“That cannot be avoided, Rujit,” replied Tall-Thin. “When we read their minds we awaken extrasensory faculties which would ordinarily remain dormant in them.”
“And rudimentary.”
“And rudimentary.” Tall-Thin agreed. “It’s like stimulating a low-grade energy circuit with a high-grade charge. The low-grade circuit will remain supercharged for a brief period.”
“Would it not be safer to kill them at once?”
“Unnecessary killing is always unpleasant,” Tall-Thin said.
“We should be emotionally prepared for it,” Rujit countered. “We would not have survived and become great as a race if we had not conquered all such squeamishness in ourselves. We must be prepared to nullify all opposition by instant drastic action—the most drastic action available to us at any given time.”
Rujit paused for an instant to transfix Tall-Thin with an accusing stare. Then he went on quickly, “In an emergency it is often very difficult to decide instantly how necessary an action may be. To take pleasure in killing unnecessarily is therefore a survival attribute of a very high order.”
“I would as soon kill the Earth-children as not.” Tall-Thin said. “But the slightest emotional unpleasantness militates against survival. Every act we perform must be dictated by reason. Our moral grandeur as a race is based on absolute logic—not on blind instinct. Even in an emergency we are wise enough to determine how necessary an action may be. So your argument falls to pieces.”
Tall-Thin straightened, his parchment-dry face crinkling with rage. “This isn’t the first time you’ve questioned my wisdom and authority, Rujit!” he said and his voice was like the hiss of a snake uncoiling in the long grass of a jungle clearing.
Rujit stiffened as if invisible fangs had buried themselves in his flesh. His cheeks could hardly have been called ruddy to begin with but their pallor suddenly became extreme. He took a quick step backward, a look of horror coming into his eyes.
“You wouldn’t! No, no, Hilili!”
“The choice is no longer mine alone.”
“But I was just thinking out loud!”
Tall-Thin clicked off the beam, leaving Melvin still standing large-eyed and motionless against the wall. He raised the tube which had projected the beam until it was pointing directly at Rujit.
“I’m going to step up the beam,” he said.
“But why? Why, Hilili? For the love you bear me—”
“I bear you no love.”
“But you are my biogenetic twin, Hilili. We have been closer than ordinary brothers from birth.”
“It does not matter. It does not concern me. Family relationships militate against survival when reason falters in a single member of a family group.”
Tall-Thin’s voice hardened. “We came to this planet for one purpose—to colonize it for the good of all. We numbered thousands and now we are reduced to a pitiful remnant—just ourselves. Thanks to the stupidity of a few.”
“I was never one of the stupid ones!” Rujit protested. “I advised our immediate return. The unknown and hideous diseases which decimated us like migs, the atmospheric gases which rotted our ships so insidiously that we were not aware of the damage until they exploded in flight—remember, I kept insisting that we could not survive such hazards for long!”
“Your sound judgment in that respect was more than offset by your wilful insistence we explore the entire planet,” Tall-Thin countered. “Our ships were so numerous that they were observed in flight and we might have been destroyed completely when death and disaster struck.
“As might have been expected the very shape of our ships made them conspicuous. Fiery disks they must have seemed to the Earth dwellers, so terrifying that they would have eventually found a way to fathom the mystery, and strike back. A perishing remnant of an advanced race has never yet succeeded in killing two billion primitives armed with Class C-type weapons.”
“But how could I have known it then?”
“Ignorance is never an excuse!” Tall-Thin’s voice was a merciless rasp. “A well-organized logical mind does not make such mistakes. Now we are facing utter disaster unless we can get back to our home planet and warn The Twenty that it would be sheer madness to attempt to colonize this planet again without better disease-preventing safeguards and atmosphere-resisting metals. Such safeguards can and must be worked out.”
Tall-Thin paused, watching Melvin as if apprehensive that the praise he was about to bestow would be held against him to the detriment of his vanity.
“Unfortunately only two of us can go in this rocket, which has miraculously come into our possession. The primitive who constructed it, this Earth-child’s progenitor, must have an almost Class B-type mind. Only two of us, understand?”
“But—”
“The survival of the wisest. I’m afraid I shall have to extinguish you, Rujit.”
The tube lit up again, so brightly that Tall-Thin’s hand was blotted out by the glare. Equally blotted out was Rujit’s face but the rest of him did not vanish immediately. One arm disappeared but not the other—and there was a yawning dark gap between his knees and his waist.
It might not have seemed so horrible if Rujit had not shrieked first. The shriek had an outward-inward quality, echoing both inside the heads of the children and in the room as actual sound.
Even Tall-Thin seemed shaken by it, as if in a race that had outgrown the need for physical speech there could be nothing more unnerving than anguish so expressed.
Yet both the shriek and the almost instant blotting out of Rujit’s face were eclipsed in point of horror by the fading of the little man’s legs. They faded, kicking and protesting and spasmodically convulsed, faded in a ruby red glow that lingered for an instant in the still air like a slowly dissolving blood clot, then as slowly vanished.
It was at that moment Mary Anne ceased to think as a child. She dug her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming but the undaunted way in which her mind worked was a tribute to her forgetfulness of self. If he should do that to Melvin!
Tall-Thin must
