Beside Miles, Luhon’s elbow no longer urged him on. With his sensitivity, Miles could feel the other crew members, behind him, baffled but equally spellbound.
“Perhaps. But explain it to me anyway,” said Miles.
“If you wish. You have earned whatever explanation you desire,” said the Center Alien. “As I said, your illogical, suicidal attack altered the factors of the situation—not only to our view, but evidently to the Horde’s as well. Your attack, alone, must have been something they could not understand, so that they expected the worst and turned their full strength to crush you. Our devices recomputed and found, as a result, that where before the slight but decisive edge of advantage had been in favor of the Horde, now because of your action there was an equally slight but decisive edge of advantage in our favor.”
The Center Alien paused. Miles could feel all the eyes within that huge globe on him and his companions.
“So,” the Center Alien went on with the same unvarying tone of voice, as if he were discussing something of no more importance than the time of day, “we came back and engaged the Horde after all.”
For a moment, within Miles’ brilliantly burning mind, a faint flicker of guilt awoke. With an ability to understand that he would not have had if he had not been in overdrive, he read clearly and sharply some of the meanings behind the Center Alien’s words. The individuals of this race, for all their lack of apparent emotion, wanted to live as badly as he did. Also, while their decisions were governed by their computing devices, they had no means of knowing whether that computation was ultimately correct or not. They had only known that the answer they got was the best that could be gotten within their power and the power of their computers. So, just as they had fled without shame—but undoubtedly with as deep an inner pain at the thought of what they were doing in abandoning their worlds to the onslaught of the Horde—they had returned without question. They had returned with as deep an inner courage as was possible to them, to enter a battle which they could not be sure they would win.
Miles felt Luhon stir against him. There was a quality of indecisiveness in that movement that announced that the gray-skinned crewmate was cut adrift from his earlier fierce desire to make the Center Aliens admit to cowardice. Now it was plain they could not be taken to task at all in the sense that Luhon and the others had envisioned. For they had done nothing, after all, but be true to their own different pattern of behavior.
“Thank you,” said Miles. “Now we understand.”
“We are glad you understand,” said the taller Center Alien. “But since this is a moment for understanding, there is something we would like to ask you.”
“Ask away,” said Miles, already expecting what was to come.
“Of all who joined us in the Battle Line,” said the Center Alien, “you twenty-three were the only ones who did not obey our order to retreat and save yourselves. Instead, you did a clearly reasonless thing. You attacked the Silver Horde alone. Yet all of you are thinking beings, though primitive. You must have realized that nothing you could do would make any difference to the question of whether your native worlds and peoples would escape or survive the Horde once it was among the stars of our galaxy. Also, you must have known that by no miracle whatsoever could your one tiny ship so much as slow down the advance of the Horde for a moment. In short, you knew that attacking them could do no good, that it was only a throwing away of your own lives. Older and many times advanced over you as we are, we should understand why you would do such a thing. But we do not. Alone, with no hope, why did you attack the Horde the way you did? Was there some way you could guess that by attacking, you would bring the rest of us back to join you in fighting after all?”
It struck Miles then, with the clarity of his overdrive-sharpened mind, that this was the first time he had ever heard one of the Center Alien race ask a question. Obviously this could mean only one thing. It must have occurred to this advanced race that the only reasonable possibility was that Miles and the others had some means of calculating the battle odds within their own minds and bodies which was superior to the calculating devices the Center Aliens themselves used.
“No,” answered Miles. “We didn’t expect you back. We knew we were attacking the Horde on our own, and we knew what had to happen if we met them alone.”
“Yes,” said the Center Alien. There was a second of silence. Then he went on—to Miles’ extrasensitive perceptions, it sensed, a little heavily. “We were almost certain that you could not have expected help. But, seeing you did not expect help, the question remains of why you did it.”
“We had no choice,” said Miles.
“No choice?” The Center Alien stared strangely at him. “You had a clear choice. Your choice was to leave, as you had been ordered to do.”
“No,” said Miles.
Once more he was conscious of standing between two points of view: the point of view of the Center Aliens and that of his crewmates—neither of whom fully saw and understood the situation and what had taken place in their meeting with the Horde. It was up to Miles now to satisfy them both, even if he could make neither understand what he now understood.
“Maybe it’s because, as you say, we’re primitive compared to the rest of you in the Battle Line,” said Miles slowly. “But our choice wasn’t a head choice, it was a heart choice. I don’t believe I can explain it to you. I can only tell you that it’s that way—with us. You can’t take people like myself and those here with me, who care for their own races, and set them out between those races and an enemy who threatens utter destruction—and then expect that we whom you set there will be able to step aside, leaving our people unshielded, simply because logic dictates that we’re going to lose if we try to fight the destroyer.”
He paused. From the beginning the huge globeful of watchers had been silent, and there was no more silence now than there had been before. Yet Miles felt a certain extra focusing of attention on him, a metaphorical holding of the breath by the hundreds of thousands or millions who were listening. He went on.
“Probably,” he said, “there’s no way for me to make you understand this. But in running away without fighting the Horde, we were leaving our people—probably to die. And we couldn’t do that. We aren’t built that way—so that we can cold-bloodedly save ourselves if they’re likely to be wiped out. To save ourselves under those conditions would have required a self-control greater than any of us has.”
Once more he paused. The globeful of listeners still listened.
“Our peoples,” Miles said, slowly, “are part of us, you see—the way our arms and legs are parts of our body. We couldn’t any more abandon them just to save ourselves than we could coolly submit to cutting off all our arms and legs so that the useless trunks of our bodies would be left to survive. If our people had to face death, the least we could do—not the most, but the least— was to face that death with them. It wasn’t any thinking decision we made. I repeat, it was an instinctive decision—to kill as many of the Horde as we could before we were killed. It wasn’t any different for us than if we’d come back and found our planets turned to desert, our people dead—and then we’d run into the Horde. Then, just as we did here, we’d have tried without thinking to kill as many of the Horde as we could before we were killed ourselves.”