Chapter 6

The wild otters were a mated pair who'd selected the floatwood lagoon as their private preserve. The male would nearly match Spiff in size. The female was young, a smaller edition of Sweeting. They might be three or four generations away from domestication, but they used translingue as readily as Sweeting and much in her style. Interspersed were unfamiliar terms based on their independent oceanic existence, expressing matters for which no human words had been available. Usually Nile could make out their sense.

When the Parahuans arrived, the curious otters had made a game of studying the unfamiliar creatures and their gadgetry. There was a ship anchored to the island under the floor of the lagoon. It was considerably bigger than the average human submersible, chunky and heavily built—evidently a spaceship. Its lock was always open on the water. A second ship, a huge one, was also in the vicinity. Normally it stayed deep in the sea, but at times it had moved up almost to the island. Ticos had said that the headquarters ship of the Parahuan expedition seemed to be accompanying this floatwood drift.

Above sea level the Parahuans had set up ten or twelve posts in the forest. Most of them were small, probably observation points or weapon emplacements. The exception was in the island section to which Nile wanted to go. "Big house," Sweeting said. It was set near the edge of the lagoon, extending well back into the floatwood and completely concealed by it. Perhaps a fifth of the structure was under water. Nile got the impression of something like a large blockhouse or fort, a few hundred yards beyond the rookery of the sea-havals. She wouldn't have selected the giant kesters as neighbors herself—the rookery was an evil-smelling and very noisy place—but alien senses might not find that disturbing.

The immediately important thing about the blockhouse was that it told her exactly where Ticos could be found, unless he'd been taken away after her arrival. He'd said his captors had shifted him and his equipment to such a structure and described its location.

The wild otters knew nothing of Ticos, but they did know about the tarm. When the Parahuans first came, there'd been two of the pale monsters in the lagoon from time to time. One of them evidently had been taken away again shortly afterward. The description they gave of the other one matched that of the records. It was an aggressive beast which fed heavily on sea life and made occasional forays into upper forest levels.

"Have you had any trouble with it?" Nile asked.

The question seemed to surprise them. Then they gave her the silent otter laugh, jaws open.

"No trouble. Tarm's slow!" Sweeting's small kinswoman explained.

"Slow for you," Nile said. Hunting otters had their own notions about water speed. "Could I keep away from it in the water?"

They considered.

"Jets, heh?" the big male asked.

"Sadly, no jets!" Sweeting made a stroking motion with her forelegs, flipped hind feet up briefly. "Human swim . . . "

"Human swim! Tarm thing eat you!" the female told Nile decisively. "You hide, keep no-smell, Nile! How do the no-smell? Trick, heh?"

"Uh-huh. A trick. But it won't work in the water."

The male grunted reflectively. "Tarm's back under big house. Might stay, might not." He addressed the female. "Best poison-kill it soon?"

Poison-killing, it developed, involved a contraption put together of drift weed materials—hollow reeds and thorns chewed to fit the hollows and smeared with exceedingly poisonous yellow bladder gum. Wild otter tribes had developed the device to bring down flying kesters for a change of diet. The female demonstrated, rolling over on her back, holding an imaginary hole-stock to her mouth and making a popping noise through her lips. "Splash come kester!" They'd modified the technique to handle the occasional large predators who annoyed them too persistently—larger thorns, jammed directly through the hide into the body. Big sea animals didn't die as quickly as the fliers, but they died.

"Many thorns here," the male assured Nile. "Stick in ten, twenty, and the tarm no trouble."

She studied him thoughtfully. Sweeting could count . . . but these were wild otters. Attempts had been made to trace the original consignment of laboratory-grown cubs to its source. But the trail soon became hopelessly lost in the giant intricacies of Hub commerce; and no laboratory was found which would take responsibility for the development of a talking otter mutant. The cubs which had reached Nandy-Cline seemed to be the only members of the strain in existence.

For all practical purposes then, this was a new species, and evidently it was less than fifty years old. In that time it had progressed to the point of inventing workable dart blowguns and poisoned daggers. It might have an interesting future. Nile thought she knew the yellow bladder gum to which they referred. It contained a very fast acting nerve poison. What effect it would have on a creature with the tarm's metabolism couldn't be predicted, but the idea seemed worth trying.

She asked further questions, gathered they'd seen the tarm motionless under the blockhouse only minutes before Sweeting got the first caller signal. It was the creature's usual station as water guard of the area. Evidently it had been withdrawn from the hunt for the Tuvela. Groups of Parahuans were moving about in the lagoon, but there was no indication they were deployed in specific search patterns. . . .

"Waddle-feet got jets," remarked the male.

"Slow jets," said the female reassuringly. "No trouble!"

But armed divers in any kind of jet rigs could be trouble in open water. Nile shrugged mentally. She could risk the crossing. She nodded at the dark outlines of the distant forest section.

"I've got to go over there," she said. "Sweeting will come along. The waddle-feet have guns and are looking for me. You want to come too?"

They gave her the silent laugh again, curved white teeth gleaming in the dusk.

"Nile-friends," stated the male. "We'll come. Fun, heh? What we do, Nile? Kill the waddle-feet?"

"If we run into any of them," said Nile, "we kill the waddle-feet fast!"

A few minutes later the three otters slipped down into a lifting wave and were gone. Nile glanced about once more before following. A narrow sun-rim still clung to the horizon. Overhead the sky was clear—pale blue with ghostly cluster light shining whitely through. High-riding cloud banks to the south reflected magenta sun glow. Wind force was moderate. Here in the lee of the forest she didn't feel much of it. The open stretch of sea ahead was broken and foaming, but she'd be moving below the commotion.

In these latitudes the Meral produced its own surface illumination. She saw occasional gleams flash and disappear among the tossing waves—colonies of light organisms responding to the darkening air. But they wouldn't give enough light to guide her across. Time to shift to her night eyes. . . .

She brought a pack of dark-lenses from the pouch, fitted two under her lids, blinked them into position: a gel, adjusting itself automatically to varying conditions for optimum human vision. An experimental Giard product, and a very good one.

She pulled the breather over her face, fitted the audio plugs to her ears, and flicked herself off the floatwood. Sea shadow closed about her, cleared in seconds to amber half-light as the dark-lenses went into action. Fifteen feet down, Nile turned and stroked into open water.

Open but not empty. A moving weed thicket ahead and to the right . . . Nile circled about it, a school of small skilts; darting past, brushing her legs with tiny hard flicks. She brought her left wrist briefly before her eyes, checked the small compass she'd fastened to it, making sure of her direction. The otters weren't in view. If the crossing was uneventful, she shouldn't see much of them. They were to stay about a hundred feet away, one of the wild pair on either side, Sweeting taking the point, to provide early warning of approaching danger.

A cloud of light appeared presently ahead; others grew dimly visible beyond it . . . pink, green, orange. The Shining Sea was the name the sledmen gave the Meral as it rolled here down the southern curve of the globe toward the pole. Nile began to pass thickets in which the light-bearers clustered. Each species produced its own precise shade of waterfire. None were large; the giants among them might be half the length of her forearm, narrow worm bodies. But their swarms turned acres of the subsurface to flame.

The fins moved her on steadily. She listened to the sea through the audios, sensed its changing vibrations against her skin. Amber dimness of open water for a while; then she went turning and twisting through a soggy dark forest of weed. Beyond it, light glowed again. She avoided the brightest areas—too easy to be spotted there.

Sweeting came to her once, circled about, was gone, a flicking shadow. Not an alarm report; the otter had checked on her position.

Then there was a sound which momentarily overrode the myriad other sounds of the Meral. A deep, distant booming. Half a minute later it was repeated. Closer now.

Nile held her course but moved toward the surface, scanning the areas below and ahead of her. The giant sea-havals were hunting. An encounter with one of the great creatures in the open sea ordinarily brought no risk to a human swimmer or, in fact, to anything but a sizable skilt. Sea-havals hunted by scent and sight; and skilts were their only prey. But when they made that sound, they were driving a major school. To avoid accidents, it was best to keep well out of the way of such a school. . . .

If possible, Nile added mentally.

And there came the first indications of trouble!

A dozen big torpedo shapes hurtled toward her, coming from a line of light-thickets ahead. Skilts—approximately in the three hundred pound class. Preferred size for a sea-haval.

Nile checked, moved quickly to the side, lifted farther toward the surface near enough to feel the tugging surge of the swells—

The sea boomed like the stroke of a tremendous bell.

And the string of light-thickets exploded as the van of the skilt school bulleted through them. Coming at her in a straight line. They were harmless creatures in themselves, but their panic, speed and weight made them deadly now. The impact of any of them would break her body apart. And the sea seemed an onrushing mass of thousands.

The scene was blotted from Nile's vision as she broke the surface. She rolled herself into a tight ball. There was nothing else she could do. A great wave lifted her. Then came a vast, thudding sensation from below, streaming past, a racing river which threatened to drag her down. Skilts exploded from the sea in frantic thirty foot leaps all about, came smashing back to the surface. Then two final tremendous surges of the water beneath her. A pair of sea-havals had gone past.

Sweeting was there an instant later. The wild otters arrived almost as promptly.

"Nile here, heh? . . . Fun, heh?"

Nile had no comments. She'd pulled off the breather, was gulping long lungfuls of storm air. Dim and remote, more sensed by her nerves than heard, came an echo of the sea-havals' booming. The hunt had moved on.

Moments later, she and the otters were underway again. For the next two hundred yards, weed beds were ripped and shredded by the passage of the fleeing school. Cleanly sectioned skilts, chopped by the big kesters, drifted about. Then things began to look normal. . . .

Suddenly Sweeting was back, moving past Nile's face in a swirl of water, dropping a dozen feet, checking to turn, turning again and gliding toward a great limp tangle of weeds below her. Nile followed instantly in a spurt of speed. Come fast! was what that had meant.

She slipped into the rubbery slickness of the thicket. The otter was there, waiting. Far enough, apparently. . . . Nile turned, took out the UW, parted the weeds enough to see anything coming toward her. When she glanced aside again, Sweeting was gone.

She waited. A light-thicket hung twenty yards to her left; about her was dimness. Small skilt shadows slipped past, and something big and chunky drifted up, slowly turning head-on as it came opposite her to stare in at her among the weeds. It paused, moved off. A large weed skilt, perhaps three times the weight of the maddened projectiles which had made up the school. A carrion eater by preference. It should do well in the wake of the sea-havals' hunt tonight—

Abrupt violent commotion—swirling of water, lifting and sinking of the weed fronds, thudding sensations which suddenly stopped. . . . Nile knew the pattern of an underwater death fight; and this had been one, not many yards away. It was over now. She slipped forward, gun held out, peering up. Dark smoky veils floated down and something bulky came settling through them, grazing the weed tangle. The Parahuan's head seemed nearly detached from the squat body, blood pumping out through the gashes. Typical otter work.

Sweeting reappeared from above. Together they hauled the unwieldy thing by its harness straps into the weeds. Fastened to the broad back was the Parahuan version of a jet rig. Nile studied it a moment, gave up the notion of converting the device to her own use; she would lose more time over that than it should take her to get back into the floatwood. They left the big rubbery body wedged in the center of the tangle. As they turned away, the first scavenging weed skilt was nosing up toward it from the other side.

A hissing had begun in the audio pickup and was growing louder. Nile halted Sweeting in the trailing fringes of the thicket. Then two other bulky figures were slanting down swiftly through open water toward them, trailed by thin jet tracks. The Parahuans' guns were in their hands. Possibly they had picked up traces of the brief commotion and were looking for their dead companion. At any rate, they were hardly twenty-five feet away when Nile saw them, and their faces were turned toward her, semicircular water eyes staring. The UW couldn't miss on such targets, and didn't.

The immediate vicinity of a sea-haval rookery at night was not for the nervous. Monstrous rumblings and splashings came from within the floatwood walls surrounding it, as the adult kesters left the rookery by a diving hole hacked through the forest's subsurface root floor, returned presently, beak-spears holding up to a ton of mangled skilts, to be greeted by the roars of their gigantic young.

Upwind of the racket, on the lagoon side, Nile finished recoating herself and her equipment with buti sap. She was down among the massive boles near the water, waiting for Sweeting to return and report. While they were dealing with three members of the Parahuan sea patrol, the wild otters had found and dispatched another three. That seemed to have left no survivors. But the patrol should have been missed by now; and what she did next would depend at least in part on what the Parahuans were doing as a result.

The tarm had been found still at its station beneath the blockhouse. Nile was thankful for that. The sudden near-encounter in the other forest with the pallid sea thing had rammed fear deep into her nerves; the thought of it hadn't been far from her mind since. The early reports that the Parahuans might have developed the monsters out of their own kind somehow made the tarm more horrible. After seeing what their biological skills had done in creating the form of a Great Palach, Nile thought it was possible. She told herself the buti and reasonable caution would keep the creature from noticing her if she met it again, but she wasn't at all sure of that. And the buti would be no protection if it came near her in the water.

Her wild allies might presently free her of that particular fear. They'd gone to get a supply of the poisoned thorns and seemed confident that in the underwater tangle of floatwood beneath the blockhouse they could plant a lethal dose into the tarm's huge body without too much trouble. Sweeting was prowling the lagoon, looking for signs of alien activity there or in the forest near Nile.

"Found Tikkos, Nile!"

"Where?"

Sweeting slipped up along the bough out of the lagoon, crouched beside her. "In boat," she said. "With little waddle-feet."

"Little waddle-feet?" Palachs?

"Half-size," said Sweeting. "Five, six. Tikkos talking to Guardian Etland. Then waddle-feet talking to Guardian Etland. Loud-voice. You Guardian Etland, heh?"

"The waddle-feet think so." Loud-voice was a loudspeaking device. "Let's get this straight! First, where's the boat Ticos and the waddle-feet are in?"

The otter's nose indicated the eastern end of the forest. "Boat's coming into lagoon. Coming this way. Got lights. Got loud-voice. Talking to forest. They think Guardian Etland's in forest. Tikkos say waddle-feet talk, not fight. You talk and maybe they go away. Waddle-feet say they sorry about fighting. No guns in boat. You come talk, please." Sweeting paused, watching her. "Kill them, get Tikkos now, heh?"

"No," Nile said. "No, we don't kill them. I'd better hear what they have to say. You say the boat's coming in this direction—"

"Coming slow. You don't listen to waddle-feet, Nile! Trick, heh? You come close, they kill you."

"It may not be a trick. Stay here."

But she felt shaky as she climbed quickly back into the forest toward the sea-haval rookery. The theoretical Tuvela, totally self-confident, certainly would be willing to talk to the aliens at this point, press the psychological advantage she'd gained. On the other hand, the Tuvela presumably would know what to do if it turned out she'd stepped into a Parahuan trap. Nile wasn't sure she would know what to do.

She caught her breath briefly as the wind backed up and assorted rookery stenches billowed around her. Far enough from the lagoon. . . . She opened the pouch, took out the roll of tanglecord, added the otter caller to the other items, closed the pouch and shoved it into one of the fins, the buti stick into the other. She taped the fins together. They made a compact package which she wedged into a floatwood niche and secured further with tanglecord, leaving the roll stuck to the package. She was keeping the climb-belt and the UW.

She looked around a moment, memorizing the place, started back to the lagoon. Sweeting was hissing with alarm and disapproval when she got there. Nile calmed the otter, explained the situation as well as she could. The boat lights hadn't yet appeared around the curve of the forest to the east. They set off in that direction, Nile moving through the floatwood not far from the edge of the lagoon, Sweeting in the water slightly ahead of her. If a trap had been laid, they should spot it between them before they were in it. . . .

Going by Ticos' descriptions, the six Parahuans in the boat with him were Palachs. Concealed at a point some fifty feet above the water, Nile looked them over. Two were about his size; four ranged down from there, though none came near the midget level. In the boat lights they displayed odd headgears and elaborate harness arrangements . . . and, of course, they might be carrying concealed weapons.

She studied Ticos more carefully than his companions. There was a stiffness in the way he moved which showed he wasn't in good physical condition. But his amplified voice was clear; and if his phrasing had more than a suggestion of obsequiousness about it, that fitted the role he was playing: an inferior addressing the Guardian. A role of his own choosing; not one he had been forced to assume.

She was convinced that so far there was no trap. But there were other considerations. . . .

The loudspeaker began booming about her again. It was set to penetrate high and deep into the forest, overriding the surging winds, to reach the attention of the Guardian Etland wherever she might be. Ticos and one of the Palachs used it alternately. The others squatted about the boat as it moved slowly through the lagoon along the forest.

The message was repetitious. She'd been listening to it for the past few minutes, keeping pace with the boat. Her talk with the Great Palach Koll had been monitored by the Everliving. The transmitting device presumably had been another of the jewels fixed to Koll's head; and the idea might have been Koll's—to let the other Great Palachs and Palachs follow his interrogation of the captured human, witness the collapse of her pretensions as Guardian and Tuvela. If so, the plan had backfired. Everything said, the fact that Koll was the prisoner, the Tuvela's evident knowledge of Porad Anz's secrets, was designed to further undermine the Everliving's confidence. It explained Koll's sudden furious attack. He felt she had to be silenced then and there to preserve the goals of the Voice of Action. Oganoon trackers had found his body an hour later.

Nile gathered that the ranks of the Everliving had been in turmoil since. The loss of the sea patrol did nothing to calm them. They didn't suspect she had nonhuman assistants, so it appeared to them that the patrol had encountered the Tuvela on her way over from the other forest and that she'd wiped it out single-handedly before it could get out an alarm. Then a short while ago they'd begun getting reports that a small fast surface vessel was maneuvering elusively about the Drift—the Sotira sleds had kept their promise to provide her with a message courier. The Everliving naturally associated the presence of the ship with that of the Tuvela. But they didn't know what its purpose was. . . .

They'd been under psychological pressure since she'd first avoided what had seemed inevitable capture. With each move she'd made thereafter the pressure increased. That the moves were forced on her they didn't realize. All of it would seem part of the Tuvela's developing plan . . . a plan they didn't understand and seemed unable to check. They didn't know to what it would lead. Fears they'd nourished and fought down for over half a century fed heavily on them again.

So they, the proud Palachs of Porad Anz, had sent out Dr. Ticos Cay and a delegation of the Voice of Caution to offer the Tuvela a cessation of hostilities and the opportunity to present the Guardians' terms to them in person. No doubt some of Koll's adherents remained ragingly opposed to the move.

Could she risk talking to them?

As things stood, she had a very good chance of getting away from here presently. Then she could warn her kind that there was an enemy among them and that they must prepare for attack. If she walked into the enemy's camp and couldn't maintain the Tuvela bluff, she'd have thrown away the chance. If Ticos had understood that, he mightn't be urging her now to reveal herself.

But if she didn't respond and remained concealed, the pressure on the Everliving wouldn't let down. They'd interpret silence to mean that they were no longer being offered an opportunity to withdraw. How would they react? They might feel it was too late to attempt retreat. They'd had many weeks to prepare the strike against Nandy-Cline from their hidden floatwood bases. If they decided to launch it before countermoves began, how long would it be before space weapons lashed out at the mainland? Hours? Her warning would come too late in that case.

The real question might be whether she could risk not talking to them.

Abruptly, Nile made up her mind.

The Parahuan boat came slowly around the curve of the forest. The loudspeaker began to shout again. After a few words it stopped. The Palach Moga, standing beside Ticos Cay, lowered the instrument carefully and turned it off with an air of preferring to make no sudden moves. There was a burst of sibilant whisperings behind Ticos. They ceased. The boat's engines cut out and it drifted up against a tangle of lagoon weeds. The man and the six aliens stared at the motionless figure standing at the forest's edge ten yards away.

The Tuvela's voice said crisply, "Dr. Cay!"

Ticos cleared his throat. "Yes, Guardian?"

"Have that craft brought over here and introduce the Parahuan officers to me—"

Stepping down into the boat was like crossing the threshold of a grotesque dream. They stood erect on long legs, abandoning the natural posture of their kind, balanced not too certainly on broad feet. Parahuan heads inclined in obeisance to the Guardian as Ticos introduced them in turn. She knew the names of the Palach Moga and one of the others from his report. Along with half a dozen Great Palachs, Moga was the most influential member of the Voice of Caution. He retained his place beside Ticos. The others stood well to the back of the boat as it turned out again into the lagoon.

Moga spoke briefly into a communicator, said to Nile, "The Everliving are assembling to hear the Guardian. . . . "

She didn't ask where they were assembling. A Tuvela would show no concern for such details. An angry whistling came for an instant from farther out in the lagoon. Sweeting still didn't approve of this move.

The sound seemed to jar all along Nile's nerves. She was frightened; and knowing that now of all times she couldn't afford to be frightened simply was making it that much worse. For moments her thoughts became a shifting blur of anxieties. She tried to force them back to what she would say to the Everliving, to anticipate questions to which she must have answers. It didn't work too well. But the physical reactions faded gradually again.

Stocky Oganoon figures, weapons formally displayed, lined the sides of the water-level entrance to the blockhouse. The boat moved a few yards along a tunnel, was moored to a platform. She followed Moga up into the structure. Ticos stayed a dozen steps behind, effacing himself, playing his own role. After the introductions, she hadn't spoken to him. On the next level, she realized he was no longer following.

The Palach Moga paused before a closed door.

"If the Guardian will graciously wait here . . . I will see that the Assembly is prepared. . . . "

Nile waited. After moments the door reopened and the Palach emerged. He carried something like a jeweled handbag slung by a long strap over one shoulder. Nile had the impression he was ill at ease.

"If the Guardian permits . . . There are Great Palachs beyond this door. They are unarmed. They would prefer it if the Guardian did not address them with a weapon at her hand."

If she couldn't convince them, Nile thought, she would die behind that door. But a Tuvela would not need to draw courage from a gun at this stage—and the UW by itself was not going to get her back past the clusters of guards in the passages behind them. She unclipped the holster from her belt, held it out. Moga placed it carefully in the bag and drew open the door. Nile went inside.

For a moment she had the impression of being in the anteroom to a great, dimly lit hall—too large a hall by far to be part of this structure in the floatwood. Then she knew that the whole opposite wall of the room was a viewscreen. There were upward of a dozen Great Palachs in the room with her, squatting along the wall to either side . . . creatures not much larger than Koll, in richly colored stiff robes and an assortment of equally colorful hats. The remainder of the Everliving, Palachs and Great Palachs of all degrees, were arranged in rows along the hall, which must be a section of the headquarters ship below the sea. Shallow water shifted and gleamed here and there among the rows. Motionless and silent, the massed amphibians stared up at her from the dimness.

Nile heard the door through which she had come close quietly at her back. And curiously, with the tiny click her uncertainties were gone. A cool light clarity seemed to settle on her mind, every thought and emotion falling into place. . . . She discovered she had moved forward and was standing in the center of the chamber, facing the big screen.

Selecting her words with chilled precision, the Tuvela began to speak.

Chapter 7

The outstanding feature of the big room in the blockhouse structure the Parahuans had assigned Ticos Cay as his working laboratory was its collection of living specimens. The floatwood island's life forms lined three of the walls and filled long shelf stands in between. Neatly labeled and charted, they perched on or clung to their original chunks of floatwood, stood rooted in the pockets of forest mold or in victimized life forms in which they had been found, floated in lagoon water, clustered under transparent domes. They varied from the microscopic to inhis organisms with a thirty foot spread. For the most part, they were in biological stasis—metabolism retarded by a factor of several million, balance maintained by enzyme control and a variety of other checks. Proper handling would otherwise have been impossible.

The Guardian was able to find little fault with the progress Dr. Cay had made in his work projects. "In this respect you have not done badly," she acknowledged, for the benefit of whatever ears might be listening. She tapped the charts he'd offered for her inspection and dropped them into the file he'd taken them from. "It's disappointing, however, that it became necessary at last for me to intervene directly in a matter we had expected you to handle without our assistance."

"Given more time, I might have done it!" Ticos remonstrated humbly. "I was opposed by a number of intractable beings, as you know."

"I do know—having encountered one of those beings. But it was hardly a question of time. The issues were clear. If they had been presented with clarity, a rational majority of our uninvited guests would have drawn the correct conclusions and acted on them. We must count this a failure. You needn't let it concern you unduly. The excellent thoroughness of your work on the basic assignment, under somewhat limiting conditions, will offset the failure, at least in part."

Ticos mumbled his gratitude, went back with evident relief to additional explanations about his project. Nile checked her watch.

Forty-two minutes since she'd been escorted with careful courtesy from the assembly chamber to the lab and left there with Ticos. No word from the Everliving since then, and the Palach Moga hadn't shown up with her gun. Good sign or bad? While she was talking to them, she'd almost been a Tuvela. She'd blasted them! She'd felt exalted. There'd been no questions. The Great Palachs closest to her in the chamber had edged farther back to the walls before she was done, stirred nervously again whenever she shifted a glance in their direction.

Afterward, brief sharp letdown. No Tuvela, no Guardian. Simply a scared human in a potentially very bad spot, with much too much at stake. If she'd fumbled this in any way, made the slightest slip—

Now she was somewhere between those states, back to normal, worried enough but again busily balancing possibilities, planning as much as could be planned here.

One of the factors she'd been considering was this room itself. It was long, wide, high, located somewhere near the top of the overall structure—she'd come up another level after leaving the chamber. It had a door at either end, probably locked now. The last could make no real difference since there was bound to be a gaggle of armed Oganoon outside each door to make sure the Guardian and her scientist didn't walk out on the conference. From the door at the left a raised walkway led to a platform some four feet above the floor near the center of the room. The Palachs, Ticos had explained, customarily stood there when they'd come to have dealings with him. Lighting came from conductor rods in ceiling and walls, primitive but efficient. Ventilation arrangements, while equally simple, met the lab's requirements perfectly. There was a large shadowy rectangle enclosed in a grid up on one of the walls just below the ceiling. Behind the grid was an unseen window, a rectangular opening in the wall. The salty-moist many-scented freshness of the floatwood forest swirled constantly about them. Enclosed without it, many of Ticos' research specimens would have died in days. But the storm gusts which occasionally set the blockhouse structure quivering were damped out at the window, and almost no sound came through.

So the shadowy rectangle was a force screen. It would let out no light, and certainly it was impenetrable to solid objects such as a human body. The screen controls must be outside the room, or Ticos would have indicated them to her. But there was a knobby protrusion on either side of the grid which enclosed the rectangle. And beneath those protrusions were the screen generators. . . .

Which brought up the matter of tools, and weapons or items which could serve as weapons. Her UW would be hard to replace in either capacity. But one could make do. Ticos had left a small cutter-sealer on the central worktable back of them. A useful all-around gadget, and one that could turn into a factor here. Another potential factor was the instrument studded with closely packed rows of tiny push-buttons, which Ticos carried attached to his belt and through which he regulated various internal balances and individual environmental requirements of his specimens.

The only obvious weapons around were the guns in the hands of three Parahuan guards who squatted stolidly in two feet of water in the partitioned end of the room at the right. From the platform, Nile had looked in briefly across the dividing wall at them. Two were faced toward the wall; one was faced away toward a long table near the second exit. None of them moved while she studied them. But they looked ready to act instantly. The guns appeared to be heavy-duty short-range blasters, made to be used by hands four times larger than hers. On the table stood Ticos Cay's communicator.

The guns weren't factors, except as they could become negative ones. But with a Sotira racing sled moving within close-contact band reach, the communicator was a very large factor. The Everliving in their nervous ambivalence had decreed it should be available at a moment's notice in case they were forced to open emergency negotiations with the Tuvelas through Dr. Cay. The guards were there to blast death into anybody who attempted to use it under any other circumstances.

Ticos Cay himself was, of course, an important factor. Physically he could become a heavy liability if matters didn't develop well. He'd lost his wiry bounciness; be was a damaged old man. His face looked drawn tight even when he smiled. He'd been holding pain out of his awareness for weeks; but as an organism he'd been afflicted with almost intolerable strains and had begun to drift down towards death. Of course be knew it.

Mentally he didn't seem much impaired. His verbal responses might be a trifle slowed but not significantly. Nile thought she still could depend on him for quick and accurate reaction, as she might have to do. Because the final factor in the calculation here was Ticos Cay's collection of floatwood life. On the worktable, next to the cutter-sealer she'd mentally earmarked, lay several objects like hard-shelled wrinkled gray fruits, twice the size of her fist. Ticos had taken them out of a container to explain the purpose they were to serve in his research, left them lying there.

They were called wriggler apples and the shells showed they had ripened. The thing to know about ripe wriggler apples was that they remained quiescent until they received the specific environmental stimulus of contact with salt water. At that moment they split open. And the wrigglers came out. . . .

At best, the apples were a dubious research item. And they were not at all the only specimens in that category here. At a rough estimate, one in fifty of the life forms which cluttered the shelf stands and walls had caused Nile to flinch inwardly at first glimpse or whiff of identifying odor. Floatwood stuff she'd been conditioned against almost since she was big enough to walk. It wasn't all small or unobtrusive. Dominating the center of the room was a great purple-leafed inhis, the pale blue petals of its pseudoflowers tightly furled. A rarity, to no one's regret. In the forests, Nile wouldn't have come willingly within thirty feet of one. By classification it was a plant form. A vegetable, with lightning reactions. The sledmen, with good reason, had named it the Harpooneer. For some weeks it had loomed above and just behind the Palachs who had come and squatted on the platform, staring down at the human prisoner. . . .

It was dormant now, as were most of the other unreliable specimens—totally innocuous, metabolism slowed to a timeless pulse. In biological stasis. It would remain innocuous until it was given the precise measured stimulus, massive enzyme jolt or whatever, that broke the stasis.

And who could produce such stimuli? Why, to be sure, Dr. Cay with his push-button control device. He'd made certain that when it came time to die, he should have the means of taking some of the enemy with him.

Which might not be a detached scientific attitude but was certainly a very human one. . . .

Nile flicked another glance at her watch. Forty-three and a half minutes.

The door at the left clanged open.

The Palach Moga came first along the walkway. The bag into which the UW had disappeared swayed at his side, its strap slung over his shoulder. That detail might have been reassuring if the group behind him had looked less like an execution squad.

Nile stood with her back to the worktable, feeling tensions surge up and trying to show nothing. Ticos gave her an uncertain, questioning look, then turned and moved off slowly along the table, stopping a dozen feet away to watch the Parahuans. The fingers of his right hand fiddled absently with the control device. Moga was approaching the central platform in his grotesquely dainty upright walk, webbed feet placed carefully for each step. Two Oganoon guards came behind him, staring at Nile, massive short-barreled guns held ready for action. Two unfamiliar Palachs followed, moving in an uncompromising Parahuan waddle. Their strap harnesses were an identical crimson; and each carried two sizable handweapons, one on either side, grips turned forward. Another pair of guards concluded the procession. These had their guns slung across their backs and held items like folded black nets. A fifth guard had stopped inside the door, which had closed again after the party passed through. He had another kind of gun with a long narrow barrel, attached to a chunky tripod. He set the tripod down with a thump on the walkway, squatted behind it. The gun muzzle swung around and pointed at Nile.

She didn't move. She'd given them some reason not to trust her.

The group reached the platform, spread out. Moga stood near the platform's edge. The red-harnessed Palachs flanked him, hands clamped on their gun grips. The guards with the guns took up positions to either side of the Palachs. The guards with the black nets remained a little to the rear, at the left side of the platform. There were, Nile thought, indications of as much nervous tenseness as she was able to make out in a Parahuan visage—silently writhing speech slits, blinking atmosphere eyes. And all eyes were fixed on her, on the Tuvela. Nobody looked at Ticos Cay.

"Guardian, I shall speak first for myself," Moga's voice said suddenly.

Nile didn't answer. The voice resumed. "I am in great fear for Porad Anz. . . . When you agreed to address the Everliving, I was certain that your mission would succeed and that the Balance would shift to reason. And the response of the Assembly was strongly favorable. Your logic was persuasive. But there has been an unforeseen development. By violence the Voice of Action has assumed control of our forces. It is against all custom, an unprecedented Violation of Rules—but that appears to be no longer important. Here, on the Command Ship and elsewhere on this world, many Great Palachs and Palachs lie dead. Those who survive have submitted to the Voice of Action which now alone speaks for the Everliving. I have come to inform you of what has been decreed. And having spoken for myself, I shall speak now with the words of the Voice of Action."

Silence.

The group on the platform remained tautly motionless. Nile watched them; they stared at her. So the red-harnessed Palachs represented the Voice of Action. . . . The thought came suddenly that these must be very courageous creatures. They'd entered the laboratory to confront a legend. They were braving gromgorru. They waited now to see what the Tuvela might do in response to Moga's statement.

The Tuvela also stayed silent and motionless.

The Palach to Moga's right began speaking abruptly in a series of fluctuating Parahuan hootings, eyes fixed on Nile. After perhaps half a minute he stopped. Moga promptly began to translate.

"Whatever you call yourself, you are a Tuvela. We know this now. You have threatened Porad Anz in the name of your kind. That cannot be tolerated. You have told us that in any hostile encounter with the Guardians the Everliving must be defeated. Once and for all, that lie shall now be disproved. . . . "

Moga's voice ended. The red-harnessed Palach spoke again. His fellow turned his head for an instant, addressed the two Oganoon holding the nets. The two took the nets from their arms, shook them out. Black straps dangled from their rims. . . .

Moga took up the translation.

"The Voice of Action offers you and Dr. Cay the death of Palachs. It is painful but honorable. If you accept, you will submit to being enclosed by the confinement nets. If you attempt to resist, you will be shot down and die here like Hulons. In either case, Tuvela, your defeat and death signal the beginning of the hour of our attack on your world. And now, if it is within the power of a Tuvela to defy our purpose, show what you can do."

Beyond the group, the Parahuan at the door sagged silently forward over the gun, head and upper body obscured by the curling green fog lifting from a specimen on the wall beside him. The armed guards on the platform had pointed their guns at Nile. The red-harnessed Palachs drew their weapons. A dozen or so of the Harpooneer's pseudoflowers behind the platform quivered and unfurled in a flick of motion like great yellow-blue eyes blinking open. Nile dropped flat.

There had been at least two guns aimed directly at her in that instant; and fast as the Harpooneer was, it might not be fast enough to keep the guns from going off.

They didn't go off. There were other sounds instead. Something landed with a thump on the floor not far away. With a brief shock of surprise her mind recorded the bag Moga had been carrying. She was coming back up on her feet by then, scooped two of the gray-shelled wriggler apples from the worktable, lobbed them across the partitioning wall into the flooded section of the room. She heard them splash. A detached part of her awareness began counting off seconds. She looked around.

They were dead up there, nervous systems frozen, unlidded double-lensed eyes staring hugely. Embedded in their backs were bone-white spikes, tipping the thick coiled tendrils extended from the pseudoflowers. Four still stood swaying, transfixed, long legs stretched out rigidly. Three had been lifted from the platform, were being drawn over to the Harpooneer. Nile upended Moga's bag, shook out the UW, had it clipped to her climb-belt as the part of her mind that was counting seconds reached thirty and stopped. There'd been a few violent splashings from beyond the partition, but she heard nothing now. Ticos, holding the control device in both hands, face taut and white, gave her a quick nod.

The climb-belt was at half-weight as she reached the partition wall. She jumped, clapped her hands to the top, went up and over.

Seven years before, she'd seen a wriggler swarm hit a human diver. It was largely a matter of how close one happened to be to the apple when it tumbled down out of the floatwood forest, struck salt water and split. In the same moment thousands of tiny writhing black lines spilled from it and flashed unerringly toward any sizable animal bodies in the immediate vicinity, striking like a cluster of needle drills, puncturing thick hide or horny scales in instants.

The three guards lay face down, partly submerged, in the water that covered the floor. Two were motionless. The third quivered steadily, something like a haze of black fur still extending along his torso below the surface. All three were paralyzed now, would be dead in minutes as the swarms spread through them, feeding as they went.

And the passage was safe for Nile. The wrigglers were committed.

She reached the stand with Ticos' communicator on it, flipped switches, turned dials, paused an instant to steady her breath.

"Sotira-Doncar!" she said into the speaker then. "Sotira-Doncar! Parahuans here! Parahuans here!" And cut off the communicator.

No time to wait for a reply. No time at all—

"Can you needle the stink-fogs into action?"

"Of course. But—"

"Hit them!" Nile drew the climb-belt tight around his waist, clipped the UW to the top of her trunks. "If we can get out, we'll be out before it hurts us."

Ticos glanced up at the force-screened window oblong, grunted dubiously. "Hope you're right!" His finger tapped a control. "They're hit. Now?"

Nile bent, placed her hands together. "Foot up! Try to keep your balance. You're minim-weight—you'll go up fast. Latch on to the grid and drop me the belt. I think I can make it to your ankles."

She put all her strength into the heave. He did go up fast, caught the grid and hooked an arm through it. The climb-belt floated back down. Greasy clouds boiled about the aroused stink-fogs near the entrance door on the left as Nile snatched the belt out of the air and fastened it around herself. Ticos was hanging by both hands now, legs stretched down. She sprang, sailed up along the wall, gripped his ankles and swarmed up him, the antigrav field again enclosing both of them. Moments later she'd worked her knees over a grid bar, had the belt back around Ticos. Breathing hard, he pulled himself up beside her and reached for the control device.

"Fogging up down there, all right!" he wheezed. "Can't see the door. Might alert a few more monsters, eh?"

"Any you can without killing us." Somebody outside the room must know by now that the execution plans had hit a snag. Clinging by knees and left hand, Nile placed the UW's muzzle against one of the grid casings that should have a force screen generator beneath it, held the trigger down. The beam hissed and spat. The casing glowed, turned white. An incredible blending of stenches rose about her suddenly, closing her throat, bringing water to her eyes. She heard Ticos splutter and cough.

Then the casing gave. Something inside shattered and flared. Wind roared in above Nile, salty and fresh.

"Up and out, Ticos! Screen's gone!" She hauled herself up, flung an arm across the ledge. Her shoulder tingled abruptly. Nerve charge! Parahuans in the lab. . . . Below her, Ticos made a sound of distress. Straddling the ledge, she squinted down, saw him blurrily. He'd dropped the control gadget, was clinging to the grid with both hands, shaking in hard convulsions. Heart hammering, Nile reached for him, caught his arm, brought the low-weight body flopping over the ledge and into the growth outside the window. He grasped some branches, was steadying himself, as she turned back.

Half the lab below was obscured by stink-fog emissions, whirled about by the wind. There was an outburst of desperate hootings—one or more Parahuans had run into a specimen which wasn't bothered by smells. She had glimpses of bulky shapes milling about, blinded by the fog. They should also be half-strangled by it. But at least one of them had seen Ticos up here long enough to take aim with a nerve gun. . . .

The greasy mist swirled aside from a section of floor where four glassy containers stood on a low table. Nile had seen what was inside them when she came into the lab. The top of the nearest container splintered instantly now under the UW's beam. She shifted aim. The startled organism in the shattered container already was contracting and expanding energetically like a pump. A second container cracked. As Nile sighted on a third one, a Parahuan reeled out of the stink-fog cloud, swung a big gun up at the window.

She ducked back behind the ledge. No time for gun duels. And no need. Two of the containers were broken and she'd seen jets of pale vapor spurting from both. The specimens in them were called acid bombs, with good reason. Nobody in the lab at present was likely to leave it alive—and certainly no one coming in for a while was going to get out again in good enough condition to report that the captives had fled by way of the force screen window.

She aimed along the room's ceiling to a point where the central lighting bars intersected. Something exploded there, and the lab was plunged into darkness.

Nile swung back from the window, the stink-fog's reek wafting about her. Ticos was leaning against branches, clinging to them, making abrupt jerking motions.

"How badly are you hit?" she asked quickly.

He grunted. "I don't know! I'm no weapons specialist. What did hit me? Something like a neural agitator?"

"In that class. You didn't stop a full charge, or you wouldn't be on your feet. With the climb-belt, I can carry you. But if you can move—"

"I can move. I seem able to hold off some of the effects. If I don't slow you down too much."

"Let's try it out," Nile said. "They shouldn't be after us immediately. Let me know if it gets too difficult. . . . "

Her bundle was in the niche of floatwood where she'd left it. She opened it hastily. Ticos stood behind her, clinging to the vegetation, bent over and gasping for breath. Nile was winded enough herself. They'd scrambled straight up from the roof of the blockhouse into the forest, cut across south of the sea-haval rookery, clambered down again toward the lagoon. It hadn't been a lightweight dance along the branches for her this time. Her muscles knew they'd been working. Even so, Ticos, supported by the climb-belt, had been pushed very hard to keep up with her. He wasn't equipped with dark-lenses, wasn't sufficiently skilled in the use of the belt; and at intervals the nerve gun charge he'd absorbed set off spasms of uncontrollable jerking and shaking. There were antidotes for the last, and no doubt the Parahuans had them. But there was nothing available here. He'd have to work it out. Another five or ten minutes of climbing might do it, Nile thought. It had better do it: she knew now Ticos had lost half his reserves of physical energy since she'd seen him last. If the effects of the alien weapon corresponded at all closely to those of its humanly produced counterparts, a more central charge should have killed him quickly. The load he'd stopped might still do it, though that seemed much less likely now.

She fished the pack of dark-lens gel from the pouch, handed it to him. "Better put on your night eyes."

"Huh? Oh! Thanks. I can use those."

A series of shrill whistles rose from the lagoon. Ticos' head turned quickly.

"Sounded almost like one of your otters!"

"It was. Sweeting." Nile had heard intermittent whistling for the past several minutes, hadn't mentioned it. The wind still drowned out most other sounds. She pried the end of the buti stem open with her knife. "Got the lenses in place?"

"Yes."

"Then let's see how fast you can put on a coat of buti. We might have a problem here rather soon."

Ticos took the stem, began rubbing sap hurriedly over his clothes. "Parahuans?" he asked.

"Perhaps. Something seems to be coming this way along the lagoon. That was Sweeting's warning signal. Did you know your friends had a tarm here?"

"I've seen it." Ticos' tone held shock, but he didn't stop working. "You think that's what's—"

"It's more likely to be the tarm than Parahuans."

"What can we do, Nile?"

"Buti seems to be good cover if it doesn't see us. The thing got close to me once before. If it comes this far, it probably will find our trail. I'll go see what Sweeting has to tell. You finish up with the buti. But don't smear the stuff on your shoe soles yet."

"Why not?"

"I think we can lose the tarm here. It may not be too healthy by now anyway."

He looked up briefly, made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"More Tuvela work?"

"This Tuvela has little helpers." Nile switched on the otter-caller, moved quickly toward the lagoon. At the edge of the water she stood glancing about, listening. Nothing significant to be seen. The blurred snarling of engines came for a moment from the general direction of the blockhouse. Then Sweeting broke the surface below her.

"Nile, you watch out! Tarm's coming!"

Nile rejoined Ticos moments later. The tarm was approaching through the floatwood above water level. It might be casting about for their trail, or might be on the move simply because it was beginning to feel the effects of the wild otters' weed poison. They'd succeeded in planting a considerable number of the thorns in it under the blockhouse. Sweeting reported its motions seemed sluggish. But for a while it could still be dangerous enough.

She postponed further explanations, and Ticos didn't press for any. They hurried down to the lagoon together. If the tarm didn't turn aside, it should come across their human trail. Then the lagoon must be where the trail seemed to end. If it began searching for them in the water, the otters would try to finish it off. Evidently the tarm didn't realize that the small elusive creatures might be dangerous to it. After it found it couldn't catch them, it hadn't paid them much attention.

They rubbed buti sap into the soles of their shoes, waves lapping a few feet below. Nile thought the last coating she'd given herself should be adequate otherwise. Her stock of the sap was running out; she might need some later and didn't know whether she could find another stand. By the time they finished, otter whistling had begun again, not far off. She led the way back into the forest, moving upward. Ticos crowded behind her, tarm fear overriding his fatigue. Perhaps a hundred feet on, Nile suddenly checked.

"Down, Ticos! Flatten out!"

She dropped beside him on the bough along which they had been moving. There was a disturbance in the forest below that wasn't caused by the wind. Vegetation thrashed heavily. The noise stopped for some seconds, then resumed. It seemed to be approaching the area they'd left. They watched, heads raised, motionless.

Then Nile saw the tarm for the third time. Ticos stiffened beside her. He'd detected it too.

Even with the dark-lenses she couldn't make out many details. There was growth between them. The great thing moving among the boles of the forest looked like a fat gliding worm. Its nearness had an almost numbing effect on her again. She stared at it in fixed fascination; and it was some moments then before she realized it had stopped—about at the point where they had gone down to the water, where the human scent lay and where it should end, blotted out by the buti.

They both started at an abrupt series of loud sucking noises. The pale mass seemed to swell, then flattened. It had turned, was flowing up into the forest. Ticos swallowed audibly.

"It's—"

"Going back the way we came. It isn't following us."

He sighed with relief. They watched the tarm move out of sight. Long seconds passed. Finally Ticos looked over at Nile. She shook her head. Better not stir just yet. . . .

And then the tarm reappeared, following the line of their trail back to the water's edge. Now it slid unhesitatingly down into the lagoon and sank below the surface. Otter whistles gave it greeting.

They got to their feet at once, hurried on. The wind noises had become allies, covering the sounds of their retreat. Nile selected the easiest routes—broad boughs, slanted trunks. Ticos simply wasn't up to much more; he stumbled, slipped, breathed in wheezing gasps. At last she stopped to let him rest.

"Huh?" he asked. "What's the delay?"

"We don't have to kill you at this stage," Nile told him. "They may not even know yet that we aren't lying dead in the laboratory. They've probably sealed the doors to keep half their fort from becoming contaminated."

He grunted. "If they haven't searched the lab yet, they soon will! They can get protective equipment there in a hurry. And someone should have thought of that window by now."

Nile shrugged. The tarm could chill her, but she was no longer too concerned about Parahuan trackers. "We have a good head start," she said. "If they trail us to the lagoon, they won't know where to look next. We could be anywhere on the island." She hesitated. "If they have any sense left, they won't waste any more time with us at all. They'll just get their strike against the mainland rolling. That's what I'm afraid they'll do."

Ticos made a giggling sound. "That's the one thing they can't do now! Not for a while."

"Why not?"

"It's the way their minds work. The only justification the Voice of Action had for what it's done was the fact that it could deliver your head. Proof of the argument—Tuvelas can be destroyed! They've lost the proof and they'll be debating for hours again before they're up to making another move. Except, of course, to look for you. They'll be doing that, and doing it intensively. We'd better not wait around. They might get lucky. How far is it still to the incubator?"

Nile calculated. "Not much more than four hundred yards. But it includes some pretty stiff scrambling."

"Let's scramble," Ticos said. "I'll last that far."

Chapter 8

The incubator was a loosely organized colony-animal which looked like a globular deformity of the floatwood bough about which it grew. The outer surface of the globe was a spiky hedge. Inside was a rounded hollow thirty feet in diameter, containing seed pods and other vital parts, sketchily interconnected. The hedge's spikes varied from finger-long spines to three foot daggers, mounted on individually mobile branches. Only two creatures big and powerful enough to be a potential threat to the incubator's internal sections were known to have found a way of penetrating the hedge. One of them was man.

The other was no enemy. It was a flying kester, a bony animal with a sixteen foot wingspread, at home among the ice floes of the south, which maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the incubator organism. Periodically it flew northward to meet floatwood islands coming along the Meral, sought out the incubators installed on them, left one of its leathery eggs in a seed pod on each, finally returned to its cold skies. In the process it had distributed the incubators' fertilizing pollen among the colonies, thereby carrying out its part of the instinctual bargain. When the young kester hatched, the seed pod produced a sap to nourish the future pollinator until it left its foster parent and took to the air.

Man's energy weapons could get him undamaged through the hedge. The simpler way was to pretend to be a polar kester.

"It's right behind these bushes," Nile said. She indicated a section of the guard hedge curving away above the shrubbery before them. "Don't get much closer to it."

"I don't intend to!" Ticos assured her. Their approach had set off a furious rattling as of many dry bones being beaten together. The incubator was agitating its armament in warning. Ticos stood back watching as Nile finished trimming a ten foot springy stalk she'd selected to gain them passage through the hedge. Another trick learned in childhood—the shallows settlers considered incubator seeds and polar kester eggs gourmet items. Spiky fronds at the tip of the stalk were a reasonable facsimile of the spines on the kesters bony wing-elbow. Confronted by an incubator's challenge, the kester would brush its elbow back and forth along one of the waving hedge branches. A number of such strokes identified the visitor and admitted it to the globe's interior.

Nile moved up to the shrubs standing across their path on the floatwood bough, parted them cautiously. The rattling grew louder and something slashed heavily at the far side of the shrubs. She thrust out the stalk, touched the fronds to an incubator branch, stroked it lightly. After some seconds the branch stiffened into immobility. Moments later, so did the branches immediately about it. The rattling gradually died away. Nile continued the stroking motion. Suddenly the branches opposite her folded back, leaving an opening some five feet high and three wide.

They slipped through, close together. Nile turned, tapped the interior of the hedge with the stalk. The opening closed again.

Unaided human eyes would have recorded blackness here. The dark-lenses still showed them as much as they needed to see. "Over there," Nile said, nodding.

The interior of the colony-animal was compartmentalized by sheets of oily tissue, crisscrossed by webbings of fibrous cables. In a compartment on their left were seven of the big gourd-shaped seed pods. The caps of all but two stood tilted upward, indicating they contained neither fertilized seeds nor an infant kester.

"We settle down in those?" It was Ticos' first experience inside an incubator.

"You do," Nile said. "They're clean and comfortable if you don't mind being dusted with pollen a bit. The whole incubator has built-in small-vermin repellents. We could camp here indefinitely."

"It doesn't object to being tramped around in?"

"If it's aware of being tramped around in, it presumably thinks there's a kester present. Go ahead!"

He grunted, gripped one of the cables, stepped off the bough to another cable and swayed over to the nearest pod. Nile came behind, waited while he scrambled up the pod, twisted about, let himself down inside and found footing. "Roomy enough," he acknowledged, looking over the edge at her. He wiped sweat from his face, sighed. "Here, let me give you back your belt."

"Thanks." Nile fastened the climb-belt about her. "Where's yours, by the way?"

"Hid it out in my quarters when I saw the raiding party come up. Thought I might have use for it later. But I never got an opportunity to pick it up again. It's probably still there."

"How do you feel now?"

Ticos shrugged. "I've stopped twitching. Otherwise physically exhausted, mentally alert. Uncomfortably alert, as a matter of fact. I gather you've had experience with nerve guns?"

"Our kinds," said Nile. "The Parahuan item seem to produce the same general pattern of effects."

"Including mental hyperstimulation?"

"Frequently. If it's a light charge, a grazing shot—which is what you caught. The stimulation should shift to drowsiness suddenly. When it does, don't fight it. Just settle down in the pod, curl up and go to sleep. That's the best medicine for you at present."

"Not at present!" Ticos said decidedly. "Now that we've hit a lull in the action, you can start answering some questions. That ship you may have contacted—"

"A sledman racer. It was waiting for a message from me."

"Why? How did it happen to be there?"

Nile told him as concisely as possible. When she finished, he said, "So nobody out there has really begun to suspect what's going on. . . . "

"With the possible exception of Tuvelas," Nile said dryly.

"Yes, the Tuvelas. Gave you quite an act to handle there, didn't I?"

"You did. But it kept me from being clobbered in the air. The Parahuans have been creating the recent communication disturbances?"

"They've been adding to the natural ones. Part of the Great Plan. They're familiar with the comm systems in use here. They worked out the same general systems on their own water worlds centuries ago. So they know how to go about disrupting them."

"What's the purpose?"

"Testing their interference capability. Conditioning the humans to the disturbances. Just before they strike, they intend to blank out the planet. No outgoing messages. Knock off spaceships attempting to leave or coming in. Before anyone outside the system gets too concerned about the silence, they intend to be in control."

Nile looked at him, chilled. "That might work, mightn't it?"

"Up to that point it might. I'm no trained strategist, but I believe the local defenses aren't too impressive."

"They aren't designed to deal with major invasions."

"Then if the Voice of Action can maintain the previous organization—coordinate the attack, execute it in planned detail—I should think they could take Nandy-Cline. Even hold it a while. The situation might still be very much touch and go in that respect. Of course the probability is that they killed too many dissenting Palachs tonight to leave their military apparatus in good working condition. And in the long run the Great Plan is idiotic. Porad Anz and its allies don't have a reasonable chance against the Hub."

"Are you sure of that?"

"I am. Take their own calculations. They've studied us. They've obtained all the information they could, in every way they could, and they've analyzed it in exhaustive detail. So they wound up with the Tuvela Theory. A secretly maintained strain of superstrategists. . . . "

"I don't see how they ever got to the theory," Nile said. "There isn't really a shred of evidence for it."

"From the Palachs' point of view there's plenty of evidence. It was a logical conclusion when you consider that with very few exceptions they're inherently incapable of accepting the real explanation: that on the level of galactic competition their species is now inferior to ours. They've frozen their structure of civilization into what they consider a pattern of perfection. When they meet conditions with which the pattern doesn't cope, they can't change it. To attempt to change perfection would be unthinkable. They met such conditions in their first attempt to conquer Hub worlds. They failed then. They'd meet the same conditions now. So they'd fail again."

"They've acquired allies," Nile said.

"Very wobbly ones. Porad Anz could never get established well enough to draw them into the action. And they're showing sense. Various alien civilizations tried to grab off chunks of the Hub while the humans were busy battling one another during the War Centuries. All accounts indicate the intruders got horribly mangled. How do you account for it?"

Nile shrugged. "Easily enough. They got in the way of a family fight, and the family had been conditioned to instant wholesale slaughter for generations. It isn't surprising they didn't do well. But frankly I've begun to wonder how prepared we'd be generally to handle that kind of situation now. The nearest thing to a war the Hub's known for a long time is when some subgovernment decides it's big enough for autonomy and tries to take on the Federation. And they're always squelched so quickly you can hardly call it a fight."

"So they are," Ticos agreed. "What do you think of the Federation's Overgovernment?"

She hesitated. One of the least desirable aftereffects of a nerve gun charge that failed to kill could be gradually developing mental incoherence. If it wasn't given prompt attention, it could result in permanent derangement. She suspected Ticos might be now on the verge of rambling. If so, she'd better keep him talking about realities of one kind or another until he was worked safely past that point. She said, "That's a rather general question, isn't it? I'd say I simply don't think about the Overgovernment much."

"Why not?"

"Well, why should I? It doesn't bother me and it seems able to do its job—as witness those squelched rebellious subgovernments."

"It maintains the structure of the Federation," Ticos said, "because we learned finally that such a structure was absolutely necessary. Tampering with it isn't tolerated. Even the suggestion of civil war above the planetary level isn't tolerated. The Overgovernment admittedly does that kind of thing well. But otherwise you do hear a great many complaints. A recurrent one is that it doesn't do nearly enough to control the criminal elements of the population."

Nile shook her head. "I don't agree! I've worked with the Federation's anticrime agencies here. They're efficient enough. Of course they can't handle everything. But I don't think the Overgovernment could accomplish much more along those lines without developing an oppressive bureaucratic structure—which I certainly wouldn't want!"

"You feel crime control should be left up to the local citizenry?"

"Of course it should, when it's a local problem. Criminals aren't basically different from other problems we have around. We can deal with them. We do it regularly."

Ticos grunted. "Now that," he remarked, "is an attitude almost no Palach would be able to understand! And it seems typical of our present civilization." He paused. "You'll recall I used to wonder why the Federation takes so little obvious interest in longevity programs, eugenics projects and the like."

She gave him a quick glance. Not rambling, after all? "You see a connection?"

"A definite one. When it comes to criminals, the Overgovernment doesn't actually encourage them. But it maintains a situation in which the private citizen is invited to handle the problems they create. The evident result is that criminality remains a constant threat but is kept within tolerable limits. Which is merely a small part of the overall picture. Our society fosters aggressive competitiveness on almost all levels of activity; and the Overgovernment rarely seems too concerned about the absolute legality of methods used in competition. The limits imposed usually are imposed by agreements among citizen organizations, which also enforce them."

"You feel all this is a kind of substitute for warfare?"

"It's really more than a substitute," Ticos said. "A society under serious war stresses tends to grow rigidly controlled and the scope of the average individual is correspondingly reduced. In the kind of balanced anarchy in which we live now, the individual's scope is almost as wide as he wants to make it or his peers will tolerate. For the large class of non-aggressive citizens who'd prefer simply to be allowed to go about their business and keep out of trouble, that's a non-optimum situation. They're presented with many unpleasant problems they don't want, are endangered and occasionally harassed or destroyed by human predators. But in the long run the problems never really seem to get out of hand. Because we also have highly aggressive antipredators. Typically, they don't prey on the harmless citizen. But their hackles go up when they meet their mirror image, the predator—from whom they can be distinguished mainly by their goals. When there are no official restraints on them, they appear to be as a class more than a match for the predators. As you say, you handle your criminals here on Nandy-Cline. Wherever the citizenry is making a real effort, they seem to be similarly handled. On the whole our civilization flourishes." He added, "There are shadings and variations to all this, of course. The harmless citizen, the predator and the antipredator are ideal concepts. But the pattern exists and is being maintained."

"So what's the point?" Nile asked. "If it's maintained deliberately, it seems rather cruel."

"It has abominably cruel aspects, as a matter of fact. However, as a species," said Ticos, "man evolved as a very tough, alert and adaptable creature, well qualified to look out for what he considered his interests. The War Centuries honed those qualities. They're being even more effectively honed today. I think it's done deliberately. The Overgovernment evidently isn't interested in establishing a paradisiac environment for the harmless citizen. Its interest is in the overall quality of the species. And man as a species remains an eminently dangerous creature. The Overgovernment restricts it no more than necessity indicates. So it doesn't support the search for immortality—immortality would change the creature. In what way, no one can really say. Eugenics should change it, so eugenics projects aren't really favored, though they aren't interfered with. I think the Overgovernment prefers the species to continue to evolve in its own way. On the record, it's done well. They don't want to risk eliminating genetic possibilities which may be required eventually to keep it from encountering some competitive species as an inferior."

Nile said after a pause, "Well, that's mainly speculation, Ticos."

"Of course it is. But it's no speculation to say that the Hub still has its Tuvelas and that they're as thoroughly conditioned to act at peak performance as they ever were in the pre-Federation days. Further, there's now a relatively huge number of them around. That's what makes the position of the Parahuans and their potential allies impossible. They aren't opposed by a narrow caste of Guardians. They'd hit automatic Tuvela strategy again wherever and whenever they tried to strike. A few, a very few, of the Palachs realized that. Moga was one of them. That's why he killed himself."

"Moga killed himself?"

"At the crucial moment in the lab," Ticos said, "you rather cravenly dropped flat on your face. Since nobody was pointing a gun at me, I remained standing and watched. Moga couldn't foresee exactly what would happen, but I knew he'd been aware of the purpose of my specimens for some time. He understood that he and the group which came into the lab with him would have to die if we were to escape. We had to escape to keep the Voice of Action checked. When the moment came, Moga was quite ready. The others didn't find time to squeeze their gun studs. He found time to pitch that bag at you so you would get your gun back. You see, he knew you were a very competent but still very vulnerable human being. He didn't believe at all in the legend of the invincible Tuvela. But he had to do what he could to help preserve the legend. He had a cold, hopeless hatred for humanity because he had realized it was the superior species. And, as he said, he was in deathly fear for Porad Anz. The Everliving as a whole were simply unable to understand that mankind could be superior to them. The concept had no meaning. But they could be persuaded to withdraw if they became convinced that the freakish supermen who ruled humanity were truly invincible. So, in effect, Moga conspired with me, and later with you, to produce that impression on them. . . . "

He paused, shook his head, yawned deeply. Nile watched him.

"You see, I . . . uh, what . . . " His voice trailed off. His eyes were half closed now, lids flickering. After a moment his head began to sag.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Huh?" Ticos raised his head again, shook it. "I don't know," he said hesitantly. "There was—mental confusion for a moment . . . swirling bright lights. Don't quite know how to describe it." He drew a deep breath. "Part of the nerve charge effect, I suppose?"

"Yes, it is," she said. "Neural agitators are dirty weapons. You never know what the results will be. The particular kind of thing you're experiencing can build up for hours. When it does, it may cause permanent brain damage."

Ticos shrugged irritably. "What can I do about it? I've been blocking the stuff, but it seems to be leaking through to me now."

"Sleep's indicated. Plenty of sleep—preferably not less than a day or two. After that you should be all right again."

"The problem there," Ticos said, "is that I don't believe I'll be able to sleep without drugs. And we don't—" He glanced at her. "Or do we?"

"We do. I saw balath seeds on the way here and brought a few along."

He grunted. "Think of everything, don't you? Well, I'll be no good to the cause in the shape I'm in; that's obvious. Better give me the balath and get on about your Tuvela business. Try to make it back here though, will you?"

"I will." The natural end to the balath sleep was death. For the human organism, in about a week. Ticos knew that if she couldn't get him to the mainland and to antidotes presently, he wouldn't wake up again.

He took three soft-shelled seeds from her hand, said, "Hold your breath—good luck!" and cracked them between his fingers, close to his face. Nile heard him breathe deeply as the balath fumes drifted out from the seeds. Then he sighed, slumped back and slid down out of sight into the pod. After a few seconds, the pod cover closed over the vacated opening. . . . Well, he'd be as safe in there for a while as he could be anywhere in this area.

She reset the belt, checked her gear. Then paused a moment, head turned up. Something—a brief muffled thudding, as much body sensation as sound. It seemed to come from the sky. She'd heard similar sounds twice before while Ticos was talking. Evidently he hadn't heard them. They might have been the rumble of thunder, but she didn't think it was thunder.

Lightweight again, she moved back quickly along the living cables to the floatwood bough which intersected the incubator and on to the barrier hedge. She laid her hands for a moment against the hedge's branches. They opened quietly for her, and she slipped out into the forest.

For a minute she stood glancing about and listening. The thudding noise hadn't been repeated and there were no other indications of abnormal activity about. A great racket was starting up in the sea-haval rookery; but the sea-havals, young and old, needed no abnormal activities to set them off. Nile descended quickly through the forest until she heard water surge and gurgle below, then moved back to the lagoon.

The sky was almost cloudless now, blazing with massed starshine. She gazed about the lagoon from cover. At the base of the forest across from her a string of tiny bright-blue lights bobbed gently up and down. Were they looking for her over there? She twisted the otter caller.

Sweeting appeared, bubbling and hunting-happy, eager to be given fresh instructions. The tarm was dying or dead. The otters had rammed a fresh battery of poison thorns into it when it came out into the water, and shortly afterward it sank to the lagoon's root floor, turned on its side and stopped moving. Next they discovered a large group of armed Parahuans prowling about the floating pads and other vegetation in the central area of the lagoon. The otters accompanied them in the water, waiting for opportunities to strike. Opportunities soon came. By the time the search party grew aware of losses in its ranks, eight lifeless Oganoon had been left wedged deep among the root tangles. . . .

"You didn't let yourselves be seen?"

Sweeting snorted derisively.

"Waddle-foot jumps into water. Doesn't come up. Is sad, heh? Sea-haval eat him? Guardian Etland eat him? No otters there then."

Nile could picture it. A subsurface swirl in the dark water, three or four slashes, another flopping body hauled quickly down toward the roots . . . and no slightest indication of the nature of the attacker. The remaining Parahuans had bunched up together on the pads, keeping well away from the water. When lights began to flash and several boats approached, bristling with guns, Sweeting and her companions moved off. From a distance they watched the boats take the search party away.

Presently then: "Bloomp-bloomp! Big gun—"

Which explained the thudding noises Nile had heard. Great geysers boiled up suddenly from the area where the Parahuans had been waylaid. The fire came from a hidden emplacement on the far side of the lagoon. Sweeting described pale flares of light, soft heavy thumps of discharge. A medium energy gun—brought into action in hopes of destroying what? The Tuvela? The Palachs would have no other explanation for what had happened out there. And if they'd realized by now that their great tarm was also among the dead or missing . . .

"What were they shooting at later?" she asked.

Sweeting tilted her nose at the sky, gave the approximate otter equivalent of a shrug. "Up here! Kesters. . . . "

"Kesters?"

Kesters it seemed to have been. Perhaps the gun crew had picked up a high-flying migratory flock in its instruments and mistaken it for human vehicles. In any case, some time after the discharge a rain of charred and dismembered kester bodies briefly sprinkled the lagoon surface.

Nile chewed her lip. Parrol couldn't possibly be about the area yet, and that some other aircar should have chanced to pass by at this particular time was simply too unlikely. It looked like a case of generally jittery nerves and growing demoralization. Ticos had questioned whether the Voice of Action would be able to maintain the organization of the forces which were now under its sole control.

"And this last time?" she asked. Water stirred at her left as she spoke. She glanced over, saw that the wild otter pair had joined them, lifted a hand in greeting. They grinned silently, drifted closer.

"Wasn't us," Sweeting told her. The fire had been directed into the lagoon again, near the western end of the island. The otters hadn't been anywhere near those waters. Another panic reaction?

"What are they doing over there?" Nile asked. She nodded to the north, across the lagoon. The pinpricks of blue light had continued to move slowly along the base of the forest.

The otters had investigated them. A flotilla of small submersibles had appeared, presumably dispatched by the great command ship in the depths. Each was marked by one of the lights—purpose unknown. They were stationing sentries in pairs along the edge of the forest.

Nile considered it. The beginning of a major organized drive to encircle the Tuvela in the lagoon, assuming the energy gun hadn't got rid of her? It seemed improbable. Sentries normally were put out for defensive purposes. They had at least one gun emplacement over there, perhaps other posts that looked vulnerable to them. They might be wondering whether the Tuvela would presently come out of the water and start doing something about those posts. . . .

How open were the sentries to attack?

The otters had been considering the point when Sweeting picked up Nile's signal. The Parahuans were stationed above water level, at varying heights. One pair squatted on a floatwood stub not much more than fifteen feet above the lift of the waves. There was no visual contact between most of the posts.

Nile had seen Spiff and Sweeting drive up twenty-five feet from the surface of the sea to pluck skimming kesters out of the air. . . .

"If you can pick off that one pair before they squawk," she said, "do it. It will keep the rest of them interested in that side of the lagoon for a while. Stay away from there afterward . . . and don't bother any other waddle-feet until you hear from me."

They agreed. "What you doing now, Nile?" Sweeting asked.

"Getting a fire started so Dan can find us."

Chapter 9

She moved steadily upward. The ancient floatwood trunks swayed and creaked in the wind; lesser growth rustled and whispered. The uneasy lapping of the ocean receded gradually below.

When she had come high enough, she turned toward the sea-haval rookery. The thickest sections of the oilwood stand rose somewhat beyond it. A swirl of the wind brought the rookery's stenches simmering about her. Vague rumblings rose through the forest. The area was quieter than it had been in early evening, but the gigantic feedings and the periodic uproar connected with them would continue at intervals through the night. She kept well above the rookery in passing. It was like a huge dark cage, hacked and sawn by great toothed beaks out of the heart of the forest. Intruders there were not viewed with favor by the sea-havals.

She was perhaps three hundred feet above the rookery and now well over toward the southern front of the forest when she came to an abrupt halt.

Throughout these hours her senses had been keyed to a pitch which automatically slapped a danger label on anything which did not match normal patterns of the overall forest scene. The outline which suddenly impressed itself on her vision was more than half blotted out by intervening thickets; but her mind linked the visible sections together in an instant. The composite image was that of a very large pale object.

And that was enough. She knew in the same moment that another tarm had been brought to the island by the Parahuans.

Nile stood where she was, frozen with dismay. There was no immediate cover available here; the slightest motion might bring her to the tarm's attention. The massive latticework of the forest was fairly open, with only scattered secondary growth between her and the clusters of thickets along the great slanted branch where the giant thing lay. The wild otters had reported seeing two of the creatures when the Parahuans first arrived. This one must have been kept aboard the big headquarters ship since then; it had been taken back to the surface to be used against her, had approached the island through the open sea to the south—

What was it doing in the upper forest levels? . . . Had it already discovered her?

The answer to the first question came immediately. The wind carried the scent of all life passing through the area to the west and along the lagoon up to the tarm. It was lying in wait for an indication that the human enemy was approaching the big blockhouse. A defensive measure against the Tuvela . . . and it was possible that it had, in fact, made out her shape, approaching along the floatwood branches in the night gloom, but hadn't yet defined her as human because she didn't bring with her a human scent.

Nile took a slow step backward, then another and a third, keeping her eyes fixed on what she could see of the tarm. As she reached the first cluster of screening growth, the great body seemed to be hunching, shifting position. The bushes closed behind her. Now the tarm was out of sight . . . and it was difficult to avoid the thought that it had waited only for that instant to come swinging cunningly through the floatwood in pursuit, grappling branches with its tentacle clusters, sliding along the thicker trunks. She ran in lightweight balance toward a huge central bole, rounded it quickly, clutching the gnarled surface with hands and grip-soles, hesitated on the far side, eyes searching the area below.

Forty feet down was a twisted branch, thickets near its far end. Nile pushed off, dropped, landed in moments, knees flexing, ran along the branch and threaded her way into the thickets. From cover, she looked back. Nothing stirred above or behind her. The tarm hadn't followed.

She moved on less hurriedly, stopped at last to consider what she could do. She was still stunned by the encounter. Scentlessness would have been no protection if she had come much closer to that lurking sea beast before she discovered it. And how could she get to the oilwood now? The tarm lay so near it that it seemed suicidal recklessness to approach the area again. She scanned mentally over the weapons the floatwood offered. There was nothing that could stop a great creature like that quickly enough to do her any good. The UW's beam would only enrage it.

She had an abrupt sense of defeat. The thing might very well lie there till morning, making it impossible to start the beacon which was to identify the island to Parrol. There must be something she could do to draw it away from its position.

Almost with the thought, a vast bellowing erupted about her, seeming to come from inches beneath her feet, jarring her tight-drawn nerves again. . . . Only a sea-haval from the rookery below.

Nile's breath caught.

Only a sea-haval? From the rookery below—

She went hurrying on down through the forest.

Presently she returned, retracing her former route. But now she gave every section of it careful study—glancing ahead and back, planning it out, not as a line of ascent but of a headlong descent to follow. When she came back along it, she would be moving as quickly as she could move, unable to afford a single misstep, a single moment of uncertainty about what to do, or which way to turn. A good part of that descent would be low-weight jumping; and whenever one of the prospective jumps looked at all tricky, she tried it out before climbing farther.

She reached a point at last where she must be within a minute of sighting the tarm . . . if it had stayed where it was. For it might have been having second thoughts about the upright shape which had been coming toward it and then backed away, and be prowling about for her now. Nile moved as warily and stealthily as she ever had in her life until she knew she was within view of the branch where the tarm had lain. She hadn't approached it from the previous direction but had climbed up instead along the far side of the great bole which supported most of the floatwood and other growth in the area.

When she edged around the bole, she saw the tarm immediately where she had judged it would be—flattened out on the branch, the head end of the big worm body turned toward her. A great lidless pale eye disk seemed fixed on the bole. Something thick and lumpy—the mass of retracted tentacles—stirred along the side. There was a deceptively sluggish heavy look about the thing.

Nile glanced back and down along her immediate line of retreat. Then she took the UW from its holster and stepped out on a branch jutting from the massive trunk. Weaving tips lifted abruptly from the tarm's clumped tentacles. Otherwise it didn't move. Nile pointed the gun at the center of the horny eye lens and held down the trigger.

The tarm's body rose up. Nile snapped the gun into the holster, slipped back around the bole. Turned and sprang.

There was a sound of something like tons of wet sand smashing against the far side of the bole as she darted through a thicket thirty feet down. She swung out below the thicket, dropped ten feet, dropped twenty-five feet, dropped again, descending a stairway of air. . . .

A deep howling swept by overhead, more like the voice of the storm than that of an animal. Nile turned, saw the tarm, contracted almost to the shape of a ball, hurtle through smashing growth a hundred feet above, suspended from bunched thick tentacles. She pulled out the UW and held the beam centered on the bulk, shouting at the top of her lungs. The awesome cry cut off and the big body jerked to a stop, hung twisting in midair for an instant, attached by its tentacles to fifty points of the floatwood. Then the tarm had located her and swiftly came down. Nile slipped behind a trunk, resumed her retreat.

She was in and out of the tarm's sight from moment to moment, but the next series of zigzagging downward leaps did not draw her away from it again. She heard its crashing descent, above and to this side or that, always following, cutting down distance between them—then stench and noise exploded about. Strain blurred her vision, but there was a wide opening among the branches below and she darted toward it. A horizontal branch came underfoot—a swaying narrow bridge, open space all about and beneath. Sea-haval stink roiled the air. Heavy stirrings below, angry rumble. . . .

A great thump behind her. The branch shook violently. The tarm's howl swelled at her back, and furious bellowings replied. The branch creaked. Ahead to the right were the waving thickets she remembered—

Nile flung herself headlong off the branch into the growth, clutching with arms and legs. An explosively loud crack, not yards away—another. Then, moments later, a great thudding splash below.

Then many more sounds. Rather ghastly ones. . . .

Nile scrambled farther into the thicket, found solid foothold and stood up, gripping the shrubbery. She fought for breath, heart pounding like an engine. The racket below began to settle into a heavy irregular thumping as the beaks of the sea-havals slammed again and again into the rubbery monster which had dropped into their rookery, gripping a branch of floatwood . . . a branch previously almost cut through at either end by the beam of Nile's gun. The tarm was finished; the giant kesters wouldn't stop until it had been tugged and ripped apart, tossed in sections about the evil-smelling rookery, mashed to mud under huge webbed feet.

Nerves and lungs steadying gradually, Nile wiped sweat from her eyes and forehead, then looked over her gear to make sure nothing of importance had been lost in that plunging chase. All items seemed to be on hand.

And now, unless she ran into further unforeseen obstacles on the way, she should be able to get her oilwood fire started. . . .

There were no further obstacles.

For the fourth or fifth time Nile suddenly came awake, roused perhaps by nothing more than a change in the note of the wind. She looked about quickly. A dozen feet below her, near the waterline, an otter lifted its oval head, glanced up. It was the wild female, taking her turn to rest while her mate and Sweeting patrolled.

"Is nothing, Nile . . . " The otter yawned, dropped her head back on her forelegs.

Nile turned her wrist, looked at her watch. Still about two hours till dawn. . . . She'd been dozing uneasily for around the same length of time at the sea edge of the forest, waiting for indications of Parrol's arrival. Current conditions on the island had the appearance of a stalemate of sorts. On the surface, little happened. The Parahuans had withdrawn into their installations. An occasional boat still moved cautiously about the lagoon, but those on board weren't looking for her. If anything, since the last developments, they'd seemed anxious to avoid renewed encounters with the Tuvela. There was underwater activity which appeared to be centered about the ship beneath the lagoon floor. If she'd had a jet rig, she would have gone down to investigate. But at present the ship was out of her reach; and while the otters could operate comfortably at that depth, their reports remained inconclusive.

In spite of the apparent lull, this remained an explosive situation. And as she calculated it, the blowup wouldn't be delayed much longer. . . .

It must seem to the Voice of Action that it had maneuvered itself into an impossible situation. To avoid the defeat of its policies, it had, by its own standards, committed a monstrous crime and dangerously weakened the expeditionary force's command structure. Porad Anz would condone the slaughter of the opposed Great Palachs and Palachs only if the policies could be successfully implemented.

And now, by the Voice of Action's own standards again, the policies already had failed completely to meet the initial test. The basis of their argument had been that Tuvelas could be defeated. Her death was to prove it. With the proof at hand, the fact at last established, the attack on the planet would follow.

Hours later, she not only was still alive but was in effect disputing their control of the upper island areas. They must have armament around which could vaporize not only the island but the entire floatwood drift and her along with it. But while they remained here themselves, they couldn't employ that kind of armament. They couldn't use it at all without alerting the planet—in which case they might as well begin the overall attack.

Their reasoning had become a trap. They hadn't been able to overcome one Tuvela. They couldn't expect then that an attack on the Tuvelas of the planet would result in anything but failure. But if they pulled out of Nandy-Cline without fighting, their crime remained unexpiated, unjustified—unforgivable in the eyes of Porad Anz.

Nile thought the decision eventually must be to attack. Understaffed or not, their confidence shaken or not, the Voice of Action really no longer had a choice. It was simply a question now of when they would come to that conclusion and take action on it.

There was nothing she could do about that at present. At least she'd kept them stalled through most of the night; and if the Sotira racer had caught her warning, the planet might be growing aware of the peril overhanging it. Nile sighed, shifted position, blinking out through the branches before her at the sea. Starshine gleamed on the surging water, blended with the ghostly light of the luminous weed beds. Cloud banks rolled through the sky again. Fitful flickering on the nearby surface was the reflection of the oilwood. If Parrol would only get here . . .

She slid back down into sleep.

Something very wet was nuzzling her energetically. She shoved at it in irritation. It came back.

"Nile, wake up! Spiff's here!"

Grogginess vanished instantly. "Huh? Where are—"

"Coming!" laughed Sweeting. "Coming! Not far!"

She'd picked up the tiny resonance in the caller receiver which told her Spiff was in the sea, within three miles, homing in on her. And if Spiff was coming, Parrol was with him. Limp with relief, Nile slipped down to the water's edge with the otter. Almost daybreak, light creeping into the sky behind cloud cover, the ocean black and steel-gray, great swells running before the island.

"Which way?"

Sweeting's nose swung about like a compass needle, held due south. She was shivering with excitement. "Close! Close! We wait?"

"We wait." Nile's voice was shaky. "They'll be here fast enough . . . " Parrol had done as she thought—read the oilwood message from afar, set his car down to the south, worked it in subsurface toward the floatwood front. He'd be out of it now with Spiff, coming in by jet rig and with equipment.

"Where are your friends? Has anything been happening?"

"Heh? Yes. Two ships under lagoon now. Big one."

"Two—Has the command ship moved up?"

"Not that big. Waddle-feet carrying in things."

"What kind of things?"

Sweeting snorted. "Waddle-feet things, heh? Maybe they leave. Ho! Spiff's here. . . . "

She whistled, went forward into the water. Nile stood watching intently. Against the flank of a great rising wave two hundred yards out, two otters appeared for an instant, were gone again. . . .

"You look something of a mess, Dr. Etland!"

She'd jerked half around on the first low-pitched word, had the gun out and pointing as his voice registered on her consciousness. She swore huskily. "Thought you were a—forget it!"

On the surface twenty feet to her right, straddling the saddle of a torpedo-shaped carrier, Parrol shoved black jet rig goggles up on his forehead, reached for a spur of floatwood to hold his position. A UW rifle was in his right hand. He grinned briefly. "Dr. Cay?"

"All right for the moment," Nile said. She replaced her gun, hand shaking. "Did you run into trouble coming in?"

"None at all. The immediate area's clear?"

"At present."

Parrol had left the mainland in response to Nile's first call for help nine hours previously. Most of the interval he'd spent being batted around in heavy typhoon weather with a static-blocked communicator. He was within two hours of the island when he got a close-contact connection with sledman fleet units and heard for the first time that Dr. Etland meanwhile had got out another message. The Sotira racer had received her chopped-off report about Parahuans, carried it within range of other sleds. It was relayed through and around disturbance areas, eventually had reached the mainland and apparently was reaching sled fleet headquarters all about Nandy-Cline. Parrol's informants couldn't tell him what the overall effect of the warning had been; if anything, communication conditions had worsened in the meantime. But there seemed to be no question that by now the planet was thoroughly alerted.

They speculated briefly on the possibilities. There might or might not be Federation warships close enough to Nandy-Cline to take an immediate hand in the matter. The planet-based Federation forces weren't large. If they were drawn into defensive positions to cover key sections of the mainland, they wouldn't hamper the Parahuans much otherwise. The mainland police and the Citizens Alert Cooperative could put up a sizable fleet of patrol cars between them. They should be effective in ground and air encounters, but weren't designed to operate against heavily armed spacecraft. In general, while there were weapons enough around Nandy-Cline, relatively few were above the caliber required to solve personal and business problems.

"The sleds have unwrapped the old spaceguns again," said Nile. "They'll fight, now they know what they'll be fighting."

"No doubt," Parrol agreed. "But the Navy and Space Scouts are the only outfits around organized for this kind of thing. We don't know if they're available at present, or in what strength. If your web-footed acquaintances can knock out communications completely—"

"Evidently they can."

Parrol was silent a moment. "Could get very messy!" he remarked. "And in spite of their heavy stuff, you figure they're already half convinced they'll lose if they attack?"

"Going by their own brand of logic, they must be. But I don't think it will keep them from attacking."

Parrol grunted. "Well, let's talk with the otters again . . . "

The wild otters had joined the group. They confirmed Sweeting's report of the arrival of a second ship beneath the lagoon. It was more than twice the size of the first, anchored directly behind it. Parahuans were active about both. Parrol and Nile asked further questions and the picture grew clear. The second ship seemed to be a cargo carrier, and the Parahuans apparently were engaged in dismantling at least part of the equipment of their floatwood installations and storing it in the carrier.

"So they're clearing the decks," Parrol said. "And not yet quite ready to move. Now, if at this stage we could give them the impression that the planet was ready—in fact, was launching an attack on them—"

Nile had thought of it. "How?" she asked. "It would have to be a drastic demonstration now. Not blowing up their blockhouse. Say something like hitting the command ship."

"We can't reach that. But we can reach the two under the lagoon. And we can get rather drastic about them."

"With what?"

"Implosion bombs," Parrol said. "Your message suggested I should bring the works, so I did. Three Zell-Eleven two pounders, tactical, adherent." He nodded at the equipment carrier in the water below them. "In there with the rest of it."

"Their ship locks are open," said Nile, after a moment.

"Two should do it. One in each lock."

"Spaceships. It may not finish them. But—"

They glanced over at Spiff. He'd been watching them silently, along with the other three.

"Like to do a little bomb hauling again, Spiff?" Parrol inquired.

The big otter's eyes glistened. He snorted. Parrol got to his feet.

"Brought your rig," he told Nile. "Let's go pick up Dr. Cay and get him out to the car. He'll be safest there. Then we'll take a look at those ships. . . . "

Trailing Parrol and the carrier out to the aircar, Nile darted along twenty feet below the surface, the twin to his UW rifle clasped against her, luxuriating in the jet rig's speed and maneuverability. They'd left the otters near the floatwood; fast as they were, Sweeting and her companions couldn't have maintained this pace. It was like skimming through air. The rig's projected field nearly cancelled water friction and pressure; the rig goggles clamped over Nile's eyes pushed visibility out a good two hundred yards, dissolving murk and gloom into apparent transparency. Near the surface, she was now the equal of any sea creature in its own element. Only the true deeps remained barred to the jet rig swimmer. The Parahuan rigs she'd seen had been relatively primitive contrivances.

Parrol, riding the carrier with Ticos Cay asleep inside, was manipulating the vehicle with almost equal ease. It too had a frictionless field. He slowed down only in passing through the denser weed beds. By the time they reached the aircar, riding at sea anchor in the center of a floating thicket, a blood-red sun rim had edged above the horizon.

They got Ticos transferred to the car, stowed the carrier away, locked the car again, made it a subsurface race back to the floatwood and gathered up the otters. Spiff and Sweeting knew about tactical bombs by direct experience; their wild cousins knew about human explosives only by otter gossip and were decidedly interested in the operation. Roles were distributed and the party set off. Spiff, nine foot bundle of supple muscle, speed, and cold nerve, carried two of Parrol's implosion devices strapped to his chest in their containers. He'd acted as underwater demolition agent before. Parrol retained the third bomb.

And shortly Nile was floating in a cave of the giant roots which formed the island floor, watching the open locks of the two Parahuan spaceships below. A fog of yellow light spilled from them. Two points of bright electric blue hovered above the smaller ship, lights set in the noses of two midget boats turning restlessly this way and that as if maintaining a continuous scan of the area. There were other indications of general uneasiness. A group of jet-rigged Oganoon, carrying the heavy guns with which she had become familiar, floated between the sentry boats; and in each of the locks a pair of guards held weapons ready for immediate use.

All other activities centered about the lock of the larger ship. Parahuans manipulating packaged and crated items were moving into it from the sea in escorted groups, emerging again to jet off for more. Like the guards, they carried guide lights fastened to their heads.

Nile glanced around as Spiff came sliding down out of the root tangles above. The otters had returned to the surface to saturate themselves with oxygen before the action began. Spiff checked beside her, peering out through the roots at the ships, then tilted his head at her inquiringly. His depth-dark vision wasn't equal to hers but good enough for practical work. Nile switched on her rig speaker. "Dan?"

"I read you."

"Spiff's back and ready to go."

"My group's also on hand," Parrol's voice told her. "We'll start the diversionary action. Sixty seconds, or any time thereafter—"

Nile's muscles tightened. She gave Spiff a nod, watched him start off among the roots. Resting the barrel of the UW rifle on the root section before her, she glanced back and forth about the area below. Her position placed her midway between the two ship locks; Spiff was shifting to the right, to a point above the lock of the cargo carrier, his first target. Where Parrol and the other three otters were at the moment she didn't know.

A group of Oganoon approached the cargo lock again, guiding a burdened transport carrier. As they moved into the lighted area, the one in the lead leaped sideways and rolled over in the water, thrashing violently. The next in line drifted limply upward, long legs dangling. The ripping sound of Parrol's UW reached Nile's audio pickup a moment later.

There was abrupt milling confusion around and within the lock. The rest of the transport crew was struggling to get inside past the guards. Thumping noises indicated that a number of Parahuan weapons had gone off. A medley of watery voice sounds filled the pickup. Then one of the little boats was suddenly in purposeful motion, darting at a slant up from the ships toward the root floor of the island. The other followed.

"Boats have a fix on you and are coming, Dan!"

"I'm retreating."

The boats reached the roots, edged in among them. The patrol above the smaller ship had dispersed, was now regrouping. Somebody down there evidently was issuing orders. Nile waited, heart hammering. Parrol's rifle snarled, drew a heavier response, snarled again. Among the roots he had a vast advantage in mobility over the boats. A swarm of armed Parahuans jetted out from the smaller ship's lock. One of them shifted aside, beckoned imperiously to the patrol above. They fell in line and the whole group moved quickly up to the roots. Their commanding officer dropped back into the lock, stood gazing after them.

"The infantry's getting into the act," Nile reported.

"Leaving the ships clear?"

"Clear enough."

The transport crew had vanished inside the carrier. Its two guards floated in the lock, shifting their weapons about. The pair on duty in the other lock must still be there, but at the moment only the officer was in sight. Nile studied him. Small size, slight build—a Palach. He might be in charge of the local operation. . . . Parrol's voice said, "I've given the otters the go-ahead. They're hitting the infantry. Move any time!"

Nile didn't answer. She slid the rifle barrel forward, sighted on one of the carrier guards, locked down the trigger, swung to the second guard as the first one began a back somersault. In the same instant she saw Spiff, half the distance to the carrier already behind him, doubling and thrusting as he drove down in a hunting otter's awesomely accelerating sprint. He'd picked up his cue.

Now the Palach at the smaller ship floated in the rifle's sights, unaware of events at the carrier. Nile held fire, tingling with impatience. The two guards there hadn't showed again; she wanted them out of the way before Spiff arrived. The Palach glanced around, started back into the lock. She picked him off with a squeeze of her finger—and something dark curved down over the hull of the ship, flicked past the twisting body and disappeared in the lock.

Nile swallowed hard, slipped forward and down out of the cover of the roots. There were thumping sounds in the pickup; she couldn't tell whether some of them came now from the ship. Her mind was counting off seconds. Parrol's voice said something, and a moment later she realized she hadn't understood him at all. She hung in the water, eyes fixed on the lock entrance. Spiff might have decided his second implosion bomb would produce a better effect if carried on into the spaceship's guts—

A Parahuan tumbled out of the lock. Nile's hand jerked on the rifle, but she didn't fire. That Parahuan was dead! Another one. . . .

A weaving streak emerged from the lock, rocked the turning bodies in its passage, seemed in the same instant a hundred feet away in the water, two hundred—

Nile said shakily, "Bombs set, Dan! Jet off!"

She swung about, thumbed the rig's control grip, held it down, became a glassy phantom rushing through the dimness in Spiff's wake.

Lunatic beast—

Presently the sea made two vast slapping sounds behind them.

There was light at the surface now. Sun dazzle shifted on the lifting waves between the weed beds. The front of the floatwood island loomed a quarter of a mile to the north. Flocks of kesters circled and dipped above it, frightened into the upper air by the implosions which had torn out a central chunk of the lagoon floor.

"Can you see me?" Parrol's voice asked.

"Negative, Dan!" Nile had shoved the rig goggles up on her head. Air sounds rolled and roared about her. "Too much weed drift! I can't get far enough away from it for a clear look around."

"Same difficulty here. We can't be too far apart."

"Nobody seems to be trailing us," Nile said. "Let's keep moving south and clear this jungle before we try to get together."

Parrol agreed and she submerged again. Spiff and Sweeting were around, though not in view at the moment. The wild otters had stayed with Parrol. There was no real reason to expect pursuit; the little gunboats might have been able to keep up with them, but the probability was that they'd been knocked out among the roots by the bombs. She went low to get under the weed tangles, gave the otter caller a twist, glanced at her rig compass and started south. Parrol had a fix on the aircar. She didn't; but he'd said it lay almost due south of them now.

Sweeting and Spiff showed up half a minute later, assumed positions to her right and left . . . then there was a sound in the sea, a vague dim rumbling.

"You getting that, Nile?"

"Yes. Engine vibrations?"

"Should be something of that order. But it isn't exactly like anything I've ever heard. Any impression of direction?"

"No." She was watching the otters. Their heads were turning about in quick darting motions. "Sweeting and Spiff can't tell where it's coming from either." She added, "It seems to be fading at the moment."

"Fading here too," Parrol said. "Let's keep moving."

They maintained silence for a minute or two. The matted canopy of weeds still hung overhead. The strange sound became almost inaudible, then slowly swelled, grew stronger than before. There was a sensation as if the whole sea were shuddering faintly and steadily about her. She thought of the great spaceship which had been stationed in the depths below the floatwood drift these months. If they were warming up its drives, it might account for such a sound.

"Nile," Parrol's voice said.

"Yes?"

"Proceed with some caution! Our wild friends just showed up again. They indicate they have something significant to report. I'm shifting to the surface with them to hear what it is."

"All right," said Nile. "We'll stay awake."

She moved on, holding rig speed down to her companions' best traveling rate. The dim sea thunder about them didn't seem to change. She was about to address Parrol when his voice came again.

"Got the report," he said. "There's a sizable submersible moving about the area. Evidently it is not the source of the racket we're hearing. It's not nearly large enough for that. The otters have seen it three times—twice in deeper water, the third time not far from the surface. It was headed in a different direction each time. It may not be interested in us, but I get the impression it's quartering this section. That seems too much of a coincidence."

Nile silently agreed. She said, "Their detectors are much more likely to pick up your car than us."

"Exactly."

"What do we do, Dan?"

"Try to get to the car before the sub does. You hold the line south, keep near cover if you can. Apparently I'm somewhere ahead of you and, at the moment, closer to the sub. The otters are out looking for it again. If we spot it on the way to the car, I'll tag it."

"Tag it?"

"With bomb number three," Parrol said. "Had a feeling it might be useful before we were through. . . . "

Nile gave Spiff and Sweeting the alert sign, indicating the area before them. They pulled farther away on either side, shifted to points some thirty feet ahead of her. Trailing weed curtains began limiting visibility and the overhead blanket looked as dense as ever. The rumbling seemed louder again, a growing irritation to tight nerves. . . . Then soggy tendrils of vegetation suddenly were all about. Nile checked rig speed, cursing silently, pulled and thrust through the thicket with hands and feet. And stopped as she met Sweeting coming back.

Something ahead. . . . She followed the otter down through the thicket to the edge of open water. Other drift thickets in the middle distance. Sweeting's nose pointed. Nile watched. For an instant then, she saw the long shadow outline of a submersible glide past below. Her breath caught. She cut in the rig, came spurting out of the growth, drove after the ship—

"Dan!"

"Yes?"

"If you see that sub, don't try to tag it!"

"Why not?"

"Because it's ours, idiot! I was looking down on it just now. It's a Narcotics Control boat! And at a guess the reason it's been beating around here is that it has its detectors locked on the Parahuan command ship—"

The receiver made a muffled sound of surprise. Then, quickly: "It's probably not alone!"

"Probably not. How far do you register from your car?"

"Nine hundred yards," Parrol's voice said. "By the time we get together and make it there, we might—"

"We might be in the middle of a hot operation!"

"Yes. Let's get back upstairs and see what we can see."

Nile jetted up through the water, trailed by darting otter shapes, broke surface in a surging tangle of drift growth, began splashing and crawling out of the mess. Morning sun blazed through wind-whipped reeds about and above her.

"Nile," snapped the intercom, "their ship's here!"

"Their ship?"

"It's got to be the Parahuan. Something beneath me—lifting! Looks like the bottom of the ocean coming up. Keep out of the way—that thing is big! I'm scrambling at speed."

The intercom went silent. Nile stumbled across a pocket of water, lunged through a last tangle of rubbery brown growth, found open sea before her. The drift was rising sluggishly on a great swell. She shoved the goggles up on her head. Something shrieked briefly above. An aircar swept past, was racing back into the sky. Higher up, specks glinted momentarily, circling in the sun. A chain of patrol cars, lifting toward space, cutting through the aliens' communication blocks—

The swell had surged past; the weed bed was dropping toward its trough, shut off by a sloping wall of water to the south. Nile knifed into the sea, cut in the rig, swept upward, reached and rode the shifting front of the wave. View unobstructed.

"Sleds coming, Dan! Three of them."

His voice said something she didn't catch. Off to the right, less than half a mile away, the black hull of the Parahuan command ship lifted glistening from the sea. Rounded back of a giant sea beast. Nile tried to speak again and couldn't. Wind roar and sea thunder rolled about her. Out of the west, knifing lightly through the waves like creatures of air, the three sleds came racing in line on their cannon drives. On the foredeck of the one in the lead, the massive ugly snouts of spaceguns swiveled toward the Parahuan ship, already a third clear of the water and rising steadily. Pale beams winked into existence between the sled's guns and the ship, changed to spouts of smashing green fire where they touched the dark hull. The following sleds swung left, curving in; there were spaceguns there too, and the guns were in action. About the spaceship the ocean exploded in steam. Green fire glared through it. A ragged, continuous thundering rolled over Nile. The ship kept lifting. The sleds' beams clung. There was no return fire. Perhaps the first lash of the beams had sealed the ship's gunports. It surged heavily clear of the sea, fled straight up into the sky with an enormous howling, steam and water cascading back from it. The beams lifted with it, then winked out in turn, ceasing their thunder.

Nile's ears still rang with the din. Lying back in the water, she watched the ship dwindle in a brilliant blue sky.

Run, Palachs, run! But see, it's too late!

Two thin fire lines converged in the blue on the shrinking dot of the Parahuan ship. Then a new sun blazed in white fury where the dot had been. The fire lines curved away, vanished.

Federation warships had come hunting out of space. . . .

She swung about in the water, saw a section of a broken floatwood bough twenty feet away, caught it and clambered aboard. A wave lifted the bough as she came to her feet, sent it rushing south. Nile rode it, balanced against a spur, gaze sweeping the sea . . . a world of brilliance, of dazzling flashes, of racing wind and tumbling whitecaps. Laughter began to surge in her, a bubbling release. One of the great sleds knifed past, not a hundred yards away, rushing on humming drives toward the island. A formation of CA patrol cars swept above it, ports open. Jet chutists would spill from the ports in minutes to start cleaning the abandoned children of Porad Anz from the floatwood.

Details might vary considerably. But as morning rolled around the world, this was the scene that was being repeated now wherever floatwood drifts rode the ocean currents. The human demon was awake and snarling on Nandy-Cline. . . .

"Nile—"

"Dan! Where are you?"

"On the surface. just spotted you. Look southwest. The aircar's registering. Dr. Cay's all right. . . . "

Flick of guilt—I forgot all about Ticos! Her eyes searched, halted on a swell. There he was.

She flung up an arm and waved, saw Parrol return the salute. Then she cut in the rig, dived from the floatwood, went down and flashed through the quivering crystal halls of the upper sea to meet him.

Chapter 10

"You are not," said the blonde emphatically, "Dr. Ticos Cay. You are not Dr. Nile Etland. There are no great white decayed-looking monsters chasing you through a forest!"

Rion Gilennic blinked at her. She was an attractive young creature in her silver-blue uniform; but she seemed badly worried.

"No," he told her reassuringly. "Of course not."

The blonde brightened. "That's better! Now, who are you? I'll tell you who you are. You're Federation Council Deputy Rion Gilennic."

"Quite right," Gilennic agreed.

"And where are you?"

He glanced about. "In the transmitter room."

"Anybody can see that. Where's this transmitter room?"

"On the flagship. Section Admiral Tatlaw's flagship. Oh, don't worry! When I'm myself, I remember everything. It's just that I seem to slide off now and then into being one of the other two."

"You told us," the blonde said reproachfully, "that you'd absorbed recall transcriber digests like that before!"

"So I have. I realize now they were relatively minor digests. Small doses."

She shook her head. "This was no small dose! A double dose, for one thing. A twenty-six minute bit, and a two minute bit. Both loaded with emotion peaks. Then there was a sex crossover on the two minute bit. That's confusing in itself. I think you've been rather lucky, Deputy! Next time you try out an unfamiliar psych machine, at least give the operators straight information. On a rush job like this we had to take some things for granted. You could have stayed mixed up for weeks!"

"My apologies," said Gilennic. Then he made a startled exclamation.

"Now what?" the blonde asked anxiously.

"What time is it?"

She checked her watch. "Ship or standard?"

"Standard."

She told him. Gilennic said, "That leaves me something like ten minutes to get straightened out before Councilman Mavig contacts me."

"I can give you a shot that will straighten you out in thirty seconds," the blonde offered.

"Then I won't remember the digests."

"No, not entirely. But you should still have the general idea."

Gilennic shook his head. "That's not good enough! I need all the details for the conference."

"Well, I understand the Councilman's absorbed the digests too. He may not be in any better shape."

"That'll be the day!" said Gilennic sourly. "Nothing shakes the Councilman."

She reflected, said, "You'll be all right, I think. You've been coming out of it fast. . . . Those two subjects had some remarkable experiences, didn't they?"

"Yes, remarkable. Where are they at present?"

She looked concerned again. "Don't you remember? They left ship almost an hour ago. On your order. Dr. Etland wanted to get Dr. Cay back to the planet and into a hospital."

Gilennic considered. "Yes, I do remember now. That was just before this stuff began to take effect on me, wasn't it? I suppose—"

He broke off as the entrance door slid open. A trim young woman stepped in, smiled, went to the transmitter stand, placed a sheaf of papers on it, and switched on the screen. She glanced about the other items on the stand and looked satisfied.

"These are the reports you wanted for the conference, Mr. Gilennic," she announced. "You'll have just time enough to check them over."

"Thanks, Wyl." Gilennic started for the stand.

"Anything else?" Wyl asked.

"No," he said. "That will be all."

Wyl looked at the blonde. "We'd better be leaving."

The blonde frowned. "The Deputy isn't in good condition!" she stated. "As a Psychology Service technician, I have a Class Five clearance. Perhaps—"

Wyl took her arm. "Come along, dear. I'm Mr. Gilennic's confidential secretary and have a Class Two clearance. That isn't good enough to let me sit here and listen."

The blonde addressed Gilennic. "If you start running hallucinations again—"

He smiled at her. "If I do, I'll buzz for help. Good enough?"

She hesitated. "If you don't put it off too long, it will be. I'll wait beside the buzzer." She left the room with Wyl, and the door slid shut.

Rion Gilennic sighed and sat down at the stand. His brain felt packed—that was perhaps the best way to describe it. Two sets of memories that weren't his own had been fed in there in the time span of fifty seconds. He gathered that the emotional effects they contained were damped out as far as possible; but they remained extraordinarily vivid memories as experienced by two different sensory patterns and recorded by two different and very keen minds. For the next several hours, a part of him would be in effect Dr. Ticos Cay, able to recall everything that had occurred from his first realization of a search party of alien beings closing in stealthily on the floatwood hideout to the moment consciousness drained from him in the incubator pod. And another part would be Dr. Nile Etland, scanning at will over the period between her discussion with the Sotira sledmen and her return to the mainland with Danrich Parrol, Dr. Cay, and a pair of mutant otters.

By now Gilennic's mind seemed able to recognize these implants for what they were and to keep them distinct from his personal memories. But for a while there'd been confusion and he'd found himself running colorful floatwood nightmares in a wide-awake condition, blanked out momentarily on the fact that he was not whichever of the two had experienced that particular sequence. He'd really been much less upset about it than the two transcriber technicians who evidently blamed themselves for the side-effects. A recall digest, in any case, was the fastest and most dependable method known to get all pertinent information on a given set of events from a person who'd lived through them; and a few hours from now the direct impressions would fade from his mind again. No problem there, he decided. . . .

He flicked through the reports Wyl had left. Among them was one from the surgeon's office on the condition of Dr. Ticos Cay—a favorable prognosis. In spite of his age Dr. Cay's recuperative ability remained abnormally high. He'd been near total exhaustion but should recover in a few weeks of treatment. Gilennic was glad to see the memo; he'd been worried about the old man.

The latest report on military developments had nothing of significance. Most of the fighting had been concluded five hours ago, almost before the Etland party reached the mainland. Space pursuit continued; but the number of targets was down to twelve. Gilennic considered. Call Tatlaw and tell him to let a few more get away? No, two shiploads were enough to carry the bad word to Porad Anz. Too many lucky escapees would look suspicious—the Parahuans had learned the hard way that Fed ships could run them down. Some eight hundred Oganoon, holed up in a floatwood island, had been taken alive. The Palachs with them were dead by suicide. No value to that catch—

The other reports weren't important. The Psychology Service was doctoring newscast sources on Nandy-Cline. He'd hear more about that in the conference.

Gilennic sat a moment reflecting, smiled briefly. Not a bad setup, he thought. Not bad at all!

"Ship's comm section to Deputy Gilennic," said the screen speaker.

"Go ahead," he told it.

"Transmission carrier now hot and steady, sir! Orado is about to come in. When I switch off, the transmission room will be security-shielded."

"Double check the shielding," Gilennic said and pushed down the screen's ON button.

"What decided you to give the order to allow two Parahuan warships to escape?" Federation Councilman Mavig asked.

Gilennic looked at the two men in the screen. With Mavig was Tolm Sindhis, a Psychology Service director—publicity angles already were very much a part of the situation, as he'd expected. The discussion wasn't limited to the three of them; Mavig had said others were attending on various extensions on the Orado side. He hadn't given their names and didn't need to. Top department heads were judging the Federation Council Deputy's actions at Nandy-Cline. Very well. . . .

Gilennic said, "Section Admiral Tatlaw's fleet detachment was still approaching the system when we picked up a garbled report from Nandy-Cline indicating the fighting had started there. Tatlaw went in at speed. By the time the main body of the detachment arrived, Parahuan ships were boiling out into space by twos and threes. Our ships split up and began picking them off.

"It was clear that something drastic had happened to the enemy on the planet. The colonial forces were in action, but that couldn't begin to account for it. The enemy wasn't in orderly retreat—he was breaking from the planet in absolute panic. Whatever the disaster was, I felt it was likely to be to our advantage if Porad Anz were permitted to receive a first-hand account of it by informed survivors.

"The flagship had engaged the two largest Parahuan ships reported so far, approximately in our cruiser class. It was reasonable to assume they had high-ranking Parahuans on board. We know now that except for the headquarters ship, which was destroyed before it could escape from the planet's atmosphere, they were in fact the two largest ships of the invasion. There was no time to check with Orado, even if it had been possible in the infernal communication conditions of the system. We were in a running fight, and Tatlaw would have cut the enemy apart in minutes. I was the leading representative of the civilian government with the detachment. Therefore I gave the order."

Mavig pursed his lips. "The Admiral didn't entirely approve of the move?"

"Naturally not," said Gilennic. "From a tactical point of view it made no sense. There were some moments afterward when I was inclined to doubt the wisdom of the move myself."

"I assume," Mavig said, "your doubts were resolved after you absorbed the digest of Dr. Etland's recall report."

"Yes. Entirely so."

Mavig grunted.

"Well, we know now what happened to the invasion force," he remarked. "Its command echelons were subjected to a concentrated dose of psychological warfare, in singularly appalling form. Your action is approved, Deputy. What brought Dr. Etland and her companions to your attention?"

"I went down to the planet at the first opportunity," Gilennic said. "There was still a great deal of confusion and I could get no immediate explanation for the Parahuan retreat. But I learned that a warning sent out by a Dr. Etland from one of the floatwood islands had set off the action. She reached the mainland at about that time, and I found her at the hospital to which she'd taken Dr. Cay. She told me in brief what had occurred, and I persuaded her to accompany me to the flagship with Dr. Cay. She agreed, on condition that Dr. Cay would remain under constant medical attention. She took him back to a mainland hospital a short while ago."

Mavig said, "The people who know about this—"

"Dr. Etland, Dr. Cay, Danrich Parrol," said Gilennic. "The two recall transcriber technicians know enough to start thinking. So does my secretary."

"The personnel will be no problem. The other three will maintain secrecy?"

"They've agreed to it. I think we can depend on them. Their story will be that Dr. Etland and Dr. Cay discovered and spied on Parahuans from hiding but were not seen by them and had no contact with them. There'll be no mention made of the Tuvela Theory or of anything else that could be of significance here."

Mavig glanced at the Psychology Service director. Sindhis nodded, said, "Judging by the personality types revealed in the recall digests, I believe that's safe. I suggest we give those three people enough additional information to make it clear why secrecy is essential from the Federation's point of view."

"Very well," Mavig agreed. "It's been established by now that the four other water worlds which might have been infiltrated simultaneously by Parahuans are clear. The rumored enemy action was concentrated solely on Nandy-Cline. We're proceeding on that basis." He looked at Tolm Sindhis. "I understand your people have begun with the publicity cover work there?"

"Yes," Sindhis said. "It should be simple in this case. We're developing a popular local line."

"Which is?"

"That the civilian and military colonial forces beat the fight out of the invaders before they ever got back to space. It's already more than half accepted."

Gilennic said thoughtfully, "If it hadn't been for Dr. Etland's preparatory work, I'm inclined to believe that's what would have occurred. Not, of course, without very heavy human casualties. The counterattack certainly was executed with something like total enthusiasm."

"It's been a long time between wars," Mavig said. "That's part of our problem. How about the overall Hub reaction, Director?"

"We'll let it be a three day sensation," said Sindhis. "Then we'll release a series of canned sensations which should pretty well crowd the Nandy-Cline affair out of the newscasts and keep it out. I foresee no difficulties."

Mavig nodded. "The follow-up then. I rather like that term `gromgorru.' We can borrow it as the key word here."

"Gromgorru and Tuvela-Guardians," said Tolm Sindhis.

"Yes. The two escaped cruisers reach Porad Anz. The sole survivors of the invasion present their story. The top echelons of the Everliving have a week or two to let new Tuvela-fear soak through their marrows. There is no word of a significant reaction in the Federation. What happens then? Deputy, you've shown commendable imagination. How would you suggest concluding the matter?"

"How would Tuvela-Guardians conclude it?" said Gilennic. "Dr. Etland set the pattern for us, I think. The attitude is not quite contempt, but not far from it. We've taken over a thousand low-grade prisoners for whom we have no use. Guardians don't kill purposelessly. In a week or two the prisoners should be transported to Porad Anz."

"By a fleet detachment?" Mavig asked.

Gilennic shook his head.

"One ship, Councilman. An impressive ship—I'd suggest a Giant Scout. But only one. The Guardian Etland came alone to the floatwood. By choice, as far as the Parahuans know. The Guardians would not send a fleet to Porad Anz. Or more than one Guardian."

"Yes—quite right. And then?"

"From what Dr. Cay was told," Gilennic said, "there are no surviving human captives on Porad Anz. But we'd make sure of that, and we'd let them know we're making sure of it. Half dead or insane, we don't leave our kind in enemy hands."

Tolm Sindhis said, "The Service will supply a dozen xenotelepaths to the expedition. They'll make sure of it."

Mavig nodded. "What else, Deputy?"

"Men were murdered on Nandy-Cline," said Gilennic. "The actual murderers are almost certainly dead. But the authorities on Porad Anz need a lesson—for that, and simply for the trouble they've made. They're territory-greedy. How about territorial restrictions?"

Mavig said, "Xeno intelligence indicates they've occupied between eighteen and twenty water planets. They can be told to evacuate two of those planets permanently—say the two closest to the Federation—and given a limited time in which to carry out the order. We'll be back presently to see it's been done. Would that sum it up?"

"I think," said Gilennic, "a Guardian would say so." He hesitated, added, "I believe the terms Tuvela or Guardian should not be used in this connection by us, or in fact used by us at all. The Everliving of Porad Anz can form their own conclusions about who it is that issues them orders in the name of the Federation. As far as we're concerned, the superhumans can fade back now into mystery and gromgorru. They'll be more effective there."

Mavig nodded, glanced aside. "I see," he remarked, "that meanwhile the selection of the person who is to issue the Council's orders to Porad Anz has been made." He pressed a button on the stand before him. "Your transmission duplicator, Deputy—"

Rion Gilennic slid a receptacle from the stand duplicator, took a card from it, saw, without too much surprise, that the name on the card was his own. "I'm honored by the assignment," he said soberly.

"You can start preparing for it." Mavig shifted his gaze to Tolm Sindhis. "We should expect that some weeks from now there'll be individuals on Nandy-Cline taking a discreet interest in the backgrounds of Dr. Etland and Dr. Cay. It might be worth seeing what leads can be developed from them."

The director shrugged. "We'll watch for investigators, of course. My opinion is, however, that if the leads take us anywhere, they'll show us nothing new. . . . "

Conclusions of the Evaluating Committee
of the Lords of the Sessegur,
Chiefs of the Dark Ships

Subject: The Human-parahuan
Engagement of Nandy-cline

The committee met in the Purple Hall of the Lord Ildaan. Present besides the Lord Ildaan and the permanent members of the Committee were a Wirrollan delegation led by its Envoy Plenipotentiary. The Lord Ildaan introduced the Envoy and the members of the delegation to the Committee and referred to the frequently voiced demands of Wirrolla and its associated species that the Alliance of the Lords of the Sessegur should agree to coordinate and spearhead a unified attack on the Federation of the Hub. He explained that the conclusions to be expressed by the Committee might serve as a reply to such demands. He then requested the Lord Toshin, High Ambassador of the Alliance to the Federation of the Hub, to sum up intelligence reports compiled in the Federation following the Parahuan defeat.

The Lord Toshin: The overall impression left in the Federation by the attempted Parahuan conquest of the world of Nandy-Cline is that it was an event of almost no significance. In the relatively short period before I left Orado to confer in person with other members of this Committee, it appeared that the average Federation citizen had nearly forgotten such an attempt had been made and certainly would have found it difficult to recall much more than the fact. We must understand, of course, that this same average citizen in all likelihood never before had heard of the planet of Nandy-Cline. The sheer number of Federation worlds blurs their individual significance.

On Nandy-Cline itself the conflict with the Parahuans naturally has remained a topic of prime interest. While we may suspect that the bulk of the Parahuan force was destroyed in space by Federation military, the continental population takes most of the credit for its defeat. No opinions have been obtained from the sizable pelagic population known as sledmen, who appear to be secretive by habit and treat Federation news personnel and other investigators with such scant civility that few attempt to question them twice.

There has been no slightest public mention in the Federation of the Parahuan Tuvela Theory. The person referred to in the reports of Parahuan survivors to Porad Anz as "the Guardian Etland" and believed by them to be a member of a special class of humans known as Tuvelas, does exist. Her name is Dr. Nile Etland and she is a native of Nandy-Cline. My office had a circumspect but very thorough investigation made of her activities and background. Most of you are familiar with the result. It indicates that Dr. Etland is very capable and highly intelligent, but in a normally human manner. She is a biochemist by training and profession, and there is nothing to suggest overtly that she might be one of a group of perhaps mutated humans who have made themselves the secret rulers and protectors of the Federation. A simultaneous investigation made of her associate, Dr. Ticos Cay, believed by the Parahuans to be possibly another Tuvela, had similar results. We have no reason to think that Dr. Cay is more or other than he appears to be.

Of particular interest is the fact that there is no public knowledge in the Federation of the role ascribed to these individuals by Parahuan survivors in bringing about the evidently panic-stricken retreat from Nandy-Cline. On the planet Dr. Etland and Dr. Cay are generally credited with having given the first warning of the presence of alien intruders, but it is assumed that this is all they did.

Under the circumstances, I felt it would be unwise to attempt to have Dr. Etland questioned directly. It would have been impossible in any case to question Dr. Cay. After a period of hospitalization, he appears to have returned to his research on one of the many floating jungles of that world; and it is believed that only Dr. Etland is aware of his current whereabouts.

The Lord Ildaan: The Lord Mingolm, recently the Alliance's Ambassador to Porad Anz, will comment on discrepancies between the Federation's publicized version of the Parahuan defeat and the account given by Parahuan survivors.

The Lord Mingolm: As the Committee knows, only two of the Parahuan invasion ships escaped destruction and eventually returned to Porad Anz. Aboard those ships were eighty-two Palachs and Great Palachs, twenty-eight of whom had been direct witnesses of the encounter between the Everliving and the female human referred to as the Guardian Etland.

All of these twenty-eight were members of the political faction known as the Voice of Action and under sentence of death for their complicity in the disastrous revolt of the faction on Nandy-Cline. All were questioned repeatedly, frequently under severe torture. I attended a number of the interrogations and on several occasions was permitted to question the subjects directly.

Their stories agreed on every significant point. Both Dr. Cay and Dr. Etland had stated openly that Dr. Etland was a Guardian of the Federation and that the designation of Tuvela applied to her. Such statements would not have convinced the Voice of Action, which had argued vehemently against the implications of the Tuvela Theory in the past, and particularly against the claim that Tuvelas appeared to have supernormal powers. However, the chain of events which began with the arrival of Dr. Etland in the area where they were holding Dr. Cay did convince them. There seemed to be nothing they could do to check her. She came and went as she chose, whether in the sea or in the dense floating forests, and was traceless as a ghost. Moreover, those who had the misfortune of encountering her did not report the fact. They simply disappeared. The list of the missing included an advanced Great Palach, renowned as a deadly fighter and the leader of the Voice of Action, and two battle-trained tarms, which are most efficiently destructive giant beasts. When a majority of the Everliving voted to parley with the Guardian, she came voluntarily into their forest stronghold, spoke to them and ordered them off the planet. The Voice of Action realized the nerve of their colleagues had broken and that the order would be obeyed. In frenzy and despair they struck out at the yielding majority and gained control of the invasion forces.

But now the situation simply worsened. The Voice of Action had made its move under the assumption that the Guardian Etland, in her willingness to speak to the Everliving, had allowed herself to be trapped. At the time she was still in a guarded compartment of the stronghold, disarmed and in the company of Dr. Cay. But when a detachment was sent to execute her there, it was destroyed in a horribly vicious attack by native life forms which until then had appeared completely innocuous. Deadly fumes infested other sections of the fort; and there was so much confusion that considerable time elapsed before it was discovered that the Guardian had left the stronghold, evidently unharmed, and had taken Dr. Cay with her.

Neither of the two was seen thereafter, but there were continuing manifestations of the Guardian's presence in the area. The Great Palachs and Palachs of the Voice of Action, now in furious dispute among themselves as to what might be the best course to follow, retreated to the expedition's command ship and to two other space vessels in the vicinity. The ships were stationed at depths below the surface of the sea which seemed to place them beyond the reach of the Guardian, but presently the command ship received a fragmentary report that she was attacking the two other vessels. This was followed by violent explosions in which the two ships evidently were destroyed.

It was enough. The command ship broadcast an order to all divisions on Nandy-Cline to withdraw at once from the planet. As we know, this belated attempt to escape was not successful. The general human attack already had begun. The command ship apparently was annihilated in the planet's atmosphere, and in a short time the entire expeditionary force was virtually wiped out.

I must emphasize strongly the oppressively accumulating effect these events produced on the Parahuans during the relatively short period in which they occurred. As related by the survivors, there was a growing sense of shock and dismay, the conviction finally of having challenged something like an indestructible supernatural power. At the time they were questioned, the survivors still seemed more disturbed by this experience than by the practical fact of their own impending demise on orders of Porad Anz, of which they were aware. It is not only that at the end there were no Parahuan disbelievers in the Tuvela Theory on Nandy-Cline but that the Tuvelas seemed to have proved to be monstrously more dangerous even than had been assumed. The impression was strengthened by the fact that the Guardian Etland appeared to be a young female. The Parahuans are aware that in the human species as in many others it is the male who is by biological and psychic endowment as well as by tradition the fighter. What a fully mature male Tuvela might have done to them in the circumstances staggered their imagination. Evidently the Guardians had considered it unnecessary to employ one of their more formidable members to dispose of the invasion forces; and evidently their judgment was sound.

I must conclude that the account of the surviving Parahuan witnesses was objectively correct. What they reported did occur. The interpretation we should put on these events may be another matter. But the reports circulating in the Federation obviously were distorted in that the true cause of the Parahuan rout at Nandy-Cline—that is, the appearance and actions of Dr. Etland—was not made public. I offer no opinion on the possible reasons for the falsification.

The Lord Ildaan: The Lord Toshin will comment.

The Lord Toshin: I agree with the Lord Mingolm's conclusion. We can assume that the Parahuan survivors told the truth as they knew it. We must ask, then, why the Federation's official version of the Parahuan defeat did not refer to the Tuvela Theory, why Dr. Etland's name was barely mentioned, and why she is credited only with having warned of the enemy presence.

The simplest explanation might seem to be that she is in fact, as she claimed and as Dr. Cay claimed, a Tuvela-Guardian. But that confronts us with the other question of why a Guardian should reveal her most secret identity and expose her group to the enemy. To that question there is no reasonable answer.

Further, I see no room in the structure of the Federation's Overgovernment for a class of hidden rulers. It is a multilayered complex in which the Federation Council, though popularly regarded as the central seat of authority, frequently appears to be acting more as moderator among numerous powerful departments. That all these organizations, led by very capable beings, should be the unwitting tools and pawns of Tuvela-Guardians may not be impossible but is highly questionable.

Therefore, I say we should not accept the possibility that Dr. Etland is a Guardian as a satisfactory explanation. I ask the Lord Ildaan to poll the Committee.

The Lord Ildaan: I poll the Committee and the Committee agrees. The Lord Toshin will resume comment.

The Lord Toshin: The second possible explanation is that Dr. Etland, while not a Guardian and not in the Parahuan sense a Tuvela, has paranormal abilities and employed them to terrorize the invasion force to the point of precipitate retreat. I refer to what is known as the Uld powers. To this, I can say only that there is nothing in her record or reputation to indicate she has such abilities. Beyond that, lacking sufficient information on the human use of Uld powers, I shall offer no opinion.

The Lord Ildaan: The Lord Gulhad will comment.

The Lord Gulhad: At one time I made an extensive investigation of this subject in the Federation. My purpose was to test a theory that the emergence of a species from its native world into space and the consequent impact of a wide variety of physical and psychic pressures leads eventually to a pronounced upsurge in its use of Uld powers. The human species, of course, has been in space for a very short time in biological terms. Because of the recent acute disturbances in its political history, I was unable to obtain confirmation of the theory. The available records are not sufficiently reliable.

However, I could establish that the humans of our day make use of Uld powers more extensively than most other intelligent species now known to us. Humans who do so are called psis. There is little popular interest in psis in the Federation, and there is considerable misinformation concerning them. It is possible that several branches of the Overgovernment are involved in psi activities, but I found no proof of it. It is also possible that the Federation has advanced the non-biological harnessing of Uld powers to an extent considerably beyond what is generally known, and is therefore relatively indifferent to its usually less exact control by living minds.

The question is then whether Dr. Etland, either directly or with the aid of Uld devices, could have used Uld powers to produce the disconcerting manifestations reported to the Committee by the Lord Mingolm. Did she incite normally harmless lower life forms to attack the Parahuans? Did she make herself invisible and generally untraceable? Did she cause opponents to disappear, perhaps into the depths of the sea, into space—even into dimensions presently unknown to us? Did she madden the minds of the Voice of Action, forcing them into their disastrous revolt? Was the explosion of the two submerged ships which triggered the abrupt retreat brought on by a manipulation of Uld powers?

All this is possible. We know or suspect that human psis and other users of Uld have produced phenomena which parallel those I listed.

However, it is improbable. In part because there is no record that any one Uld user could employ the powers in so many dissimilar ways. Even if we assume that Dr. Cay was also an accomplished psi and that the two worked together, it remains improbable.

It is further improbable because we cannot say that Dr. Etland could have achieved what she did only through the use of Uld power. Considered individually, each reported event might have had a normal cause. And since the deliberate control of Uld to a significant extent remains exceedingly rare also among humans, its use should not be assumed when other explanations are available.

The Lord Ildaan: I poll the Committee and the Committee agrees. The Lord Toshin will comment.

The Lord Toshin: There remains, as the Lord Gulhad indicated, a third possibility. I find it perhaps more disquieting than the two we have considered. It is, of course, that Dr. Etland is precisely what she seems to be—an exceptionally capable human, but one with no abnormal qualities and no mysterious authority. Our investigation indicated that she is thoroughly familiar with the floating forests of her world and the life forms to be found there, is skilled with weapons and on a number of occasions has engaged successfully in combat with her kind. Dr. Cay was a Parahuan captive long enough to have gained detailed information on the Tuvela Theory. It is difficult to see how he could have transmitted this knowledge to Dr. Etland. But if we assume he found a way of doing it, it seems we should accept, as the most probable explanation of the events reported by the Parahuan survivors, that Dr. Etland used the information and her familiarity with the area and its tactical possibilities, along with physical competence and ordinary weapons, to demoralize and eventually rout the enemy.

Of course, we cannot prove this. And evidently that is precisely what the Federation's Overgovernment intends, in seeing to it that no mention was made of Dr. Etland's role or the Tuvela Theory in the accepted reports on the Parahuan invasion. Any investigators who were aware of the Parahuan version of the affair would know something was being concealed but could only speculate, and perhaps speculate uneasily, on what was concealed. For note that it is not of major significance which of the possibilities considered here contains the answer. To an enemy, the individual we know as Dr. Etland would be as deadly in one aspect as in another. We should regard the silence of the Federation's authorities on the point as a warning directed to those who might base their actions on too definite a conclusion—such as the one made by Porad Anz. It implies that a hostile intruder cannot know in what shape disaster may confront him among humans, that if he comes he will face the unexpected—perhaps the uncalculable.

The Lord Mingolm: Still, we must calculate. We have established only that Dr. Etland was a dangerous individual. What information does the Parahuan mistake give us about the species?

The Lord Toshin: It confirms that the species is extremely variable. The Parahuan evaluation was based on the study of a few thousand individuals, plucked secretly from space over a long period of time and tested to destruction. No doubt Porad Anz learned a great deal about these humans in the process. Its mistake was to generalize from what it learned and to calculate from the generalizations. To say that the human is thus and so is almost to lie automatically. The species, its practices and philosophies remain unpredictable. Individuals vary, and the species varies with circumstances. This instability seems a main source of its strength. We cannot judge it by what it is today or was yesterday. We do not know what it will be tomorrow. That is the cause of our concern.

The Lord Ildaan: It is, indeed, the cause of our concern. And it seems from what has been said that the human Overgovernment must be considered now as a prime factor. The Lord Batras will comment.

The Lord Batras: The function of the Overgovernment is strategy. In part its strategies are directed at the universe beyond the Federation. But that is a small part.

Regard the Federation as the object of an invader's plans. It covers a vast area of space. Its inhabited worlds appear almost lost among the far greater number of worlds which support no human life. Below the central level, its political organization seems tenuous. Federation military power is great but thinly spread.

The area of the Federation would thus appear open to limited conquests by a determined and well prepared foe. But we are aware that during many star periods every such attempted thrust has failed. We have seen more subtle plans to weaken and cripple the human civilization fail as completely, and we still do not know specifically why some of them failed. However, on the basis of what we have observed, we can say in general now that the Federation is a biological fortress armed by the nature of its species. The fortress may be easily penetrated. When this occurs, it turns into a complex of unpredictable but always deadly traps.

This being true, we must ask why the Overgovernment persists in acting in a manner which appears almost designed to conceal the strength of the Federation's position. We have seen that its policy is to treat hostile activities as being of no importance and that it provides no more information concerning them than it can avoid. We may assume it genuinely believes its present galactic neighbors do not constitute a serious military threat. However, the great restraint it shows in retaliating for planned attacks must have a further reason. In the latest instance, it has not even forced Porad Anz to disarm, as it easily could have done.

I believe we have amassed sufficient information at last to explain the matter. The Overgovernment's main concern is with its own populations. What plans it has for the species we do not know. As yet, that defies analysis. But we know what plans it does not have for the species and the means it employs to keep it from turning into directions regarded as undesirable.

Consider the creature again as the Lord Toshin described it. Individuals vary in attitude and behavior, but the creature as a class is eminently dangerous. It is, of course, inherently aggressive. Before the structure of the Federation was forged, humans fought one another for many star periods throughout that area with a sustained fury rarely observed in other species. Since that time they have remained technically at peace. But the aggressive potential remains. It expresses itself now in many ways within the confines of the human culture.

I said that we know what the human Overgovernment does not want. It does not want its unstable, variable, dangerous species to develop a philosophy of space conquest from which it could gain nothing it does not already have, and through which it might return eventually to the periods of interhuman conflict which preceded the Federation. Possibly the Overgovernment is influenced by additional considerations in the matter. We do not know that. We do know that the human species is oriented at present to deal with other intelligent beings in a nonhostile manner. There are criminal exceptions to that rule—we and others have clashed with them. But those exceptions are regarded as criminals also by their kind.

This general attitude could change if the present humans of the Federation gained the impression they were being seriously challenged by outside enemies. So far, they have been given no reason to believe it. The Parahuan invasion was a serious challenge only in the minds of Porad Anz. We anticipated its failure but believed we could gain information from it—as we have done.

I submit to the Committee that we now have gained information enough. The Overgovernment has shown it is afraid of the effects continuing irritations of the kind might have on its species. We too should be wise enough to be afraid of such effects. If the Federation is launched on a pattern of retaliatory conquests, the pattern might well become an established habit. That is the real danger.

The Lord Ildaan: The Committee agrees. I speak then as the Lord Ildaan, representing the Alliance of the Lords of the Sessegur, Chiefs of the Dark Ships. I address the Wirrollan delegation and all those they represent. To the ends of the area through which the influence of the Alliance extends there will be no further hostile action prepared or planned against the human Federation. The Alliance forbids it, and the Dark Ships enforce our ruling as they have done in past star periods. Be warned!

The Committee concurs. The meeting is closed.