Part 2

Although the Scientist-General had warned Henig against it, he decided to use the telecommunicator. If she would help him, he had a chance of getting back to his shuttle. It was the only way he could escape. He took one risk in using the device: the female might become aware of every concept in Henig's mind. But that was a small risk. Only an intellectual equal, with the heightened perceptions of the computer civilization, would read the full context of his communication.

"I need help," he conveyed to her. "I have a place of safety in the mountains; will you take me to it?"

With a sudden, indrawn breath--like the hissing of a small child--the female stiffened beside him. Had he frightened her? He tried to explore her mind, but her cerebral pattern was amazingly complex. He couldn't evaluate the interlocked emotion--shock, sorrow, a sympathetic loneliness, and finally understanding. How much of his thinking--how much of himself--she had seen, he did not know. Her rational logic was subordinate to the emotion. Her most surprising reaction was pity.

Pity for him because of the computer civilization that had shaped his mind!

"Of course you must go back," she said. So she had dredged that much out of his mind during the brief openness of the telecommunication. "And you--you have found a resource that your unfortunate people need."

The petroleum? Did she understand about that, too? Then why would she help him escape, since it meant the invasion and destruction of her world?

She told him she would persuade her brother to drive his truck up the mountain road. She had learned from the telecommunication where Henig wanted to stop. "You'll be hidden in back. Open the door and slip out when we stop. It won't be far to your shuttle." So she had understood that, too. Henig realized he had grossly underestimated the mental abilities of these emotional animals.

Very gently she put a salve and a bandage on his wound. She helped him into a small, panel truck which was sheltered in a frame building open to the street. Before she closed the door she handed him a package of nut meats.

"This will help you--with your other problem. Give them to your scientists. We call these nuts peanuts. They make an excellent oil. You may have the soil on one of your worlds to grow them for yourselves; if not, we might be able to produce the oil for you."

She closed the door. Henig felt a tight constriction in his throat. This hairless female had read every thought in his mind; there was no question of that. And she was letting him go home unharmed; she was helping him escape. To Henig this was the final demonstration of the emotion of her species, the quality of love that the computer civilization had never found.

He would not let her world be invaded and exploited. The oil resources were not that important. Very carefully he removed the sample capsule from his mouth and emptied it. With his unhurt arm he clawed loose dirt together from the floor of the truck and pushed it through the membrane. When the scientists analyzed that sample, they would leave her world in peace.

* * * * *

The motor hummed and the truck began to move. In the darkness Henig opened the package of peanuts and crushed one between his teeth. As a food it was very unpalatable. Perhaps the hairless bipeds enjoyed it--from her mind the telecommunicator had picked up the fact that they looked upon it as a food--but nothing like this was of any value to the empire. The various species in the computer civilization were not vegetable eaters.

Henig was sure the nut was not a source of oil. The female, of course, had underestimated his mentality, just as he had misjudged hers. The purpose of her gift was forlornly obvious. She wanted to buy off the invasion she had read in his mind, and presumably the nutmeat was their favorite food which they produced in quantity. The Lieutenant grinned over her emotional foolishness.

Her world needed no subterfuge to protect it. The bipeds had something better--they would be safe. Henig would make sure of that.

After a time the truck came to a stop. Henig opened the rear door and dropped to the road. He recognized the garage where he had killed the two aliens that afternoon. He knew where he was.

The Lieutenant leaned for a moment against the open truck door, adjusting to the new pain in his wound. In the front of the vehicle he saw the girl and her brother. A pale light from the dash fell on their faces. Henig saw the girl's eyes for the first time, and he realized suddenly that she was blind!

No wonder she had helped him, then. She hadn't known he was an alien. That accounted, too, for her quick understanding of his telecommunication; sightlessness had heightened her other perceptions.

The radio in the truck was on. The girl and her brother were listening to a newscast reporting the diplomatic maneuvers of something referred to as the cold war. Impatiently the blind female snapped off the broadcast.

Henig heard her say softly, "Have you ever wondered, Fred, what another race might think of us?"

"They'd call us fools, I suppose. We have the ability to build so much, but instead we're using our science to destroy ourselves."

"But you know, Fred, I don't think that would seem important to an outsider. Perhaps he wouldn't even be aware of the conflict. Simply because we're human beings, Fred, we have something far more significant. We have it because men and women have to live together, because--"

"Love?" Her brother laughed. "We take that for granted."

"It's a pity we can't see ourselves--just once--as strangers might. We would be able to understand our own greatness, then."

But Henig didn't know that, for he wasn't conscious of how much of a change the impact of love had made in himself. He was thinking about the last mate the psychological services had assigned him. He wanted to see her again. He wanted to see her litter of young, hissing and purring in the family nest. It was the first time in his life he had felt the need to go back, and the feeling was a factor no computer could measure. He would have clawed the throat of any scientist who told him such thinking was illogical, for Henig had found what he considered to be the higher logic of emotion.

Silently Henig scurried through the forest toward his shuttle, carrying with him a useless sample of dust fastened at the back of his mouth--and an idea that would one day overthrow his computer civilization. An emotion marked for export, from an anthropoid world.

The exportable commodity of man.