Title: Cultural Exchange
Author: Bone, J.F.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Cultural Exchange" ***


                           Cultural Exchange

                             By J. F. BONE

                      _How could any race look so
                  ferocious and yet be peaceful--and
                      devise so nasty a weapon?_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


                                   I

I couldn't help listening to the big spaceman sitting alone at the
corner table. He wasn't speaking to me--that was certain--nor was his
flat, curiously uninflected voice directed at anyone else. With some
surprise I realized that he was talking to himself. People don't do
that nowadays. They're adjusted.

He noted my raised eye-brows and grinned, his square teeth white
against the dark planes of his face. "I'm not psycho," he said. "It's
just a bad habit I picked up on Lyrane."

"Lyrane?" I asked.

"It hasn't been entered on the charts yet. Just discovered." His voice
was inflected now. And then it changed abruptly. "If you must know,
this is ethanol--C_{2}H_{5}OH--and I drink it." He looked at me with
an embarrassed expression in his blue eyes. "It's just that I'm not
used to it yet," he explained without explaining. "It's easier when I
vocalize."

"You sure you're all right?" I asked. "Want me to call a
psychologician?"

"No. I've just been certified by Decontamination. I have a paper to
prove it."

"But--"

"Draw up a chair," he invited. "I hate to drink alone. And I'd like to
talk to somebody."

I smiled. My talent was working as usual. I can't walk into a bar
without someone telling me his life history. Nice old ladies buttonhole
me at parties and tell me all about their childhoods. Boys tell me
about girls. Girls tell me about boys. Politicians spill party secrets
and pass me tips.

Something about me makes folks want to talk. It's a talent and in my
business it's an asset. You see, I'm a freelance writer. Nothing fancy
or significant, just news, popular stuff, adventure stories, problem
yarns, romances, and mysteries. I'll never go down in history as a
literary great, but it's a living--and besides I meet the damnedest
characters.

So I sat down.

"I guess you're not contagious if you've been through Decontamination,"
I said.

       *       *       *       *       *

He looked at me across the rim of an oversized brandy sniffer--a
Napoleon, I think it's called--and waggled a long forefinger at my
nose. "The trouble with you groundhogs is that you're always thinking
we spacers are walking hotbeds of contagion all primed to wreck Earth.
You should know better. Anything dangerous has about as much chance of
getting through Decontamination as an ice cube has of getting through a
nuclear furnace."

"There was Martian Fever," I reminded him.

"Three centuries ago and you still remember it," he said. "But has
there been anything else since Decontamination was set up?"

"No," I admitted, "but that was enough, wasn't it? We still haven't
reached the pre-Mars population level."

"Who wants to?" He sipped at the brownish fluid in the glass and a
shudder rippled the heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders. He
grinned nastily and took a bigger drink. "There, that ought to hold
you," he muttered. He looked at me, that odd embarrassed look glinting
in his eyes. "I think that did it. No tolerance for alcohol."

I gave him my puzzled and expectant look.

He countered with a gesture at the nearly empty brandy glass. I got
the idea. I signaled autoservice--a conditioned reflex developed over
years of pumping material out of spacemen--and slipped my ID into the
check slot of the robot as it rolled up beside us and waited, humming
expectantly.

"Rum," the spaceman said. "Demerara, four ounces."

"You are cautioned, sir," the autoservice said in a flat mechanical
voice. "Demerara rum is one hundred fifty proof and is not meant to be
ingested by terrestrial life-forms without prior dilution."

"Shut up and serve," I said.

The robot clicked disapprovingly, gurgled briefly inside its cubical
interior and extruded a pony glass of brownish liquid. "Sir, you will
undoubtedly end up in a drunkard's grave, dead of hepatic cirrhosis,"
it informed me virtuously as it returned my ID card. I glared as I
pushed the glass across the table.

"Robots," I said contemptuously. It was lost on that metallic
monstrosity. It was already rolling away toward another table.

The spaceman poured the pony glass into his Napoleon, sniffed
appreciatively, sipped delicately and extended a meaty hand. "My name's
Halsey," he said. "Captain Roger Halsey. I skipper the _Two Two Four_."

"The Bureau ship that landed this morning?"

He nodded. "Yeah. I'm one of the Bureau's brave boys." There was a
faint sneer in his voice. "The good old Bureau of Extraterrestrial
Exploration. The busy BEE." He failed to pronounce the individual
letters. "You're a reporter, aren't you?" he asked suddenly.

"How'd you guess?"

"That little trick of not answering an introduction. Most of you sludge
pumpers do it, but I never knew why."

"Libel and personal privacy laws," I said. "If you don't know who we
are, you can't sue."

He grinned. "Okay. I don't care. Keep your privacy. All I want is
someone to talk to."

I smiled inwardly.

"Think my job's exciting?" he asked. "Skipper of an exploration ship.
Poking my nose into odd corners of the Galaxy. Seeing what's over the
hill."

"Of course," I said.

"Well, you'd be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred. It's just a
job. Most of it is checking--or did you know that only one sun in ten
has planets, and only one in ten thousand has a spectrum that will
support human life, and that only one in ten thousand planets has
Earthlike qualities? So you can imagine how we felt when we ran across
Lyrane." He grimaced wryly. "I had it on the log as Halsey's Planet for
nearly two weeks before we discovered it was inhabited." He shrugged.
"So the name was changed. Too bad. Always did want to have a planet
named after me. But I'll make it yet."

I clucked sympathetically. Capt. Halsey sighed, and this is what he
told me.


                                  II

It's a beautiful world, Lyrane is. Like Earth must have been before
it got cluttered up with people. No cities, no smoke, no industrial
complexes--just green plains, snowy mountains, dark forests, blue seas,
and white polar caps all wrapped in cotton clouds swimming in the
clearest atmosphere you ever saw. It made my eyes ache to look at it.
And it affected the crew the same way.

We were wild to land. We came straight in along the equatorial plane
until we hit the Van Allen Belt and the automatics took over. We
stopped dead, matched intrinsics and skirted the outer band, checking
the radiation quality and the shape of the Belt. It was a pure band
that dipped down at the poles to form entry zones. There was not a sign
of bulges or industrial contaminants.

Naturally we had everything trained on the planet while we made our
sweeps--organic detectors, radar, spectroanalytic probes--all the
gadgets the BEE equips us with to make analysis easy and complete. The
readings were so homelike that every man was landsick. I wasn't any
different from the rest of them, but I was in command and I had to be
cautious about setting the _Two Two Four_ down until we'd really wrung
the analytic data dry.

So, while the crew grumbled about hanging outside on a skyhook, we kept
swinging around in a polar orbit until we knew that world below us like
a baby knows its mother. It checked clean to five decimal places, which
is the limit of our gadgetry. Paradise, that's what it was--a paradise
untrod by human foot. And every foot on the ship was itching.

"When we gonna land, Skipper?" Alex Baranov asked me. It was a gross
breach of discipline, but I forgave him. Alex was the second engineer,
an eager kid on his first flight out from Earth. Like most youngsters,
he thought there was romance in space, but right now he was landsick.
Even worse than most of us. And, like most kids, he'd leap where
angels'd dread to walk on tiptoe.

"We'll land," I assured him. "You'll be down there pretty soon."

He hurried off to tell the others.

We set the ship down in the middle of one of the continental land
masses in an open plain surrounded by forest and ran a few more tests
before we stepped out, planted the flag, and claimed the place for the
Confederation. After that we had an impromptu celebration to thoroughly
enjoy the solid feel of ground under our feet and open sky overhead. It
lasted all of five minutes before we came to our senses and posted a
guard.

It was five minutes too long. Alex Baranov had a chance to get out of
sight and go exploring, and, like a kid, he took it. We didn't miss him
for nearly ten minutes more, and in fifteen minutes a man can cover
quite a bit of territory.

"Anyone see where he went?" I asked.

"He was wearing a menticom," one of the crew offered. "Said he wanted
to look around."

"The idiot!" I snapped. "He had no business going off like that."

"Nobody told him not to," Dan Warren said. Dan was my executive
officer, and a good hand in case of trouble, but he left the command
decisions to me, and of course I figured that everybody knew the
cardinal rule of first landings. The net result was that Alex had
disappeared.

I went back into the ship and broke out another menticom.

"Alex!" I broadcasted. "Return to ship at once!"

"I can't, Skipper," Alex's projection came back to me. "I'm surrounded."

"By what? Where?"

"They look sorta human--bigger than us. I'm near the edge of the forest
nearest the ship. I can't do anything. I didn't bring a blaster." There
was panic in his thoughts. And then suddenly I saw two hairy bipeds
flash across Alex's vision. Both of them were carrying spears. The
nearest one jumped and lunged. The scene dissolved in a blaze of red
panic and the projection cut off as though someone had turned a switch.

I had a fix now and turned to face a knob of forest jutting out into
the plain. Near the forest's edge I saw a flurry of movement that
vanished as I watched.

"Break out a 'copter," I ordered.

"Why?" Warren asked, and then I realized that I alone of all the crew
had seen what had happened to Alex.

I told them.

       *       *       *       *       *

The search, of course, was unproductive. I didn't expect that it would
be anything else. I was pretty certain that Alex was a casualty. I'd
felt people die while wearing menticoms, and the same blank sense of
emptiness had blotted out Alex. It was a bad deal all around. I liked
that kid.

But Alex's death had provided data. This world was inhabited and the
inhabitants weren't friendly. So I had the crew stake out a perimeter
which we could energize with the ship's engines, and activated a
couple of autoguards for patrol duty. Alex wasn't a pleasant thought,
but we weren't equipped to retrieve bodies. So I wrote him in the log
as missing and let it go at that.

I had to correct the entry a week later when Alex came walking up to
the perimeter as large as life and just as healthy, wearing a mild
sunburn, a sheepish expression, and nothing else.

The autoguard announced his coming and I headed the delegation that met
him. I read him the riot act, and after I'd finished chewing on him he
was pinker than ever.

"Okay, sir--so I was a fool," he said. "But they didn't hurt me. Scared
me half to death, but once they realized I was intelligent there was no
trouble. They were fascinated by my clothes." Alex grinned ruefully.
"And they're pretty strong. They peeled me."

"Obviously," I said coldly.

"They have a village back in the woods." He pointed vaguely behind him.
"It'd pay to take a look at it."

"_Mister_ Baranov," I said. "If I don't throw you in the brig for
what you've done, it's only because you may have brought back some
information we can use. What are these natives like? What did they do
to you besides making you a strip-tease artist? What cultural level
are they? How many of them do you estimate there are? What do they
look like? Get up to the ship and report to Lieutenant Warren for
interrogation and draw new clothing." I had the same half exasperated,
half angry tone that a relieved mother has when one of her youngsters
returns home late but unharmed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alex must have recognized it, because he grinned as he went off.

I contacted Warren on the intercom. "Dan," I said, "Baranov's
back--apparently unharmed. I want him given the works. When you've
gotten everything you can get, have a man detailed to watch him. If he
so much as looks suspicious, heave him in the brig."

Warren's answering projection had a laugh in it. "Always cautious, hey,
Skipper? Okay, I'll see that he gets the business."

It turned out that Alex didn't have much real information except for a
description of the natives, their village, and their attitude toward
him. It was about what you'd expect from a kid, interesting but far
from helpful.

The delegation of natives showed up a half hour later. They came
walking across the open space between the ship and the forest as though
they hadn't a care in the world. Four of them--big hairy humanoids,
carrying spears. They were naked as animals. Not that they needed
clothes with all that hair, but just the same their appearance gave me
a queasy feeling--like I was looking at man's early ancestors suddenly
come to life.

If you can imagine a furry humanoid seven feet tall, with the face of
an intelligent gorilla and the braincase of a man, you'll have a rough
idea of what they looked like--except for their teeth. The canines
would have fitted better in the face of a tiger, and showed at the
corners of their wide, thin-lipped mouths, giving them an expression of
ferocity.

They came trotting straight across the plain, moving with grace
and power. All external signs pointed to them being a carnivorous,
primitive race. Hunters, probably. The muscles of my scalp twitched as
some deep-buried instinct inside me whispered, "_Competition!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

I've met plenty of humanoids, but these were the first that roused any
emotion other than curiosity. Perhaps it was their fierce appearance,
or the bright, half-contemptuous intelligence in their eyes, or the
confident arrogance in their approach, or merely that they looked more
like us than the others I had met. Whatever it was, it was strong, and
I had the impression that the feeling was mutual.

"Stop!" I said as they approached the periphery.

"Why should we?" the foremost native replied in perfect Terran.

"Because that barrier'll burn you to a nice crisp cinder if you don't."

"That's a good reason," the native said, nodding.

Then the delayed reaction took over and the shock nearly floored me,
until I saw that he was wearing Alex's menticom. Well, that explained
the language and the feeling of mutual distrust--and it could explain
why I thought Alex had died back there in the jungle. A mental
communicator snatched from its wearer's head can give that impression.

But it raised an entirely new set of questions. Where did this savage
learn to operate the circlet and how did he recognize its purpose? I
guess I wasn't too smart, because the native was tuned to me and I
wasn't shielding my thoughts at all.

He chuckled--it sounded like the purr of a cat. "We are not stupid,
Earthman."

"So I see," I said uneasily.

"I am K'wan, chief of this segment. I wish to know why you are here."

"To survey your world. We are members of the Bureau of Extraterrestrial
Exploration. It is our job to make surveys of planets."

"Why?"

"For trade, colonization, and exploitation," I answered. There was
no sense in giving him a dishonest explanation. With him wearing that
communicator, it would have done no good to try.

"And what have you decided about us?"

"That's not our job. We just investigate and report. What happens next
is not our affair. But if you're worrying--don't. There are plenty of
worlds available without bothering inhabited places. Since you are
intelligent, we would probably like to trade with you, if you have
anything to trade--but that, of course, is up to you. We never intrude
where we are not wanted, as long as we are treated with respect. If
we are attacked, however, that is a different story." It was the old
respect-and-threat routine that worked with primitive races. But I
wasn't at all sure it was working now.

"Strange," K'wan said. "I would have sworn you were a predatory race.
You are enough like us to be our little cousins." He scratched his
head with a surprisingly human gesture. "In your position I would have
attacked to show my power and inspire respect. Perhaps you are telling
the truth."

"A predator can grow soft when he has too much prey," I said.

"Aye, there is truth in that. But what is too easy and how much is too
much? And does a man change his habits of eating just because he is
fat?"

"You can find out."

"I do not think that would be wise," the native said. "Although you
are physically weak, you sound confident. Therefore you are strong.
And strength is to be respected. Let us be friends. We will make an
agreement with you."

       *       *       *       *       *

I shook my head. "It is not our place to make agreements. We only
observe."

"You have not done much of that," he said pointedly. "You sit here and
send your machines over our seas and forests, but you do not see for
yourselves. You cannot learn this way."

"We learn enough," I said shortly.

"We have talked of you at our council," K'wan continued, "and we think
that you should know more before you depart. So we have come to make
you an offer. Let four of your men come with me, and four of mine will
stay with you. We will exchange--and you can see our ways while we see
yours. That would help us understand each other."

It sounded reasonable. An exchange of hostages--or call it a cultural
exchange, if you'd prefer. I told him that I'd think it over and to
come back tomorrow. He nodded, turned, and together with his retinue
disappeared into the jungle.

       *       *       *       *       *

We hashed K'wan's proposal over at a board meeting that night and
decided that we'd take it. The exact status of Lyranian culture worried
us. It is a cardinal rule never to underestimate an alien culture or to
judge it by surface appearances. So we organized a team that would form
our part of the "cultural exchange."

I would go, of course. If K'wan could visit us, I could hardly stay
back. Alex was selected partly because he was an engineer, mostly
because he'd been over the ground before. Ed Barger, our ecologist, and
Patrick Allardyce, our biologist, made up the remainder of the party.
I'd have liked to take the padre and Doc, but Doc was more valuable at
base, and if I could have only four men, I wanted fighting men.

"Now," I said, "we'll take along a tight-beam communicator. Coupled to
our menticoms, it should be able to reach the ship and put what we see
and what happens on permanent record." Then I turned to Dan Warren. "If
anything goes wrong, don't try to rescue us. Finish your observations
and get out. You understand? And get those exchange natives into
Interrogation. Condition them to the eyeballs with cooperation
dogma. We may need some friends here when the second echelon makes a
landfall."

Warren nodded. I didn't have to elaborate.

The native village was about what I expected from our reconnaissance
flights. It was beautifully camouflaged. You couldn't tell it from
the rest of the forest except that the trees were larger and were
hollow--apparently hewn out with patient care to make a comfortable
living space inside. Lyranians lived in one place, if what I could see
of their dwellings was any criterion. I wanted to look inside, but
K'wan hustled us down the irregular "street" that wound through the
grove of giant trees until we finally came to the granddaddy of them
all, a trunk nearly forty feet in diameter.

K'wan gestured at the tree. "Your house while you are here. We made
it for you Earthmen." His voice came over my menticom and was duly
recorded on the ship, since we were in constant contact, giving our
impressions of the place. So far it was strictly SOP.

"Thanks," I said. "We appreciate it." I was really touched at this
tribute. K'wan had probably evacuated his own house to furnish us
quarters where we could be together. The size of it indicated that
it must be the chief's residence. But like all primitives he had to
lie a little and the fiction of making this place for us was a way of
salvaging pride in the face of our technological superiority.

He walked inside and we followed, expecting to find a gloomy hole--but
instead the room glowed with a soft light that came from the walls
themselves. The air was cool and comfortable, a pleasing contrast to
the heat outside.

"What the--" I began, but Allardyce was already peering at the walls.

"A type of luminous fungus," he said. "A saprophyte. Lives on the wood
of this tree and gives off light. Clever."

I shut my mouth and looked around. There were other rooms opening off
this one and along one wall a knobby imitation of a staircase led
upward to a hole overhead.

"Hmmm, a regular skyscraper," Ed Barger commented, noting the direction
of my gaze. "Well, we should not be crowded, at any rate."

I had been noticing something was wrong without realizing it. You
know the feeling you get when you've lost something, but can't quite
remember what it was. Then my neurons made connections and I realized
that the communicator and the menticom were both as dead as if we were
in a lead box.

Quietly I moved to the door--and Dan's voice hammered in my ears:
"Skipper! Answer me! What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Dan," I said. "We just went into the quarters they assigned
us. Something about them blocks transmission and reception. We're all
fine."

"Oh." Dan sounded relieved. "For a minute I was worried."

"One of the boys'll call in every two hours," I assured him. "If you
don't hear from us then, it'll be time to do something."

"Okay, Skipper, but what'll I do?"

"That'll be your decision," I said. "You'll be ranking officer."

Dan's chuckle was humorless. "Thanks, but I hope we keep on hearing
from you."

"Don't worry--you will. These people look worse than they really are.
At least they have been nice so far."

"They'd better stay that way," Dan replied grimly.

It was my turn to chuckle. "Keep calm and keep your blasters dry. I'm
going inside now. You'll hear from us in two hours."

       *       *       *       *       *

Ed Barger looked at me a trifle oddly as I came through the doorway. "A
while ago you were laughing at that story K'wan was telling us about
making this house for us. I caught your undertone."

"Sure. What about it?"

"Well, I'm not so sure he was lying."

"Huh?"

"Take a look around you."

I did. It was a nice room, considering its origin--low benches around
the walls, a table and four chairs in the center, a soft, thick floor
covering that was a pleasure to the feet.

"See anything unusual?" Ed asked.

"No," I said.

"What about those benches?"

"They're part of the walls," I said, "cut out of the tree when it was
hollowed out."

"Cut to _our_ size?"

I did a double take. Barger was right. The Lyranians were seven feet
tall and long-legged, but the benches were precisely right for human
sitting, and the table in the center was only three feet above the gray
floor. Suddenly I didn't feel so good.

"And those rooms--there are four of them--scaled to people _our_ size?"

I shrugged. "So they modified the joint for us."

"You still don't get it. This place is _living_. It's _growing_.
Nothing here except those chairs isn't part of this tree, and I'm not
sure that they weren't. Besides, how did they know that there'd be four
of us?"

"They could have been hopeful, or maybe four is their idea of a
delegation. Remember there were four of them that visited us, and they
suggested that four of us visit them."

"It's obvious," Allardyce added, "that this place _has_ been made for
us. K'wan wasn't lying."

Barger shook his head. "I still don't like it. I think we'd better get
out of here. If they are as good biologists as this tree indicates,
they're a Class VI civilization at least--and we're not set up to
handle levels that high."

"I don't think that's necessary," Allardyce said. "They don't seem
unfriendly, and until they do, we're better off sitting pat and playing
the cards as they're dealt. We can always warn the ship in case
anything goes wrong."

"Don't be jumpy," Alex broke in. "I told you they were all right. They
grew the place for me. It's just grown a little since."

I made a noncommittal noise.

"It's true," Alex said. "While I was here I needed quarters and nobody
wanted me in with them. They have some custom about not letting
strangers in their houses after sunset. So they took a sapling and
sprayed it with some sort of stuff and by the next afternoon I had a
one-room house."

"Where did you stay that first night?" I demanded.

Alex shrugged. "In one of the trees down the street," he said, pointing
through the door. "It was some sort of a storage warehouse. No air
conditioning and blacker than the inside of the Coal Sack. It rains
pretty bad at night and they had to give me some shelter."

He was right on time with his last statement, because the skies opened
up and started to pour. The four-hour evening rain had begun. It had
fascinated us at first, the regularity with which the evening showers
arrived and left, but our meteorologist assured us that it was a
perfectly natural phenomenon in a planet with no axial tilt.

"But growing a tree in a day is fantastic," I said. "What's more, it's
unbelievable, a downright--"

"Not so fantastic," Allardyce interrupted. "This really isn't a tree.
It's a cycad--related to the horsetail ferns back on Earth. They grow
pretty fast anyway and they might grow faster here. Besides, the
Lyranians could have some really potent growth stimulants. In our
hydroponics stations we use delta-gibberelin. That'll grow tomatoes
from seed in a week, and forage crops in three days. It could be that
they have something better that'll do the job in hours."

"And one that makes a tree grow _rooms_?" I scoffed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Allardyce nodded. "It's possible, but I hate to think of the science
behind it--it makes me feel like a blind baby fumbling in the
dark--and I'm supposed to be a good biologist." He shivered. "Their
science'll be centuries ahead of ours if that is true."

"Not necessarily," Barger said. "They could be good biologists or
botanists and nothing much else. We've run into that sort of uneven
culture before."

"Ha!" Allardyce snorted. "That shows how little you know about
experimental biology. Anybody able to do with plants what these people
do would have to know genetics and growth principles, biochemistry,
mathematics, engineering and physics."

"Maybe they had it once and lost most of it," I suggested. "They
wouldn't be the first culture that's gone retrograde. We did it after
the Atomic Wars and we were several thousand years recovering. But we
hadn't lost the skills--they just degenerated into rituals administered
by witch doctors who handed the formulas and techniques down from
father to son. Maybe it's like that here. Certainly these people give
no evidence of an advanced civilization other than these trees and
their native intelligence. Civilized people don't hunt with spears or
live in tribal groups."

Barger nodded. "That's a good point, Skipper."

"Well, there's no sense speculating about it; maybe we'll know if we
wait and see," Allardyce summed up.

I set sentries, three hours on and nine off, to keep Dan informed of
our situation, and since rank has its privileges, I took the first
watch. We were all tired from our walk through the woods; the others
turned in readily enough. I was sufficiently worried about the hints
and implications in the native culture to keep alert--but nothing
happened. I checked in with Dan back at the ship and went to awaken
Alex, who had drawn the second watch, and turned in to the bedroom
allotted to me. Normally I can sleep anywhere, but I kept thinking
about houses grown from trees and upholstery grown from fungus, about
spear-carrying savages who understood the working principle of a
menticom.

It was all wrong and my facile explanation of a regressed culture
didn't satisfy me. Superior technology and savagery simply didn't
go together. Even in our Interregnum Period, islands of culture and
technology had remained, and men hadn't reverted to complete savagery.
But there were no such islands on this world--or none that were
apparent.

Such enclaves couldn't have escaped our search mechanisms, which are
designed precisely to locate such things. And besides, an advanced
biological technology would have no need for hunting or spears. They
could grow all the food they needed. Any damn fool knew that. Then why
the noble savage act? For if our analysis was right, it must be an act.
Why were they trying to hoodwink us? The only answer was that there was
a high civilization here that was being deliberately hidden from us.
The only mistake they had made was in underestimating us--the old story
of civilized men sneering at savages, but in reverse.

The trees, therefore, must be such old and primitive techniques that
they thought nothing of them, deeming them so inconsequential that even
savages like us would know of them and not be suspicious. At that, they
probably didn't have too much time after they detected us orbiting and
intending to land. And if that were true, there could be only one place
where their civilization was hidden.

       *       *       *       *       *

I tried to get to my feet, to warn the others--but I couldn't move and
no sound came from my flaccid vocal cords. I was paralyzed, helpless,
and K'wan's amused thought floated gently into my brain. "I told the
others that you humans were an advanced race, but they couldn't believe
an obviously warlike species that depended upon _machinery_ could be
anything but savages. And your man Alex confirmed their beliefs. So we
tried to meet you on your own ground--savage to savage, as it were. It
seems as though we weren't as good at being savages as we thought." And
K'wan stepped through an apparently solid section of tree trunk that
parted to let him pass!

This tree was nothing but a mousetrap, and we were the mice! Why hadn't
one of us carried the discussion a bit further? Any idiot should know
that biological agents were fully as deadly as physical ones. And these
people were self-admittedly predatory. Contempt at my stupidity was the
only emotion that filled my mind--that we would be trapped like a flock
of brainless sheep and led bleating happily to slaughter. Raw anger
surged through me, smothering my fear in a red blanket of rage.

K'wan shook his head. "Your reaction works against you. It's
primitive--and, I think, dangerous. We cannot risk associating with a
race that cannot control themselves. You have developed too fast--too
soon. We are an old race and a slow race, and our warlike days are far
behind us. The council was right. Something must be done about you or
there will be more of your kind on Lyrane--hard, driving, uncontrolled,
violent." He sighed--a very human sigh--half regret, half resignation.

"And you promised no harm would come to us if we came with you," I
thought bitterly.

"I said you would come to no harm, nor will you. You'll just be changed
a little."

"Like Alex?"

"Yes."

"What did you do to him?"

He grinned, exposing his long tusks. "You'll find out," he said. He
sounded just like a villain in a cheap melodrama.

He took the menticom circlet off my head and all communication stopped.
Two other Lyranians stepped through the wall, lifted me and carried me
out like a shanghaied drunk from a spaceport bar. I wasn't particularly
surprised at the laboratory that lay behind the wall. After all, an
observation cage had to have its laboratory facilities.

These were good--very good indeed. Even though I knew hardly anything
about biological laboratories, there was no doubt that here were the
products of an advanced technology. I hated to admit it, but it looked
as though we had run into what we had always feared but had never
found--a civilization superior to ours. From the windowless appearance
of the place, it was probably underground, and K'wan's look and nod
seemed to confirm my guess.

They laid me out on a table, took blood and tissue samples and
proceeded to forget me while they ran tests and analyses. I kept
trying to move, but it wasn't any use.

A group of about a dozen oldsters came in, looked at me and went away.
The council, I guessed.

In a surprisingly short time K'wan came back, distinguishable by the
menticom circlet. He was holding something that looked like a jet hypo
in his hand. The barrel was full of a cloudy red liquid that swirled
sluggishly behind the confining glass.

"This won't hurt," he said, his thoughts amplified by the circlet.

He lifted my arm, examined it and nodded. There was a high-pitched,
sibilant hiss as he touched the trigger of the syringe and I felt a
brief sting near my elbow.

"There--that's that!" he said. "Now we'll take you back and get the
others."

I swore at him coldly and viciously.

He smiled.

Alex helped lay me back on my bed in the tree house. He looked down
at me and grinned. It wasn't a pleasant grin. It reminded me of a
crocodile.

       *       *       *       *       *

Naked, I was standing on an endless sandy plain. Off in the distance
the _Two Two Four_ stood on her landing jacks, a tall, needle-pointed
tower of burnished silver metal. The sun beat down from a cobalt sky
burning my bare back as I trudged painfully across the hot shifting
sand. My feet, scorched and blistered, sent agony racing through me
with every step I took toward the tall silver column that seemed to
recede from me as fast as I approached. My throat was choked with dust
and my mind filled with fear and pain.

I had to reach the ship. I _had_ to. Yet I knew with dreadful certainty
that I would not.

He came at me from a hollow in the sandy ground, a huge, furry
Lyranian--bigger than any I had seen. His white tusks glittered in the
sunlight as he leaped at me.

Twisting, I avoided him and turned to run. To fight that mountain of
fanged flesh was futile. He could rip me apart with one hand. But I
moved with viscid slowness, stumbling through the shifting sands.

In a moment he was upon me, clutching with his huge hands, snapping at
my throat with his tusked mouth. Fear pumped adrenalin into my system
and I fought as I had never fought before, breaking his holds, throwing
jarring punches into his fanged face as he clawed and bit at me.

With a violent effort I broke away and ran again toward the safety of
the distant ship. For a moment I left him behind as he scrambled to
regain his feet and came running after me. He was on me again, hands
reaching for my throat. I couldn't get away. And again we fought,
battering and clawing at each other, using fists, feet and teeth,
biting and gouging. His strength was terrible and his hot, fetid breath
was rank in my nostrils. With a grunt of triumph he tripped me and I
fell on my back on the blazing sand. I screamed as my back struck the
searing surface, but he held me helpless and immovable, pinned beneath
his massive, crushing weight.

And then he began to eat me!

I felt his sharp fangs sink into my shoulder muscles and meet in my
flesh. With a rush of frantic strength I threw him off again and again,
ran stumbling across the plain. Once more he caught me and again we
fought.

It went on endlessly--the fight, the temporary breakaway, the flight,
the pursuit, and the recapture. I wondered dully why no one on the
ship had seen us. Perhaps they were looking in the wrong direction,
or perhaps they weren't even looking. If I survived this and found
that they hadn't been on watch--I snarled and slammed my fist into the
Lyranian's face.

Both of us were covered with blood, but he was visibly weaker. It was
no longer a fight; we were too exhausted for that. We pawed at each
other feebly, and I could detect something oddly like fear in him now.
He couldn't hold me--but neither could I finish him.

I gathered my last remaining strength into one last blow. My torn fist
smashed into his bloody face. He toppled to the ground and I fell
beside him, too spent to move. I lay there panting, watching him.

He rose to his hands and knees and came crawling toward me, trembling
with weakness. I felt his smothering weight pinning me as he fell
across me. He twisted slowly, his fanged mouth gaping to bite again.
His jaws closed on my arm. I was done--beaten--too weary and bruised to
care. He had won. But his teeth couldn't break my skin. Like me, he was
finished.

We lay there as the sun beat down, glaring at each other with fear and
hate. And suddenly--over us--loomed the familiar faces of my crew and
the tall tower of the _Two Two Four_.

Somehow I had reached the ship and safety!

       *       *       *       *       *

I awoke. I was bathed with sweat. My muscles were aching and my head
was a ball of fire. I looked around. Everything seemed normal. My
menticom was on my head and I was lying on the bed in the tree house.
Painfully I rose to my feet and staggered into the main room.

"My God! Skipper, you look awful!" Allardyce's voice was sharp with
concern. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know," I muttered. "My head's splitting."

"Here, sit down. Let me take a look at you." Allardyce produced a
thermometer and stuck it in my mouth. "Mmmm," he said worriedly.
"You've got fever."

"I feel like I've been through the mill," I said.

"We'd better get back to the ship. Doc should have a look at you."

I wanted nothing more than the familiar safety of the ship, away
from these odd natives and exotic diseases that struck despite
omnivaccination. And we should get back before the others fell sick.

"All right, Pat," I said. "Contact Dan. Have him send the big 'copter.
We'll leave at once." I discounted the experience of last night as
delirium, but just to make sure, I checked with Allardyce and Barger
when they came in.

"Obviously fever," Barger said. "Nothing happened to me like you
describe."

"Nor to me," Allardyce said.

I nodded. They were right, of course, unless the Lyranian in _their_
dreams had eaten and absorbed them. Then--but that was sheer nonsense.
I was being a suspicious fool. But that dream--all of it--had been
damnably real.

We made our excuses to K'wan as the 'copter fluttered down into a
nearby clearing.

"I'm sorry about this," K'wan said apologetically, "but I never
thought of the possibility of diseases. We are all immune. We do have
some biological skill, as you've surely guessed, but our engineering
technology is far inferior to yours. We thought it would be better not
to let you know about us until we had a chance to observe you. But you
undoubtedly have seen enough to deduce our culture." He grinned--a
ferocious grimace that exposed his long tusks. "I suppose we are rather
bad liars. But then we're not accustomed to deception."

"I understand," I said. "You had no way of knowing what we were really
like. We could have been the advance guard of a conquering space
armada. You showed great courage to open relations with us."

"Not as great as yours. We had the opportunity of examining your man
Alex. You had only his untried opinions to go by."

The 'copter came down with a flutter of rotor blades, and I shook
hands with K'wan. For a moment I was tempted to call Dan and tell him
to turn our hostages loose, but on second thought decided that could
wait. I slipped my menticom off. There was no point in broadcasting my
thoughts, and without the gadget K'wan couldn't intercept them unless
they were directed. After all, we were a minority on this world and
Earth didn't even know where we were yet. A ship can cross hyper-space
far more easily and quickly than the most powerful transmitter can
broadcast across normal space. It would be a thousand years before
Earth could hear from us by radio, even if they could distinguish our
messages from stellar interference. While I felt oddly friendly, there
was no reason to take chances, especially if there was any truth in
that dream.

"You will be leaving soon?" K'wan asked. "You and the ship?"

"Yes," I said. "We have done all we can do here."

I looked up at him. He was standing there--_holding_ the menticom in
his _hand_--yet I understood him!

I didn't let the astonishment show on my face, nor the shock that
coursed through my mind _when the Lyranian in my brain tried vainly to
scream a warning_! Instead I took the circlet and turned to go.

"Remember what you are to do; the others will help," K'wan said.

"I will remember," I replied. _You're damn well right I'll remember_,
I thought grimly.

The Lyranian was supposed to wreck the ship.

       *       *       *       *       *

He waved farewell as I turned to enter the 'copter. "Our thoughts go
with you for your success," he said.

The Lyranian in my brain screamed and struggled, but I held him easily.
I was his master, not he mine. There would be no sabotage on the _Two
Two Four_. He wouldn't wreck my ship.

"Dan," I said as we went into orbit, "did Alex come aboard?"

"Of course."

"Where is he?"

"Down in the engine room, I suppose, or in his bunk. It's not his
watch."

"Maybe you'd better check. But before you do--"

He waited for me to continue, and finally I was able to.

"Put Allardyce, Barger, and myself in the brig," I said. "Set a guard
over us with instructions to shoot if we try to make a break. Then get
Alex, if he's aboard. Frankly, I don't think you'll find him. They
didn't need a ship's commander, a sociologist or a biologist, but they
did need an engineer. Now get going. This is an order!"

Warren stiffened. "Yes, sir--sorry, sir!"

Inside my skull, the Lyranian came to life--struggled briefly--and
then quit. Barger, Allardyce and I spent the rest of the trip home
in the air-conditioned, radiation-resistant, germproof, dustproof,
escape-resistant brig. Alex, of course, wasn't aboard. There aren't
many places on a starship where a man can hide, and the crew searched
them all.

Even so, I kept worrying about the ship's safety all the way back.
It was a miserable trip. I suppose it was just as miserable for the
Lyranians in my two companions who kept worrying about how to destroy
us. It didn't do them any good either. They never got a chance, and
ultimately we reached Decontamination.

Barger and Allardyce are up there now. The medics think they can erase
the Lyranians with insulin shock, but it'll take time. Mine, being a
nice, tame one, was considered to be more valuable in me than out.
We're going to have to know a lot about Lyrane in a hurry if we're
going to do anything about those people, and my Lyranian can tell us
plenty.

But I'll bet we'll find things different on Lyrane when we go back.
They'll have at least ten years, and with the brains they've got--and
Alex's brain to pick--they'll do just fine from an engineering point of
view. I'll bet they'll even have spaceships.

From what I can gather from my alter ego, they checked Alex's brain
and didn't like what they saw. That's the trouble with romantics. They
always remember the wars and the fighting, never the stodgy, peaceful
interims. But you simply don't spring that sort of stuff on a culture
like Lyrane's. And I suppose my anger didn't help things any, but if
not for that anger and my primitive bull-headedness, we might not be
here.


                                  III

Capt. Halsey hurriedly downed the rum. "Skippers are picked because
they're tough-minded and authoritarian. In space you need it
occasionally. Fortunately I lived up to specifications. A peaceful sort
like my Lyranian just couldn't take it--fortunately."

"Fortunately?" I asked.

"Sure. What else? Possibly those natives we conditioned would help
our case, possibly not. And in the meantime the Lyranians would suck
Alex dry. And with the _Two Two Four_ gone it'd be maybe a couple of
hundred years before we ran into them again, and by then they'd really
be ready--loaded for bear with itchy trigger fingers--and we just might
have a war on our hands. As it is we'll send out a battle fleet to give
some authority to our negotiators so no one will get hurt. They just
shouldn't have picked Alex as typical of us. With his attitude and our
weapons, they naturally got a lot of wrong ideas."

"Wrong?" I prompted the skipper.

Halsey chuckled. "Yes, that's what I said--wrong ideas," he said in
that remote second voice. "Just because you've forgotten self-defense
doesn't mean that other peaceful civilizations don't remember it."





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