"Wha-what do you mean?"
"We can't get away. Sooner or later-" His voice trailed off. He reached up, twisted a dial labelled EMERGENCY. The ship's ULR unit hummed. Root said into the mesh, "Di-cantropus station-we're being attacked by natives. Send help at once."
Root sank back into the seat. A tape would repeat his message endlessly until cut off.
Barbara staggered to the seat beside Root "What were those orange balls?"
"That's what I've been wondering-some sort of bomb."
But there were no more of them. And presently the horizon began to glare, the hill became a silhouette on the electric sky. And over their heads the transmitter pulsed an endless message into space.
"How long before we get help?" whispered Barbara.
"Too long," said Root, staring off toward the hill. "They must be afraid of the machine gun-I can't understand what else they're waiting for. Maybe good light."
"They can-" Her voice stopped. She stared. Root stared, held by unbelief-amazement. The hill across the pond was breaking open, crumbling,..
Root sat drinking brandy with the captain of the supply ship Method, which had come to then* assistance, and the captain was shaking his head.
'I've seen lots of strange things around this cluster but this masquerade beats everything."
Root said, "It's strange in one way, in another it's as cold and straightforward as ABC. They played it as well as they could and it was pretty darned good. If it hadn't been for that scoundrel Landry they'd have fooled us forever."
The captain banged his glass on the desk, stared at Root "But why?"
Root said slowly, "They liked Dicantropus. It's a hell-hole, a desert to us, but it was heaven to them. They liked the heat, the dryness. But they didn't want a lot of off-world creatures prying into their business-as we surely would have if we'd seen through the masquerade. It must have been an awful shock when the first Earth ship set down here."
"And that pyramid ..."
"Now that's a strange thing. They were good psychologists, these Dicantrops, as good as you could expect an off-world race to be. If you'll read a report of the first landing, you'll find no mention of the pyramid. Why? Because it wasn't here. Landry thought it looked new. He was right. It was new. It was a fraud, a decoy-just strange enough to distract our attention.
"As long as that pyramid sat out there, with me focusing all my mental energy on it, they were safe-and how they must have laughed.. As soon as Landry broke in and discovered the fraud, then it was all over...
"That might have been their miscalculation," mused Root "Assume that they knew nothing of crime, of anti-social action. If everybody did what he was told to do their privacy was safe forever." Root laughed. "Maybe they didn't know human beings so well after all."
The captain refilled the glasses and they drank in silence, "Wonder where they came from," he said at last.
Root shrugged. "I suppose we'll never know. Some other hot dry planet, that's sure. Maybe they were refugees or some peculiar religious sect or maybe they were a colony."
"Hard to say," agreed the captain sagely. "Different race, different psychology. That's what we run into all the time."
"Thank God they weren't vindictive," said Root, half to himself. "No doubt they could have killed us any one of a dozen ways after I'd sent out that emergency call and they had to leave."
"It all ties in," admitted the captain. Root sipped the brandy, nodded. "Once that ULR signal went out, their isolation was done for. No matter whether we were dead or not, there'd be Earthmen swarming around the station, pushing into their tunnels-and right there went their secret."
And he and the captain silently inspected the hole across the pond where the tremendous space-ship had lain buried under the spine-scrub and rusty black creeper.
"And once that space-ship was laid bare," Root continued, "there'd be a hullabaloo from here to Fomalhaut A tremendous mass like that? We'd have to know everything-their space-drive, their history, everything about them. If what they wanted was privacy that would be a thing of the past. If they were a colony from another star they had to protect their secrets the same way we protect ours."
Barbara was standing by the ruins of the station, poking at the tangle with a stick. She turned and Root saw that she held his pipe. It was charred and battered but still recognizable.
She slowly handed it to him.
"Well?" said Root
She answered in a quiet withdrawn voice: "Now that I'm leaving I think I'll miss Dicantropus." She turned to him, "Jim..."
"What?"
"I'd stay on another year if you'd like."
"No," said Root. "I don't like it here myself."
She said, still in the low tone: "Then-you don't forgive me for being foolish ..."
Root raised his eyebrows. "Certainly I do. I never blamed you in the first place. You're human. Indisputably human."
"Then-why are you acting-like Moses?"
Root shrugged.
"Whether you believe me or not," she said with an averted gaze, "I never-"
He interrupted with a gesture. "What does it matter? Suppose you did-you had plenty of reason to. I wouldn't hold it against you."
"You would-in your heart"
Root said nothing.
"I wanted to hurt you. I was slowly going crazy-and yon didn't seem to care one way or another. Told-him I wasn't-your property."
Root smiled his sad smile. I'm human too."
He made a casual gesture toward the hole where the Di-cantrop spaceship had lain. "If you still want diamonds go down that hole with a bucket. There're diamonds big as grapefruit. It's an old volcanic neck, it's the grand-daddy of all diamond mines. I've got a claim staked out around it; we'll be using diamonds for billiard balls as soon as we get some machinery out here."
They turned slowly back to the Method.
"Three's quite a crowd on Dicantropus," said Root thoughtfully. "On Earth, where there're three billion, we can have a little privacy."
Where Hesperut Falls
My servants will not allow me to kill myself. I have sought self-extinction by every method, from throat-cutting to the intricate routines of Yoga, but so far they have thwarted my most ingenious efforts.
I grow ever more annoyed. What is more personal, more truly one's own, than a man's own life? It is his basic possession, to retain or relinquish as he sees fit. If they continue to frustrate me, someone other than myself will suffer. I guarantee this.
My name is Henry Revere. My appearance is not remarkable, my intelligence is hardly noteworthy, and my emotions run evenly. I live in a house of synthetic shell, decorated with wood and jade, and surrounded by a pleasant garden. The view to one side is the ocean, to the other, a valley sprinkled with houses similar to my own. I am by no means a prisoner, although my servants supervise me with the most minute care. Their first concern is to prevent my suicide, just as mine is to achieve it.
It is a game in which they have all the advantages-a detailed knowledge of my psychology, corridors behind the walls from which they can observe me, and a host of technical devices. They are men of my own race, in fact of my own blood. But they are immeasurably more subtle than I.
My latest attempt was clever enough-although I had tried it before without success. I bit deeply into my tongue and thought to infect the cut with a pinch of garden loam. The servants either noticed me placing the soil in my mouth or observed the tension of my jaw.
They acted without warning. I stood on the terrace, hoping the soreness in my mouth might go undetected. Then, without conscious hiatus, I found myself reclining on a pallet, the dirt removed, the wound healed. They had used a thought-damping ray to anaesthetize me, and their sure medical techniques, aided by my almost invulnerable constitution, defeated the scheme.