curiosity they must be feeling toward each other. Angrily, MacEwan turned away to examine the traffic movements display.
There was an lllensan factory ship in orbit, a great, ungainly nonlander whose shuttle had touched down a few minutes earlier, and a Nidian ground transporter fitted with the chlorine breathers’ life-support was on the way in to pick up passengers. Their Tralthan-built and crewed passenger ship was nearly ready to board and stood on its apron on the other side of the main aircraft runway. It was one of the new ships which boasted of providing comfortable accommodation for six different oxygen-breathing species, but degrees of comfort were relative and MacEwan, Grawlya-Ki, and the other non-Tralthans in the lounge would shortly be judging it for themselves.
Apart from the lllensan shuttle and the Tralthan vessel, the only traffic was the Nidian atmosphere craft which took off and landed every few minutes. They were not large aircraft, but they did not need to be to hold a thousand Nidians. As the aircraft differed only in their registration markings, it seemed that the same machine was endlessly taking off and landing.
Angry because there was nothing else in the room to engage his attention fully, and because it occupied such a prominent Position in the center of the lounge that all eyes were naturally drawn to it, MacEwan turned finally to look once again at that frightful and familiar tableau.
Grawlya-Ki had already done so and was whining softly to itself.
It was a life-sized replica of the old Orligian war memorial, one of the countless thousands of copies which occupied public places of honor or appeared in miniature on the desks or in the homes of responsible and concerned beings on every world-of the Federation. The original had stood within its protective shield in the central Plaza of Orligia’s capital city for more than two centuries, during which a great many native and visiting entities of sensitivity and intelligence had tried vainly to describe its effect upon them.
For that war memorial was no aesthetic marble poem in which godlike figures gestured defiance or lay dying nobly with limbs arranged to the best advantage. Instead it consisted of an Orligian and an Earthman, surrounded by the shattered, remnants of a Control Room belonging to a type of ship now long obsolete.
The Orligian was standing crouched forward, the fur of its chest and face matted with blood. A few yards away lay the Earth-human, very obviously dying. The front of his uniform was in shreds, revealing the ghastly injuries he had sustained. Abdominal organs normally concealed by skin, layers of subcutaneous tissue and muscle were clearly visible. Yet this man, who had no business being alive much less being capable of movement, was struggling toward the Orligian.
Two combatants amid the wreckage of a warship trying to continue their battle hand to-hand?
The dozens of plaques spaced around the base of the tableau described the incident in all the written languages of the Federation.
They told of the epic, single-ship duel between the Orligian and the Earth-human commanders. So evenly matched had they been that, their respective crew members dead, their ships shot to pieces, armaments depleted and power gone, they had crash-landed close together on a world unknown to both of them. The Orligian, anxious to learn all it could regarding enemy ship systems, and driven by a more personal curiosity about its opponent, had boarded the wrecked Earth ship. They met.
For them the war was over, because the terribly wounded Earth-human did not know when he was going to die and the Orligian did not know when, if ever, its distress signal would bring rescuers. The distant, impersonal hatred they had felt toward each other was gone, dissipated by the six-hour period of maximum effort that had been their duel, and was replaced by feelings of mutual respect for the degree of professional competence displayed. So they tried to communicate, and succeeded.
It had been a slow, difficult, and extraordinarily painful process for both of them, but when they did talk they held nothing back. The Orligian knew that any verbal insubordination it might utter would die with this Earth- human, who in turn sensed the other’s sympathy and was in too much pain to care about the things he said about his own superiors. And while they talked the Earth-human learned something of vital importance, an enemy’s-eye view of the simple, stupid, and jointly misunderstood incident which had been responsible for starting the war in the first place.
It had been during the closing stages of this conversation that an Orligian ship which chanced to be in the area had landed and, after assessing the situation, used its Stopper on the Earth wreck.
Even now the operating principles of the Orligian primary space weapon were unclear to MacEwan. The weapon was capable of enclosing a small ship, or vital sections of a large one, within a field of stasis in which all motion stopped. Neither the ships nor their crew were harmed physically, but if someone so much as scratched the surface of one of those Stopped hulls or tried to slip a needle into the skin of one of the Stopped personnel, the result was an explosion of near-nuclear proportions.
But the Orligian stasis field projector had peaceful as well as military applications.
With great difficulty the section of Control Room and the two Stopped bodies it contained had been moved to Orligia, to occupy the central square of the planetary capital as the most gruesomely effective war memorial ever known, for 236 years. During that time the shaky peace which the two frozen beings had brought about between Orligia and Earth ripened into friendship, and medical science progressed to the point where the terribly injured Earth-human could be saved. Although its injuries had not been fatal, Grawlya-Ki had insisted on being Stopped with its friend so that it could see MacEwan cured for itself.
And then the two greatest heroes of the war, heroes because they had ended it, were removed from stasis, rushed to a hospital, and cured. For the first time, it was said, the truly great of history would receive the reward they deserved from posterity — and that was the way it had happened, just over thirty years ago.
Since then the two heroes, the only two entities in the whole Federation with direct experience of war, had grown increasingly monomaniacal on the subject until the honor and respect accorded them had gradually changed to reactions of impatience and embarrassment.
“Sometimes, Ki,” MacEwan saidt turning away from the frozen figures of their former selves, “I wonder if we should give up and try to find peace of mind like the Colonel said. Nobody listens to us anymore, yet all we are trying to tell them is to relax, to take off their heavy, bureaucratic gauntlets when extending the hand of friendship, and to speak and react honestly so that—”
“I am aware of the arguments,” Grawlya-Ki broke in, “and the completely unnecessary restatement of them, especially to one who shares your feelings in this matter, is suggestive of approaching senility.”
“Listen, you mangy, overgrown baboon!” MacEwan began furiously, but the Orligian ignored him.
“And senility is a condition which cannot be successfully treated by the Colonel’s psychiatrists,” it went on. “Neither, I submit, can they give psychiatric assistance to minds which are otherwise sane. As for my localized loss of fur, you are so lacking in male hormones that you can only grow it on your head and—”
“And your females grow more fur than you do,” MacEwan snapped back, then stopped.
He had been conned again.
Since that first historic meeting in MacEwan’s wrecked Control Room they had grown to know each other very well. Grawlya-Ki had assessed the present situation, decided that MacEwan was-feeling far too depressed for his own good, and instituted curative treatment in the form of a therapuetic argument combined with subtle reassurance regarding their sanity. MacEwan smiled.
“This frank and honest exchange of views,” he said quietly, “is distressing the other travelers. They probably think the Earth — Orligian war is about to restart, because they would never dream of saying such things to each other.”
“But they do dream,” Grawlya-ki said, its mind going off at one of its peculiarly Orligian tangents. “All intelligent life-forms require periods of unconsciousness during which they dream. Or have nightmares.”
“The trouble is,” MacEwan said, “they don’t share our particular nightmare.”
Grawlya-Ki was silent. Through the transparent outer wall of the lounge it was watching the rapid approach of the ground transporter from the Illensan shuttle The vehicle was a great, multiwheeled silver bullet distinctively marked to show that it was filled with chlorine, and tipped with a transparent control module whose atmosphere was suited to its Nidian driver. MacEwan wondered why all of the smaller intelligent life-forms, regardless of species, had a compulsion to drive fast. Had he stumbled upon one of the great cosmic truths?
“Maybe we should try a different approach,” the Orligian said, still watching the transporter. “Instead of trying to frighten them with nightmares, we should find them a pleasant and inspiring dream to — What is that idiot doing?”
