“Don’t worry, Cha Thrat,” Prilicla said, the musical triils and clicks of its
native speech backing the translated words. “You are among friends.”
“There’s a problem,” Naydrad said. “No acceleration furniture to suit that
stupid shape of yours. Lie down on a casualty litter and I’ll strap you in.”
Chapter 12
The FOKT facility was completed and thoroughly tested, first by Naydrad and
then, on the orders of Major Fletcher, by Rhabwar^ engineer officer, Lieutenant
Chen. That, apart from brief meetings on the way to or from the combination
dining area and recreationdeck, was her only direct contact with any of the
ship’sofficers.
It was not that they tried to discourage such contact between the officer-ruler
level and a being of the lowest technical rank, or that they deliberately tried
to make her feel inferior. They did neither. But all Monitor Corps personnel who
passed the very high technical and academic requirements for service on
interstellar ships were automatically considered, at least to the
status-conscious mind of a Sommaradvan, to be as close to ruler status as made
no difference. Without meaning to give offense they kept slipping into a highly
technical and esoteric , language of their own, and they made her feel very
uncomfortable.
In any case she felt more at home with the civilian medics than with the beings
who, apart from a few small but significant badges on their collars, wore the
same uniform as she did. As well, it was impossible to be in the same company as
Prilicla without feeling very comfortable indeed. So she made herself as
inconspicuous as her physiology would permit, reminded herself constantly that
she now belonged to the maintenance rather than the medical fraternity, and
tried very hard not to join in while the others were discussing the mission.
Goglesk had been a borderline case so far as the Cultural Contact people were
concerned. Full contact with a technologically backward culture could be
dangerous because, when the Monitor Corps ships dropped out of their skies, they
could never be sure whether they were giving the natives evidence of a future
technological goal at which they could aim or a destructive inferiority complex.
But the Gogleskans, in spite of their backwardness in the physical sciences and
the devastating racial psychosis that forced them to remain so, were
psychologi-cally stable, at least as individuals, and their planet had not known
war for many thousands of years.
The easiest course would have been for the Corps to withdraw and leave the
Gogleskan culture to continue as it had been doing since the dawn of its
history, and write their problem off as insoluble. Instead they had made one of
their very few compromises by setting up a small base for the purposes of
observation, investigation, and limited contact.
Progress for any intelligent species depended on increasing levels of
cooperation among its individuals and family or tribal groups. On Goglesk,
however, any attempt at close cooperation brought drastically reduced
intelligence, a mindless urge to destruction, and serious physical injury in its
wake, so that the Gogleskans had been forced into becoming a race of
individualists who had close physical contact only during the brief reproductive
period or while caring for the very young.
The problem had come about as the result of a solution forced on them in
presapient times. They had been a food source for every predator infesting their
oceans, but they, too, had evolved natural weapons of offense and defense—stings
that paralyzed or killed the smaller life-forms and long cranial tendrils that
gave them the faculty of telepathy by contact. When threatened by large
predators they had linked bodies and minds together to the size required to
neutralize any attacker with their combined stings.
There was fossil evidence on Goglesk of a titanic struggle for survival between
them and a gigantic and particularly ferocius species of ocean predator, a
battle that had raged for many, many thousands of years. The FOKTs had won in
the end, and had evolved into intelligent land-dwellers, but they had paid a
terrible price.
In order to sting to death one of those giant predators,physical and telepathic
link-ups ot hundreds of individual FOKTs had been required. A great many of them