gravity requirements and they should, at least, have been acknowledging each
others’ presence even if they did not openly display the curiosity they must be
feeling toward each other. Angrily, MacEwan turned away to examine the traffic
movements display.
There was an lllensan factory ship in orbit, a great, ungainly nonlander whose
shuttle had touched down a few minutes earlier, and a Nidian ground transporter
fitted with the chlorine breathers’ life-support was on the way in to pick up
passengers. Their Tralthan-built and crewed passenger ship was nearly ready to
board and stood on its apron on the other side of the main aircraft runway. It
was one of the new ships which boasted of providing comfortable accommodation
for six different oxygen-breathing species, but degrees of comfort were relative
and MacEwan, Grawlya-Ki, and the other non-Tralthans in the lounge would shortly
be judging it for themselves.
Apart from the lllensan shuttle and the Tralthan vessel, the only traffic was
the Nidian atmosphere craft which took off and landed every few minutes. They
were not large aircraft, but they did not need to be to hold a thousand Nidians.
As the aircraft differed only in their registration markings, it seemed that the
same machine was endlessly taking off and landing.
Angry because there was nothing else in the room to engage his attention fully,
and because it occupied such a prominent Position in the center of the lounge
that all eyes were naturally drawn to it, MacEwan turned finally to look once
again at that frightful and familiar tableau.
Grawlya-Ki had already done so and was whining softly to itself.
It was a life-sized replica of the old Orligian war memorial, one of the
countless thousands of copies which occupied public places of honor or appeared
in miniature on the desks or in the homes of responsible and concerned beings on
every world-of the Federation. The original had stood within its protective
shield in the central Plaza of Orligia’s capital city for more than two
centuries, during which a great many native and visiting entities of
sensitivity and intelligence had tried vainly to describe its effect upon them.
For that war memorial was no aesthetic marble poem in which godlike figures
gestured defiance or lay dying nobly with limbs arranged to the best advantage.
Instead it consisted of an Orligian and an Earthman, surrounded by the
shattered, remnants of a Control Room belonging to a type of ship now long
obsolete.
The Orligian was standing crouched forward, the fur of its chest and face matted
with blood. A few yards away lay the Earth-human, very obviously dying. The
front of his uniform was in shreds, revealing the ghastly injuries he had
sustained. Abdominal organs normally concealed by skin, layers of subcutaneous
tissue and muscle were clearly visible. Yet this man, who had no business being
alive much less being capable of movement, was struggling toward the Orligian.
Two combatants amid the wreckage of a warship trying to continue their battle
hand to-hand?
The dozens of plaques spaced around the base of the tableau described the
incident in all the written languages of the Federation .
They told of the epic, single-ship duel between the Orligian and the Earth-human
commanders. So evenly matched had they been that, their respective crew members
dead, their ships shot to pieces, armaments depleted and power gone, they had
crash-landed close together on a world unknown to both of them. The Orligian,
anxious to learn all it could regarding enemy ship systems, and driven by a more
personal curiosity about its opponent, had boarded the wrecked Earth ship. They
met.
For them the war was over, because the terribly wounded Earth-human did not know
when he was going to die and the Orligian did not know when, if ever, its
distress signal would
bring rescuers. The distant, impersonal hatred they had felt toward each other
was gone, dissipated by the six-hour period* of maximum effort that had been
their duel, and was replaced by feelings of mutual respect for the degree of
professional competence displayed. So they tried to communicate, and succeeded.
It had been a slow, difficult, and extraordinarily painful process for both of
them, but when they did talk they held nothing back. The Orligian knew that any