“This is a dream,” he said flatly, and the dragon-man responded with a very human shrug.
“In a sense,” he acknowledged. “You are most certainly asleep, at any rate. But if this is a dream, it’s one we share . . . and the only way in which we could communicate with you. It is also—” the sense of a smile was even stronger, but this time it carried a hungry edge, as well “—a method of communication which the Commander and his kind cannot possibly tap or intercept.”
“Ah?” Despite himself, Sir George’s mental ears pricked at that. No doubt it was only a dream, and this talkative dragon-man was no more than his own imagination, but if only—
“Indeed,” the dragon-man reassured him, and folded his arms across a massive chest. “Our kind do not use spoken speech among ourselves as most other races do,” he explained. “In fact, we are not capable of it, for we lack the vocal cords—or equivalent—which you and other species use to produce sound.”
“Then how do you speak to one another?” Sir George asked intently. “And, for that matter, what do you call your kind among yourselves?”
“We are what others call `telepaths,’ ” the dragon-man replied. “It means simply that we cast our thoughts directly into one another’s minds, without need of words. And no doubt because we do so, we do not use individual names as other species do. Or, rather, we don’t require them, for each of us has a unique gestalt—a taste, or flavor, if you will—which all others of our kind recognize. As for what we call ourselves as a species, the closest equivalent in your language would probably be `People.’ Since meeting you humans, however, and especially since establishing a contact point in your mind, we aboard this ship have been rather taken by your own descriptions of us.” The dragon-man’s amusement was apparent. “The notion of playing the part of one of your `dragons’ against the Commander is extremely attractive to us, Sir George.”
Sir George smiled. “In that case, we will no doubt continue to call you dragons,” he said, and the dragon-man projected the sense of another fierce grin as he nodded.
“We would find that most acceptable,” he said. “Yet the need for you to give us a name because we’ve never developed one is another example of the differences between your kind and us which result from the fact of our telepathy. Despite several of your millennia as the Federation’s slaves, we have still to evolve many of the reference points most other species take for granted. Indeed, it was extremely difficult for our ancestors to grasp even the concept of spoken communication when the Federation discovered our world. They took many years to do so, and only the fact that we had independently developed a nuclear-age technology of our own prevented the Federation from classifying us as dumb beasts.”
” `Nuclear-age’?” Sir George repeated, and the dragon-man shrugged again, this time impatiently.
“Don’t worry about that now. It simply means that we were considerably more advanced technically than your own world . . . although the Federation was even more relatively advanced compared to us than we would have been compared to your world.
“Unfortunately,” the alien went on, and his “voice” turned cold and bleak, “we were too advanced for our own good—just enough to be considered a potential threat, yet not sufficiently so to defend ourselves—and the Federation declared our world a `protectorate.’ They moved in their military units `for our own good,’ to `protect’ us from ourselves . . . and to insure that we never became any more advanced than we were at the moment they discovered us.”
“Because they feared competition,” Sir George said shrewdly.
“Perhaps,” the dragon-man replied. “No, certainly. But there was another reason, as well. You see, the Federation is entirely controlled by species like the Commander’s. They are far more advanced than our own race—or yours—and they regard that as proof of their inherent superiority.”
“So I’ve noticed,” Sir George said bitterly.
“We realize that, yet we doubt that you have fully realized what that means,” the dragon-man said, “for you lack certain information.”