CHAPTER XIII

They were back at the temporary base of the disks, sitting on the grass in the shade of the great ships, the sun just going down behind them. Brave's slug had been extracted and the wound bandaged with ointments that eased the pain. Bill Thihling, who had been knocked cold early in the fight, was sucking on a lozenge that was lessening his headache by the minute. Alan had not been shot and the beating his head had taken did not worry him, for pain was forever a stranger. He sat with Unquote asleep in his lap and Win's hand held tight in his.

"I don't want to live four hundred years," he said. "I want to die in the same years that Brave and my friends go. I don't want to be invulnerable; I want to stick myself with a needle and yell Ouch. I don't want to move like a hopped-up panther, and know what people are thinking, and send brainstorms out to sea from my little skull. I want to be me again." His words were light and half-whimsical, but his thoughts were black.

"Same here, baby," said the girl. She put up a hand to adjust her amethyst halter and his eyes followed it; she laughed. "At least your baser instincts are still intact, thank God."

Rob Pope said, "There's a lot they have to explain to us yet. We seem to have heard the final chapter of a thousand-page book. They haven't even said who they are, or which system they come from, or what Mac's gang did that they were exiled for."

"And by the way," said Win indignantly, "no one's told me yet why they attacked Project Star on the ground instead of bombing it. Give."

"Yes, love. They attacked it that way because they didn't want to damage any of the experimental stuff and the disks. They lost four disks in space, coming here, and they're overcrowded, besides having Mac's crew to take home for trial. They need disks. And they're interested in seeing what advances we may have made on fuel and instruments, advances that might give them ideas. All quite logical."

"Sure, sure. Everybody knew but Winnie."

"Between their numbing rays and our preliminary work, we managed to save nearly all the normal humans on the colony grounds, and about seventy per cent of the robots. There are aliens there now, guarding them and the disks and the whole project."

The leader came over to them and squatted on the grass, radiating intelligence and power. "There's quite a man," said Rob in spite of himself.

"He is that. I wonder how such advanced people happened to evolve such barbaric ornaments and clothing?" Win said.

* * * * *

The leader smiled. Evidently the blood Alan had seen on his chest had been someone else's, for he was unhurt. Now he said to their minds, "The girdles and arm bands are traditional. They go back farther than the oldest histories, and date perhaps from our original home, which was on a different planet from our present one. We consider them attractive, if gaudy and a little unfitted for our sort of civilization; but it would be unthinkable to change our mode of dress after so many centuries."

"And _that_ is the attitude I rebelled against," said Mac aloud, from his place between two guards. "That's how they look at everything. Jee-blighted-rusalem, can you blame me?" He stared at his manacled wrists. "I used to go around the cities in a kind of toga that appealed to my esthetic sense. My God, I was shunned. I was a pariah. No armband."

The leader smiled again. "My nephew exaggerates. Five hundred years haven't calmed that roiling renegade blood.

"I know what you are desirous of knowing. I will try to tell you the story simply and quickly, for I must join my companion ship within two hours in the island which I see you call England." He glanced at Brave and Alan. "First I must thank you for your indispensable help in overcoming the rebels at Project Star."

"We didn't do much for you."

"You fought beside us when you hated us for the bombing of your cities; that implies understanding, if not forgiveness. We appreciate that. You saved innocent lives; that is the best way to help us. To kill is a terrible thing to us. We do not do it lightly. To kill innocents, even in cases of dire necessity, is trebly terrible."

"Your men went at it as if they were born to it," said Brave.

"They do not like it, no, but there is a heritage in our blood of fighting that dates back, as do our clothes, to the times before history."

"Pious old fraud," said McEldownie, "you love it, but you won't admit it to yourselves. It was we rebels who were the honest ones."

The leader ignored him. "I was about to tell you--"

Mac said aloud, so that the leader's thought waves were garbled, "I could hate you two for running amok alongside these sniveling so-and-sos. You helped kill scores of my companions. You couldn't have been that sure we were wrong, could you? Damn it, I loved those boys. I lived with them for a dozen of your match-spark lifetimes."

"If you speak out of turn again, I shall have you taken into the leaded room of my disk, where your thoughts and words will be confined to yourself. I was about to tell you of our history," the leader thought, looking at Alan's group. "Long, long ago, so long that even we, who live a thousand years, cannot comprehend what a vast reach of time it was, we lived on a planet very like your own. The atmosphere must have been exactly, or nearly exactly, like that of Earth; for you and I have the same lungs, the same organs, and only differ fundamentally in the texture of our skins and the flexibility of our skeletons and muscles.

"Then, for a reason we do not know except by vague and undependable myth, our ancestors left that planet and went out into space. They were already superbly advanced scientists, though they did not have the rays later developed, which gave us our extended life span. They built disks and journeyed out into the star systems, and eventually found a planet that could support their life in the way the mother planet had done. There they settled. The old charts and logs and histories are long since lost, and this is known only by legend and tradition."

"What does legend say sent them away from the first planet?" asked Rob Pope.

"Several things. Terrible wars, the rise of inimical civilizations which would have had to be obliterated to insure peace, which our ancestors did not wish to do--" _bovine feces_, muttered Mac rudely--"and the sinking of their homeland into the sea."

"Good grief," said Win, opening her eyes wide, "could that have been Atlantis? Here on Earth?"

"The time wouldn't seem to be right," said Bill, "but heaven only knows, it sounds like it."

The leader groped in their minds. "You have a legend of just such a nation here, on this planet," he thought excitedly. "We must investigate it. This may be our home." He chuckled aloud. "Don't worry, we wouldn't come back and settle in with you. We are too happy on our own world. But it would be wonderfully satisfying to know the truth of our beginnings!"

* * * * *

Alan felt himself becoming intellectually agog over this matter, and resolutely drew away from it. "Please," he said, "your history."

"Certainly. On the new planet, which we call Tlonis, our race set up a civilization that has endured for many millennia. Our ancestors found no intelligent race on that world, by the way, but only low forms of animal life. The flora is analogous to your own in many ways, as is natural when two planets are so alike.

"For all our recorded history we have been a peaceful people, although in the course of our scientific advancement we have discovered terrible weapons, which we manufactured and put aside in the always possible case of invasion from another system. Our own sun system, in which Tlonis is the ninth planet from the sun, contains no other life at all; but we recognized the possibilities, and built the weapons to be ready. We also improved the disks, and discovered the ray of longevity and that of painlessness. Our astronomy was always our first science, and there I venture to say we outshine you as your sun does your moon."

"He's right," said Mac suddenly, looking up. "Tlonis telescopes make your Giant Eye look like a gnat's. If you had one here, you could see a candle lighted on the sun."

"Your turn is coming; be silent.

"We have always existed in excellent harmony with one another. Wars are unknown. There is no such thing as territorial expansion, for we are all one nation, one blood. The government is a form of benevolent parliamentary rule."

McEldownie did not venture to interrupt, but his homely face spoke bookshelves of disdain.

"Our joys were intellectual, a reveling in rationality, philosophy and perception of truths, metaphysical reasoning. I am speaking in the past tense; I should not be. These are the things which have always occupied us, and always will."

"Sounds deadly dull," said Rob Pope, and Mac grinned and shook his head in vigorous agreement.

The leader went on. "This sounds too placid to you. We are a different race, remember. It fits our temperaments to a T.

"But there are members of any society whose tastes run counter to the norm of that society; in our case, in our time, it was this nephew of mine and his faction who rebelled. First in dress, as he has said; then by initiating the custom of hunting and killing the lower forms of life for sport, a thing unheard of before they originated it. This was their first serious breach of our laws and customs. From it they went on--talking against the government, decrying traditions, until at last their mania to be different intensified and turned to violence. In short, they mutinied against the established order of things which had made our race a happy one for untold ages. They wished to substitute ways of life which would have torn us apart with dissension and strife."

"We rebelled against complacency, fatheadedness, hidebound slavishness to tradition, and unutterable dullwitted dullness. You can appreciate that, for cripe's sake," said Mac. "Picture the way of life he's given you a briefing on, and tell me you, especially Alan and Brave, wouldn't have rebelled, even if it meant war, to be allowed the right to live your own lives."

Alan and the great Indian looked at each other. The same thought was in both their minds: it sounded as though Mac and his outlaw crew had been in the right.

* * * * *

The leader directed a thought at them. "You must realize that this man, my nephew, was not content to share his views with those who agreed with him. He forced an insurrection on a people who had been thoroughly happy. There was bloodshed in a race that had known none for generations. We overcame him and we might have executed him, but it was repugnant to us. So we gave him space disks and fuel and synthetic food machines and all else he would need, he and the men who had fought for him, and we exiled him to space.

"We knew that somewhere there was a planet which could sustain life. He had a chance of finding it, a small chance, but a chance. As it happens, he did find it."

"After three hundred years of the blackness of the void," said McEldownie. "It was the mercy of God we did. Otherwise we'd have lived out our lives in space. Do you see the cruelty that lurks in these people, which they won't recognize? Killing us would have been kind; but they sent us to wander among the galaxies."

"You may tell them briefly what you did then," the leader ordered him. "Be quick, my time is nearly up."

Mac stood up and walked back and forth, clinking his chained manacles. "We found Earth because our detectors told us the atmosphere was the same as that of our world. It was the only one of its kind we'd come across in all those centuries, centuries of sweeping through sun system after sun system.

"Maybe it's the original home planet our ancestors left, and maybe it isn't. I've mucked around with that Atlantis theory too. The names are similar--Atlantis, Tlonis. It isn't important.

"We landed in the late years of your eighteenth century. Our disks were seen and you can still find records of the sightings in the books and periodicals of that time, and of later times when our lads took the ships out of hiding for practice flights. I never practiced because it's only in the last forty years my crippling wounds have been really healed.

"We more or less took you over. It was reprehensible from your point of view. Don't hate me for it. We had to make you advance a thousand years' worth in two hundred. We wanted to go back to Tlonis and--not conquer it, but make a place for our kind of thinking so we could live there. It's home, after all. We needed disks and an army.

"Sure, we kept you in a stew, worked up, always at war, and so on. It was the only way. You'd always warred before, anyway. Only in times of war could we advance your knowledge of science and make its rapidity seem logical. So we controlled governments and laboratories and brains. If we hadn't, you'd still be in the gunpowder stage, instead of the jet and electronic stage. We aren't all bad. We aren't pure black. We hurt you but as little as we could. We used you as you used to use oxen and horses; but like you loved horses--which often got killed in war, mind you--we loved you."

"Stop apologizing, Mac. We understand your point of view," said Alan. "But we understand this man's, too."

"Sure, sure. Everybody has a right to his own opinion, even if it's a stuffy one.

"Anyhow, in the early '40s we gave you the atom bomb, nuclear fission, that is. And the radiations of those first bombs went out across the great spaces, and twelve years later were detected and analyzed on Tlonis by the astronomers. Uncle's bunch got in an uproar, as we'd known they would, and piled into ships and started out for Earth. We couldn't help that; we'd had to give you fission. We figured we had enough time. We started disk construction and we began to build an invincible army out of your men, by raying them with the painkilling and telepathic rays. We miscalculated the time it would take Uncle to get here. We wanted to meet him in space or bypass him and get to Tlonis with our gang. Maybe, we thought, he wouldn't have connected the atomic explosion with us, anyhow. But he did, and knew we were preparing to invade Tlonis, and he came.

"His scouting ships reached Earth a few months ago, reported back to the main fleet, and down he came, to blunder and take things for granted and make too-hasty decisions, as always; and he murdered more people through hastiness than we ever would have in our scheme of things."

* * * * *

The leader thought bitterly, "I admit the justice of that. I have said we are more sorry than we can tell." He gestured at Alan. "Consider this as you weigh what my nephew has said. There is a false sense of kinship between you because of the mutual language. He talks while I must telepath my thoughts to you. Discount that when you judge us, please."

Mac said, "That's right. When you sit down to think us over, just consider the stories, not who told 'em. I believe you'll agree with my way of thinking, whether you hate me for what I've done or not." He moved over in front of Brave. "Oh, you great iron-faced ruffian, you lost me my world, I think. Simply because I liked you too well to kill you, you and your sidekick here. Believe that or not. I have a real affection for you."

It seemed important to the lanky alien. Brave said, "I believe you, Jim."

"Thanks, Brave." He grinned. "Will you shake hands with a fallen angel, or if you prefer with an ambitious devil, John Kiwanawatiwa?"

Brave stood and took his hand. Alan and Bill, Rob and Win did likewise. There was something paradoxically touching about the little ceremony. Then the leader thought at them, "We will take him back for trial, him and those of his mutineers who are still alive. There are some still free in your world. With your permission we will stay on Earth until we have hunted them down. We would also like to study your histories, out of intellectual curiosity, and exchange scientific knowledge with you. These things can be arranged with your governments after their members have been freed from the hypnosis applied by our rebels."

He paused. "But we owe you this. You are representative of the people of this world. I give you the right to speak for all of them now. Shall we leave you? You hate us, will always hate us for what we did out of blindness and hasty folly. If you say so, you five, then we will get into our ships and go home."

Alan was a little staggered. "We can't speak for our country."

"I am not interested in governments, which are in reality artificial things. I am interested in the people of this planet, and I think you five can speak for them."

Alan did not hesitate. "Then I say, stay till you've found the rebels, and till you've made your researches. You're right, I believe we'll hate you. But it would be insane to pack you off and lose all that you can give us, or have you lose what we may be able to teach you."

The leader smiled. "Then we will stay." He turned to his men and gave an order; shortly many of the blond aliens came trooping out of the disk, carrying machinery. They proceeded to set it up before the Earthmen.

The leader told them, "These will be used on all of you who were tricked or cajoled or forced into the beams of the mutation rays by my nephew and his cohorts. Please stand quietly."

Shafts of violet and indigo color shot out of the lenses of the machines. It took a full ship's complement of men to work all of them. The lights played across Alan and Win, to a lesser degree on Brave and the scientists. There was no sensation from them.

Then Alan said, "Wow! That hurts my ear something fierce."

Win turned to him. "Your ear hurts, darling?"

"Like a red-hot iron."

Brave clamped his hands on his friend's biceps. "Emir! You can feel pain!"

"Pain ... my Lord, blessed pain! Oh, how it burns! I've a splitting headache, too." Alan hit Brave in the chest, laughing, and then embraced Win. "Baby, I can feel pain! I'm okay!" He kissed her savagely. She gave a shriek.

"You bit me, you--Alan, I can feel it too!"

"Of course," the leader told them. "You are whole again. The effect of my nephew's rays is dissipated."

Alan sobered. "One thing. Will I still live four hundred years?"

"No. That effect is gone too, unfortunately."

Alan stared around him at his friends. "Thank God," he said quietly.

Then Rob Pope said, "Look, the bubble of that disk is closing!"

* * * * *

It was true. The leader of the outlanders turned and saw it and gave a loud cry. "He is escaping! You let him out of your sight, you fools!" he thought angrily. All the gold-and-silver-clad men ran toward the disk. It rose into the air, flipping its edges impudently. Then it gathered speed and shot out of sight.

Brave said, "Jim, old Jim! He's made his break. I kind of thought he would. He was too restless a spirit to sit calmly under chains and captivity!"

The aliens had clustered together and were sending their brain waves out across the land, signalling other disks in remote spots to find and pursue the escaping McEldownie. Alan said, "I almost hope he makes it!"

Then straight across the sky from horizon to horizon a great silver ship flashed, bright in the rays of the vanished sun against a darkening lapis lazuli vault, on its way out to sea in the direction of Africa. The abandoned outlanders were piling into their second disk to give chase.

Brave put his arm over Alan's shoulders. "Chief, I hope he makes it too. Maybe he was Lucifer, fallen and using us as dogs of war to regain his lost kingdom; or maybe he was really Prometheus, fighting the stodgy gods to bring fire--the fire of real freedom--to his friends. By his lights, he was justified in using us to do it. He caused us an awful throng of troubles in the past two hundred years, but what he gave us may be worth it in the final estimate. And when he had his goal in sight he threw it away because he couldn't bring himself to kill us."

"Prometheus is the word, son. I'd hate to see old Zeus there bring him back in chains, to be bound to the rock for the vultures."

Brave looked into the sky where Jim McEldownie had disappeared. He chuckled deep in his chest.

"He claimed to be the best hotshot disk pilot in the universe. If he is, I have a notion he'll get away." He rubbed a hand across his chin reflectively. "By the Great Spirit!" he shouted, laughing. "I believe he will!"