That word struck the superintendent like a shock. The very idea of a slave's thinking-making a decision for himself concerning an action he was to perform — was repugnant to a member of the dominant race. They preferred to think of their slaves as mindless creatures relying on their masters for the necessities of existence — a comforting fiction that had been maintained for so many rotations of the Galaxy that its originators had come to believe it themselves. He had suspected that this particular slave must be an unusual specimen in many ways; now he was sure of it.
It was this that kept him silent while the creature paused, visibly collected its waning energies, and resumed the tale.
“I found what I thought was the answer at last. Since the tremendous number of particles must have come from the farm that had been blown up, it seemed likely that their orbits would be more or less controlled by that and would have at least a slight family resemblance. If I were to take up a powered, nearly elliptical path through that region, matching velocities with most of them instead of falling in a practically parabolic orbit across their path, I should be able to avoid the worst of the blows.”
Weakly, the shattered creature shuddered and paused, mustering strength to continue.
“I had about made up my mind to try this when I detected another slave inbound,” it went on, “and it occurred to me that two would be better than one. If one died, at least the other could learn from what had happened. I caught him easily since he was in free fall and explained the idea. He seemed willing to follow any suggestion, not thinking for himself at all, so he went with me.
“For a while it worked. We got inside the orbit of the fourth planet without being hit more than a few times each — that was harder on me than on him, because I'd already been hurt quite a lot on the first trip. Into that level, a great deal of the wreckage is formed of quite large particles, anyway; it's easy to see and avoid. Farther in, though, where most of the heavy stuff either never went or was cleared out by collision with the inner planets in a few million of their revolutions, there was much more extremely fine stuff. It actually seems to increase in concentration near the sun. Maybe radiation pressure has something to do with it.
“Anyway, we began to take a bad beating again. It was a little better than before. My idea must have had something to it, but it still wasn't good. The other slave wasn't used to it, either, and lost control of himself just as I had. We were almost to the third farm plot then, but he must have gone completely blind from pain. He apparently never sensed the food so near by — that plot is incredibly rich.
“He went blundering squarely into another, useless plot that accompanies the third one in its orbit; an object too small to hold culture material in that temperature range, though still several hundred times the diameter of my body or his. He rammed it hard, and the energy involved in matching velocities was more than enough to volatilize his mass completely. The object was pretty well scarred with impact craters, but he made one of the neatest.
“I was close enough then to the third planet to start harvesting — at least, I would have been under normal circumstances. I tried, but couldn't concentrate on one course of action long enough. The bombardment was endless. There are simply no words to describe what it was like. I was not twenty of its own diameters from the most amazingly rich farm plot I have ever seen, and was not able to touch a bit of it!
“It had been so long since it was harvested that substances completely strange to me had developed in its surface layers. There were carbohydrates, of course, and light-element oxides and carbonates which anyone would expect; but there were proteins more fantastically complex than anyone could well imagine. Their emanations nearly drove me wild. They must have been building up and breaking down at incredible speed at that temperature — It had quite an atmosphere out, as a result of boiling off surface matter to use up incoming radiant energy — and they had evolved to an unheard-of degree. And I couldn't get a taste!
“I could sense them, though, and in spite of the pain of the meteor bombardment, I stayed near the planet, vacillating as I had done before, for a couple of hundred of its trips around the Sun. That may seem like a short time, but it was long enough to ruin my body past saving. It was only when my senses began to fail that I was able to turn away from it and fight my way out this far. I just managed to get into a stable orbit that would keep me clear of that hellish halo of planet fragments, and every now and then I succeeded in mustering enough energy to call for help, but I knew it was useless. Even had you come much sooner, it would still have been too late for me.
“I live to warn you, however. Do not go within the orbit of the old fifth planet! Do not even look within it, for if you sense what lies on that unharvested third world, you will be drawn to your doom as surely as I was ordered to mine!”
The slave fell silent, and the superintendent pondered its tale as they drifted on about the Sun. He could not, offhand, think of any adequate punishment for the student whose recklessness had brought about this state of affairs. The mere cruelty of ordering endless crowds of slaves to nearly certain death did not affect him particularly; but the waste of it did, very much. To him the thought of hundreds of lifeless bodies drifting endlessly about the Sun, boiling off a little more of their masses with each perihelion passage until nothing was left but a loose collection of high-melting-point pebbles, was a painful picture of economic loss. The fact that the best farm plot in the system had apparently become unattainable was also to be considered, and the driving of at least one slave to the extreme of thinking for himself was not to be ignored.
Of course, everything should be checked before confronting the student with such charges. Only the last, after all, could be considered as yet a matter of objective knowledge.
The overseer moved abruptly away from the slave — sunward. The dying creature, seeing him depart, called once more for aid, and was silenced instantly and permanently by a slashing beam of ions. For an instant the overseer regretted the impulsive act — not from gratitude for the warning, to which he attached little weight and which was part of a slave's duty, but simply because it was impulsive rather than reasoned. But then he reflected that the creature could probably not have told much more anyway, even if it had survived until his return.
He was in no hurry. He let the gravity of the central furnace draw him in to the orbit of the giant planet, his senses covering the half-billion-mile sphere of space ahead where death was reputed to lurk.
At this range, all seemed innocuous. He watched the inner planets circling rapidly in their paths — even the giant one made most of a revolution during his fall — and noted that the slave had spoken the truth about a companion body to the third planet. But space seemed otherwise empty.
He did not completely abandon caution, however. What had proven fatal to slaves might be inconvenient or even dangerous to a master.
He stopped at the fifth planet's orbit and began a more minute examination of that suspicious volume of space.
The small bodies were there, all right. Thousands of them, even though he was not trying to detect anything less than a twentieth of his own diameter. They did show a rather vague preference for the orbit of the old fifth planet, as the slave had said. The greater number circled between the present fourth and fifth orbits, at any rate. There seemed no reason why he could not match velocities well enough to keep out of trouble. Why, chance alone could be trusted to protect him from collision with a few thousand asteroids, when they were scattered through something like ten-to-the-twenty — fourth-power cubic miles of space!