Langford wet his dry lips. Reaching inside his resplendent uniform, he removed a small, shining object which he set down at the edge of his superior’s desk. “They shot this out at us when I ordered them to stand by for boarding,” he said. “It was contained in a small, translucent capsule which I picked up with a magnetic trawl. It’s just a model in miniature, but take a good look at it, sir; would you care to make the acquaintance of a creature like that in the flesh?”
Commander Gurney’s eyes widened and his mouth twitched slightly. “In the name of all that’s unholy, Langford, what is it?” he muttered.
Langford shook his head. “I wish I knew, sir. It looks quite a bit like a praying mantis. A little, metallic praying mantis six inches tall. But it doesn’t behave like one!”
The statuette on Gurney’s desk seemed chillingly lifelike in the cold light. It had been fashioned with flawless craftsmanship; its upraised forelimbs were leaf green, its abdomen salmon pink, and its gauzy wings shone with a dull, metallic luster as Langford turned it carefully about.
Gurney couldn’t help noticing, with a little shudder, that its mouthparts consisted of a cutting mandible, and a long, coiled membrane like the ligula of a honeybee. Huge, compound eyes occupied the upper half of the metal insect’s face.
Gurney’s hand had gone out, and was about to close on the little statue; but something in Langford’s stare made him change his mind. As his hand whipped back he fastened his gaze on Langford’s face with the ire of a peevish child denied access to a jampot.
“What in blazes has that to do with your failure to obey orders?” he demanded, with explosive vehemence. “That ship must have used an interstellar space-warp drive to appear out of nowhere in the middle of the Asteroid Belt. And you deliberately let it slip away from you!”
Langford shut his eyes before replying. He saw again the myriad stars of space, the dull red disk of Mars and the far-off gleam of the great outer planets. He saw the luminous hull of the alien ship looming up out of the void. An instant before, the viewpane had been filled with a sprinkling of very distant stars with a faint nebulosity behind them. The ship had appeared with the suddenness of an image forming on a screen, out of the dark matrix of empty space.
Langford leaned forward, a desperate urgency in his stare. “Mere alienage doesn’t justify the crime of murder, sir!” he said. “Attacking an alien race without weighing the outcome would have been an act of criminal folly, charged with great danger to ourselves.”
Commander Gurney shook his head in angry disagreement. “Just how would you define murder, Langford?” he demanded. “If a highly intelligent buzzsaw came at you would you bare your throat?”
Langford ignored the question. “Violence breeds violence, sir,” he said, with patient insistence. “Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose the inhabitants of another planet attacked you without giving you a chance to prove your friendliness?”
Langford’s eyes held a dogged conviction. “Remember, sir—to issue a warning is an act of forbearance. No reasonable man could mistake a warning for an aggressive act. If their weapons are superior to ours, or they are superior to us in other, truly terrifying ways, they proved their friendliness by warning us. Would you have had me attack their ship without studying that warning?”
Gurney’s eyes had returned to the statue. He seemed fascinated by the glitter of its folded wings. He had a sudden vision of the metal insect spreading its wings and taking off with a low, horrible droning.
Suddenly there was a dull throbbing in the Patrol commander’s temples. A frightful dread took possession of him, so that he could hardly breathe; in his mind’s gaze he saw a vast, stationary plain that seemed to hang suspended in midair above a fiery sea. Sweeping straight toward him, dark against the glow, were hundreds of flying mantis shapes with their arms upraised in the glow.
Gurney shuddered and gripped the arms of his chair. He transfixed Langford with an accusing stare. “Man, if you’d engaged them in open combat we’d at least know where we stand! We could have put the entire patrol on the alert. Now they’ve given us the slip and may show up anywhere, armed with weapons that could wipe out civilization overnight.”
“I chose what I believed to be the lesser of two evils, sir,” Langford said, stepping closer to the desk. His eyes rested briefly on the metal insect; then they returned to Gurney’s face.
“There were two metal insects in that capsule, sir. I’m going to show you exactly what happened to the one I experimented with.”
Langford’s forefinger whipped out as he spoke, striking the little statue sharply on its folded wing membranes. For an instant nothing happened; then, with appalling suddenness, the metal insect came to life. It spread its wings and ascended straight up into the air.
Gurney leapt to his feet with a startled cry. As he did so the flying insect’s wings blurred and another pair of wings came into view behind them. The wings were shadowy at first, but they quickly solidified, taking on a glittering sheen. Preying arms sprouted from them. Then, even more quickly, a big-eyed head and a writhing, salmon-pink abdomen.
The instant the second shape became a complete insect it whipped away from its parent image with a furious buzzing. As Gurney stared up in horror the original insect gave off eight more buzzing replicas of itself. They darted swiftly up toward the ceiling and circled furiously about, their wings gleaming in the cold light.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light. The flying replicas vanished and the original
