Title: Reign of the telepuppets
Author: Galouye, Daniel F.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Reign of the telepuppets" ***


                       Reign of the Telepuppets

                         By DANIEL F. GALOUYE

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

"Alpha Tauri."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You did _all that_ in two years' time?" McAllister asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assuring himself that the insolent creatures were _not_ spurious
impressions on his drums, he blasted another boulder. _That_ for the
pretenders, should they ever decide to contest His Reign!

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

_He, Himself_, was the Supreme Being of All Creation!

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let her try.

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

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



                                  II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And McAllister?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accident? he asked himself.

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Released, the lesser worker scurried off to rejoin Minnie.

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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



                                  III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And there are our puppets!" Carol announced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean there might be danger?"

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortimer stabbed his chest with a pudgy thumb. "_Me?_"

"Right."

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

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

Mortimer paled as he lunged for the subspace drive switch.

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

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

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

Outside, the puppets were withdrawing.

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The master robot didn't even break stride.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the way back to the _Photon II_, Stewart lost himself in confusion.
Random misorientation? Of course. What else? But why should he even
consider the alternate possibility--that the misorientation was _not_
random, as suggested by the director's question?

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how could _anyone_ restrain Vrausot?

       *       *       *       *       *

"Prepare for gunnery practice," the Chancellor directed.

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

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

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

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

"Suit yourself," the Chancellor grumbled.

The screen hunted out and steadied upon the alien ship.

"It's clean!" Mittich exclaimed. "They're _not_ armed!"

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

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

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

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

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

Appalled, the Assemblyman drew back. "But that's just what we're _not_
supposed to do! We might touch off a war that will annihilate either or
both of two cultures!"

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

"But--"

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

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

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

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

"I--what?"

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

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

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

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



                                  IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart examined the thing. The pilot was right.

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

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

The director looked up sharply.

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

McAllister only hunched his bony shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded--not enthusiastically, however.

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

"Can you pinpoint the frequency?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But can you give it _coded_ commands?"

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

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

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

"Still transmitting. No interruption."

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

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

Randall started. "What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

Interested, he inspected the sequenced data and took note of the
modulation peaks that exactly duplicated the C_{5}H_{8} parameter.

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

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

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

He did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subdued finally, she withdrew.

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

"Yes?" the Assemblyman prompted, expecting more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

"Action?" Mittich asked, fearing the worst.

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

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

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

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

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

"They evidently need the practice," Kavula advised.

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

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

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

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

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

"But--"

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

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

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

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

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



                                   V


Stewart woke up shouting the next morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instantly, the monstrous creatures poured through.

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he stood hesitatingly before the master robot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

Bigboss!

In a most unusual position! And--_motionless_!

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

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

_Still_ no response!

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

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

She had won! She had supplanted Bigboss!

She had climbed to the top rung of the ladder!

And now She was Supreme Being!

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How _did_ an Omnipotent One act?

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

Was that what _She_ should do?

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

       *       *       *       *       *

Halfway back to the _Photon_, Stewart paused and leaned against a
boulder, exhausted. The muscles in his legs were flaccid from lifting
the great weight of hermetically sealed plating with each step. Now he
fully understood that the suit was _not_ made for walking.

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

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

It was _a ship_--the likes of which he had never seen before! Or, then
again--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had expected it all along!

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

He had _known_ that a ship--_an alien vessel_--would be here waiting
for them!

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

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



                                  VI


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

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

Grim-faced, the Assemblyman only stared at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I--" The other hesitated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vrausot displayed his teeth in an expression of uncertainty.

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

"How soon?"

"By next sunup, I'm sure."

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

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

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

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

"_You_ do?"

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

McAllister and Mortimer were huddled against the wall, still assuring
each other it must have been some mistake, that there just _couldn't_
be an alien race anywhere around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Randall motioned for silence. "Let him finish."

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

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

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

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

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

But Randall was shaking his head miserably.

       *       *       *       *       *

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

Stewart staggered back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

But there was no response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



                                  VII


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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

Then Carol screamed and lurched back against the far wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol gripped his arm and he looked off in the direction of her
extended finger. Seeping in through the entrance, the gathering light
of day was dimmed by a dark form descending silently to the surface.

He lunged up. "The Tzarean ship!"

But it wasn't until several seconds later that he realized he had used
two _clicks_ of his teeth and a _hiss_ to pronounce the strange word
between "the" and "ship."

       *       *       *       *       *

Chancellor Vrausot was even more imposing in his home-environment suit.
The helmet made his head seem twice as large and the clear-plastic
snout cup enormously magnified his craggy teeth.

Just inside the main hatch, Assemblyman Mittich regarded the other and
swallowed a strong taste of neglected opportunity. He had soaked awake
all night, trying desperately to muster the will to accuse Vrausot of
malfeasance and assume command.

But he had to face the bitter fact that he lacked sufficient courage.
And, even more distressing, his cowardice was something he would have
to live with for the rest of his life--as he watched the destruction of
many worlds and billions of their inhabitants.

Odd, he thought, how so much could hinge on a single twist of
circumstance. Vrausot would return to the Shoal and become a symbol
around which Tzarean determination would rally.

On the other hand, if he, Mittich, were leader of this expedition, he
too would receive a hero's welcome. Only, his praises would be hissed
in the same breath with glorious tribute to the concepts of peaceful
contact.

Vrausot turned to check the readiness of his landing party.

"All stun weapons loaded and set?" he asked, his voice sounding coarse
both in Mittich's earphones and through a bulkhead speaker.

He received twenty affirmative tail flicks.

Of the pilot, standing by the hatch control switch, he demanded:
"Status of the aliens' robots?"

"They are _all_ impotent," Kavula reported back into the bulkhead
speaker. "The last one used up its remaining power as we descended."

Vrausot stepped toward the hatch, but hesitated again. "Kavula, you
will double check the detention compartment and see that the proper
protein nutrient is being synthesized."

The pilot acknowledged with a thump of his tail and opened the hatch.

A short while later the landing party was making its way across the
plain toward the area strewn densely with boulders and the cave in the
cliff beyond. Formality was strictly observed. Vrausot went first.
Twenty paces behind him came Mittich; then, at intervals of ten paces,
the remainder of the detail.

       *       *       *       *       *

For Minnie, impotence was a strange and bewildering sensation as she
stood paralyzed out among the boulders.

Equilibrium gyros spinning too slowly to accomplish their function, she
had tilted over against a rock. In a final and desperate spasm, her
drill head had swung upward, toppled over, fallen a few centimeters and
come to rest precariously against a ridge.

Frantically, she fought relentless inertia. She opened special circuits
that would ordinarily have flooded her balancing system with emergency
current. But servomechanisms failed to respond and her chrome-plated
neck remained thrust toward a sun now well up in the sky.

Gears whirred faintly and her head turned ever so slowly on its axis,
bringing its video sensor to bear on the cave entrance.

It had been her determined efforts to reach the non-Totemic mobiles,
she reasoned, that had drained off all her energy. She had been aware
of the imminent power failure even during her last, frantic blows at
the rocks. Then, retreating, she had struggled desperately against
terrifying paralysis.

And now she stood almost powerless, whereas before her forced
ascendancy she had imagined she would be _All_ Powerful. It was an
ironic turn of fate indeed. Oh, how she longed now for the telemetric
voices of the clan, the crisp orders from Bigboss, the obedient,
sometimes plaintive responses of Screw Worm to her own directions.

Incapable of movement, she sensed finally and with much distress that
her rationalization processes themselves--were becoming--sluggish,
weak. She could hardly--think coherently--or with rapidity--any longer.

Slowly her head responded to the pull of gravity and turned once
more on its axis, the weighty chuck arcing down like a pendulum. It
reached the nadir of its swing and momentum carried it up in the other
direction. In a desperate effort, she locked the servo unit.

In that position, her video lens took in the huge, new symmetrical form
that had come to rest out on the plain.

It was--another Totem! And approaching--in her direction now were--many
other non-Totemic creatures--somewhat different in form--perhaps,
from--the ones Bigboss had--pursued. But--still insolent,
despicable--things, nevertheless.

Was it--possible that she--could still--discharge her--function
as--Supreme Being? If they--passed--close enough, it--would
require--only one--final--desperate--impulse--to--

       *       *       *       *       *

With the others, Stewart crowded into the cave entrance, careful not
to let Carol press too far outside where she would no longer be in the
stream of oxygen flowing from the bowels of the satellite.

"They're coming!" McAllister exclaimed, withdrawing. Mortimer retreated
with him, striking out for a small passageway that fed from one of the
side walls.

Stewart strained forward, shading his eyes against the glare of
Aldebaran. The landing party's advance was half concealed by the
mass of rocks and outcroppings that hid most of their ship. Only
occasionally could he see part of a space-suited Hyadean form as its
clumsy, swaying stride brought it more completely into his line of
sight.

And vision was further complicated by the glint of sunlight off the
Mineral Analyzer's up-thrust drill head, which had finally come to rest
against the rock.

Carol tilted her head attentively and frowned. "I'm picking up the
_oddest_ radio stuff. The modulation breaks down into nothing more than
clicking and hissing sounds. I can't seem to get any meaning. It's
too--alien!"

Randall reached back into the cave for his hostile-atmosphere sheath.
"I'm going out there and see what happens. After all, I'm responsible
for our predicament."

But just then the first alien figure pulled into view, coming around
the boulder and pausing. Apparently sighting Randall's movement in the
cave entrance, the Hyadean raised a stubby arm that held a gleaming
metal instrument.

Randall pulled Carol back into the subterranean chamber. But Stewart
only stood there frozen in bewilderment.

Then the Mineral Analyzer's ponderous drill head slipped from its perch
and came plunging down. It shattered the Hyadean's helmet and almost
tore his grotesque head off, sending his weapon flying out across the
plain.

The creature lay there writhing for a moment, then was still, its
hideous crocodile head turned lifelessly toward Aldebaran.

Stewart, his eyes locked hypnotically on the prostrate form, could only
watch with shocked fascination as the other members of the landing
party appeared from behind the rocks. They stood silently around the
body, then turned back toward their ship.

"Tzareans"--"Tzarean Shoal"--"Curule
Assembly"--"Vrausot"--"Mittich"--"_uraphi_"--

Strange words and phrases whirled about in Stewart's thrashing
thoughts as a great flood of deeply buried experiences rushed
with cyclonic fury into the conscious levels of his mind. And he
realized that, just as the sight of the Hyadean ship had swept aside
the conditioning Randall had imposed upon him, so was the sight
of Hyadeans--Tzareans--hurling aside another, denser curtain of
conditioning.

He staggered back into the cave and fell sitting against the wall as
all the suppressed knowledge and memories engulfed him.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Stewart and Harlston were seated beside the table in the Great Hall of
the Curule Assembly. They were having some difficulty making themselves
comfortable in chairs designed to accommodate Tzarean buttocks and
tail, rather than support the human form. They were manacled, but only
symbolically--with flimsy crepe paperlike handcuffs._

_"Our problem," Mittich, the Hisser of the Assembly was saying, "has
been clearly defined. We have captured the expeditionary ship of an
alien culture that appears to be expanding in the direction of the
Tzarean Shoal. We have taken pain to teach its two crew members the
rudiments of our language. And we have found that the official alien
response to this situation may or may not be hostile."_

_"Kill them! Kill them!" one of the Assemblymen clicked out as he
sprang up on his tail._

_The Great Hall resounded with click-hisses of approval and
disapproval--an equal measure of each, it seemed to Stewart._

_He watched Mittich smile--at least, it passed for a smile in the
Tzarean Shoal--tolerantly at the excited Assemblyman._

_"Killing our prisoners," he chided, "will not alter the fact that
alien expansion is under way in the direction of our Shoal."_

_Chancellor Vrausot lumbered down the central aisle, defying the
independence of the legislature as he had during all sessions which
Stewart and Harlston had attended as Exhibits A and B of the "Alien
threat" issue._

_Whacking his tail against the floor for attention, he stood before
the table and hissed vehemently, "We must arm to the limit of our
potential. We must dispose of these prisoners. We must attack their
centers of civilization before they attack_ ours!"

_Another Assemblyman rose imploringly. "But how can we do that? We
haven't fought a war in countless millennia! Once we were many and
mighty, as_ they _are now. But while they have grown, we have shrunk.
Why, our entire Shoal consists of only two civilized worlds. All the
others have long been in decay."_

_"Oh, we could take them by surprise and inflict much damage on their
worlds," Hisser of the Assembly Mittich agreed with Chancellor Vrausot.
"But they would recover. And we would be annihilated."_

_"Then what," the Chancellor asked scornfully, "would you propose that
we do?"_

_"Our choices are enumerable:_

_"One--we kill these captives and prepare a surprise attack. Two--we
condition our captives to return to the center of their civilization
and report that they found no worlds worth possessing in this sector."_

_Vrausot reared erect in protest. "But eventually the conditioning will
break! They will remember! And their race will then fashion an attack!"_

_"If we are to assume that they would attack in the first place,"
Mittich pointed out. "Our prisoners themselves aren't certain whether
their race would or would not._

_"Three--we could try instilling fear in them. Condition our captives
to go back home and report a powerful, vast Tzarean Shoal culture. But
that, I suspect, would only drive the aliens into a frantic arming
effort. And, once a formidable striking potential is accumulated, use
will be found for it--believe me._

_"Four--we could let them return and tell the truth--that the Tzareans
are a declining culture on its last tail, so to speak."_

_Again Chancellor Vrausot erupted in a series of violent hisses and
clicks. "But that might only encourage them to attack!"_

_"Precisely. So the only course left is Number Five. That is to
condition our prisoners to report_ indications _of an interstellar
culture in the Tzarean Shoal--nothing precise, nothing definite. Our
prisoners will say they made no visual observations. We thus present
the aliens with neither the temptation of our actual weakness, nor the
fear of our pretended strength._

_"At the same time we interrupt communications between them and the
robots they have stationed in the system halfway between their center
of civilization and ours. We shall hope they interpret that action as
signifying we have discovered their automatons and desire to meet them
in peace on that satellite._

_"We shall go there prepared for friendly contact. If they come_
unarmed, _we shall know there will be no fighting; that perhaps they
will even provide the stimulus and inspiration for regeneration of the
Tzarean culture. After all, it's a pretty big galaxy and there's plenty
of room for_ two _interstellar races."_

_"But," Vrausot hissed grimly, "what if they come_ armed?"

_"Then we shall know what fate holds in store for us. We will prepare
to the limit of our resources and acquit ourselves honorably."_

_Stewart watched Vrausot thump his tail on the floor in an expression
of displeasure._

_"The administration," click-hissed the Chancellor, "will agree to
that plan with two modifications: one--that the Tzarean ship we send
to contact the aliens will itself be armed so that the lives of our
brave men will not be jeopardized; two--that the highest administrative
authority be appointed to lead the expedition."_

       *       *       *       *       *

"Dave! Oh, Dave! What's wrong?"

He opened his eyes and stared up into Carol's solicitous face. "I'm all
right," he said numbly.

Randall was tinkering with the transceiver, while Mortimer and
McAllister were moving about excitedly in the cave entrance.

"Come see what those Hyadeans are doing!" the latter exclaimed.

Stewart went over. In front of the cave, obscuring the formation
of outcroppings and boulders beyond, was a pile of shining, metal
instruments that looked like--

"The linear intensifiers off their laser guns!" Mortimer revealed.
"They've been stripping them off the ship for the past half hour. And
look!"

He pointed off to the side, indicating another mound of weapons that
were quite obviously of the class the landing party had worn as side
arms. In between the two piles and lying directly in front of the
cave's mouth was the body of the Tzarean who had been slain by the fall
of the Mineral Analyzer's drill head.

Even as Stewart watched, other Tzareans brought more weapons to add to
the two stacks.

"Dave!" Randall's voice sounded excitedly back in the cave. "Come
listen to this. I've tuned in on their frequency!"

Stewart accepted the earphones and listened to the clicks and hisses
that translated readily into:

"How many gun batteries left?"

"Two more and they will have all been dismantled."

"And the stun weapons?"

"There isn't a single one left on the ship."

Stewart tensed. The questioning voice--it couldn't be--

Anxiously, he picked up the microphone and ignored the bewilderment on
Randall's face as he hissed, "Mittich! Is that you?"

And the Tzarean who had practically been his companion during the
Curule Assembly hearing phase of his captivity answered with a series
of startled clicks:

"Friend Stewart? It's not _really_ Stewart, is it?"


                                THE END




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