Seed of the Gods

scales. I'll be damned if he didn't move. I was paralyzed. I won't say I forgot my duty, but I ignored regulations. This was the first intelligent life we'd ever encountered and I wasn't about to bug out of there and let it die. I watched, my hackles rising, as his big, thick, scaled chest heaved. Then I got some more oxygen into the dome. Soon we had it filled with good, sweet air. And that scaled monster sat up. «Contact, please, Dr. Janti,» I ordered. The alien was sitting on the little bed looking at us with a set of blue eyes unlike anything I'd ever seen—huge, soft, alive. Think of the eyes of one of those Satina sea nymphs and multiply them four times. He looked at us and the little creep from Belos II went probing into his mind. Meantime, this scaled cat was breathing us down to nothing. His lungs and cells could hold almost all the oxygen we pumped in. I was watching him. He looked at us. His face wasn't built for expression, being pretty well hidden by scales. He made no hostile move; he just looked. When he shifted his eyes to Janti, I felt a force in the air that I couldn't put my finger on. It was just something that came out of him. Then Janti lost control and started screaming that the alien had to be killed. The alien looked down at his female. She wasn't moving. She was dead. I felt an overwhelming sense of despair, as if the planet-killers had done in all our worlds with all my friends, family, crew, all the girls I'd ever loved, all the sweet grass I'd walked on and sat on, all the good, blue water, all the sweet air, everything. Gone. I don't have the words to describe the total sadness I felt. I wanted to reach out to him, but Janti was screaming that the alien had to be killed and that we had to blast the planet before it was too late. I had never realized that Janti was a psychopath. Whose mind can heal the mindhealer's mind? But all the time he'd been one of those damned doom-sayers and he was sure we'd run into a form of life that would do us all in unless we acted quick. In all this turmoil the scaled fellow turned and made an animal sound. It was a sound of pure pain. He put his arms around the female and held her dead body close. He rocked and rocked. It was quiet in the dome, because the good doctor had finally made his escape, taking all the air out with him. I pumped it up again. Then I went out and threatened to smash Janti's faceplate and let in space to boil his blood. Janti recovered his sanity and came back into the dome but he couldn't get any communication. I ordered him to contact, breaking every rule in the book. The scaled fellow was closed off tightly and Janti couldn't find a chink. He said the alien's mind was like a solid ball of steel. So I had to watch as this first intelligent being we've met in all our history died. He held the female close and rocked back and forth. I had tears running down inside my helmet. There was plenty of air in the dome, but the alien wouldn't breathe. He seemed to will himself to death. It took a long, long time and there was nothing we could do to reach him. We tried contact on all levels. But he was closed. Janti said his mind was the most powerful he had ever encountered. In the end we tried to pump oxygen into his mouth, but he merely voided it from his gills. He was from the planet, of course And the way he got to the satellite is one of the most incredible stories I've ever run into, fiction or otherwise. I've told you that the female breeders fly. Well, when we went down to the planet we landed on this fellow's home continent. As I've described, it's a piece of desolate real estate if I've ever seen one. It wasn't much better than the planet's moon. Janti and his help made hypno-contact. Luckily our encounter with the live one on the moon had warned us of the strength of their minds. If we'd made direct contact those Far Seer types would have sensed us. It turned out that the fellow we met on the moon was a hero, and their last hope. Everyone knew all about him. He'd been sent to the satellite because of their wild belief in nature. They just knew that there was a happy, sweet-aired world up there, so they sent these damned kids, and I say lads because the life span of a male breeder is about twenty-two N.Y. and that of the female breeder even less. The female breeder literally consumes her life substance in flight. But how did they manage to get there? Well, they had come up with something new. It wasn't a machine or anything like that. It was a mutation, those two beings were propelled to the moon of that planet on power of mind, Jack. Somehow, this Healer—he was called the New One—was able to «blend his flesh» with others. It was somewhat like a blood transfusion, only infinitely more complete, for he could go into the body of the others and heal them, as he healed himself, on the cell level. His fantastic capacity to store oxygen, combined with what food and air they could carry in that dome, gave him enough energy to send that whole crazy space ship, and that's what it was, all the way to the moon. Don't ask me why they didn't freeze. There was no artificial heat in the thing. Our boys think he might have been able to diffuse the heat from direct sunlight around the dome with his scales. At any rate, he had to have been exposed to direct sunlight and to the freezing cold. He must have had a fantastic tolerance for extremes in temperature, for when we found him he came out of his coma unharmed, except for a small ashlike deposit on his scales. The female had apparently died of a variety of things, cold, heat, radiation, and lack of oxygen. They went there expecting to find life and they found airless space and heat and cold and death. Back on the planet everyone knew all about the trip all over the western continent, and even in the eastern areas, too. We were interested in our first alien, naturally, so we traced him through the records in the minds of the Keepers and compiled the stat that we've submitted as exhibit one. Now maybe you're thinking it's a sad story but no justification for us to step in. I know that there are isolationists high up in the council of President Borne and they'll agree with Janti that these people could threaten us with their fantastic mental powers. How would we control people who can teleport, send fatal force from their mind, and live in conditions that would kill us in three minutes? I know that a lot of powerful people are going to insist on following regulations—no contact until a thorough study has been made. But if the study were carried out according to regulations, it would take twenty N.Y. Jack, we can't let these people die. We've spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to find exactly what we've found here, a civilization of intelligent beings. They're different, but not that different. They're gentle. When we pieced together the account of Rack the Healer from the minds of the Keepers and the others it was so human that there wasn't a one of us who wasn't touched. I like to think that Rack would be pleased with his book. It was taken from a lot of sources and the end of it is not yet written. We found a part of Rack's book in the mind of his infant child, a Keeper living in the east. We found more of it in the minds of his friends and their Keepers. I wanted you to read it even before you scanned the official reports, because I think it shows that these are nice people, Jack. They must be saved. Hell, I'm selfish. I want one of those Far Seers in my crew some day. What an exploration tool he'd be! And a Power Giver to do short range scouting. And a Healer to look around on hell-hole planets where even the best suit is only good for limited periods. I won't guarantee that if we took them into the United Planets they wouldn't be running things in a few hundred years, but we could do worse for leaders. They have gentleness, true regard for individual freedom, and a reverence for life of any sort. If they're smarter than we are, then we'll just have to buckle down and learn more. We just can't let them die. As I see it, we have three choices. We can let them die—and that's what will happen if the regulations are followed. In order to hide our contact we can move some or all of them under hypnosis and risk having them go into some kind of shock when they awaken on a totally different planet. Or, we can contact them, explain the whole situation, and move them to a nice, fresh planet. It wouldn't even have to be a prime planet. Worlds we look on as being waste worlds would be paradise to them. They'd live like kings on Terra II, for example. I am unalterably opposed to the first course of action, and I don't favor the second, because we'd be unable to move all of them in time. I therefore suggest we undertake the third alternative and in support of this course I have one more item. I said, earlier, that when I went out to see what my junior officer had reported I found my crew beside a regular junkpile. Up to now I haven't mentioned anything but the dome in which the two aliens made the trip from their world to the satellite. But there was something else. The spot where we found Rack the Healer and his nicely named female was not, obviously, their first landing on the moon. They had made some prior stops. We found Rack's footprints in the lunar dust. That fantastic scaled character could walk around in a complete vacuum, using his stored oxygen. He'd done a lot of exploration and all along he must have known that it was hopeless. He didn't have enough reserves to make it back home. His Breathers had been used up and were dying. His girl must have been dying. But he didn't give up and during his explorations he found this junkpile I mentioned. He knew, before he died, that he was not the first to make the trip from his planet to his moon, because his landing, his last one, was made alongside a meteorite-pitted, antique contraption that could have been nothing but the jettisoned state of a primitive combustion rocket. Yep, there it was. We found others later. And here was the real kick in the ass for us and for Rack. This thing has been there a helluva long long time. And I wondered, as I looked at it, what he thought. As you know from reading his book, he valued and speculated about the small chunks of metal he found on his planet. Even while he and his lover were dying he must have been amazed to discover such a store of metal. But he wouldn't have known what it was. And I thought of you, old buddy, and the talks we used to have about where we came from and about all our speculations about which direction our ancestors would have taken after they launched us into space. We dreamed about finding them and being welcomed. We would be the long-lost children home from the far stars. We'd be given the benefit of all their advanced wisdom. We'd gain immortality, and other fantastic gifts, because a society that, 75,000 N.Y. past, could launch a starship, would have made unbelievable advances. I'm sorry I have to kill that dream for you, because, knowing you, I'm sure there's a spot somewhere in your aging carcass where that young dream survives. But it's dead, that dream. We killed it when we landed on a barren satellite without a name, just a generic label,