Yes. World's forces were surely adequate.
He shivered in the slow, sloppy raindrops. The drops splashed over the instruments and controls on the roof, too, but they were built for it—everything on World was built, or evolved, to stand chronic wetness and warmth. Everything but Manyface, anyway. "I think I'll get out of the rain," he excused himself, and the smart erk reared himself up on his hind legs to touch vibrissae to fingers as a handshake in farewell.
It was just as Castor had said. The forces of Yanks and erks were unbeatable.
Manyface entered the city, toweling himself to get the rain off his body—not that that was much use, since a film of sweat sprang out at once to replace it. He gazed around benignly at smart erks and dumb, at the Yank sisters and occasional males who stared at him and whispered to each other. There was no sign on the little face in the front of the pumpkin of the great debate going on inside.
Not all of Manyface's committee was quite united. Corelli, Potter, Angorak, and Dien were, after all, not genetically Han Chinese. They did not have the same inbred devotion to Home as Fung himself or the rest of the implants. But all did have an aversion to racial suicide and even to unnecessary murders. All had seen what hap-paned to the island the erk ship had wiped sterile in a single pass. All agreed that something had to be done.
When the committee was in agreement it could act with great speed and precision. Manyface did not need to retire to ponder and regroup. He had eleven concurrent data processors going inside that pumpkin that so wearied the muscles of his neck. Each datum of information that came in went straight to the mind (or minds) that could make best use of it, and integrate it into knowledge already stored, and be ready to patch it into the general pattern when needed.
So Manyface did not change his ways. He continued to rubberneck and sightsee and question. The only difference was that now the questions were more pointed, and the points of interest on the tour more pointedly chosen.
The Yanks and the erks did not seem to notice.
The same gaggle of soft-skinned beetles followed him around in fascination. Most of them were dumb erks, tumbling over each other in excitement to see what this weirdest of biped creatures was up to. But smart erks were always somewhere around, too, equally curious. Even the Yankees—almost all of them female, of course— also took an interest—when they were not taking an interest in Castor, of course.
Manyface covered the erk city—no, he corrected himself (or Dien-the-engineer corrected all of them), it was not really an erk city, but a Living God city. It was not hopelessly wrong for human beings. But for erks it was grotesquely out of scale. The erks had made patchy attempts to adjust it to their tininess. Soft-surfaced ramps lay over staircases that would have been a trifle steep for even one of World's tall Yankees; the erks, smart and dumb alike, scuttled up and down them and did not seem even to wonder why they had not reprogrammed the Living Gods' machines to rebuild in their own scale. There was hardly a window in the city that an erk could look out of. The kitchens—they were more like chemical laboratories—were all two-tiered. An elevated platform had been built in to run along the sides of tables and stoves and benches of mixing devices. The erks who chose to create their own cuisine, instead of letting the automatics do it, climbed to the upper level for their work. The lower was not used at all—except by the exploring Manyface. It was the same in the public rooms and the libraries and even the living quarters, where erks had to hop up a bench to get into the tall, wide beds.
Manyface explored them all... especially the libraries.
It was too bad that the language the erks spoke among themselves, which was the language the Living Gods had spoken long ago, was not Chinese. Or even English. But the problem was not fatal, because much of the data in the library stores was pictorial, and there were English language summaries, prepared for the use of the Yankees, for the most important parts.
Corelli-the-anthropologist was busy there, learning what he could about the Yankees. He learned a great deal. He learned, for example, that when the original interstellar ship reached Alpha Eridani and was transported direct to World, the first thing the erks did was construct another transporter ship and send it back through the same portal to begin the long, slower-than-light trip to Earth. That trip had taken forty-two years. That was a very significant datum to Manyface; the Alpha Eridani outpost was the closest the erks had come to Earth. He learned, too, that the Yankee population amounted to just under 8,500, 8,450 of them female. He snickered to the rest of Manyface, "If they had just waited two more generations they could have outnumbered us!" And he learned a great deal more that did not as yet fit into a pattern.
The Yankee records themselves were wondrous. Not only were they in English (of course), but they were automatically kept current. The journal of the Yankees on World was updated every day. The most interesting files Corelli-the-anthropologist found were the files that covered the Earth visitors themselves.
Manyface had not realized those files existed. It was a surprise to him to deduce that among the erks and Yanks who flocked after them, there must have been some with cameras. And not just those who followed Manyface; and sometimes the camera must have been hidden in the walls—how else to account for the shot of Tsoong Delilah, naked as a skinned cat, furiously haranguing a naked and sullen Pettyman Castor over his attentions to the Feng girl? Or—this was a surprise—the zealot Tchai Howard observed in the act of vigorously seducing one of those huge, healthy Yank sisters?
Nothing was left out, it seemed. And nothing was hidden from the casual curiosity-seeker. The erks had never had any reason to mark any data "classified." What one erk knew, they could all know. The Yanks had never questioned the customs of the erks, and so it was all there.
All of it. Even the parts that made sweat pop out on the great forehead of Manyface and drove his component parts to panicky debate.
Even the parts that told how the erks had helped the cause of freedom all over the galaxy for thousands of years. The library was very productive for Manyface, and not only of risque entertainment.
"Those poor little pink things," sobbed Potter Alicia, and Angorak thundered, "To hell with those animals, Potter! What about our homeland?"
To that there was no easy answer. To that there was only silence in response, until Shum said diffidently, "Comrades? 1 think we have failed to understand the complexities of this situation."
"Indeed," said Angorak heavily. "Please enlighten us all, Comrade Shum!"
"Thank you, Comrade Angorak, I will. I propose that we consider the possibility that we have underestimated these erks. They are quite comic little creatures, to be sure. But they are not entirely ludicrous."
"Of course they're ludicrous, Shum," Potter said crossly. "They're not even human."