“Eh?” White said. His expression turned to one of surprise. “But that’s obvious!”
“Glad to hear it,” Camhorn said drily.
“Well, it is. Dowland’s attitude showed clearly that he suspected the truth himself on that point. Naturally, he was somewhat reluctant to put it into words.”
“Naturally. So what did he suspect?”
White shook his head. “It’s so simple. The first specimen of humanity the aliens encountered alive was Paul Trelawney. High genius level, man! It would take that level to nullify our I.Q. tests in the manner he and his half-brother did. When those creatures were prowling around on the mesa, they were looking for that kind of mentality. Dowland’s above average, far from stupid. As you say, you like his theories. But he’s no Trelawney. Unquestionably, the aliens in each case regarded him as some kind of clever domestic animal. The only reason he’s alive is that they weren’t taking him seriously.”
That,” Camhorn said thoughtfully, “may have changed a number of things.”
“It may, indeed.”
“Do we have anything on hand that would block their specific psi abilities?’ ”
“Oh, surely. If an AR field can stop them, there’s nothing to worry about in that respect. Our human telepaths wouldn’t be seriously hampered by that degree of interference.”
“Very good,” Camhorn said. “Do you have any theory about the partial sensory interpretation of the two areas which both Dowland and Miss Trelawney reported? The matter of being able to hear the river on the other planet from time to time.”
White nodded. “There are several possible explanations for that. For one thing . . .”
“Better save it for lunch, Lolly,” Camhorn interrupted, glancing at his watch. “I see I have two minutes left to make the meeting. Anything else you feel should be brought up at the moment?”
“Just one thing,” White said. “If the Trelawneys’ machine is capable of locating a Terra-type planet anywhere in the universe . . .”
Camhorn nodded. “It is.”
“Then,” White said, “we’ve solved our exploding population problem, haven’t we?”
“For the time being, we have,” Camhorn agreed. “As a matter of fact, Lolly, that’s precisely what the meeting I’m headed for is about.”
“Then the Terran Freeholders can stop worrying about the political pressures that have threatened to turn Terra into another hygienically overcrowded slum-world.”
“True enough,” Camhorn said. “In another few years, if things go right, every man, woman and child can become a Freeholder—somewhere.”
“So the Trelawneys got what they wanted, after all. . . .”
“They did, in a way. If the brothers knew the whole score, I think they’d be satisfied. The situation has been explained to their niece. She is.”
The End of the Line
The spaceship dropped near evening towards the edge of a curving beach. A half-mile strip of grassy growth stood tall and still behind the beach; beyond the jungle smoothly marbled prows of pink and gray cliffs swept steeply upwards for nearly two thousand feet to the northernmost shelf of a wide, flat continent. The green-black waters of the planet’s largest ocean stretched away in a glassy curve ahead, broken by two narrow chains of islands some thirty miles out.
The sleek machine from beyond the stars settled down slowly, a wind thundering out below it and wrinkling the shallows near the beach into sudden zigzag patterns. It fell through explosive sprays of dry sand, sank its base twenty feet deep into the rock below, and stopped. A sharp click announced the opening of a lock a third of the way up its rounded flank; and seven of the nine members of Central Government’s Exploration Group 1176 came riding out of the lock a moment later, bunched forty feet above the beach on the tip of their ship’s extension ramp.
Six of them dropped free of the ramp at various points of its swooping descent. They hit the hard sand in a succession of soft, bounceless thumps like so many cats and went loping off towards the water. Grevan alone, with the restraint to be looked for in a Group Commander, rode the ramp all the way down to the ground.
He stepped off it unhurriedly there: a very big man, heavy of bone and muscle, though lean where weight wasn’t useful, and easy-moving as the professional gladiators and beast-fighters whose training quarters he’d shared in his time. A brooding, implacable expression went so naturally with the rest of it that ordinary human beings were likely to give him one look and step out of his way, even when they weren’t aware of his technical rank of Central Government Official.
It was a pity in a way that the members of his Exploration Group weren’t so easily impressed.
Grevan scowled reflectively, watching five of the six who had come out of the ship with him begin shucking off weapon belts, suits, and other items of equipment with scarcely a break in their run as they approached the water’s edge. Cusat, Eliol, Freckles, Lancey, Vernet—he checked them off mentally as they vanished a few seconds later, with almost simultaneous splashes, from the planet’s surface. They were of his own experimental breed or something very near it, born in one of Central Government’s germination laboratories and physically, though not quite adults yet, very nearly as capable as Grevan was himself. However, nobody could tell from here what sort of alien, carnivorous life might be floating around beyond this ocean’s shallows. . . .
They had too good an opinion of themselves!
Weyer, at any rate, seemed to have decided to stay on shore with his clothes on and his armament handy, in case of trouble. Somewhat reassured, Grevan turned his attention next to a metallic bumping and scraping at the ship’s open lock overhead. Klim and Muscles, K.P.’s for the day, were trying to move a bulky cooking unit out of the ship so the Group could dine outdoors.
“Boss?” Klim’s clear soprano floated down.
“Right here,” Grevan called back. “Having trouble?”
“Looks like we’re stuck,” Klim announced from within the lock. “Would you come up and . . . no, wait a minute! Muscles is getting it cleared now, I think . . . Wait till I’ve degraved it again, you big ape! Now, push!”
The cooker popped into sight with a grinding noise, ejected with considerable violence from the ship’s interior. For a moment, it hung spinning quietly in the air above the ramp, with Klim perched on top. Then Muscles came out through the lock and attached himself to the gadget’s side. They floated down lopsidedly together, accompanied by tinkling sounds from the cooker’s interior.
“What’s it going to be tonight?” Grevan asked, reaching up to guide them in to an even landing.
“Albert II in mushroom sauce,” said Klim. She was a tall, slender blonde with huge blue eyes and a deceptively wistful expression. As he grounded the cooker, she put a hand on his shoulder and stepped down. “Not a very original menu, I’ll admit! But there’s a nice dessert anyway. How about sampling some local vegetables to go with Albert?”
“Maybe,” said Grevan cautiously. “Whose turn is it to sample?” Too often, preoccupied with other matters, he’d discovered suddenly that he’d been roped in again for that chore when the items to be sampled were suspected of being of a particularly uncooperative nature. And then the Group would drop whatever it was doing to gather around and sympathize while he adapted.
“Vernet’s turn, isn’t it?” said Muscles.
“Vernet’s the victim,” Klim nodded. “You’re safe this time.”
“In that case,” Grevan said, relieved, “you’ll find Vernet out there full fathom five somewhere. Bring her in if you can and we’ll go browse in the shrubbery a bit.”
“This,” Klim remarked, gazing out over the shoreline towards which Muscles was heading in search of Vernet, “is still the best spot of an all-right little world! Know what the cubs were calling it when we first set down here three weeks ago?” She was Grevan’s junior by a good ten years but a year or so older than the Group’s other members and inclined to regard them all with motherly tolerance. “Our point of no return.”
Grevan grimaced uneasily, because that phrase did describe the Group’s position here, in one way or another. Never once, in the eight years since Central Government had put him in charge of what had been a flock of rebellious, suspicious, and thoroughly unhappy youngsters, who weren’t even sure whether they were actually human beings or some sort of biological robots, had the question of escaping from CG controls been openly discussed among them. You never knew who might be listening, somewhere. The amazing thing to Grevan even now was that—eight weeks travel on the full fury of their great ship’s drives beyond the borders of Central Government’s sprawling interstellar domain—they did seem to have escaped. But that was a theory that still remained to be proved.
“Are you going to accept contact with CG tomorrow?” Klim inquired.