beyond thought, beyond belief!'
'The bottom's sloping,' Lavon said, looking ahead intently. 'The walls of the canyon are retreating, and the water's becoming rather silty. Let the stars wait, Shar; we're coming toward the entrance of our new world.'
Shar subsided moodily. His vision of space had disturbed him, perhaps seriously.
He took little notice of the great thing that was happening, but instead huddled worriedly over his own expanding speculations, Lavon felt the old gap between their two minds widening once more.
Now the bottom was tilting upward again. Lavon had no experience with delta-formation, for no rivulets left his own world, and the phenomenon worried him. But his worries were swept away in wonder as the ship topped the rise and nosed over.
Ahead, the bottom sloped away again, indefinitely, into glimmering depths. A proper sky was over them once more, and Lavon could see small rafts of plankton floating placidly beneath it. Almost at once, too, he saw several of the smaller kinds of protos, a few of which were already approaching the ship—
Then the girl came darting out of the depths, her features distorted with terror. At first she did not see the ship at all. She came twisting and turning lithely through the water, obviously hoping only to throw herself over the ridge of the delta and into the savage streamlet beyond.
Lavon was stunned. Not that there were men here—he had hoped for that—but at the girl's single-minded flight toward suicide.
'What—'
Then a dim buzzing began to grow in his ears, and he understood.
'Shar! Than! Tanol!' he bawled. 'Break out crossbows and spears! Knock out all the windows!' He lifted a foot and kicked through the big port in front of him.
Someone thrust a crossbow into his hand.
'Eh? What's happening?' Shar blurted.
'Rotifers!'
The cry went through the ship like a galvanic shock. The rotifers back in Lavon's own world were virtually extinct, but everyone knew thoroughly the grim history of the long battle man and proto had waged against them.
The girl spotted the ship suddenly and paused, stricken by despair at the sight of the new monster. She drifted with her own momentum, her eyes alternately fixed hypnotically upon the ship and glancing back over her shoulder, toward where the buzzing snarled louder and louder in the dimness.
'Don't stop!' Lavon shouted. 'This way, this way! We're friends! We'll help!'
Three great semi-transparent trumpets of smooth flesh bored over the rise, the many thick cilia of their coronas whirring greedily. Dicrans— the most predacious of the entire tribe of Eaters. They were quarreling thickly among themselves as they moved, with the few blurred, presymbolic noises which made up their 'language.'
Carefully, Lavon wound the crossbow, brought it to his shoulder, and fired. The bolt sang away through the water. It lost momentum rapidly, and was caught by a stray current which brought it closer to the girl than to the Eater at which Lavon had aimed.
He bit his lip, lowered the weapon, wound it up again. It did not pay to underestimate the range; he would have to wait until he could fire with effect.
Another bolt, cutting through the water from a side port, made him issue orders to cease firing.
The sudden irruption of the rotifers decided the girl. The motionless wooden monster was strange to her and had not yet menaced her—but she must have known what it would be like to have three Dicrans over her, each trying to grab away from the other the biggest share. She threw herself toward the big port. The Eaters screamed with fury and greed and bored after her.
She probably would not have made it, had not the dull vision of the lead Dicran made out the wooden shape of the ship at the last instant. It backed off, buzzing, and the other two sheered away to avoid colliding with it. After that they had another argument, though they could hardly have formulated what it was that they were fighting about. They were incapable of saying anything much more complicated than the equivalent of 'Yaah,' 'Drop dead,' and 'You're another.'
While they were still snarling at each other, Lavon pierced the nearest one all the way through with an arablast bolt. It disintegrated promptly.—rotifers are delicately organized creatures despite their ferocity—and the remaining two were at once involved in a lethal battle over the remains.
'Than, take a party out and spear me those two Eaters while they're still fighting,'
Lavon ordered. 'Don't forget to destroy their eggs, too. I can see that this world needs a little taming.'
The girl shot through the port and brought up against the far wall of the cabin, flailing in terror. Lavon tried to approach her, but from some where she produced a flake of stonewort chipped to a nasty point. H sat down on the stool before his control board and waited while she took in the cabin, Lavon, Shar, the pilot, the senescent Para.
At last she said: 'Are—you—the gods from beyond the sky?'
'We're from beyond the sky, all right,' Lavon said. 'But we're not gods. We're human beings, like yourself. Are there many humane here?'
The girl seemed to assess the situation very rapidly, savage though she was.
Lavon had the odd and impossible impression that he should recognize her. She tucked the knife back into her matted hair—ah, Lavon thought, that's a trick I may need to remember—and shook her head.
'We are few. The Eaters are everywhere. Soon they will have the last of us.'
Her fatalism was so complete that she actually did not seem to care.
'And you've never cooperated against them? Or asked the protos to help?'
'The protos?' She shrugged. 'They are as helpless as we are against the Eaters.
We have no weapons which kill at a distance, like yours. And it is too late now for such weapons to do any good. We are too few, the Eaters too many.'
Lavon shook his head emphatically. 'You've had one weapon that counts, all along. Against it, numbers mean nothing. We'll show you how we've used it. You may be able to use it even better than we did, once you've given it a try.'
The girl shrugged again. 'We have dreamed of such a weapon now and then, but never found it. I do not think that what you say is true. What is this weapon?'
'Brains,' Lavon said. 'Not just one brain, but brains. Working together.
Cooperation.'
'Lavon speaks the truth,' a weak voice said from the deck.
The Para stirred feebly. The girl watched it with wide eyes. The sound of the Para using human speech seemed to impress her more than the ship or anything else it contained.
'The Eaters can be conquered,' the thin, buzzing voice said. 'The protos will help, as they helped in the world from which we came. The protos fought this flight through space, and deprived Man of his records, but Man made the trip without the records. The protos will never oppose men again. I have already spoken to the protos of this world and have told them what Man can dream, Man can do, whether the protos wish it or not.
'Shar, your metal records are with you. They were hidden in the ship. My brothers will lead you to them.
'This organism dies now. It dies in confidence of knowledge, as an Intelligent creature dies. Man has taught us this. There is nothing that knowledge ... cannot do.
With it, men ... have crossed ... have crossed space...'
The voice whispered away. The shining slipper did not change, but something about it was gone. Lavon looked at the girl; their eyes met.
'We have crossed space,' Lavon repeated softly.
Shar's voice came to him across a great distance. The young-old man was whispering: 'But have we?'
'As far as I'm concerned, yes,' said Lavon.
'This is a slightly unusual request,' said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. 'As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence
