There was a long silence. Then Joyce Barron turned to the tiny creature across the room. “This is true, what you say?”
“We have vision-proof ships observing every sector in the Rings. I am speaking the truth.”
“But not the whole truth,” Joyce said. “You claim that you will not intervene, and yet right now in this room you are intervening by drawing us into contact. Is that not true?” Their host hesitated a fraction of a second. “Your reasoning is sound, of course. We have already intervened, to this extent. But a different kind of intervention than before.”
“Then why did you bring us here?” the girl cried. “You must have had a reason. Why us? Why not other Earthmen and other Spacers?”
“Because we are still hoping that this disaster may be stopped,” the Searcher said, “and already you—the three of you—have taken the first critical step to stop it.” They stared at the tiny elfin creature, and then at each other as the Searcher continued.
“You may be the only three humans alive who can succeed where we have failed.” Hours later, after they had been escorted out of the Searchers’ ship, back through the cleft in the rock and into Ben Trefon’s little S-80, the three friends still were not certain that they had fully understood the responsibility that had suddenly fallen on their shoulders. Their memory of the encounter with the Searchers already had taken on a dreamlike quality, and as they sat and talked through the long hours, neither Ben nor the Barrons could be entirely certain that the encounter had not been a strange kind of delusion that they had shared together.
The Searchers were gone. Their escort had turned away from them at the entrance hatch to the S-80, and then vanished as though a light had been switched out. The tools Ben and Tom had left out were still where they had dropped them when they first became alarmed about Joyce’s disappearance, and everything since seemed slightly blurry in their memories.
And yet they all remembered quite clearly the haunting strains of the mauki chant and the strange story it had told, preserved for them on the ancient tape.
“I just don’t understand,” Joyce said when they were back in the ship with the hatch closed behind them. “You and Tom had listened to that tape before, and couldn’t understand it. How did we understand it in there?”
“It was being translated for us,” Ben said. “There’s no other explanation. We were hearing it through the Searchers’ ears. And yet we weren’t reading their minds. I’m sure that the tape was necessary for us to understand at all.”
Tom stuck his hands in his pockets. “Remember what he said before he started playing it—that hearing it would demonstrate something to us. Maybe he was trying to show us what two intelligent races in cooperation could do that neither could do alone.”
Ben nodded. “I thought of that. There never has been any real success in our scientists’ attempts to study extrasensory perception. It has always seemed as if men have had half a talent, and were missing the other half, somehow. And if another race of creatures somewhere had the other half—” He paused, shaking his head. “It could mean almost anything. Our bodies are limited by the temperatures and environments we can survive, but our minds aren’t. Even the speed-of-light barrier to star travel might fall away, if another intelligent race could help us away from our bodily limitations. Maybe our intelligence, here in our solar system, is just a tiny piece in a huge puzzle.”
“But what did the Searcher mean about stopping the war?” Joyce said. “He made it seem that we were the only ones who could hope to do anything.”
“Don’t you see?” Tom said excitedly. “Where else have Earthmen and Spacers joined hands and learned the truth about each other? Nowhere else. Yet you and I and Ben know that this war is pointless folly. There isn’t a single valid reason for it, if each side knew the truth about the other. And that was what the Searchers were trying to tell us, that somehow we have to tell both sides the truth and make them believe it just as we do.”
“It sounds good,” Ben said, “but how? I don’t have any power among my people, even if I could get to Asteroid Central, and that would mean running the Maze right under the nose of five hundred Earth ships. And as for you convincing your people—oh, it’s hopeless. Who would believe us? How could we tell them a story like this and get anybody even to listen?”
“You already know the answer to that,” Joyce Barron said quietly. “We can get people to listen just the way the Searchers got us to listen.”
Ben frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
“There was a ship that came back from a reprisal raid, years ago,” Joyce said. “An Earth ship, one of the ‘pirates’ you spoke of. They kidnapped a mauki and her five-year-old boy, and then destroyed the boy and tried to get the mauki back home. It didn’t work; they fell into a trap, and a Spacer ship boarded them and recaptured the mauki. But the reason they were trapped was because the mauki was singing.”
Ben looked skeptical. “How could that have been a trap?”
“You’re used to mauki chants. You’ve heard them all your life, and still you stop and listen, don’t you?”
“Well, I suppose I do.”
“Yes. And when that woman in that ship began to sing, every crewman stopped what he was doing to listen.”
They stared at her in silence. Then Ben said, “She’s got it, Tom. She’s got the answer. If we can find a way to put it to work in time.”
9. The Maze
BIT BY BIT, then, a plan evolved from their council of war. It was a slender thread to hang upon, but at least it was a beginning. Time after time Ben shook his head hopelessly and they nearly discarded the whole idea; it was almost suicidally risky, and even should the first steps succeed, there was no real hope that it would work when the chips were really down. It would be a desperation move, and there would be no turning back once they had started.
But time after time they came back to face the plain facts: feeble as it might be, it was the only conceivable plan that could work. Already things had moved too far and too fast. There would be no time for negotiating, no time to try a little at a time to get across to people on Earth and in space the awful implications of this war. It had to be done swiftly and surely, in terms that nobody could possibly misunderstand.
“We’ll only have one chance,” Tom said gloomily, looking up at Ben and his sister. “We’ve got to be certain it’s worth the risk.”
Ben nodded. “It’s worth it. My father never stopped to worry about the risk. That was why he had a belt to wear.”
“Then let’s get moving. There isn’t time to waste.”
The first impediment was staring them in the face already. The ship was still disabled. With renewed energy Tom and Ben tackled the repair work again, and now Joyce worked with them, driven by the same sense of urgency the others felt. During rest periods they talked, filling in details of the plan as best they could. It seemed incredible to them now that they had once mistrusted each other; now they were haunted by only one fear: that disaster might strike before they could get moving, that they might put their plan into action only to discover that they were too late.