Jase’s stomach relaxed. Bela had clearly had no alternative. Once attacked he could not in Honor do otherwise than fight, even if as a normal man he could have restrained himself. It was simply a matter of condemning the Antoniti and excusing Bela from guilt.
But—on the verge of opening his mouth to do just that—an idea occurred to Jase. An idea so sudden and so convenient that it could only have sprung from the Random Factor which had caused the fight to involve Bela in the first place. That some fights should take place on a voyage of this length with fifty-eight men within the walls of a single ship, was inevitable. But it was far from inevitable that the Random Factor should cause the first fight to involve Jase’s Secondcousin. Jase looked up from the desk at the assembled members of the Expedition.
“The Antoniti,” he announced, “is self-admittedly the instigator. Ordinarily, he alone would be condemned. However, I find it necessary to remind you now that I announced at the inception of this voyage that I expected all of you to work for perfection on this Expedition. To execute only the Antoniti would be to leave one of those that had marred this expedition by fighting still among us. Accordingly, while I hereby absolve Bela Secondcousin Brutogas of any guilt in the incident, and enter into the ship’s records my judgment that he acted honorably in all respects, in the interests of undeviating and unyielding perfection of action—to which I committed myself at the voyage’s beginning—I hereby condemn him also.”
He looked at Bela and the Antoniti. Bela’s eyes met his squarely.
“My judgment as Keysman is given,” he said.
He stepped back and turned away from the table, hearing behind him the roaring of the crew as they swarmed over the two condemned men and tore their throats out. He walked slowly back through the corridors alone to his own quarters, and only when he was once more behind the locked door of his own room did he give way to the feelings of grief that threatened to overwhelm him.
He sank into a crouching position before the table on which the dirtworm in its transparent cube sat silent and still. The violence of his mourning shook his whole body and made his jaws gasp for air. First it had been Aton Maternaluncle. And now Bela. Who else would the Random Factor require from him—his Family Head, the Brutogas himself?
The door spoke behind him, announcing that the Captain was outside wishing to see him. Jase pulled himself together and got to his feet.
He admitted the Captain, locking the door behind the older man. The Captain saluted.
“Yes?” said Jase.
“Sir,” said the Captain, and there was a profound respect in his voice. “I wish to offer you my condolences on the necessary death of your kinsman.”
“Thank you,” said Jase, woodenly.
“And sir—” the Captain hesitated. “I am charged by the members of the Expedition to convey their condolences as well.”
“Thank you.”
The Captain still hesitated.
“Something more?” asked Jase.
“Yes, sir.” The Captain’s face was stiff with emotion. “Something I wished to say, Keysman. I believe this crew aboard this ship will follow you anywhere now, Keysman. I said when you first lifted ship that there were two sorts of leaders whom men would follow. One was a man, and the other was a Founder. Sir,” said the Captain, “it is a great Honor to me and to all of us aboard to have a Founder for our Keysman on this Expedition.”
He saluted and went.
Jase locked the door behind him and fell once more into a crouch before the table with the cube and the model of the artifact. Two great, conflicting emotions—sorrow and triumph—fought within him. It was, he thought, a wonderful but lonely thing to move with the Random Factor. He hid his eyes in his hands and let the emotions toss him as they would.
Mourning and exulting, safe behind his locked door in the exalted loneliness of a Keysman, he fell, at last, asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
“…I tell you,” Swanson was saying, “we know they’ve landed. On the far side of the moon. Why didn’t you tell us?”
Jase swayed a little with weariness and decided to sit down. He dropped into one of the heavy, carved-wood armchairs that belonged around the meeting table in the library room, but which was now scattered , back away from it. In the library room now, Coth was seated at that table, as was the man from the United | Nations. Swanson was standing in front of the table, talking to Jase. Neither Mele nor any of the members of the original Board were present. Somehow they had ceased to be part of the discussions—arguments rather—between Jase and Swanson’s associates. Their place had been taken by several unidentified individuals—men in business suits of various ages—who sat around, listening intently but not intruding on the verbal duel between Swanson and Coth on one side and Jase on the other.
“—Didn’t I tell you?” Jase passed a hand over his jaw. He needed a shave. Even Alan Creel had disappeared, to be replaced by some physician with what sounded like a trace of French accent and a neck thick with the fat of middle age. “I’ve been so busy in the stacks…” He searched his memory, sorting it out from the Kator-memories that competed for attention in his head. “I must have forgotten.”
“Don’t forget,” said Coth from the table. "That’s what makes you valuable, your not forgetting to tell us everything.”
Jase looked exhaustedly at him.
"Don’t threaten me,” Jase said. “I’m too worn out to be threatened. Let me keep my strength for necessary things.”
“Yes,” said Swanson, without turning around. “Perhaps we’d better be gentle, Bill. Jase does look shaky. But Jase—that’s because you’re wearing yourself out in those library stacks. Why don’t you give that up for a while?”
“It’s our only chance,” said Jase, leaning his head back against the top of the backrest of his chair and closing his eyes for a second. What Swanson was saying became a meaningless jumble of words as sleep plucked at him, trying to drag him down into unconsciousness. He opened his eyes and Swanson’s voice came clear again. “—What have you learned, anyway?”
“A lot,” said Jase. “A lot.”
“Such as?”
“I’m on the track,” said Jase, “of what it is—that wellspring that their instinctive reactions come from. It’s that we’ve got to understand. Not what they do, but why they do it.”
“Be reasonable!” broke in Coth, suddenly—almost angrily. “They’ve landed on the other side of the moon and dug in there somewhere. We’ll have them on top of us any day now. Is there time for that sort of scientific poking around and nonsense?”
“Nonsense!” Jase straightened up in the chair, taking his head away from the backrest. “It’s because the world didn’t have any time for what you call nonsense—yes, the same sort of nonsense, and the same sort of people like yourself having no use for it—that we’re in this spot. Our neck stuck out into space ready to be chopped off, while the body of our race’s still back down on plain earth, living and thinking in terms of it’s a long way from here to Tokyo. And the world lying naked to a globe of space six hundred light years at least in radius around us—”
He broke off suddenly. He had lost his temper like this before with these people. It did no good; it did not even begin to open up their closed minds that thought of the Ruml as something between a horde of black-furred foreigners and a composite of all the science-fiction movie monsters they had ever seen on their home screens.
“…What do you want from me now?” Jase asked, wearily.
“We know they landed on the other side of the moon,” said Swanson. “We don’t know where. You can tell us where.”
“Why?” said Jase. “So you can send one of our space-going vessels over the spot to drop a nuclear bomb on it?”
“Of course not!” said Swanson. “We’d try to take them alive if at all possible.”
“It wouldn’t be possible,” said Jase. “In any case, you’re to leave them alone.” He closed his eyes again, tempting himself with the thought of
unlimited slumber. “I won’t tell you.”
“Won’t tell us!” the voice of Coth jerked Jase’s eyes open. “Won’t tell us?”
“No,” said Jase. “As long as you ignore them, they’ve got no reason to think you know they exist. They’ll go on trying to scout us, instead of messaging back for an invasion team from their seven worlds. Once they do that, there’s no hope for any of us. As long as they hold off, I’ve got time to go on searching for what moves someone like Kator. What makes what he does noble—”
“Noble?” said Goth. “This mindpartner—this Kator Secondcousin of yours—killed his scout partner in his sleep, lied about that, stole part of the artifact-bait from his own authorities, took an unfair advantage to kill another of his own kind in a duel—and he’s just finished executing the one close relative he liked in order to make his crew on the ship admire him.” Goth breathed sharply for a second. There were two points of color in his face, high on his narrow cheekbones. “—And that’s, according to what you’ve seen fit to tell us about him and his race, noble!”
“Noble by his standards, not ours,” answered Jase. He looked around the room at all of them. “Isn’t there one of you who’s willing to be openminded about the difference between Ruml and humans?”
“Of course,” said Swanson. “Just tell us what those differences are. And what they mean.”
“But that’s what I’m breaking my neck to find out!” said Jase, furiously. “I’m not asking you to listen to a set of differences and then conclude the Ruml aren’t like us! I’m asking you to believe they’re not like us to start off with and use the fact of their not being like us as a starting point to understanding their differences of beliefs and thoughts and actions!”
“And after we’ve understood them, what then?” asked Goth. “Will understanding them stop Kator and his expedition? Or the Ruml that come after them?”
“No,” said Jase. “But if we understand, we can maybe explain to them why they needn’t or shouldn’t try to kill us and take over our world the way they want to. Don’t you understand?” he glared at Swanson. “They don’t know any better. Neither do we—yet. But we’ve got a chance in me, and my contact with Kator’s mind, to find out better. So it’s our responsibility to find the answers, not theirs.”
One of the men present, who never spoke, grunted.
“Cut it out,” said Jase looking over at him in disgust. “I’m as human as you are. No alien’s speaking through me.” The man who had grunted got out a cigarette, studied it, and lighted it—not looking at Jase or showing he had heard.
“Go on,” said Swanson patiently. “Go on. Explain it to us.”
“Look—,” said Jase, leaning forward in his chair. “J. P. Scott, in the early nineteen-sixties, did some research on the critical periods in behavioral development that was printed in Science magazine. I’ve just been reading over that article he wrote, again. It points out that there’s an amazing amount of flexibility in behavioral development. In humans and dogs, for example, the periods can actually occur in reverse order—”
“What periods?” asked Swanson.
“Well, they vary from species to species. The song sparrow, Scott points out, for example, has six developmental periods. The dogs—puppies—have four. There’s neonatal, the nursing period, first. Then the transition period, in which the puppy makes the transition to adult methods of feeding and moving about. Third, there’s the socialization period, in which the puppy first begins to socialize with his equals, playing and forming primary social bonds. The fourth and final stage, juvenile, is characterized by the beginning of final weaning-independence.”
Jase paused and swallowed. His throat was dry with the effort of explaining.
“What about it?” demanded Coth.
“Don’t you see?” asked Jase. “Think how different a dog is from a human. And yet those four periods correspond—though not in that order—to similar periods in human development. But of those four periods, only one is comparable to a period of Ruml development. The others are either unconscious, or not there at all in the development of a young individual as Kator was to begin with.”
“What do you mean?” asked Swanson, taking off his spectacles and beginning to clean them with a tissue.
“Didn’t you read my earlier reports?” demanded Jase. “Kator wasn’t even conscious until, by human standards, he was about ten years old. He was born after being carried for three years inside his mother, then transferred to a pouch where he spent the next six years, developing physically but hardly growing and as unconscious as a human in a deep sleep, nursing and breathing and all else by instinctive reflex. Then, suddenly, in his tenth year, he started to grow. Within a week he was too large for the pouch that had been his home for six years. He awoke to consciousness, struggled out of the pouch, and left his mother. Within an hour or two after leaving her, he was walking erect, physically able to care for himself—in fact, a young adult in miniature, already weaned. Left alone, he would have wandered away from his mother. Under civilized Ruml conditions, he was first taken to the Head of the Family, named, and given a room of his own. In the next two years he grew to nine-tenths of his adult size and took his place in Ruml society.”
Jase stopped at last, worked his dry throat, and looked around him. None of the faces looking at him showed any sign of understanding the implications of what he had said. The silent men, in fact, were actually showing signs of restlessness and boredom.
“Don’t you—can’t you understand?” Jase appealed to Swanson. “All the things a human child learns from ten years of conscious association and growing up with its parents or other adults are completely unknown to a Ruml. Mother love is unknown; juvenile play and socialization is unknown. In place of those things are reflexes, or instinctive conditioning we can only guess at. Kator’s reasons for what he does literally don’t make sense in our terms-but they make sense to him. And we’ve got to understand why they make sense if we want to stop the Ruml attack!”
Jase ran down finally. Swanson stood looking at him.
"I'm sorry,” said Swanson, at last. “You made any sense to me, or convinced me that all studying and searching of yours is leading to vital. Let alone that it’s more important than realistic action to surround that Ruml up there on the other side of the moon. Now, will you tell us where they are?”
“No,” said Jase. He stood tip, swaying a little, and reached back to catch hold of the top of the chair to steady himself. “And you won’t go ahead without my telling you because what I will tell you is that you can’t get close to search the other side of the moon without them spotting you. And if they spot you, word will go back immediately, by collapsed universe field relay, to the Ruml Homeworld, and the invasion by the Ruml will be started. So—I won’t tell you, and you’ll leave them alone.”
He turned and started toward the closed door of the library room. Halfway there, he stopped and faced about.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “what comes now that they’re dug in on the moon. They’ll be sending down little relay devices on to the earth’s surface to relay back pictures of what it’s like and we’re like. I’ll keep you informed of where each one of these devices is sent—and if there’s something there you don’t want them to see, you can arrange to have some accident ruin the device.” He paused, swaying a little. “And meanwhile,” he said, “I’ll keep on with the important work, and you’ll let me. Because I’m the only pipeline you’ve got into the enemy camp, and you can’t force me.”
He laughed—or, rather, he had intended to laugh. It came out as the harsh barking of an exhausted man.
“Because,” he said, sharing the joke with them, Tin just as ready to die to save the world in my way as the rest of you are in yours…”
He turned around, fumbled the library door open, and went through it, closing it behind him. Outside he staggered and caught himself with a hand against the wall.
From within the room he had just left a voice penetrated
the relative thinness of the door panels. It was voice, and he assumed it belonged to one of the men who were always present but never spoke.
“That ivory tower bastard!” it said. “He probably never had to work for a living!”
Chapter Fifteen
The ship of the Expedition was down and safe under forty feet of lunar rock. Jase, considering the situation, felt satisfied. The rest had worked like dedicated men, and if the Muffled People were anything comparable to the Ruml, their instruments—even if their suspicions had been aroused-would have a difficult time finding the Expedition.
Jase walked through the Construction Section. In the rooms of this section the other fifty-six members of the Expedition—excluding only himself and the Captain—were working around the clock to construct the simulated shapes of alien objects and creatures that would house the tiny but powerful relay transmitters. “Information collectors” these were officially called—“collectors” plain and simple in the speech of the Expedition members themselves.
These were of three types, two of which had already been sent out. The initial type were simply lumps of nickel-iron with a monomolecular surface layer sensitized to collect up to three days’ worth of images of the surrounding environment. In addition, these collectors had been furnished with tiny internal drive units to get them down to the surface of the planet of the Muffled People and back to the ship—and to explode either on order from the ship or if the collector should be trapped or investigated in any way.
Several thousand of these, looking like meteorite fragments, had been sent down on to the planet and recovered with less than a twenty per cent loss through accident and necessary self-destruction. To the knowledge of the Ruml aboard the ship, not one of the primary devices had been even recognized as anything but a chunk of rock—let alone handled by one of the alien natives. Five weeks had been consumed in this, and now the Expedition had a complete and detailed map of the world of the Muffled People, including the streets of its cities and the contours of its deepest ocean bottoms.
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