There was a flash of motion caught in the corner of his eyes. As quickly as he could in his heavy suit, he turned, then screamed. The Kloro he had thought dead was rising to its feet.
Its neck hung limp, an oozing mass of tissue mash, but its arms reached out blindly, and the tentacles about its chest vibrated rapidly like innumerable snakes’ tongues.
It was blind, of course. The destruction of its neck-stalk had deprived it of all sensory equipment, and partial asphyxiation had disorganized it. But the brain remained whole and safe in the abdomen. It still lived.
Mullen backed away. He circled, trying clumsily and unsuccessfully to tiptoe, though he knew that what was left of the Kloro was also deaf. It blundered on its way, struck a wall, felt to the base and began sidling along it.
Mullen cast about desperately for a weapon, found nothing. There was the Kloro’s holster, but he dared not reach for it. Why hadn’t he snatched it at the very first? Fool!
The door to the control room opened. It made almost no noise. Mullen turned, quivering.
The other Kloro entered, unharmed, entire. It stood in the doorway for a moment, chest-tendrils stiff and unmoving; its neck-stalk stretched forward; its horrible eyes flickering first at him and then at its nearly dead comrade.
And then its hand moved quickly to its side.
Mullen, without awareness, moved as quickly in pure reflex. He stretched out the hose of the spare oxygen-cylinder, which, since entering the control room, he had replaced in its suit-clamp, and cracked the valve. He didn’t bother reducing the pressure. He let it gush out unchecked so that he nearly staggered under the backward push.
He could see the oxygen stream. It was a pale puff, billowing out amid the chlorine-green. It caught the Kloro with one hand on the weapon’s holster.
The Kloro threw its hands up. The little beak on its head-nodule opened alarmingly but noiselessly. It staggered and fell, writhed for a moment, then lay still. Mullen approached and played the oxygen-stream upon its body as though he were extinguishing a fire. And then he raised his heavy foot and brought it down upon the center of the neck-stalk and crushed it on the floor.
He turned to the first. It was sprawled, rigid.
The whole room was pale with oxygen, enough to kill whole legions of Kloros, and his cylinder was empty.
Mullen stepped over the dead Kloro, out of the control room and along the main corridor toward the prisoners’ room.
Reaction had set in. He was whimpering in blind, incoherent fright.
Stuart was tired. False hands and all, he was at the controls of a ship once again. Two light cruisers of Earth were on the way. For better than twenty-four hours he had handled the controls virtually alone. He had discarded the chlorinating equipment, rerigged the old atmospherics, located the ship’s position in space, tried to plot a course, and sent out carefully guarded signals-which had worked.
So when the door of the control room opened, he was a little annoyed. He was too tired to play conversational handball. Then he turned, and it was Mullen stepping inside.
Stuart said, “For God’s sake, get back into bed, Mullen!”
Mullen said, “I’m tired of sleeping, even though I never thought I would be a while ago.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m stiff all over. Especially my side.” He grimaced and stared involuntarily around.
“Don’t look for the Kloros,” Stuart said. “We dumped the poor devils.” He shook his head. “I was sorry for them. To themselves, they’re the human beings, you know, and we’re the aliens. Not that I’d rather they’d killed you, you understand.”
“I understand.”
Stuart turned a sidelong glance upon the little man who sat looking at the map of Earth and went on, “I owe you a particular and personal apology, Mullen. I didn’t think much of you.”
“It was your privilege,” said Mullen in his dry voice, There was no feeling in it.
“No, it wasn’t. It is no one’s privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.”
“Have you been thinking about this?”
“Yes, all day. Maybe I can’t explain. It’s these hands.” He held them up before him, spread out. “It was hard knowing that other people had hands of their own. I had to hate them for it. I always had to do my best to investigate and belittle their motives, point up their deficiencies, expose their stupidities. I had to do anything that would prove to myself that they weren’t worth envying.”
Mullen moved restlessly. “This explanation is not necessary.”
“It is. It is!” Stuart felt his thoughts intently, strained to put them into words. “For years I’ve abandoned hope of finding any decency in human beings. Then you climbed into the C-chute.”
“You had better understand,” said Mullen, “that I was motivated by practical and selfish considerations. I will not have you present me to myself as a hero.”
“I wasn’t intending to. I know that you would do nothing without a reason. It was what your action did to the rest of us. It turned a collection of phonies and fools into decent people. And not by magic either. They were decent all along. It was just that they needed something to live up to and you supplied it. And-I’m one of them. I’ll have to live up to you, too. For the rest of my life, probably.”
Mullen turned away uncomfortably. His hand straightened his sleeves, which were not in the least twisted. His finger rested on the map.
He said, “I was born in Richmond, Virginia, you know. Here it is. I’ll be going there first. Where were you born?”
“Toronto,” said Stuart.
“That’s right here. Not very far apart on the map, is it?”
Stuart said, “Would you tell me something?”
“If I can.”
“Just why did you go out there?”
Mullen’s precise mouth pursed. He said, dryly, “Wouldn’t my rather prosaic reason ruin the inspirational effect?”
“Call it intellectual curiosity. Each of the rest of us had such obvious motives. Porter was scared to death of being interned; Leblanc wanted to get back to his sweetheart; Polyorketes wanted to kill Kloros; and Windham was a patriot according to his lights. As for me, I thought of myself as a noble idealist, I’m afraid. Yet in none of us was the motivation strong enough to get us into a spacesuit and out the C-chute. Then what made you do it, you, of all people?”
“Why the phrase, ‘of all people’?”
“Don’t be offended, but you seem devoid of all emotion.”
“Do I?” Mullen’s voice did not change. It remained precise and soft, yet somehow a tightness had entered it. “That’s only training, Mr. Stuart, and self-discipline; not nature. A small man can have no respectable emotions. Is there anything more ridiculous than a man like myself in a state of rage? I’m five feet and one-half inch tall, and one hundred and two pounds in weight, if you care for exact figures. I insist on the half inch and the two pounds.
“Can I be dignified? Proud? Draw myself to my full height without inducing laughter? Where can I meet a woman who will not dismiss me instantly with a giggle? Naturally, I’ve had to learn to dispense with external display of emotion.
“You talk about deformities. No one would notice your hands or know they were different, if you weren’t so eager to tell people all about it the instant you meet them. Do you think that the eight inches of height I do not have can be hidden? That it is not the first and, in most cases, the only thing about me that a person will notice?”
Stuart was ashamed. He had invaded a privacy he ought not have. He said, “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I should not have forced you to speak of this. I should have seen for myself that you-that you-”