The speaker crackled at him.
“Keysman?”
He said nothing.
“Keysman? This is the Captain. Can you hear us?”
Kator held his silence, a slight smile on his Ruml lips.
“Keysman!”
Kator leaned forward to the voice-collector before him. He whispered into it.
“No use—” he husked brokenly, “natives… surrounding me here. Captain—”
Kator paused. There was a moment’s silence, and then the Captain’s voice broke in.
“Keysman! Hold on. We’ll get ships down to you and—”
“No time—” husked Kator. “Destroying self and ship. Get Home…”
He reached out to his controls and sent the little ship leaping skyward into the dark. As it rose, he fired a cylindrical object back into the ground where it had lain. And, three seconds later, the white, actinic glare of a phase-shift explosion lighted the landscape.
But by that time, Kator was drilling safely upward through the night darkness.
He took upwards of four hours, local time, to return to the Expedition Headquarters. There was no response as he approached the surface above the hidden ship and its connected network of rooms excavated out of the undersurface. He opened the passage that would let his little ship down in, by remote control, and left the small ship for the big one.
There was no one in the corridors or in the outer rooms of the big ship. When Kator got to the gathering room, they were all there, lying silent. As he had expected, they had not followed his orders to return to the Ruml Homeworld. Indeed, with the ship locked and the keys lost with their Keysman, they could not have raised ship except by an extreme butchery of their controls, or navigated her once they had raised her. They had assumed, as Kator had planned, that their Keysman—no doubt wounded and dying on the planet below—had been half-delirious and forgetful of the fact he had locked the ship and taken her keys.
With a choice between a slow death and a fast, they had taken the reasonable choice; and suicided politely, with the lesser ranks first and the Captain last.
Kator smiled, and went to examine the ship’s recorder. The Captain had recited a full account of the conversation with Kator, and the Expedition’s choice of action. Kator turned back to the waiting bodies. The Expedition’s ship had cargo space. He carried the dead bodies into it and set the space at below freezing temperature so that the bodies could be returned to their families—that in itself would be a point in his favor when he returned. Then he unlocked the ship, and checked the controls.
There was no great difference between any of the space-going vessels of the Ruml; and one man could handle the large Expedition ship as well as the smallest scout. Kator set a course for the Ruml Homeworld and broke the ship free of the moon’s surface into space.
As soon as he was free of the solar system, he programmed his phase shift mechanism, and left the ship to take itself across immensity. He went back to his own quarters.
There, things were as they had been before he had gone down to the planet of the Muffled People. He opened a service compartment to take out food, and he lifted out also one of the alcohol-producing cultures. But when he had taken this last back with the food to the table that held his papers, badges, and the cube containing the worm, he felt disinclined to swallow the culture.
The situation was too solemn, too great, for drunkenness.
He laid the culture down and took up the cube containing the worm. He held it to the light above the table. In that light the worm seemed almost alive. It seemed to turn and bow to him. He laid the cube back down on the table and walked across to put his smashed recording device in a resolving machine that would project its story onto a life-size cube of the room’s atmosphere. Then, as the lights about him dimmed, and the morning he had seen as he emerged from his small ship the morning of that same day, he hunkered down on a seat with a sigh of satisfaction.
It is not every man who is privileged to review a few short hours in which he has gained a Kingdom.
The Expedition ship came back to the Ruml Homeworld, and its single surviving occupant was greeted with the sort of excitement that had not occurred in the lifetime of anyone then living. After several days of due formalities, the moment of real business arrived, and Kator Secondcousin Bruto gas was summoned to report to the heads of the fifty great families of the Homeworld. Now those families would number fifty-one, for The Brutogas would after this day—at which he was only an invited observer—be listed among their number. Fifty-one long-whiskered male Rumls, therefore, took their seats in a half-circle facing a small stage, and out onto that stage came Kator Secondcousin to salute them all with claws over the region of his heart.
“Keysman,” said the eldest family head present, “give us your report.”
Kator saluted again. His limp was almost gone now but his whiskers were barely grown a few inches. Also, he seemed to have lost weight and aged on the Expedition.
“My written report is before you, sirs,” he said. “As you know we set up a headquarters on the moon of the planet of the Muffled People. As you know, my Captain and men, thinking me dead, suicided. As you know, I have returned.”
He stopped talking and saluted again. The family heads waited in some surprise. Finally, the eldest broke the silence.
“Is that all you have to say, Keysman?”
“No, sirs,” said Kator. “But I’d like to show you the recording I made of the secret place of the Muffled People before I say anything further.”
“By all means,” said the eldest family head. “Go ahead.”
Kator saluted again, and put the smashed recorder into a resolving machine at one edge of the stage. He stood beside it while the heads of the great families watched the incidents from Kator’s landing to the moment of his fall in the factory building that had smashed the recorder.
“After I fell,” said Kator, as he switched the resolving machine off beside him, “I came to hear two natives discussing the fact they had been unable to find anyone prowling about. They left, and I got away, back to my small ship. From then on, it was simple. I waited until darkness ensured that it was safe for me to take off unnoticed. Then I armed the device I had rigged to simulate a small phase-shift explosion, and called Expedition Headquarters. As I’d planned, my voice-message and my imitation explosion with its indication that the ship’s keys were lost for good, left the rest of the Expedition no choice but polite suicide. I gave them ample time to do so before I re-entered the Expedition ship and headed her Home.”
Kator stopped talking. There was a remarkable silence from the fifty-one faces staring at him for a long moment—and then a rising mutter of question and incredulity. The strong voice of the eldest family head cut across this.
“Are you telling us you planned the suicides of your Captain and men?”
Kator’s face twisted in a sudden, apparently uncontrollable fashion. Almost as if he had been ready to laugh.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I planned it.”
There was another dead silence.
“In the name of… why?” burst out the eldest. At one side of the half-circle of faces, the face of The Brutogas looked stricken with paralysis.
Kator’s face twisted again.
“Our ancestor, The Morahnpa,” he said, “once ensured the conquest of a world and a race by his own individual actions. Because of this, and to encourage others who might do likewise, the principle was laid down that whoever might match The Morahnpa’s action, might have, as The Morahnpa did, complete sovereignty over the natives of such a conquered world, after the conquest was accomplished. That is—other men might be entitled to take their advantages of the world and race itself. But its true conqueror, during his lifetime, would be the final authority on the planet.”