"I can't possibly let you look inside me. You may see something this time that will make me vulnerable to your techniques."

"Then change course."

"No. That would mean I can't go anywhere until you die about a thousand years from now. I refuse to accept such a limitation."

The second reference to Silkie age gave Cemp great pause. On Earth no one had known how long Silkies could live, since none born there had died a natural death ... He himself was only thirty-eight years of age.

"Look," he said finally, "if I have only a thousand years, why don't you just sit me out? That must be only a pinpoint in time compared with your lifespan."

"All right, we'll do that!" replied the Glis. But the deceleration continued.

Cemp telepathed, "If you don't turn aside, I must take action."

"What can you do?" was the contemptuous response.

It was a good question. What, indeed?

"I warn you," said Cemp.

"Just don't tell anyone about me. Other than that, do anything you please."

Cemp said, "I gather you've decided I'm not dangerous. And this is the way you act with those you consider harmless."

The Glis said that had Cemp been able to do something, he would already have done it. It finished, "And so I tell you flatly, I'm going to do as I please; and the only restriction on you is, don't violate my need for secrecy. Now, don't bother me again."

The meaning of the dismissal was clear. He had been judged helpless, categorized as someone whose desires need not be considered. The eighty days of inaction had stood against him. He hadn't attacked; therefore, he couldn't. That was palpably the other's logic.

Well ... what could he do?

He could make an energy a.s.sault. But that would take time to mount, and he could expect that the Silkie nation would be wiped out in retaliation and Earth destroyed.

Cemp decided that he was not ready to force such a calamity.

He was presently dismayed to realize that the Glis's a.n.a.lysis was correct. He could keep his mind shut and respect its need for secrecy--and nothing more.

He ought, it seemed to him, to point out to the Glis that there were different types of secrecy. Gradations. Secrecy about itself was one type. But secrecy about the star system ahead was quite another. The whole subject of secrecy-- Cemp's mind poised. Then he thought, How could I have missed it?

Yet, even as he wondered, he realized how it had happened. The Glis's need to withhold knowledge of itself had seemed understandable, and somehow the naturalness of it had made him bypa.s.s its implications. But now ...

Secrecy, he thought. Of course! That's it!

To Silkies, secrecy was an understood phenomenon.

After a few more seconds of thinking about it, Cemp took his first action. He reversed gravity in relation to the planetoid ma.s.s below him. Light as a thistledown, he floated up and away from the treetop that had been his observation post for so long. Soon he was speeding along granite corridors.

13.

Without incident, Cemp reached the chamber containing Earth.

As he set his signals so that all his screens would protect that precious round ball, Cemp permitted himself another increment of hope.

Secrets! he thought again, and his mind soared.

Life, in its natural impulse, had no secrets.

Baby gurgled or cried or manifested needs instant by instant as each feeling was experienced. But the child, growing older, was progressively admonished and inhibited, subjected to a thousand restraints. Yet all his life the growing being would want openness and unrestraint, would struggle to free himself from childhood conditioning.

Conditioning was not of itself logic of levels, but it was related--a step lower. The appearance was of a control center; that is, a rigidity. But it was a created center and could be repeatedly mobilized by the correct stimulus. That part was automatic.

The decisive fact was that, since the Glis had conditioned itself to secrecy--it was conditionable.

Having reached this penultimate point in his a.n.a.lysis, Cemp hesitated. As a Silkie, he was conditioned to incapacitate rather than kill, to negotiate rather than incapacitate, and to promote well-being everywhere.

Even for the Glis, death should be the final consideration not the first.

So he telepathed, "In all your long span, you have feared that someone would one day learn how to destroy-you. I have to tell you that I am that feared person. So unless you are prepared to back down from those insolent statements of a little while ago, you must die."

The answer came coldly. "I let you go to your planet. Earth because I have the real hostages under my complete control--the Silkie nation!"

"That is your final statement?" Cemp questioned.

"Yes. Cease these foolish threats. They are beginning to irritate me."

Cemp now said, "I know where you come from, what you are, and what happened to others like you."

Of course, he knew nothing of the kind. But it was the technique. By stating the generalization, he would evoke from the Glis's perception and memory network, first, the truth. Then, like all living things, the Glis would immediately have the automatic impulse to give forth the information as it actually was.

Yet before it could do so, it would exercise the restraint of secrecy. And that would be an exact pattern, a reafirmation of similar precise restraints in its long, long past. His problem was to utilize it before it destimulated, because as long as it held, it was the equivalent of a logic-of-levels gestalt.

Having, according to the theory, mobilized it, Cemp transmitted the triggering signal.

A startled thought came from the Glis: "What have you done?"

It was Cemp's turn to be sly, covert, scheming. He said, "I had to call to your attention that you had better deal with me."

It was too late for the Glis to help itself, but the pretense--if successful--might save many lives.

"I wish to point out," said the Glis, "that I have not yet damaged anything of value."

Cemp was profoundly relieved to hear the statement. But he had no regrets. With such a creature as this, he could not hope to repeat what he was doing against it. Once the process was started, it was all or nothing.

"What was it you said before about bargaining?" the Glis asked urgently.

Cemp steeled himself against sympathy.

The Glis continued, "I'll give you all my secrets in exchange for your telling me what you're doing to me. I'm experiencing severe internal disturbance, and I don't know why."

Cemp hesitated. It was a tremendous offer. But he divined that once he made such a promise, he would have to keep it.

What had happened was this: As he had hoped, his final signal had triggered the equivalent of a colony gestalt, in this instance the process by which life forms slowly over the millennia adjusted to exterior change.

And the cycle-completing control centers, the growth-change mechanisms in the great being, were stimulated.

Silkies understood the nature of growth, and of change they knew much from their own bodies. But Silkies were late indeed in the scheme of life. In terms of evolution, their cells were as old as the rocks and the planets. The entire history of life's progression was in every cell of a Silkie.

That could not be true of the Glis. It was from an ancient eon, and it had stopped time within itself. Or at least, it had not pa.s.sed on its seed, which was the way of change through time. In itself, it manifested old, primitive forms. Great forms they were, but the memory in each cell would be limited to what had gone before. Therefore, it couldn't know what, in holding back as it had, it was holding back from.

"I promise not to go on to the Nijjan system," said the Glis. "Observe--I'm already stopping."

Cemp sensed a cessation of the motion of the planetoid, but it seemed a minor act, not meaningful.

He merely noted, in pa.s.sing, the ident.i.ty of the star the Glis had named, observing that since it knew the name, it had been there before. This seemed to imply that the Glis had a purpose in going there.

It didn't matter; they were turning away from it, would never reach it. If there was a threat there for Cemp or for Silkies, it was now diverted and had been useful only in that it had forced him to action regardless of the consequences.

The Glis's willingness to make amends when it no longer had any choice was merely a sad commentary on its character, but much too late. Many planets too late, Cemp thought.

How many? he wondered. And because he was in the strange emotional condition of someone whose whole thought and effort are concentrated on a single intensely felt purpose, he asked the question aloud automatically, as it came into his mind.

"I don't think I should tell you; you might hold it against me," the Glis replied.

It must have sensed Cemp's adamant state, for it said quickly, "Eighteen hundred and twenty-three."

So many!

The total of them did not shock Cemp--it hurt him. For one of that countless number of unnecessary dead on those planets was Joanne. Another was Charley Baxter.

"Why have you done all this?" Cemp asked. "Why destroy all those planets?"

"They were so beautiful."

True. Cemp had a sudden mental vision of a great planet hanging in s.p.a.ce, its atmosphere ballooning up above the oceans and mountains and plains. He had seen that sight often, yet found it always a thing of splendor beyond all the visual delights of the universe.

The feeling pa.s.sed, for a planet was beautiful when it was brooded over by its parent sun and not as a shrunken museum piece.

The Glis with its planets was like a head hunter of old. Skillfully, he had murdered each victim. Patiently, he had reduced the head to its small size. Lovingly, he had placed it in his collection.

For the head hunter, each perfect miniature head was a symbol of his manhood. For the Glis, the planets were ... what?

Cemp couldn't imagine.

But he had delayed long enough. He sensed incipient violence on the communication band. He said hastily, "All right, I agree--as soon as you do what I want, I'll tell you exactly how I'm attacking you."

"What do you want?"

Cemp said, "First, let the other Silkies go outside."

"But you'll do as I've asked?"

"Yes. When you've released them, put me and the Earth outside, safely."

"Then you'll tell me?"

"Yes."

The Glis threatened, "If you don't, I'll smash your little planet. I will not let you or it escape, if you don't tell me."

"I'll tell you."

14.

The method that was used was, the entire section of the planetoid surrounding Cemp simply lifted up and shot off into the sky. Cemp found himself floating in black, empty s.p.a.ce, surrounded by meteorite debris.

The Glis's thought came to him, "I have done my part. Now tell me!"

Even as Cemp complied, he began to wonder if he really understood what was happening.

Uneasiness came. In setting in motion a cycle-completion process, he had taken it for granted that Nature would strike a balance. An old life form had somehow been preserved here, and in its body, evolution was now proceeding at lightning speed. Millions of years of change had already been compressed into minutes of time. Since none other of its kind remained alive, he had a.s.sumed that the species had long since evolved to ... what?

What was this creature? A chrysalis? An egg? Would it become a b.u.t.terfly of s.p.a.ce, a great worm, a gigantic bird?

Such possibilities had not occurred to him before. He had thought only of the possibility of extinction. But--it struck him keenly--he hadn't considered seriously enough what extinction might consist of in its end product.

Indeed, he hadn't thought about the existence of an end product.

Unhappily, Cemp remembered what the computer had reported--that the atomic structure of this giant being reflected a younger state of matter.

Could it be that, as the particles "adjusted" and changed to current norm, energy would be released on a hitherto unknown scale?

Below, a t.i.tanic thing happened.

Part of the planetoid lifted, and a solid ball of red-hot matter, at least a mile thick, lifted slowly out of it. As Cemp drew aside to let the improbable thing past him, he saw that an even more unlikely phenomenon was taking place. The "up" speed of the chunk of now white-hot rock and dirt was increasing--and the ma.s.s was growing.

It was well past him, and it was at least a hundred miles in diameter. A minute later, it was five hundred miles thick, and it was still expanding, still increasing in speed.

It expanded to a burning, incredible ma.s.s.