Reflex, the reflex that brings an animal out of sound sleep to its feet, brought Miles to his. He found himself standing almost between the two aliens. At close range their faces looked directly into his, no less human of feature or color or general appearance than they had looked before. But this close, it seemed to Miles that he felt an emanation from them—something too still, too composed to be human. And yet the eyes they fixed upon him were not unkind.
Only remote, as remote as the eyes of men on some high plateau looking down into a jungle of beasts.
“Miles,” said the one on his left, who was slightly the shorter of the two. His voice was a steady baritone—calm, passionless, distant, without foreign accent. “Are you ready to come with us?”
Still fogged by sleep, still with his nerves wound wire-tight by the animal reflex that had jerked him up out of slumber, Miles snapped out what he might not have said without thinking, otherwise.
“Do I have a choice?”
The two looked steadily at him.
“Of course you have a choice,” said the shorter of the two calmly. “You’d be no good, to your world or to us, unless you wanted to help us.”
Miles began to laugh. It was harsh, reflexive laughter that burst from him almost without intention. It took him a few seconds to get it under control, but finally, he did.
“Want to?” he said—his real feelings bursting out in spite of himself. “Of course I don’t want to. Yesterday I had my own life, with its future all planned out. Now the sun turns red, and it seems I have to go to some impossible place and do some impossible thing—instead of what I’ve been planning and working toward for five years! And you ask me if I want to!”
He stared at them, checking just in time the bitter laughter that was threatening to rise inside his throat again. They did not answer.
“Well?” he challenged. “Why should I want to?”
“To help your race live,” answered the shorter one emotionlessly. “That’s the only reason that will work. If you don’t want that, then we’ve been wasting our time here—and time is precious.”
He stopped speaking and gazed at Miles. Now it was Miles’ turn to feel that they were waiting for him to say something. But he did not know what to say.
“If you don’t want to be your people’s representative in the fight against the Horde,” said the shorter one, slowly and deliberately as if he were spelling matters out for Miles, “you should tell us now, and we will leave.”
Miles stared at him.
“You mean”—Miles looked narrowly at him—“you wouldn’t choose somebody else?”
“There’s no one else to choose,” said the shorter one. “No one, that is, who’d be worth our time to work with. If you don’t want to go, we’ll leave.”
“Wait,” said Miles, as the two turned away. They stopped and turned back again.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” said Miles. “It’s just that I don’t understand anything about all this. Don’t I have a right to have it explained to me first?”
“Of course,” answered the taller one unexpectedly. “Ask us whatever you want to know.”
“All right,” said Miles. “What makes me so different from everybody else in the world, to make you pick me?”
“You have a capability for identification with all the other people in your world,” answered the short one, “that is far greater than that of anyone else alive on that world at this present moment.”
“Understand, we don’t say,” put in the taller one, “that at the present moment you’ve got this identification. We only mean that the capacity, the potential to have it, is in you. With our help that potential can be developed. You can step forward in this ability to a point your own race won’t reach for many generations from now, under ordinary conditions.”
“Your race’s representative against the Horde has to have this identification,” said the shorter one. “Because you’re going to need to draw upon their sources of—” he hesitated, and then went on—“of something that they each possess so far only in tiny amounts. You must combine these tiny amounts in yourself, into something large enough so that you can effectively operate the type of weapon we will be giving you to use against the Horde.”
He stopped speaking. For a moment Miles’ mind churned with the information that had been given him. It sounded sensible—but he felt unexpectedly stubborn.
“How do I know this is all going to be for the benefit of human beings anyway?” he asked. “How do I know that it’s not a case of our not being in danger at all—but your needing me and whatever this thing is that everybody has a little bit of just for your own purposes?”
Their faces did not change as they gazed at him.
“You’ll have to trust us on that point,” said the taller one quietly.
“Tell me one thing then,” said Miles, challenging him. “Do you really look just like human beings?”
“No,” said the smaller one, and the word seemed to echo and reecho in the room. “We put on this appearance the way you might put on a suit of clothes.”
“I want to see you the way you actually are,” said Miles.
“No,” said the shorter one again. “You would not like what you saw if we showed you ourselves as we are.”
“I don’t care,” said Miles. He frowned. “I’m an artist. I’m used to looking at things objectively. I’ll make it a point not to let whatever you look like bother me.”
“No,” repeated the shorter one, still calmly. “You think you wouldn’t let it bother you. But it would. And your emotional reaction to us would get in the way of your working with us against the Horde, whether or not you believe it now.”
“Fine! I have to trust you!” said Miles grimly. “But you don’t trust me!”
“Trust us or not,” said the taller one. “If your world contributes a representative to the galaxy’s defense, that will entitle it to whatever protection all our galaxy’s defensive forces can give it. But your contribution is tiny. In the civilization from which we two come anyone, such as I or my friend here, can operate many weapons like the one you’ll be given to handle. In short, one of our people has fighting abilities worth many times that of the total population of your world. So to us it’s a small matter whether you join us or not. Your help counts—because the slightest additional bit of strength may be enough to swing the balance of power between the Horde and ourselves. But it is small to us, no matter how big it seems to you.”
“In short,” put in the smaller one, “to us you represent a fraction of a single individual defender like myself against the Horde. To yourself, you represent several billions of your people. The choice is up to you.”
“If we’re just one isolated little world, way out here,” said Miles, with the uneasy suspicion that he was clutching at straws, “and not worth much, why should the Horde bother with us at all? If there are so many of you worth so much more in toward the center of the galaxy?”
“You have no understanding of the numbers and rapacity of the Horde,” said the smaller one. “Suppose we show you a picture.”
Instantly the room was gone from around Miles. He stood in the midst of dirt and rock—an eroded desert stretching to the horizon. Nowhere was there an intelligent creature, an animal—or even any sign of a bush, or tree, or plant. There was nothing—nothing but the raw surface of a world.
Suddenly he was back in the room again.
“That is what a world looks like after the Silver Horde has passed,” said the shorter one. “That was a picture taken by those few who survived of the race that held the center of this galaxy before us, several million years ago. The Horde broke through then and processed everything organic for food. Its numbers are beyond your imagining. We could give you a figure, but it would have no real meaning for you.”