“We’re from beyond the sky, all right,” Lavon said. “But we’re not gods. We’re human beings, just like you. Are there many humans 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: a tall, deceptively relaxed, tawny young woman, someone from another world, but still ...
She tucked the knife back into her bright, matted hair— aha, Lavon thought confusedly, 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 itself, or anything else it contained.
“The Eaters can be conquered,” the thin, burring 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 Man again. I have already spoken to the protos of this world, and have told them that 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. He felt an unaccountable warmth.
“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?”
Lavon was looking at the girl. He had no answer for Shar’s question. It did not seem to be important.
MATURITY
By Theodore Sturgeon
Dr. Margaretta Wenzell, she of the smooth face and wise eyes and flowing dark hair, and the raft of letters after her name in the medical “Who’s Who,” allowed herself to be called “Peg” only by her equals, of whom there were few. Her superiors did not, and her inferiors dared not. And yet Dr. Wenzell was not a forbidding person in any way. She had fourteen months to go to get to her thirtieth birthday; her figure hadn’t changed since she was seventeen, and her face, while hardly suited for a magazine cover, was a natural for a salon study. She maintained her careful distance from most people for two reasons. One was that, as a gland specialist, she had to make a fetish of objectivity; and the other was the fact that only by a consistent attitude of impersonality could she keep her personal charm from being a drawback to her work. Her work meant more to her than anything else in life, and she saw to it that her life stayed that way.
And yet the boy striding beside her called her “Peg.” He had since he met her. He was neither her superior nor her inferior, and he was certainly not her equal. These subconscious divisions of Dr. Wenzell’s’ had nothing to do with age or social position. Her standards were her own, and since Robin English could not be judged by any of them—or by anyone else’s standards, for that matter—she had made no protest beyond a lift of the eyebrow. It couldn’t be important.
He held her arm as they crossed the rainy street. He always did that, and he was one of the half-dozen men she had met in her life who did it unconsciously and invariably.
“There’s a taxi!” she said.
He grinned. “So it is. Let’s take the subway.”
“Oh, Robin!”
“It’s only temporary. Why, I’ve almost finished that operetta, and any day now I’ll get the patent on that power brake of mine, and—” He smiled down at her. His face was round and ruddy, and it hadn’t quite enough chin, and Peg thought it was a delightful face. She wondered if it knew how to look angry or—purposeful.
“I know,” she said. “I know. And you’ll suddenly have bushels of money, and you won’t have to worry about taxis—”
“I don’t worry about ‘em anyhow. Maybe such things’ll bother me when your boy friend gets through with me.”
“They will, and don’t call him my boy friend.”
“Sorry,” he said casually.
They went down the steps at the subway terminal. Sorry. Robin could always dismiss things with that laconic expression. And he could. Whether he was sorry or not wasn’t important, somehow; it was the way he said it. It reduced the thing he was sorry for to so little value that it wasn’t worth being sorry about.
Peg stood watching him as he swung up to the change booth. He walked easily, with an incredible grace. As graceful as a cat, but not at all like a cat. It was like the way he thought—as well as a human being, but not like a human being. She watched the way the light fell on his strange, planeless, open face, and his tousled head of sandy horsehair. He annoyed her ever so much, and she thought that it was probably because she liked him.
He stood aside to let her through the turnstile, smiling at her and whistling a snatch of a Bach fugue through his teeth. That was another thing. Robin played competent piano and absolutely knocked-out trumpet; but he never played the classics. He never whistled anything else.
There was no train in. They strolled up the platform slowly. Peg couldn’t keep her eyes off Robin’s face. His sensitive nostrils dilated, and she had the odd idea that he was smelling a sound—the echoing shuffle of feet and machinery in the quiet where there should be no quiet. As they passed the massive beam-and-coil-spring bumper at the fold of the track, Robin paused, his eyes flicking over it, gauging its strength, judging its materials. It had never occurred to her to look at such a thing before. “What does that matter to you, Robin?”
He pointed. “First it knocks the train pigeontoed. Then she’ll nose into the beam there and the springs behind it will take up the shock. Now why do they use coils?”
“Why not?”
“Leaf springs would absorb the collision energy between the leaves, in friction. Coil springs store the energy and throw it right back… oh! I see. They took for granted when they designed it that the brakes would be set. Big as those springs are, they’re not going to shove the whole train back. And then, the play between the car couplings would—”
“But Robin—what does it matter? To you, I mean. No,” she said quickly as a thick little furrow appeared and disappeared between his eyes. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested. I’m just wondering exactly what it is about such devices that fascinates you so.”