“In Zone F. He’s got a camp there.”
“He’s here, yes. Yes.”
Muller’s face was stony. Within, all was turmoil. “Why did he do all this? What does he want with me?”
Rawlins said, “You know that there’s a third intelligent race in the universe, beside us and the Hydrans.”
“Yes. They had just been discovered when I left. That was why I went to visit the Hydrans. I was supposed to arrange a defensive alliance with them, before these other people, these extragalactics, came in contact with us. It didn’t work. But what does this have to—”
“How much do you know about these extragalactics?”
“Very little,” Muller admitted. “Essentially, nothing but what I’ve just told you. The day I agreed to go to Beta Hydri IV was the first time I had heard about them. Boardman told me, but he wouldn’t say anything else. All he said was that they were extremely intelligent—a superior species, he said—and that they lived in a neighboring cluster. And that they had a galactic drive and might visit us some day.”
“We know more about them now,” Rawlins said.
“First tell me what Boardman wants with me.”
“Everything in order, and it’ll be easier.” Rawlins grinned, perhaps a bit tipsily. He leaned against the stone tub and stretched his legs far out in front of himself. He said, “We don’t actually know a great deal about the extragalactics. What we did was send out a ramjet, throw it into warp, and bring it out a few thousand light-years away. Or a few million light-years. I don’t know the details. Anyway, it was a drone ship with all sorts of eyes. The place it went to was one of the X-ray galaxies, classified information, but I’ve heard it was either in Cygnus A or Scorpius II. We found that one planet of the galactic system was inhabited by an advanced race of very alien aliens.”
“How alien?”
“They can see all up and down the spectrum,” Rawlins said. “Their basic visual range is in the high frequencies. They see by the light of X-rays. They also seem to be able to make use of the radio frequencies to see, or at least to get some kind of sensory information. And they pick up most wavelengths in between, except that they don’t have a great deal of interest in the stuff between infrared and ultraviolet. What we like to call the visible spectrum.”
“Wait a minute. Radio senses? Do you have any idea how long radio waves are? If they’re going to get any information out of a single wave, they’ll need eyes or receptors or whatever of gigantic size. How big are these beings supposed to be?”
“They could eat elephants for breakfast,” said Rawlins.
“Intelligent life doesn’t come that big.”
“What’s the limitation? This is a gas giant planet, all ocean, no gravity to speak of. They float. They have no square-cube problems.”
“And a bunch of superwhales has developed a technological culture?” Muller asked. “You won’t get me to believe—”
“They have,” said Rawlins. “I’ve told you, these are very alien aliens. They can’t build machinery themselves. But they have slaves.”
“Oh,” said Muller quietly.
“We’re only beginning to understand this, and of course I don’t have much of the inside information myself, but as I piece it together it seems that these beings make use of lower life-forms, turning them essentially into radio-controlled robots. They’ll use anything with limbs and mobility. They started with certain animals of their own planet, a small dolphin-like form perhaps on the threshold of intelligence, and worked through them to achieve a space drive. Then they got to neighboring planets—land planets— and took control of pseudoprimates, protochimps of some kind. They look for fingers. Manual dexterity counts a great deal with them. At present their sphere of influence covers some eighty light-years and appears to be spreading at an exponential rate.”
Muller shook his head. “This is worse nonsense than the stuff you were handing me about a cure. Look, there’s a limiting velocity for radio transmission, right? If they’re controlling flunkeys from eighty light-years away, it’ll take eighty years for any command to reach its destination. Every twitch of a muscle, every trifling movement —”
“They can leave their home world,” said Rawlins.
“But if they’re so big—”
“They’ve used their slave beings to build gravity tanks. They also have a star drive. All their colonies are run by overseers in orbit a few thousand kilometers up, floating in a simulated home-world environment. It takes one overseer to run one planet. I suppose they rotate tours of duty.”
Muller closed his eyes a moment. The image came to him of these colossal, unimaginable beasts spreading through their distant galaxy, impressing animals of all sorts into service, forging a captive society, vicariously technological, and drifting in orbit like spaceborne whales to direct and coordinate the grandiose improbable enterprise while themselves remaining incapable of the smallest physical act. Monstrous masses of glossy pink protoplasm, fresh from the sea, bristling with perceptors functioning at both ends of the spectrum. Whispering to one another in pulses of X-rays. Sending out orders via radio. No, he thought. No.
“Well,” he said at length, “what of it? They’re in another galaxy.”
“Not any longer. They’ve impinged on a few of our outlying colonies. Do you know what they do when they find a human world? They station an orbiting overseer above it and take control of the colonists. They find that humans make outstanding slaves, which isn’t very surprising. At the moment they have six of our worlds. They had a seventh, but we shot up their overseer. Now they make it much harder to do that. They just take control of our missiles as they home in, and throw them back.”
“If you’re inventing this,” said Muller, “I’ll kill you!”
“It’s true. I swear.”
“When did this begin?”
“Within the past year.”
“And what happens? Do they just march right through our galaxy and turn us all into zombies?”
“Boardman thinks we have one chance to prevent that.”
“Which is?”
Rawlins said, “The aliens don’t appear to realize that we’re intelligent beings. We can’t communicate with them, you see. They function on a completely nonverbal level, some kind of telepathic system. We’ve tried all sorts of ways to reach them, bombarding them with messages at every wavelength, without any flicker of a sign that they’re receiving us. Boardman believes that if we could persuade them that we have—well, souls—they might leave us alone. God knows why he thinks so. It’s some kind of computer prediction. He feels that these aliens work on a consistent moral scheme, that they’re willing to grab any animals which look useful, but that they wouldn’t touch a species that’s on the same side of the intelligence boundary as they are. And if we could show them somehow—”
“They see that we have cities. That we have a star drive. Doesn’t that prove intelligence?”
“Beavers make dams,” said Rawlins. “But we don’t make treaties with beavers. We don’t pay reparations when we drain their marshes. We know that in some way a beaver’s feelings don’t count.”
“Do we? Or have we simply decided arbitrarily that beavers are expendable? And what’s this talk of an intelligence boundary? There’s a continuous spectrum of intelligence, from the protozoa up through the primates. We’re a little smarter than the chimps, sure, but is it a
“I don’t want to argue philosophy with you,” Rawlins said hoarsely. “I’m trying to tell you what the situation is—and how it affects you.”
“Yes. How it affects me.”
“Boardman thinks that we really can get the radio beasts to leave our galaxy alone if we show them that we’re closer to them in intelligence than we are to their other slaves. If we get across to them that we have emotions, needs, ambitions, dreams.”
Muller spat. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
