“Were I to live a hundred lifetimes,” Lioren said harshly, “I could never save a fraction of the number of beings I caused to die.”
“But you could try—” O’Mara began, and broke off as once again the fleet commander raised his hand for silence.
“Address your arguments to the court, not each other,” Der-mod said, looking at them in turn. “I shall not warn you again. Major O’Mara, some time ago you stated that you had little more to say. May the court now assume that you have said it?”
The Chief Psychologist remained standing fora moment; then it said, “Yes, sir” and sat down.
“Very well,” the fleet commander said. “The court will now hear the case for the prosecution. Surgeon-Captain Lioren, are you ready to proceed?”
Lioren’s skin showed an increasing and irregular discoloration caused by the deep emotional distress that even the earliest and innocent memories evoked, but his surface air sacs had deflated so that he was able to speak quietly.
“I am ready.”
Chapter 2
THE Cromsag system had been investigated by the Monitor Corps scout ship Tenelphi while engaged on a survey mission in Sector Nine, one of the embarrassing three-dimensional blanks which still appeared in the Federation’s charts. The discovery of a system containing habitable planets was a pleasant break in the boring routine of counting and measuring the positions of a myriad of stars, and when they found one displaying all the indications of harboring intelligent indigenous life, their pleasure and excitement were intense.
The pleasure, however, was short-lived.
Because a scout ship with a complement of only four entities did not have the facilities to handle a first-contact situation, the regulations forbade a landing, so the crew had to content themselves with conducting a visual examination from close orbit while trying to establish the natives’ level of technology by analyzing their communications frequencies and any other electromagnetic radiation emanating from the planet. As a result of their findings, Tenelphi remained in orbit while it recklessly squandered its power reserves on the ship’s energy-hungry sub-space communicator on increasingly urgent distress messages to base.
The Monitor Corps’s specialized other-species contact vessel, Descartes, which normally made the initial approach to newly discovered cultures, was already deeply involved on the planet of the Blind Ones, where communications had reached the stage where it was inadvisable to break off. But the situation on the new planet was not a problem of First Contact but of insuring that enough of the natives would survive to make any kind of contact possible.
The Emperor-class battleship Vespasian, which was more than capable of waging a major war although in this instance it was expected to end one, was hastily converted to disaster-relief mode and dispatched to the region. It was under the command of the Earth-human Colonel Williamson, but in all matters pertaining to relief operations on the surface it was the Tarlan subordinate, Surgeon-Captain Lioren, who had the rank and the sole responsibility.
Within an hour of the two vessels matching orbits, Tenelphi had docked with Vespasian and the scout ship’s captain, the Earth-human Major Nelson, and its Nidian medical officer, Surgeon-Lieutenant Dracht-Yur, were in the operations room giving the latest situation report.
“We have recorded samples of their radio signals,” Major Nelson reported briskly, “even though the volume of traffic is unusually small. But we were unable to make any sense of it because our computer is programmed for survey work with just enough reserve capacity to handle the translation requirements of my crew. As things stand, we don’t even know if they know we are here—”
“Vespasian’s tactical computer will translate the surface traf- fie from now on,” Colonel Williamson broke in impatiently, “and the information will be passed to you. We are less interested in what you did not hear than in what you saw. Please go on, Major.”
It was unnecessary to mention a fact known to everyone present, that while Williamson’s tremendous capital ship had the bigger brain, Nelson’s tiny and highly specialized survey vessel had eyes that were second to none.
“As you can see,” Nelson went on, tapping the keys that threw the visuals onto the room’s enormous tactical display screen, “we surveyed the planet from a distance of five diameters before moving in to map in more detail the areas that showed signs of habitation. It is the third planet, and so far as we know the only life-bearing one, of a system of eight planets. Its day is just over nineteen hours long, surface gravity one and one-quarter Earth-normal, the atmospheric pressure in proportion, and its composition would not seriously inconvenience the majority of our warm-blooded oxygen-breathers.