CHAPTER XII

They landed gently beside the two great silver disks, and Mac sat back and said, "Well," proudly, for it was his first landing in half a millennium. "Now what, Jack the Ripper?"

"Now we go out and talk to them. First we let the gang out of the middle room, though."

Mac flipped a switch. "They can open the door now."

Brave and the others came to meet them in the corridor. They all had their rifles at the ready. "Put up the knife, Alan," said Rob Pope. "He's under control pretty well, I'd say. One phony move or thought and he's done."

Mac looked at them all. "I liked you," he said sadly. "I suppose I'll have to kill you eventually, but I did like you." Then they marched him down the ramp to the ground.

Alan and Win and Rob were aware at once of the amazement that ran through the alien forces like a chinook wind among pines. Alan could catch the thoughts plainly: _It is he, it is the leader!_

"Holy cats," he said, and Unquote stirred feebly but angrily on his shoulder. "Mac, are you the chief of your bunch?"

"Yes. Oh, laddie, I'm a prize catch. They'll give you the Iron Cross for me. Or the Lead Casket."

The outlanders, duplicates in form and clothing of the men slain by Alan and the others, clustered around them. Alan wondered if there were hatred in his brain to be found by these fellows. He did not actually know himself whether or not he hated them for their bombing. The destruction of New York had been such a gargantuan thing, such an incredibly huge blow, that the solution of smaller problems seemed to have driven it out of his thoughts entirely; perhaps it was a trick of his subconscious, to prevent his going mad with horror.

He could hear them--if "hear" was the verb--talking mentally together. There was no language involved, evidently, for the thoughts were surely as plain to him as to the aliens themselves. "It's like listening in on an old-fashioned party line," he told Win.

"Isn't it! I mean," she added hastily, "I'm not old enough to remember, but it must be."

Alan grinned. "As I catch it, they're congratulating each other on capturing Mac. And by glory, they're thanking us!"

"They just unfolded my mind like a road map," said Rob, "so they know about all that we know. What stupendous capacities for absorption their brains must have! I get the feeling that they just glance through a kind of card index that's in the back room of my skull, and then they know how I feel about them, and about chess and women, and what I had for supper last night."

"It's not that miraculous," said McEldownie, on whose wrists two of the aliens in filigreed harness had placed brass manacles connected by a long chain. "They--and I--touch the centers of emotion, and judge from them what sort of person you are. Just now they read the records of how you got the disk, and how you captured me; and they tried to find out how you reacted to the bombing of New York, but your emotion there was too obscure."

"I obscured it myself. I was ashamed of it. Because," said Rob, wrinkling up his forehead, "although I'm shaken when I think of it, and feel so sorry that _sorry_ is a mild word, still I can't find any hatred for your brothers here. I honestly think it was a mistake on their part; and it must have been based on evidence, so that evidence was falsified; and only you and your crew could have done that. Ergo, I don't hate them. I hate you, Mac."

"You're all wrong."

"I'll find out before I do anything about it."

* * * * *

Half a dozen of the bare-chested blond fellows came to stand before them. Again, there was no evidence of weapons--but whereas the first group had been careless after finding no basic hatred in Rob and Bill, this contingent had carefully studied the intent and the mental content of each of them. Probably, thought Alan, it was because they had brought McEldownie, who had been instantly recognized.

"That's right," said Mac in answer to his thought. "That first bunch were strangers to me. See the tall bloke with the argent head-band? That's my uncle, my mother's brother. Half of this lot knew me at home."

"Mac," said Win, "where _is_ your home?"

"Erin Grady told you the truth. We come from the ninth planet of a sun unknown to you."

"And why did you come?"

"That's a long yarn--and my uncle says he has something to tell you." Mac shut his mouth. Tall, bony, homely, dressed in ordinary American clothes, his beak of a nose and the half-lidded green eyes so familiar to them all, Alan and the others felt a pang at seeing him silent and crestfallen among the fantastically clad outlanders. He was one of them, but he was also McEldownie, the TV announcer, the fellow who made bad puns and got drunk and ate enormously and suffered with them when New York died. Even Rob Pope, surer than the rest that Mac was at the bottom of all the hell unleashed that day, scowled and gave him a sorry grin.

"Maybe I'm planting the thought in your minds," Mac said cynically. None of them had spoken.

"I'd know if you were, I think," said Rob. "No, it's natural. You were a good egg."

"And as good eggs go, I went bad." He shrugged. "I think now that I didn't need to let you capture me for them. I might have killed Alan on the spot by touching a single button. Damn you all," he said without emotion. "I either loved you too well, or I was sick of running and being a rebel."

"A rebel against what?" asked Bill Thihling.

"Stuffiness and authority. I've got to shut up." He hung his head. He looked very tired and rather older than he had before this hour.

Then the leader of the aliens spoke to them. The message came in the curious wordless manner, and each of them put words to it in his own mind. To Alan it came like this:

"We are profoundly shocked at our hasty action of this morning. We have done you incomparable injury where a little more investigation would have shown us you were not inimical, not working against us, not bad at all as men go. Our only excuse is that we were direly pressed for time.

"We investigated certain sections of your planet where activities showed us some of the rebels from our world were at work; they were building ships and weapons to return to us, to attack us. We found at these places, some cities and some isolated deserts, some small towns and some government projects, that our rebels had taken control of your people, making them invulnerable with the ray which is known to us, making them long-lived and incapable of pain and with quickened reflexes and swifter bodies than before. To investigate this we should have had weeks. We gave ourselves less than a day. For we knew that our ships would have been sighted and the rebels would be speeding their plans. So we found many robot humans, many scientists working with our exiled people, and we thought that in all these places there must be millions of potential foemen."

* * * * *

The message was charged with emotion; it was impossible to believe that the man was lying. Indeed, thought Alan, there was no reason why he should lie. If he could wipe out New York with one small golden egg, he had no need to make allies of a few puny humans.

"Again, our sole excuse is the lack of time. We did find many places where only a portion of those checked were under rebel control. Those places we did not bomb, trusting that if we struck the large cities and the projects where disk manufacture was under way, we could mop up the others with ground fighting."

I wonder if Project Star is gone, thought Alan.

"I wonder," echoed Win aloud. Then they turned to each other, astounded. "Darling," she said after a second, "that's the one thing I like about this hardening, pain-removing process--now we can talk to each other without words!"

"Think what we can do with our mouths while we're talking," he grinned.

The leader went on. "I may interject here that we took over control of your artificial satellite some days ago. We did not kill the men therein, who were not enemies, but control them by simple hypnosis. They will of course be freed of this as soon as our job is done and a peace settled on between our worlds."

Brave looked up at the sky. Albertus, of course, could not be seen with the naked eye, but he said, "I know a couple of the lads that run that space station. Good boys. I'd been afraid they were dead. I knew they wouldn't have let us be smeared like this if they'd been able to prevent it."

"Only one city we bombed that we had not personally checked on; that is the large one over there," and he gestured toward Manhattan. "We could not send our men on the ground into that place; the entranceways are too complex, the place is too big, it would have taken too long; and we could scarcely fly over and drop spies. After earnest consultation we decided to bomb it. Being the largest concentration of civilized people in your world, being so close to the major rebel project, we felt--we _knew_--that it was full of enemies. Our stupidly certain assumption was wrong. We can never make reparation for that mistake, we cannot begin to make amends to you. Your only help will be the knowledge that we will live with the memory of that mistake the rest of our lives; and they are long, long lives.

"We are men of good will. We beg you to believe this. We have outlawed war and our planet lives at peace, prosperous peace. Now we have committed an intolerable crime against a brother race. We are hurt, in our way, as much as you have been hurt."

* * * * *

Brave had taken Alan's hand in his own and was squeezing it hard; the scientist thought suddenly that if he were not impervious to pain, his hand would be aching like fury. Brave said, "Son, I need help," quite simply and humbly.

"What is it, Brave?"

"Alan, these people are good. They look like barbarians, they ride in twenty-second century vehicles, and they plaster our greatest cities into the earth. But they're good. He isn't lying."

"What's the problem, Brave?"

"I hate them," the Indian said fiercely. "I'd like to have them all here," he let go Alan's hand and jabbed a great forefinger at his palm. "I'd smash 'em like lice. I don't want to feel that way. It's primitive. But strip me of the veneer I've lost these last hours, and I'm primitive to the core. I'm simple and single-minded. I hate people who do me harm. I won't go berserk and start in on these gentry, but by heaven, by the Great Spirit, I'd like to wipe them all out--slaughter them all! I want to sacrifice them to the ghosts of our dead cities."

Alan said slowly, "And you don't want to feel that way. Because they're good, you want to forgive them their mistake. My God, Brave," he cried, "how can we ever forgive them? We can understand them, but none of us will ever truly forgive and forget. Do you think because you feel that way that you are reverting to savagery? Then we're every one of us on the face of the earth pure howling savages!"

Brave searched his face. He nodded. "I see. I thought it was just me. I guess I thought you would be shooting them up if you felt that way too. Sorry, khedive. Heap sorry make-um dust-up over nothin'."

Alan smiled grimly.

Rob said, "If we only knew a little more of the basic story, hang it! They haven't mentioned where they came from, why they exiled Mac's boys or why they chased after them, anything about themselves except that they made a mistake. Holy old boot, we know that."

The leader put in urgently: "I sense many questions which I would happily answer if I had the time. But I have just received word that our forces are massing to attack the disk project to the east of that large city. I must therefore leave you until the job is done."

"They're attacking Project Star!" said Win sharply. "Good Lord, Alan, we've got a hundred friends there!"

"Yes, and just as innocent people as those who died in Manhattan. They can't do it." He stepped forward--it was significant that not one alien tried to stop him--and laid a hand on the leader's bare, brawny arm. The flesh was almost normal ... but not quite. Alan recalled Brave's suggestion of the feel of a rubber product. The arm was hairless and without pores, cool to the touch. He looked up into the leader's face. It was a good face, though the widened features gave it a somewhat aboriginal cast. It was a patriarchal face, more that of the ruler of a tribe than of the leader of a fleet of space disks who must also be an advanced scientist. The long yellow hair was turning slightly gray over the temples.

The man smiled. Yes, he said to Alan without words, I am over nine hundred years old.

"He comes from Shangri-la," said Bill Thihling. "He's the High Lama. Can't kid me."

Among his captors, the manacled McEldownie threw back his head and laughed. "That's what we needed," he said, "a good feeble jest. This meeting was getting dull as hell."

Alan ignored them. He tried to pierce into the leader's brain with his eyes, he thought fiercely and as hard as he ever had.

After three minutes the leader nodded. Alan turned to Brave. "Boy, we're going with them. We're going to lead the attack on Project Star."

"If you've got something up your sleeve--" began Rob.

"Nothing he doesn't know of. You think I'm able to keep my thoughts to myself? But we can save, or try to save, a lot of our people. Win stays here, of course. So does Rob, who has a bad leg." The leader started, gestured to another outlander, who opened one of the numerous cases on the ground and took out bandages and salves in tins, with which he began to repair the burn on Pope's leg. "Bill," said Alan, "you want to come?"

"Try and dissuade me!"

"Cheers, then, gal," said Alan lightly, and kissed Win. He turned and went into the great disk via the bubble's ramp. Brave and Bill followed him. The leader and five of the others went up, leaving half a dozen with McEldownie and Win and Rob. Then Alan reappeared, looking sheepish, came down and handed a weary cat to the girl. "I've been wearing her on my shoulder for so long she thought she was growing there." He patted Unquote (who raked up the energy to spit at him) and disappeared once more. The disk rose silently into the air.

* * * * *

Alan learned now that the aliens had a spoken tongue; for they began to chatter to each other, the sentences brief, the words evidently long and complex. It sounded a little like Latin, a little like Greek; but no words were even faintly familiar.

"What's your plan, Alan?" asked Brave.

"Not a very complex one, I'm afraid. We're to be allowed to go in first, the disk having flown low to avoid being sighted, and been landed behind the hill that overlooks our house. We're to gain entrance naturally, if possible, or sneak in if the place is too heavily fortified and suspicious. I think we can walk right in. I'm patently a 'robot' and you two can be under my charge. Then we have an hour to contact everyone we can. We tell the fellows who are okay to collect in the chem lab. We try to persuade the robots to congregate in the welding room, where they can be captured easily and without bloodshed. But if we can't tell the difference between robots and aliens, then we pass along quick. We have to step high and fast, lads. And we can't separate to do the job, since you two can't check over the thoughts of the people we meet."

He stood up. "I'm going to wander around and get to know the boys. We'll be fighting on their side soon."

"I hope it's the right side."

"I think it is."

He walked over to the nearest group of aliens, who greeted him courteously. He found that when they spoke aloud he could not read their thoughts; but when they sensed that he believed them to be talking about him or about secrets they had from him, they at once went mute and directed their thought conversation to his brain cells. He sat down and began to ask questions. He found that he was able to do so now without strain.

"Yes," one of them told him, "your powers develop rapidly after the third exposure to the rays. They come so gradually that you are hardly aware of them. It's a rapid gradualness, though."

Alan recalled that it was in the captured disk that he first felt the tremendous awakened power of his mind to read and feel the reciprocation of other minds. He nodded. They went on talking.

* * * * *

At three-thirty p.m. of the day New York died, the three men walked up to the gate of Project Star. They carried their heavy rifles openly, and looked belligerent. It would have been hard to appear otherwise.

They were challenged by a soldier, who fronted a squad of men with flamers and grenade pistols. Before Alan could answer, the soldier said, "Oh, it's Dr. Rackham. Pass in, sir. Where'd you come from?"

"Manhattan."

"Cripes! you're lucky to be here." It was the same soldier who had passed him on the night of his treatment in the shed. He went in to the colony, Brave and Bill Thihling at his heels.

At four-twenty-eight p.m. the three of them walked up close to the same gate. There were nine soldiers on duty. Beyond the fence were the ack-ack guns, radar detectors, and force field generators, manned by a number of other soldiers.

The three put their rifles down on the ground. Then they solemnly began to dance around in a little circle, unbuttoning their coats as they did so. The squad stared, moved uneasily a little closer, looked at their leader for guidance. He shrugged. He was a robotized fellow who had been made a particular pet by one of the aliens; he knew a great deal about the scheme of things in the colony--consciously, rather than unconsciously as most of them did--and was trusted above most of his fellows. He was not especially bright.

"They ain't breaking any rules," he said. "You never know what the hell a scientist is gonna do."

Brave and Alan and Bill had now divested themselves of their shirts and were taking off their undershirts. They were still dancing their lilting small cakewalk.

"Nuts," said the soldier. "They're nuts. Musta caught some radiation from that buster." All the men on the ring of huge equipment beyond the fence were watching them too. It was amusing to see a really mad scientist, and three were delightful. They whooped and cheered and laughed.

Then the saucermen came over the hill.

It was as though they erupted from the ground, even to Alan and his henchmen who had been watching for them. And what a sight it was! Barbarians in every physical trait, from face to naked chest to ornate girdle and gold loincloth, armed with tiny tubes that hurled fireballs and with thin blowpipes that shot numbing darts over incredible distances, they might have been warriors from a forgotten land in a long-forgotten time. And they came silently, so that they seemed to approach through the noiseless depths of a dream. But the shriek of a soldier falling from a gun platform, his face in flames, was not out of a dream, but a hideous nightmare.

* * * * *

The three men pounced on their rifles, threw them up and were firing methodically even before they had regained the erect position. Alan and Brave, crack shots who had been used to practice every Sunday morning on the military range, shot for the heads; Bill, a less certain marksman, tried for the chests. The brain and heart were the only sure targets when you fought a man who could feel no pain and could keep going with half of his body shot away.

For a brief time it seemed to the soldiers that the scientists were shooting aliens; then the leader turned and saw where the muzzles pointed.

"Get 'em!" he bellowed, and sprayed a charge from a grenade pistol that went wide of its mark but fanned Bill's cheek with tiny scraps of hot breeze. Next instant he was down kicking from Bill's slug, and the guards of the gate were finished.

The vanguard of the outlanders swept in and across the grounds. They had concentrated on this single gate, as the others had too open approaches for safety. There were men from sixteen saucers, over four hundred of them, and they ran like deer, like cheetahs after deer, like winds after cheetahs. Mutely, with a kind of ferocious impersonality, they descended on the colony.

Men came running out with machine guns and feverishly began to load them. They were picked off by rifle bullets, by paralyzing ray tubes, and relays came and were picked off and more came. One gun stuttered into action momentarily, and the crew went twisting up in the air, their gun blown apart, their bodies rent by a weapon that even Alan had not known of. He spotted it finally, a blunderbuss-shaped thing of silver with a flaring mouth, fired like a bazooka. Another machine gun blew up.

Among the buildings there was hand-to-hand combat, automatics against fire tubes, outlander against rebel outlander in wrestling, heaving confusion. All the men from the stranger planet fought without speaking; the robots shouted, like normal men in a battle. Brave was bawling war whoops and Alan was cursing steadily, as he always did under fire. Bill Thihling had got himself lost somewhere.

The leader of Alan's saucer went by, blond hair streaming, blood dripping down the brown chest. Alan caught a thought: _thanks_. He knew, from touching Alan's mind in passing, that many of the nonrobot men and women were gathered in safety, and even a number of the alien-controlled puppets had been herded into the welding room and locked in, obedient to Alan's hypnotic order.

* * * * *

The Indian and Alan came at last to the end of the ammunition that had bulged out their trousers' pockets. They clubbed their rifles and waded into a melee that staggered back and forth between two office buildings, across the scarlet-stained grass. Then Alan lost his rifle, and drew his automatic. The range was always short and his hand was steady as a granite statue's. He was recognizing his foemen at every turn, and putting away the recognition and thinking, _They are rebels from the stars, mutineers against a good people, it was their plottings brought on the smashing of our cities. This is not Dr. Coulterre, it's a creature eight hundred years old who wanted to make me into a brainless slave. That isn't Dr. Simms curled up with my bullet in his belly, it's the slayer of a million New Yorkers as sure as if it had put its own damned finger on the trip release._

He could tell the robots because they yelled, and those he left alone, because the saucermen were shooting them with numbing rays that did not kill. It was a humane method as far as it went. Sometimes he had to blow a robot's brains out, or be slain by him. Then he said, I've killed a friend. He went looking for more aliens to fight.

In all the press of bodies Alan and Brave were easiest to see. Brave was huge and his head was that of a savage buck, the lips writhed back from teeth athirst for blood; Alan, naked to the waist and with a white bandage over his right ear, put on by a surgeon in the saucer, was a figure differing radically from the barbaric saucermen and the sedately-clothed rebels and robots. They had taken off their shirts in the dance for a better reason than holding the attention of the soldiers. Among a hundred men like them they would have been indistinguishable had they stayed fully clothed. It's simple, he thought, to tell the good guys from the bad guys; the good guys haven't got any shirts.

The two of them made excellent targets. Brave knew he carried a slug in his leg just next the groin; Alan had no idea whether he had been hit. Enemies were continually firing at them both.

Alan was knocked to the turf by a man who leaped on his back and beat at his head with a pistol butt. Brave swung the rifle, a terrible war club in his hands, and broke the man's head like a rotten gourd. Alan got up with the feeling that he should have a headache. But he felt nothing.

Then the rebel outlanders gave up. Suddenly, all over the scattered fields of battle, they had thrown down their weapons and thrust up their hands above their heads in the universal signal of surrender. Their robot people followed suit. The saucermen had won. Project Star was theirs.