Only one in two hundred thousand of those gloving suns had planets.
That was the colossal fact that compelled them now to an irrevocable act. Wearily, Enash looked around him.
“The monster has been very clever,” he said quietly. “If we go ahead, he goes with us, obtains a reconstructor, and re-
‘ turns by his method to his planet. If we use the directional beam, he flashes along it, obtains a reconstructor, and again reaches his planet first. In either event, by the time our fleets arrived back here, he would have revived enough of his kind to thwart any attack we could mount.”
He shook his torso. The picture was accurate, he felt sure, but it still seemed incomplete. He said slowly, “We have one advantage now. Whatever decision we make, there is no language machine to enable him to learn what is it. We can carry out our plans without his knowing what they will be. He knows that neither he nor we can blow up the ship. That leaves us one real alternative.”
It was Captain Gorsid who broke the silence that followed.
“Well, gentlemen, I see we know our minds. We will set the engines, blow up the controls, and take him with us.”
They looked at each other, race pride in their eyes. Enash touched suckers with each in turn.
An hour later, when the heat was already considerable, Enash had the thought that sent him staggering to the communicator, to call Shuri, the astronomer. “Shun,” he yelled, “when the monster first awakenedremember Captain Gorsid had difficulty getting your subordinates to destroy the locators.
We never thought to ask them what the delay was. Ask them … ask them”
There was a pause, then Shuri’s voice came weakly over the roar of the static. “They… couldn’t… get… into the…
room. The door was locked.”
Enash sagged to the floor. They had missed more than one point, he realized. The man had awakened, realized the situation; and, when he vanished, he had gone to the ship, and there discovered the secret of the locator and possibly the secret of the reconstructorif he didn’t know it previously. By the time he reappeared, he already had from them what he wanted. All the rest must have been designed to lead them to this act of desperation.
In a few moments, now, he would be leaving the ship, secure in the knowledge that shortly no alien mind would know his planet existed. Knowing, too, that his race would live again, and this time never die.
Enash staggered to his feet, clawed at the roaring communicator, and shouted his new understanding into it. There was no answer. It clattered with the static of uncontrollable and inconceivable energy. The heat was peeling his armoured hide as he struggled to the matter transmitter. It flashed at him with purple flame. Back to the communicator he ran shouting and screaming.
He was still whimpering into it a few minutes later when the mighty ship plunged into the heart of a blue-white sun.