Part 2

After a time he slept--fitfully, caught in a confusion of fragmentary dreams. The hope of yesterday and the disillusionment of now; his pride as a pioneer; and the pain of his responsibility for what his frontier had created. Out of the chaos a pattern of action slowly emerged. Sometime in the small hours before the dawn Greg made up his mind what he would do.

It would be futile to try to arouse the colonies to attack the earth. Each man in his own soul might admit the truth, but as a culture they would all reject it. They needed to keep the symbol of earth as home, though they might never return to it. Even if that psychological objection could be overcome, war was not the answer. Only if the children were taken completely by surprise--given no time to use their alien abilities--could they be effectively destroyed.

Greg knew how that could be done. A decade before his pioneer flight to Mars, the first artificial satellite had been sent up in an orbit around the earth. A purely military weapon--capable of destroying any objective on the surface of the earth--the satellite had overturned the balance of power and forced the creation of a united world. The resources of a planetary government had made Greg's first flight possible. Afterward, in the excitement of exploiting the new frontier, the satellite had been forgotten.

But it was still there, still armed with a firepower capable of wiping the earth clean of life. It would be the murder of a world--but murder to save human kind. Greg could do it alone. His only problem was to lift his ship without the children knowing what was in his mind. He felt no guilt, no pang of conscience. Once the decision was made, Greg slept easily; and he awoke completely refreshed, with only a slight headache from the liquor he had drunk the night before.

Dr. Vayle and Holly Wilson insisted that Greg breakfast with them in the hotel. He would have preferred to forage for himself. The painted woman's protective, maternal affection for the astrophysicist made Greg acutely uncomfortable. It was not the sort of behavior he would have expected of either of them. Greg's discomfort quickly became a feeling of guilt. If he used the old satellite wheel to destroy the alien children, he would be slaughtering the few human beings who remained on the earth. Discreetly he asked how many others had stayed behind.

"It's hard to say," Vayle told him. "A hundred thousand, perhaps."

"Do you keep up any sort of contact?"

"Why should we? We're outcasts." With a sudden rationality, he added, "We're ashamed. When we're together we feel bound to face the truth. It's impossible for man to admit he's a second-rater. So we hide out in deserted villages like this one--and pretend all this nightmare never happened." Then Vayle slipped back into his delusion again. "However, all that will be different as soon as my research is finished. Why, do you know, Captain--"

"I'm leaving this morning," Greg broke in. "Would you like to go with me?"

Vayle shook his head. "I'm too old to make a new start on your frontier, Captain." He reached for the woman's hand. "And as long as my secretary can't have a clearance--"

"Leave us as we are," Holly said. "Your dream is no better than ours."

* * * * *

After breakfast Greg left the hotel and crossed the highway to the field. It was still early morning, but the desert sun blazed hot in a copper sky. As Greg passed the old terminal building, the twelve year old boy suddenly materialized and fell in step beside him.

This was the thing Greg feared most. He began to walk more rapidly, fighting a rising panic. How could he keep the kid from prying into his mind? Desperately he tried to think of something else--anything, inane or banal. The children were not gods; they couldn't dig deeper than his conscious thought. (Or could they? Greg wasn't sure.)

"We're giving you a cargo for Venus," the boy said conversationally. "It will put you in business again, Captain. The Martian colony is equipped to repair your ship. You'll have enough cash to pay for it, now."

"Fine," Greg grunted. In his mind he was frantically reciting a rhyme his grandmother had taught him ago, "One two, buckle my shoe; three four, open the door...." Reciting it with fervor, like a prayer for survival--which it was.

"After this, Captain, it might be better if you stayed in the colonies. Don't get me wrong. You're welcome on earth anytime you want to come home, but conditions are different here and...."

Suddenly the boy's tone changed. "But you aren't responsible, Captain!"

Greg's muscles tensed. So the boy had probed that deep!

"A new frontier always means change, Captain--but not tragedy; not defeat! We've never supposed any of you would believe that. You gave us a miracle, the greatest frontier men have ever crossed. When all the other pioneers are forgotten, Captain, your name...."

Pretty words, like the pretty speeches Greg had listened to twenty years ago. They wanted to confuse him, make him doubt the decision he had made. "One two, buckle my shoe! Three four, open the door!"

The boy caught Greg's sleeve. "You might as well blame Galileo or Copernicus because they studied the universe. Or go back to the beginning. Blame the unknown who did our first scientific pioneering."

Copernicus and Galileo? What was the kid trying to say? And why would a twelve year old speak so glibly--so knowingly--of the giants? That proved his alienness. When Greg was twelve, the only thing he had thought about seriously was football or baseball or summer vacation or how he was going to get out of the piano lessons his mother imposed on him.

The boy pulled him to a stop. "The first pioneer, Captain: do you blame him for it all? We don't know his name, but we do have his monument. Look, Captain Greg." In the drifting sand the boy sketched the outline of a wheel.

Greg panicked. He was too intent upon keeping his mind impregnable to make any other interpretation. The wheel symbolized the satellite riding above the earth; then the boy knew what Greg was going to do.

Greg swung his fist blindly. He took the boy by surprise. The child had no time to rematerialize at a safe distance. Greg's fist struck his chest and the boy went down, with a cry of agony. Greg felt a subconscious surge of satisfaction; humanity hadn't been defeated after all and the children were by no means invulnerable. Surprise--physical initiative--gave men their trump card over these undernourished mind readers.

Greg sprinted toward his ship. The body lay on the drifting sand gasping for breath, gesturing futilely with his small hand.

Greg's foot was on the ramp when he heard a scream behind him. He looked back toward the road. He saw Dr. Vayle and Holly Wilson running toward him. A mongrel, frothing at the mouth, was yapping at their heels.

* * * * *

Greg reacted with an altogether human instinct. He ripped a metal bar loose from the ramp rail and went back to help them, two fellow humans in trouble. A tiny warning of logic flamed briefly in his mind: this could be a trick; his only real chance of escape was to leave now, while he could. But he ignored it.

He ran across the field and swung the bar at the dog, crushing its skull with one blow. The woman clutched his arm. Her hands were shaking; her face was white with fear.

"What happened?" Greg demanded.

"Adrian and I were clearing the breakfast table. Suddenly the dog was--he was just there, growling at us."

"A mad dog," the astrophysicist added. "The kids did it. They can make any living thing appear anywhere they please."

"A trick!" Greg said. The whisper of logic had been right. He glanced at where the boy had fallen; the child was gone.

"They're trying to make me leave," Vayle complained, "before I finished my research. They know I have the answer to--"

"Now you have no other choice," Greg snapped. He pulled the scientist toward his ship; the woman followed. Greg reasoned that he might still have an outside chance. The children obviously had expected him to take Vayle back to the hotel. That would have given them a chance to disable his ship.

Greg pushed the two through the airlock. His luck still held. He shoved them toward the safety webbing and jerked down the firing toggle. As the ship quivered in the thunder of the power tubes, Greg dialed the satellite course on the pilot computer.

It was the simplest setting he could make. His was an old ship, built when the satellite had still been used as an initial landing station, before the new fuel had made the big wheel obsolete. Every ship had once had an automatic satellite course projection taped in the pilot computer. Without a new setting, the ship would move into the core ramp of the wheel and the lock would open automatically when the magnetic seal was completed.

Greg felt the sudden, crushing weight of gravity. He caught at the safety webbing until the pressure stabilized. From that point--if he remembered his early flights accurately--it would be six minutes before the ship reached the satellite. He had won. Nothing could stop him--nothing.

Then Holly Wilson screamed and Greg saw the twelve year old boy standing beside the flight console.

"It wasn't a virus invasion," the child said, shouting to be heard above the roar of the power tubes. "I didn't know you were thinking that this morning. I could have explained if--"

Greg swung his fist--against an emptiness. The boy rematerialized two feet away.

"Reset your course!" the boy cried. "You understand machines, Captain; we don't. And I can't get enough technical information from your mind to do it for you."

"One two, buckle my shoe!" Greg thought, in an ecstacy of triumph. He had kept that much of his thinking safe. The kids were making one last effort to save themselves--he was sure of that--but it wouldn't work. They had the alien skill to pry into a human mind, but they were helpless against man's machines. Inexorably the computer would drive the ship to the satellite; nothing could stop it.

"Think rationally," the boy pleaded, "not with your emotions. You have only four minutes left, Captain Greg. If the Redearth was a virus invasion as you believe it was, why were only the children affected? We made it an antibiotic; we used it for millions of people; every colonist was innoculated before he emigrated."

He was lying. He had to be lying. He was trying to confuse Greg with side issues. It didn't matter now how the virus had been brought back to the earth. "Three four, open the door; five six, pick up sticks."

"We aren't different, Captain. We've simply crossed your frontier in a different way. We have a theory how it happened, but no proof. The Martian Redearth worked as a sort of mental catalyst when it was used for newly born infants. It awoke the full thought potential of our cerebral cortex. That's all. We have no ability that men haven't always been capable of; if you believe that, you can do it yourself."

Belief!--mystical nonsense. Did the kid really think Greg would buy that? Greg glanced at Adrian Vayle. The scientist's face was gray with horror. Sweat stood in beads on his lips. Holly Wilson clung desperately to his hand.

"I drew a wheel in the sand for you, Captain: another monument to another pioneer, the first primitive who grasped what we might do with a rolling disk. He gave us terror and disaster, yes; but he gave us progress, too. Do we blame him because his heirs sometimes misapplied his discovery? Do we call ourselves alien invaders because we have a more complex technology than his? Then why heap shame on yourself because you gave us a frontier in the stars? It won't end the way you thought it would; nothing ever does. We're your children, Captain; we're your new frontier."

"Aliens!" Greg spat.

"My research was for nothing," Dr. Vayle said numbly. The words were a whisper of agony, the torment of a soul ripped out of the comfortable world of madness.

"Don't say that. You'll finish your work," Holly told him soothingly.

He pushed her away. "Not now. It was pointless."

The boy wrung his hands. "You have only two minutes left. Forget your emotions; put aside your self-pity. It's a luxury you can't afford any longer. Use the brains God gave you, Captain Greg. You can't land on the satellite. You must--"

* * * * *

Greg swung again and again he missed the boy, but he lost his balance and plunged into the pilot computer, smashing the machine. Greg saw what he had done and began to laugh. It was impossible, now, for anyone to change the course setting. The boy's pleading was for nothing.

The twelve year old rematerialized and stood looking at the broken computer. Then shrugged his shoulders calmly. "A minute and a half left, Captain; and now you have no choice." The child sighed, as a parent might have sighed over the prank of a mischievious son.

"You killed the mad dog," he said. "You didn't hesitate about that. I thought him into Port City to give you an object lesson. You missed the point, I'm afraid. You couldn't understand that you were yourself a mad dog yapping at our heels. Potentially, all the older generation threaten us the same way. Your kind of emotional reasoning, in one form or another, will sooner or later infect them all. We encouraged the migration to the colonies in order to prevent a conflict. By administering the Redearth to every adult who left the earth, we thought we might make a few of them realize their mental capacity. Apparently the catalyst works only with an infant, and not always then. In a sense, Captain Greg, your frontier has made us two species--ours, mankind; yours, the rejects; the unfinished men."

Dr. Vayle made a choking sound deep in his throat. His dream was gone; the comfort of his madness had been stripped away from him.

"And if it does come to the point of conflict," the boy went on quietly, "we fully intend to survive."

"Not after I reach the satellite," Greg answered grimly. His voice sounded hollow and uncertain, even to himself. The boy had destroyed the dramatic fiction of a virus invasion. Greg's dream, too, was gone.

"I tried to save you, Captain, but by your own violence you made that impossible. Now you will provide another object lesson. What I have told you is true; every man has our ability. In sixty seconds your ship will reach the old satellite; the airlock will open automatically--only there will be no air in the wheel. This shell rusted open years ago. You face death just as certain as if you leaped into outer space. But you can save yourselves--all three of you--by thinking yourselves back to the earth, or out to one of the colonies. This experiment interests us a great deal. We didn't intend to resort to it quite so soon, but you've given us an ideal opportunity. If you can unshackle your minds now, we have hope for the rest of the rejects. There will be fewer mad dogs for us to dispose of later on."

The boy was gone.

Greg felt the ship slide into the ramp of the satellite. He heard the grapples clang against the hull, and the scream of rusting metal as the airlock began to open. A paralyzing emotional opiate flamed through his mind: this was a dream, nothing more. In a moment he would jerk himself awake and be amused by his terror. But there was something else in his mind, too, a stirring of greatness, a fire of magnificence, a new self he had never known before. He groped blindly toward that pinpoint of light.

From a great distance, like an echo of shattering ice, he heard Adrian Vayle's voice, "The children have mastered the art of hypnotic illusion, but obviously they cannot violate the established physical laws. Our problem is entirely mechanical. I am sure Captain Greg can work out...."

Vayle had found the sublime ignorance of sanity; and that was no solution.

"Kiss me," Holly Wilson whispered. "Nothing else matters, Adrian."

And she had chosen the equally blind sterility of resignation.

Greg knew they were both wrong. He was a realist; a spaceman had to be. The kid had been able to read his thoughts; naturally the kid could put this weird sense of a new self in Greg's mind. It was only a clever, semantic manipulation of words to keep Greg from using the satellite.

He squared his shoulders. The star-point of greatness flickered out in his mind. Greg was a man, a product of a sophisticated and intelligent culture. This undernourished, alien generation wasn't going to confuse him with mystic mumbo jumbo about belief. He knew how to sort out fact from childish magic.

He walked toward the lock, straight and proud with the confidence of man. He was smiling savagely. Mankind was no mad dog, to be crushed into oblivion by a pack of puny children. They might as well learn that now!

And then the airlock screamed open.