Collected Short Fiction, page 1248
“But it is not necessary that we—”
“Permit me to insist. I am overwhelmed by your unselfishness but I could not bear the shame of having inconvenienced you so deeply.”
There was a frosty silence. The Locrian looked—so far as Wing-Marra was capable of telling—extremely annoyed.
But after a moment the Locrian said, “Very well. Let us use the translator. You know me as Speaker-to-Erthumoi. I am accompanied by Ship-Commander and Recorder.”
Three names, four Locrians, no indication of what was what or which was whom. Wing-Marra didn’t even try to get an explanation.
“I am Captain Wing-Marra,” he said. “This is my Diplomacy, Ayana Sanoclaro. These Naxians travel with us and will observe. They call themselves Blue Sphere and Rosy Tetrahedron. Jorin Murry-Balff, my Communications, will record our conversation. With your permission, of course.”
“Granted,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi.
Within the helmet of its suit its head split open, revealing the great luminous beacon of its inner eye.
Wing-Marra shivered.
One of the other Locrians opened its eye also. Wing-Marra could not decide whether that one was Recorder or Ship-Commander. Did it matter? Perhaps they were all Recorder. Or all four were Ship-Commander.
Aliens, he thought. Go and figure.
The other two remained sealed. A safety measure, Wing-Marra suspected. Locrians were terribly vulnerable when their inner eye was exposed. The slightest pressure against it—the touch of a hand—could blind or even kill. Therefore they opened their facial hinges only when they deemed it absolutely necessary to do so.
Even in normal visual mode, Wing-Marra had heard, Locrians saw three-dimensionally, penetrating into the interiors of things. With the inner eye unveiled, he imagined that they could see right into his soul.
The two unveiled ones were watching him from opposite sides, as though trying to read all aspects of him. It was like being in the crossfire of two brilliant lasers. Wing-Marra understood now why they had asked for this face-to-face meeting. They wanted a chance to evaluate die nature of the Erthuma they were dealing with in a way that long distance conversation via neutrino wave could not provide.
Well, let them look, Wing-Marra thought. Let them look as long and as hard and as deep as they like.
The silent surveillance went on and on and on.
After a time he stopped finding it merely disagreeable and began to find it worrisome. He glanced toward the Naxians for an opinion. But they were calm. They lay motionless, placidly coiled side by side in a comer of the room, watching with unblinking eyes. They were in their limbless relaxation state. Evidently they saw no cause for alarm in this peculiar wordless interrogation.
At length one of the unveiled Locrians—not the one who had identified itself as Speaker-to-Erthumoi—said, “We believe that you are trustworthy.”
“I am deeply grateful for that,” Wing-Marra said, trying hard not to sound sarcastic.
“These are delicate matters in which we find ourselves enmeshed,” another of the Locrians intoned. “We must operate from a position of absolute assurance that you will not abuse our confidence.”
“Of course,” Wing-Marra said.
“Let us come to the point, Captain Wing-Marra,” said the fourth alien. “What we would prefer is that you leave this region at once, making no further investigation.”
Ayana Sanoclaro uttered a muffled, undiplomatic grunt of surprise and anger. Wing-Marra’s own reaction was closer to amusement. Was that why they had given him this elaborate scrutiny? That seemed a preposterous buildup for such a straightforward, almost simpleminded demand. Did they think he was a child?
But he restrained himself.
Carefully he said, “We have come a great distance, and we have significant research goals that we wish to carry out. Leaving here now is out of the question for us.”
“Understood. You will not leave and we do not expect you to. As we have said, the problem we face here is delicate, and we would prefer to handle it without the complications that the intrusion of another galactic species can bring. But we state only a preference.”
Wing-Marra nodded. He had forgotten how literal minded Locrians could be.
“Aside from our going away from here right away, then, what is it you really want from us?” he asked.
The two Locrians who had not opened their inner eyes now drew back the hinges of their faces. Wing-Marra found himself confronting four great blazing orbs. Within the translucent helmets, four sharp-edged alien beaks were slowly opening and closing—a sign, he supposed, of intense concentration. But he suspected also that it might connote Locrian tension, disquietude, malaise. Something about their stance suggested that: They held themselves even more stiffly than usual, practically motionless, limbs rigid.
The Naxians too now seemed distressed, probably from having picked up jittery auras from the Locrians. They had uncoiled and lay stretched taut, side by side, their eyes gleaming and bulging, their little transient flipper-limbs shooting in and out of their sides.
“It may be the case,” said one of the Locrians finally, just as the silence had begun to seem interminable, “that we are not able to deal with the problem that we see here unaided. Indeed, we are quite certain of this. What we propose, therefore, is an alliance.”
“What?”
“We will recapitulate. There is a problem in this solar system that causes us much concern. We would rather conceal it from you than share it with you; but because we have come to feel that we are incapable of solving the problem without assistance, specifically without Erthuma assistance, we are willing to regard the arrival of Erthumoi at just this moment as providential. And invite you to work with us toward a solution.”
Wing-Marra felt a faintly sickening sensation, as though he were teetering on the rim of an infinitely deep mine shaft. What, he wondered, was he getting into here?
He looked from one Locrian to the next, four fleshless, forbidding insectoid heads whose alien eyes blazed like frightful torches.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me something about this problem of yours.”
“Let us show you,” said the Locrian who was Speaker-to-Erthumoi.
The alien gestured to another of the Locrians—perhaps it was Recorder—who drew from the folds of its spacesuit a small brassy-looking metallic object that Wing-Marra recognized as an Locrian image-projecting device. The Locrian set it on the floor in front of itself.
“We came here,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi, “much as you did, simply to explore. We had no military or economic purpose in mind. As you already recognize, the planets of this solar system would be of little value to us. But in the course of our reconnaissance, we came upon something in the vicinity of the second world that aroused our curiosity. We investigated more closely, and this is what we observed.”
Speaker-to-Erthumoi nodded. Recorder—if that was who it was—stared at the image projector until a warm golden glow, like that of a little sun, began to come from it. The device, Wing-Marra knew, was tuned to the Locrian’s brain waves.
Suddenly the room blossomed into vivid color. A three-dimensional scene, so immediate in its presence that it seemed almost as though the wall of the Achilles had opened to reveal another world just outside, took form before Wing-Marra’s eyes.
It was another world. Heavy-bellied orange clouds hung low in a deep turquoise sky. The vantage point at which Wing-Marra found himself was just below the clouds, perhaps a kilometer above the surface. He saw dense blue-green forests below, broad rivers, a chain of huge shimmering lakes.
Far off on the horizon a smallish G-type sun was setting, streaking the air with brilliant bands of violet and gold. On the opposite side of the sky a moon had already begun rising, huge and oppressively close, perhaps no more than one hundred thousand kilometers away. Its bare, smooth, gleaming face was marked with the dark, rugged lines of what must surely be immense mountain ranges ringing shining ovals that might have been the beds of long-dry seas.
“What you see is the second world of the nearby system on a summer evening,” Speaker-to-Erthumoi announced. “It is not an agreeable place. The mean temperature at the altitude of observation is approximately 315 K. It is slightly cooler at ground level, but still unpleasantly warm, at least by our standards. The atmosphere is composed almost entirely of nitrogen and oxygen, with substantial water vapor and minor components of argon and carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure is equally displeasing, approximately seven times as great, at surface level, as on Locrian-norm worlds. There are strong tidal effects, caused by the proximity of a satellite unusually large in relation to its primary, and a vortex of relatively cool air descending permanently from the poles creates constant strong cyclonic winds. Ordinarily we would not have continued our observations of such a planet beyond this point. However—”
The other Locrian made a barely perceptible movement. The focal intensity of the image changed, and Wing-Marra abruptly found himself looking at die second world from a point not far above the tangled canopy of a tropical jungle.
Winged creatures were moving slowly through the air.
“Native life?” Wing-Marra asked.
“No. Look again.”
He narrowed his eyes against the brightness of the sky, doubly lit by the spectacular sunset and the cold white glory of the gigantic shining moon. What had seemed to him at first quick glance to be huge birds now appeared something quite other: humanoid figures with small stubby legs and two slender arms held close against their chests. From bulging humps below their shoulders rose two powerful limblike projections heavily banded with muscle and anchored by jutting keels on their chests; and out of those came the giant fleshy wings, far larger in area than the creatures themselves, whose steady stately flapping motions held them aloft.
Then one of the flying creatures turned so that its narrow, tapering head was clearly outlined against the sky, and Wing-Marra could plainly see the great curving bony crest rising from its forehead and the equally astonishing jut of its elongated chin. He had no further doubt. Another of the galactic races had preceded both Locrians and Erthumoi to this place.
“Crotonites?” he said, with a little involuntary shudder. “Indeed. See, now, their base.” Focus shifted once again, and Wing-Marra beheld the elaborate webwork weave of a Crotonite nest, spreading through the treetops to cover perhaps a hectare. The winged aliens, equipped with breathing masks to help them deal with an atmosphere whose chemistry was not much to their liking, moved busily back and forth, swooping down to land, disappearing within the strands of the delicate structure, emerging again and rising skyward with strong, unhurried strokes of their great wings.
“If there are Crotonites here,” Wing-Marra said, “why haven’t we detected any signs of a Crotonite starship in the vicinity?”
“No doubt it has been here and gone,” said the Locrian. “So far as we can determine, the Crotonite base here has been established for quite some time. We regard it a semipermanent outpost.”
Wing-Marra looked toward Sanoclaro. The Diplomacy’s expression was solemn.
She said, “It might just be a world they could use, I suppose. Thick atmosphere, warm climate. Though the atmosphere doesn’t seem poisonous enough to make them really happy, but they could work out some kind of adaptation to help them cope with all that oxygen. They seem to be doing all right with those breathing masks. Well, if they’ve filed a claim, we’ll have to apply to them for permission if we want to make a landing and set up a base. But not if we’re only going to make a ship survey of the molecular cloud. This solar system lies completely outside the cloud. Their claim wouldn’t give them any rights to adjacent space.”
“They have filed no claim,” Speaker-to-Erthumoi said.
Wing-Marra frowned. “No?”
“Nothing. Nor have they made any response to our presence here. They seem to be making an elaborate point of ignoring us. It is as though they have not noticed us. Or you, we presume, since you evidently have not heard from them. They simply go about their business, setting out every day from that base and exploring the planet in an ever widening circle.”
“Then I fail to see the difficulty,” the Erthuma captain said. “If they don’t care that others are here, why should you care so much that they are? This whole solar system’s a free zone for everybody. And in any case there doesn’t seem to be much here of any importance.”
“You have not heard the entire story yet,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. “They also have a base on the moon.”
Another tiny movement by the Locrian operating the projector, and the lush tropical scene vanished in an instant. Its place was taken by something far more harsh: the barren, airless landscape of the second planet’s moon. Now Wing-Marra found himself at the edge of what must have been an ancient sea. A shallow, barren basin of some white limy rock stretched to the horizon. Colossal mountains, their lofty summits unexpectedly eroded and rounded as they might have been on a world that had an atmosphere, rose to one side. The dazzling green bulk of the second world hung close overhead, filling the sky, terrifyingly near, seemingly about to plunge down upon him.
The Crotonites had woven a seven-sided Crotonite dwelling that sprawled over the brightly lit plain just at the edge of the mountains’ shadow. And Crotonites, swaddled in individual pressure-bubbles that covered them, wings and all, from crested heads to stubby legs, were driving about in land-crawlers.
But their movements were incomprehensible. They seemed to be circling a big empty area a dozen or so kilometers from their base. From time to time one of the crawlers would abruptly disappear, as though it had been devoured by some unseen lurking monster, or one would wink suddenly into existence in the middle of the plain, as if popping out of nowhere.
“I don’t understand,” Wing-Marra said. “Where are they going? Where are they coming from?”
“We ask ourselves the same thing,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. “Our answer is that the Crotonites believe they must go to great pains to conceal whatever they are doing on that lunar plain. And so they have generated a zone of invisibility around it.”
“Can they do such a thing?” Wing-Marra asked, surprised.
“It would appear that they can. We see nothing; and yet we feel the presence of living beings in that empty zone.”
Murry-Balff said, “What do your instrument readings show? If there are Crotonites moving around out there, you’d be getting infrared output. And if they’ve set up some kind of invisibility gadget, there might be some measurable light-wave distortion around its edges. Or various other forms of data corruption.”
“We do not have instruments capable of measuring what cannot be seen,” replied the Locrian, and there was a distinctly icy edge to its flat, unemotional voice. “What we detect is the emanations of intelligent beings, radiating in the Crotonite mind-spectrum, coming from a place that seems to be uninhabited and uninhabitable.”
Wing-Marra said, “What do you think they’re trying to hide? A weapons factory? A center for espionage activities? A laboratory for secret scientific research?”
“We have considered all those possibilities. They have varying orders of probability. But what we think is most probable of all is that they have discovered something of great value on that moon, and do not want any other galactic race to know what they have.”
“That might explain why they haven’t filed a claim to this system,” Sanoclaro said. “Even though their occupation of the planet and the moon would ordinarily validate any claim. Maybe they didn’t want to call this place to anybody’s attention even to the extent of claiming it. They gambled instead that nobody else would find it.”
“This is our belief also,” said the Locrian.
Sanoclaro shook her head. “Bad luck for them that not one but two different galactic races stumbled on it right after them, against all odds. But sometimes it does happen that the needle in the haystack gets found.”
Speaker-to-Erthumoi said, “What it is the Crotonites have discovered here, we have no idea, any more than we know how they are able to conceal it. But Crotonites would not remain in so hostile an environment without strong motivation. We wish to know what that motivation is: that is, what it is that they are concealing.”
Wing-Marra laughed. “We thought you were the ones who had found something valuable here.”
“What we found was Crotonites working here secretly in a zone of mystery. We wish to know what that zone of mystery contains. And so we invite you to enter into partnership with us.”
“So you’ve already told us. But just what kind of partnership do you mean?”
“We have one asset to offer: the discovery that the Crotonites are hiding something. But we are unable to proceed beyond that. You Erthumoi can provide, perhaps, the asset we lack: the technology by which the Crotonites’ shield of concealment can be penetrated. Let us work together to expose and exploit their secret. And we will share, half and half, in such profits as come from the venture.”
“Half and half?” Wing-Marra said. “If there’s something valuable on that moon, don’t you think the Crotonites are entitled to a share, too? Or are you planning to cut them out of it altogether?”
“To be sure,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. “We may have to divide the profits in thirds.”
The discussion aboard the Achilles that followed the departure of the Locrian boarding party was very possibly the loudest and most vociferous that Wing-Marra had ever known in all the eleven cycles of his life.
Sanoclaro, of course, was horrified at the notion of entering into any kind of deal with Locrians, and urged Wing-Marra to head for the nearest Erthuma world at once and turn the affair over to the authorities there. But her friend Linga Hyath, to everyone’s amazement, disagreed completely with her: She was all for finding out without any delay what it was that the Crotonites were hiding on the second planet’s moon. If the cool and unemotional Locrians were so churned up over it, she said, then it was important to know what they had. Mikoil Karpov took the same position, and so did Murry-Balff, who was already bubbling with notions of how to break through the Crotonite data screen.
“Permit me to insist. I am overwhelmed by your unselfishness but I could not bear the shame of having inconvenienced you so deeply.”
There was a frosty silence. The Locrian looked—so far as Wing-Marra was capable of telling—extremely annoyed.
But after a moment the Locrian said, “Very well. Let us use the translator. You know me as Speaker-to-Erthumoi. I am accompanied by Ship-Commander and Recorder.”
Three names, four Locrians, no indication of what was what or which was whom. Wing-Marra didn’t even try to get an explanation.
“I am Captain Wing-Marra,” he said. “This is my Diplomacy, Ayana Sanoclaro. These Naxians travel with us and will observe. They call themselves Blue Sphere and Rosy Tetrahedron. Jorin Murry-Balff, my Communications, will record our conversation. With your permission, of course.”
“Granted,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi.
Within the helmet of its suit its head split open, revealing the great luminous beacon of its inner eye.
Wing-Marra shivered.
One of the other Locrians opened its eye also. Wing-Marra could not decide whether that one was Recorder or Ship-Commander. Did it matter? Perhaps they were all Recorder. Or all four were Ship-Commander.
Aliens, he thought. Go and figure.
The other two remained sealed. A safety measure, Wing-Marra suspected. Locrians were terribly vulnerable when their inner eye was exposed. The slightest pressure against it—the touch of a hand—could blind or even kill. Therefore they opened their facial hinges only when they deemed it absolutely necessary to do so.
Even in normal visual mode, Wing-Marra had heard, Locrians saw three-dimensionally, penetrating into the interiors of things. With the inner eye unveiled, he imagined that they could see right into his soul.
The two unveiled ones were watching him from opposite sides, as though trying to read all aspects of him. It was like being in the crossfire of two brilliant lasers. Wing-Marra understood now why they had asked for this face-to-face meeting. They wanted a chance to evaluate die nature of the Erthuma they were dealing with in a way that long distance conversation via neutrino wave could not provide.
Well, let them look, Wing-Marra thought. Let them look as long and as hard and as deep as they like.
The silent surveillance went on and on and on.
After a time he stopped finding it merely disagreeable and began to find it worrisome. He glanced toward the Naxians for an opinion. But they were calm. They lay motionless, placidly coiled side by side in a comer of the room, watching with unblinking eyes. They were in their limbless relaxation state. Evidently they saw no cause for alarm in this peculiar wordless interrogation.
At length one of the unveiled Locrians—not the one who had identified itself as Speaker-to-Erthumoi—said, “We believe that you are trustworthy.”
“I am deeply grateful for that,” Wing-Marra said, trying hard not to sound sarcastic.
“These are delicate matters in which we find ourselves enmeshed,” another of the Locrians intoned. “We must operate from a position of absolute assurance that you will not abuse our confidence.”
“Of course,” Wing-Marra said.
“Let us come to the point, Captain Wing-Marra,” said the fourth alien. “What we would prefer is that you leave this region at once, making no further investigation.”
Ayana Sanoclaro uttered a muffled, undiplomatic grunt of surprise and anger. Wing-Marra’s own reaction was closer to amusement. Was that why they had given him this elaborate scrutiny? That seemed a preposterous buildup for such a straightforward, almost simpleminded demand. Did they think he was a child?
But he restrained himself.
Carefully he said, “We have come a great distance, and we have significant research goals that we wish to carry out. Leaving here now is out of the question for us.”
“Understood. You will not leave and we do not expect you to. As we have said, the problem we face here is delicate, and we would prefer to handle it without the complications that the intrusion of another galactic species can bring. But we state only a preference.”
Wing-Marra nodded. He had forgotten how literal minded Locrians could be.
“Aside from our going away from here right away, then, what is it you really want from us?” he asked.
The two Locrians who had not opened their inner eyes now drew back the hinges of their faces. Wing-Marra found himself confronting four great blazing orbs. Within the translucent helmets, four sharp-edged alien beaks were slowly opening and closing—a sign, he supposed, of intense concentration. But he suspected also that it might connote Locrian tension, disquietude, malaise. Something about their stance suggested that: They held themselves even more stiffly than usual, practically motionless, limbs rigid.
The Naxians too now seemed distressed, probably from having picked up jittery auras from the Locrians. They had uncoiled and lay stretched taut, side by side, their eyes gleaming and bulging, their little transient flipper-limbs shooting in and out of their sides.
“It may be the case,” said one of the Locrians finally, just as the silence had begun to seem interminable, “that we are not able to deal with the problem that we see here unaided. Indeed, we are quite certain of this. What we propose, therefore, is an alliance.”
“What?”
“We will recapitulate. There is a problem in this solar system that causes us much concern. We would rather conceal it from you than share it with you; but because we have come to feel that we are incapable of solving the problem without assistance, specifically without Erthuma assistance, we are willing to regard the arrival of Erthumoi at just this moment as providential. And invite you to work with us toward a solution.”
Wing-Marra felt a faintly sickening sensation, as though he were teetering on the rim of an infinitely deep mine shaft. What, he wondered, was he getting into here?
He looked from one Locrian to the next, four fleshless, forbidding insectoid heads whose alien eyes blazed like frightful torches.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me something about this problem of yours.”
“Let us show you,” said the Locrian who was Speaker-to-Erthumoi.
The alien gestured to another of the Locrians—perhaps it was Recorder—who drew from the folds of its spacesuit a small brassy-looking metallic object that Wing-Marra recognized as an Locrian image-projecting device. The Locrian set it on the floor in front of itself.
“We came here,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi, “much as you did, simply to explore. We had no military or economic purpose in mind. As you already recognize, the planets of this solar system would be of little value to us. But in the course of our reconnaissance, we came upon something in the vicinity of the second world that aroused our curiosity. We investigated more closely, and this is what we observed.”
Speaker-to-Erthumoi nodded. Recorder—if that was who it was—stared at the image projector until a warm golden glow, like that of a little sun, began to come from it. The device, Wing-Marra knew, was tuned to the Locrian’s brain waves.
Suddenly the room blossomed into vivid color. A three-dimensional scene, so immediate in its presence that it seemed almost as though the wall of the Achilles had opened to reveal another world just outside, took form before Wing-Marra’s eyes.
It was another world. Heavy-bellied orange clouds hung low in a deep turquoise sky. The vantage point at which Wing-Marra found himself was just below the clouds, perhaps a kilometer above the surface. He saw dense blue-green forests below, broad rivers, a chain of huge shimmering lakes.
Far off on the horizon a smallish G-type sun was setting, streaking the air with brilliant bands of violet and gold. On the opposite side of the sky a moon had already begun rising, huge and oppressively close, perhaps no more than one hundred thousand kilometers away. Its bare, smooth, gleaming face was marked with the dark, rugged lines of what must surely be immense mountain ranges ringing shining ovals that might have been the beds of long-dry seas.
“What you see is the second world of the nearby system on a summer evening,” Speaker-to-Erthumoi announced. “It is not an agreeable place. The mean temperature at the altitude of observation is approximately 315 K. It is slightly cooler at ground level, but still unpleasantly warm, at least by our standards. The atmosphere is composed almost entirely of nitrogen and oxygen, with substantial water vapor and minor components of argon and carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure is equally displeasing, approximately seven times as great, at surface level, as on Locrian-norm worlds. There are strong tidal effects, caused by the proximity of a satellite unusually large in relation to its primary, and a vortex of relatively cool air descending permanently from the poles creates constant strong cyclonic winds. Ordinarily we would not have continued our observations of such a planet beyond this point. However—”
The other Locrian made a barely perceptible movement. The focal intensity of the image changed, and Wing-Marra abruptly found himself looking at die second world from a point not far above the tangled canopy of a tropical jungle.
Winged creatures were moving slowly through the air.
“Native life?” Wing-Marra asked.
“No. Look again.”
He narrowed his eyes against the brightness of the sky, doubly lit by the spectacular sunset and the cold white glory of the gigantic shining moon. What had seemed to him at first quick glance to be huge birds now appeared something quite other: humanoid figures with small stubby legs and two slender arms held close against their chests. From bulging humps below their shoulders rose two powerful limblike projections heavily banded with muscle and anchored by jutting keels on their chests; and out of those came the giant fleshy wings, far larger in area than the creatures themselves, whose steady stately flapping motions held them aloft.
Then one of the flying creatures turned so that its narrow, tapering head was clearly outlined against the sky, and Wing-Marra could plainly see the great curving bony crest rising from its forehead and the equally astonishing jut of its elongated chin. He had no further doubt. Another of the galactic races had preceded both Locrians and Erthumoi to this place.
“Crotonites?” he said, with a little involuntary shudder. “Indeed. See, now, their base.” Focus shifted once again, and Wing-Marra beheld the elaborate webwork weave of a Crotonite nest, spreading through the treetops to cover perhaps a hectare. The winged aliens, equipped with breathing masks to help them deal with an atmosphere whose chemistry was not much to their liking, moved busily back and forth, swooping down to land, disappearing within the strands of the delicate structure, emerging again and rising skyward with strong, unhurried strokes of their great wings.
“If there are Crotonites here,” Wing-Marra said, “why haven’t we detected any signs of a Crotonite starship in the vicinity?”
“No doubt it has been here and gone,” said the Locrian. “So far as we can determine, the Crotonite base here has been established for quite some time. We regard it a semipermanent outpost.”
Wing-Marra looked toward Sanoclaro. The Diplomacy’s expression was solemn.
She said, “It might just be a world they could use, I suppose. Thick atmosphere, warm climate. Though the atmosphere doesn’t seem poisonous enough to make them really happy, but they could work out some kind of adaptation to help them cope with all that oxygen. They seem to be doing all right with those breathing masks. Well, if they’ve filed a claim, we’ll have to apply to them for permission if we want to make a landing and set up a base. But not if we’re only going to make a ship survey of the molecular cloud. This solar system lies completely outside the cloud. Their claim wouldn’t give them any rights to adjacent space.”
“They have filed no claim,” Speaker-to-Erthumoi said.
Wing-Marra frowned. “No?”
“Nothing. Nor have they made any response to our presence here. They seem to be making an elaborate point of ignoring us. It is as though they have not noticed us. Or you, we presume, since you evidently have not heard from them. They simply go about their business, setting out every day from that base and exploring the planet in an ever widening circle.”
“Then I fail to see the difficulty,” the Erthuma captain said. “If they don’t care that others are here, why should you care so much that they are? This whole solar system’s a free zone for everybody. And in any case there doesn’t seem to be much here of any importance.”
“You have not heard the entire story yet,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. “They also have a base on the moon.”
Another tiny movement by the Locrian operating the projector, and the lush tropical scene vanished in an instant. Its place was taken by something far more harsh: the barren, airless landscape of the second planet’s moon. Now Wing-Marra found himself at the edge of what must have been an ancient sea. A shallow, barren basin of some white limy rock stretched to the horizon. Colossal mountains, their lofty summits unexpectedly eroded and rounded as they might have been on a world that had an atmosphere, rose to one side. The dazzling green bulk of the second world hung close overhead, filling the sky, terrifyingly near, seemingly about to plunge down upon him.
The Crotonites had woven a seven-sided Crotonite dwelling that sprawled over the brightly lit plain just at the edge of the mountains’ shadow. And Crotonites, swaddled in individual pressure-bubbles that covered them, wings and all, from crested heads to stubby legs, were driving about in land-crawlers.
But their movements were incomprehensible. They seemed to be circling a big empty area a dozen or so kilometers from their base. From time to time one of the crawlers would abruptly disappear, as though it had been devoured by some unseen lurking monster, or one would wink suddenly into existence in the middle of the plain, as if popping out of nowhere.
“I don’t understand,” Wing-Marra said. “Where are they going? Where are they coming from?”
“We ask ourselves the same thing,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. “Our answer is that the Crotonites believe they must go to great pains to conceal whatever they are doing on that lunar plain. And so they have generated a zone of invisibility around it.”
“Can they do such a thing?” Wing-Marra asked, surprised.
“It would appear that they can. We see nothing; and yet we feel the presence of living beings in that empty zone.”
Murry-Balff said, “What do your instrument readings show? If there are Crotonites moving around out there, you’d be getting infrared output. And if they’ve set up some kind of invisibility gadget, there might be some measurable light-wave distortion around its edges. Or various other forms of data corruption.”
“We do not have instruments capable of measuring what cannot be seen,” replied the Locrian, and there was a distinctly icy edge to its flat, unemotional voice. “What we detect is the emanations of intelligent beings, radiating in the Crotonite mind-spectrum, coming from a place that seems to be uninhabited and uninhabitable.”
Wing-Marra said, “What do you think they’re trying to hide? A weapons factory? A center for espionage activities? A laboratory for secret scientific research?”
“We have considered all those possibilities. They have varying orders of probability. But what we think is most probable of all is that they have discovered something of great value on that moon, and do not want any other galactic race to know what they have.”
“That might explain why they haven’t filed a claim to this system,” Sanoclaro said. “Even though their occupation of the planet and the moon would ordinarily validate any claim. Maybe they didn’t want to call this place to anybody’s attention even to the extent of claiming it. They gambled instead that nobody else would find it.”
“This is our belief also,” said the Locrian.
Sanoclaro shook her head. “Bad luck for them that not one but two different galactic races stumbled on it right after them, against all odds. But sometimes it does happen that the needle in the haystack gets found.”
Speaker-to-Erthumoi said, “What it is the Crotonites have discovered here, we have no idea, any more than we know how they are able to conceal it. But Crotonites would not remain in so hostile an environment without strong motivation. We wish to know what that motivation is: that is, what it is that they are concealing.”
Wing-Marra laughed. “We thought you were the ones who had found something valuable here.”
“What we found was Crotonites working here secretly in a zone of mystery. We wish to know what that zone of mystery contains. And so we invite you to enter into partnership with us.”
“So you’ve already told us. But just what kind of partnership do you mean?”
“We have one asset to offer: the discovery that the Crotonites are hiding something. But we are unable to proceed beyond that. You Erthumoi can provide, perhaps, the asset we lack: the technology by which the Crotonites’ shield of concealment can be penetrated. Let us work together to expose and exploit their secret. And we will share, half and half, in such profits as come from the venture.”
“Half and half?” Wing-Marra said. “If there’s something valuable on that moon, don’t you think the Crotonites are entitled to a share, too? Or are you planning to cut them out of it altogether?”
“To be sure,” said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. “We may have to divide the profits in thirds.”
The discussion aboard the Achilles that followed the departure of the Locrian boarding party was very possibly the loudest and most vociferous that Wing-Marra had ever known in all the eleven cycles of his life.
Sanoclaro, of course, was horrified at the notion of entering into any kind of deal with Locrians, and urged Wing-Marra to head for the nearest Erthuma world at once and turn the affair over to the authorities there. But her friend Linga Hyath, to everyone’s amazement, disagreed completely with her: She was all for finding out without any delay what it was that the Crotonites were hiding on the second planet’s moon. If the cool and unemotional Locrians were so churned up over it, she said, then it was important to know what they had. Mikoil Karpov took the same position, and so did Murry-Balff, who was already bubbling with notions of how to break through the Crotonite data screen.
