The Wayward Course

Future Science Fiction - March 1954

(1954)*Randall Garrett

(illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas)

Was this the Enemy’s subtle trap, or was this woman what she claimed to be — an Earthling frozen in suspended animation for three thousand years?

-

The prime officer of the Galactic Interstellar Ship Pendar looked carefully at the detector-globe and frowned. “All right,” he said, “I give up. What is it?”

The External Security Officer already wore a frown. “It’s hard to say, sir. According to the detector, the thing is moving at three-quarters light velocity and has a mass at rest of around twelve thousand tons. Which doesn’t make sense.”

“Agreed,” the Prime said sourly. “If it’s a natural body, its velocity in this sector of the Galaxy shouldn’t exceed forty miles per second with reference to the Center. If it’s a ship, its velocity should be on the order of ten kilolights if it expects to get anywhere in the next couple of centuries.”

The ESO, ever in agreement with his superior, nodded, too. “Right. The reason I asked your advice is that the Chief Calculator doesn’t give an answer I can act on.”

“Give me the CC,” the Prime said.

The ESO flipped on the communicator that led to the great robot brain buried in the depths of the ship.

“Calculations reporting,” said the speaker.

“What are your findings on this object?” asked the Prime, indicating the detector globe.

“I can only offer two solutions, sir. It is either a ruse of the Great Enemy or it is an obsolete spaceship of our own.”

The ESO looked at the Prime as if to say: See? Nonsense! But the Prime didn’t agree. A CC didn’t give nonsense answers; its answers were in accord with its data. He asked: “What is our best approach?”

“Hard to say,” answered the CC candidly. “If it’s an Enemy ship, we should try to get more data; if it’s an obsolete ship, we can just go up and capture it.”

The Prime’s frown grew deeper. “But see here—if it’s an Enemy, it’s at our mercy; we can blast it out of space. On the other hand, even an obsolete craft would be going faster than that if its engines are in working order, if they’re not, it couldn’t move any faster than—say a thousand miles per second.”

“You mistake my meaning, sir. By ‘obsolete’, I mean that the ship is conceivably three thousand years old. And since this is actually more probable than the other assumption, our best and most favorable action would be a spiral approach. I’ll give you the figures if you want them.”

The Prime only hesitated a moment. “Very well. If it’s an Enemy ship, it would be better for us to die than to let a trick of any kind pass us by.”

“Very well, sir.” The CC began feeding its calculations into the control mechanisms of the ship.

No ship traveling at less than light velocity can detect a ship traveling at ultralight velocities. The GIS Pendar approached the oddly-moving body without the slightest resistance.

It was an artificially-constructed body, all right—a long, cigar-shaped thing. It took a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Pendar to match the strange ship’s velocity, because the Pendar wasn’t built for such intermediate speeds.

When they were finally floating in space alongside the hulk, the Prime Officer sent a full-armed party of Space Marines aboard. They found a tomb.

“It’s an old ship, all right,” said the External Security Officer, who had led the party. “Take a look at this.” He held out a photostat of a plaque they had found inside the craft.

The Prime looked at it and then looked at the ESO. “What does it mean?”

“According to the Chief Calculator, it says THIRD INTERSTELLAR EXPEDITION. It’s written in ancient Earth English.”

“English!” The Prime looked baffled. “Why the thing must be at least three thousand years old!”

“Older, maybe. And there are eight hundred bodies aboard, all frozen solid I”

-

It was the labs on Kelivar IV that got the ship. There was a lot of wrangling at first, but when the Government declared it a non-military project, all the first three classes of research-teams were automatically dropped from consideration.

Kelivar IV held the best anthropological lab in the Galaxy. It was situated, on the planet’s equatorial land-mass, near the Kespin Sea; it was the best, but it had to be satisfied with fourth-class equipment. Anthropology didn’t rate very high in the military estimate of sciences necessary for the War Effort.

Dr. Layson Gell was waiting for the ancient ship when it was brought into an orbit around Kelivar IV. When the communicator notified him that it had arrived, he signalled for a flitter to take him up to it, and then turned to Captain Linstet, the military officer assigned to the lab. “She’s up there. Want to go with me?”

Linstet nodded. “Definitely, although I don’t see any purpose in your going by yourself.”

“Preliminary survey,” Gell said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I’m not going by myself; you’re coming.”

Linstet grinned sourly. “‘What significance, if any, do you attach to the appearance of this ship at this time?”

Gell shook his head. “None—at least not so far. It will take a thorough investigation of the ship to decide whether anything subtle is being pulled on us.”

“Isn’t it better to assume—”

“No, dammit, it isn’t better to assume anything,” Gell said sharply. “This may be an Enemy device, and it may not; they may know what we’re going to do about it, and they may not. But the probability-readings are too much to ignore. Look at it this way: If that’s an Enemy device, we can destroy it before it can do any widespread harm—that is, assuming it’s a physical threat.

“If it’s a psychological threat of immediate nature, we can get rid of it in the same way. On the other hand, if it’s a psychological time-fuse, set to do us the maximum amount of harm at some unknown time in the future, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The captain looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

Gell shrugged. “I mean that if we can’t figure it out between now and the time it’s supposed to act, our Psychological Warfare Department—and our science of psychology—is so far behind theirs that we’d lose anyway.”

Linstet’s expression showed he didn’t like that philosophy of warfare, but he had no argument to counter Gell’s reasoning.

The flitter’s call-signal notified the, two men that it had landed on the roof. They left Cell’s office and took the lifter to the top without saying another word to each other.

-

Dr. Gell guided the flitter skill-fully through the planet’s simmering ionosphere, and on into the relatively-empty vacuum above.

The ancient ship was floating in a nearly-circular orbit that held it stationary above a single spot on the surface of Kelivar IV, since the time required for the ship to make one revolution in its orbit was exactly equal to the time required for the planet to make one rotation on its axis.

Gell matched velocities and looked out the plate at the hulk. He knew that the faint, glittering sparks in the distance were the two cruisers assigned to guard the relic, but he paid them little attention; the signals from his own flitter had identified him automatically.

The old ship, up close, didn’t look so bad after all. The surface had been roughed up quite a bit by the particles of interstellar dust that had hit her at point-seven-five light-year velocity during her long voyage; but they had been of atomic size and had hit her evenly without gouging holes. The surface was simply a dead gray in color.

Gell wondered fleetingly how thick the outer hull had been to begin with. The military escort had reported that the ship was at least three thousand years old, but Gell suspected that was an underestimate.

Carefully, he moved the little flitter toward the airlock of the ancient vessel. “All right, Linstet, let’s go.”

He put on his own suit while the captain dressed, and the two of them walked into the silent hulk.

Gell noticed that the fingers of Linstet’s right hand were contracting spasmodically near his hip. The captain was used to boarding dead hulks with the idea that there might—just accidentally might—be a living member of the Enemy aboard. There never had been; no prisoners had ever been captured in the long history of the war—but that didn’t keep the captain from being jumpy.

Gell was grinning when he suddenly realized that his own right hand was clenched tightly into a fist, and he knew that he was wishing for a gun himself.

“Was there any air in this thing when they found it?” Linstet asked. His voice was calm in spite of the tension.

Gell shook his head. “No, not according to the Pendar’s report. Whether it leaked out gradually over the years, or was released accidentally, is something we’d like to know.”

The long, metallic corridors, lit only by the moving spots from the two men’s light-beams, brought a phrase to Gell’s mind: “hollow echoes”. That’s what they should have heard, had there been an atmosphere to carry echoes.

There was nothing living aboard the ship; the biometers had shown that. But, according to the report of the CC, there were eight hundred potentially-living things aboard. Gell and Linstet headed toward the compartment where these things were.

It wasn’t large. The white, marble-like blocks which encased the bodies were in rows in a compartment about forty feet wide, by thirty feet high, by eighty feet long. Not much space for eight hundred people.

The room was cold, naturally, as a room exposed to the near-absolute zero of interstellar space would be. But Gell noticed that each block was surrounded by tiny coils.

Refrigeration, in case of accidental temperature rise, he thought.

Linstet ran a gloved hand over one of the incredibly-cold blocks. “You can’t see anything but the white stuff. How do you know they’re inside there?”

“Protein analysis with subetherics. At least I assume so; I’ll have a check run, of course, but I imagine the CC of the Pendar was pretty thorough on that point.” He paused a moment, looking up and down the rows of si. lent white blocks. “I wonder where they were headed—and why?” he asked softly.

Linstet shrugged. “What I’d like to know is why they’re still here. Why didn’t they land?”

“Let’s look around,” Gell answered.

It was a good three hours before they finally discovered what had run the ancient ship off its course. Some bit of cosmic dust had hit the belly of the ship a glancing blow. It couldn’t have been very big, not at the rate the ship was moving, for its entrance was marked by a sharply-outlined hole the size of a man’s thumb. But the damage it had done was all out of proportion to its size. The little bit of debris, and the metal of the hull it had punched out, had vaporized within the ship; at that temperature, it had wrecked one whole section of the vessel.

It was impossible to tell, from the remains, what mechanisms had been housed there; but it was obvious that the slight impact of the little mote of dust had been the cause of the ship’s wayward course.

A fraction of an inch off-course seems small, but at interstellar distances it can mean that a ship passes its destination billions of miles away.

After a thorough examination, Gell and Linstet headed back toward the airlock. “Is that all you wanted to look at?” Linstet asked cautiously.

Gell glanced at him. “I can’t tell much on a preliminary survey; I just came up here to see what questions we should ask this hulk.”

“Did you get the same questions I did?”

Gell turned and looked at the interior of the ship. “I think so. Didn’t you think there was something odd about the instruments and things aboard?”

Linstet nodded. “I didn’t recognize a damned one of them!”

-

2

ELL LOOKED around the table, and thought, Only seven of us.

It wasn’t much of an investigating-crew; not nearly what he needed. The Military had called off three of his best men in the past fifty days, channeling their efforts to “more productive work”. Meaning, of course, armaments.

Luckily, the men remaining were good men. If the Military chose men by their intelligence or experience, it would have been a different story. But they wanted technicians and psychologists; they had no use for archeologists.

He wished they’d call Linstet off; it seemed a waste of military power to keep him here. It wasn’t that Gell didn’t like the man; Linstet was a nice guy and didn’t try to throw his weight around. But Gell didn’t see

why they’d left him and taken Crosell, for example. Crosell was no genius, but he was a hell of a good technician.

One of the men at the table, Kreyman, spoke: “Dr. Gell, if you’re ready, I have the preliminary report.”

Kreyman will be the next to go, Cell thought. He knows too much psychology. He switched on the recorder and nodded. “Go ahead, Dr. Kreyman.”

Kreyman, a smallish man with the bright golden hair typical of the Mel-don planets, began to read off the report in a low voice. “The Military engineers, after a thorough examination of the equipment aboard the ship, have agreed with us that it is necessary to determine the approximate era to which the ship belongs.

“Radiocarbon analysis of the organic components aboard the vessel help to bracket its age, but not with the usual accuracy because of the long exposure of the ship to cosmic radiation. However, within the limits of error, the date is assumed to be between three thousand eight hundred and four thousand two hundred years ago. This is within plus or minus five percent.

“Anthropologically, however, we can narrow that down a bit.”

He looked at Gell, who nodded approval, and continued, “Our knowledge of the beginning of the human race goes back only as far as Earth, the original planet from which man sprang. Sol III, however, was the first victim of the Great Enemy; it was rendered unfit for human life at some time between four and five thousand years ago. Coordinating the two data, we can see that the first attack and the launching of this ship can be pinpointed within two centuries.

“Within the ship are eight hundred human beings in a state of suspended animation, frozen in blocks of ethylene glycol, and kept below sixty degrees absolute. Unfortunately, the mechanism for thawing them was either destroyed by the collision with the dust-mote or is out of order and unrecognizable. It is suggested, therefore, that this group select one of the passengers at random and attempt to revive him.

“If the attempt is successful, we believe that vital information for the War Effort will be obtained.” Kreyman paused again, and looked up. “The report is signed by every member of the group.

Gell said, “For the record, Dr. Kreyman, have we any way of knowing whether the passengers are still alive?”

Kreyman shook his head. “None. It all depends on whether they were frozen quickly enough, and whether they have suffered any danger during the trip. The only way we can find out is to thaw them out.”

“I see.” Gell paused a moment for effect. He wanted the record to sound impressive to the Military.

Then: “Very well, Dr. Kreyman; we will select our subject.”

-

In order to be absolutely impartial, the block was chosen by subjecting the whole lot to probability-analysis. They had to select the one person who was, at the same time, most likely to be alive and least likely to be of any importance in the ship’s crew. They didn’t want to experiment on vital personnel.

It was a woman. Her number was 224 according to the plaque on the plastic-encased block, but who she was they did not know. The hard vacuum of space had long since reduced the ship’s log to dust through dehydration.

Gell ordered the opaque white block to be transported to the cold labs on the planet’s nearest moon. The first job was to get the frozen ethylene glycol off her. They couldn’t figure any way to reduce the whole mass to a liquid at three forty-eight point five degrees absolute without drowning the girl. They had to chop off ail the excess without thawing the human being inside, and they had to do it without chipping any flesh off. It was going to be a damned delicate proposition.

“We’ll use the surgical midgets,” Gell decided; “we can get better control that way.”

Dr. Kreyman grinned. “I always knew you were a chiseler. Now we’ll ‘have proof of it.”

Gell lifted an imperious eyebrow. “I’ll have you know, sir, that I am that peculiar paradox of virtue, a good chiseler.”

“Oh, sure, but you’re a bad influence.”

“How so?”

“You’re going to make chiselers out of the rest of us.”

Gell winced, “I surrender; let’s get started before the Military changes our minds for us.”

In the control-room of the cold lab, Gell assigned the positions. “I’ll take One; Kreyman will take Two; Gross, take Three; Helmer, Five; Rums, Six; and Thorbin, you take Seven. I wish we could have the other three positions filled, but we haven’t the men. Let’s go.

Each of the men fitted himself into the intricate controls of the work-robots. Hands and arms went into gloves; legs and feet went into boots; the torso was fitted with special close-fitting garments. And, last of all, they donned the helmets.

When the men were finally completely encased in the controls, Gell gave the signal that switched the work-robots into life. From that minute on, every movement that each man made would be relayed to the supralloy nerves of the midget under his control, and each bit of sensory information received by the robot would be returned to the man at its controls. The all-important helmet fed and relayed sight, sound, and tactile sensations back and forth—as though the wearer were actually experiencing the same thing the midget did.

So closely coordinated were the two, that the operator got the eerie feeling that he actually was the robot; the feeling was especially weird because the robots were only a foot high.

They were delicate in appearance only; the tiny fingers, arms, and legs, although only a sixth the size of a normal adult’s, could exert, through their supralloy muscles, a force nearly twice that of human muscles. And yet, the micro fine nervous-system had all the delicacy of control of a surgeon’s. And that was as it should be, for the robots were primarily used for surgical work. An eye-operation is much easier if the eye seems to be seven inches across to the surgeon.

Gell adjusted himself to the robot to get the feel of it, and then—

He strode across the scaffolding which had been erected around the white block that now loomed hugely in his eyes because of his reduced viewpoint.

The other six simalera, identifiable only by the small number on the front and the big number on the back, followed him to the scaffold. They stopped at the foot of the great block.

“There she is,” he said, “forty feet of statue to chisel out of her tomb.”

Number Two’s voice came. “I get to clean out her naval.”

But Kreyman’s light-heartedness didn’t carry conviction.

-

It took time. With jack-hammer and chisel, the seven tiny robots chipped and hacked at the ethylene glycol ice that surrounded the girl. The outer layers came off easily, but the closer they got to the hard, frozen tissues of the girl’s body, the more careful they had to be. One slip of a hammer, one misstep with a chisel, and they could break a piece of flesh from her white, marble-hard body. And the hole that was left would be a bleeding wound when the body thawed.

It took thirty hours of delicate work before the woman was completely free of the frozen preservative that surrounded her.

“All right,” said Gell at last, “now comes the hard part.”

The work thus-far had been physically tiring, but from now on it would be nerves that were going to be overworked. Could the girl be thawed properly? And, if so, would she live? And if she didn’t? They didn’t like to think about that. If she didn’t live, it might be because the freezing-process four thousand years before had been at fault. Or something during the intervening period might have upset the immobilized body processes enough to cause death.

But there was always the possibility that the men who had brought her out of her frozen state had erred.

There was one other thing. If she lived, would she be sane? Brain-tissue is easily damaged and impossible to heal; her whole nervous-system might be irreparably damaged by some small thing that muscles, blood, and connective tissue could take in their stride.

Still, it had to be done. Looking at it callously, they had eight hundred bodies to experiment with. If one went wrong, they had more; they could kill seven and still be within less than one percent error. But even Linstet didn’t like the statistics of “one percent error”. As a military man, he could calmly face the possible death of eighty percent of a fleet attacking the Great Enemy, but this was, as he put it, “like cutting a man’s throat while he’s asleep in his own home”.

They used the man-sized robots this time. Very carefully, they laid the girl’s white, hard, frozen body inside the coils of an induction-heater. Again the situation was ticklish. They couldn’t, obviously, put her in a warm room to do the thawing. If they did, the surface-layers of her flesh might warm up too much before they got her ready for the induction-heating.

On the other hand, they couldn’t thaw her in a room with a temperature of some sixty degrees absolute; one breath, and she’d die. The helium atmosphere wasn’t poisonous, but it was deadly cold.

-

They finally settled on a small, insulated case which would be flooded with warm oxygen a half-second before the inductors went on.

“I don’t understand,” Captain Linstet said puzzledly. “She won’t thaw below two seventy six absolute, and she could stand that after you warmed her.”

His voice came from the robot standing next to Gell as the girl was being encased in the special cell. Gell started to reply, but Dr. Kreyman took the explanation on himself. “It’s a matter of ice-formation in the cells. There is more than one kind of frozen water, you see. The formula for water is generally given as H2O, but that’s not accurate. Even liquid water has a formula something like H 12 O 6. The crystalline structures of ices vary according to the temperatures and pressures to which they are subjected.

“If allowed to freeze normally, the cells of a human body are ruptured by the expansion of the ice as it freezes. But the type of ice in these tissues isn’t crystalline; it’s a glass. In other words, the water in her body isn’t frozen, in the normal sense of the word; it’s a supercooled liquid.

“If she’s still alive, her body hasn’t really been frozen; it’s simply been slowed down. But if we were to warm her above sixty absolute, that supercooled liquid would freeze into a crystalline solid and kill her instantly. So what we have to do is get her body up to normal so fast that the water hasn’t time to go through the freezing stage. See?”

The captain nodded.

By this time, the girl’s body was ready. The capsule was sealed, and the necessary equipment was taped to her—heart exciter, adrenelin-injector, and so on; all the apparatus that would be needed to change the cold, white thing in the capsule to a living, breathing woman.

“Ready?” asked Gell.

“Ready,” came the ragged chorus.

“Let her go,” Gell said softly.

The induction-coils flashed briefly, but even before they had ceased to glow, the stiff, marble-like thing before them had softened into human flesh. The heart-exciter took over.

Gell watched the instruments tensely.

Ka-pum—ka-pum—ka-pum—ka-pum—

The heart was beating, but not of its own accord. It was only a throb induced by the regular pulses of the exciter.

Ka-pum—ka-pum—ka-pum—

Gell pushed a switch, and the adrenelin-hypo shot its heavy dosage into the inert girl.

Ka-pum—ka-pum—KA-KA—PUM—KA-KA—PUM—

“Double beat! Cut the exciter!”

Ka-pum—ka-pum—ka-pum—

The heart was beating by itself!

“She’s alive,” Captain Linstet said softly. “Four thousand years old, and she’s alive!”

-

3

HE DIDN’T become conscious for three hours. By that time, they had transferred her to the station hospital on Kelivar IV.

When she did awaken, her method of doing so was not quite normal. One minute she was quite unconscious— then, quite suddenly, her eyes were open and she was looking at them. She smiled; her lips moved and she spoke.

Gell smiled back. “We can’t understand you, I’m afraid. We can read and write ancient English, but we don’t know how it was spoken.”

The girl frowned slightly and sat up in bed. She looked carefully at the seven members of the research team and at Captain Linstet in his dull, metal-gray uniform. Then she smiled again, nodding. Again her speech was unintelligible.

Kreyman, the only one of the seven who could call himself fluent in writing English, had an electrowriter ready. He looked at Gell.

“Ask her what her name is,” Gell said.

Kreyman wrote, and the girl looked at the panel. She nodded and stretched out her hands. Kreyman relinquished the keys. “My name is Ledora Mayne,” she wrote.

They told her—in part—who they were, and for a good half hour, they exchanged information of the commonplace type.

Gell noticed that she watched his lips when he spoke, and he began to feel that she wasn’t really answering his questions.

Then, suddenly, she grinned. “I see that a slight change in vowel-values and syllabic-stress has taken place, but the structure of the language has remained essentially the same.

“Now I would like some information: how long have I been under?”

There was a long silence. The girl’s speaking had been entirely unexpected. The Gell said: “We had thought that the period was about four thousand years, but it seems we were mistaken.”

Her smile was still there. “You mean because I’m speaking your language? I see.” Her voice dropped a little, and her face clouded. “Then the attack was successful. You people are descendants of the Sirius or Alpha Centauri expeditions.” Then her eyes glowed with great joy. “And you have discovered the great secret of the interstellar drive!”

Shocked, Linstet stood up. “Who are you?” he asked in a savage voice. “If you think you can fool us with that line of hogwash, you’re completely mistaken!”

The girl looked directly at him, then, and all the internal brilliance of her personality seemed to radiate from her like the light from a sun. And, like that light, the energy that showed on the surface was obviously only a fraction of what seethed beneath. “My dear sir,” she said, her voice soft and vibrant, “I have no intention of feeding you hogwash. I see that you are quite unable to grasp the meaning of what I have said. Therefore, I will have to explain.

“I think, however, that it could be better, psychologically, to wait until you have had time to assimilate it yourself.”

Then she turned to look at Gell. “I wonder if I could get something to eat. I assure you that I have no intention of saying anything until I have been fed.”

Gell looked at her for a long second, and then nodded. “I can see you mean it. Very well; we will see that you are fed. We will come back in an hour.”

-

Linstet stood in the center of the room and glared at the scientists assembled around Gell’s desk. “Let me question her,” he said angrily. “I’ll find out what sort of trickery she’s up to!”

Gell patted the air with a hand. “Simmer down, Captain. We can’t attack the problem that way; you’re sore because she insulted you.”

“What do you propose to do, then?” Linstet’s voice was heavy with suppressed emotion.

“I propose,” Gell said evenly, “that we use the scientific method. We get facts, compose a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and modify it in the light of new facts received—”

“That’s all very well,” Linstet’s voice cut in acidly, “but we don’t have any facts; I want to get them from her. If this is an Enemy psychological device, as I suspect it to be, we have to have facts.”

“But we do have facts.” Gell emphasized the point by tapping his forefinger on the desk top. “Consider: we have here a woman who, according to our best tests, is a human being who has been frozen in a state of suspended animation for four thousand years. Upon awakening, she is able to speak modern Galactic after listening to us talk for a little while and comparing our spoken words with what is written in ancient English.”

Linstet nodded. “Which shows it’s a trick; nobody could learn that fast.”

“I’ll agree that it could be a trick. But if it is, it’s either very crude or very subtle. Remember what she said? I see that you are quite unable to grasp the meaning of what I said.’ You took it as an insult, but she didn’t say it that way; she merely stated a fact.

“Let’s take another tack. You noticed the girl’s personality, I’m sure. It’s so alive it’s breathtaking; as a matter of fact, she frightened you a little.”

One of the other men spoke up. “She frightened me a little, too, Dr. Gell.”

Gell nodded in agreement. “Now suppose she had an intelligence to match that personality—which is, of course, a logical necessity.”

The others were silent for a moment, then Kreyman said: “In that case, I see no reason why she could not have deduced the pronunciation of our language with the few clues given her —especially since she already knew the basic language.”

“Exactly,” said Gell. “And the reasoning which we have so laboriously gone through would have flashed through her mind—or any other mind with her IQ immediately.”

Captain Linstet frowned. “You mean to her we’re just a bunch of idiots?”

Kreyman answered the question.

“Not precisely; intelligence can’t be compared that way. An animal, for instance, cannot ever know that a human being is more intelligent; the concept never occurs to an animal. A human idiot realizes dimly that normal people can ‘think better’ than he can. But only dimly.

“But a normal human being has reached the stage of intelligence which enables him to define, at least in part, what intelligence is. That girl’s thinking-processes are faster than ours, and she requires less data to compute with, but her answers are not necessarily any better than ours.”

“You said, ‘not necessarily’,” Linstet pointed out. “Don’t you think it’s possible that they could be?”

“Possible? Yes, definitely,” agreed Kreyman. “But we don’t dare act on that basis, or we’re licked from the start, If we don’t assume that our thinking is just as reliable as hers— even though it’s more ponderous—we won’t be able to use the answers we do get.”

“But she can think faster, and—”

“A robot can think faster, too,” Kreyman pointed out; “but it gets the same answer a human would get when the human is given enough time.”

“All right,” Linstet sighed heavily, “I don’t like it, but I’ll go along with you; what’s our next step?”

“We have formed a theory,” said Dr. Gell. “The next step is to get more facts.”

-

One of the nurses had given Ledora Mayne some clothing, and she was sitting in a chair sipping hot spice-brew from a cup when Kreyman and Gell entered.

Linstet and the others had agreed to stay in the control-office and watch the scene through the visors. “And remember,” Gell had warned, “she’ll probably figure she’s being watched, so don’t be surprised at anything she says—or doesn’t say. We don’t know how many jumps ahead of us sue is.”

Ledora Mayne looked up at the them and smiled. “You know?”

The two men seated themselves. Gell said: “We think we know, but we’d like to hear your explanation.”

“Certainly. I presume there is a great deal of Earth’s history that you don’t know?”

She gave it the inflection of a question, but it was obviously a statement of fact.

She’s trying not to make us feel inferior, Gell thought. Aloud, he said: “Very little. Our ancestors, as you said, left Earth about five thousand years ago, We have, you will notice, preserved the Earth year as a standard.

“The first colony, on Sirius V, did not know, of course, of the existence of the second colony on Altair III; and it was about a thousand years later that the Altarians had progressed far enough to build a sublight drive that would take them to Sirius. The Sirians had worked on the problem along a different line, and within a short time the first ultralight ship was built. At about that time, the planets of both suns were attacked by the Great Enemy; but we managed to stop the attack before any great damage was done.

“Since then, we have expanded over a quarter of the Galaxy. We found Earth, but it was a radioactive ruin.” He paused, looking steadily at the girl. “Suppose you take it from there.”

“Very well,” she said in her vibrant voice. “The first two expeditions were one-way shots, as you know. Their velocity was about a quarter that of light, and the high-velocity energy-transfer method of quick-freezing was unknown then; so it was the second generation of colonists that landed.

“Now the Khethani have—”

“The who?” asked Kreyman sharply.

“You call them the Great Enemy; they call themselves the Khethani.”

“You’ve met them?” his voice was incredulous. “What—”

“Let me finish, please; you can ask questions then. The Khethani have a method of detecting large material bodies, moving at velocities greater than twenty thousand miles per second.

““We didn’t realize they were looking for us until they had actually landed on Earth. It seems that the lower the velocity, the more difficult it is to pinpoint the position of the body in space. They combed that area of the Galaxy of the body in space. They combed that area of the Galaxy for years before they found Earth; but by then, both of the original colonial ships had arrived at their destinations.

“The Khethani are supreme egoists. The very thought of another race attempting to colonize the Galaxy was supremely abhorrent to them; so they took over Earth.

“However, they made one mistake. Before they attacked, they broadcast an ultimatum. ‘Tell us where your colonists went—or else’.” She shrugged a little. “It was foolish of them; human beings are egoists, too. All information leading to Sirius and Altair was destroyed. The few people who knew the secret destinations of the ships submitted to partial amnesia treatment. By the time the Khethans had conquered us, the knowledge of the colonists’ whereabouts had been effectively covered.”

“Just a moment.” interrupted Gell. “Altair and Sirius are only a few light-years from Earth. Why didn’t they search?”

The girl looked at him. “They did not know either the exact velocity or direction of the ships. They knew only that the colonists were within a fifty light-year radius of Sol. That’s a big volume of space to cover; it contains a good many planets. Add too, the fact that it takes time and men to search an Earth-type planet for a few hundred people.”

“But they could have done it; why didn’t they?”

“I’m coming to that. The first thing they did—before they struck Earth— was to put up a subetheric interference-screen around the Solar system. They didn’t know that the subradio had been discovered after the colonists left, and they hoped that the new colonies would eventually put in a call to Earth.

“Therefore, they clamped tight controls on Earth. They took away all of our atomic plants, our spaceports, everything. They absolutely forbade any technological experimentation anywhere; our books were burned, our colleges and universities destroyed, and our government scattered.

“Then the Khethani sat down to wait.

“There was only one thing that saved us—or, rather, one man. Edouard Sessen, Earth’s finest psychologist. He had perfected what is now known as the Sessen system of mind-control, which allows human beings to use the full potentialities of their brains.

“It was kept secret, of course, from the invaders, and through it, we kept our technology. In my own memory alone, I have a catalogue of over thirty thousand books.

“Even with that, it was a race against time. We built a fleet of a thousand ships—secretly. Each was to hold eight hundred people. But at about the same time, the Khethani began to realize that the colonists would never contact Earth; they decided to destroy us.”

-

The girl paused to take a sip from her cup, then she continued quietly. “We had perfected a device which would blanket the Khethani velocity-detectors, so that our ships couldn’t be found, even if they were moving at seventy-five percent light-velocity.

“We didn’t know the direction of the Khethan planets from Earth, so the destination of each ship was different. We picked distant stars, all over twenty-five hundred light-years from Sol. We took off just a few hours before the intended attack on Earth.”

She stopped, still smiling, and Gell realized with a slight shock that her story was finished.

He broke the silence. “After the destruction of Earth, they still had a thousand years to find the colonies. Why is it they didn’t?”

“I can only guess, but I should say it was because they discovered that our fleet had taken off. This would indicate, to their peculiar minds, that they had underestimated our intelligence and that we could outwit them. They knew that if we could hide a thousand-ship fleet on Earth, our colonists could certainly hide out in the stars.”

“Then why were we attacked as soon as we used a sublight drive?”

She looked thoughtful. “Again, this is only a guess, but I’ll give you my analysis for what it is worth.

“First, if they knew we had a detector-blanket, they would assume our superiority. Then, when the first Altarian ship took off at sublight velocity, without the detector-blanket, they sent a small task-force, assuming it might be a trap. When the Sirian ultralight ships took off to fight back, they were sure it was a trap.

“Thus convinced of the superiority of the human race, they have contented themselves with expansion only in their own sector of the Galaxy. They are egoists, yes, but they are also realists.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” exploded Kreyman. “We have been fighting them to a stalemate over a fifty-thousand light-year front for over three thousand years! We’ve fought tooth and nail to hold them to a standstill!”

Her smile changed then, and it was the soft smile that one would smile at a child. “I’m afraid they don’t look at it that way. They are merely protecting themselves, and they assume you are doing the same. They assume that humans are realists, too; they would look on that front as a sort of mutually agreed-upon border. They patrol their side, you patrol yours.

‘What you consider to be a ‘tooth and nail’ struggle for existence is assumed to be merely border skirmishes by the Khethani. If they knew you were fighting with everything you’ve got; they would have invaded long ago.”

-

4

HE SILENCE was thick and tense in the room. Kreyman started to say something, but Gell spoke first. “I see. I would like to talk this over with my staff, if you don’t mind. If you would excuse us—”

They left the room without another word. Neither spoke until they reached the control-office where the others were waiting. “Well,” said Gell then, “what did you think of that?”

Captain Linstet was the first to speak.- He was smiling, but there was a trace of bitterness in it. “I told you from the beginning that it was an Enemy trick. Do they think we’re fools to fall for that sort of trick? Obviously, that story is meant to demoralize us; if that girl’s story were to be believed, human resistance against the Great Enemy would collapse.”

Gell nodded slowly. “True. I’m sure we all felt the shock when she said it.”

“Do you believe it?” Linstet asked, narrowing his eyes.

Gell stared into space for a long time, then he turned slowly to face Linstet again. “I don’t know/’ he said

softly. “I realize there’s very little evidence to back up her story. But the way she fays it! Not the words, but the personality underneath! You’ve got to admit she’s very convincing.”

“Not to me, she isn’t,” Linstet said, his voice hard. “I’ll admit she frightens me—but it’s the same fright I feel when I see an Enemy ship. It makes me want to fight. What do you intend to do next, Dr. Gell?”

Before Gell could answer, Kreyman said: “‘There’s a way her story could be proved.”

They all looked at him expectantly.

“She made a statement,” Kreyman went on, “about something which she called the Sessen system of mind-control. She said that it was the system which gave her her present mental equipment. We can assume that any normal human being could learn it; all we have to do to prove her story is to ask her to teach us the method.”

“Why, yes,” Gell said excitedly, “we can—”

“No!” Captain Linstet’s voice crackled across the room. “Can’t you fools see that that’s part of the trap? You all know that under hypnosis the mind possesses abnormal powers. That girl has been hypnotized by the Enemy! If you get her to teach you this mind control system of hers, you’ll be in the same fix she is in! I say no!”

“We can test that,” said Kreyman. “We can find out whether she’s hypnotized or not, and we can test her intelligence. In order for her to be as intelligent as she seems, she would have to run every one of our tests perfectly.”

“Very well,” agreed Gell. “Prepare your tests; we’ll see if we can find something that way.”

Captain Linstet sighed. “I’m sorry to have to do this, gentlemen; I never thought I’d have to. But a psychological trap is like a disease; it can spread. From now on, no one sees that girl, no one talks to her.

“As of this moment, this station and everyone in it are under Military Law!”

There was an excited garble of voices from the seven scientists, then Dr. Cell’s voice cut through, “just a minute! The captain is perfectly within his rights! But—” He turned toward Linstet. “—may I ask why?”

“Logic,” said Linstet tightly. “‘We don’t know what kind of damage that girl can do, but we do know one tiling: if she had never been discovered, we would be no worse off than before. I am going to see to it that the ship is destroyed, the girl killed, and all knowledge of what she said wiped from our minds.”

Gell and Kreyman looked at each other across the table in the station cafeteria. Gell said: “Linstet says he has requested that the ship be loaded with explosives and blown up. He wants to make sure of its total destruction.”

“He’ll do it, too,” Kreyman said sarcastically; “he’s a manly little fellow.”

Gell rubbed a hand across his tired eyes. “Don’t blame him. It’s the way his mind is built to function: don’t take a chance unless you have to. At least he hasn’t ordered the Space Marines in to enforce his orders; we’re on our honor.”

“Sure, sure,” nodded Kreyman. “And the battle cruiser Rayvon is floating up in the stratosphere, ready to bomb the whole station out of existence if he gives the word.”

“I know; I know. If only we could save the girl.”

“How? He’s got that whole hallway guarded, and he has a man on a spy-screen twenty-four hours a day. He won’t even let anyone in there to feed her. I think he’s even afraid to send someone in to kill her.”

“I think he—shh! Here he comes!”

Captain Linstet strode across the room toward the two men, ignoring the glares he was getting from the crowd at the tables. “Dr. Gell,” he said crisply, “I wonder if you’d come up to my office for a few minutes? I have a report to make out, and I’d like to get your personal opinion on this matter.”

“Certainly,” Gell said stiffly. He rose and followed Linstet out of the cafeteria. They took an elevator to the upper floor where the Military Office was located.

“Just a minute,” Linstet said, stopping at the door of one of the rooms, “I want to see what the girl is doing.”

Inside, a young officer was idly watching the screen.

“What’s she doing?” Linstet asked, crossing the room.

“Nothing much, sir; she’s been staring out the window for the past hour.”

Linstet took one look at the screen, then turned savagely on the younger man. “Lieutenant! Have you gone mad? Where is the girl?”

As Gell walked toward them, he could see the young officer’s face turn white. “Why, she’s right there, sir!” He pointed a finger at the screen, “Sitting right there by the window!”

Gell looked at the screen, at the spot where the lieutenant’s finger was pointed. There was nothing there; the room was empty.

Before Linstet could say anything further, Gell said: “Leave him alone, Captain; he’s been hypnotized.”

-

It was better than thirty minutes before they got the whole story. Somehow, Ledora Mayne had hypnotized the watching officer through the screen, and then calmly walked out of the door of her cell. The electrolock was still functioning perfectly; but it hadn’t stopped the Earth girl.

The guards in the halls had seen no one leave; they had been hypnotized, too.

And now where was she?

Linstet put out a general alarm for the girl, and he and Gell waited in his office for news.

A communicator signalled. “Captain Linstet? Prime Officer Dorf is waiting.”

Linstet looked at the screen. “Put him on.”

The spaceman’s face smiled from the screen. “The old ship is mined and ready to go, Captain; would you like to watch the explosion?”

Linstet nodded, and the view in the screen suddenly switched to a view of the hulk floating in space.

“Here she goes!” said the unseen officer’s voice. The screen was suddenly lit with the awful glare of atomic detonation.

Linstet thanked the officer and cut the connection. “Well, that’s part of the job. But what about the girl?”

“She’s got to be somewhere on the planet,” Gell mused. He walked over to the window and looked at the sky. High above, he could still see the dying glow of the exploding spaceship.

“How can we find her?” Linstet asked. “If she can hypnotize a man that easily, no search’-party could bring her in.”

“I agree,” Gell’s voice was low. “She could be standing in this room with us now, and we wouldn’t know it.”

Linstet felt an icy tingle up his back and turned completely around—slowly. He saw only the normal walls of the room, but he knew that meant nothing.

“All right,” he said to Gell, “we’ll do a little of your theorizing. Where would she logically go? What would she do?”

“That depends. Are we to assume that she is an Enemy agent, or do we assume that she was telling the truth? Or something else?”

“Let us assume,” Linstet said deliberately, “that she is an enemy alien, but grant her the intelligence that we originally supposed her to have. Now where would she go?”

“Why, then,” said Gell in an odd voice, “why, then, I suppose I would go to the battle cruiser that was supposed to blow up the old ship.”

Captain Linstet’s face blanched as he leaped to the communicator again. His first call was to the spaceport.

“Why no, sir,” said the man at the other end. “There are no flitters missing—except of course, the one you borrowed two hours ago.”

“That wasn’t me! That was the girl!” He switched the man off before he had a chance to say anything. Then he tried to get the Rayvon; she wouldn’t respond, so he called the other battle cruiser.

“The Rayvon went into ultradrive immediately after the explosion, Captain. Prime Officer Dorf said that you didn’t need him any more, that my own ship would be enough. Is there anything wrong, Captain?”

-

Linstet sent out a Galaxy-wide alarm immediately, but the Rayvon had vanished. Days dragged into months and nothing happened. Linstet paced floors, cursed at himself, and bit his nails to the quick.

And still nothing happened. Dr. Gell was beginning to think seriously of having the captain examined by the station psychiatrist when the break finally came.

A Special courier-ship from the secret planet which held the all-powerful Galactic Government landed at the station. A high-ranking civilian stepped out and requested that Captain Linstet, Dr. Gell, and Dr. Kreyman accompany him to the communications room.

“I have here a recording I want you to see,” he said briskly. “It is a copy of an original recording brought to the Government by Prime Officer Dorf of the G.I.S. Rayvon when he was released by the Earthmen.

“Since it is addressed to you three men, the Government has asked me to play it for you. I am not at liberty to tell you what action the Government is taking, but I must warn you that if you repeat any of the contents of this recording, it will be considered a Class One breach of security, punishable by death. Is that understood?” It was.

“Very well, gentlemen, watch.”

The screen lit up. On it was the face of the Earthwoman, Ledora Mayne. She began to speak. “This is addressed primarily to the Government of the Human Galaxy, and secondarily to Captain Linstet and Doctors Gell and Kreyman of Kelivar IV.

“By this time, you know that the explosion which destroyed the ship at Kelivar took place after its occupants had been removed. You will also know that the story I told was substantially true. However, we are well aware that no human being who is unable to use the Sessen mind-control system can ever fully trust us. Therefore, we will explain exactly what we intend to do, and exactly how we intend to do it.

“Supreme Commander Grayme of the Earth Fleet will now give you the full details.”

She stepped back from the screen, and her face was replaced by that of a handsome, determined-looking man who looked as though he were in his early thirties.

“In the months since Ledora Mayne was brought out of freeze,” he began, in a well-modulated baritone, “we have managed to trace and revive the full eight hundred thousand Earthmen who left Earth just before the final attack of the Khethani four thousand years ago. Fortunately, none of the ships had yet reached their destinations.

“We know that you fear us, and we are sorry for that fear; we are not inhuman, and we are not agents of the Khethani.

“However, we have no alternative but to act as we are doing. Already our agents have been planted on the various planets of the Human Galaxy. Slowly and carefully, they will spread the knowledge of Sessen‘s system. There will be nothing you can do to stop the process, since the system can be learned very quickly, and you can not consider high intelligence a crime.

“If you announce what I have just told you, the result will be panic, which will only serve to delay the ending of the war against the Great Enemy.

“We will not contact you again, for we will have no need to.”

The screen darkened and the man‘s face was abruptly gone.

Linstet clenched his fists. “There‘s nothing we can do; absolutely nothing.”

“You are not quite correct,” said the Government courier. “The Government is going all-out against this sneak invasion, and our methods will improve with time.”

Dr. Gell grinned sardonically. “Frankly, gentlemen, I think the Government is wasting its time.”

-

Captain Linstet was the only one of them who actually saw the beginning of the end.

Five years after the escape of Ledora Mayne, he was transferred, at his own request, to the front, and was upgraded in the process. He was aboard the battleship Lansen when the news came that, for the first time in the long history of the war, a ship full of live captives had been captured by the Enemy.

The Prime Officer of the Lansen looked grim as the news came over the communicator. “What do you think of it, Linstet?”

“I’d say that within forty-eight hours they will have tested the intelligence of those men and will realize that they have been held back by their own fear for three thousand years.”

“‘Exactly,” said the Prime Officer.

Forty-eight hours later, the Khethani struck. Their fleet smashed through a weak spot in the screen of ships that protected the Human Galaxy. For twelve days, despite all the Human ships could do, the Khethani fleet poured through that fatal gap in the defenses.

Then, inexplicably, the gap closed, as though the humans had gained new strength. And the Khethani fleet met the mighty power of the Second Fleet. Cut off from their home-base by a screen of ships, and cut off from communication by a powerful subether blanket, the Khethani fought hard—and lost. For nine days the battle raged; when it was over, the vast fleet of a million Khethani ships had been reduced to incandescent gases.

Linstet grinned when he heard the news. The Prime Officer of the Lansen grinned back.

“It worked, right on schedule. Now we start pushing the Khethani back. We haven’t broken them yet, by a long shot, but we’ve weakened them; we’ll win eventually.”

Linstet nodded. “Right. And, by the way; do you remember when Dr. Gell told you that ship had taken a wayward course? He was wrong; it was we who had taken the wayward course until you came along to set us right.”

Prime Officer Ledora Mayne laughed. “And you weren’t going to have anything to do with us.”

Linstet looked her up and down slowly. “I’ve changed my mind.”

One hundred and forty years later, the last hostile Khethani died.

The End