Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

around indefinitely? Would the black people have just remained in hiding,

living on roots, until they froze to death? Not very likely.”

“Hmmm. But the electromagnetic silence was perfectly real; we sampled

continuously, and never heard a whisper, beyond whatever it was that the

computer first picked up.”

“Right,” Kamblin said solemnly. “The silence was real; therefore the

high-energy civilization was not You can’t shut a high-energy civilization

down that far without exterminating it, it’s just plain impossible. And if

Ertak hadn’t cut the power to the computer when we were attacked, we might

have found that out in time. That was one of the things the computer was

ringing its alarms about; it detected right away that the entire attack was

being directed from a single central source-tbat big metal dome on the

large moon. Now it makes sense, you see: you can shut down the energy

output of a single installation to a trickle, and shield the trickle,

except for detectors; and if the detectors are transistorized they don’t

make enough noise to be overheard from space.

“And once we turned the computer back on again and fed the tapes of the

attack to it, it immediately identified the broadcast of the black man as

coming from the same source. Furthermore, it identified the black man

himself as a solidigraph-a construct. So we never really saw even one black

man; we saw a synthetic image, and heard a synthetic voice. The computer

also says that what was actually doing the speaking-the being with which

Ailiss was really talking-was itself a computer.”