-For good reason, Thinker said. For you are not human. You are something made by humans, you are an agent of the humans.
-And yet, said Changer, one must be something. I’d rather be a human than not anything at all. One cannot stand alone.
-You will not be alone, said Thinker. The two of us are with you.
-Still, said Changer stubbornly, I insist on being human.
-I cannot understand, said Thinker.
-Perhaps I can, said Quester. Back there in the hospital I felt something I had not felt before, something that no quester has felt for a long, long time. The pride of race, and, furthermore, a pride in the racial fighting spirit that was tucked away somewhere deep inside of me and that I had not known was there. I suspect, Changer, that my race, in the time of long ago, was as much upon the prod as your race is today. And it is a prideful thing to be of such a race. It gives you strength and stature and a great deal of self-respect. It is something that Thinker and his kind perhaps could never feel.
-My pride, if I had any, Thinker said, would be of a different kind and arise from different motives. But I will not foreclose there being many kinds of pride.
Quester jerked his attention to the hillside and the woods, alerted by a whiff of danger that had come snaking along the detection net that he had laid out.
-Quiet! he told the other two.
Faint, far off, he caught the indications and zeroed in on them. There were three of them, three humans, and in a little time more than three of them – a long line of them advancing cautiously, searching through the woods. And there could be, he knew, only one thing that they sought.
He caught the faint edges of their mind-waves and they were afraid, but they were also angry and filled with a hate-tinged loathing. But, as well as this fear and hatred, there was the sense of hunt, the strange, wild excitement that drove them on to find and kill the thing that was the cause of fear.
Quester bunched his body and half rose to dart out of the den. For there was, he thought, only one way to elude these humans – to run and run and run.
-Wait, said Thinker.
-They will be on top of us.
-Not for a time. They are moving slowly. There may be a better way. We cannot run for ever. We have made one mistake. We should not make another.
-What mistake?
-We should not have changed to you. We should have stayed as Changer. It was blind panic that forced us to make the change.
-But we had no knowledge. We saw danger and reacted. We were being threatened…
-I could have bluffed it out, said Changer. But this way may have been the best at that. They had suspicions of me. They would have put me under observation. They might have locked me up. This way, at least, we’re free.
-But not for long, said Thinker, if we keep on running. There are too many of them – too many on the planet. We can’t hide from all of them. We can’t dodge them all. Mathematically we have so little chance that it is no chance at all.
-You have something in your mind? asked Quester.
-Why don’t we change to me. I can be a lump, a nothing, something in this cave. A rock, perhaps. When they look into it they will see nothing strange.
-A minute, there, said Changer. Your idea is all right, but there may be problems.
-Problems?
-You should have it figured out by now. Not problems, but a problem. The climate of this planet. It is too warm for Quester. It will be far too cold for you.
-Cold is lack of heat?
-That’s right.
-Lack of energy?
-Correct.
-It takes a little time to get all the terminology sorted out, said Thinker. It has to be catalogued, soaked into the mind. But I can stand some cold. For the common cause I can stand a lot of cold.
-It’s not just a matter of standing it. Of course, you can do that. But you require great amounts of energy.
-When I formed that time in the house…
-You had the energy supply of the house to draw on. Here there is nothing but the heat stored in the atmosphere. And now that the sun is down, that is steadily becoming less and less. You’ll have to operate on the energy that the body has. You can’t draw on outside sources.
-I see, said Thinker. But I can form a shape to conserve what energy there is. I can hug it to me. If the change is made, I have all the energy that is in the body?
-I would think you would have. The change itself perhaps requires some energy exchange, but I suspect not very much.
-How do you feel, Quester?
-Hot, said Quester.
-I don’t mean that. You aren’t tired, are you? No lack of energy?
-I feel all right, said Quester.
-We wait, said Thinker, until they are almost here. Then we change to me and I am a nothing or almost a nothing. Just a shapeless lump. Best way would be for me to spread myself all around the cave, a lining for the cave. But that way I’d lose too much energy.
-They may not see the cave, said Changer. They may pass it by.
-We can’t take chances, Thinker said. I’ll be me no longer than we have to. We must change back as soon as they are past. If what you say is true.
-Calculate it for yourself, invited Changer. You have the data that I gave you. You know as much physics, as much chemistry as I do.
-The data, perhaps, Changer. But not the habit of mind to employ it. Not your way of thought. Not your ability at mathematics, not your swift grasp of universal principles.
-But you are our thinker.
-I think another way.
-Stop this jabbering, Quester said, impatiently. Let’s get set what we are to do. Once they’re past, we change back to me.
-No, said Changer. Back to me.
-But you haven’t any clothes.
-Out here it doesn’t matter.
-Your feet. You need shoes. There are rocks and sticks. And your eyes are no good in the dark.
-They are almost here, warned Thinker.
-That is right, said Quester. They are coming down the hill.
17
It was fifteen minutes until her favourite dimensino programme came on. Elaine Horton had looked forward to it all day, for Washington was boring. Already she was looking forward to the time when she could return to the old stone house in the Virginia hills.
She sat down and picked up a magazine and was idly flipping through its pages when the senator came in.
‘What did you do all day?’ he asked.
‘Part of the time I watched the hearing.’
‘Good show?’
‘Fairly interesting. What I can’t understand is why you bothered to dig up that stuff from two hundred years ago.’
He chuckled. ‘Well, partly, I suppose, to shake up Stone. I couldn’t see his face. I would guess his eyeballs might have popped.’
‘Mostly,’ she said, ‘he simply sat there glaring. I suppose that you were proving that bioengineering is not so new a thing as many people think.’
He sat down in a chair and picked up a paper, glanced at the glaring headlines.
‘That,’ he said, ‘and that it can be done – that it, in fact, was being done, and rather skilfully, two centuries ago. And that we were scared out once, but shouldn’t be again. Think of all the time we’ve lost – two hundred years of time. I have other witnesses who will point that out, rather forcefully.’
He shook out the paper and settled down to read.
‘Your mother get away all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes, she did. The plane left a little before noon.’
‘Rome this time, isn’t it. Was it films or poetry or what?’
‘Films this time. Some old prints someone found from the end of the twentieth century, I believe.’
The senator sighed. ‘Your mother,’ he told her, ‘is an intelligent woman. She appreciates such things; I’m afraid I don’t. She was talking about taking you along with her. It might have been interesting if you had cared to go.’
‘You know it wouldn’t have been interesting,’ she said. ‘You are an old fraud. You make noises as if you admired these things that Mother likes, but you don’t care a lick.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ he agreed. ‘What’s on dimensino? Could I squeeze in the booth with you?’
‘There is plenty of room and you know it. And you would be very welcome. I’m waiting for Horatio Alger. It will be on in another ten minutes or so.’