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XIII

"What—" Kirby started to ask.

Shari said softly, "Don't frighten her or she'll 'port you away."

"That?" said Kirby.

Shari nodded with complete solemnity.

Sitting still as a rock, Kirby stared at Shari and then at the fat, pinkish, lubberly creature in her arms, the four-footed and utterly animal creature with the expression of happy imbecility. He tried several times, and finally the words came out, carefully subdued.

"Are you trying to tell me that this is the thing we—"

"But it's only a baby. Isn't it?"

"Yes. But she can do as much as an adult, except that her range is short and her power not so great. Kirby, the thing we were looking for is not a single individual, it's a breed, a herd, a whole species. They're absolutely unbelievable."

It occurred to Kirby then to ask Shari if she was all right. And she began to cry again. "I followed you all the way here, beloved, with my mind, and I tried so hard to make you hear me."

"If you are all right, it doesn't matter." Kirby meant it. Nothing mattered. Not stars nor colonies nor R-ships. "What happens if I—"

"Gently, and I'll think her happy thoughts, and she'll love it."

Kirby took Shari and the pinkish creature into his arms and held them both in a muddy embrace, and that was when it all come over him, the aftermath of the days and nights when he had thought he would probably never see her again. It got dark, and through the darkness he could hear the creature gurgling. He began to laugh, and Shari began to laugh, and in a minute or two the darkness cleared. Kirby said, "You're all right, really?" And she answered, "At first I was terrified. And then I began to understand. After that, it was just making friends and waiting for you."

Kirby sat back on the mud. "I don't understand at all," he said. "To me she just looks moronic."

"She is."

"But—"

"They are. The whole species. That is why I could not find the intelligence I was searching for. There is none. The espees do not—"

"The what?"

"I suppose I have been calling them that in my mind, since ESP is their distinguishing characteristic. Whatever you call them, they do not think. They only feel."

"But they can see inside of atoms."

Rather impatiently Shari said, "All animals can see the world they live in. They do not necessarily understand it. Do you suppose a bird knows or cares what makes a tree grow, or that those hoofed ones out there on the prairie comprehend the wind or the shining of the suns?"

"No," said Kirby, "I guess not. But—"

"But these see farther than the others, that's all." Shari stroked the small espee and made her kick her fat legs with pleasure, "I think it is one of Mother Nature's mistakes on this world. She has not yet managed to evolve an intelligent species, but she has tried, and this is one of her efforts. She experimented with a psi mutation, but whether she chose the wrong physical form to put it into or whether the psi power itself stopped mental development by removing the need for it—if you can fell a tree by thinking about it, why invent the axe?—it was a complete dead end."

She rose. "Come, I'll show you. Walk quietly, and above all don't use any mechanism. They're sensitive to any release of energy and it frightens them, As soon as Marapese used his power-torch, they sent him away. They're very timid."

Still not believing it, Kirby said, "Is that why they damped the atomic batteries and stopped radio transmission?"

"Yes. Their reflexes—"

The infant espee vanished cleanly from her arms in the middle of a grunt.

". . . are very simple," she finished.

"Simple," said Kirby. "Oh, yes. Very."

They walked, sinking in the mud, wading in shallow water. It was quiet and hot, and the shafts of dead trees stood up like the white pillars of some long-forgotten temple, hung with votive offerings of moss.

"It must have been one of them that Wilson saw. Teleported, of course. That's why it didn't make any noise coming or going. I guess it came to look us over, and got scared when we yelled. Is that why they took Marapese, just to see what he was like?"

"They're curious," Shari said. "That's why they took me. I was different from the others."

"Different?"

"Female."

"Oh."

In the quiet, there was a sudden feeling of activity. Clumps of reed shook where there was no wind. Things plopped and swirled in the water. Out of nowhere a small pink-and-mud-colored form appeared under Kirby's feet, tripped him, and flickered out like a picture when the film breaks. From then on the walk turned strange. The air was full of gurgles, grunts, and pleased little snortings, but the bodies that produced them moved so fast that they left the sounds eerily behind. Spouts of water flew up and drenched the two humans. Objects, twigs, berries, clots of mud, live fish, startled frog-like things, pelted them out of the clear air. Kirby began to get mad.

"The young ones like to play," said Shari. "They never really hurt. . ."

She disappeared. Kirby shouted, and then the ground was pulled out from under him. There was a flash so brief he only sensed it, and he was up to his neck in water in the middle of a herd of great somnolent beasts, the adult espees wallowing comfortably in warmth and idleness, hardly bothering to notice him.

Shari appeared in a clump of reeds and beckoned to him. He began to swim, very gently so as not to startle the creatures, and a feeling of helpless and frightened wrath brought him almost to the verge of tears. These great half-witted brutes could, if they wanted to, transport him a hundred miles away in the bat of an eyelash, and there was nothing he could do about it.

They did not choose to, and he made the reeds without interference. Holding tight to Shari's hand lest she vanish again, he looked at the hippopotamoid forms and wondered, "How come Marapese didn't see them when he was here? How could he have avoided it?"

"They hid from him. I told you they were timid. Now they are more used to humans, and besides I have spent all these days teaching them not to fear us." She sighed wearily. "They are so stupid. They cannot read thoughts, or understand them. But I made them feel that we are friends."

She shook her head in a kind of agony. "Oh, Kirby, the knowledge that is locked up in those great thick heads! If they understood only a fraction of it they would be like gods. And how do they use their power? Look."

She pointed to where an adult lay on his side, half in water, half on a bank of warm mud. A heap of succulent grass flicked into being a few inches from his nose. He lay with his mouth open and the grasses crawled into it. Kirby got the feeling that the beast only bothered to chew them because the taste was pleasant.

"They can shift atoms," Shari said. "They can hold the unstable ones so that there is no emission of particles. In fact, they have complete mental control over matter, and they can do all these things singly or as a group with enormous potential. And in this way they feed themselves and repel their enemies and keep their wallows at just the right temperature, all without the slightest effort. It isn't fair! Men have labored so hard for thousands of years to learn just a little of what these creatures are born with but never understand!"

"I don't know," said Kirby. "Maybe our Mother Nature was smarter than this one. She made us work."

He sat for some time, watching the heap of fodder move obediently into the waiting mouth. When it was all gone the espee sighed a mighty sigh, rumbled twice, and rolled over on his back to sleep.

Kirby said, "They're not dangerous."

"No. Oh, in a panic they might do harm, more or less by accident. But not otherwise."

"Then the message from the R-ship was a lie."

"Yes. They hamper human activity as soon as it invades their forest, but the simple remedy for that is to stay away and not bother them. They are completely lazy and unaggressive. Only a great stimulus of fear would cause them to use their power as far away as the Lucy B. Davenport. Of course, the people who sent that message may not know that it's untrue."

"I doubt if they care," said Kirby, "but I see what you mean. When RSS-1 orbited over this part of the forest the espees probably blanked off all the recording devices, among other things, so nothing showed up here at all. There may well be other swamps with other espees, too, and from the holes in the record and the signs of temporary malfunction in the operations of the ship the Government technicians would have known there was something peculiar here, but not what it was."

He looked at his watch and then at the sky, and said, "So now we have the truth, and what good does it do us? The R-ship will land in approximately thirty minutes. We haven't a hope of getting back."

He stopped. Shari gave him a look of alarm.

"No!" she said. "They are uncontrollable, unpredictable. They—"

"They sent Marapese back, didn't they?"

"Pure chance. They could send us anywhere, and it might not be together."

"Listen," said Kirby. "The ship will land. The people will all get into it, and the ship will go away. Forever. Do you understand what that will mean for us?"

"But," said Shari, "I think—" She looked at the espees and moaned. "Intelligence one may bargain with, or reason with, or at the very least one may guess what the course of action may be. But with such imbeciles, who can say?"

Kirby pulled her to her feet. "We'll go back to the edge of the swamp, in the direction of the ship. It may give them the idea. I'll use the field radio. I may be able to get a message through to Fenner before they stop it, or they may 'port us within reach of the ship. Or both. Anyway, we can hardly be worse off. Come on."

She hesitated, still doubtful. Then she touched Kirby's arm and whispered, "Look."

The sleeping espee on the mudbank had waked again. He heaved himself over and raised his head as though to listen. A second or two later he snorted uneasily and was gone.

An expression of apprehension came into Shari's face. "Yes," she said. "We must go."

Out in the warm water the great bodies stirred and shifted, as if some sudden current had disturbed them. Then they, too, disappeared.

Shari began to move fast away from the water, through the reeds.

"What's the matter?" Kirby asked.

"They have caught the first vibrations from the R-ship."

"Oh, lord," said Kirby, and began to run.

They came out on a sunny bank. A shoal of the young espees, probably including the one Shari had held in her arms, lay snoring together in the mud, worn out by their frolic. Kirby asked, "How far did the little demons send us, anyway?"

"I don't know. Half a mile. More." She fled past the young ones. Kirby followed. They splashed through a slough and then Shari pointed back at the bank. Some of the small espees were already gone. Others vanished while he watched, flick-flick-flick. In no more than a second the bank was empty.

"They have gone back to the herd, where it has moved deeper into the swamp," said Shari. She plucked his sleeve. "Hurry!"

She had forgotten all about not running or making too much noise. It seemed that that no longer mattered. They hurried together through the swamp, and once again their passage acquired a strangeness. This time it was not the overt acts of the young ones. This was different. This was quiet, and tightening all the time until even the non-sensitive Kirby could feel each nerve stretched and singing like a fiddle string.

Finally he stopped of his own accord and listened. The silence ached in his ears. It was not merely a negation of sound. It was a force in itself, a positive thing. And there was something behind it. He felt it as a man feels the bulking potential of a tornado in the first capful of wind.

"They have gathered," Shari whispered. "They are all together now."

She rushed away again, with her hands on either side of her head. Her face was ashen. Kirby caught up with her. He stopped her and said, "We can't go any farther, there isn't time. We'll have to try it from here."

"No," she said. "No, Kirby, don't." She started to say something more, and then she crumpled down on the ground, all curled up and moaning. "Too close, too strong, I can't shut it out."

He got down beside her and pulled her up so that she was lying across his knees. She threw her arms around him tight and pressed her head in against his chest. Kirby's heart was pounding, fast and hard.

He unslung the pack and opened it and fumbled out the radio.

Shari lifted her head. She screamed and grabbed for his wrist. He struck her hand away. The switch clicked. "Fenner! Fenner, this is Kirby. Don't—"

Static, a roar and a crash that split his ears. The radio flew out of his hands and smashed to bits against a tree. Shari screamed again. He caught hold of her, not so much to save her as to save himself. Then something hit him, something intangible, something mighty, as the earth hits a crashing ship.

He was rolling over and over on the prairie. There was dust in his mouth. He was still hanging on to Shari. He saw her dark hair fly as they tumbled, saw it grow dun-colored in the dust. They fell apart and stopped rolling and lay there, and after a while, without moving, Shari whispered, "I tried to warn you. They were afraid, and all together. They might have killed us."

"They weren't gentle," Kirby said, sitting up painfully. "But they were strong, all right. Too strong. Look."

Shari crawled to him. No more than a mile away the Lucy B. Davenport lay in the bright sunlight. They could see the people gathered near her, a dark blot on the lighter soil. They could see the pattern of the plowed land with the flush of green deepening on it from the sprouting crops, and they could see the sawmill and the streets that were going to be, with the square stone beginnings of the houses. Only a mile, but it might as well have been ten or a hundred, because the river was between them and three quarters of that mile was water.

And the R-ship was coming down.

They could see it, glittering in the high blue air, huge and cold and unconcerned, doing the thing it had been told to do. Inside its shining hull the innumerable relays clicked and whirred, the radar impulses telling the control centers the exact altitude and rate of fall, the control centers regulating the thrust of the landing jets, and farther in, deep in, sealed off in perfect safety but sending its spreading ganglia to every farthest section of the ship, the great electronic brain presided, overseeing every action, evaluating every bit of information transmitted to it by its sensory members, orienting the total effort of the ship toward the fulfillment of the code commands set up immovably on the master tapes, recorded inexorably on the master dials.

The shining robot sank, and the people waited beside the Lucy B. Davenport, the old ship about to be robbed of her final glory. And across the river Kirby watched and did nothing because there was nothing he could do.

Shari whispered, "Wait. Look there"

The R-ship's landing jets burst out in violent flame and thunder. It hovered uncertainly for as long as a man might draw two breaths before it started down again.

Kirby stiffened. He started to speak, but Shari's hand was tight on his arm and she had that far-off listening look he had come to know.

Again the RSS-2 halted in its downward flight, a silver bubble poised on a pillar of fire.

Shari said, "Now I understand."

"What is it?" Kirby said. "What's happening?"

"Watch."

The landing jets cut out abruptly. The thunder stilled, and the trembling of the ground. The RSS-2 hung momentarily in mid-air, incredibly unsupported. Then it vanished.

Even at that distance Kirby could hear the cry that went up from the waiting crowd. It came thin and faint across the water, and Kirby echoed it, triumphantly.

But only for a moment. The RSS-2 was returning, relentlessly obedient to the commands it had crossed 4.3 light-years of space to obey.

"Even together," Shari said, "they cannot release enough energy to teleport so great a mass very far away."

The ship came down as it had before, on the howling jets. And this time they did not cut off.

Kirby said, "They can't stop it."

"Wait. Oh, if I could make you see it! They learned every atom of the controlling brain when the first R-ship passed over them, photographing. They repelled it. They would have tried to repel the Lucy the same way, but we did not pass over them."

"Fortunately," said Kirby, shivering at the thought.

"The landing was made before they quite realized we were here, and then they were trying to find another R-ship, not knowing there could be another kind. Now they are on familiar ground again, and I can see—"

She broke off, holding her head once more between her hands, but this time she was laughing in a sheer hysteria of excitement.

"It makes me dizzy. There is no perspective. The whole brain, the little transistors, the atoms, the electrons streaming, all are the same. The atoms shift, some of them, and all the time they dance and spin. The electron streams are broken up, moving in a different way—and now the needles on the dials move too, and on the code tapes a layer of atoms less than a micron deep is stretched to make them blank. This time they know the right combination. Before they must have tried endless permutations to find the relay system that controls the order to go away. There! The tapes are blank, the circuits are closed off, and the master dial has moved to. . ."

The RSS-2 staggered, swooped down like a bird wounded in flight, and then, bathed in tremendous fires, it regained its balance and roared upward into the bright sky.

". . . return-to-base," finished Shari, on a note of anti-climax.

Kirby watched until the silver shape had dwindled to a speck, and then to nothing. Across the river the people watched too, stunned into silence. And in the distant swamp, Kirby knew, the espees were watching too, not with their eyes but with whatever nerve it was that measured for them the proximity of fear-things. Presently when the nerve ceased to twinge at all they would sigh and heave and 'port themselves back to their nice warm wallows, as unaware of what they had done as a great cat is unaware of the total physiological, emotional, and social consequences following after the single casual stroke of its paw that has just opened up a hunter's bowels. This playing with atoms was to them as instinctive and casual as the paw-stroke, used for the same reason and of no greater significance.

Kirby began to laugh. There was something joyous about watching all man's misspent ingenuity going down to defeat before a herd of muddy morons that didn't even have to try terribly hard.

"They took care of it," he said.

"The first one frightened them badly. They remembered."

"I guess they are our friends, then, even if they don't know it."

Shari said, "They'll know it in time, if we behave as we ought to."

Kirby looked across the river, at the streets that would be finished and the houses that would be built, and the crops that would be harvested after all. Nobody would be going back now. And it was doubtful if more R-ships would ever come. He put his arms around Shari and held her close.

"Maybe your espees aren't so stupid at that," he said. "It's wonderful just to be alive and at peace."

THE END

 

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