It was some minutes before either returned, and then only one came back. It was the taller of the two who finally materialized alone in the pilot room of the ship, where Miles was waiting, and Miles’ awareness told him that the two of them were alone in the ship.
“I’ll take you now to your position on the line,” said the taller alien. As usual, he did nothing that Miles could see with his hands; but the unbroken surface of the dreadnought filling most of the screen began to slide off it at one side, and Miles knew that they were moving away from it and down the Battle Line toward its left end.
If the dreadnought had proved to be larger than Miles had ever imagined, the distance to the left end of the line from its middle turned out to be even longer than he had estimated. For several hours they slid at high speed past globe-shaped vessels of varying size, from the enormous bulk of the dreadnought down to the ships smaller than the one Miles was on. As they approached the far end of the line, the ships grew progressively smaller. Also, their shape changed. No longer were they all globular. Many of them were rod- or cigar-shaped.
“These are the ships,” the taller alien explained to Miles, without being asked, “of those outlying races that prefer to fight in their own way and with the ships they have built themselves and with which they are familiar. Because they’re effective, we let them do this. You, and those you’ll be joining, will fight in ships and weapons we supply.”
There was something chilling about this pronouncement. Miles had not grown close to either of the two Center Aliens, but if he had felt closer to one than another, it had been the shorter instead of the taller. The taller one had always seemed more remote and less approachable than the smaller alien. Now that remoteness came through to Miles with extra force. Miles felt as a speck of dust might feel, lectured by a mountain. He was not being given a choice—he was only being given orders.
In silence they moved on, until the ships dwindled to the point of being very small indeed, until, finally, the point was reached at which the ships, instead of hanging in space beside the raftlike structures which evidently held their supplies and material, were small enough to lie on those rafts. Still they went on, until they came at last to what seemed to be the end of the line.
Here, on a raft several times the size of a football field, lay a ship hardly bigger than a nuclear submarine of Earth. The larger ship holding Miles and the taller alien stopped perhaps half a mile from it.
“Now,” said the taller alien—and without warning he and Miles were transported to the raft.
Miles found himself standing on a metal surface at the foot of a metal ladder leading up to an open doorway in the side of the ship. There was no visible shell about the raft to enclose a breathable atmosphere, yet he breathed. The doorway was dark, in contrast with the light outside from the distant sunlamp. Miles could not see what might be inside.
“This ship,” said the taller alien quietly, “is the smallest of our scout ships. It is staffed by thirty individuals, each a representative of a world like your own. You will become the thirty-first—and last—individual to make up its crew. In the weeks to come, you, with the others, will learn to maneuver it and together use its weapon. Now follow me. I’ll take you to join the rest of the crew.”
The taller alien floated up the ladder. Miles, starting to float behind him, felt an unexpected spasm of stubbornness. Instead of levitating, he seized hold of the ladder and climbed it like an ordinary mortal.
As his head drew level with the entrance, he could see inside. The taller alien was waiting for him in what seemed to be a small room or hatchway with a further entrance beyond. Miles joined him, and the alien turned without a word to lead him through the interior hatchway into a large room furnished with chairs and tables of various sizes and dimensions. Miles walked after him into the light of the room—and stopped abruptly.
The room was full. On its furniture and around its walls stood and sat a variety of different-appearing beings. All were four-limbed, standing upright on the lower two and with handlike appendages at the end of their upper pair. They all were of roughly the same size and proportions and general shape. But there was tremendous variety.
No two had the same skin color. No two had the same facial appearance. All had roughly similar features, as far as possessing two eyes and a single nose and mouth was concerned. But from there on everything was different. Their appearance ranged from that of the completely innocuous to the completely ferocious—from one being who seemed as round and inoffensive as a toy bear to one who seemed a walking tiger, equipped with a pair of ripping teeth projecting from the upper jaw over his lower lip.
“Members of this ship,” said the alien, stepping aside to let them all see Miles, “let me introduce you to your new fellow crew member, who on his own world is known as Miles Vander.”
He spoke in a tongue which Miles had never heard before but which Miles found he understood, as he had earlier understood all the various languages of Earth.
He turned back to face Miles.
“I’ll leave you in their hands,” he said in English. And disappeared.
Miles looked around him.
Those of his new fellow crew members who had been seated about the room were now getting to their feet and moving forward. Those who had been on their feet were also moving forward.
“Well,” said Miles, speaking in the language he had just heard, “I’m glad to meet you all.”
There was no response. They continued to close in on him, making a tight circle with no space between any of them. Now he sensed it—with all his new sensitivity. There was an atmosphere in the room of savagery and bloodlust, of anticipation and fury. They closed in silently like wolves about a stranger wolf, the one with the tiger-like features moving in directly before Miles and directly toward him.
The tigerlike being came on. Even when the others stopped, now locked in a tight ring around Miles, he came on until he stood only at arm’s length from Miles. And then he stopped.
“My name is Chak’ha!” he said. He spoke the common language in a growling, throaty combination of sounds that no human vocal apparatus could have originated or imitated, but Miles understood him perfectly.
And even as he said it, Chak’ha launched himself, clawlike nails outstretched, tusks gleaming, at Miles’ throat, and Miles went down under the attack.
6
As he fell backward with the being called Chak’ha on top of him, Miles felt panic, like a cold jagged knife, ripping upward through his belly toward his throat.
For a moment he froze, staring up at the toothed face snarling down into his own. Then, out of something deep within him came a counteracting mingled fear and fury, as primitive and brutal as the attack on him. Suddenly he was fighting back.
It was a simple, instinctive, animallike battle. They rolled on the metal deck together, fighting, scratching, biting, and digging at each other with every nail, tooth, or bony extremity that could be used as a weapon. For some seconds, for Miles, there was nothing but this. He had awakened into an instinctive rage out of simple fear for his life. But just as the rage had followed fear, now something beyond rage followed again.
It came over him like drunkenness. Suddenly he found that he did not care what Chak’ha was doing to him as long as he was able to continue what he was doing to Chak’ha. The adrenalized passion of destruction filled and intoxicated him.