Chapter II

The _Photon II_ groaned, heaved and popped out of subspace for a fix before striking out on the last, short leg of its journey. As Stewart had feared, they were five light-years off course.

Ship Systems Officer Mortimer's thickly-fleshed face struggled with an embarrassing smile. "Well, you can't hit 'em on the nose _every_ time out," he rationalized, waddling back to the charts.

Stewart reflected that rare indeed were the occasions on which Mortimer came anywhere near the nasal target. Conceding the loss of nearly an entire day, he waited for Director Randall's permissive nod, then joined Mortimer in cutting the new navigation tapes.

It took two hours to process all data and feed them into the SCC-772. When the computer burped out the new heading, Stewart threaded the tape into the control programmer and decided to spend the uneventful period of subspace travel in his bunk.

Sleep came swiftly, but it was shallow and restless. More than once over the next several hours, as he plummeted down a chasm of nightmares, he regretted having left the control compartment.

First his dreams brought him back to the Hyadean Cluster, as they had on so many occasions during recent weeks. And, for a while, he drank in the blue-green beauty of the seven--or, was it eight?--worlds that seemed to beckon with all their irresistible allure.

They were incredibly splendrous, these planets that would soon embrace man and feed and clothe and shelter him. But, as he admired them in his dream, a sort of astronomical surrealism bunched them together--all in orbit around a central, massive sun--until it seemed they were occupying so compact an area that they must surely crumble under the weight of their mutual attraction.

And, as though upon his suggestion, crumble they did. Only, it was no pulverizing force that scattered them into fragmented rings, such as those around Sol's Saturn. Instead, each planet cracked like a hatching egg, its crust stripping away and exposing beneath a gruesome Harpy that was all razor-sharp talons and vicious beak and slime-filmed, ruffled feathers.

Stewart tried to scream himself awake but couldn't. He only flailed helplessly in the void while monstrous wings thrashed space into a frenzy, producing great currents that set the stars themselves to eddying and swirling.

They dived at him, but before their talons could sink into his flesh he awoke trembling and cold in his twisted, moist clothes.

For a long while he merely lay there trying to wash his mind of the horror. But the steady whine of the subspace drive reminded him that the _Photon_ was streaking in the direction of the Hyades. That it would end its headlong plunge in the Aldebaran system, only halfway there, brought no relief from his baseless, unreasonable fear.

When he returned to the control compartment, the ship was back in normal space and within Aldebaran Four-B's gravitational field.

He joined Carol Cummings in the forward section, hooking his arm through a view-port strap and mooring himself against null gravity.

"You suppose we're home free?" she asked uncertainly.

Her normally effusive smile, he noticed, had moderated considerably. "If McAllister doesn't louse up his landing."

"I take it he's not very efficient."

"Pure and simple understatement. Last time out he missed an entire continent. It was a case for Search and Rescue."

Carol pressed forward and soft light from Aldebaran Four, off the port bow, warmed her sculpturesque features with primrose high lights. "I should imagine he would have been cashiered."

"But he wasn't. Instead he turns up on this _crucial_ mission."

He busied himself with frequency adjustment on his portable transmitter. With it he would be able to tell, soon after landing, whether the Operations Co-ordinator could still be reached orally through its command discriminator circuit.

He flicked on the power switch, positioned the microphone comfortably against his larynx and sharply intoned a series of numerals. An oscilloscope faithfully traced the amplitude pattern, verifying effective transmission.

* * * * *

Down the companionway in the pilot's compartment, he could see McAllister anchored in his acceleration couch. He was drifting back and forth between padding and slack restraining straps, vicariously lost in the blood-and-guts action of a dramatape feeding into the view slot of his helmet.

Stewart read the label on the empty container--"The Kowalski Bros. in the Korean War."

"Always has his head buried in one of those escapist tapes, hasn't he?" Carol observed, still staring out the port.

"I don't think he ever grew up," Stewart agreed. But, again, even the Bureau seemed to contain its share of coasters who had never quite reached maturity, he remembered.

"Even in the Bureau," Carol observed thoughtfully, "you'll find coasters who've never reached maturity."

Intuitively, he tensed. Was it just coincidence that she had repeated, almost word for word, his own thoughts?

"I've never looked at any of those warfare tapes myself," she said. "But I've heard about them. Do you suppose armed conflict was really that horrible?"

"Pretty rough, according to the historians. It's not the sort of thing I'd like to be mixed up in."

"And McAllister?"

"Him? He's just building up a reservoir of false courage through his viewer." Yet, in fairness to the pilot, Stewart had to admit that he, himself, felt a deep and reasonable gratitude that wars were a thing of the historic past.

Carol sighed and glanced at him. "I'm certainly glad," she said, straight-faced, "that wars are a thing of the historic past."

He seized her arm. "Carol! Do you realize you're repeating _everything I'm thinking_? You've gone a step beyond radio empathy! You can pull in _thought_ waves too!"

"No-o-o, you're joking!"

"No. Honest, I--" But his words were lost in her welling laughter.

He followed her amused stare to his portable voice transmitter and the mike that still clung to his throat. And instantly he realized that his subvocalizations, being picked up and broadcast, were to her like a window opening on his thought processes.

"Why, you--" Feigning indignation, he caught her around the waist and pulled her toward him. Weightless, she drifted forward and spread out conveniently across his knees.

But before he could bring a hand down resoundingly on the curvature of taut coveralls, Randall drifted in on the scene.

Still laughing, Carol straightened and announced, "Saved--by the great, white-haired protector."

* * * * *

Randall grinned benignly, lighted his pipe and stared out the port. "Couldn't help hearing your conversation about the horror of warfare. I've seen all the documentary tapes. It _was_ rough."

"Thank God it's a closed book," Carol said seriously.

"But, _is_ it? There's still a large and articulate school that regards armed conflict as an instinctive human mechanism."

"We've had no war in two hundred years," Stewart said.

"Only because political subdivisions haven't had time for one. The instinct is blurred as a result of our expanding into a vacuum."

"I see." Carol's eyes strained with disillusionment. "And the question is--what happens when we run out of galaxy?"

"Fat chance." Stewart laughed. "We've got a few billion years to go before we find ourselves short on worlds."

Having apparently lost interest in the conversation, Randall was staring ahead at the onrushing satellite.

"That's one way of looking at it," Carol said pensively. "But there's also another possibility--resistance to the expansion."

"You kidding? In two centuries we haven't run into a single life form that's the intellectual equivalent of a Terran fiddler crab. What do you think, Chief?"

The director blew a stream of smoke at the swiftly expanding disc of Four-B. "I think our Maid of the Megacycles ought to start sniffing for that telepuppet team. I wouldn't want to rely on Mortimer's locating them with directional gear."

Carol faced the view port with her eyes closed for perhaps three minutes. Then she grinned. "I think I've got it! Not just a single, strong signal. Bundles of weak ones."

"It figures," Stewart verified. "The OC wouldn't be transmitting now. But the lesser puppets would be funneling the stuff into the CXB-1624. Can you identify any frequencies?"

She hesitated. "I'd say they're spaced out between fifteen hundred and two thousand kilo-cycles."

"You're a bit off. Should be sixteen to twenty-four hundred."

She opened her eyes, studied the rugged face of the satellite, then pointed. "There--near the end of that mountain range."

He handed her a mike and earphone set. "I'll tell McAllister you're ready to guide him in."

As Stewart had feared, McAllister's landing turned out to be a real corker. It even started with a three-gainer flip, rather than a simple end-about maneuver, when he first applied braking thrust.

* * * * *

Bigboss responded automatically to the abruptly peaking sine wave that reminded him it was time for feeding. Summoning the clan with a brisk flow of "come-and-get it" signals on all command wave lengths, he strutted to the center of the clearing and prepared the trough. Squatting, he switched on all outlet circuits and directed bristling current into each jack.

The workers came from the cave, over the hills, out of the shadowy depths of fissures, from behind grotesque outcroppings. Illuminators piercing the twilight gloom, they extended retractable electrodes and converged on Bigboss.

One by one, plugs slipped into jacks and steadily increasing drain gave assurance of an orderly distribution of current.

Minnie was late arriving. She came along clumsily, massive drill head bobbing with her awkward stride. Had Bigboss' memory pack been serving him more efficiently at the time, he might have realized her gyros couldn't be overcorrecting that radically without triggering a "fix-me-I'm-broke" impulse.

But, as it was, she completed her apparently innocuous approach with impunity. Taking a last, measured step, she toppled over backwards on her posterior analyzing chamber. An ostensibly helpless victim of imbalance, her neck teetered skyward and her drill head hovered over Bigboss' upper section.

Then it crashed down, the drill bit shattering his port video pickup lens. Instantly he lost visual contact with one quadrant of his surroundings. He reacted at once, though, swiveling his upper section around ninety degrees and bringing Minnie back in sight through another lens. Guarding against repetition of the accident, he reached out and gripped her neck in his vise. He guided her plug into the proper jack, maintaining his purchase just to be sure.

Accident? he asked himself.

It was an unfamiliar concept, at best. Then he recalled that "mishap" was a notion not applicable to members of the clan. Perhaps other beings in other universes were given to blunder. In His World, though, He had arranged it that His intellects would be without error. Here the concept "intent" had no polar opposite.

Which meant that Minnie, not having reported malfunctioning gyros, had _planned_ the destruction of one of his video sensors.

Vindictively, he started to turn upon her. But he realized he would be circumventing the primary compulsion--work, work, work. She was, after all, diligently discharging a worthwhile function in unraveling the secrets He had so cunningly hidden in His Creation.

* * * * *

Feeding finally over, he signaled a general "back-to-work" order on all wave lengths and watched his subjects return to their chores, motions brisk with restored energy.

For many sine wave peaks thereafter, Bigboss fretted over the ramifications of having lost visual contact with a ninety-degree wedge of his environs. Had Minnie intended that effect? Did her rationalization pack have the capacity to reason out such a complex cause-and-effect relationship? Had she anticipated his resulting vulnerability?

Oh, he was compensating readily enough through self-reprograming: stability for five sine wave saliences; activate upper section's horizontal servomechanism; circumrotate ninety degrees; stabilize; count five more waveform saliences; reverse procedure. That way three video sensors did the job of four.

It gave him adequate coverage. But there were those times when the demands of function modification required the full output of his PM&R pack and his defensive scanning had to be sacrificed.

Such as now--when he was receiving Screw Worm's clear and frantic "save-me" signals.

Activating his directional gear, he lumbered over to the precise spot--a gentle rise of topsoil not far from where Minnie herself was chipping away at a boulder. Engaging his ventral illuminator-sensor, he located Worm's most recent drill hole. The borer's distress impulses were issuing with great amplitude from the opening. Bigboss unfolded his scoop and went to work.

It wasn't long before he had uncovered the borer's rearward axial protuberance. Extending his ventral vise, he gripped Worm securely, heaved to free him from the rock formation in which he had become wedged, and brought him back to the surface.

Released, the lesser worker scurried off to rejoin Minnie.

Bigboss realized only then that, during the entire rescue operation, he had neglected his defensive scanning procedure.

Restoring his upper section's quarterly rotational motion, he regarded Minnie warily. Was there any significance to the fact that she was facing him from the other side of the boulder, such that each time she elevated her head her field of vision swept over him?

Experimentally, he moved twenty meters to his right. Compensating, she skewed left, maintaining her visual advantage.

A calculated maneuver? Of course, it _had_ to be. Perhaps her insolence should be dealt with summarily. But how could that be done without reducing the clan's over-all efficiency as a team dedicated to the compulsion of work, work, work?

* * * * *

At that moment Peter the Meter, busy scanning the sky with his battery of instruments, loosed a shrill eureka signal.

Bigboss thought for a moment that one of the latter's gamma ray spectrometers had been swamped. But, on monitoring Peter's telemetered stream, he discerned that the impulse was from an infrared photometer. A check of co-ordinates showed the source of disturbance to be skyward, with a dead zenith orientation.

He commandeered one of Sky Watcher's planetary telesensors and redirected it at the source of new emanation. Now there were additional data to throw light on the manifestation.

The disturbance was in the visual range; classification--material. A rapidly shifting parallax suggested either constant location and swift expansion, or steady size and brisk approach.

Sky Watcher, on his own adaptive initiative, settled that uncertainty. His radar gear calculated a variable approach momentum averaging twelve hundred kilometers an hour and decreasing.

Peter also improvised on his function, bringing into play a photometer that instantly gauged the emissive intensity of the disturbance: comparable to the parameter for solar brilliance.

The object had shifted from zenith and was drifting over into the quadrant wherein the clan's Totem was located. Bigboss responded with some degree of concern to this development. Did it represent a threat to their revered symbol of metallic kinship?

Then he had the object in his own visual field. It was a great, blazing ball of brilliance that extended a flickering tongue downward. Atop the sphere of fiery energy sat a shining silver needle that resembled nothing as much as it did _the clan's own Totem_!

Evaluation circuits frozen in a confusion of indecision, he stood there fully unaware that he had discontinued his protective scanning and had not brought Minnie into one of his lines of sight for a number of sine wave epipeaks.

He was shocked back into action, however, when an equilibrium circuit tripped the alarm that his attitude was unstable and beyond compensation within the limits of gyroscopic control.

He pivoted sharply and planted two pedal discs down in the direction of fall. As he did so, his upper command section swung around, bringing a video lens to bear on Minnie. Refocusing, he saw she had crept up from his blind quadrant and had begun drilling into his power-plant section.

Fool. In her thirst for supremacy, didn't she realize she could touch off an explosion that would hurl them both halfway to the pink planet?

He pulled away from the grinding bite of her drill and brought his vise swinging forcibly upward. It slammed into her forward analyzing compartment and sent her reeling backward. Her equilibrium system overextended, she toppled sideways and lay there kicking ineffectually.

By then, the great blazing light had disappeared beyond the hills at almost the exact site where the Totem was located.

He left Minnie to her struggles and went eagerly forward. Eventually, she would evaluate her position and hit upon the proper combination of responses to right herself.

Meanwhile the now surface-borne needle was a new environmental item that cried for analysis, with eureka signals already coming in from several workers. Maggie, for instance, was covering the ground in lurching strides, homing in on one of the new lines of force the object had established.

Seismo had recorded and sent along exciting data on tremors that could be interpreted in terms of a number of closely-spaced, localized impacts. Even Minnie--despite her predicament and in response to the basic compulsion of her function--was using her high neutron tool. Evaluation circuits humming, she was sending a stream of signals that fairly screamed, "Pure metal!"

And Grazer, abandoning a patch of lichen, was scrambling up a hillside in the direction of the recently arrived object. His eureka was the most frenzied of all. Which was understandable, since he was sensing DNA molecules for the first time in his memory!

The best Bigboss could surmise, from a precursory correlation of data, was that Grazer had detected the molecules in a substance that wound helically around the great needlelike form.

Then his rationalization circuits labored under peak voltage as an obscure memory fragment thrust itself up from one of his drums.

Again, it was a vague bit concerning his suspicions on the existence of insolent creatures who might imagine themselves superior to Him--might even be presumptuous enough to give orders to the Supreme Being!

If such creatures were more than spurious impressions, he reasoned, then wasn't it likely that they, too, could move about in celestial vessels? Hadn't He all along feared that if they came to contest His Reign they would come from the sky?

* * * * *

Voltage regulators clicked frantically as he shunted aside raging current and averted damage to his rationalization pack. But he could hardly consider the beings without overgenerating. They were _that_ infuriating.

Had the contemptuous creatures come at last, as he had always supposed they would? Was his period of agonizing vigilance at an end? Could this be the final accounting he had anticipated so anxiously?

Enraged, he lumbered forward, his blaster extended rigidly before him, as though it were a lance.