Yes. Yes. Is it you, Jon? We're dead, you know, Jon."
"No," he thought. "We're not dead. We've been transmuted but we're not dead."
A command rang sharply in his disembodied mind. "Lead the girl and follow me!"
Saxon's attention swung back to the Alien, perceived the man threatening him with the cylinder which had blasted them into this indeterminate dimension.
"Suppose I refuse?" he thought.
"I'm afraid that you underestimate the range of effect of this weapon." The Alien brandished the cylinder again. "Follow me."
Saxon capitulated, touched Ileth. "Keep in contact with me. I'll guide you." He began to move after the stranger who was already at a distance.
He didn't know how long they walked. Time had no expression in this state. Alpha Centauri A hung always in the same spot just above the horizon. He thought of Villainowski's inverted formula—"To travel through time during a passage of space." The Little Death must be like this, if one were conscious.
He was still turning it over in his mind when he perceived the station.
The station appeared to be a cubical structure like a large plastic block, except that the matter of which it was formed wasn't matter at all. It was energy, Saxon sensed, pulsating sheets of energy that must not be visible in the normal, three-dimensional world.
The Alien stood to one side, motioned them through the shimmering walls.
Saxon was conscious of a throbbing rhythm which swept through him like the hum of a dynamo. He experienced the eerie giddiness for the second time and groped for Ileth before he blanked out.
This time Saxon was longer regaining consciousness. He came out from under the effects of the pulsation, feeling his flesh solid again. Air warmed and caressed his skin. He was materialized, he saw, as he leaped to his feet and opened his eyes.
He felt vaguely overwhelmed by the return of his senses. He had never before appreciated their infinite variety. The walls were yellow, lemon yellow; the floor cool and firm underfoot; the air had a faint odor of bitter almonds; and Ileth....
He said, "Open your eyes, Ileth. You'll be able to see better that way."
The girl's eyes popped open. She took one look at Saxon, then at herself. Her eyes grew rounder, her throat flamed.
She gasped, "Oh! You should have let me keep my eyes shut," and whipped her back to him.
She must have realized instantly that the view she presented was no better screened, for she sat down with a thump, saying, "Oh!" again. Then, in an embarrassed voice, "This is just like a dream I had once. Only everyone but me wore clothes in the dream, and there isn't a fig leaf between the three of us."
"The three of us?"
Saxon glanced around, discovered the Alien rummaging in one of the cabinets, from which he produced three of the gleaming kilts, tossed them each one.
"You humans," he said in an amused tone and perfect English, "have odd notions about concealing yourselves. Here."
Saxon gratefully buckled his kilt in place, examined the material. The threads were almost weightless and glowed like strands of light. With a start, he recalled where he had seen them before.
The man and the woman had been wearing kilts like these in his vision during the Little Death. Then....
His mind refused to entertain the possibility. And yet it was a piece of everything else. His inability to remember his childhood. The development of first a sixth sense at twenty-seven, then a seventh at thirty-one.
He strode abruptly to the windows and looked out.
The windows were at an elevation and gave a view of the strangest city he had ever beheld.
There were houses, at least they could be houses, spaced entirely without relation to each other and surrounded by immense park-like grounds. There were no congested areas within his range of vision. Neither was he able to discover roads or sidewalks, fences or walls anywhere.
Alpha Centauri A was still just rising, its orange twin not yet above the hills, which he could see in the distance.
He turned wonderingly back into the room.
Their guard regarded them in amusement. "Sit down," he suggested, indicating a bench.
They seated themselves.
"Ask him what they're going to do with us, Jon." Ileth nudged Saxon in the ribs.
Saxon cleared his throat.
Before he could speak, the guard smiled and said, "I haven't the faintest idea how they plan to dispose of you. Even if I did, that would be for Them to tell you." He nodded toward a closed door on their right. "They'll send for you any moment now."
"Who are 'they'?" Saxon asked.
"The Elders."
"What planet is this?"
"Vark." The guard's voice was pleasant. He smiled faintly when he talked. "The fourth planet of the sun you call Alpha Centauri A. This is the city of Ghibellena." He nodded out the windows.
"How did we get here? Teleportation?"
"Not exactly."
There was a momentary silence while the Alien observed them with that amused gleam in his eye. Then Saxon tried again. "Who are you? Why have you captured us?"
The man nodded briefly again towards the closed door. "You'll learn that in there—if They see fit to tell you."
"Where are the rest of the crew? Dead? In prison?"
"Oh, no. They've been taken to Zara."
"Zara? Where's Zara?"
"Zara is a satellite of the third planet. The one we call Tunis."
"What is that city we saw? The deserted one near the ship?"
Again the man smiled and nodded toward the door. "If They see fit to tell you."
Saxon shrugged burly shoulders. "How do you make yourselves invisible?"
Surprisingly enough the man answered.
"It's a refinement of your stellar drive, an excursion into the time field. In fact, it was discovered almost a hundred of your years ago by a Terran. A Dr. Walter."
Saxon looked disconcerted. Ileth swallowed, her eyes as round as saucers. Suddenly her hand squeezed his arm.
"The door! It's opening!"
"You may go in," said their guard. "They're ready for you."
Saxon had risen uncertainly. He looked at the door which was receding into the wall. Through the portal, he glimpsed a terrace or a balcony, roofless. Beyond and below the terrace was a yellow sea stretching to the horizon, its cadmium waves frothing against a beach of black sand.
"They're expecting you," the guard prompted.
Saxon shrugged. Taking Ileth's arm, he went through the opening. The door slid shut behind them.
The balcony, Saxon saw, was paved checkerboard fashion with green and yellow blocks. At the left, out of sight from the entrance, was a twenty foot table of pale green stone. Seven incredibly old men sat behind the table.
No one said anything.
Saxon took the initiative, advanced to within six feet of the pale green table. His dark gray eyes narrowed. He was vaguely conscious of a flow of thought passing among the seven old men like conversation, but its content escaped him. His jaw jutted angrily.
"Control your anger, my son," said the old man in the center. "Your thoughts should be respectful in the presence of your elders."
Saxon concealed his astonishment, asking, "Might I inquire what this mummery is all about?" He became aware again of the hidden thoughts flowing between them.
Then the old man in the center said, "I am the moderator, my son. Your mind, we have perceived, teems with questions. We have decided that from the psychological angle, certain of these questions can now be answered."
"Psychological angle?" Saxon felt confused. The deviousness of the Aliens, the maddening superiority which they assumed began to get under his skin. With an effort, he got a grip on himself, returned their curious stares.
The seven old men were wrinkled, emaciated. Once they had been big men like Saxon, but the years had wasted their flesh.
"That's better," approved the Moderator, referring to Saxon's change of tactics. "Now for your questions," and he seemed to look straight into Saxon's mind.
"Very early in our history," began the Moderator after a moment, "we learned that we advanced in the physical sciences by trial and error. A disheartening process, because only so many combinations can be tried in a single life-time...."
"What the hell has this got to do with us?" Saxon interrupted harshly.
"Patience, my son. I'm explaining the relation between our world and the third planet of Sol which you call Earth."
A little muscle began to jump in Saxon's jaw.
"Trial and error," the old man began again. "A slow heartbreaking process, and one which in its nature is inescapable. At least, so we thought until quite recently." He paused, tugged at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger.
Saxon mastered an impulse to shout, "Get to the point!"
"Recently," went on the moderator, "we tried an experiment in our biological laboratories which we hoped would speed up the trial-and-error formula.
"By exposing the germ plasm of a semi-intelligent anthropoid inhabiting the fourth planet of this system to hard radiations, we succeeded in creating a mutant, a biologic sport who's life span was only an instant of time. It matured, mated and died in an incredibly brief period.
"They were startlingly prolific as well; they multiplied like—like—" he groped for a simile—"like guinea pigs or rats.
"Furthermore, they early exhibited the most amazing ingenuity. In twenty generations they had fire; in thirty, crude implement of stone."
Saxon, unable to restrain his impatience longer, cried, "The point, man—get to the point."
The old man gave Saxon a steely look. "We recognized," he went on stiffly, "the significance of our mutation. As soon as the semi-intelligent sports developed a science, we could expect the trial and error method to be speeded up. A life-time of experiment to them was only a moment to us.
"We isolated them on the fifth planet of our sun. But it soon became apparent that they constituted a dangerous menace even that close. They were so fecund, and their ferocity was appalling. Wars broke out between various tribes. They murdered each other by the thousands."
Gradually Saxon's interest had been caught by the history of the semi-reasoning mutants whose ferocity and proliferation had constituted a menace to their creators. He glanced at Ileth, discovered her spellbound.
The Moderator's voice was growing thinner.
"Luckily," he was saying, "stellar travel was accomplished at this time. We exported several thousand of the creatures to another star system and destroyed the rest.
"The environment on the planet where we transplanted our colony of humanoids was ideal for our purpose—harsh and savage. Several species of bipeds with rudimentary intelligence already inhabited the planet, but our own culture speedily wiped them out and were happily warring among themselves...."
A suspicion began to grow in Saxon's mind. He blurted, "On what planet did you introduce this culture?"
The Moderator paused, stared Saxon coolly in the eye.
"Earth!" he said.
Saxon and Ileth looked at each other incredulously, unable to comprehend the significance of the Moderator's answer.
"Earth?" repeated Saxon. "I don't understand."
The Moderator wrinkled his brow, and said, "I don't know how to put it any more clearly. We transplanted our biological sports to Earth. The two sub-human races which our humanoids exterminated were the Cro-Magnards and the Neanderthalers."
Saxon's brain reeled. "Do you mean that man as we know him, homo sapiens, originated in your laboratories as—an experiment?"
He heard Ileth laugh hysterically.
"Precisely," replied the Moderator. "And I might add that the experiment has proven successful. During the last thousand years they have supplied us with hundreds of discoveries and developments. The real nature of the space-time continuum, for example.
"The creatures are inordinately clever at the physical sciences—as was to be expected from an emotionally unstable, rationalizing mammal under the pressure of such an antagonistic environment. Our own laboratories have become, for all practical purposes, unnecessary!"
Ileth was staring at the Moderator with wide horrified eyes. "I," she gasped. "I am a humanoid? I don't live but a moment? I'm prolific and savage and—and clever like a monkey? Why, you shriveled up old bag of bones, that's the most stupid pack of lies I've ever heard!"
The Moderator regarded her compassionately. "You haven't changed because I've told you the truth. Your life expectation is no shorter. It's a matter of relativity. To us our ten thousand years seems no longer than your three score and ten does to you."
"Ten thousand years?" exploded Saxon. The sum was so staggering that it was only a figure to him. "Then—" he began, but the Moderator answered before he could speak.
"No. I was not born when the experiment with the humanoids began. They were developed some twenty-five thousand years ago."
Ileth began to laugh crazily, unable to stop. In a moment she would be hysterical. Saxon shook her roughly. "Stop it!"
"I—I—I can't," she giggled. "Either he's mad or I am." Her words ended in a flood of tears.
Saxon put his arm around the girl, turned back to the Moderator. "It was done with hard radiations?"
"Yes. In the resultant mutants their metabolism had been accelerated beyond our wildest expectation. Their life cycle geared to their metabolism passed through its different phases like—like ..." again he fished in Saxon's mind for a simile. "Like a meteor. By artificially slowing down their metabolism they returned to their normal life span.
"You've been very curious about the replica of New York II which you saw when you landed."
Saxon nodded, trying to conceal a thought which had begun to take shape in the back of his mind.
"It's just that. A replica of a city built during the Atomic Age by the humanoids. Their constant implacable wars are so savage that we've found it necessary to duplicate their work here, if we hope to preserve any of it for study."
Saxon narrowed his eyes, asked, "You spoke of the menace of having such savage neighbors. Just how serious was such a threat?"
The Moderator smiled and glanced at his constituents. Saxon strained to grasp the thoughts flowing between them, but failed utterly.
"Admirable!" the Moderator commented suddenly. "Your reactions, my son, are leading us to hope we may turn in the most optimistic report."
Saxon stared at him as if he were crazy. Ileth's tears had subsided to a sniffle.
"Now for your question," said the Moderator and coughed again.
"The menace was real, not imaginary. We had created a monster that would be either a marvelous scientific instrument, or—the means of our destruction.
"Remember, my son, time is relative. These creatures lived, fought, loved, begat children, carried on scientific research and died, all in seventy short years. They existed at fever intensity. Their metabolism burns them up.
"Our lives are adjusted to a span of ten thousand years. We have a total population of little over a million. We are neither a war-like people, nor a highly-industrialized people.
"In one of their generations the humanoids accomplish almost as much as we do in one of ours. Think, my son, they perform in seventy years what it takes us ten thousand to do.
"If it ever came to hostilities between us we'd be doomed, overwhelmed almost before we realized what was happening."
Saxon listened in astonishment. The thought in the back of his mind kept trying to push to the fore, but he repressed it, afraid that the Aliens might see it.
"Their amazing fecundity," the Moderator was saying, "their short life spans, their ingenuity and ferocity made them a very real menace even isolated outside our stellar system. Fortunately, we also foresaw the inevitable crisis and prepared for it."
"Crisis?" Saxon echoed.
"The time when the humanoids would reach our scientific level and surpass us," said the Moderator in a grim voice. "That time has arrived!"
IX
Somewhere a bell began to ring shrilly. Saxon saw an expression of annoyance pass across the Moderator's wrinkled visage. He pressed a button set in the table top. The bell stopped ringing. A voice began to speak in an alien tongue directly behind Saxon. The burly nuclear physicist spun around in surprise.