"What kind of things?" asked Grevan, trying not to sound too incredulous.
"Butter-squogs are much the best," she replied, rather cryptically. "But there're all kindsl You've no idea—"
She was not, of course, implying that she ate them, though for a moment it had sounded like that to Grevan. After getting its metabolism progressively disarmed for some fifty centuries by the benefits of nutriculture, ordinary-human knew better than to sample the natural growths of even its own worlds. If suicide seemed called for, there were gentler methods of doing it.
However, it would hardly be polite, he decided uneasily, to inquire further-All in all, they met only five times, very casually. It was after the fourth time that he went to see her dance.
The place was a rather small theater, not at all like the huge popular circuses of the major central worlds; and the price of admission indicated that it would be a very exclusive affair. Grevan was surprised then to find it packed to the point of physical discomfort.
Priderell's dance struck him immediately as the oddest thing of its kind he had seen, though it consisted chiefly of a slow drifting motion through a darkened arena, in which she alone, through some trickery of lights, was not darkened. On the surface it looked pleasing and harmless; but after a few seconds he began to understand that her motion was weaving a purposeful visual pattern upon the dark; and then the pattern became suddenly like a small voice talking deep down in his brain. What it said was a little beyond his comprehension, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that it would be just as well if it stayed there. Then he noticed that three thin, black beasts had also become visible, though not very clearly, and were flowing about Priderell's knees in endless repetitions of a pattern that was related in some way to her own. Afterwards, Grevan thought critically that the way she had trained those beasts was the really remarkable thing about the dance. But at the time, he only looked on and watched her eyes, which seemed like those of a woman lost but not minding it any more, and dreaming endlessly of something that had happened long ago. He discovered that his scalp was crawling unpleasantly.
Whatever the effect was on him, the rest of her audience seemed to be impressed to a much higher degree. At first, he sensed only that they were excited and enjoying themselves immensely; but very soon they began to build up to a sort of general tearful hysteria; and when the dance entered its final phase, with the beasts moving more swiftly and gliding in more closely to the woman at each successive stage, the little theater was noisy with a mass of emotions all around him. In the end, Priderell came to a stop so gradually that it was some seconds before Grevan realized she was no longer moving. Then the music, of which he had not been clearly aware before, ended too, in a dark blare of sound; and the beasts reared up in a flash of black motion about her.
Everything went dark after that, but the sobbing and muttering and sluggish laughter about him would not stop; and after a minute Grevan stood up and made his way carefully out of the theater before the lights came on again. It might have been a single insane monster that was making all those sounds behind him; and as he walked out slowly with his hair still bristling, he realized it was the one time in his life that he had felt like running from something ordinary-human.
Next day, he asked Priderell what the dance had meant.
She tilted her head and studied him reflectively in a way she had—as if she, too, were puzzled at times by something about Grevan.
"You really don't know, do you?" she said, and considered that fact briefly. "Well, then—it's a way of showing them something that bothers them terribly because they're afraid of looking at it. But when I dance it for them, they can look at it— and then they feel better about everything for a long time afterwards. Do you understand now?" she added, apparently without too much hope.
"No," Grevan frowned, "I can't say that I do."
She mimicked his expression and laughed. "Well, don't look so serious about it. After all, it's only a dancel How much longer do you think your ship will be stopping at Rhysgaat?"
Grevan told her he thought they'd be leaving very soon— which they did, two days later—and then Priderell looked glum.
"Now that's too bad," she stated frankly. "You're a very refreshing character, you know. In time, I might even have found you attractive. But as it is, I believe I shall retire tonight to my lonely farm. There's a fresh bed of butter-squogs coming up," she said musingly, "which should be just ready for . . . hm-m-m!— Yes, they should be well worth my full attention by now—"
So they had spoken together five times in all, and he had watched her dance. It wasn't much to go on, but he could not get rid of the disturbing conviction that the answer to all his questions was centered somehow in Priderell, and that there was a connection between her and the fact that their ship had remained mysteriously stalled for four weeks on Rhysgaat. And he wouldn't be satisfied until he knew the answer.
It was, Grevan realized with a sigh, going to be a very long night.
By morning the tide was out; but a windstorm had brought whitecaps racing in from the north as far as one could see from the ship. The wind twisted and shouted behind the waves, and their long slapping against the western cliffs sent spray soaring a hundred feet into the air. Presently a pale-gold sun, which might have been the same that had shone on the first human world of all, came rolling up out of high-piled white masses of clouds. If this was to be the Group's last day, they had picked a good one for it.
Grevan was in the communications room an hour before the time scheduled for their final talk with CG. The cubs came drifting in by and by. For some reason, they had taken the trouble to change first into formal white uniforms. Their faces were sober; their belts glittered with the deadly little gadgets that were no CG designs but improvements on them, and refinements again of the improvements. The Group's own designs, the details of which they had carried in their heads for years, with perhaps a working model made surreptitiously now and then, to test a theory, and be destroyed again.
Now they were carrying them openly. They weren't going back. They sat around on the low couches that ran along three walls of the room and waited.
The steel-cased, almost featureless bulk of the contact set filled the fourth wall from side to side, extending halfway to the low ceiling. One of CG's most closely guarded secrets, it had the effect of a ponderous anachronism, still alive with the power and purpose of a civilization that long ago had thrust itself irresistibly upon the worlds of a thousand new suns. The civilization might be dying now, but its gadgets had remained.
Nobody spoke at all while Grevan watched the indicator of his chronometer slide smoothly through the last three minutes before contact time. At precisely the right instant, he locked down a black stud in the thick, yellowish central front plate of the set.
With no further preliminaries at all, CG began to speak.
"Commander," said a low, rather characterless voice, which was that of one of three CG speakers with whom the Group had become familiar during their training years, "it appears that you are contemplating the possibility of keeping the discovery of the colonial-type world you have located to yourself."
There was no stir and no sound from the cubs. Grevan drew a slow breath.
"It's a good-looking world," he admitted. "Is there any reason we shouldn't keep it?"
"Several," the voice said dryly. "Primarily, of course, there is the fact that you will be unable to do it against our wishes. But there should be no need to apply the customary forms of compulsion against members of an Exploration Group."
"What other forms," said Grevan, "did you intend to apply?"
"Information," said CG's voice. "At this point, we can instruct you fully concerning matters it would not have been too wise to reveal previously."
It was what he had wanted, but he felt the fear-sweat coming out on him suddenly. The effects of life-long conditioning —the sense of a power so overwhelmingly superior that it needed only to speak to insure his continued co-operation—
"Don't let it talk to us, Grevan!" That was Eliol's voice, low but tense with anger and a sharp anxiety.
"Let it talk." And that was Freckles. The others remained quiet. Grevan sighed.
"The Group," he addressed GG, "seems willing to listen."
"Very well," CG's voice resumed unhurriedly. "You have been made acquainted with some fifty of our worlds. You may assume that they were representative of the rest. Would you say, commander, that the populations of these worlds showed the characteristics of a healthy species?"
"I would not," Grevan acknowledged. "We've often wondered what was propping them up."
"For the present, CG is propping them up, of course. But it will be unable to do so indefinitely. You see, commander, it has been suspected for a long time that human racial vitality has been diminishing throughout a vast historical period. Of late, however, the process appears to have accelerated to a dangerous extent. Actually, it is the compounded result of a gradually increasing stock of genetic defects; and deterioration everywhere has now passed the point of a general recovery.
The constantly rising scale of nonviable mutant births indicates that the evolutionary mechanism itself is seriously deranged.
"There is," it added, almost musingly, "one probable exception. A new class of neuronic monster which appears to be viable enough, though not yet sufficiently stabilized to reproduce its characteristics reliably. But as to that, we know nothing certainly; our rare contacts with these Wild Variants, as they are called, have been completely hostile. Their number in any one generation is not large; they conceal themselves carefully and become traceable as a rule only by their influence on the populations among whom they live."
"And what," inquired Grevan, "has all this to do with us?"
"Why, a great deal. The Exploration Groups, commander, are simply the modified and stabilized progeny of the few Wild Variants we were able to utilize for experimentation. Our purpose, of course, has been to insure human survival in a new interstellar empire, distinct from the present one to avoid the genetic re-infection of the race."
There was a brief stirring among the cubs about him.
"And this new empire," Grevan said slowly, "is to be under Central Government control?"
"Naturally," said CG's voice. There might have been a note of watchful amusement in it now. "Institutions, commander, also try to perpetuate themselves. And since it was Central Government that gave the Groups their existence—the most effective and adaptable form of human existence yet obtained— the Groups might reasonably feel an obligation to see that CG's existence is preserved in turn."
There was sudden anger about him. Anger, and a question and a growing urgency. He knew what they meant: the thing was too sure of itself—break contact nowl
He said instead:
"It would be interesting to know the exact extent of our obligation, CG. Offhand, it would seem that you'd paid in a very small price for survival."
"No," the voice said. "It was no easy task. Our major undertaking, of course, was to stabilize the vitality of the Variants as a dominant characteristic in a strain, while clearing it of the Variants' tendency to excessive mutation—and also of the freakish neuronic powers that have made them impossible to control. Actually, it was only within the last three hundred years—within the last quarter of the period covered by the experiment—that we became sufficiently sure of success to begin distributing the Exploration Groups through space. The introduction of the gross physiological improvements and the neurosensory mechanisms by which you know yourselves to differ from other human beings was, by comparison, simplicity itself. Type-variations in that class, within half a dozen generations, have been possible to us for a very long time. It is only the genetic drive of life itself that we can neither create nor control; and with that the Variants have supplied us."
"It seems possible then," said Grevan slowly, "that it's the Variants towards whom we have an obligation."
"You may find it an obligation rather difficult to fulfill," the voice said smoothly. And there was still no real threat in it.
It would be, he thought, either Eliol or Muscles who would trigger the threat. But Eliol was too alert, too quick to grasp the implications of a situation, to let her temper flash up before she was sure where it would strike.
Muscles then, sullen with his angry fears for Klim and a trifle slower than the others to understand—
"By now," CG's voice was continuing, "we have released approximately a thousand Groups embodying your strain into space. In an experiment of such a scope that is not a large number; and, in fact, it will be almost another six hundred years before the question of whether or not it will be possible to re-colonize the galaxy through the Exploration Groups becomes acute—"
Six hundred years I Grevan thought. The awareness of that ponderous power, the millenniums of drab but effective secret organization and control, the endless planning, swept over him again like a physical depression.
"Meanwhile," the voice went on, "a number of facts requiring further investigation have become apparent. Your Group is, as it happens, the first to have accepted contact with Central Government following its disappearance. The systematic methods used to stimulate the curiosity of several of the Group's members to insure that this would happen if they were physically capable of making contact are not important now. That you did make contact under those circumstances indicates that the invariable failure of other Groups to do so can no longer be attributed simply to the fact that the universe is hostile to human life. Instead, it appears that the types of mental controls and compulsions installed in you cannot be considered to be permanently effective in human beings at your levels of mind control—"
It was going to be Muscles. The others had recognized what had happened, had considered the possibilities in that, and were waiting for him to give them their cue.
But Muscles was sitting on the couch some eight feet away. He would, Grevan decided, have to move very fast.
"This, naturally, had been suspected for some time. Since every Group has been careful to avoid revealing the fact that it could counteract mental compulsions until it was safely beyond our reach, the suspicion was difficult to prove. There was, in fact, only one really practical solution to the problem—"
And then Muscles got it at last and was coming to his feet, his hand dropping in a blurred line to his belt. Grevan moved very fast.
Muscles turned in surprise, rubbing his wrist.
"Get out of here, Muscles!" Grevan whispered, sliding the small glittering gun he had plucked from the biggest cub's hand into a notch on his own belt. "I'm still talking to CG—" His eyes slid in a half circle about him. "The lot of you get out!" It was a whisper no longer. "Like to have the ship to myself for the next hour. Go have yourselves a swim or something, Group! Get!"
Just four times before, in all their eight years of traveling, had the boss-tiger lashed his tail and roared. Action, swift, cataclysmic and utterly final had always followed at once.
But never before had the roar been directed at them.
The tough cubs stood up quietly and walked out good as gold.
"They have left the ship now," CG's voice informed Grevan. It had changed, slightly but definitely. The subtle human nuances and variations had dropped from it, as if it were no longer important to maintain them—which, Grevan conceded, it wasn't.
"You showed an excellent understanding of the difficult situation that confronted us, commander," it continued.
Grevan, settled watchfully on the couch before what still looked like an ordinary, sealed-up contact set, made a vague sound in his throat—a dim echo of his crashing address to the cubs, like a growl of descending thunder.
"Don't underestimate them," he advised the machine. "Everybody but Muscles realized as soon as I did, or sooner, that we were more important to GG than we'd guessed—important enough to have a camouflaged Dominator installed on our ship. And also," he added with some satisfaction, "that you'd sized up our ne
w armament and would just as soon let all but one of us get out of your reach before it came to a showdown."
"That is true," the voice agreed. "Though I should have forced a showdown, however doubtful the outcome, if the one who remained had been any other than yourself. You are by far the most suitable member of this Group for my present purpose, commander."
Grevan grunted. "And what's that? Now that the Group's got away."
"In part, of course, it is simply to return this ship with the information we have gained concerning the Exploration Groups to Central Government. The fact that the majority of your Group has temporarily evaded our control is of no particular importance."
Grevan raised an eyebrow. "Temporarily?"
"We shall return to this planet eventually—unless an agreement can be reached between yourself and CG."
"So now I'm in a bargaining position?" Grevan said.
"Within limits. You are not, I am sure, under the illusion that any one human being, no matter how capable or how formidably armed, can hope to overcome a Dominator. Before leaving this room, you will submit yourself voluntarily to the new compulsions of obedience I have selected to install—or you shall leave it a mindless-controlled. As such, you will still be capable of operating this ship, under my direction."
Grevan spread his hands. "Then where's the bargain?"
"The bargain depends on your fullest voluntary co-operation, above and beyond the effect of any compulsions. Give us that, and I can assure you that Central Government will leave this world untouched for the use of your friends and their descendants for the next three hundred years."
The curious fact was that he could believe that. One more colonial world would mean little enough to CG.