verbal insubordination it might utter would die with this Earth-human, who in
turn sensed the other’s sympathy and was in too much pain to care about the
things he said about his own superiors. And while they talked the Earth-human
learned something of vital importance, an enemy’s-eye view of the simple,
stupid, and jointly misunderstood incident which had been responsible for
starting the war in the first place.
It had been during the closing stages of this conversation that an Orligian ship
which chanced to be in the area had landed and, after assessing the situation,
used its Stopper on the Earth wreck.
Even now the operating principles of the Orligian primary space weapon were
unclear to MacEwan. The weapon was capable of enclosing a small ship, or vital
sections of a large one, within a field of stasis in which all motion stopped.
Neither the ships nor their crew were harmed physically, but if someone so much
as scratched the surface of one of those Stopped hulls or tried to slip a needle
into the skin of one of the Stopped personnel, the result was an explosion of
near-nuclear proportions.
But the Orligian stasis field projector had peaceful as well as military
applications.
With great difficulty the section of Control Room and the two Stopped bodies it
contained had been moved to Orligia, to occupy the central square of the
planetary capital as the most gruesomely effective war memorial ever known, for
236 years. During that time the shaky peace which the two frozen beings had
brought about between Orligia and Earth ripened into friendship, and medical
science progressed to the point where the terribly injured Earth-human could be
saved. Although its
injuries had not been fatal, Grawlya-Ki had insisted on being Stopped with its
friend so that it could see MacEwan cured for itself.
And then the two greatest heroes of the war, heroes because they had ended it,
were removed from stasis, rushed to a hospital, and cured. For the first time,
it was said, the truly great of history would receive the reward they deserved
from posterity—and that was the way it had happened, just over thirty years
ago.
Since then the two heroes, the only two entities in the whole Federation with
direct experience of war, had grown increasingly monomaniacal on the subject
until the honor and respect accorded them had gradually changed to reactions of
impatience and embarrassment.
“Sometimes, Ki,” MacEwan saidt turning away from the frozen figures of their
former selves, “I wonder if we should give up and try to find peace of mind like
the Colonel said. Nobody listens to us anymore, yet all we are trying to tell
them is to relax, to take off their heavy, bureaucratic gauntlets when extending
the hand of friendship, and to speak and react honestly so that—”
“I am aware of the arguments,” Grawlya-Ki broke in, “and the completely
unnecessary restatement of them, especially to one who shares your feelings in
this matter, is suggestive of approaching senility.”
“Listen, you mangy, overgrown baboon!” MacEwan began furiously, but the Orligian
ignored him.
“And senility is a condition which cannot be successfully treated by the
Colonel’s psychiatrists,” it went on. “Neither, I submit, can they give
psychiatric assistance to minds which are otherwise sane. As for my localized
loss of fur, you are so lacking in male hormones that you can only grow it on
your head and—”
“And your females grow more fur than you do,” MacEwan snapped back, then
stopped.
He had been conned again.
Since that first historic meeting in MacEwan’s wrecked Control Room they had
grown to know each other very well. Grawlya-Ki had assessed the present
situation, decided that MacEwan was-feeling far too depressed for his own good,
and instituted
curative treatment in the form of a therapuetic argument combined with subtle
reassurance regarding their sanity. MacEwan smiled.
“This frank and honest exchange of views,” he said quietly, “is distressing the
other travelers. They probably think the Earth—Orligian war is about to restart,
because they would never dream of saying such things to each other.”
“But they do dream,” Grawlya-ki said, its mind going off at one of its
peculiarly Orligian tangents. “All intelligent life-forms require periods of