The Long Way Home

15

The flat microphone voice answered bleakly: “Yes. Now, are you certain that no traps have been laid, that you have not been traced, that everything is in order?”

“Of course!” Brannoch’s glee seemed to nose-dive; all at once, he looked sullen. “Unless you were seen flying your tank here.”

“We were not. But after arrival, we made an inspection. The laxity of the plantation superintendent which means yours—has been deplorable. In the past week he has bought two new farm hands and neglected to condition them against remembering whatever they see of us and our activities.”

“Oh, well—plantation slaves! They’ll never see the compound anyway.”

“The probability is small, but it exists and it can be guarded against. The error has been rectified, but you will order the superintendent put under five minutes of neural shock.”

“Look here—” Brannoch’s lips drew back from his teeth. “Mujara has been in my pay for five years, and served faithfully. A reprimand is enough, I won’t have—”

“You will.”

For a moment longer the big man stood defiantly, as if before an enemy. Then something seemed to bend inside him, and he shrugged and smiled with a certain bitterness. “Very well. Just as you say. No use making an issue of it; there’s enough else to do.”

Langley’s mind seemed to pick itself up and start moving again. He still felt hollow, drained of emotion, but he could think and his reflections were not pleasant. Valti was hinting at this. Those gazabos in that glorified ashcan aren’t just Brannoch’s little helpers. They’re the boss. In their own quiet way, they’re running this show.

But what do they want out of it? Why are they bothering? How can they gain by brewing up a war? The Thorians could use more land, but an Earth-type planet’s no good to a hydrogen breather.

“Stand forth, alien,” said the machine voice. “Let us get a better look at you.”

Saris glided forward, under the muzzles of guns. His lean brown form was crouched low, unmoving save that the very end of his tail twitched hungrily. He watched the tank with cold eyes.

“Yes,” said the Thrymans after a long interval. “Yes, there is something about him- We have never felt those particular life-currents before, in any of a hundred races. He may well be dangerous.”

“He’ll be useful,” said Brannoch.

“If that effect can be duplicated mechanically, my lord,” interrupted Valti in his most oleaginous tone. “Are you so sure of the possibility? Could it not be that only a living nervous system of his type can generate that field... or control it? Control is a most complex problem, you know; it may require something as good as a genuine brain, which no known science has ever made artificially.”

“That is a matter for study,” mumbled Brannoch. “It’s up to the scientists.”

“And if your scientists fail? Has that eventuality occurred to you? Then you have precipitated a war without the advantage you were hoping for. Sol’s forces are larger and better coordinated than yours, my lord. They might win an all-out victory.”

Langley had to admire the resolute way Brannoch faced an idea which had not existed for him before. He stood a while, looking down at his feet, clenching and unclenching his hands. “I don’t know,” he said at last, quietly. “I’m not a scientist myself. What of it, Thrymka? Do you think it can be done?”

“The chance of the task being an impossible one has been considered by us,” answered the tank. “It has a finite probability.”

“Well... maybe the best thing to do is disintegrate him then. We may be taking too much of a gamble—because I won’t be able to fool Chanthavar very long. Perhaps we should stall, build up our conventional armaments for a few more years—”

“No,” said the monsters. “The factors have been weighed. The optimum date for war is very near now, with or without the nullifier.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do not ask needless questions. You would lose weeks trying to understand the details of our analysis. Proceed as planned.”

“Well... all right!” The decision made for him, Brannoch plunged into action as if eager to escape thought. He rapped out his orders, and the prisoners were marched off to a block of cells. Langley had a glimpse of Marin as she went by, then he and Saris were thrust together into one small room. A barred door clanged shut behind them, and two Thorians stood by their guns just outside.

The room was small and bare and windowless: sanitary facilities, a pair of bunks, nothing else. Langley sat down and gave Saris, who curled by his feet, a weary grin. “This reminds me of the way the cops back in my time used to shift a suspect from one jail to another, keeping him a jump ahead of his lawyer and a habeas corpus writ.”

The Holatan did not ask for explanations; it was strange how relaxed he lay. After a while, Langley went on: “I wonder why they stuck us in the same room.”

“Becausse we can together talk,” said Saris.

“Oh... you sense recorders, microphones, in the wall? But we’re talking English.”

“Doubtless they iss... they hawe translation facilitiess. Our discussion iss recorded and iss translated tomorrow, maybe.”

“Hm-m-m, yeah, Well, there isn’t anything important we can talk about anyway. Let’s just think up remarks on Centaurian ancestry, appearance, and morals.”

“Oh, but we hawe much to discuss, my friend,” said Saris. “I shall stop the recorder when we come to such topics.”

Langley laughed, a short hard bark. “Good enough! And those birds outside don’t savvy English.”

“I wish my t’oughtss to order,” said the Holatan. “Meanwhile, see if you can draw them out in conwersation. Iss especially important to learn T’ryman motiwes.”

“So? I should think you’d be more interested to know what’s going to become of you. They were talking about killing you back there, just in case you don’t know.”

“Iss not so wital as you t’ink.” Saris closed his eyes.

Langley gave him a puzzled stare. I’ll never figure that critter out. The flicker of hope was faintly astonishing; he suppressed it and strolled over to the door.

One of the guards swung up his gun, nervously. It had a nonstandard look about it: probably a smoothbore, designed and built for this one job, but no less dangerous. “Take it easy, son,” said Langley. “I don’t bite... often.”

“We have strict orders,” said the Thorian. He was young, a little frightened, and it thickened the rough accent. “If anything at all goes wrong, whether it seems to be your fault or not, you’re both to be shot. Remember that.”

“Taking no chances, huh? Well, suit yourselves.” Langley leaned on the bars. It wasn’t hard to act relaxed and companionable—not any more, now when nothing mattered. “I was just wondering what you boys were getting out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I suppose you came here along with the diplomatic mission, or maybe in a later consignment. When did you hit Earth?”

“Three years ago,” said the other guard. “Outplanet service is normally for four.”

“But that don’t include transportation time,” pointed out Langley. “Makes about thirteen years you’re gone. Your parents have gotten old, maybe died; your girl friend has married someone else... Back where I come from, we’d consider that a long term.”

“Shut up!” The answer was a bit too stiff and prompt.

“I’m not talking sedition,” said Langley mildly. “Just wondering. Suppose you get paid pretty well, eh, to compensate?”

“There are bonuses for outplanet service,” said the first guard.

“Big ones?”

“Well—”

“I kind of thought so. Not enough to matter. The boys go off for a couple of decades; the old folks have to mortgage the farm to keep going; the boys come back without money to get out of hock, and spend the rest of their lives working for somebody else—some banker who was smart enough to stay at home. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Happened on Earth seven thousand years ago. Place called Rome.”

The heavy, blunt faces—faces of stolid, slow-thinking, stubborn yeomen—screwed up trying to find a suitably devastating retort; but nothing came out.

“I’m sorry,” said Langley. “Didn’t mean to needle you. I’m just curious, you see. Looks as if Centauri’s going to be top dog, so I ought to learn about you, eh? I suppose you personally figure on getting a nice piece of land in the Solar System. But why is Thrym backing you?”

“Thrym is part of the League,” said one of the men. Langley didn’t miss the reluctance in his tone. “They go along with us... they simply have to.”

“But they have a vote, don’t they? They could have argued against this adventure. Or have they been promised Jupiter to colonize?”

“They couldn’t,” said the guard. “Some difference in the air, not enough ammonia I think. They can’t use any planet in this system.”

“Then why are they interested in conquering Sol? Why are they backing you? Sol never hurt them any, but Thor fought a war with them not so long ago.”

“They were beaten,” said the guard.

“Like hell they were, son. You can’t beat a unified planet larger than all the others put together. The war was a draw, and you know it. The most Earth and Thor together could do, I’ll bet, is mount guard on Thrym, keep the natives down there where they belong. Thor alone could only compromise, and take the short end of the stick at that. The Thrymans did win their point, you know; there aren’t any human colonies on the Proximan planets.

“So I still wonder what Thrym’s getting out of this deal.”

“I don’t want to talk about it any longer!” said the guard angrily. “Go on back.”

Langley stood for a moment, considering the situation. There were no soldiers in the cell block except these two. The door was held by an electronic lock, Saris could open it with a mere effort of will. But the two young men were keyed to an almost hysterical pitch; at the first sign of anything unforeseen, they’d open up on their prisoners. There didn’t seem to be any way out of here.

He turned back to Saris. “Got your thoughts uncoiled?” he asked.

“Somewhat.” The Holatan gave him a sleepy look. “You may be astonished at certain t’ingss I hawe to say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I cannot read the human mind—not its actual t’oughtss, only its pressence and its emotional state. Giwen time, I could learn to do more, but there iss not been time yet, ewen wit” you. But the T’rymanss hawe a very long time had to study your race.”

“So they can read our thoughts, eh? Hm-m-m—bet Chanthavar doesn’t know that! Then that inspection here they mentioned would have been via the superintendent’s mind, I suppose—But are you sure?”

“Yess. It iss a certainty. Let me explain.”

The exposition was short and to the point. Every living nervous system radiates energy of several kinds. There are the electrical impulses, which encephalography had discovered in man even before Langley’s time; there is a little heat; there is the subtler and more penetrating emission in the gyromagnetic spectrum. But the pattern varies: each race has its own norms. An encephalographer from Earth would not find the alpha rhythm of the human brain in a Holatan; he would have to learn a whole new ‘language’.

On most planets, including Earth, there is little or no sensitivity to such emissions. The evolving life develops reactions to such vibrations as light and sound and, these being sufficient for survival purposes, does not go on to an ability to “listen in” on nervous impulses. Except for a few dubious freaks—to this day, the subject of ESP in man was one for debate and bafflement—humanity is telepathically deaf. But on some planets, through a statistically improbable series of mutations, ESP organs do develop and most animals have them: including the intelligent animals, if any. In the case of Holat, the development was unique—the animal could not only receive the nervous impulses of others, but could at short range induce them. This was the basis of Holatan emotional empathy; it was also the reason Saris could control a vacuum tube. As if following some law of compensation, the perceptive faculty was poor on the verbal level; the Holatans used sonic speech because they could not get clear ideas across telepathically.

Thryman telepathy was of the “normal” sort—the monsters could listen in, but could not influence, except via the specialized nerve endings in their joined feelers.

But a telepathic listener does not perceive pure thought. “Thought” does not exist as part of the real world; there is only the process of thinking, the flow of pulses across synapses. The Thryman did not read a man’s mind as such, but read the patterns of subvocalization. A man thinking on the conscious level talks to himself: the motor impulses go from brain to throat as if he were speaking aloud, but are suppressed en route. It was these impulses that the Thryman sensed and interpreted.

So to read the thoughts of another being, they had to know that being’s language first. And Saris and Langley habitually thought in languages unknown to them. What they detected was gibberish.

“I... see.” The man nodded. “It makes sense. I read about a case once which happened some hundred years before my time. An alleged telepath was demonstrating before the Pope—that was a religious person back then. He got confused, said he couldn’t understand, and the Pope answered he’d been thinking in Latin. Yes, that may have been the same thing.” He smiled, grimly. “Keeping our mental privacy is one consolation, at least.”

There iss otherss,” replied the Holatan. “I hawe a warning to giwe you. There iss soon to be an attack.”

“Huh?”

“Act not so alarmed. But the female you hawe—Marin iss her name? In her I hawe detected an electronic circuit.”

“What?” Langley sucked in his breath. There was an eerie tingle along his nerves. “But... that’s impossible... she—”

“In her iss been planted surgically a t’ing which I t’ink iss a wariable-frequency emitter. She can be traced. I would hawe told Walti, but wass not then familiar wit” the human nerwous system. I t’ought it a normal pattern for your femaless, ewen ass ours iss different from the maless. But now that I hawe seen more of you, I realize the trut’.”

Langley felt himself shivering. Marin—Marin again! But how-?

Then he understood. The time she had been seized, and returned. It had been for a purpose, after all; he, Langley, had not been the goal of that raid. An automatic communicator similar to Valti’s, planted in her body by today’s surgery—yes.

And such a device would be short-range, which meant that only a system of detectors spotted around the planet could hope to follow her. And only Chanthavar could have such a system.

Langley groaned: “How many people’s Judas goat is she, anyway?”

“We must be prepared,” said the Holatan calmly. “Our guards will try to kill us in case of such, no? Forewarned, we may be able to—”

“Or to warn Brannoch?” Langley played with the idea a minute but discarded it. No. Even if the Centaurians got clean away, Sol’s battle fleet would be on their heels; the war, the empty useless crazy war, would be started like an avalanche.

Let Chanthavar win, then. It didn’t matter.

Langley buried his face in his hands. Why keep on fighting? Let him take his lead like a gentleman when the raid came.

No. Somehow, he felt he must go on living. He had been given a voice, however feeble, in today’s history; it was up to him to keep talking as long as possible.

It might have been an hour later that Saris” muzzle nosed him to alertness. “Grawity wibrationss. I t’ink the time iss now.”