'Let me go back,' I said. 'I'11 have to talk this over with the others.'
I think that Doc right then began to suspect how deeply he had become committed?began to see for the first time the impossibility of us trusting one another.
'When you come back,' he told me, 'have it all thought out. I'll want some guarantees.'
'Sure, Doc,' I said.
'I mean this, Captain. I'm in deadly earnest. I'm not just fooling.'
'I know you aren't, Doc.'
I went back to where the others were clustered just a short distance from the building. I explained what was up.
'We'll have to spread out and charge him,' Hutch decided.
'He may get one or two of us, but we can pick him off.'
'He'll simply close the port,' I said. 'He can starve us out. In a pinch, he could try to take the ship up. If he ever managed to get sober, he could probably do it.'
'He's crazy,' said Pancake. 'Just plain drunken crazy.'
'Sure he is,' I said, 'and that makes him twice as deadly. He's been brooding on this business for a long, long time. He built up a guilt complex that's three miles high. And worst of all, he's got himself out on a limb and he can't back down.'
'We haven't got much time,' said Frost. 'We've got to think of something. A man can die of thirst. You can get awfully hungry in just a little while.'
The three of them got to squabbling about what was best to do and I sat down on the sand and leaned back against one of the machines and tried to figure Doc.
Doc was a failure as a medic; otherwise he'd not have tied up with us. More than likely, he had joined us as a gesture of defiance or despair?perhaps a bit of both. And besides being a failure, he was an idealist. He was out of place with us, but there'd been nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. For years, it had eaten at him and his values got all warped and there's no place better than deep space to get your values warped.
He was crazy as a coot, of course, but a special kind of crazy. If it hadn't been so ghastly, you might have called it glorious crazy.
You wanted to laugh him off or brush him to one side, for that was the kind of jerk he was, but he wouldn't laugh or brush.
I don't know if I heard a sound?a footstep, maybe?or if I just sensed another presence, but all at once I knew we'd been joined by someone.
I half got up and swung around toward the building and there, just outside the entrance, stood what looked at first to be a kind of moth made up in human size.
I don't mean it was an insect?it just had the look of one. Its face was muffled up in a cloak it wore and it was not a human face and there was a ruff rising from its head like those crests you see on the helmets in the ancient plays.
Then I saw that the cloak was not a cloak at all, but a part of the creature and it looked like it might be folded wings, but it wasn't wings.
'Gentlemen,' I said as quietly as I could, 'we have a visitor.'
I walked toward the creature soft and easy and alert, not wanting to frighten it, but all set to take evasive action if it tried to put the finger on me.
'Be ready, Hutch,' I said.
'I'm covering you,' Hutch assured me and it was a comfort to know that he was there. A man couldn't get into too much trouble with Hutch backing him.
I stopped about six feet from the creature and he didn't look as bad close up as he did at a distance. His eyes seemed to be kind and gentle and his funny face, alien as it was, had a sort of peacefulness about it. But even so, you can't always tell with aliens.
We stood there looking at one another. The both of us understood there was no use in talking. We just stood and sized one another up.
Then the creature took a couple of steps and reached out a hand that was more like a claw than hand. He took my hand in his and tugged for me to come. There were just two things to do?either snatch my hand away or go. I went.
I didn't stop to get it figured out, but there were several factors that helped make up my mind. First off, the creature seemed to be friendly and intelligent. And Hutch and all the others were there, just behind me. And over and above all, you don't get too far with aliens if you act stand-offish. So I went.
We walked into the silo and behind me I heard the tramping feet of the others and it was a sound that was good to hear.
I didn't waste any time wondering where the creature might have come from. I admitted to myself, as I walked along, that I had been half-expecting something just like this. The silo was so big that it could hold many things, even people or creatures we could not know about. After all, we'd explored only one small corner of the first floor of it. The creature, I figured, must have come from somewhere on the upper floors as soon as he learned about us. It might have taken quite a while, one way or another, for the news to reach him.
He led me up three ramps to the fourth floor of the building and went down a corridor for a little way, then went into a room.
It was not a large room. It held just one machine, but this one was a double model; it had two bucket seats and two helmets.
There was another creature in the room.
The first one led me over to the machine and motioned for me to take one of the seats.
I stood there for a while, watching Hutch and Pancake and Frost and all the others crowd into the place and line up against the wall. Frost said: 'A couple of you boys better stay outside and watch the corridor.'
Hutch asked me: 'You going to sit down in that contraption, Captain?'
'Why not?' I said. 'They seem to be all right. There's more of us than them. They don't mean us any harm.'
'It's taking a chance,' said Hutch.
'Since when have we stopped taking chances?'
The creature I had met outside had sat down in one of the seats, so I made a few adjustments in the other. While I was doing this, the second creature went to a file and got out two sticks, but these sticks were transparent instead of being black.
He lifted off the helmets and inserted the two sticks. Then he fitted one of the helmets on his fellow- creature's head and held out the other to me.
I sat down and let him put it on and suddenly I was squatting on the floor across a sort of big coffee-table from the gent I had met outside.
'Now we can talk,' said the creature, 'which we couldn't do before.'
I wasn't scared or flustered. It seemed just as natural as if it had been Hutch across the table.
'There will be a record made of everything we say,' said the creature. 'When we are finished, you will get one copy and I will get the other for our files. You might call it a pact or a contract or whatever term seems to be most applicable.'
'I'm not much at contracts,' I told him. 'There's too much legal flypaper tied up with most of them.'
'An agreement, then,' the creature suggested. 'A gentlemen's agreement.'
'Good enough,' I said. Agreements are convenient things. You can break them any time you want. Especially gentlemen's agreements.
'I suppose you have figured out what this place is,' he said.
'Well, not for sure,' I replied. 'Library is the closest that we have come.'
'It's a university, a galactic university. We specialize in extension or home-study courses.'
I'm afraid I gulped a bit. 'Why, that's just fine.'
'Our courses are open to all who wish to take them. There are no entrance fees and there is no tuition. Neither are there any scholastic requirements for enrollment. You yourself can see how difficult it would be to set up such requirements in a galaxy where there are many races of varying viewpoints and abilities.'
'You bet I can.'
