“But Jeff! I know that emotionally I feel that way too. But objectively, think how many thousands of years ahead of us they are!”
“But, Julie, we have that index of ingenuity. In men of this planet there is something quicker, tougher, more elastic. We started later than the others, but we’ll move faster. Those arbitrary divisions of theirs will fly by like mileposts on a road. And beyond their ultimate point of progress we will find yet a new division.”
“Nine thousand years of grace,” she said. She shuddered.
He turned her around and took her wrists. “Look at me, Julie. If we face it, we can both function more accurately. Put it into the crudest language. We plan to double-cross them. Once we can attain Division Four, all their techniques will become available. We can select and train others like ourselves. We can out-think them, if we must. We will become a polite and cooperative member of the Covenant. But we will continue to grow. And then, when the struggle comes at last, when the older species drops into the galaxy, it will be Earth which has the knowledge and skills to halt the conflict and take its rightful place.”
“I think that too, but maybe it’s just the typical emotional pattern of any primitive race, Jeff,” she said bitterly.
“Downstairs in the main dining room of this hotel, Julie, a world-famous muralist, a man of great genius and great bitterness, was asked to do a mural on one wall. He painted the mural, and in one small portion of it he wrote, ‘Dios no existe.’ Students defaced the mural and the management boarded it up. I don’t want to be a mystic. Before this all happened I had become as embittered as that muralist. But what he wrote was not as important as the fact that for many years He had turned his back on us. I’m not saying this well. Now there is a chance for us again.”
“And for the immediate future?”
“Our plans must be the same as theirs. Reach Division Four as soon as possible. That will be our point of divergence.”
Now together they had found their motive, and Syala had given them the means. The interlude on the far planet was a step that had been taken — a step that could never be retraced. It committed both of them to a vast lifetime of being intensely on guard. On guard against the little men on Earth who would fight Means and all he stood for. On guard against those of Syala and the other planets of Reeth who would quietly crush any attempt at Covenant domination.
She came, shivering, into his arms. “Suppose they hadn’t... come here?”
“Then we would have gone on, I suppose, with a rather poor possibility of living out even a normal life span.”
He caught her thought before she vocalized the words. “What will happen to us when they begin to notice that as the years go by, we stay the same?”
“New identities for us. New names and new histories, with all the proper coordinate memories planted in the minds of whatever group we select.”
She suddenly became very feminine. “And we’ll have time to grow very weary of each other, Jeff?”
“If we could know each other only as normal people do, yes. But now there are other thresholds of consciousness and contact and knowledge. Maybe there won’t be time to explore all of them.”
She blushed hotly, and with one accord they turned and glanced at the thing on the bed. The bedlamp slanted across the empty face. The mouth was like something carved of wood.
Julie yawned, stretched like a small silky cat.
And what they had to say to each other was better said without words. Each day and each night made words seem cruder, more awkward.
They left the decoy alone in its mindlessness, in its almost obscene emptiness of face. They shut the door softly behind them.
And then, because even the supermen do not hold themselves above double-checking even the most proven operational methods, the decoy raised itself on one elbow and stared long at the closed door, its eyes as cold as dead stars in their orbits, then slumped back into the position in which they had left it — the perfect and exact position, even to the curl of the thick white fingers of the hands that had once dug ten thousand post holes in the harsh drumbeat of the Texas sun.