“Gas,” said engineering officer Veed. “The internal com-bustion engine. That places him.”
Captain Gorsid motioned to the guard with the ray gun.
The third man sat up, and looked at them thoughtfully.
“From the stars?” he said finally. “Have you a system, or was it blind chance?”
The Ganae councillors in that domed room stirred uneasily in their curved chairs. Enash caught Yoal’s eye on him. “The shock in the historian’s eye alarmed the meteorologist. He thought: “The two-legged one’s adjustment to a new situation, his grasp of realities, was unnormally rapid. No Ganae could have equalled the swiftness of the reaction.”
Hamar, the chief biologist, said, “Speed of thought is not necessarily a sign of superiority. The slow, careful thinker has his place in the hierarchy of intellect.”
But Enash found himself thinking, it was not the speed; it was the accuracy of the response. He tried to imagine himself being revived from the dead, and understanding instantly the meaning of the presence of aliens from the stars. He couldn’t have done it.
He forgot his thought, for the man was out of the case. As Enash watched with the others, he walked briskly over to the window and looked out. One glance, and then he turned back.
“Is it all like this?” he asked.
Once again, the speed of his understanding caused a sensa-tion. It was Yoal who finally replied.
“Yes. Desolation. Death. Ruin. Have you any ideas as to what happened?”
The man came back and stood in front of the energy screen that guarded the Ganae. “May I look over the museum? I have to estimate what age I am in. We had certain possibilities of destruction when I was last alive, but which one was realized depends on the time elapsed.”
The councillors looked at Captain Gorsid, who hesitated; then, “Watch him,” he said to the guard with the ray gun. He faced the man. “We understand your aspirations fully. You would like to seize control of this situation and ensure your own safety. Let me reassure you. Make no false moves, and all will be well.”
Whether or not the man believed the lie, he gave no sign.
Nor did he show by a glance or a movement that he had seen the scarred floor where the ray gun had burned his two predecessors into nothingness. He walked curiously to the nearest doorway, studied the other guard who waited there for him, and then, gingerly, stepped through. The first guard followed him, then came the mobile energy screen, and finally, ~ trailing one another, the councillors.
Enash was the third to pass through the doorway. The _room contained skeletons and plastic models of animals. The room beyond that was what, for want of a better term, Enash called a culture room. It contained the artifacts from a single period of civilization. It looked very advanced. He had examined some of the machines when they first passed through ,it,, and had thought: Atomic energy. He was not alone in his recognition. From behind him. Captain Gorsid said to the man:
“You are forbidden to touch anything. A false move will be the signal for the guards to fire.”
The man stood at ease in the centre of the room. In spite of a curious anxiety, Enash had to admire his calmness. He must have known what his fate would be, but he stood there thoughtfully, and said finally, deliberately, “I do not need to go any farther. Perhaps you will be able to judge better than I of the time that has elapsed since I was born and these machines were built. I see over there an instrument which, according to the sign above it, counts atoms when they explode.
As soon as the proper number have exploded it shuts off the power automatically, and for just the right length of time to prevent a chain explosion. In my time we had a thousand crude devices for limiting the size of an atomic reaction, but it required two thousand years to develop those devices from the early beginnings of atomic energy. Can you make a com-parison?”
The councillors glanced at Veed. The engineering officer hesitated. At last, reluctantly, he said, “Nine thousand years ago we had a thousand methods of limiting atomic explosions.”
He paused, then even more slowly, “I have never heard of an instrument that counts out atoms for such a purpose.”
“And yet,” murmured Shuri, the astronomer, breathlessly, “the race was destroyed.”
There was silence. It ended as Gorsid said to the nearest guard, “Kill the monster!”
But it was the guard who went down, bursting into flame.
Not just one guard, but the guards! Simultaneously down, burning with a blue flame. The flame licked at the screen, recoiled, and licked more furiously, recoiled and burned brighter. Through a haze of fire, Enash saw that the man had retreated to the far door, and that the machine that counted atoms was glowing with a blue intensity.
Captain Gorsid shouted into his communicator, “Guard all exits with ray guns. Spaceships stand by to kill alien with heavy guns.”
Somebody said, “Mental control. Some kind of mental control. What have we run into?”
They were retreating. The blue flame was at the ceiling, struggling to break through the screen. Enash had a last glimpse of the machine. It must still be counting atoms, for it was a hellish blue. Enash raced with the others to the room where the man had been resurrected. There, another energy screen crashed to their rescue. Safe now, they retreated into their separate bubbles and whisked through outer doors and up to the ship. As the great ship soared, an atomic bomb hurtled down from it. The mushroom of flame blotted out the museum and the city below.
“But we still don’t know why the race died,” Yoal whispered into Enash’s ear, after the thunder had died from the heavens behind them.
The pale yellow sun crept over the horizon on the third morning after the bomb was dropped, the eighth day since the landing. Enash floated with the others down on a new city.
He had come to argue against any further revival.
“As a meteorologist,” he said, “I pronounce this planet safe for Ganae colonization. I cannot see the need tor taking any risks. This race has discovered the secrets of its nervous system, and we cannot afford”
He was interrupted. Hamar, the biologist, said dryly, “If they knew so much why didn’t they migrate to other star systems and save themselves?”
“I will concede,” said Enash, “that very possibly they had not discovered our system of locating stars with planetary families.” He looked earnestly around the circle of his friends.
“We have agreed that was a unique accidental discovery.
We were lucky, not clever.”
He saw by the expressions on their faces that they were mentally refuting his arguments. He felt a helpless sense of imminent catastrophe. For he could see that picture of a great race facing death. It must have come swiftly, but not so swiftly that they didn’t know about it. There were too many skeletons in the open, lying in the gardens of magnificent homes, as if each man and his wife had come out to wait for the doom of his kind. He tried to picture it for the council, thtit last day long, long ago, when a race had calmly met its ending. But his visualization failed somehow, for the others shifted impatiently in the seats that had been set up behind the series of energy screens, and Captain Gorsid said, “Exactly what aroused this intense emotional reaction in you, Enash?”
The question gave Enash pause. He hadn’t thought of it as emotional. He hadn’t realized the nature of his obsession, so subtly had it stolen upon him. Abruptly now, he realized.
“It was the third one,” he said slowly. “I saw him through the haze of energy fire, and he was standing there in the dis-
~ tant doorway watching us curiously, just before we turned to run. His bravery, his calm, the skilful way he had duped us it all added up.”
“Added up to his death!” said Hamar. And everybody laughed.
“Come now, Enash,” said Vice-captain Mayad good-humouredly, “you’re not going to pretend that this race is braver than our own, or that, with all the precautions we have now taken, we need fear one man?”
Enash was silent, feeling foolish. The discovery that he had had an emotional obsession abashed him. He did not want to appear unreasonable. He made a final protest, “I merely wish to point out,” he said doggedly, “that this desire to discover what happened to a dead race does not seem abso-lutely essential to me.”
Captain Gorsid waved at the biologist, “Proceed,” he said, “with the revival.”
To Enash, he said, “Do we dare return to Gana, and recommend mass migrationsand then admit that we did not actually complete our investigations here? It’s impossible, my friend.”