Beastchild

Chapter One

In his onyx-walled room in the occupation tower, Hulann, a naoli, had disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain. He removed it from all stimuli, including the cells of his memory banks, where it could not even dream. He slept the perfect death-like sleep that only his kind, in all the myriad worlds of the galaxy, seemed to be able to achieve.

The naoli? The lizard men? They're the ones who die every night, aren't they?

To Hulann in his sleeping state, there was no sound whatsoever. No light. No images of color, no heat or cold. If there was a taste upon his long, thin tongue, his overmind could not know. Indeed all the stimuli were so censored that there was not even darkness. Darkness, after all, represented only nothingness.

He could return to wakefulness in any one of three ways, though there was a decided order of preference among these methods. First, and most unpleasant, was his body's built-in danger alarm. If his regulating brain, the heavily convoluted organic portion of his mind, should discover something seriously amiss with his temporal shell, it would be able to contact and wake his overmind through a fail-safe system of seldom-used third-order nerve clusters. Such a contact would shock its own gray cortex opening the nether-world pocket in which the ethereal overmind sleeps. (Pause here for an anecdote or two. In a thousand places across the stars, stories are told which concern the naoli and the seriousness with which alcoholic beverages affect their "danger alarm" waking system. These stories are told in barrooms in port cities, down in the basements of questionable buildings that lease their rooms to even more questionable businessmen, or in sweet-drug centers on better looking but no more honest streets. It seems that while sweet-drugs bring only euphoria to the naoli, alcohol transforms them into bobbling, bouncing, scaly-tailed clowns who — after half an hour of making total fools of themselves — collapse into their death-sleep. They stretch out stiff as ice right on the floor. In some less reputable establishments (which is to say most of these places) the other patrons make great sport out of carrying the unconscious lizard men to odd places like garbage bins and ladies' washrooms and letting them there to wake. This damages nothing but the naoli's ego. A far more nasty pastime among these same drunken buffoons is to see how far they must go to trigger the naoli's "danger alarm" system. But the alarm is stupefied by alcohol and does not work well. The stories you hear later are about naoli lying there with their webs sizzling, not even twitching in response. Or of a naoli with fifty pins stuck in its legs, sleeping peacefully while its heavy blood seeped out through its tough gray skin. Naoli's do not often drink liquor. When they do, it is usually alone. They are not a stupid race.) Much less unpleasant but still not desirable, a naoli could come awake if the Phasersystem had something to tell him. That could, of course, be anything from urgent news to another spate of propaganda from the central committee. More often than not, it was the latter.

Finally, and best of all, the overmind could awake of its own accord. Before retiring into the nether-world, the overmind could plant a suggestion with a time-trigger. Then, ten or eight, or fifteen or twenty hours later, it would click into consciousness with the clarity of a tri-dimensional screen being turned on.

This morning, Hulann, a naoli archaeologist among the thousands in the occupation forces, was tuned into the real world by the second of these three methods, the Phasersystem.

One moment: Nothingness.

Then: Color. Crimson to bring total wakefulness. Rouge to indicate psychological conditioning period (i.e. — propaganda). Then amber to soothe jangled nerves.

Finally: Three-dimensional, total-sensory visions of the Phasersystem, fed directly into the organic brain and translated by the now functioning overmind.

In the Phaserdream, Hulann was in a thick forest of strange, dark trees whose criss-crossing arms and broad, black-veined leaves thatched a roof that thrust back the sun. Only fine rays of peach light filtered through to the wet, rustling, musty floor of the place. These were soon dissipated, for there was nothing here from which they might be reflected. The surface of each growth was dull, filmed with a mucous-like substance of a uniform gray-, brown color.

He was on a narrow, winding path. Each step he took down this trail only isolated him farther from whatever place he had begun his journey, for the tangled mass of vegetation flourishing on the forest bottom closed in behind him as swiftly as he advanced. There was no going back.

There seemed to be things hiding in the trees, He moved on.

Eventually, the trail began to narrow. Vines, stalks, and ropy roots, pressed closer, closer, until he could no longer walk without the chilling touch of the cold, slimy life forms.

He tucked his tail between his legs, wrapping it around his left thigh in the age-old reaction to danger, to the unknown, to that which made the scales of the scalp tighten and ache.

To the naoli, a voice chanted monotonously from nowhere, the human mind was unfathomable.

Still, the forest closed in on him. He could almost see it moving.

The things in the swaying trees whispered to one another.

They were whispering about him.

To the human, the same voice said, the naoli mind was equally mysterious.

Yes, definitely, something was moving in the trees. In several places, simultaneously, he caught a shivering, shimmering, rippling action. He was not certain whether he was seeing the movements of a dozen creatures spread along his flank — or whether one was being hidden behind the trunks and the leaves, watching.

The confrontation, the chanter chanted, was an inevitability. It was clear that the naoli had to move first in order to protect its very future.

Now, the trail had ceased to exist. Ahead, there was only dark vegetation. It seemed to writhe.

He looked behind. The trail had closed.

The naoli met the aliens.

Hulann saw that the small, bare circle where he stood was rapidly being encroached upon by the eerie fungus-like vines. A tentacle of green slithered over his foot, making him leap in surprise.

The naoli saw the danger.

The forest reared up, snaring him with its chlorophyl ropes. He found his arms pinned at his sides by clutching leaves. Roots had grown up one side of his feet, across them, down the other side and into the earth again. He could not move.

The movement of the things in the trees came closer.

He tried to scream.

If the naoli had not acted, the voices saidThe things in the trees sprang, great dark shapes leaping onto him, engulfing him, chilly, wet things with fog for eyes and fingers that touched the insides of his over-mind, squeezing the warmth out of it… — the naoli would have died! The voice finished.

And Hulann died. The dark beasts sucked away his warmth, and he slipped out of his body forever.

There was a moment of intense blackness. Then the Phasersystem began to feed colors to him again, as it was feeding to nearly all the naoli on the occupation force. Amber to soothe the nerves again. Then blue to engender a sense of pride and fulfillment.

Then the last stage of the psychological conditioning/ propaganda began. The questioning to determine fitness:

Why did the naoli strike first?

Hulann's overmind replied and was monitored by the main computer behind the Phasersystem. "For survival of our race."

Why did the naoli strike so completely?

"The human race was tenacious, ingenius. If the naoli had not been thorough, the human race would have grown, regrouped, and destroyed the naoli forever."

Should any naoli feel guilt over this extinction of the human race?

"Guilt has no role in it. One cannot feel guilt over something on so cosmic a scale. Nature ordained the meeting of our races. Since we have met with the other eleven races without trouble, it must have been intended as a test to match us against the humans. We did not wish to war. It was a natural necessity. I feel no guilt."

There was a pause in the Phasersystem's interrogation. A moment later, the voice continued, but on a slightly different tonal level. Hulann knew that he had been taken off the general program of questions and was receiving individual attention from a more refined portion of the computer's "brain."

You have registered eighteen points on a scale of one hundred in relation to your sense of guilt.

Hulann was surprised.

Is this a conscious guilt? the computer asked. Please be truthful. You will be under observation of a multi-systems polygraph.

"It is not a conscious guilt," Hulann's overmind replied.

There was another pause as the Phasersystem considered the sincerity of his answer. You are honest, it said at last. But if this guilt index should rise — even if it remains subconscious, you understand — beyond thirty points on a scale of one hundred, you will have to be replaced in your position with the occupation forces and returned to the home system for recuperation and therapy.

"Of course," his overmind replied, though he felt depressed with such a prospect He liked his work and considered it valuable. He was trying to save the fragments of a race none of them would see again.

The Phasersystem continued to probe his psyche, looking for faults that could open and swallow him.

Somewhere, Hulann, a group of these humans is still holding out. Now and then, a representative of them is reported to have contacted members of the other eleven races in search of support for a counter-attack. We have thus far been unable to find the place they hide, the place they call the Haven. What do you feel when you consider the existence of this small but alien group?

"Fear," he said. And he was telling the truth.

If you discovered the whereabouts of these last creatures, would you report it to the central committee?

"Yes," Hulann said.

And if you were chosen to be in the expedition charged with the destruction of these last humans, could you kill them?

"Yes."

The Phasersystem. was silent.

Then: Consciously, you are telling the truth. But your guilt index jumped to twenty-three on both questions. You will request an appointment with the traumatist at his earliest convenience.

Then the colors came in, orange at first, then fading through various shades of yellow. Lighter and lighter until there were no colors and the Phasersystem had released control of him.

Hulann remained in the force webbing that held him suspended four feet above the blue floor. It seemed as if he floated above the sky, a bird or a cloud, not an earthbound creature. He probed his own mind, looking for the guilt the computer told him was present. He could see nothing. Yet the computer could not err. When he thought of the Haven, his scalp tightened and hurt. He was afraid. Afraid not only for himself, but for his race and history.

For a short moment, he had a vision of dark, fog-eyed things hiding behind a shield of trees, watching.

He snorted, opening his second set of nostrils now that he would need a full air supply for movement. When his lungs swelled and adjusted to the new air flow, he got out of bed.

For some reason, he was sore this morning, as if he had done a great deal of work the day before (when, in fact, he had not) — or as if he had tossed and turned in his sleep. Which was impossible for a naoli who slept the graveyard slumber. He very much wanted to cleanse himself, but he would soon have to be at the diggings to direct the day's operation.

He dialed breakfast, devoured it within minutes (a delicious paste of fish eggs and larva, something a remote force of naoli would surely have had to do without even a mere fifty years ago. Progress was truly wonderful.) and looked at the clock. If he left now, he would arrive at the diggings before the others. He did not want to do that.

Well, after all, he was the director of the team. If he were late, that was merely his prerogative.

He went into the cleansing room and cycled the watertight door behind. He set the dials where he liked them, and the thick, creamy fluid began to bubble up. ward through the holes in the floor.

He scrunched his toes in it, feeling good.

When it was up to his knees, he bent and splashed it over himself. It was warm and viscuous. He felt it sluicing at his thousands of overlapping scales, drawing out the dust that had accumulated between them.

When it was four feet deep in the cubicle, he stretched in it like a swimmer, letting the stuff buoy him. He was tempted to return to the dials and set the room for longer cycles, but he wasn't that irresponsible. Soon, the mud-cream began to grow less heavy, thinning, thinning, until it seemed only as thick as water (though it still buoyed him with the same efficiency of the mud-cream). This new form washed off the cleansing cream, dissipated it. Then the clear fluid began draining out of holes in the floor.

He stood, waited until it was gone. His scales were already dry. He opened the door and went into the living room, gathered up his note tapes and stuffed them into the recorder case. He slung the recorder over one arm, the camera over the other, and set out for the diggings.

The others were busy with their individual projects. They toiled through the half-demolished structures, prying with their tools, x-raying partitions and mounds of fallen stones and steel. They had been assigned the ruined sections of the city which the humans had destroyed with their own weapons trying to fend off the naoli forces. Hulann did not care that their site was a difficult one. If he had been assigned to the group tilling the un-destroyed sectors of the city, he would have been bored to tears. Naoli could cry. There was no adventure in gathering things that were sitting in the open. The pleasure came from unearthing a treasure, from the painstaking work of separating a find from the rubble around it.

Hulann nodded to the others, stepped by Fiala, then turned to look at her collection of statsheets which she had uncovered only yesterday. They had been waterlogged but readable. She was translating.

"Any luck?" he asked.

"Nothing much that's new."

She licked her lips with her tongue, then stuck more of it out and flicked at her chin. She was pretty. He did not understand how he had almost walked by without stopping.

"Can't expect a treasure every day," he said.

"But they have a mania for repetition. I've found that."

"How so?"

"Day after day, the same stories appear in the stat sheets. Oh, new ones come along. But once they printed a story, they didn't let up on it. Here. Look. For seven days in succession, this stat sheet gave frontpage coverage to the destruction of their Saturn moon bases and the pulling back of their defense ring."

"It was a major story."

"No story is that major. After two or three days, they were only repeating themselves."

"Research it," he said. "It may prove interesting."

She went back to her papers, forgetting his intrusion.

He watched her a moment longer, reluctant to leave. More than any other female he had seen in the last two hundred years, she made him want to make a verbal commitment. It would be a delight to go away with her, into the warren of his own house back on the home world, and fuse for sixteen days, living off the fat of their bodies and the ceremonial waters they would take with them.

He could envision her in ecstasy.

And when she came out of the warren, she would have the gaunt, fleshless look of a desirable woman who has mated for a standard fusing period.

She would be gorgeous in the aura of her femininity.

But Fiala was not concerned with the things in his reproductive pouch. Indeed, he often wondered if she had a sex drive. Perhaps she was not a male or a female at all. Perhaps she was a third sex: an archaeologist.

He continued along the diggings until he reached the end, walked a hundred yards through a narrow street where the substantially damaged buildings still stood. He had saved the best spot for himself. Others might consider that reprehensible, but he viewed it as a simple perogative of his position.

He went through the doorway of a large, marble and concrete structure. The door had been of glass, shattered during the final battles. Inside, he crossed the littered floor and went down the dark stairs, feeling a delicious thrill at entering the catacombs of the mysterious creatures whose planet this had once been. At the bottom of the steps, he flicked on the lights he had rigged three days ago.

Light sprung up for a great distance. Today, he would extend the bulbs another few blocks. The cellars and the sub-cellars of this entire section of the city had been connected and turned into a repository for what the human's considered precious. Hulann meant to open all of it and see everything first-hand before pulling the other members of the team from their present tasks to sift through what he had found.

He walked to the end of the lights and took his camera and recorder off his shoulders, piled them next to the cases of tools left since yesterday. Taking a handlamp, he went to the wall of rubble, where a ceiling had partially caved in. There was a gap between the ruins and the walls that he just might be able to push through to reach the cellars beyond and string his lights.

He clambered up the stones, sliding back a bit for, every piece of progress he made. Dust rose around him.

At the top, he stretched on his belly and went through the gap into darkness. He turned up the power of his lamp and illuminated most of the chamber in which he found himself. The place was a library of sorts, full of booktapes. For the humans to have buried it this deep must mean that the tomes here contained were considered by them as most valuable.

He advanced to a rack of spools and began to read the titles. He did, not recognize most of them. What ones he knew were fiction. This, of course, was quite a surprise. The humans he had met — that his race had met — in the stars some hundred and seventy years ago had not been the type to enjoy fiction. They had been cold, precise men with little time to smile and only a slight imagination.

Yet here, apparently, was a room full of novels.

And they had thought highly enough of them to bury them against destruction.

He was still fumbling through the racks, amazed, when the light, airy voice called to him in pure, unaccented Terran: "Above you! A rat!"

He whirled, looked up.

The rat hung almost upside down from a beam. It's red eyes glared with reflected light.

Foolishly, he had come without a weapon.

He held the beam of the handlamp on it, paralyzing it, blinding it. He could see it plainly, and he was not happy with what he could see. It weighed a good twenty pounds; it had the wide mouth of a mutant, and the extra long teeth. He could hear them gnashing. Its claws, now hooked around the overhead beam, were more wicked than those of a normal rat It was ironic that one of the naoli's own weapons might kill a naoli. Ironic, not amusing.

The naoli had introduced mutated rats into the humans' home planet some sixty years ago, one of the preliminary weapons for the five-plus decades of the final assault. They had bred true in the sewers and cellars and had done their damage.

Bright teeth: gnashing.

Hulann held the light on the rat, keeping it hypnotized. He looked around for a weapon, something, anything. It was not his time to be particular. To his right was a length of steel pipe that had twisted loose, fallen to the floor. The end had twisted away in some bomb blast and was pointed, deadly. He inched to it, stooped, and picked it up with his free hand.

The rat hissed at him.

He advanced on it, clutching the pipe so firmly that the muscles of his six-fingered hand ached.

Perhaps the growing brightness of the light warned the rat. It stiffened, then scurried along the beam, almost escaping the blinding radiance.

Hulann shifted the lamp, leaped, jabbed the sharp end of the pipe up at the low beam, caught the mutant on its flank. Blood appeared.

The rat screeched, scurried further along, confused and angry. Froth tipped its brown lips and flecked its dung-colored fur. When he followed it with the light, it scrambled about on its perch and tried to go back the way it had come.

He jabbed at it again.

It fell onto the floor, momentarily escaping his light. When it came to its feet, almost instantly, it saw him and came for him, chittering insanely. It was more than likely rabid; the mutated rats had been built with a low tolerance for diseases which they might catch and later transfer to humans.

He stepped back. But that was not a good move, and he knew it.

The rat's feet chattered on the cement floor. Pieces of cement, shards of glass, and other small debris rattled out from under it.

There was no time to open a link with the Phasersystem and send for help. He would be dead by the time they got there. He had to rely on his own agility. He side-stepped, swung out at the beast with the pipe and connected, locking it end for end.

The rat's squeal echoed from wall to wall. For a moment, there were a hundred rats in the room. It came up, staggering, and scampered back at him, completely mad now.

He swung again, missed the rat, and slammed the pipe into a steel support beam. There was an explosion of sound in the room, and the concussion surged back into his arm, making it numb. The pipe fell out of his fingers, clattered on the floor.

The noise made the rat leap aside and fall back. But now that the echo had died, it came at him once more.

His hand was still too weak to grasp anything.

The rat was close enough to leap. It had almost launched itself — when a chunk of concrete smashed into it, crushing its hindquarters. Another chunk rained down, missing it. A third connected. And a fourth. It stopped squirming then — absolutely dead.

In his excitement, Hulann had all but forgotten the voice that had first called out a warning to him. The warning that had been in pure Terran. — Unaccented Terran. Massaging his numbed arm, he looked around until he saw the human.

It was a young one, about eleven years old, crouched on a shelf of rubble to his left. It looked down on him with a curious expression, then eyed the rat.

"Is it dead?"

"Yes," Hulann said.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"It was a mutant."

"I know. Yes. A mutant."

The boy looked at the naoli, then back the way the alien had come. "You're alone?"

Hulann nodded.

"I guess you'll turn me over to the rest of them."

Hulann's chest was afire. He was waging a constant battle between his mind and overmind, trying desperately to stifle at least a little of the fear his organic brain was feeding the higher levels of his thinking apparatus. He had seen humans before. But never when he was alone. And never when they would have so much to hate him for.

"Will you turn me in?" the boy asked.

Hulann was afraid. Desperately. Painfully. But there was something else stirring in him as well. It took some moments before he realized that this other thing was guilt.

Though surely there must have been things the boy wished to say to Hulann (curses and damnations should fill at least an hour; a naoli rarely engaged in physical violence with one of his own kind, resorting to sustained verbal denunciations to work off accumulated frustrations), he merely sat upon the rubble, the concrete, wood and steel, the plastic and aluminum, watching the alien. He did not seem frightened nor particularly angry. Curious, more than anything else.

It was quite an uncomfortable situation as far as Hulann was concerned. To be spat upon and reviled would have raised his own hatred. Hating the boy, he could have acted. But the lengthening silence was a wall he could not breach.

Hulann went to the rat, kicked the chunks of stone away and looked at the corpse. He prodded it with a tentative foot. The fleshy body quivered with a post mortem muscle spasm and was still again. He walked back to the boy and looked up at him where he sat just slightly above eye level.

The boy looked back, his head tilted to one side. He was, Hulann supposed, a pretty specimen by human standards. His head seemed somewhat too large, but its features were well placed for his species. He had a thick mass of golden hair. Hair alone astounded the scaled naoli; golden hair was nearly too much to comprehend. Blue eyes beneath yellow brows, a small nose, and thin lips. His smooth skin was dotted here and there with what the humans called "freckles" and strangely considered an attribute — but which the naoli chose to regard as imperfections in coloration and possibly the marks of disease (although they never had been able to study a freckled human at close quarters).

"What are you doing here?" Hulann asked.

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

Hulann interpreted this as indecision, though he was not certain that some more subtle, complex answer was being given.

"You must have some reason for being down here in the cellars!"

"Hiding," the boy said simply.

Hulann felt the guilt again. He was doubly frightened. To be in the presence of a human after all that had happened was terrifying enough. But he was also afraid of his own guilt — and his lack of concern for that guilt. A good naoli would immediately call for help on the Phasersystem, then turn himself into the traumatist and get himself sent home for therapy. Somehow, though, the guilt feeling seemed fitting. Deep in his overmind, he had a desire to know penance.

He repeated the arguments fed to all the naoli by the Phasersystem during the psychological conditioning periods every morning. He attempted to recall that cold, eerie forest where the plants had been sentient and monsters had lurked in the trees. But that seemed silly now.

"Are you turning me in?" the boy asked.

"That is my duty."

"Of course. Your duty." It was said without malice.

"I would be severely punished."

The boy said nothing.

"Unless, of course, you were to escape before I could apprehend you," Hulann said.

Even as he spoke, he could not believe his vocal apparatus had formed the words. He had always been an individual of great common sense, of cool thought and reasoned action. Now, he was engaging in sheer madness.

"That's no good," the boy said, shaking his head so his yellow hair bounced and sprayed about. To Hulann, the sight was breathtaking. "I can't get away. I crawled in here because I thought it was safe. I thought I'd come out when you'd all gone."

"Ten years," Hulann said. "That would be ten years." The boy looked surprised. "That's how long our researches will take — the reconstruction of daily human life alone."

"Anyway," the boy interrupted, "I'm stuck here. There's food and water. I thought I could hole up. Then you came along. See, it's my leg."

Hulann moved closer, raising the double lids completely free of his huge, oval eyes. "What's wrong with it?"

"I was hurt," the boy said, "in the final stand."

"You participated in the battle?"

"I was on a grenade lobbing station. Loader, not marksman. We were struck with something. Don't know what. See? Here. It's kind of dirty, but you can see."

Hulann was within a foot of the boy now. He saw a tear in the lad's thigh, perhaps five inches in length. It was crusted with dirt and blood, very ugly looking. His trouser leg had been torn off, and there was nothing to protect the wound from all the filth it had come into contact with. Hulann could see a giant bruise spreading out in all directions from the gash.

"You'll poison from that," he said.

The boy shrugged.

"Oh, certainly you will." He turned and started back toward the other cellar, beyond the caved-in ceiling.

"What are you doing?" the human asked.

"I've got a kit in the next room. I'll bring it back and do something for your leg."

When he returned with the medicines, the boy had come down from the rubble and was sitting on the floor. Hulann could see that he was in pain. But the moment the boy realized the naoli had returned, he erased the grimace from his features.

"Some of the medicines would endanger you," he said, talking as much for his own gratification as for the human's. "But I think I can remember which ones will do some good." He fumbled through the kit, brought out a hypodermic needle designed for naoli skin. He would have to remember to be gentle; human skin was fragile. He filled it with green liquid from a green bottle. When he turned to inject it into the boy's thigh, he stopped. "It should be cleaned," he said.

"It won't clot," the boy advised. "It stopped bleeding a lot faster when I let the dirt collect."

Hulann dampened a sterile sponge and bent to the muddied wound. Abruptly, he recoiled, realizing he was going to have to touch the human.

"Could you clean it?" he asked of the boy.

The human took the sponge, smelled it for some reason or other, then began swabbing the wound. It was soon apparent that three hands were required to do a proper job, two to hold away the ragged edges of the flesh and the third to daub at the crushed slash.

"Here," Hulann said at last, taking the sponge. "Hold your hand here."

And he touched the human. He held one side of the wound while the boy held the other, and he worked the antiseptic into the flesh until he had sponged away the last of the dirt. New blood slowly welled, ran down the leg.

Hulann injected the green fluid into several points about the wound, then bound the thigh in a pressure bandage of light, two-molecule cloth that had almost no bulk. The bleeding stopped.

"It will be healed in three to four days," he said.

"We had these bandages too. But they were pretty scarce for civilians during the last ten years of the war."

As Hulann repacked the kit, he asked, "Why didn't you just let the rat kill me?"

"They're ugly. No one should die under one."

Hulann winced. His double stomach burned on both levels with acidic agitation. Surely his guilt index must have risen higher than eighteen points. Or was it merely that his guilt was now a conscious thing?

"But I am a naoli," he argued. "We're at war."

The boy did not answer. When Hulann clamped down the top of the medical kit, the boy said, "My name's Leo. Do you have one? A name?"

"Hulann."

He thought it over, nodded his yellow head with approval. "I'm eleven. How old are you?"

"Two hundred and eighty-four of your years."

"You're lying!" To lie seemed a greater crime than all the acts of war.

"No, no. We have a long life span. Your kind dies at a hundred and fifty. We live for five or six hundred years."

They sat in silence a time, listening to the rustle of things in the rubble, to the moaning wind that had picked up above and somehow found its way down into this dungeon. At last, the boy said, "Are you turning me in?"

"I guess so," Hulann said.

"I don't think you will."

"What?"

The boy indicated the leg dressing. "After healing me, why take me in to be killed?"

Hulann watched his enemy," his friend. His overmind was overtaxed trying to analyze his own behavior. He was obviously quite a sick creature. It would be a crime against his race to release this beast. It would have bordered on sin, except that his people had no such concept. Whatever this boy did from now until his death would be Hulann's fault. He might murder other naoli. And if Hulann's crime were discovered he would either be tried as a traitor or sent home for total washing and restructuring.

The organic brain specialists had developed startling techniques during the war. They had learned how to totally erase a captured human's mind and refill it with false identity and purpose. It had been these unknowing traitors among the human fleets who had signaled the turning of the war tide against mankind. The naoli doctors had now learned to use the same procedures on their own kind in the treatment of the most mentally deranged.

Once washed, he would never remember his first two hundred and eighty-seven years of life. The centuries to come would be nothing more than a farce without history — and therefore without purpose. Such a thing should be avoided at all cost.

Yet now he was considering letting the human escape, thereby risking all of these things. It had to do with the boy's saving him from the rat. But there was also that great pool of misery lying on his soul bottom: the knowledge that he had assisted in the extermination of an entire race.

"No," he said. "I am not taking you in to be killed. But I want you to be gone from here as fast as possible. I will be back tomorrow to continue my work. You will be gone?"

"Of course," Leo said. Hulann thought of him as Leo now, not just as a human or a boy. He wondered if Leo also thought of him by his naoli name.

"I'll go now," Hulann said.

He went. He took with him the knowledge that he was now a criminal against all others of his race, against the naoli treasures and traditions, against the beloved home worlds and the powerful central committee. Against Fiala — and maybe against himself as well.

Banalog, the chief traumatist of the occupation forces' Second Divison, leaned his head into the scope of the tapeviewer and watched the life history of Hulann Po'-naga flit before his weary eyes. The film moved at a rate four times faster than he could consciously comprehend.

The end of the film passed, then only whiteness. Banalog pushed the viewer away and settled back in his chair, crossing his hands on the slight rise of his primary stomach. When his overmind had mulled the data, he punched a desk stud and spoke to the air in a gruff, commanding tone — his natural voice.

"Tentative recommendation based on files. Hulann should be returned to home world for therapy. Otherwise, he will become a hopeless neurotic. He is a fine and gentle person; the war has affected him more than most. Too, he has a history of mild obsessions. Therapy will be to his advantage. Naturally, final recommendation will be deferred until I've seen the patient first-hand as per the Phasersystem's advice. Perhaps it is relevant to note that, although he was told to contact me as soon as possible, Hulann has thus far not come to schedule an interview. This may be an indication he is suffering and subconsciously nursing his guilt. The Phasersystem should remind him of the necessity of making an appointment during the condition period in the morning."

He shut off the recorder.

For a while, he sat in the office with the lights dimmed nearly to total darkness. Not much illumination filtered through the windows from the late winter afternoon.

He thought of the home world where his family was now safe. The menace had been put down; mankind was gone. There would be much mating, many days spent in the warrens in rejoicing. He thought of his children, the entire brood of three hundred and some. How many exactly? He did not know. But he was proud of all of them.

Inexorably, his mind traced rambling patterns until it had returned to the situation at hand. The occupied planet. The dead cities. The ill naoli stationed here.

So Hulann's conscience was bothering him. Genocide was a bitter pill to swallow.

Banalog toyed with the recorder microphone, then thumbed the lights completely out. The room seemed to shrink in the darkness until it was the size of a closet.

He rose from his desk and went to the window to look upon the fallen city that the humans had called Boston. He could not see much, for the clouds hung low and a snowfall was beginning. Sheets of fine white flakes drifted by the glass, some smearing wetly along it, distorting what little the traumatist could see of the place where men had once lived.

So Hulann's conscience was bothering him, eh?

Well, there were other naoli with the same problem.

Later that same night, Fiala stretched in the invisible strands of her bed and allowed the pleasant power web to caress her lithe body. Though her flesh tingled excitingly and began to feel better as the tension and fatigue drained from it, her mind still boiled. She was cultivating her hatred for Hulann.

There was no reason why he should have been appointed director of this team. His record was no better than hers. Not substantially, anyway. And his time of service was actually somewhat less. She could see no logic in his receiving the position other "than the possibility that he had been able to pull strings of which she had no knowledge.

Today, when he had left the diggings early, he had looked drawn and troubled. His lids had been drooping until his eyes were only slits. He had his lips drawn tightly over his teeth, covering them: the sign of shame. She knew that he was a strong possibility for therapy, and she had been expecting him to be pulled out of the operation by this time, sent home to recover. Yet he hung on.

Damn him!

And she could no longer afford to wait for his breakdown. Whoever brought this job to a conclusion would be established for the rest of his or her career. It was the greatest chore in the history of archaeology, in the entire span of naoli scientific history. And Boston was one of the few unatomized cities where something worthwhile could still be uncovered.

There must be some way of hurrying Hulann's certain collapse, she thought, though the method presently evaded her. She toiled over various plans, rejecting one, after another, and finally gave up on it for the night.

Elsewhere in the dead city:

Hulann slept the death sleep, his overmind tucked in its nether-world pocket. Even with his burdens, he could know peace in this manner.

Leo had finished fashioning a place for himself among clothes that had spilled from a shattered closet. He nestled deeply in them to ward off the cold of the New England night. There was a knife by his side which he could reach easily if he should need it. As he was falling asleep, a picture of perfect clarity burst into his mind. It was of his father, lying dead beneath the grenade lobbing station. He sat upright in the clothes, as if activated by a spring, shivering. He refused to allow himself to think about it. When he felt he could trust to sleep without a nightmare, he laid down again and sought his pocket of warmth.

Two blocks away, above ground, a winter bird worked its way down into a nest of offal and grass, string and ribbon, pecking and plucking at the fibers of its home with a quick, unpleasant nervousness. Farther along the rain gutter, a hundred feet from where the bird worried, a sick and dying mutant rat crept as stealthily as it could. Its head kept drooping, and it found itself stopping at the same spot for long periods of time, delirious. Its legs felt weak and almost useless to it, and there was a sharp burning sensation along its spine. It could not know of the naoli virus that did deadly work within it. It only knew that it was hungry. When it was within a few feet of the nest, it stopped and tensed to leap. Somehow, the bird heard it and took wing into the darkness. The diseased rat jumped, in one last, desperate effort, missed the slapping feathers, and felt itself going over the edge of the rain gutter. It clawed wildly at the stone, but could find no purchase. It fell away from the top of the empty cathedral toward the silent street below.

In the chief administration building of the occupation forces, the programmers of the Phaserdreams worked industriously on the broadcasts for the following morning. Now and then, one of the technicians took a break, went outside and popped a sweet-drug lozenge for fifteen minutes of drifting pleasure, watched the snow fall and eddy around his splayed feet. Under the effects of the chemicals, it seemed as if the naoli were one with the floating flakes, as though losing his identity to the natural forces of this world.