"chap-14" - читать интересную книгу автора (Biggle Lloyd Jr. - All The Colours Of Darkness)

14

The realization came as a shock to Darzek.

He had succumbed to his surroundings, and the aliens no longer looked grotesque to him. Worse, Alice’s weird, unending cacophony had begun to sound musical. He found himself listening absently, even following her voice with pleasant anticipation on one of the several songs she repeated frequently. He wondered what the music was supposed to express—what the words might mean.

Understanding came accompanied by a veritable tidal wave of astonishment: they were love songs.

Alice and Xerxes were in love, or some oblique alien equivalent of love. The relationship was, as far as Darzek could tell, entirely nonphysical. Except for the hasty first-aid treatment Alice had supplied to Xerxes’s wounded arm, he had never seen them touch one another. They rarely spoke. They did not even look at each other, and yet Darzek was certain that the word "love" took him as close as he would ever come to an understanding of their strangely remote intimacy.

He consulted Ysaye about this, and Ysaye, after grappling long with the subtleties of comparative philology, firmly denied it.

"What else would you call it?" Darzek demanded, and Ysaye had no answer.

"I need to do some thinking," Darzek said.

"Certainly," Ysaye said, and politely withdrew to the level above. Darzek seated himself on his sleeping pad, lit one of his rapidly dwindling stock of cigarettes, and ordered his mind to think.

The awareness that Alice’s strident caterwauling was actually a tender love message brought home to him for the first time the horror of the thing that he had done. Blindly and impulsively, with no thought for the consequences, he had taken action that doomed five living beings. Since then he had been flitting about the capsule like a lunatic on a holiday, treating the aliens with no more consideration than he would have extended to a few denizens of the zoological gardens with whom he had been locked up by mistake, deliberately contriving actions and comments to shock them into responses that he could analyze and classify. He had not thought of them as highly intelligent beings with their own intensely personal aspirations, and sorrows, and frustrations, and depth of emotional response.

He had not thought of them as—as human beings, and they were. They were intensely human. They merely revealed their humanity in ways that were strange to him.

"They don’t seem to have the grit to face up to a crisis," he mused. "Which isn’t by way of condemning them, because I’ve known businessmen and college professors and bus drivers to lose their heads under far less pressure. The point is, I cooked up this mess we’re in, and getting us out of it is my responsibility. And just how the devil am I going to manage that?"

He wondered if the fantastic supply horde contained anything that could serve as a distress signal. A flare, perhaps, or a signal rocket, or—he brushed the idea aside with a gesture of disgust. He had set off a sizable flare when he blew up the power plant, and if that brought no response, anything less than an atomic holocaust would go unnoticed.

Further, the aliens did not want to be rescued in that way. As he understood their enigmatic Code, rescue by an expedition from Earth would constitute a failure worse than death. He could not expiate his blundering by wresting them from their present fate, only to push them into one they regarded as incomparably more dreadful.

And he did not blame them. Code or no Code, he could foresee what would happen if the United States Space Administration, or its Russian equivalent, got its hands on these aliens. They would end their days in a custom-built zoo, giving regular performances for scientists and politicians, with matinees twice weekly for reporters.

"If I save them," he told himself, "I’ll have to do it on their terms. And just for a starter, I’d better find out what their terms are."

He went looking for Ysaye, found him squatting meditatively on the level above. "This Code of yours," Darzek said. "Tell me about it."

"I cannot do that," Ysaye said.

"Why not?"

"The Code does not allow it."

Darzek turned away to conceal his frustration. "Since we have to die together," he said, "it’s unfortunate that we can’t trust each other."

Ysaye gave a clipped utterance of agreement in his own language.

"How about another game?" Darzek asked.

They descended to the first level, and Darzek went to his bin for his pocket secretary and pencil. In a moment of whimsey he had taught Ysaye the child’s game of ticktacktoe. It fascinated and delighted him. He was so utterly naive at the game that he never won without Darzek’s contrivance, but no number of defeats could discourage him. They quickly filled Darzek’s memo pad with scribbled diagrams, and now they were going through it a second time utilizing every modicum of blank space. The alien’s ineptness intrigued Darzek quite as much as his enthusiasm.

And Ysaye was the lonely one, the outsider. Darzek reasoned that he must be the weakest of the five, and the one most likely to tell him what he wanted to know. Could he find a means of exploiting that weakness?

"Wrong approach," Darzek told himself. "The problem is to find out if he has a weakness that can be exploited."

He passed the memo pad to Ysaye. "I must concede that your people have outstanding technology and wonderful medical science," he said. "I’ve seen ample evidence of both. It’s your ethics that bother me. You realize, don’t you, that they are decidedly second-rate?"

Ysaye paused with an X half finished, and carefully looked past Darzek at the ladder. As familiar as Darzek had become with the aliens, they still avoided his eyes. "Ethics?" Ysaye said. "Second-rate?"

"Second-rate," Darzek said firmly.

"I do not understand."

"Take this Code of yours. You say you are sworn to uphold it. You’re even ready to die upholding it, if necessary, because that was your oath. And you seem to think that makes you a highly ethical people."

Ysaye waited with pencil poised.

"Perhaps you’re right," Darzek went on. "But look at it this way. Am I sworn to uphold your Code?"

"Certainly not," Ysaye said. "You do not even know the Code."

"Right. But you are forcing me to die to uphold this Code that I know nothing about. How do you reconcile that with your ethics?"

"You do not understand," Ysaye said.

"I certainly do not, but I would like to understand. If I have to die to uphold your Code, I think I’m entitled to understand. Don’t you?"

Ysaye did not answer.

"Is it just for your Code to condemn me to death when I don’t know anything about it? Can you have ethics without justice?"

"I’ll ask * * *," Ysaye said.

Darzek laughed. "Don’t you know what she’ll say?"

"Yes—yes—"

"Then why ask her? Ethics—" Darzek pointed a finger. "Ethics is not something you look up in a book, or run to ask advice about every time you’re challenged. Ethics is something you feel deep within yourself. Feel, and act upon. Does your Code say that you can’t do what you know is just?"

"You do not understand."

"Does your own sense of justice say I should die without understanding?" Darzek persisted.

"You are not able to understand. There is darkness within you."

"Ah!" Darzek had the feeling that he was on the verge of discovering something important, and he chose his words carefully. "Darkness. Well—there is darkness within everyone."

"Yes. Within all of your people."

"And within you, and your people."

"But the darkness within you—" Ysaye spoke as if the words were wrenched from him "—the darkness within you is the wrong color."

"The—wrong—color," Darzek mused. The conversation had taken an unexpected twist that he did not like. "But darkness has no color."

"It has many colors."

"Many colors—" Darzek echoed with a smile.

But he had suddenly grasped the full implications of what Ysaye had said, and he was shaken. It was as though some ultimate, invincible power had used this grotesque alien to pronounce judgment on the human race—had judged it, and found it wanting. And there was no appeal.

"It is your turn," Ysaye said.

Darzek stirred himself, and carefully drew an O. "Because my darkness is the wrong color, does this mean that I cannot have justice?"

"You do not understand," Ysaye said. And drew an X.

Ysaye was the misfit among the aliens. If they were given to classifying things in terms of round holes, he was the square peg. Darzek considered him the youngest of the five, but this did not seem sufficient cause to set him apart from the others so drastically.

Darzek’s sympathy and liking for him increased in exact measure as his taunts grew bitter and malicious. He sensed that his remarks cut the young alien deeply, and he loathed himself for what he was doing.

But now he was determined to know—to know everything. His "tick… tock" chant was overheard by Zachary, who asked Ysaye for an explanation and then told Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn hurried to relay the information to Alice and Xerxes, and thereafter a single "tick" from Darzek disrupted the game above and brought Alice’s singing to a choking halt.

In the grim psychological battle he was waging, Darzek could count on only one superior weapon. The aliens feared death. He did not, and to sit quietly waiting for it seemed ludicrous. As the unspoken tension fed on the aliens’ fright and became a bloated, terrifying force that filled the capsule, his own sense of responsibility staggered him. Fear had immobilized the aliens. They were no longer capable of acting to save themselves.

And Darzek was immobilized by ignorance.

He tried a new tack. "You went about it the wrong way, you know," he said to Ysaye.

"I do not understand," Ysaye said.

"I’m talking about the attempt to put Universal Trans out of business. It seems surprising—you people being the right color, and all that—that you did such a miserably inept job."

"We must follow our Code," Ysaye said.

"I have some misgivings about a Code that allows you to go about smashing property that doesn’t belong to you. But never mind. For the moment I’m just wondering how you happened to botch the job so badly."

"What should we have done?"

"We’ve been over that before. I’ll trade information, but I won’t donate it."

"We do not smash property if we can help it," Ysaye said. "There was no other way."

"No other way to do what?"

Ysaye did not answer.

"No other way to smash property except by smashing property?"

Again no answer.

"Look," Darzek said. "You claim to be a highly civilized, highly ethical people. Surely such a people would not indulge in wanton destruction merely for the fun of it. You must have some overriding purpose or objective."

Ysaye got to his feet slowly. "I feel very tired. I must sleep."

He disappeared up the ladder. The other aliens also seemed to be sleeping. Alice had been silent for an unusually long time, and there were no muttered disputations—or perhaps exaltations, since Darzek had failed utterly to interpret them— from the game. Darzek went to his personal bin, and after some deliberation took one of his two remaining cigarettes and lit it. He stretched out on his sleeping pad.

He was in need of sleep himself. Even after he had come to appreciate it somewhat, Alice’s singing kept him awake, and she slept seldom. He felt intensely sorry for her. As the Group Leader she must be suffering a ravaging remorse for the disaster that had fallen upon them. Her wide face was narrower than Gwendolyn’s, more perfectly proportioned. Her voice was noticeably less harsh than those of the other aliens, or at least he had come to think so. He wondered if she were considered dazzlingly lovely by her own people. He could—almost—envision her as a thing of beauty, in the way that an abstract painting could be, at the same time, a ludicrous distortion and a work of art.

He finished his cigarette—finished it down to a minute stub that scorched his fingers—and composed himself for an attempt at sleep. For a time his mind kept him awake with unanswerable questions and irrational speculations, but eventually he dozed off. He was not aware of Zachary’s presence until he opened his eyes and saw the alien seated on the pad beside him.

Zachary said softly, "I am sorry to have awakened you, Jan Darzek. But Ysaye—" He paused. The aliens were still grappling uncertainly with the results of Darzek’s impromptu christenings, as if they feared that he was somehow insulting them. "—Ysaye is so much with you when both of you are awake that we have little opportunity to speak with you confidentially."

"Perfectly all right," Darzek whispered. He sat up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes.

"We have been listening," Zachary said, "and we have discussed the matter. We agree that it is unjust to require your death for principles you do not understand. For—" he crossed his legs, and gazed steadily at a storage compartment behind Darzek "—for it is true that we could have summoned assistance from your people. We could have employed them to save our lives, and yours, but we did not. Our Code sternly forbids it."

"That only confirms what I already knew," Darzek murmured. "Since your Code sternly forbids your telling me anything about—your Code, I don’t see that it alters the situation."

"The Code requires that we utilize any or every means of preventing outsiders, such as your people, from becoming aware of our presence or objectives. We have reread the Code, and discussed it, and we are agreed that it refers to outsiders as a group rather than as individuals. In all of our previous experience there is no instance in which this distinction has had relevance. In your case, as you have pointed out, there is no possibility of your giving the information to your group. We have decided that the Code permits us to make an exception."

"It sounds as if an attorney would have a delightful time with that Code," Darzek said. "Just what do you mean by making an exception?"

"We have decided to tell you what you want to know."

"I see. If you don’t mind, I’ll smoke my last cigarette."

"Please do. I regret that we are unable to supply you with more, but we did not anticipate the need for them here." He added, almost apologetically, "We have never been able to use them ourselves."

Darzek lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply. "You’ve been reading those old medical reports, I suppose. But I thought the manufacturers had that cancer thing licked."

"Oh, we do not avoid them for medical reasons. It is just that they make us ill."

"Understandable. They made me sick the first time I tried them—though I was only about ten years old at the time. You’ve thrown me for a loop. I thought that if any of you told me anything it would be Ysaye. He seems—I suppose I’d call him the most idealistic."

"He is," Zachary said promptly.

"But I couldn’t budge him."

"Of course not. It is precisely for that reason that he would never tell you anything. And I must request, please, that you do not ask him any more questions. You have disturbed him exceedingly."

"I meant to disturb him, but I certainly didn’t get the results I expected."

"The young are always the most inflexible in their application of the Code," Zachary said, "and Ysaye is not only young, but he is also—is it not the same with your people?"

"I wouldn’t say so, no."

"It does not surprise me to hear it. We have noticed many instances where your people are emotionally inverted. I must also ask that you do not mention our conversation to Ysaye. Perhaps later I shall find a way to make him understand. What would you like to know?"

Darzek blew a smoke ring, and watched it float through the opening above. "Everything," he said.

Zachary shifted his position to lean against the ladder, and recrossed his legs. "No," he said finally. "I cannot tell you everything. You do not need to know everything, and we have relatively little time. Ysaye will be awakening soon."

"Tell me what I need to know, then," Darzek said with a grin.

"Perhaps you would prefer to ask questions."

"All right. Why the vendetta against Universal Trans?"

"Our action against Universal Trans—and it will resume as soon as a group is sent to replace us—has two important purposes: to protect the inhabitants of the planet you call Earth, and to protect the inhabitants of other planets of which you could not possibly have any conception."

"Interesting," Darzek said. He was taking long, slow puffs on his cigarette, on the general assumption that this would make it last longer. It was another scientific problem he would like to have discussed with Ted Arnold. "You are protecting us, and them, against what?"

"Against each other."

"Sounds like a noble objective," Darzek said. "But putting aside for the moment the question as to whether these various inhabitants and planets want or need such protection, what does Universal Trans have to do with it?"

"Universal Trans has perfected a type of matter transmitter. With this achievement your people are but two steps removed from absolute mastery of space travel."

"Ah! Mankind is reaching out for the stars, as the poets put it. But I don’t think Universal Trans or anyone else is aware of this."

"They must not become aware of it. For this reason Universal Trans must, and will, fail. Your transmitter must, and will, develop—" He paused.

"Bugs?" Darzek suggested.

"Bugs. Defects, that will hold back its effective utilization for many, many years. Your people are not ready for space travel, and will not be for generations."

"Because our darkness is the wrong color?"

"The color," Zachary said deliberately, "is horribly wrong. Do you have any more questions?"

"Not more than a few hundred. I’m still grappling with the connection between the transmitter and space travel."

"It is difficult to discuss even your crude transmitter in simple terms, but nevertheless the device represents what you would call a breakthrough. A decisive first step. Once its principles are mastered—and Universal Trans has mastered them even though its engineers are far from understanding them— it becomes relatively easy to proceed to step two, which is the transmitter that works without a receiver. The third step is the transmitter that transmits itself, also without a receiver. This is the only practical kind of spaceship. The rockets your people have been developing for so many years are crude toys by comparison."

"I see. Very neat. All the glowing advantages of Universal Trans travel applied to batting about the Solar System. Mars and back before breakfast, and that sort of thing."

"Not only the Solar System. Your galaxy—and others."

"I won’t pretend that I understand, but I’m willing to take your word for it. Limitless distances in one instantaneous twitch, and no wonder our rockets look crude to you. What I don’t see is what our color has to do with it—of darkness or whatever.

Zachary spoke with the lofty patience of an adult instructing a child. "Think! Your darkness is so deeply ingrained that your people are generations away from merely mastering your relations with each other. You exploit the weak. You defy the strong with nuclear weapons. You pervert and distort your own justice, even where justice exists. Your honor is for sale in every market place. You persecute those of your own kind who have different hues of skin—and what minute differences they are, compared with the variegated colors of the inhabitants of other worlds! You even wage war among yourselves over trifling contradictions of words in what you choose to call religion—and what feeble contradictions, when compared with those of the major religions of only this galaxy! You have not even mastered the relationship between your sexes, you who are so fortunate as to have only two. We cannot—we must not—permit your people to leave your Solar System. The galaxy has myriads of worlds with power and technology beyond your comprehension. You are pugnacious, and resourceful, and at the mercy of your own darkness. You would inflict grievous harm upon others, but they would utterly destroy you. Now do you have any other questions?"

"Only one more—for the present, anyway. Who are you?"

"You might call me a policeman," Zachary said. "I fear that my superiors will consider me—consider all five of us— highly inept policemen. We should have recognized that the Earth situation had developed beyond our control, and asked for assistance. Not that it will really make any difference. We are due for resupply in approximately seven of your months, and then our superiors will learn what has happened. A reinforced group of specially trained officers will be brought in, and it will halt the operations of your Universal Transmitting Company permanently."

"Thank you," Darzek said. "You have given me much to think about."

"Whenever you have more questions, I invite you to ask them. I shall probably feel free to answer most of them."

He withdrew up the ladder, and Darzek held a cold fragment of cigarette between his fingers and gazed blankly after him.

He felt torn between two conflicting desires. His loyalty to his fellow men demanded that he bend every effort to put a halt to the activities of these super-smug aliens. On the other hand, he felt morally obligated to save the lives of the five aliens entrapped through his blundering.

But the conflict was at worst an academic one. There was no possible way for him to do either.

14

The realization came as a shock to Darzek.

He had succumbed to his surroundings, and the aliens no longer looked grotesque to him. Worse, Alice’s weird, unending cacophony had begun to sound musical. He found himself listening absently, even following her voice with pleasant anticipation on one of the several songs she repeated frequently. He wondered what the music was supposed to express—what the words might mean.

Understanding came accompanied by a veritable tidal wave of astonishment: they were love songs.

Alice and Xerxes were in love, or some oblique alien equivalent of love. The relationship was, as far as Darzek could tell, entirely nonphysical. Except for the hasty first-aid treatment Alice had supplied to Xerxes’s wounded arm, he had never seen them touch one another. They rarely spoke. They did not even look at each other, and yet Darzek was certain that the word "love" took him as close as he would ever come to an understanding of their strangely remote intimacy.

He consulted Ysaye about this, and Ysaye, after grappling long with the subtleties of comparative philology, firmly denied it.

"What else would you call it?" Darzek demanded, and Ysaye had no answer.

"I need to do some thinking," Darzek said.

"Certainly," Ysaye said, and politely withdrew to the level above. Darzek seated himself on his sleeping pad, lit one of his rapidly dwindling stock of cigarettes, and ordered his mind to think.

The awareness that Alice’s strident caterwauling was actually a tender love message brought home to him for the first time the horror of the thing that he had done. Blindly and impulsively, with no thought for the consequences, he had taken action that doomed five living beings. Since then he had been flitting about the capsule like a lunatic on a holiday, treating the aliens with no more consideration than he would have extended to a few denizens of the zoological gardens with whom he had been locked up by mistake, deliberately contriving actions and comments to shock them into responses that he could analyze and classify. He had not thought of them as highly intelligent beings with their own intensely personal aspirations, and sorrows, and frustrations, and depth of emotional response.

He had not thought of them as—as human beings, and they were. They were intensely human. They merely revealed their humanity in ways that were strange to him.

"They don’t seem to have the grit to face up to a crisis," he mused. "Which isn’t by way of condemning them, because I’ve known businessmen and college professors and bus drivers to lose their heads under far less pressure. The point is, I cooked up this mess we’re in, and getting us out of it is my responsibility. And just how the devil am I going to manage that?"

He wondered if the fantastic supply horde contained anything that could serve as a distress signal. A flare, perhaps, or a signal rocket, or—he brushed the idea aside with a gesture of disgust. He had set off a sizable flare when he blew up the power plant, and if that brought no response, anything less than an atomic holocaust would go unnoticed.

Further, the aliens did not want to be rescued in that way. As he understood their enigmatic Code, rescue by an expedition from Earth would constitute a failure worse than death. He could not expiate his blundering by wresting them from their present fate, only to push them into one they regarded as incomparably more dreadful.

And he did not blame them. Code or no Code, he could foresee what would happen if the United States Space Administration, or its Russian equivalent, got its hands on these aliens. They would end their days in a custom-built zoo, giving regular performances for scientists and politicians, with matinees twice weekly for reporters.

"If I save them," he told himself, "I’ll have to do it on their terms. And just for a starter, I’d better find out what their terms are."

He went looking for Ysaye, found him squatting meditatively on the level above. "This Code of yours," Darzek said. "Tell me about it."

"I cannot do that," Ysaye said.

"Why not?"

"The Code does not allow it."

Darzek turned away to conceal his frustration. "Since we have to die together," he said, "it’s unfortunate that we can’t trust each other."

Ysaye gave a clipped utterance of agreement in his own language.

"How about another game?" Darzek asked.

They descended to the first level, and Darzek went to his bin for his pocket secretary and pencil. In a moment of whimsey he had taught Ysaye the child’s game of ticktacktoe. It fascinated and delighted him. He was so utterly naive at the game that he never won without Darzek’s contrivance, but no number of defeats could discourage him. They quickly filled Darzek’s memo pad with scribbled diagrams, and now they were going through it a second time utilizing every modicum of blank space. The alien’s ineptness intrigued Darzek quite as much as his enthusiasm.

And Ysaye was the lonely one, the outsider. Darzek reasoned that he must be the weakest of the five, and the one most likely to tell him what he wanted to know. Could he find a means of exploiting that weakness?

"Wrong approach," Darzek told himself. "The problem is to find out if he has a weakness that can be exploited."

He passed the memo pad to Ysaye. "I must concede that your people have outstanding technology and wonderful medical science," he said. "I’ve seen ample evidence of both. It’s your ethics that bother me. You realize, don’t you, that they are decidedly second-rate?"

Ysaye paused with an X half finished, and carefully looked past Darzek at the ladder. As familiar as Darzek had become with the aliens, they still avoided his eyes. "Ethics?" Ysaye said. "Second-rate?"

"Second-rate," Darzek said firmly.

"I do not understand."

"Take this Code of yours. You say you are sworn to uphold it. You’re even ready to die upholding it, if necessary, because that was your oath. And you seem to think that makes you a highly ethical people."

Ysaye waited with pencil poised.

"Perhaps you’re right," Darzek went on. "But look at it this way. Am I sworn to uphold your Code?"

"Certainly not," Ysaye said. "You do not even know the Code."

"Right. But you are forcing me to die to uphold this Code that I know nothing about. How do you reconcile that with your ethics?"

"You do not understand," Ysaye said.

"I certainly do not, but I would like to understand. If I have to die to uphold your Code, I think I’m entitled to understand. Don’t you?"

Ysaye did not answer.

"Is it just for your Code to condemn me to death when I don’t know anything about it? Can you have ethics without justice?"

"I’ll ask * * *," Ysaye said.

Darzek laughed. "Don’t you know what she’ll say?"

"Yes—yes—"

"Then why ask her? Ethics—" Darzek pointed a finger. "Ethics is not something you look up in a book, or run to ask advice about every time you’re challenged. Ethics is something you feel deep within yourself. Feel, and act upon. Does your Code say that you can’t do what you know is just?"

"You do not understand."

"Does your own sense of justice say I should die without understanding?" Darzek persisted.

"You are not able to understand. There is darkness within you."

"Ah!" Darzek had the feeling that he was on the verge of discovering something important, and he chose his words carefully. "Darkness. Well—there is darkness within everyone."

"Yes. Within all of your people."

"And within you, and your people."

"But the darkness within you—" Ysaye spoke as if the words were wrenched from him "—the darkness within you is the wrong color."

"The—wrong—color," Darzek mused. The conversation had taken an unexpected twist that he did not like. "But darkness has no color."

"It has many colors."

"Many colors—" Darzek echoed with a smile.

But he had suddenly grasped the full implications of what Ysaye had said, and he was shaken. It was as though some ultimate, invincible power had used this grotesque alien to pronounce judgment on the human race—had judged it, and found it wanting. And there was no appeal.

"It is your turn," Ysaye said.

Darzek stirred himself, and carefully drew an O. "Because my darkness is the wrong color, does this mean that I cannot have justice?"

"You do not understand," Ysaye said. And drew an X.

Ysaye was the misfit among the aliens. If they were given to classifying things in terms of round holes, he was the square peg. Darzek considered him the youngest of the five, but this did not seem sufficient cause to set him apart from the others so drastically.

Darzek’s sympathy and liking for him increased in exact measure as his taunts grew bitter and malicious. He sensed that his remarks cut the young alien deeply, and he loathed himself for what he was doing.

But now he was determined to know—to know everything. His "tick… tock" chant was overheard by Zachary, who asked Ysaye for an explanation and then told Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn hurried to relay the information to Alice and Xerxes, and thereafter a single "tick" from Darzek disrupted the game above and brought Alice’s singing to a choking halt.

In the grim psychological battle he was waging, Darzek could count on only one superior weapon. The aliens feared death. He did not, and to sit quietly waiting for it seemed ludicrous. As the unspoken tension fed on the aliens’ fright and became a bloated, terrifying force that filled the capsule, his own sense of responsibility staggered him. Fear had immobilized the aliens. They were no longer capable of acting to save themselves.

And Darzek was immobilized by ignorance.

He tried a new tack. "You went about it the wrong way, you know," he said to Ysaye.

"I do not understand," Ysaye said.

"I’m talking about the attempt to put Universal Trans out of business. It seems surprising—you people being the right color, and all that—that you did such a miserably inept job."

"We must follow our Code," Ysaye said.

"I have some misgivings about a Code that allows you to go about smashing property that doesn’t belong to you. But never mind. For the moment I’m just wondering how you happened to botch the job so badly."

"What should we have done?"

"We’ve been over that before. I’ll trade information, but I won’t donate it."

"We do not smash property if we can help it," Ysaye said. "There was no other way."

"No other way to do what?"

Ysaye did not answer.

"No other way to smash property except by smashing property?"

Again no answer.

"Look," Darzek said. "You claim to be a highly civilized, highly ethical people. Surely such a people would not indulge in wanton destruction merely for the fun of it. You must have some overriding purpose or objective."

Ysaye got to his feet slowly. "I feel very tired. I must sleep."

He disappeared up the ladder. The other aliens also seemed to be sleeping. Alice had been silent for an unusually long time, and there were no muttered disputations—or perhaps exaltations, since Darzek had failed utterly to interpret them— from the game. Darzek went to his personal bin, and after some deliberation took one of his two remaining cigarettes and lit it. He stretched out on his sleeping pad.

He was in need of sleep himself. Even after he had come to appreciate it somewhat, Alice’s singing kept him awake, and she slept seldom. He felt intensely sorry for her. As the Group Leader she must be suffering a ravaging remorse for the disaster that had fallen upon them. Her wide face was narrower than Gwendolyn’s, more perfectly proportioned. Her voice was noticeably less harsh than those of the other aliens, or at least he had come to think so. He wondered if she were considered dazzlingly lovely by her own people. He could—almost—envision her as a thing of beauty, in the way that an abstract painting could be, at the same time, a ludicrous distortion and a work of art.

He finished his cigarette—finished it down to a minute stub that scorched his fingers—and composed himself for an attempt at sleep. For a time his mind kept him awake with unanswerable questions and irrational speculations, but eventually he dozed off. He was not aware of Zachary’s presence until he opened his eyes and saw the alien seated on the pad beside him.

Zachary said softly, "I am sorry to have awakened you, Jan Darzek. But Ysaye—" He paused. The aliens were still grappling uncertainly with the results of Darzek’s impromptu christenings, as if they feared that he was somehow insulting them. "—Ysaye is so much with you when both of you are awake that we have little opportunity to speak with you confidentially."

"Perfectly all right," Darzek whispered. He sat up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes.

"We have been listening," Zachary said, "and we have discussed the matter. We agree that it is unjust to require your death for principles you do not understand. For—" he crossed his legs, and gazed steadily at a storage compartment behind Darzek "—for it is true that we could have summoned assistance from your people. We could have employed them to save our lives, and yours, but we did not. Our Code sternly forbids it."

"That only confirms what I already knew," Darzek murmured. "Since your Code sternly forbids your telling me anything about—your Code, I don’t see that it alters the situation."

"The Code requires that we utilize any or every means of preventing outsiders, such as your people, from becoming aware of our presence or objectives. We have reread the Code, and discussed it, and we are agreed that it refers to outsiders as a group rather than as individuals. In all of our previous experience there is no instance in which this distinction has had relevance. In your case, as you have pointed out, there is no possibility of your giving the information to your group. We have decided that the Code permits us to make an exception."

"It sounds as if an attorney would have a delightful time with that Code," Darzek said. "Just what do you mean by making an exception?"

"We have decided to tell you what you want to know."

"I see. If you don’t mind, I’ll smoke my last cigarette."

"Please do. I regret that we are unable to supply you with more, but we did not anticipate the need for them here." He added, almost apologetically, "We have never been able to use them ourselves."

Darzek lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply. "You’ve been reading those old medical reports, I suppose. But I thought the manufacturers had that cancer thing licked."

"Oh, we do not avoid them for medical reasons. It is just that they make us ill."

"Understandable. They made me sick the first time I tried them—though I was only about ten years old at the time. You’ve thrown me for a loop. I thought that if any of you told me anything it would be Ysaye. He seems—I suppose I’d call him the most idealistic."

"He is," Zachary said promptly.

"But I couldn’t budge him."

"Of course not. It is precisely for that reason that he would never tell you anything. And I must request, please, that you do not ask him any more questions. You have disturbed him exceedingly."

"I meant to disturb him, but I certainly didn’t get the results I expected."

"The young are always the most inflexible in their application of the Code," Zachary said, "and Ysaye is not only young, but he is also—is it not the same with your people?"

"I wouldn’t say so, no."

"It does not surprise me to hear it. We have noticed many instances where your people are emotionally inverted. I must also ask that you do not mention our conversation to Ysaye. Perhaps later I shall find a way to make him understand. What would you like to know?"

Darzek blew a smoke ring, and watched it float through the opening above. "Everything," he said.

Zachary shifted his position to lean against the ladder, and recrossed his legs. "No," he said finally. "I cannot tell you everything. You do not need to know everything, and we have relatively little time. Ysaye will be awakening soon."

"Tell me what I need to know, then," Darzek said with a grin.

"Perhaps you would prefer to ask questions."

"All right. Why the vendetta against Universal Trans?"

"Our action against Universal Trans—and it will resume as soon as a group is sent to replace us—has two important purposes: to protect the inhabitants of the planet you call Earth, and to protect the inhabitants of other planets of which you could not possibly have any conception."

"Interesting," Darzek said. He was taking long, slow puffs on his cigarette, on the general assumption that this would make it last longer. It was another scientific problem he would like to have discussed with Ted Arnold. "You are protecting us, and them, against what?"

"Against each other."

"Sounds like a noble objective," Darzek said. "But putting aside for the moment the question as to whether these various inhabitants and planets want or need such protection, what does Universal Trans have to do with it?"

"Universal Trans has perfected a type of matter transmitter. With this achievement your people are but two steps removed from absolute mastery of space travel."

"Ah! Mankind is reaching out for the stars, as the poets put it. But I don’t think Universal Trans or anyone else is aware of this."

"They must not become aware of it. For this reason Universal Trans must, and will, fail. Your transmitter must, and will, develop—" He paused.

"Bugs?" Darzek suggested.

"Bugs. Defects, that will hold back its effective utilization for many, many years. Your people are not ready for space travel, and will not be for generations."

"Because our darkness is the wrong color?"

"The color," Zachary said deliberately, "is horribly wrong. Do you have any more questions?"

"Not more than a few hundred. I’m still grappling with the connection between the transmitter and space travel."

"It is difficult to discuss even your crude transmitter in simple terms, but nevertheless the device represents what you would call a breakthrough. A decisive first step. Once its principles are mastered—and Universal Trans has mastered them even though its engineers are far from understanding them— it becomes relatively easy to proceed to step two, which is the transmitter that works without a receiver. The third step is the transmitter that transmits itself, also without a receiver. This is the only practical kind of spaceship. The rockets your people have been developing for so many years are crude toys by comparison."

"I see. Very neat. All the glowing advantages of Universal Trans travel applied to batting about the Solar System. Mars and back before breakfast, and that sort of thing."

"Not only the Solar System. Your galaxy—and others."

"I won’t pretend that I understand, but I’m willing to take your word for it. Limitless distances in one instantaneous twitch, and no wonder our rockets look crude to you. What I don’t see is what our color has to do with it—of darkness or whatever.

Zachary spoke with the lofty patience of an adult instructing a child. "Think! Your darkness is so deeply ingrained that your people are generations away from merely mastering your relations with each other. You exploit the weak. You defy the strong with nuclear weapons. You pervert and distort your own justice, even where justice exists. Your honor is for sale in every market place. You persecute those of your own kind who have different hues of skin—and what minute differences they are, compared with the variegated colors of the inhabitants of other worlds! You even wage war among yourselves over trifling contradictions of words in what you choose to call religion—and what feeble contradictions, when compared with those of the major religions of only this galaxy! You have not even mastered the relationship between your sexes, you who are so fortunate as to have only two. We cannot—we must not—permit your people to leave your Solar System. The galaxy has myriads of worlds with power and technology beyond your comprehension. You are pugnacious, and resourceful, and at the mercy of your own darkness. You would inflict grievous harm upon others, but they would utterly destroy you. Now do you have any other questions?"

"Only one more—for the present, anyway. Who are you?"

"You might call me a policeman," Zachary said. "I fear that my superiors will consider me—consider all five of us— highly inept policemen. We should have recognized that the Earth situation had developed beyond our control, and asked for assistance. Not that it will really make any difference. We are due for resupply in approximately seven of your months, and then our superiors will learn what has happened. A reinforced group of specially trained officers will be brought in, and it will halt the operations of your Universal Transmitting Company permanently."

"Thank you," Darzek said. "You have given me much to think about."

"Whenever you have more questions, I invite you to ask them. I shall probably feel free to answer most of them."

He withdrew up the ladder, and Darzek held a cold fragment of cigarette between his fingers and gazed blankly after him.

He felt torn between two conflicting desires. His loyalty to his fellow men demanded that he bend every effort to put a halt to the activities of these super-smug aliens. On the other hand, he felt morally obligated to save the lives of the five aliens entrapped through his blundering.

But the conflict was at worst an academic one. There was no possible way for him to do either.