Reign of the telepuppets
Date: 2023-12-30T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Robots -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Interstellar travel -- Fiction

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Title: Reign of the telepuppets

Author: Daniel F. Galouye

Illustrator: Lloyd Birmingham

Release date: December 30, 2023 [eBook #72555]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1963

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REIGN OF THE TELEPUPPETS ***

Reign of the Telepuppets

By DANIEL F. GALOUYE

In all Creation, Bigboss knew there
was nothing superior to him. Yet a nagging
in his memory drums hinted that somewhere
were creatures who challenged his rule.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories August 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"The way this thing shapes up," Director Gabe Randall of the Bureau of Interstellar Exploration was saying in his usual manner of understatement, "it will be our most important trouble-shooting mission to date."

He stood cranelike, one leg hooked over a corner of the desk, as he whacked his thigh with an illuminated indicator rod. With purposeful eyes, he sized up the other three men in the briefing room. Lean and alert, he held himself straight against the encroachment of age that was evident in a fully white shock of hair and a brow furrowed with decades of executive responsibility.

"I suppose," he digressed, smiling, "that we'll have to get along without our Maid of the Megacycles."

Dave Stewart, Randall's assistant, glanced at the empty chair. "Carol said she'd be along shortly." Actually, she hadn't. But, if the situation were reversed, she'd cover for him.

"Woman's prerogative," the director observed, shrugging phlegmatically. "Gentlemen, I submit that the greatest deterrent to progress in BIE is the fact that direct radio empathy can be developed only in women—and young ones at that."

But Stewart recognized the imperceptible jocularity in the other's stare. It contrasted the sobriety with which he had said only a moment earlier that the nature of the mission required top personnel.

At half the director's age, Stewart had earned his recognition as logical successor to the seat of executive authority. And, in Carol Cummings, Randall had selected the most capable radio empathy specialist BIE had produced in years. The prettiest, too, he added as an afterthought.

But there you could draw the line. Below was the Photon II's crew. At 44, Nat McAllister, pilot, was well past the age when he might look forward to a supervisory position, thanks to a rash of bad-judgment accidents and a general absence of ambition. And Ship Systems Officer Mortimer, ten years younger, seemed anchored to his niche by an equal measure of minimum ability—if not by the sheer weight of his two hundred and fifty pounds.

"Top" personnel for a "priority" job? Stewart shook his head dubiously.

Randall rapped the desk and the sharp sound snapped McAllister's chin from his chest, where it had gradually descended.

"Since it appears we'll continue to be disfavored by Miss Cummings' absence," the director resumed, "we'll proceed."

He touched a button and darkness filled the room. Another stud hurled into existence a ten-foot sphere of galactic luminosity, ablaze with motes of scattered brilliance.

Stewart located the co-ordinate axes and traced them to Sol. Nearby was Centauri, ringed with a halo to signify location of Headquarters, Bureau of Interstellar Exploration. Mortimer's corpulent face took on a Buddha-like appearance in the illumination from Alpha Hyades, hovering near his left cheek.

"All right, Stewart," Randall gestured with his rod. "Suppose you identify that star immediately behind your shoulder for McAllister and Mortimer's benefit."

"Alpha Tauri."

"Right. Aldebaran—where you made a telepuppet drop on Four-B two years ago."

"Just before Harlston and I pushed on out to explore beyond Aldebaran."

Randall directed his next words at the pilot and ship systems officer. "What Stewart did not know as he ranged outward was that the Aldebaran telepuppet team, for some reason, stopped transmitting—less than a year after the drop."

Stewart finger-combed a spray of blond hair off his forehead. In the pseudo galactic illumination his face, tanned from exposure to a score of suns radiating heavily in the ultraviolet range, appeared cinnamon in hue.

Randall glanced back at him. "Tell them what we're going to do on this mission."

"Unknot the puppet strings," he said laconically, becoming impatient with his dutiful recitation to enlighten the other two.

The director glanced off to his right, eyebrow raised to compound the eternal ridges of his forehead. "I see we've got our Maid of the Megacycles with us at last. Couldn't you tear yourself away from a Terracast, Miss Cummings? Or did you bring it along?"

Carol advanced through a patch of projected galactic nebulosity. Ebon hair sheening with the reflected glow, she smiled saucily and tapped her temple. "It so happens I am peeking in on a videocast," she bantered. "And I'm learning more about what's behind this briefing than if I'd been here all along."

Groping for her chair, she weaved between the steady, cold points of suspended light that represented Epsilon Scorpii and Eta Orphiuchi. "Don't look now, Chief," she added, winking, "but I'm afraid this newscast shows you've got a leak in your bureau."

Stewart caught her arm and guided her toward the chair. His hand held the coarse texture of fatigue coveralls that did little to obscure the shapeliness of her lithe, five-foot-four form.

She returned his greeting with a spirited, "Hi, glad to have you aboard. Not planning to lead us off on a two-year jaunt?"

Randall tapped the desk with his rod. "If Miss Cummings is willing to forego informalities, we can get along with our briefing."

McAllister tossed his head erect, but started nodding again almost immediately. Mortimer looked up tolerantly from contemplation on the orbiting of one of his stout thumbs around the other.

The director touched another button and the celestial sphere expanded to twice its diameter, encompassing another seventy light-years in all directions. "Again, directly behind you, Stewart, is—what?"

Enthusiastically, he sat erect. "The Hyades Cluster."

Randall laid down his rod. "Stewart, as you are aware, completed his expedition two weeks ago—in a ship stripped down for maximum range. Now he's going to tell us something about his experiences."

Mortimer, finally interested, glanced over at McAllister. The pilot, however, was dozing.

Stewart stared at the cluster of four stars huddled together in the still air of the briefing room. "We found the Hyades rich in Earth-type worlds. Seven—" He paused. Was it seven, or eight? "Eight of them are more like Terra than Terra itself. Four others are more suitable than anything we've run across in a century and a half of galactic exploration."

His eyes clung to the brilliant specks, set like jewels against a velvet background. They were jewels—cold and glittering and beckoning. And he could almost feel their attraction—like a magnet tugging on filings of hope and ambition. Yet, somehow he felt dejected, as though he were reluctant to reach out for them.

"You did all that in two years' time?" McAllister asked.

"Why yes, of course. I—" He could understand the other's skepticism, however. He had covered a lot of interstellar space.

"You all know what this development means," Randall said.

"That our expansion will be concentrated in a new direction!" Carol volunteered hopefully.

The chair creaked its complaint as Mortimer shifted his weight. "And the Aldebaran telepuppets?"

Randall gestured for emphasis. "That robot team is now of first-rate importance. We'll need a full analysis of Four-B in the shortest time possible. The Hyades are a hundred and fifty light-years away—too far for direct development. But a halfway base in the Aldebaran system will open them up to us immediately."

Carol found Stewart's arm. "This one is really worthwhile. Think you can get your puppets back on their strings?"

"I suppose so. There can't be too much wrong with them." But still his thoughts were on the Hyades. Somehow they left him with an emptiness, a bittersweet taste. Whereas he knew he should feel only enchantment and the satisfaction of accomplishment in his discovery.

"That all there is to this mission?" McAllister, fully awake now, asked disappointedly.

"I thought it was going to be a challenge," Mortimer complained.

Randall played the buttons on his desk as though they were a console keyboard. The celestial sphere deflated, then collapsed. Room lights blazed, harsh and intense. "Everything clear?" he asked.

Then he added, "We'll assemble at oh-eight-hundred Octoday at the Photon II dock. My gear is already packed."

Carol's eyes widened. "You're going too?"

"Yes, finally. About time I got out in the field and see how our new generation of—ah, specialists handles things."

Stewart only stared at the director. On the latter's desk were mountainous stacks of back work. Yet he was finding time to get away.

Rationalization circuits working sluggishly as he surveyed his realm, Bigboss dredged from the fragmented impressions on his memory drums his most fascinating, most disturbing subject for speculation:

In all Creation, there was nothing superior to Him. This material world that stretched out around Him, everything in the celestial reaches as far as infinity itself—all His! He had brought it into existence, although (confound those faulty drums!) He might not be able to recall the specific acts of Creation.

Yet He sensed, with the nagging certainty of conviction, that somewhere in His Universe, there was an insolent creature or creatures who would dare challenge His infinite supremacy.

Well (He generated power so fiercely that he had to shunt the excess to ground), let them! He could desire nothing more. And His only hope was that they would confront Him personally to express their insolence. Then there would be opportunity for an accounting!

Remembering his blaster, he swung around, aimed it at a boulder and, vengefully, fed it an enormous surge of power. Angry liquid light streaked out from the intensifier and crashed against the rock. The concussion sent him skittering back several meters.

Bigboss was by far the most magnificent member of the clan—if indeed, he should condescend to regard himself as belonging to the set at all. Fully twice the size of any of the others, he reared pompously erect on four stout appendages. Through its ports, his central section offered glowing evidence of the nuclear processes within. Majestic in stance, he swung a pair of formidable members—the auxiliary blaster and a massive, extensible vise.

Assuring himself that the insolent creatures were not spurious impressions on his drums, he blasted another boulder. That for the pretenders, should they ever decide to contest His Reign!

Bigboss reacted abruptly to the realization that Minnie was watching him. No longer was his digital subsystem receiving her stream of telemetric signals. Relays clicked within his control section and video gain brought intensified visual awareness in all four quadrants. Immediately he spotted Minnie, immobile and ungainly as gyros balanced her elongated metal form on six jointed legs.

Her drill head, held high above the outcropping on which she had been working, glinted in the light of a shimmering, golden sun. Her single, wide-angle lens, set like a Cyclopean eye in its chrome-plated forehead, was focused intently on him.

Interrupting his subliminal correlation of data from the other workers, he sent Minnie an indignant "back-to-work" impulse. Reluctantly, she sank her bit into the rock.

But she had ingested only a slotful of fragments when the ground bulged beside her. Displaced soil slid away and Screw Worm erupted, carrying in his thread pouches mineral specimens for her analyzers.

Bigboss generated more easily as he watched Worm at work. Not that the menial helper, who occupied the lowest rung on the ladder, was worthy of speculative attention. But a laboring borer meant Minnie was pre-occupied with her limited supervisory function and couldn't be plotting to supplant him.

Working near Minnie, Seismo squatted at his sedentary task. Sensor rod sunk to bedrock, he was proudly purring an encoded disclosure of distant rumblings beneath the surface. Less than a hectometer away, Sky Watcher's tripodal locomotive system was bringing him carefully up a rise. Arriving, he assumed the location Sun Watcher had only recently abandoned. He adjusted himself on dead level, then thrust out a number of lensed tubes that locked on a referent star, three distant planets and a smaller satellite.

At that moment came an excited eureka impulse from Breather, posted outside a cave and briskly inflating and deflating the external pouches that bracketed his long, cylindrical form. The impulse proudly told of his detection of oxygen traces.

Nearby, Scraper diligently shoveled soil into his scoop in an endless search for micro-organisms and DNA molecules. Grazer munched on a growth already identified as lichen. Peter the Meter sat on a knoll scanning the sky with his battery of inferometers, radiometers and bolometers.

Of the distant workers, Bigboss was most sensitively aware of the volant signals from Maggie. Kilometers away, she was covering the ground in great, leaping strides of abandon as she sought out and traced down each fascinating isomagnetic line of variation.

Work, work, work. Get the job done. Shake a leg. Shoulder (whatever that was) to the wheel. Dig in and pitch. But—for what?

What was responsible for the irresistible compulsion? Was it his own idea? But of course, it must be. For, how could there be any power capable of directing Him? Unless, perhaps, it might conceivably be the insolent creatures who lurked like vague shadows on the fringe of his almost obliterated memory. But, no!

He, Himself, was the Supreme Being of All Creation!

His master timer peaked in its four hundred-cycle sine wave, reminding him of the chore at hand. The sun had set and the huge, pink planet had already laid claim to the night sky. Just below it was the special grouping of stars that matched, point for point, the referent pattern on his orientation drum.

Programmed functions took over. Sensors hunted out the bright central star and aimed his parabolic antenna at the designated spot seven degrees southeastward. Then he loosed his transmission into subspace. Data stored over long hours of tedious sequencing surged from the tape, bringing a euphoria of relief.

Eventually telemetric transmission ended and Bigboss, as had become his custom, automatically turned his thoughts to the Totem.

All metal it was—sleek and sheening and shaped like a truncated cone as it lay powerless on the plain beyond the hill. How akin it was to him and the clan! Why, it even seemed he could almost remember having once been a part of the huge, polished thing. Perhaps it was the very vessel He had used on His Celestial Tour of Creation.

Yes, it was time for Pilgrimage to Totem. And a fitting reward it would be, as always, for successful transmission.

He mustered the volition required to break functional compulsion. Then he sent the "fall-in" impulse to his subjects. Eventually the line of march took shape, with Bigboss leading his analyzers up the first hill and calling for the proper reverential attitude.

Behind him lumbered Minnie, her thick neck weighted by the bulky drill and swinging awkwardly with the sway of her six-legged stride. Seismo, encumbered with a faulty, dragging sensor rod, was having some difficulty maintaining a straight course.

Sky Watcher came along in lunging motions, a natural consequence of his tripodal system. Immediately to his rear, Sun Watcher, who held the fifth rung on the ladder, moved smoothly ahead with all his instruments retracted except the solar plasma detector.

Then there was a break in the line for Maggie, who could now be seen galloping along on an interceptive course. Peter the Meter, lurching from the imbalance of an extended boom-and-ball sensor, appeared somewhat like a many-spiked sphere on spindly legs.

Farther down the file, no deference was extended in the form of gaps for those missing workers who had yet to join the march.

Bringing up the rear were the diminutive Scraper and Grazer, resembling a pair of scurrying crabs, and Screw Worm, using his blade-edge jets to propel himself in a rolling, transverse motion.

Aware of commotion behind him, Bigboss continued unconcernedly up the rise. Sky Watcher, interpreting Seismo's faulty motions as an opportunity for his own forced ascendancy, had drawn back a photo-multiplier tube and sent it crashing into the other's rear plate.

The attack, though, was only self-thwarting, since it jarred a servo unit into retracting Seismo's dangling sensor rod. His locomotive integrity restored, he kicked out with a pedal pad and sent Sky Watcher flailing back into Sun Watcher. The latter rammed forward with his plasma detector's boom-and-ball shield, managing to knock Sky Watcher back into his proper position.

Finally fearful of damage to instruments, Bigboss gruffly radioed "cut-the-comedy" impulses, then trained his rearward lens on Minnie. She had inched furtively forward and was now menacing his upper section with her drill head.

He considered wielding his blaster but rejected that expedient as an excessive and unnecessary ostentation. Instead he countered by raising his extensible vise. The lesser show of strength sufficed to discourage Minnie's ambition, for the moment at least.

How foolish she was to imagine she could supplant Him as the Supreme Being!

Let her try.

Even if she succeeded, he would merely deny her a place at the trough next feeding period.

Then where would she get the vital charge for her batteries?

II

The Photon II groaned, heaved and popped out of subspace for a fix before striking out on the last, short leg of its journey. As Stewart had feared, they were five light-years off course.

Ship Systems Officer Mortimer's thickly-fleshed face struggled with an embarrassing smile. "Well, you can't hit 'em on the nose every time out," he rationalized, waddling back to the charts.

Stewart reflected that rare indeed were the occasions on which Mortimer came anywhere near the nasal target. Conceding the loss of nearly an entire day, he waited for Director Randall's permissive nod, then joined Mortimer in cutting the new navigation tapes.

It took two hours to process all data and feed them into the SCC-772. When the computer burped out the new heading, Stewart threaded the tape into the control programmer and decided to spend the uneventful period of subspace travel in his bunk.

Sleep came swiftly, but it was shallow and restless. More than once over the next several hours, as he plummeted down a chasm of nightmares, he regretted having left the control compartment.

First his dreams brought him back to the Hyadean Cluster, as they had on so many occasions during recent weeks. And, for a while, he drank in the blue-green beauty of the seven—or, was it eight?—worlds that seemed to beckon with all their irresistible allure.

They were incredibly splendrous, these planets that would soon embrace man and feed and clothe and shelter him. But, as he admired them in his dream, a sort of astronomical surrealism bunched them together—all in orbit around a central, massive sun—until it seemed they were occupying so compact an area that they must surely crumble under the weight of their mutual attraction.

And, as though upon his suggestion, crumble they did. Only, it was no pulverizing force that scattered them into fragmented rings, such as those around Sol's Saturn. Instead, each planet cracked like a hatching egg, its crust stripping away and exposing beneath a gruesome Harpy that was all razor-sharp talons and vicious beak and slime-filmed, ruffled feathers.

Stewart tried to scream himself awake but couldn't. He only flailed helplessly in the void while monstrous wings thrashed space into a frenzy, producing great currents that set the stars themselves to eddying and swirling.

They dived at him, but before their talons could sink into his flesh he awoke trembling and cold in his twisted, moist clothes.

For a long while he merely lay there trying to wash his mind of the horror. But the steady whine of the subspace drive reminded him that the Photon was streaking in the direction of the Hyades. That it would end its headlong plunge in the Aldebaran system, only halfway there, brought no relief from his baseless, unreasonable fear.

When he returned to the control compartment, the ship was back in normal space and within Aldebaran Four-B's gravitational field.

He joined Carol Cummings in the forward section, hooking his arm through a view-port strap and mooring himself against null gravity.

"You suppose we're home free?" she asked uncertainly.

Her normally effusive smile, he noticed, had moderated considerably. "If McAllister doesn't louse up his landing."

"I take it he's not very efficient."

"Pure and simple understatement. Last time out he missed an entire continent. It was a case for Search and Rescue."

Carol pressed forward and soft light from Aldebaran Four, off the port bow, warmed her sculpturesque features with primrose high lights. "I should imagine he would have been cashiered."

"But he wasn't. Instead he turns up on this crucial mission."

He busied himself with frequency adjustment on his portable transmitter. With it he would be able to tell, soon after landing, whether the Operations Co-ordinator could still be reached orally through its command discriminator circuit.

He flicked on the power switch, positioned the microphone comfortably against his larynx and sharply intoned a series of numerals. An oscilloscope faithfully traced the amplitude pattern, verifying effective transmission.

Down the companionway in the pilot's compartment, he could see McAllister anchored in his acceleration couch. He was drifting back and forth between padding and slack restraining straps, vicariously lost in the blood-and-guts action of a dramatape feeding into the view slot of his helmet.

Stewart read the label on the empty container—"The Kowalski Bros. in the Korean War."

"Always has his head buried in one of those escapist tapes, hasn't he?" Carol observed, still staring out the port.

"I don't think he ever grew up," Stewart agreed. But, again, even the Bureau seemed to contain its share of coasters who had never quite reached maturity, he remembered.

"Even in the Bureau," Carol observed thoughtfully, "you'll find coasters who've never reached maturity."

Intuitively, he tensed. Was it just coincidence that she had repeated, almost word for word, his own thoughts?

"I've never looked at any of those warfare tapes myself," she said. "But I've heard about them. Do you suppose armed conflict was really that horrible?"

"Pretty rough, according to the historians. It's not the sort of thing I'd like to be mixed up in."

"And McAllister?"

"Him? He's just building up a reservoir of false courage through his viewer." Yet, in fairness to the pilot, Stewart had to admit that he, himself, felt a deep and reasonable gratitude that wars were a thing of the historic past.

Carol sighed and glanced at him. "I'm certainly glad," she said, straight-faced, "that wars are a thing of the historic past."

He seized her arm. "Carol! Do you realize you're repeating everything I'm thinking? You've gone a step beyond radio empathy! You can pull in thought waves too!"

"No-o-o, you're joking!"

"No. Honest, I—" But his words were lost in her welling laughter.

He followed her amused stare to his portable voice transmitter and the mike that still clung to his throat. And instantly he realized that his subvocalizations, being picked up and broadcast, were to her like a window opening on his thought processes.

"Why, you—" Feigning indignation, he caught her around the waist and pulled her toward him. Weightless, she drifted forward and spread out conveniently across his knees.

But before he could bring a hand down resoundingly on the curvature of taut coveralls, Randall drifted in on the scene.

Still laughing, Carol straightened and announced, "Saved—by the great, white-haired protector."

Randall grinned benignly, lighted his pipe and stared out the port. "Couldn't help hearing your conversation about the horror of warfare. I've seen all the documentary tapes. It was rough."

"Thank God it's a closed book," Carol said seriously.

"But, is it? There's still a large and articulate school that regards armed conflict as an instinctive human mechanism."

"We've had no war in two hundred years," Stewart said.

"Only because political subdivisions haven't had time for one. The instinct is blurred as a result of our expanding into a vacuum."

"I see." Carol's eyes strained with disillusionment. "And the question is—what happens when we run out of galaxy?"

"Fat chance." Stewart laughed. "We've got a few billion years to go before we find ourselves short on worlds."

Having apparently lost interest in the conversation, Randall was staring ahead at the onrushing satellite.

"That's one way of looking at it," Carol said pensively. "But there's also another possibility—resistance to the expansion."

"You kidding? In two centuries we haven't run into a single life form that's the intellectual equivalent of a Terran fiddler crab. What do you think, Chief?"

The director blew a stream of smoke at the swiftly expanding disc of Four-B. "I think our Maid of the Megacycles ought to start sniffing for that telepuppet team. I wouldn't want to rely on Mortimer's locating them with directional gear."

Carol faced the view port with her eyes closed for perhaps three minutes. Then she grinned. "I think I've got it! Not just a single, strong signal. Bundles of weak ones."

"It figures," Stewart verified. "The OC wouldn't be transmitting now. But the lesser puppets would be funneling the stuff into the CXB-1624. Can you identify any frequencies?"

She hesitated. "I'd say they're spaced out between fifteen hundred and two thousand kilo-cycles."

"You're a bit off. Should be sixteen to twenty-four hundred."

She opened her eyes, studied the rugged face of the satellite, then pointed. "There—near the end of that mountain range."

He handed her a mike and earphone set. "I'll tell McAllister you're ready to guide him in."

As Stewart had feared, McAllister's landing turned out to be a real corker. It even started with a three-gainer flip, rather than a simple end-about maneuver, when he first applied braking thrust.

Bigboss responded automatically to the abruptly peaking sine wave that reminded him it was time for feeding. Summoning the clan with a brisk flow of "come-and-get it" signals on all command wave lengths, he strutted to the center of the clearing and prepared the trough. Squatting, he switched on all outlet circuits and directed bristling current into each jack.

The workers came from the cave, over the hills, out of the shadowy depths of fissures, from behind grotesque outcroppings. Illuminators piercing the twilight gloom, they extended retractable electrodes and converged on Bigboss.

One by one, plugs slipped into jacks and steadily increasing drain gave assurance of an orderly distribution of current.

Minnie was late arriving. She came along clumsily, massive drill head bobbing with her awkward stride. Had Bigboss' memory pack been serving him more efficiently at the time, he might have realized her gyros couldn't be overcorrecting that radically without triggering a "fix-me-I'm-broke" impulse.

But, as it was, she completed her apparently innocuous approach with impunity. Taking a last, measured step, she toppled over backwards on her posterior analyzing chamber. An ostensibly helpless victim of imbalance, her neck teetered skyward and her drill head hovered over Bigboss' upper section.

Then it crashed down, the drill bit shattering his port video pickup lens. Instantly he lost visual contact with one quadrant of his surroundings. He reacted at once, though, swiveling his upper section around ninety degrees and bringing Minnie back in sight through another lens. Guarding against repetition of the accident, he reached out and gripped her neck in his vise. He guided her plug into the proper jack, maintaining his purchase just to be sure.

Accident? he asked himself.

It was an unfamiliar concept, at best. Then he recalled that "mishap" was a notion not applicable to members of the clan. Perhaps other beings in other universes were given to blunder. In His World, though, He had arranged it that His intellects would be without error. Here the concept "intent" had no polar opposite.

Which meant that Minnie, not having reported malfunctioning gyros, had planned the destruction of one of his video sensors.

Vindictively, he started to turn upon her. But he realized he would be circumventing the primary compulsion—work, work, work. She was, after all, diligently discharging a worthwhile function in unraveling the secrets He had so cunningly hidden in His Creation.

Feeding finally over, he signaled a general "back-to-work" order on all wave lengths and watched his subjects return to their chores, motions brisk with restored energy.

For many sine wave peaks thereafter, Bigboss fretted over the ramifications of having lost visual contact with a ninety-degree wedge of his environs. Had Minnie intended that effect? Did her rationalization pack have the capacity to reason out such a complex cause-and-effect relationship? Had she anticipated his resulting vulnerability?

Oh, he was compensating readily enough through self-reprograming: stability for five sine wave saliences; activate upper section's horizontal servomechanism; circumrotate ninety degrees; stabilize; count five more waveform saliences; reverse procedure. That way three video sensors did the job of four.

It gave him adequate coverage. But there were those times when the demands of function modification required the full output of his PM&R pack and his defensive scanning had to be sacrificed.

Such as now—when he was receiving Screw Worm's clear and frantic "save-me" signals.

Activating his directional gear, he lumbered over to the precise spot—a gentle rise of topsoil not far from where Minnie herself was chipping away at a boulder. Engaging his ventral illuminator-sensor, he located Worm's most recent drill hole. The borer's distress impulses were issuing with great amplitude from the opening. Bigboss unfolded his scoop and went to work.

It wasn't long before he had uncovered the borer's rearward axial protuberance. Extending his ventral vise, he gripped Worm securely, heaved to free him from the rock formation in which he had become wedged, and brought him back to the surface.

Released, the lesser worker scurried off to rejoin Minnie.

Bigboss realized only then that, during the entire rescue operation, he had neglected his defensive scanning procedure.

Restoring his upper section's quarterly rotational motion, he regarded Minnie warily. Was there any significance to the fact that she was facing him from the other side of the boulder, such that each time she elevated her head her field of vision swept over him?

Experimentally, he moved twenty meters to his right. Compensating, she skewed left, maintaining her visual advantage.

A calculated maneuver? Of course, it had to be. Perhaps her insolence should be dealt with summarily. But how could that be done without reducing the clan's over-all efficiency as a team dedicated to the compulsion of work, work, work?

At that moment Peter the Meter, busy scanning the sky with his battery of instruments, loosed a shrill eureka signal.

Bigboss thought for a moment that one of the latter's gamma ray spectrometers had been swamped. But, on monitoring Peter's telemetered stream, he discerned that the impulse was from an infrared photometer. A check of co-ordinates showed the source of disturbance to be skyward, with a dead zenith orientation.

He commandeered one of Sky Watcher's planetary telesensors and redirected it at the source of new emanation. Now there were additional data to throw light on the manifestation.

The disturbance was in the visual range; classification—material. A rapidly shifting parallax suggested either constant location and swift expansion, or steady size and brisk approach.

Sky Watcher, on his own adaptive initiative, settled that uncertainty. His radar gear calculated a variable approach momentum averaging twelve hundred kilometers an hour and decreasing.

Peter also improvised on his function, bringing into play a photometer that instantly gauged the emissive intensity of the disturbance: comparable to the parameter for solar brilliance.

The object had shifted from zenith and was drifting over into the quadrant wherein the clan's Totem was located. Bigboss responded with some degree of concern to this development. Did it represent a threat to their revered symbol of metallic kinship?

Then he had the object in his own visual field. It was a great, blazing ball of brilliance that extended a flickering tongue downward. Atop the sphere of fiery energy sat a shining silver needle that resembled nothing as much as it did the clan's own Totem!

Evaluation circuits frozen in a confusion of indecision, he stood there fully unaware that he had discontinued his protective scanning and had not brought Minnie into one of his lines of sight for a number of sine wave epipeaks.

He was shocked back into action, however, when an equilibrium circuit tripped the alarm that his attitude was unstable and beyond compensation within the limits of gyroscopic control.

He pivoted sharply and planted two pedal discs down in the direction of fall. As he did so, his upper command section swung around, bringing a video lens to bear on Minnie. Refocusing, he saw she had crept up from his blind quadrant and had begun drilling into his power-plant section.

Fool. In her thirst for supremacy, didn't she realize she could touch off an explosion that would hurl them both halfway to the pink planet?

He pulled away from the grinding bite of her drill and brought his vise swinging forcibly upward. It slammed into her forward analyzing compartment and sent her reeling backward. Her equilibrium system overextended, she toppled sideways and lay there kicking ineffectually.

By then, the great blazing light had disappeared beyond the hills at almost the exact site where the Totem was located.

He left Minnie to her struggles and went eagerly forward. Eventually, she would evaluate her position and hit upon the proper combination of responses to right herself.

Meanwhile the now surface-borne needle was a new environmental item that cried for analysis, with eureka signals already coming in from several workers. Maggie, for instance, was covering the ground in lurching strides, homing in on one of the new lines of force the object had established.

Seismo had recorded and sent along exciting data on tremors that could be interpreted in terms of a number of closely-spaced, localized impacts. Even Minnie—despite her predicament and in response to the basic compulsion of her function—was using her high neutron tool. Evaluation circuits humming, she was sending a stream of signals that fairly screamed, "Pure metal!"

And Grazer, abandoning a patch of lichen, was scrambling up a hillside in the direction of the recently arrived object. His eureka was the most frenzied of all. Which was understandable, since he was sensing DNA molecules for the first time in his memory!

The best Bigboss could surmise, from a precursory correlation of data, was that Grazer had detected the molecules in a substance that wound helically around the great needlelike form.

Then his rationalization circuits labored under peak voltage as an obscure memory fragment thrust itself up from one of his drums.

Again, it was a vague bit concerning his suspicions on the existence of insolent creatures who might imagine themselves superior to Him—might even be presumptuous enough to give orders to the Supreme Being!

If such creatures were more than spurious impressions, he reasoned, then wasn't it likely that they, too, could move about in celestial vessels? Hadn't He all along feared that if they came to contest His Reign they would come from the sky?

Voltage regulators clicked frantically as he shunted aside raging current and averted damage to his rationalization pack. But he could hardly consider the beings without overgenerating. They were that infuriating.

Had the contemptuous creatures come at last, as he had always supposed they would? Was his period of agonizing vigilance at an end? Could this be the final accounting he had anticipated so anxiously?

Enraged, he lumbered forward, his blaster extended rigidly before him, as though it were a lance.

III

Stewart dug out from under the miscellany of dislodged gear that had buried him in his acceleration couch.

"Good landing," he grumbled at McAllister, whose hands were still trembling at the controls, "—all six of them."

White-faced, Carol recovered her composure by releasing her hair from its free-fall net. "I wasn't sure," she whispered, "whether he was going to land or just play bounce."

Randall tested his legs. "Well, at least we are here."

He crossed over to the external view console and threw a switch. One of the screens flickered, then steadied with a wide-angle image of the sky, framed in the sweeping curvature of the horizon. Aldebaran, setting, was bisected by a serrate mountain range, while its fourth planet was rising in all its brilliant immensity.

More interested in their surface surroundings, however, Stewart brought another screen into play and aimed it at the ground. The lens swept across, then came back to focus on a silvery form that reared skyward beyond a nearby hill.

"At least McAllister put us down in the right place," he conceded. "There's the telepuppet barge—right where I left it."

He swung the lens on around and picked up movement on the ground almost in the shadow of the Photon.

"And there are our puppets!" Carol announced.

The Operations Co-ordinator, its laser intensifier evidently locked in the ready position, was leading a march toward the ship. Some of the team were not in evidence, as was to be expected after a year of managing on their own. But there was the Seismometer, the Astronomical Data Collector and the Solar Plasma Detector.

Trailing behind were the Atmosphere Analyzer and the Radiometer Complex. Stewart could make out even the lesser forms of the Micro-organism Collector and Analyzer, the Flora C&A and the Subordinate Mineral Specimen Collector. In the distance, the Roving Magnetometer was homing in on the rest of the team.

He opened the locker and selected a hostile-atmosphere sheath. "This shouldn't take long. Just a matter of replacing the OC's malfunctioning unit. It's either a thermal increment problem or a component that's been ionized by particle radiation."

Reluctantly, Randall turned from the zenith screen. "How are you going to go about it?"

"Try a few oral commands on the OC." He slipped into the rubberized suit. "Trouble's probably in its CXB-1624 digital system."

"You picking up anything, Carol?" Randall asked.

She tilted her head alertly. "Just the subordinate stuff. I can't tell if the CXB's functioning 'til big boy starts transmitting to the relay station. However—"

She paused to stare curiously at Randall, who was still scrutinizing the sky. Stewart wondered momentarily whether the director might not be wrestling with a morbid fear of the astronomical distance separating him from home. It was possible, with Sol and Centauri far less prominent than Aldebaran's minor companions in the field of brilliant stars.

"However," Carol resumed, "I'll put on a sheath and go with you. Out there I might tap the predigital spill-off and find out whether it's correlating and sequencing properly."

"You'd better stay aboard for a while," Randall advised. "Those puppets haven't responded to human direction for over a year."

"You mean there might be danger?"

"Let's just say their behavior may not be entirely predictable." He gestured toward the screen. "Like now."

The vanguard of robot explorers, led by the towering Operations Co-ordinator, had reached the ship. The Magnetometer began darting around one of the hydraulic fins, charting lines of isomagnetic intensity. The Mineral Analyzer had already sunk its drill into the broad, flat surface of the stabilizer. And the Flora Collector and Analyzer was being boosted by the OC to the lowest spiral of the ship's subspace drive intensifier. Deposited upon the ceramics-insulated coil, the crablike puppet was doing its best to flake off some of the outer substance for testing.

McAllister laughed. "Look at those mixed-up machines! They're trying to analyze the ship!"

"That's what I mean," Randall pointed out soberly. "One of their inhibitions is to ignore refined metal. That's how we keep their barges from being pecked to pieces."

"You don't think we can run into trouble out there, do you?" Mortimer asked, concerned.

Randall hesitated. "No, but we won't take any chances, although it's doubtful that loss of contact has obscured their basic inhibition."

"Of course it hasn't. Nothing like that's ever happened."

"In that case, you won't mind accompanying us outside."

Mortimer stabbed his chest with a pudgy thumb. "Me?"

"Right."

McAllister, Stewart noticed, was frowning in front of the screen as he watched the Flora C&A munching away at the subspace drive coil. "That thing can't do any damage, can it?"

"Not as long as the current's off," Stewart assured.

Mortimer paled as he lunged for the subspace drive switch.

But just then there was a thunderous concussion and the Photon II lurched and swayed on its hydraulic fins.

Randall shrugged. "Well, there goes our subspace drive."

"And our long-range transmitter too," Stewart added. "They both work off the same generator."

Outside, the puppets were withdrawing.

Mortimer, pulling up short of the switch, spread his arms apologetically. "I forgot to turn the circuit off."

Stewart grimaced. "Well, one thing's for sure: We're not going to finish up in a couple of hours and head for home."

Aiming the pickup lens more directly at the damaged area, Randall filled the screen with an image of shredded cable and shattered ceramics. "It'll take a week to repair that."

McAllister's face had whitened, causing the veins in his forehead to stand out under taut skin. "You mean we're stuck here?"

"As far as subspace is concerned. And I can't think of any lively spot we might want to visit in the Aldebaran system."

Keeping a ridge of hills between themselves and the robots, Stewart trailed the telepuppet team towards their working area.

Randall stumbled and fell against him. Glancing back, he saw that the director had lost his footing because he was still staring at the sky. Within the helmet, his face appeared harsh and grim in the profuse coral planetlight.

Stewart shrugged, deciding to let the other wrestle in silence with his phobias, whatever they might be. As for himself, he had his own brand of jitters to worry about. And what made things worse was that he had no idea what was behind them.

Not that he hadn't been afraid before. One could hardly put in twelve years with the Bureau of Interstellar Exploration without getting his courage sullied somewhere along the way by a cliff-hanger or two. But, in each of those cases, the menacing factor had been vivid, easily recognizable, something he could put his finger on.

The apprehension that lurked in the back of his mind now, however, was something he had never encountered before. Vague to the point of being mysterious, it seemed to be hardly more concrete than a fear of fear itself. But he felt that at any particular moment, if he found the right curtain to draw aside, he would expose a darkened recess filled with horror.

Was this dread something that was reaching up from the depths of his phantasmagoric nightmares? Was his subconscious, for some reason, handing up reservations on the acquisition of the Hyades as pearls on the string of galactic expansion? Intuition? Hunch?

Whatever it was, he didn't like it. And he cared for it even less now—as he trod the surface of this remote satellite and stared hypnotically ahead at the brilliant stars of the Hyades, well above the horizon. For how could he be certain this wasn't a nightmare and that in the next instant the stella ova wouldn't hatch and hurl their fierce Harpies at him?

"Why don't you try the big boy with a few commands?" Mortimer's voice rasped in his earphones. The ship systems officer, pulling up the rear, resembled an overinflated balloon as he gestured at the line of telepuppets through a breach in the ridge.

Satisfied with the concealment their present position offered, Stewart flipped on the command transmitter and intoned, "Supervisor to OC. Stabilize and remain where you are."

The master robot didn't even break stride.

He tried the order again, then repeated it several times as he tuned slightly up and down the band.

"It's no use," he said finally. "Either the thing's slipped frequency, or it's not receiving at all."

"Carol will spot any new wave length," Randall assured.

"What we ought to do," Mortimer proposed impatiently, "is show that thing who's boss."

Then Stewart caught the motion in the corner of his eye as the ship systems officer struck out for the marching file of puppets.

He intercepted the line near the tail end and tried to force his way in between the Solar Plasma Detector and the Magnetometer so he could close in on the OC. But the SPD kicked out with a stiff pedal pad and sent him sprawling in the path of the Magnetometer, which simply strode over him.

The Atmosphere Analyzer nudged him aside with an inflated air pouch and, in its turn, the Radiometer Complex compounded the indignity by planting a motor appendage in his abdomen. Mortimer rose screaming, circled wide around the Micro-organism C&A and the Subordinate Mineral Specimen Collector and raced for the ship.

"This," said Stewart, "may not be as simple as we thought. Evidently some basic inhibitions have faded."

"We can't risk getting in range of one of those larger puppets, especially the OC," Randall agreed.

Abruptly the master robot stabilized, swung sharply to face the horizon and adjusted its parabolic antenna.

"Look!" Stewart pointed. "The thing's transmitting! But it's not properly oriented! It's beaming in the wrong direction!"

"Where's it transmitting to?" Randall asked anxiously.

"Can't tell without point-to-point astrographs. Anyway, what difference does it make? It's only a random misorientation."

On the way back to the Photon II, Stewart lost himself in confusion. Random misorientation? Of course. What else? But why should he even consider the alternate possibility—that the misorientation was not random, as suggested by the director's question?

Bigboss completed transmission and burst into an instant fury of thwarted purpose. He leveled his blaster and annihilated the ridge behind which the defiant mobiles had recently hidden.

He swiveled his central section, redirecting the blaster at a boulder that lay between him and the needle and destroying it in a fiery eruption of light and heat and pulverizing forces.

Fuming, he paced forward, stopped and paced back again. He had seen the audacious creatures who were bold enough to invade His Realm! But He had been able to do nothing about them. For at that moment the irresistible compulsion of function had taken over and He could only orient and transmit all the data from his master tape.

Surlily, he bled off excessive current in his reaction circuits and watched his workers going dutifully about their business. Inactivity was frustrating, of course, but it was not entirely unwelcome. For there was much now that demanded evaluation, even though his urge to pursue the contemptuous mobiles and blast them from their needle was almost overpowering.

For one thing, there was the needle itself. Had He made it? (Oh, why couldn't he remember these things?) Of course, He must have, although he couldn't recall the specific act of Creation. And he must have produced the arrogant mobiles too, even though they would probably claim they had created Him.

But the needle itself was metal! Even a precursory analysis with Minnie's high neutron flux tools had established this. It was so much like the clan's Totem it must be Totemic.

The evidence was undeniable. Every member of the clan was metal. The clan's Totem was metal. Therefore the new thing from the sky was to be revered as the traditional Totem was.

Hence he had been justified, he assured himself, in issuing the "cease-and-desist" order that had brought an end to destructive analysis of the needle.

But, still, it was providing sanctuary for the detestable little mobiles. Which comprised a frustration that was almost unbearable. A venerable Totem offering protection to the arrogant non-Totemic creatures that had to be destroyed so His Universe would be cleansed of their blasphemous impudence!

The demands of logical deduction fully served, he published on each wave length an order that amounted to: "Vigilance is to be maintained against the non-Totemic mobiles. Report instantly on their reappearance."

That taken care of, he reduced current in his rationalization pack. But the pleasant calm of abstraction did not last long. Peter the Meter began flooding his allocated frequency with eureka signals from an infrared photometer. And once again the source of disturbance was at a remote distance in the sky.

Oh Bigboss, he invoked Himself. Not another Totemic-non-Totemic complication!

As before, Sky Watcher accepted the reported co-ordinates and trained a visual telesensor on the indicated position. But nothing was there. His doppler radar gear, however, did manage to pick up a blip at many hundred kilometers' distance just as it vanished.

Only a meteor, Bigboss decided, relieved. He let the evaluation stick, even though Peter the Meter had detected no ionized trail that would have verified that type of disturbance.

And Bigboss generated a good deal more easily, satisfied that the new manifestation had not, after all, been another needle.

His peace of rationalization pack was fleeting indeed, however. For in the next moment it required the full versatility of all his servomechanisms to maintain balance against a sudden upheaval of the ground beneath one of his appendages.

Tottering precariously, he engaged his underslung illuminator and video sensor. Screw Worm, having evidently bored a great distance, was emerging at the spot where his foot pad had been planted.

Fifty meters off, Minnie was expectantly rigid, her lens aimed in his direction. She was poised for a running start toward him should the opportunity present itself.

Screw Worm finally surfaced. Angrily, Bigboss kicked him back toward Minnie, who returned—disappointed, it seemed—to her work.

The huge Tzarean ship, bristling with the most formidable weapons its makers had devised in millennia, recovered from subspace emergency, adjusted its concealment shield and slipped into orbit.

Assemblyman Mittich, second in command, used a stout tail to brace himself against shifting inertia and watched Vrausot, Chancellor of the Tzarean Shoal, hiss his nagging instructions.

"The data, Kavula!" he demanded. "Punch out the data!"

Cowering before the impatience of the Tzarean World's highest authority, the pilot beat upon the control computer with a taloned fist. "It will be feeding out soon—I hope."

Mittich pressed forward into the anxiety that filled the compartment with hydrostaticlike intensity. It was well past time for his isotonic saline soaking and already the coarse drying process was chafing his chitinous skin. He was even sensitively aware of each scale as it grated against the one beneath it.

But he couldn't withdraw. Not when they were so close to determining whether an eons-old culture was doomed to extermination.

The computer clacked its readiness and belched out the new data. Vrausot snatched up the perforated strip and his massive head swung up and down in satisfaction.

"The orbit's absolutely synchronous," he disclosed. "We can keep the alien landing site under constant observation. And our position is additionally camouflaged by those peaks."

He used the scales of an abbreviated forearm to scratch his lower jaw. With all the authority vested within him as Chancellor of the Shoal, Adviser to the Curule Assembly and leader of the current expeditionary force, he directed the pilot to order gunnery practice.

Assemblyman Mittich swallowed incredulously. "But the aliens! Aren't we going to observe them? That's what we came for!"

"Not now." Vrausot waved him off. "Preparations first. Anyway, we know they're aggressive."

"We don't. That's what we have to establish."

The Chancellor shifted his tail from left to right. "We've observed their machines. They fight among themselves, don't they? And isn't it a fundamental fact of design that automatons are fashioned mainly after their creators, even in matters of temperament?"

"Yes," Mittich admitted. "But we interfered with those machines. We interrupted basic behavioral patterns. Our automatons, too, would show primitive social tendencies if the same thing happened to them."

Vrausot exposed a jagged array of teeth that conveyed his displeasure. "I'm in no mood for interference, although I might have expected only forensic exercise from the Leader of the Opposition."

"In that capacity, I'm here to offer suggestions." But it was more than that, Mittich reflected. The Assembly had been quite leery of the compromise plan. The Chancellor had wanted an awesome display of force; the Opposition, a try at peaceful contact.

They finally concurred in: observation, evaluation and application of force only if required. And it was hoped that, on the expedition, the Chancellor and Assemblyman would restrain each other.

But how could anyone restrain Vrausot?

"Prepare for gunnery practice," the Chancellor directed.

"But," Kavula protested, "that will produce observable emissions beyond the concealment of our shield."

Disappointed, Vrausot leaned back upon his tail. "Very well, then—we'll go through the motions. Order a wet run."

Kavula relayed the order and scores of hatches swung open, baring to space the glistening intensifiers of high-powered weapons. The ship reverberated with the hiss-click articulation of military command and response.

Pivoting on his massive tail, Mittich went over to the teleview screen. "I have your permission, of course, to take a look at the alien vessel?"

"Suit yourself," the Chancellor grumbled.

The screen hunted out and steadied upon the alien ship.

"It's clean!" Mittich exclaimed. "They're not armed!"

"Nonsense," Vrausot said, coming over to see. "They've got to be. Why else would they come here?"

"The hull is sleek." The Assemblyman pointed with his long snout. "I see no gun-hatch outlines."

The Chancellor produced the Tzarean equivalent of a humorless laugh. "They're aliens, Mittich—with an alien technology. Perhaps we wouldn't even recognize their weapons if we saw them."

"But, as if they were hostile and furtive, would they have exposed themselves helplessly on that plain—like sitting uraphi?"

Vrausot's eyes intensified with resolution. "We're going to strike them—now! We're not going to wait and take the chance of having them slip from our grasp."

Appalled, the Assemblyman drew back. "But that's just what we're not supposed to do! We might touch off a war that will annihilate either or both of two cultures!"

"If we don't strike now it'll be our culture that will be annihilated. I wouldn't want that, Mittich. Just think of the glory and honor and tradition of conquest that would be lost forever. What we do here is being watched, indeed, by our ancestors who gave their lives in the final battle for total consolidation of the Tzarean Shoal!"

"But—"

"Our opportunity now is to live up to the finest military examples set by all Tzarean heroes who ever aimed an intensifier out of love for homeworld. Mittich—This is a time for empire!"

It was no use, the Assemblyman saw. Vrausot would have his way. He would wear his shining, imaginary medals and order his attack and bring doom to—oh, how many worlds? And the Curule Assembly could only give his leadership the support it would need after he presented them with the fait accompli of this treacherous deed.

"Kavula!" the Chancellor hissed. "Order the gunners—"

But Mittich nudged him in the back. "It could be a seine."

"I—what?"

"We may be swimming into a seine. Perhaps they're just toying with us—waiting to see if we are foolhardy enough to attack."

The scales above the Chancellor's eyes stood on edge as he pondered the ramifications of the other's suggestion. Finally, "We'll hold off a while, perhaps."

Mittich had put him off for a moment. But no gain against Vrausot, political or otherwise, was ever more than temporary.

The Assemblyman was jarred from speculation as one of his major scales split with aridity. He hurried off to his isotonic saline tank.

IV

Rested, although no nearer a definite plan for resubjugation of the telepuppet team, Stewart cautiously watched the robots from behind an outcropping. To this concealed vantage point he had led Carol, Director Randall and McAllister while the automatons had been occupied with recharging.

"You're going to try some more voice commands on the OC?" Carol's voice came softly through the earphones as she squirmed to find more comfort within the folds of her oversized sheath.

"We're not doing anything," Stewart said firmly, "until that thing is well occupied with transmission."

McAllister's boot came in contact with something hard and he bent down to inspect it. "Say, what's this?"

Randall went over to see. "A burnt-out telepuppet, obviously."

Stewart had a look too. "It's an Algae Detector. But, since there's no water around here, it hasn't had a chance to exercise its function. Electronic atrophy must have set in."

"It's riddled with drill holes," McAllister noted. "Looks like one of those other puppets worked it over."

Stewart examined the thing. The pilot was right.

"At least one of our robots seems to have overcome its inhibition against analyzing pure metal," Randall observed, prodding it.

"Or maybe something else has been around here," McAllister said.

The director looked up sharply.

"Something else? Like what?" Carol laughed at the pilot's unreasonable concern.

McAllister only hunched his bony shoulders.

It was not difficult for Stewart to see that McAllister was afraid. Neither the pilot nor Mortimer was generally known in the Bureau for his courage. That their apprehension had grown to visible proportions out there on this Godforsaken edge of infinity was merely an expected extension of their characters.

Rather, it was Randall's fear—Randall's and his own—that concerned Stewart. Both seemed incommunicable. Stewart's reticence was involuntary, stemming as it did from his inability to find words for his incomprehensible dread. And he wondered whether the director's fear, too, was that inexpressible.

He picked up a clod of soil and crumbled it in his gloved hand, as though symbolizing his anxious desire to come to grips with whatever it was that hid behind a veil in his mind.

Randall lowered himself on his haunches. "Don't we have any emergency means of bringing that machine under control?"

"Oh, there are a couple of tricks. Manhandling it is one."

Carol hugged her knees and laughed skeptically. "That thing?"

"There's a recessed deactivation switch in its lower section. All I have to do is get my hand on it."

"And all it has to do," she retorted dubiously, "is get one of its fifty-pound vises on you."

She seized his hand and, through two layers of rubberized material, he sensed the unsteadiness of her grip. "Do be careful, Dave."

He was impressed. It wasn't often she allowed her more serious nature to show through candidly.

She rose suddenly and turned to face a distant mountain range.

Randall tensed. "Yes, Carol—what is it?"

Profuse light from the primary etched lines of concern on her brow. "I'm sensing electronic spill-off from somewhere up in those peaks—perhaps beyond."

Randall's breath rasped in the earphones. But he only said, "Spurious stuff. Reflections caused by a dense magnetic field can throw you off like that, you know."

She nodded—not enthusiastically, however.

Stewart glanced at the director, who looked swiftly away. But their eyes had met for an instant and, in Randall's, Stewart wondered whether he hadn't detected something cunning, elusive. Or was it just the same nameless fear that he, himself, felt.

"There it goes!" McAllister exclaimed. "The OC's getting ready to transmit!"

Elbows splayed along the ridge, Carol watched the huge machine steadying its parabolic discs on a spot close to the horizon.

"See if you can pick up some of the spill-off," Stewart urged.

She waved for silence. "I'm beginning to get it now."

"Can you pinpoint the frequency?"

"Just a notch about one thirty-six point two MCs."

"On the nose, isn't it?" Randall asked.

"Close enough. How are the signals, Carol?"

"They seem shipshape, well modulated, crammed with data. I can even read some bits having to do with oxygen—plenty of it—in that cave over there, I believe." She pointed, then glanced at Stewart. "There's no malfunctioning at all!"

He retrieved his transmitter and switched from MCW to CW. "That simplifies our task. When we re-establish control, all we'll have to do is reorient the OC."

Randall walked several feet away, kicked a stone, glanced up at the sky and returned. "What now?"

Stewart retuned his transmitter. "Penultimate emergency procedure. I'm going to come down with both heels on the frequency at which it received code signals from the relay base."

"But can you give it coded commands?"

"I'm just going to lock the sending key on a steady impulse. It's a 'stop-everything' order." He hit the lever.

Carol winced. "Ouch. I wasn't ready for that."

"What's it doing now?" he demanded.

"Still transmitting. No interruption."

He released the key. "Well that exhausts our bag of tricks. We'll have to do it by hand."

Just then Carol's amused laughter tinkled in the earphones. "Why, that harebrain machine thinks it's God!"

Randall started. "What?"

"I'm having a peek at its PM&R pack spill-off. It's lord and master of the universe! There's only one thing worthy of touching its pedal pad—the puppet barge. That's because the barge, being metal too, is a totem!"

The director shook his head and mumbled, "Most unusual." Then, "Carol! Can you see anything at all significant in its memory pack? Any evidence of—"

But in the next instant she screamed and lunged back away from a foot-long metallic crab that had drawn up before her.

"The Flora C&A!" Stewart made a grab for the thing, but it skirted his gloved hand and started forward again.

McAllister backed away until he came up against the outcropping beside the girl. Squirming qualmishly, he kicked out and caught the crab broadside, sending it skittering back.

Then he shouted in pain and gripped his instep with both hands. "My foot! It's broken!"

But, a moment later, Stewart was certain the injury was negligible, judging from the adequate support the foot provided in McAllister's sprint for the Photon.

Bigboss completed his transmission and turned full attention on the eureka signals coming frantically from Grazer.

Interested, he inspected the sequenced data and took note of the modulation peaks that exactly duplicated the C_5H_8 parameter.

Grazer had sensed hydrocarbon! More important, one of his spectrometric biodetectors was getting a whiff of DNA molecules!

Even those significant findings, however, accounted for but part of the frenzy with which Grazer was transmitting his impulses. There was much more behind the eurekas than that. But all the lesser worker could convey telemetrically was his general excitement, for there were no parameters dealing with the third element of his discovery.

Perplexed, Bigboss pondered this inadequacy of communication between him and his servitor—until a rationalization circuit came up with the recommendation: Tap in on Grazer's direct video system.

He did.

And Bigboss went momentarily irrational as motor circuits fought one another to express the exultation flooding from his evaluation pack. He leaped three meters high. His upper command section turned up a hundred revolutions per minute in triumphant delirium. He extended and retracted his vises, leveled his blaster and spat out a lance of vicious destruction that slashed a concentric trench in the ground about him.

Then he damped all activity and steadied himself with a sober appreciation of the telemetric signals Grazer had contributed. The servitor was confronting three hated non-Totemic mobiles!

They had emerged from their needle! They had come finally to hurl direct challenge at the Supreme Being!

Circuit currents surging once more toward irrational levels, Bigboss calmed himself with dedication to the vengeful destruction of those insolent creatures.

He transmitted a "stop-what-you're-doing-and-follow-me" order and headed into Grazer's telemetric signals. Every twenty meters or so, a discrimination circuit peaked in its erratic pattern and he hurled out a bolt of raw energy, annihilating a boulder here, leveling a rise there, pulverizing an occasional crag.

In his excitement, however, he had neglected the environs-scanning procedure he had devised to compensate for his damaged video sensor. And he didn't realize that, while he had been stabilized for transmission, Minnie had almost reached him in a stealthy advance. But now he was pulling steadily away from her.

Ignoring their order of social priority, the workers converged on the nearby outcropping. Some bore to the right around the rock formation, while others joined Bigboss in a flanking maneuver to the left. The long-legged Maggie and Peter the Meter evaluated the slanted stone as comprising no barrier and proceeded directly over it.

When he finally swung around and brought the contemptuous mobiles under direct visual observation, Bigboss paused to evaluate the situation. It required no small amount of self-control to restrain his motor circuits. But he had to. For he was determined the arrogant mobiles would not again reach the sanctuary of their Totem.

Grazer stood before the three creatures, his servo units idling as his transmitter continued to send frantic eurekas. And now his excited impulses were joined by those of other servitors who had formed a half circle around the outcropping—Peter the Meter, boasting of excitation of an infrared radiometer; Breather, reporting traces of both oxygen and carbon dioxide in the immediate atmosphere; Minnie, whose high neutron flux instruments were beginning to identify concentrations of calcium, potassium, carbon.

Sequencing and storing the data, Bigboss sent out a curt directive that amounted to: Do not analyze! Just stay out of the way!

The ring of clansmen remained poised. Several times one of the nonmetallic captives attempted to force its way through the workers, but was pulled back by another mobile.

Bigboss brought up his blaster and loosed a vicious, blinding charge that swamped half a dozen unretracted photometers and pulverized the top of the outcropping. He adjusted his aim, compensating for the crouching, huddled position the interlopers had assumed, and fed renewed energy to the blaster's condenser.

By the next sine wave peak, however, he regretted his pre-occupation with the mobiles. For, at that moment, Minnie's drill head, sweeping through one of his fields of vision before he could discharge the blaster, crashed into video pickup lens Three.

He sprang back, rationalization pack coming frantically to grips with this further loss of visual integrity. Through luck rather than intent, he brought one of his still functioning lenses to bear on the advancing Minnie.

She let her entire drill head fly in a bludgeoning blow, but he parried it with his vise while he reasoned out the modified swivel motion now required to provide adequate coverage with only two lenses.

But the attack had touched off a number of other clashes among socially ambitious workers. Seismo turned on Minnie's exposed flank and sent a pedal disc crashing through her after analyzing chamber. Sludge spilled out upon the ground.

Peter the Meter swung his boom-and-ball gamma ray detector against Breather's air pouches while Maggie straddled Sun Watcher and proceeded to stomp on one of his telescopic instruments.

In the midst of all this confusion, Bigboss was only vaguely aware that the three impudent mobiles had slipped out of the ring of servitors and were returning swiftly to their Totem.

Infuriated over the imminent loss of prey, he swiveled around in their direction. Again, however, he neglected his defense.

And before he could trigger a charge at the fleeing things, Minnie's drill head whipped around in a level arc that snapped his blaster off at its socket and sent it hurtling across the plain.

As she drew back for another blow, he lunged over and managed to grip her bit in his vise. With a violent twist, he broke it off at the chuck.

Subdued finally, she withdrew.

"You saw it, didn't you?" Mittich demanded.

Vrausot scratched his jaw with a rigid talon. "Interesting—that trouble between the aliens and their automatons. What interpretation do you put on it?"

Pivoting on his tail, the other spun around from the screen to face the Chancellor. "That they don't even carry side arms. They had no defense whatsoever against their machines. If they were here looking for a fight, wouldn't they be armed at all times?"

Vrausot expressed ridicule by tracing a circle with the tip of his tapering snout. "Mittich, you amuse me. Only one sunset ago you were bending my tail to make me believe they may be cunning; that they might have strung out a seine for us."

"Yes?" the Assemblyman prompted, expecting more.

"Now I simply extend your own logic back to you. They prepared that drama down there for our benefit—just in case we were watching. They want us to believe they are stupid and helpless."

Assemblyman Mittich laced the other with a calculating stare. He was aware of the heavy irony in Vrausot's hisses and clicks and he knew the Chancellor was only deriding him.

"If I had to arrive at an alternate assessment, Assemblyman—" Vrausot paused and Mittich braced himself for more scorn. "It would be that the aliens are stupid, inept, blundering, defenseless. Actually, it would seem that they must have gained interstellar status only through accident."

"Oh, no. We know that isn't true."

Ignoring the interruption, the Chancellor continued. "And they were foolish enough to come here unarmed, apparently."

But Mittich broke in again. "If I had attracted more votes in the Curule Assembly, we would have come unarmed too."

"Ah! But we didn't. And do you know why? Because the Assembly really believes as I do, even though they might not have the courage to vote their convictions. That's why I'm going to exercise my own judgment—because I know their subliminal disposition in this matter."

Mittich unhinged his jaw, conveying dismay. There was no doubt now what the Chancellor's intentions were. Oh, he would probably swim around cautiously for a while. But his final determination was already cloaked with inevitability.

Eventually—how soon?—he would lash out at the aliens with all the ship's invincible firepower. And nothing else could be done to delay that treachery. For Mittich couldn't conceive of another last-purai diversion, such as the suggestion that the aliens may have strung out a seine, to forestall the tragedy Vrausot was determined to perpetrate.

Lumbering over to the ship's control panel, the Chancellor directed his pilot: "Advance five degrees westward along our orbital path then restabilize."

Kavula's hands darted here and there and the vessel resounded with the thuds of great tails thumping down on the deck to maintain equilibrium as new velocity came in surges.

"This will put us below the aliens' horizon," Kavula noted.

"Of course it will," the Chancellor hissed back at the other's impertinence. "And we'll be in such a position that they won't be able to observe our artillery emissions."

He turned to the intercom. "Gun Crew One, prepare for firing."

"Action?" Mittich asked, fearing the worst.

"Of a sort—preparatory." The Chancellor studied the teleview screen and once more directed the gunners:

"I'm designating a target circle on one of those peaks down there. You may fire at will."

He touched a button and a green halo flared on the screen. He adjusted it to encompass the surface prominence he had in mind. The ship shuddered as the gunner punched his firing stud.

Mittich watched the surface erupt in a brilliant display of angry energy—a thousand kilometers off target.

The Chancellor received the fire control officer's apology, together with a request for permission to try again. The latter he denied.

"They evidently need the practice," Kavula advised.

The Chancellor fumed at his pilot's insolence. "They'll do better at close range," he promised. "Meanwhile, I want this ship stripped for action. I've reached my decision. One close pass is all it should take. We strike after sunup."

Desperately, Mittich hurried over and swung his small arms imploringly. "You can't do this thing!"

"Oh, quit being such a floundering minnow! Nothing's going to happen. They're quite defenseless, I'm convinced."

"If that's the case, then you are under injunction of the Curule Assembly to make peaceful contact!"

"Drown peaceful contact!" the Chancellor swore. "I'm supposed to exercise my judgment out here!"

"But—"

"Flotsam! There will be no peace. If that's what the aliens wanted, they wouldn't have come out here in the first place. We are going to blast them. And from here we'll go on!"

"Go on?" Mittich repeated cautiously. "Where?"

Vrausot's eyes glazed over and his disarray of teeth were exposed to the gums as he paced the deck and beat his arms against his side in a fit of frantic expectation.

"We know where their relay base is," he explained. "We'll strike that next! Then, capitalizing on the element of surprise, we'll continue to their World of Origin and destroy it outright. On the way back we'll probably knock out one or two other planets."

He turned on a dumfounded Mittich. "The war—if there is to be one—will be short. We'll have only to return to the Tzarean Shoal and muster a fleet before we wipe out the rest of their civilization. And once again ours will be the glory of conquest—such as we have not experienced in, oh, how many millennia?"

V

Stewart woke up shouting the next morning.

Perhaps the nightmare had been brought on by his previous day's experience with the telepuppets. For, in his dream, there had been the OC, again spitting out deadly fire that missed the targets only by inches before gouging great craters in the plain beyond.

Suddenly the master robot vanished, taking all the lesser automatons with it. In the suspenseful stillness that followed, Stewart could only stare in bewilderment at Carol and Randall.

Then it came—the blazing, naked light, together with the stentorian roaring that filled the sky and shook every rock.

Terrified, he huddled with the other two, his eyes searching desperately for some place to hide. But as he spotted each gaping fissure, each yawning cave entrance that might offer concealment, it too vanished. Until they were left with only a smooth, featureless plain extending to infinity in all directions.

Eventually the mighty ships—hundreds of them, it seemed—landed. And down debarkation ramps poured thousands of hideous Harpy-like forms, their gigantic claws magnified in his fancy until they were even larger than the bodies they supported and, by their sheer weight, made flight impossible.

This vast army assembled before its ships in the center of the plain and started forward.

But there was a blur of motion on the right and left extremities of Stewart's field of vision and he watched great, gauzy curtains draw together from opposite horizons, meeting directly in front of him. Like dazzling auroral streamers, they hung from a rod located so high in the stratosphere that it was lost in the blackness of space. Diaphanous though the drapes were, they appeared to be adequate, as if through some magical power, to hold back the horde of vicious Harpies on the other side.

But even as Stewart shuddered with the thought of what would befall Randall, Carol and himself should the almost intangible barrier fail, the director charted forward and drew the curtains aside.

Instantly, the monstrous creatures poured through.

But in the next moment Randall was beside his bunk, shaking him awake and regarding him quizzically.

Dismayed over the continued evidence of a lurking, inexplicable fear, Stewart ate breakfast mostly in silence while he cast about for a reasonable interpretation of the nightmare.

It was almost as though the auroral curtain represented a mental veil that hid a horror-filled recess of his mind. The content of that fissure—was it something he didn't want to face? Something he had intentionally hidden? Was it actually that Randall could, if he desired, draw back the curtain? Why Randall?

He brought his cup to his lips and almost gagged on an icy bitterness. Carol chided him for his abstraction, dumped the coffee into a disposal slot and gave him a refill.

Randall slapped his thigh. "Well, we still have a telepuppet problem on our hands."

Mortimer sat up sharply. "You're not going to fool around with those damned things any more, are you?"

"Don't see how we can avoid it. We've got several days' repair work on that subspace drive coil—outside the ship. That's the only way we can either get out of here or recover use of our long-range transmitter. But I wouldn't want to turn my back on those puppets while they're out of control."

"You won't catch me out there again," McAllister vowed.

Randall went over to the external view screen and spent several minutes scanning the sky, bright now with the dawning light of Aldebaran.

"You won't find the puppets up there," Stewart said, finally intolerant of whatever phobia Randall might be pampering.

The director turned guiltily away from the screen. "Anybody have any ideas on what we can do about those robots?"

Stewart went over to a second screen. "After having slept on the problem, I think I might be able to contribute something."

He focused on the telepuppets, attending to their various exploratory chores out on the plain. "Carol gave me an idea with something she said yesterday. We may be able to solve our telepuppet worries within five minutes' time."

"Bring the OC back under control?" The director arched his thick brows. "How?"

"We might succeed in immobilizing it. That'll deprive the other puppets of their source of power. Within a few hours their batteries will drain and we'll be able to go to work on the OC without any possible interference."

He indicated his hostile-atmosphere sheath slumped in a corner of the compartment. "Won't need that. But I will have to have a deep-space suit—heavily shielded against solar storm exposure. You have one aboard, McAllister?"

The pilot nodded. "Standard equipment. But you'll think it weighs a ton. It's designed for null-G use."

Carol's puzzlement drained away. "The suit's metal! Which means, as far as the puppets are concerned, that it's totemic!"

"That's what I figure," Stewart said. "Wearing it may give me status as one of the boys."

McAllister had been right. Against the relentless tug of gravity, the armored suit felt as though it weighed not much less than a ton. Laboriously, Stewart planted one thick-soled boot ahead of the other and moved at a snail's pace across the difficult terrain.

Through a separation between two boulders he could see the telepuppet team. The machines were hard at work, with the Operations Co-ordinator majestically surveying its charges.

Stewart's legs strained under the great weight as he struggled over a rise and stepped out upon the plain.

Pausing, he stared at the mike recessed in the inner curvature of his helmet. It was dead and his resulting loss of voice contact made him feel lonely and inadequate. But the suit was not equipped with radio, since its wearer would normally be plugged into the ship's intercom system through an anchor line.

Inching across the plain, he closed in on the puppet team. Thus far he had not been noticed.

Cautiously, he skirted the knoll on which sat the Solar Plasma Detector. Even now its boom-and-ball sensor was swinging around to point toward a rising Aldebaran. He was certain he had passed in the SPD's direct line of local sight. But it only ignored him.

Twenty paces farther he gave a wide berth to the Atmosphere Analyzer. Here, too, he had to go directly in front of the thing's video sensor. But the AA obliged by making no move toward him.

So far, so good. But he had approached only those robots which would ordinarily show no interest in him, since he was neither celestial nor gaseous. A minute later, however, when he was cleared through without incident by an indifferent Mineral Analyzer, he was certain his totemic qualifications would bring him to his objective without picking up a challenge along the way.

He crested a rise, trudged between the Astronomical Data Collector and the Seismometer and, more certain of his immunity, stepped over the crablike Micro-organism Collector and Analyzer.

Then he stood hesitatingly before the master robot.

Ports ablaze with luminous evidence of faultless power generation, the huge automaton ignored him. Shorn of its laser intensifier, it appeared somewhat pathetic. But Stewart was inclined to waste no sympathy. It stood swinging its upper command section, first right, then left, to compensate for loss of two video sensors. But he was more interested in the underslung, recessed compartment whose outline he could now see. He had only to flip open the lid and throw the switch in order to deactivate the OC.

Suddenly the thing reacted to his presence. One of its lenses swept over him, stopped, swung back, overcorrected, then steadied. And he couldn't guess what analytical criteria were being applied in the general assessment.

The robot raised its vise-equipped appendage. A hostile gesture? Defensive move? Or merely one of the symbols of communication it had devised during its independent reign?

There was swift movement in the periphery of Stewart's vision and, instinctively, he dropped to the ground as a great clanking form swept past him.

Rolling over, he saw it was the Mineral Analyzer, boring in for another attack. The six-legged automaton drew up in front of the OC and swung its stout drill head in a sweeping arc.

He ducked under the gleaming neck and watched it crash into the bigger machine's lower section, sending it bouncing rearward on stumpy legs. The master robot lashed back, slashing a gaping slit in the MA's neck.

Into this fury of swinging appendages Stewart decided he would have to hurl himself if he expected to immobilize the telepuppet team. As unpredictable as the robots were, he might never get this close to the master automaton again.

The flow of battle, however, made his decision unnecessary. For the grappling machines were now sweeping over the spot where he lay and a huge pedal pad barely missed him as it thudded down.

For a fleeting instant, the recessed compartment was immediately above his head. Overcoming the ponderous weight of his mailed arm, he reached up and flicked open the lid. At the same time he managed to get a finger on and throw the switch.

One final kick by the OC hurled him from beneath the tons of metal. Meanwhile, the thing's thrashing vise caught the MA broadside and sent it flailing backward. Then the master puppet toppled over like a towering tree being felled by an ancient woodsman's chain saw. The ground trembled violently with the impact.

Stewart rose and wiped dust from his helmet's view plate.

The monstrous robot lay motionless, darkened ports evidencing its lifelessness. Close by, the Mineral Analyzer stumbled around in looping circles, one of its gyros atilt. The other puppets continued their work, unaware that when all stored energy was depleted there would be no opportunity to recharge their batteries.

Exhausted, his face filmed with perspiration and his hip aching beneath the dent the big machine had kicked in his armor, Stewart headed back for the ship. But his release from urgency lightened his steps somewhat. Now there would be little to do but wait until the lesser puppets ran out of power.

An automatic erector leveled Minnie's tilted gyro. Another emergency maintenance circuit cut in and compensated for precession. Finally her sense of balance was restored.

Rationalization circuits reasoned out the precise maneuver necessary to bring her upright and she rose upon her motor appendages, expecting at any moment to be bludgeoned again by Bigboss' vise.

Slowly she turned and sent her restricted field of vision sweeping across the ground. And her video lens came to focus on—

Bigboss!

In a most unusual position! And—motionless!

He was stretched out on the ground, extensible vise limp as it lay half covered by the soil into which it had dug. One of his antennae was crumpled beneath him while the other was bent and twisted. Hardly able to accept as valid the visual data she was receiving, she transmitted an unwarranted "please-verify-that-instruction" impulse at low volume.

Her evaluation circuit was thrown almost into a frenzy when there was no response. At maximum gain, she repeated the signal.

Still no response!

Cautiously, she went forward and stood over the Supreme Being. She lowered her bitless drill head and nudged one of his motor appendages. Drawing away, she watched it swing back and forth in smaller and smaller arcs until it finally came to rest.

Then she went into a limited ecstasy of reaction. She whirled around in circles until she became afraid she would tilt another gyro. She reared up on her two posterior appendages and thumped back upon the ground. She swung her drill head up and down, back and forth, around. Through her rear slot she exhausted all the sludge from her analyzing chambers.

She had won! She had supplanted Bigboss!

She had climbed to the top rung of the ladder!

And now She was Supreme Being!

That she had been able to succeed, despite Bigboss' overwhelming superiority, was a datum so questionable that she almost decided to reject it before storing it away.

Minnie went into another triumphant dance, but suddenly came to a rigid halt. Her head held high and Her lens aimed in the direction of the non-Totemic mobile that was withdrawing toward its needle.

There was something wrong in Her Universe! It was not at all as it had been before She had conquered the Supreme Being!

Tensely, She recalled for review impressions only recently implanted on Her drums. And she recognized immediately what was missing.

The telemetric chatter of all the workers was gone! Nor could she detect the constant exchange of directive and acknowledgment that had always flowed ceaselessly between Bigboss and each of the workers. Yet, all the analyzers were there, continuing their chores as though nothing had happened.

Apprehensive now, she assigned her meager rationalization capacity to the task of deducing the reasons behind the startling change. And many sine wave peaks passed before the judgment was handed back up to her main circuits for storage on a memory drum:

Bigboss had justifiably been the Supreme Being! For He had, indeed, been Supreme. The workers had voices, of course. But they were isolated voices that could be heard by other members of the clan only because they were passed along by Bigboss.

Minnie's drill head sagged until it rested on the ground.

She was Supreme Being now. But it was only a hollow distinction. For she had fallen heir to none of Bigboss' authority. That authority had been lost forever in the neutralization of charges which had rendered the former Omnipotent One impotent.

What had she done? How could she have been so irrational? Why hadn't she more thoroughly evaluated the consequences of her forced ascendancy?

More for consolation than for any other reason, she transmitted a desperate "where-are-you?" impulse to Screw Worm.

The directional signals that returned brought with them a great sense of balance to the circuits in her PM&R pack. She was not, after all, alone! She still held the supplemental function of supervision over her sole helper!

She watched Worm approach, kicking up clouds of dust with the jets that propelled him across the ground on his rolling threads. When he arrived, she sent him a "hold-everything" signal. As he remained motionless before her, she lowered her drill head until she could sense the slight change in capacitance values that indicated physical contact with him.

No, even though she had destroyed the Supreme Being and, by that action, had forever shut herself off from the other members of the clan, she was not alone. She still had her Worm!

But within the limits of those circumstances, she resolved suddenly, she would try to act like a Supreme Being!

She drew herself upright and remained rigid while she drove her rationalization circuits at a furious pace.

How did an Omnipotent One act?

Judging from Bigboss' behavior, a Lord or Mistress of All Creation should go about destroying non-Totemic pretenders.

Was that what She should do?

Realizing the decision would require much more concentration, she retired from the site of operations to consider all the factors.

Halfway back to the Photon, Stewart paused and leaned against a boulder, exhausted. The muscles in his legs were flaccid from lifting the great weight of hermetically sealed plating with each step. Now he fully understood that the suit was not made for walking.

Ahead, the ship was a beckoning silvery pencil that glittered in the harsh, golden light of Aldebaran and cast its blocks-long shadow on strange, bare soil and rocks.

Then he saw it—the elongated, symmetrical shape that seemed to spring up from beyond the horizon and expand explosively as he watched in dismay.

It was a ship—the likes of which he had never seen before! Or, then again—

Bewildered, afraid, he could only stand there trying desperately to pierce the veil in his mind, to equate this incredible thing that was happening now to the inexpressible fear he had felt for weeks.

Meanwhile, the strange ship, gliding smoothly in its horizontal attitude that gave evidence of some highly developed type of antigravity drive, surged forward. Its smooth, dark under-surface, he could see, was broken by twin rows of open ports that extended from bow to stern on either side. And deep within those circular recesses bristled scores of elongated metal structures that could only be—linear intensifiers for laser weapons!

Then Stewart realized this could only be another nightmare and he sickened at the horrible prospect of being drawn further into the dream. The ship would land, of course, and out of its hatches would pour streams of vengeful, grotesque Harpies.

But, instead, the sky was lashed by scores of fierce, dazzling beams that streaked from the vessel as it passed overhead.

And he sensed that this was no nightmare, no mere symbolic expression of the vague dread that had harassed his thoughts all along. This was real! This was actually happening!

Bolt after bolt rammed down from the open ports, scorching the ground, blasting great holes in solid rock formations, leveling hills, raking huge furrows where before there had been only level soil.

One of the laser beams—perhaps the fiftieth or sixtieth—took the nose section off the Photon, leaving only jagged metal as an undignified crown marring its architectural integrity. Another found its mark too, annihilating one of the helpless ship's hydraulic fins and tearing a gaping hole in its engine section. The Photon tilted precariously, but somehow managed to remain upright.

Then the assaulting vessel was gone, swallowed from the sky by the ridge of hills over which it had passed in completing its low-altitude sweep.

Minute followed minute in the breathless silence that punctuated the impossible attack. Stewart knew he should be pushing on to the Photon to see if Carol and the others had happened to be in the demolished nose section.

But he only stood there, paralyzed. For, as he looked back on the unbelievable action, he realized that the vicious attack had, after all, come as no surprise to him!

He had expected it all along!

That must have been the nameless fear lurking behind a curtain in his mind. And abruptly he knew with a certainty that expectation of this assault had been the basis of his indescribable apprehension.

He had known that a ship—an alien vessel—would be here waiting for them!

And the Photon's crew would be taken all the more off guard because it was incredible, in the first place, that the galaxy might have spawned two intelligent, star-seeking races within the same sector.

But, if he had had that knowledge, how could he have forgotten anything so crucially important?

VI

Stabilizing itself once more in synchronous orbit, the immense Tzarean ship generated internal gravity and meted out isotonic saline solution to a number of tanks in crew's quarters.

In the central compartment it was a triumphant, impassioned Chancellor Vrausot who turned his massive hulk on Mittich and hissed-clicked, "There! I told you they had come unarmed! There was absolutely no response to the attack!"

Grim-faced, the Assemblyman only stared at him.

Vrausot paced, thumping his stout tail against the deck with each stride. It was a gesture that expressed anxiety.

"Don't you see what that means, Mittich? They knew we would be out here. They had independently corroborating evidence to that effect. Yet they came unarmed. They are a peaceful, naive, unsuspecting race of sitting uraphi!"

Very weakly, the Assemblyman reminded, "Our purpose, then, is to make amiable contact and determine—"

It was no use, though. The Chancellor wasn't listening. He had absolutely no sense of honor or ethical appreciation. But, Mittich reflected, that should have come as no surprise. It was to have been extrapolated from the Chancellor's political history. And now the distressing fact had to be faced: Vrausot was a megalomaniac.

The Chancellor drew proudly erect and his tail stiffened. "But we're not weak! Kavula—see that all gun crews stand by. We're going to finish them off now that we've established their inability to inflict damage on us."

Mittich drew back, appalled at the fierce determination behind the Chancellor's driving ambition for conquest, disgusted with his own inability to turn Vrausot's purpose aside. How to stop him?

It was Mittich who paced this time, helplessly wrestling with the impossible problem of preventing the Chancellor from compounding Tzarean dishonor.

Frustrated, he pivoted on his tail and returned to the teleview screen. Focusing on the landing site below, he zoomed in for an extreme close-up. The aliens were still scurrying around outside their crippled ship, glancing occasionally into the sky as though terrified over the possibility of another assault.

Mittich adjusted the instrument to its operational limits, as he had wanted to do on so many occasions since they had brought the aliens under observation.

Two of the creatures were facing the mountain range behind which hid the Tzarean ship. Anxiously, the Assemblyman moved in and studied their heads, clearly visible through transparent helmets.

He drew in a startled breath. He must be mistaken. Of course he was. He could see that now.

Yet, there was something fascinating as he compared one of the heads with the other. What impressed him most was the contrast. There was an indisputable difference—many differences. Then he tensed with sudden realization. Perhaps he could forestall their fate.

"Chancellor," he called out softly. "Don't you think it might be a good idea to take prisoners?"

"Drown the prisoners!" Vrausot swore. "We don't need them."

"Yes, I realize that. But—well, look at the screen."

The other studied the picture. The scales of his forehead strained erect as he pondered the contrast Mittich had already noticed.

"Observe the one on the left," the Assemblyman suggested.

Interested, Vrausot bent forward. "You don't suppose—?"

"Yes, I do. This is our chance to study both sexes."

"I—" The other hesitated.

"There could be significant psychological differences, you realize." Mittich pushed ahead while he had the other's attention. "Why, we can't even be sure which is dominant."

The two alien creatures had gone out of the picture, leaving only an empty image of soil and rocks.

"It would be nice to display a pair of them at the Curule Assembly, wouldn't it?" the Chancellor said thoughtfully.

"That's what I had in mind. A positive demonstration of our superiority. So much more convincing than empty hisses and clicks."

Vrausot drew himself to his full height. "It will be done. Kavula, assign twenty men to a landing party to accompany myself and Mittich out on the surface. A stun gun for each man."

The pilot turned from his controls. "You'll need something heavier than that if you're going among those machines," he said officiously.

Vrausot displayed his teeth in an expression of uncertainty.

"But the robots won't be a factor for very long," Mittich pointed out. "The principal one has been deactivated. The others depend upon it for their power. Soon they'll be immobile too."

"How soon?"

"By next sunup, I'm sure."

"Very well. We'll go asurface then." Vrausot withdrew for his isotonic soaking.

Mittich turned back to the view screen and worked with its controls. Finally he located the aliens—five of them—trudging across the ground. They were headed for a nearby cliff in whose face yawned the mouth of a cave. It was the same cave one of the automatons had reported filled with oxygen. And he further recalled that oxygen was the basic requirement of the aliens, just as it was the Tzareans' fundamental necessity too.

Evidently they feared another assault on their ship. For they were carrying a number of supplies.

"You don't much approve of what the Chancellor is doing?" Kavula asked, drawing Mittich from his troubled thoughts.

"You do?"

The pilot flicked his tail rashly—a gesture usually associated with independent thought. "If he pushes on into the alien sector, it will be genocide. Those creatures are helpless. It isn't the sort of operation I'd care to be in on. Anyway, there's no reason why Tzareans and the aliens can't live side by side, even in one small pocket of the galaxy. We have different requirements. I don't think they would even be interested in the type of world we need."

Mittich eyed the pilot gravely. "We could assume command from the Chancellor."

"You do that. I'll watch. There are just enough glory hunters in the Assembly to have my head if I tried and failed."

And Mittich was intensely dissatisfied with himself over the fact that he, too, valued his head dearly.

Aldebaran Four, rising in all its primrose splendor, cast eerie splotches of light among the tumbled rock formations outside and thrust a brilliant planetbeam boldly into the small cave.

McAllister and Mortimer were huddled against the wall, still assuring each other it must have been some mistake, that there just couldn't be an alien race anywhere around.

Randall sat glumly on the emergency transceiver set, salvaged from the Photon in order that they might contact a rescue ship—should they be able to hold out long enough for one to be sent.

Still in his suit of armor but minus the helmet, Stewart sat trancelike near the cave entrance. He hadn't said a word in hours. Nor had he uttered half a dozen words since the attack.

Beside him, Carol murmured, "It's going to be all right, Dave. Everything's going to be all right."

She placed a hand on his forehead, then looked worriedly at the director. Stewart, however, wasn't even interested in the fact that she had misinterpreted his numb silence.

For the thousandth time he searched his mind for all its hidden knowledge on the alien space ship, on how he had gained that information, how he could have forgotten it.

Carol tried to console him again, as though he were a child. "We'll get home all right. Then we'll get out of the Bureau. We'll go to Terra—you and I—and you'll see how happy we'll be."

On any other occasion, those words would have sent him into handsprings. But now they just bounced off his traumatic shield.

Then, suddenly, he had it. He knew what had happened. He rose, fully in command of himself finally, and struggled out of the heavily-shielded space suit. Then he faced the others.

"I've known all along," he said, "that we might be attacked out here by an alien ship."

Carol gasped. McAllister lunged erect. Mortimer, puzzled, started forward. But Randall stopped him.

"Wait," the director urged. "We may want to hear this."

"I said," Stewart continued, "that I knew it all along. But I didn't know I knew it."

He looked away from their bewildered expressions. "Harlston and I made an advance exploration trip to the Hyades, all right. But we didn't find seven—or was it eight?—Earth-type worlds. We didn't even drop back into the continuum. Because we found evidence of bustling subspace travel and communications that indicated a vigorous culture of star-traveling Hyadeans!"

McAllister swore. Mortimer came forward, perplexed. "But—"

Randall motioned for silence. "Let him finish."

"We got the hell out of there," Stewart said, "without even having seen a Hyadean. We figured that if there was another intelligent race in this part of the galaxy, it might be a hostile one. And our worlds had to know about it. We couldn't chance being captured.

"So we started making subspace leaps back home. One of those jumps ended here—where we had dropped off the telepuppet barge on our way out. At long range, we had a look at that team. And there was an alien ship down there—maybe the same one that attacked us this morning. It could only mean that the Hyadeans were expanding into our sector of the galaxy."

Stewart paused and stared at the cave floor, still confused over what had made him forget all that. Then he went on, but only surmising the rest:

"Don't you see? That ship must have captured us—removed from our minds the fact that we had discovered their nest in the Hyades. That way, we would never suspect we were about to run into opposition in our expansion. We'd be caught off guard, while the Hyadeans would have time for arming!"

Again, he paused uncertainly. "They must have also planted the false impression that there were many Earth-type worlds in the Hyades—so they could pick us off, ship by ship, as—"

But Randall was shaking his head miserably.

"No, Dave," the director said finally. "The Hyadeans did not brainwash you. I did. I also planted the false impression—to justify this mission. It was necessary that only I know the true situation."

Stewart staggered back.

"Yes," the other went on, "after you and Harlston told me there was another culture out there of undetermined size and intentions, I almost hit the panic stud. Two cultures expanding toward each other, previously unaware of each other's existence. The wrong move could be the shot heard around the galaxy.

"What to do? Report it to higher authorities? No. For I saw immediately what would happen: 'menace from space'; Terra and Centauri Three, our other worlds—'helpless before an unknown terror'; all that sort of stuff. Anybody could appreciate what the consequences would be.

"Send out a single ship to try for peaceful contact? But who would buy a scheme like that? Instead it would have been: Send out a thousand ships armed with laser intensifiers of every caliber, all manned by green, trigger-happy kids who had never fired a shot in battle back to the eighth generation before them."

Stewart realized there was no reason not to believe him. For, all along, Randall had acted as though he expected to run into something like an alien ship.

The director lowered himself wearily onto the transceiver and folded his hands. "Anyway, from what you reported, I had hopes that there could perhaps be peaceful contact—between two single, unarmed ships. The evidence seemed to point in that direction.

"There were our telepuppets, for instance. The OC had quit transmitting—a year ago. Later you tell me you sighted an alien ship on Aldebaran Four-B. If you put two and two together, you come out with something that looks like a logical four."

He fished for his pipe, stuck it between his teeth, but forgot to light it. "If we have hostile aliens working in our direction and planning on surprising us, would they interfere with our robots? Of course not. For then we would send a trouble-shooting gang out here to put the puppets back on their strings. And we might discover them and mess up their strategy.

"So, since the Hyadeans weren't aware you had discovered them in their own cluster, the malfunctioning telepuppets could mean only one thing: They had stumbled upon our robots, reconciled themselves to the existence of another intelligent culture, and purposely interfered with the operation of our team."

"But why would they do that?" Carol asked, perplexed.

"As I figured it, that action practically amounted to an engraved calling card—requesting our appearance in the interest of amiable relations."

His final words rasped in his throat and he added remorsefully, "But I was wrong—oh, so wrong! It was only a trap. They just wanted to get us here so they could fire their opening shots!"

McAllister cut loose with a string of expletives. Mortimer only shook his head despondently.

Carol spread her hands. "But why didn't you tell the rest of us what we were getting into?"

Randall laughed in self-disparagement. "Oh, it was part of my grand strategy. I didn't want anybody along who knew what the real setup was. If this was going to be a try for peaceful contact, there'd be no room for possible hostile predispositions built up during nerve-wracking weeks of suspense while traveling to Four-B.

"You see, I even allowed for the possibility that the aliens might be telepathic, or at least have long-range instruments which could dig into our minds. If so, I was determined they would find nothing there to touch off an incident. I went out of my way to pick McAllister and Mortimer, who wouldn't fight their way out of a torn paper bag. I didn't want any trigger-happy, eager Bureau boys who might start fissioning at half critical mass."

The pilot and ship systems officer grumbled, but sat still.

"I wanted you along, Dave," Randall went on, "because you are dependable and reasonably pacifistic. And since you already knew, subconsciously, what the setup was, you'd be useful. Because if trouble developed it would break your conditioning."

"And Carol." He smiled at the girl. "I brought her because I was aware of the tender sentiments between you two—perhaps even more aware than you yourselves were. If those Hyadeans could see inside us, they'd know something of our gentler sentiments."

Randall snorted. "But I guessed wrong. My entire strategy wasn't worth the brain it was dreamed up in. I led us into a trap. It was the Hyadeans who turned up in a ship bristling with laser weapons. They had not, after all, sent us an engraved come-and-get-acquainted card. Instead, it was come-into-my-parlor."

Stewart was still having difficulty getting it straight in his mind. Somehow, it seemed there were still unanswered questions. But he felt too numb even to wonder about his dissatisfaction.

"The upshot of everything," he said, "seems to be that we've had it. Even if that Hyadean ship doesn't finish us off, there's no way we can get a warning back home."

The director smiled finally. "Give me credit for at least one redeeming bit of foresight. I did conceive of the possibility that something like this might happen. So when I conditioned you and Harlston, I arranged it that the conditioning would break down in another three weeks. Harlston will then report everything. And the Bureau will guess why they haven't heard from us."

To Minnie's utter confusion, the great pink sphere had risen yet there had been no subsequent Pilgrimage to Totem. She spent an eternity, it seemed, pondering that enigma but getting nowhere.

Eventually Screw Worm erupted from the ground—oh, so slowly, so sluggishly—and rolled toward her with his load of mineral specimens. When he tried to force the substance into her intake slot, however, she only turned away dispiritedly, still mourning the loss of communication with all the others.

Screw dropped his specimens and squirmed around, tilting feebly into the attitude for boring down again.

His jets came on weakly, managing to rotate him only three or four times before giving out completely. Then he fell into a strange motionlessness.

Minnie prodded him with her chuck. He toppled over, but did not stir. Disturbed, she sent a "report-your-location" command.

But there was no response.

Like Bigboss, he was totally inoperative. Like Peter the Meter and Maggie and Grazer and Breather and all the others, he, too, was now a victim of the stubborn stillness.

Confused, Minnie stumbled forward, realizing that her motor circuits were not responding as lively as they always had. Too, she was having some difficulty evaluating and rationalizing.

Then an odd thought occurred to her: She had devoted most of her time since becoming Supreme Being to considering how she should act. Her motor activity had been at a minimum. The other members of the clan, on the other hand, had continued their physical tasks. And now they were all motionless. Only she had any power left. Could the formula be: Motion minus the presence of Bigboss equals eventual immobility?

If that were the case, then how hollow, indeed, was the distinction of being the successor to the Omnipotent One!

If she was going to act like a Supreme Being, she decided suddenly, she would have to do so in a hurry. But do—what?

Then she finally hit upon the answer: She must be about Bigboss' work of destroying non-Totemic pretenders.

And she knew just where to find five of the despicable things!

VII

Exhaustion blunting the bite of sharp rocks into his back, sleep finally overtook Stewart. Despite his plight, he had not resisted. For weeks had passed since his slumber had not ended in terror brought on by some form of the horrible nightmare.

But it would be different now. The Hyadean ship had torn aside the curtain behind which the suppressed knowledge had lurked. And his subconscious was rid of its awful burden.

He had been wrong, however. He knew that much when the army of hideous monsters sprang up from subliminal depth to fill the cave with their vile, menacing forms.

Only, it wasn't a cave in which he found himself now. It was a huge chamber whose vaulted ceiling was supported by ornate columns. In the center of the room was an immense table, surrounded by thousands of—chairs? Standing on stout legs evidently intended to bear ponderous hulks, the artifacts consisted of paired buttock rests merging into a large, tapering chute that curved down to the floor.

It was as though the chairs had suggested a shape for the monsters in his nightmare. For abruptly the chamber was filled with scaly creatures only remotely resembling the Harpies of his former fantasies. The head was a grotesque pair of jaws, lined with jagged teeth and resembling that of a massive crocodile. Resting in each chute was an immense tail that seemed as large as the body itself.

Then he was caught up in a vortex of blazing light and incredible sounds. He spun from fear to terror, from incomprehensible concepts to semantic confusion. The air about him was a sonic battleground of hisses and clicks. But, occasionally, one of the noises seemed to convey meaning of a sort.

The cave floor jolted beneath him and Stewart instantly sprang up, welcoming the abrupt awakening no matter what new complication had caused the tremorlike shock.

Then Carol screamed and lurched back against the far wall.

There was a blur at the mouth of the cave and the Mineral Analyzer's huge drill rammed in—until its forward test chamber was blocked by the narrowness of the entrance.

Backing off, the robot charged again; withdrew and came forward once more. Then, apparently satisfied it couldn't get through, the thing directed its drill head in a series of determined, chopping blows that sent fragments of rock hurtling in all directions.

McAllister sidled along the wall. "That thing's got the same compulsion the OC had! It's trying to reach us!"

Randall stood in front of the transceiver to protect it from flying chips. "But I don't think it'll get through," he said uncertainly. "How does it look to you, Dave?"

"All depends on the amount of power it has left." Stewart drew Carol farther from the entrance.

Between blows, he glanced outside. Dawn was beginning to tinge the sky. "But it's been almost a whole day since it's had a recharge from the OC," he added hopefully.

The MA's drill head slammed down again and knocked loose a section of rock the size of Mortimer's head.

Carol dropped to the floor and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees.

Stewart leaned against the wall above her. "You said something about leaving the Bureau—maybe going to Terra—you and I—"

Her face was rigid, though no less attractive than he had remembered it when good-natured jest was her principal mannerism. "Talking about that is only an exercise in futility now," she said.

"I won't argue that point. But I want you to know the words weren't wasted." He took her hand. "It was something I've had in mind a long time."

Abruptly he realized the MA was no longer chipping away at the cave entrance. When he looked up, the robot was withdrawing toward a mound of tumbled boulders perhaps a hundred yards off.

He slumped down beside Carol, his sense of relief dulled by renewed concern over the nightmares. Had everything in his subconscious come to the surface? Could there be more?

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 two clicks of his teeth and a hiss to 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 are all impotent," 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 be All Powerful. 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 the oddest radio 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 attack ours!"

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, as they are 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 report indications of 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 come unarmed, 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 for two interstellar races."

"But," Vrausot hissed grimly, "what if they come armed?"

"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 not really Stewart, is it?"

THE END

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