Jacob studied the group at the foot of the ramp. Culla and Jeffrey, each in his own fashion, spoke earnestly with Fagin. A small group of base personnel gathered nearby… perhaps to escape LaRoque’s persistent questioning.
The man had stalked the Cavern ever since the altercation broke up, shooting questions at those at work and complaining to those who weren’t. For a while his rage at being deprived of his camera was awesome, only slowly declining to a state Jacob would call just short of apoplexy.
“I’m not sure why I took it from LaRoque,” Jacob said to Kepler, taking it out of his pocket. The slim black camera-recorder had a maze of tiny knobs and attachments. It looked like a perfect reporter’s tool, compact and flexible and obviously very expensive.
He handed it to Kepler. “I guess I thought he was reaching for a weapon.”
Kepler put the camera in his own pocket. “We’ll check that out anyway, just in case. In the meantime I’d like to thank you for the way you handled things.” Jacob shrugged. “Don’t make much of it. I’m sorry I stepped on your authority.”
Kepler laughed. “I’m glad as hell you did! I sure wouldn’t have known what to do!” Jacob smiled, but he still felt troubled. “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “Well, now I’m going to inspect Jeff’s T.C. system, to make certain nothing’s wrong, not that I think there is. Even if LaRoque poked around in the machine, what could he do? The circuits are all worked with special tools. He had none.”
“But the panel was loose when we came over the gravity arc.”
“Yes, but maybe LaRoque was just curious. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that Jeff loosened the plate to have an excuse to pick a fight with him!”
The scientist laughed, “Don’t look so shocked. Boys will be boys. And you know that even the most advanced chimp oscillates between extreme priggishness and schoolboy pranksterism.”
Jacob knew the truth of that. But still he wondered why Kepler was so generous in his attitude toward LaRoque, whom he undoubtedly despised. Was he that anxious for a good press?
Kepler repeated his thanks and left, picking up Culla and Jeffrey on his way back to the entrance of the Sunship. Jacob found a place where he wouldn’t be in the way and sat down on a shipping crate.
He drew a sheaf of papers from his inside jacket pocket.
Masergrams had arrived from Earth for many of the Bradbury passengers earlier in the day. Jacob had been hard put not to laugh when he caught the conspiratorial glances that passed between Bubbacub and Millie Martine when the Pil went to pick up his own coded message.
During breakfast she had sat between Bubbacub and LaRoque, trying to mediate the Earthman’s embarrassing Xenophilia with the Library Representative’s aloof suspicion. She appeared anxious to bridge the gap between them. But when the messages came LaRoque was left alone as she and Bubbacub hurried upstairs.
It probably hadn’t helped the journalist’s temper.
Jacob had finished his own meal and considered a visit to the Medical Lab, but instead went to pick up his own masergrams. Back in his rooms the Library material made a pile over a foot deep, which he placed on his desk before settling into a reading trance.
The reading trance was a technique for absorbing a lot of information in a short time. It had been useful many times in the past, the only disadvantage being that it cut off the critical faculties. The information would be stored, but the material would have to be read again normally for it all to be brought to mind.
When he came to, the papers were all stacked on the left. He was certain that they had all been read. The data he’d absorbed stalked at the edge of consciousness, isolated bits capriciously leaping to mind unbidden and as yet unconnected to a whole. For at least a week he would relearn, with a sense of deja vu, things read in the trance. If he didn’t want to be disoriented too long he’d better start wading through the stuff normally, soon.
Now, perched on the plastic packing crate In the Sunship Cavern, Jacob poked at random through the papers he’d bought. Teasing fragments of information read familiarly.
…The Kisa race, newly free from indenture to the Soro, discovered the planet Pila shortly after the recent migration of galactic culture to this quadrant. Traces were evident that the planet had been occupied by another transient race some two hundred million years before. Thus Pila was verified in Galactic Archives as having once been a residence, for six hundred millenia, of the Mellin Species, see listing; Mellin-extinct).
The planet Pila, having lain fallow for greater than the required period, was surveyed and routinely registered as a Kisa colony, Class C (temporary occupancy, no more than three million years, minimal impact on contemporary biosphere allowed).
On Pila, the Kisa found a pre-sophont species whose name is taken from the planet of their origin…
Jacob tried to picture the Pil race as it had been before the arrival of the Kisa and the beginning of their uplift. Primitive hunter-gatherers, no doubt. Would they have been the same today, after half a million years, if the Kisa had never come? Or would they have evolved, as some Earth anthropologists still insisted was possible, into a different kind of intelligent culture, without the influence of their patrons?
The cryptic reference to the extinct “Mellin” species brought home the time scale covered by the ancient civilization of the Galactics and their incredible Library. Two hundred million years! That long ago the planet Pila had been held by a spacefaring race, who had resided there for six thousand centuries while Bubbacub’s ancestors were insignificant little burrowing animals.
Presumably the Mellin paid their dues and had a Branch Library of their own. They offered proper respect (though perhaps more in word than in deed) to the patron race that had uplifted them long before they colonized Pila, and perhaps they, in turn, uplifted some promising species they found when they arrived… biological cousins to Bubbacub’s people… which by now had probably gone extinct as well.
Suddenly the strange Galactic Laws of Residence and Migration made sense to Jacob. They forced species to look upon their planets as temporary homes, to be held in trust for future races whose present form might be small and silly. Small wonder many of the Galactics frowned at humanity’s record on Earth. Only the influence of the Tymbrimi, and other friendly races had enabled humanity to purchase its own three colonies in Cygnus from the stodgy and environmentally fanatic Institute of Migration. And at that it had been fortunate that the Vesarius had returned with enough warning for human beings to bury the evidence of some of their crimes! Jacob was one of less than a hundred thousand human beings who knew that there had ever been such a thing as a Manatee, or a giant ground sloth, or an orangutang.
That Man’s victims might have someday become thinking species was something that he, more than most, was in a position to appreciate, and regret. Jacob thought of Makakai, of the whales, and how narrowly they were saved.
He brought up the papers and resumed his skimming. Another piece leapt into recognition as he read it. It had to do with Calla’s species.
…colonized by an expedition from Pila. (The Pila, having threatened their Kisa patrons with an appeal to Soro for a Jihad, had won release from their indenture.] Upon receiving their license to the planet Pring, the Pila undertook their occupancy with more than perfunctory attention to the minimal-impact provisions of their contract. Since the Pila arrival on Pring, inspectors from the Institute of Migration have observed that the Pila have taken greater than average safeguards to protect indigenous species whose pre-sophont potential seemed realistic. Among those in danger of extinction upon the establishment of the colony were the genetic ancestors of the Pring race whose species name is also that of the planet of their origin…