The coruscation as the beam interacted, in an ever-vaster intensity, with Cemp's barrier screen lit the chamber as if sunlight had suddenly been let in. It stayed lit as whoever was directing the beam tested the screen's durability in a sustained power thrust.

For Cemp, it was a fight that moved at lightning speed down the entire line of his defenses and came finally up against the hard core of the second method the Kibmadine had taught him.

There, and only there, he held his own.

7.

A minute went by before the attacker finally seemed to accept that Cemp simply used the beam itself to maintain the barrier. Hence, it took nothing out of him, and the barrier would last as long as the beam did, reforming as often as necessary.

As suddenly as it had begun, the attacking energy ceased.

Cemp stared around him, dismayed. The entire chamber was a shambles of twisted, white-hot machinery and debris. The granite walls had crumbled, exposing raw meteorite rock. Molten rock dripped in a score of flowing rivers from the shattered ceiling and walls. Great sections were still tumbling and sliding.

What had been a modern office had become in a matter of minutes a gutted desolation of blackened metal and rock.

For Cemp, the initial staggering reality was that only the high-speed Kibmadine screen had saved him. The a.s.sault had been gauged to overwhelm and overspeed the entire Silkie defense and attack system.

The intent had been death. No bargaining, no discussion, no questions.

The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred.

Yet after a little, another realization penetrated. I won! he thought.

Calm again but savage, he went down five more levels and emerged abruptly at the upper level of a great vista, a huge open s.p.a.ce. The city of the s.p.a.ce Silkies spread below him.

It was precisely and exactly a small Earth city--apartment buildings, private residences, tree-lined streets. Cemp was bemused, for here, too, the native Silkies had clearly attempted to create a human atmosphere.

He could make out figures on a sidewalk far below. He started down. When he was a hundred feet above them, the people stopped and looked up at him. One--a woman--directed a startled thought at him. "Who are you?"

Cemp told her.

The reaction of the four nearest people was astonishment. But they were not afraid or hostile.

The little group, three women and one man, waited for him. As Cemp came down, he was aware that they were signaling to others. Soon a crowd had gathered, mostly in human bodies, mostly women, but an even dozen arrived in Silkie form.

Guards? he wondered. But they were not antagonistic either. Everybody was mentally open, and what was disconcerting about that was, no one showed any awareness of the attack that had been made on him in the office section near the surface.

Instantly, he saw their unawareness as an opportunity. By keeping silent and alert, he would be able to spot his vicious a.s.sailant. He presumed that the violence had been planned and carried out at the administrative level, I'll find those so and sos! he thought grimly.

To his audience of innocent citizens, he said, "I'm acting as an emissary of the Earth Government. My purpose here is to discover what binding agreements are possible."

A woman called up to him, "We can't seem to change into attractive females, Earth-style. What do you suggest?"

A gale of laughter greeted her remark, Cemp was taken aback. He hadn't expected such easy friendliness from the crowd. But his determination did not waver. "I presume we can discuss that at government level," he said, "but it won't be first on the agenda."

Some remnants of his hate flow must have gone out to them with this thought, for a man said sharply, "He doesn't sound very friendly."

A woman added quickly, "Come now, Mr. Cemp. This is your real home."

Cemp had recovered. He replied in a steady, level thought, "You'll get what you give. Right now, you're giving good. But the agents your government sent to Earth made bloodthirsty threats."

His thought paused there, puzzled. For these people as they were right now did not seem to have any of that threat in them. It struck him that that should be very significant.

After a moment's hesitation, he finished, "I'm here to discover what it's all about, so why not direct me to someone in authority?"

"We don't have authorities." That was a woman.

A man said, "Mr. Cemp, we live a completely free existence here, and you and other Earth Silkies are invited to join us."

Cemp persisted, "Who decided to send those four hundred messengers to Earth?"

"We always do that, when the time comes," another woman replied.

"Complete with threats?" asked Cemp. "Threats of death?"

The woman seemed suddenly uncertain. She turned to one of the men. "You were down there," she said. "Did you threaten violence?"

The man hesitated. "It's a little vague," he said, "but I guess so." He added quickly, "It's always been this way when E-Lerd conditions us in connection with the Power. Memory tends to fade very quickly. In fact, I hadn't recalled that threat aspect until now." He seemed astonished. "I'll be d.a.m.ned. I think we'd better speak to E-Lerd and find the reason for it."

Cemp telepathed directly to the man, "What was your afterfeeling about what you had done?"

"Just that I communicated that we s.p.a.ce Silkies were here and that it was time for the Earth Silkies to become aware of their true origin."

He turned to the others. "This is incredible," he said. "I'm astounded. We need to look into E-Lerd's administration of the Power. I uttered murderous words when I was on Earth! That's not like me at all."

His complete amazement was more convincing than anything else could possibly have been.

Cemp said firmly, "I gather, then, that contrary to your earlier statements, you do have a leader and his name is E-Lerd."

One of the Silkies answered that. "No, he's not a leader, but I can see how that might be understood. We're free. No one tells us what to do. But we do delegate responsibilities. For example, E-Lerd is in charge of the Power, and we get its use through him. Would you like to talk to him, Mr. Cemp?"

"Indeed I would," said Cemp with intense satisfaction.

He was thinking, The Power! Of course. Who else? The person who has control of the Power is the only one who could have attacked me!

"My name is O-Vedd," said the s.p.a.ce Silkie. "Come with me."

His long, bulletlike body detached itself from the group of similar bodies and darted off over the heads of the crowd. Cemp followed. They came down to a small entrance and into a narrow, smooth-walled granite corridor. After a hundred feet this opened out to another huge s.p.a.ce. Here was a second city.

At least, for a moment that was what it looked like.

Then Cemp saw that the buildings were of a different character--not dwellings at all. For him, who was familiar with most of the paraphernalia of manufactured energy, there was no question. Some of the ma.s.sive structures below were the kind that housed atomic power. Others were distributing plants for electricity. Still others had the unmistakable shape of the Ylem transformation systems.

None of these, of course, was the Power, but here indeed was power in abundance.

Cemp followed O-Vedd down to the courtyard of a building complex that, despite all its shields, he had no difficulty in identifying as a source of magnetic beams.

The s.p.a.ce Silkie landed and transformed to human form, then stood and waited for Cemp to do likewise.

"Nothing doing 1" said Cemp curtly. "Ask him to come out here."

O-Vedd shrugged. As a human he was short and dark. He walked off and vanished into a doorway.

Cemp waited amid a silence that was broken only by the faint hum of power from the buildings. A breeze touched the supersensitive spy-ray extensions that he maintained in operation under all circ.u.mstances. The little wind registered through the spy mechanism but did not trigger the defense screens behind it.

It was only a breeze, after all, and he had never programmed himself to respond to such minor signals. He was about to dismiss it from his mind, about to contemplate his reaction to the s.p.a.ce Silkies--he liked the crowd he had seen--when he thought sharply, A breeze here!

Up went his screen. Out projected his perceptors. He had time to notice, then, that it was indeed a breeze but that it was being stirred by a blankness in the surrounding s.p.a.ce. Around Cemp, the courtyard grew hazy; then it faded.

There was no planetoid.

Cemp increased all signal sensitivity to maximum. He continued to float in the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, and off to one side was the colossal white circle that was the sun. Suddenly, he felt energy drain from his body. The sensation was of his Silkie screens going up, of his system resisting outside energy at many levels.

He thought in tense dismay, I'm in a fight. It's another attempt to kill me.

Whatever it was, it was automatic. His own perception remained cut off, and he was impelled to experience what the attacker wanted him to.

Cemp felt like a man suddenly set upon in pitch darkness. But what was appalling about it was that his senses were being held by other forces, preventing awareness of the nature of the attack. What he saw was-- Distance disappeared!

There, spread over many miles of s.p.a.ce, was a group of Silkies. Cemp saw them clearly, counted in his lightning fashion two hundred and eighty-eight, caught their thoughts, and recognized that these were the renegade Silkies from Earth.

Suddenly, he understood that they had been told where the Silkie planetoid was and were on their way "home".

Time was telescoped.

The entire group of Silkies was transported in what seemed an instant to within a short distance of the planetoid. Cemp could see the planetoid in the near distance--only a few miles away, twenty at the maximum.

But to him the baffling, deadly, fantastic thing was that as these marvelous events ran their course at one level of his perception, at another level the feeling remained that a determined attempt was being made to kill him.

He could see, feel, be aware of almost nothing. But throughout, the shadowy sensations continued. His energy fields were going through defensive motions. But it was all far away from his awareness, like a human dream.

Being a fully trained Silkie, Cemp watched the internal as well as the external developments with keen observation, strove instant by instant to grasp the reality, monitored incoming signals by the thousands.

He began to sense meaning and to formulate initial speculations about the nature of the physical-world phenomenon involved. And he had the feeling of being on the verge of his first computation, when, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.

The s.p.a.ce scene began to fade. Abruptly, it winked out.

He was back in the courtyard of the buildings that housed the magnetic-power complex. Coming toward him from the open doorway of the main building was O-Vedd. He was accompanied by a man who was of Cemp's general human build--over six feet and strongly muscled. His face was heavier than Cemp's, and his eyes were brown instead of gray.

As he came near, he said, "I am E-Lerd. Let's talk."

8.

"To begin with, I want to tell you the history of the Silkies," E-Lerd said.

Cemp was electrified by the statement. He had been braced for a bitter quarrel, and he could feel in himself a mult.i.tude of readjusting energy flows ... proof of the severity of the second all-out fight he had been in. And he absolutely required a complete explanation for the attacks on him.

At that moment, caught up as he was in a steely rage, nothing else could have diverted his attention. But ... the history of the Silkies! To Cemp, it was instantly the most important subject in the universe.

The Silkie planetoid, E-Lerd began, had entered the solar system from outer s.p.a.ce nearly three hundred years before. It had, in due course, been drawn into a Sol-Neptunian orbit. On its first encirclement of the Sun, Silkies visited the inner planets and found that Earth alone was inhabited.

Since they could change form, they studied the biological structure necessary to function in the two atmospheres of Earth--air and water--and set up an internal programming for that purpose.

Unfortunately, a small percentage of the human population, it was soon discovered, could tune in on the thoughts of Silkies. All those who did so in this first visit were quickly hunted down and their memories of the experience blotted out.

But because of these sensitive humans, it became necessary for Silkies to seem to be the product of human biological experiments. An interrelationship with human females was accordingly programmed into Silkies, so that the human female ovum and the male Silkie sperm would produce a Silkie who knew nothing of Silkie history.

In order to maintain this process on an automatic level, the Special People--those persons who could read Silkie minds--were maneuvered into being in charge of it.

Thereupon, all but one of the adult Silkies returned to their planetoid, which now went to the remote end of its...o...b..t. When it came again into the vicinity of Earth, more than a hundred years later, cautious visits were made.

It became apparent that several unplanned things had happened. Human biologists had experimented with the process. As a result, in the early stages, variants had been born. These had propagated their twisted traits and were continuing to do so, growing ever more numerous.

The actual consequences were: a number of true Silkies, capable of making the three-fold transformation at will; cla.s.s-B Silkies, who could transform from human to fish state, but could not become s.p.a.ce people; and a stable form, Variants!

The last two groups had largely taken to the oceans. Accordingly it was decided to leave the cla.s.s-B Silkies alone but to make an effort to inveigle Variants into gigantic s.p.a.ceships filled with water where they would be isolated and prevented from interbreeding.

This plan was already underway by the time the Silkie planetoid made its round of the sun and again headed out toward far Neptune.

Now they were back, and they had found an unfortunate situation. Somehow, Earth science, virtually ignored by the early visitors, had achieved a method for training the Silkie perception system.

The Earth Silkies had become a loyal-to-Earth, tight-knit, masterful group of beings, lacking only the Power.

Cemp "read" all this in E-Lerd's thought, and then, because he was amazed, he questioned him about what seemed a major omission in his story. Where had the Silkie planetoid come from?

E-Lerd showed his first impatience. "These journeys are too far," he telepathed. "They take too long. n.o.body remembers origins. Some other star system, obviously."

"Are you serious?" Cemp was astounded. "You don't know?"

But that was the story. Pry at it as he might, it did not change. Although E-Lerd's mind remained closed except for his telepathed thoughts, O-Vedd's mind was open. In it Cemp saw the same beliefs and the same lack of information.

But why the tampering with human biology and the intermixing of the two breeds?

"We always do that. That's how we live--in a relationship with the inhabitants of a system."

"How do you know you always do that? You just told me you can't remember where you came from this time or where you were before that."