Colby’s eyes flicked about the room, and what she saw there gave her pause. H’lim had won. “There is still the matter of manipulating her mind with your power. You gave your word you would not do such things.”
H’lim also directed his attention to the audience, aware that they had politics and morale to consider. “At the time of that discussion, neither of us was considering such an emergency. You’re not a sadist, Dr. Colby. Had I asked your permission, you would have granted it.” He raked the humans’ faces with a measuring glance. “Would you prefer to find that you were harboring an alien life form so devoid of compassion that he would withhold succor because his first thought was for his selfish fears?”
Masterful, thought Titus, but he talks like a textbook when gets nervous. And H’lim was scared, there was no doubt of that.
Surreptitiously studying her audience, Colby announced, “Your-patient will be thoroughly tested. If we find you’ve done anything but relieve pain, your life will be forfeit.”
“Then I have nothing to worry about.” Which was true, Titus reflected as Colby strode out the door.
Everyone started to breathe again. A corpsman clapped H’lim on the back and set him to wrapping a sprained ankle. From the tone as the buzz of conversation rose again, Titus knew that H’lim had just passed the final test. The station no longer considered him inhuman or a menace. If they can accept him, maybe they can accept us-eventually. Abbot caught Titus’s gaze, and Titus knew his father was thinking the same thing-only to him, it was an alarming thought.
As more casualties came through, Titus pitched in to help Abbot and H’lim. Inea joined them, and for a while, Titus savored what it could be like to have a family again.
Later, he found out that not only had the secessionists hit the probe hangar with several bombs-others having gone wild and dug new craters in the landscape-but two of the W. S. ships defending Project Station had crashed into each other, raining deadly fragments. One dome had been breached, and was currently airless, the survivors trapped in the lower levels behind pressure seals, rescue workers trying to get to them and their casualties.
This was why there was so little help for the probe workers. Meanwhile, one of the blockaders’ ships had crashed nearby, and a party had been dispatched to search for survivors. However they might regard the secessionists’ politics, they wouldn’t let anyone suffocate. Not that they’d be thanked, considering the quarantine.
“Besides,” observed a woman carrying a welder’s helmet, “they might know something worth learning. H’lim could get it out of them.”
Titus didn’t like the enthusiastic response to that, but H’lim’s attitude reassured him. The human mind was off limits to him, he told them, and that meant all humans. “Besides,” he pointed out, “you don’t need me. You have Dr. de Lisle and her colleagues. They are difficult to lie to.”
Four days later, rescues completed, they paused before launching the repair effort to hold the mass funeral. Colby’s oration concluded with a promise to revise evacuation plans and to increase disaster drills. She bolstered their courage by pointing out that when Earth finally realized what H’lim had yet to offer, the war would end. After the day of intense grieving, life returned to something resembling normality. But now there was no further need for Titus’s department. There would be no probe to target or track.
Late that night, while Abbot and H’lim were working in H’lim’s lab, ostensibly on a project for Colby, Titus let himself into H’lim’s apartment using a borrowed maintenance key. He hid Abbot’s transmitter where neither H’lim nor Abbot would ever look, inside a casserole dish heaped in the back of a kitchen cabinet with pots and pans. He didn’t even tell Inea for fear she’d telegraph the guilty knowledge to H’lim, who was becoming all too wise in human ways.
Titus retained only a copy of the message he coaxed the transmitter to spit out. Its targeting data were, of course, his own, and of no particular interest, but the message was long, detailed, and obscurely coded. Titus was certain it would have brought the whole galaxy to their doorstep. With little to occupy him now, he spent time attempting to read the message, but without luck– except for the section that identified Earth’s sun in both digital code and in something that must have been Kylyd’s coding system. His real purpose, however, was to access H’lim’s part of the message and read it back to him to see if Abbot had altered it. It was a longshot, he admitted, but he had to do something to jar the whole truth out of the luren.
The work served another purpose, too. It kept his mind off his hunger and his growing inability to keep the orl blood down. H’lim, aware that his try with the orl blood had not been a success, wanted to risk cloning human blood in his lab, but Titus wouldn’t hear of it. If the luren was caught, the whole attitude of the station humans would change. “You might be torn limb from limb, and I mean that literally. Humans can be savage.”
When Abbot, looking worse than Titus did, supported Titus’s position, H’lim capitulated, and redoubled his efforts to refine his booster. With the mystery of why Titus was rejecting the orl blood nagging at him, H’lim wasn’t nearly as confident of the booster now.
The work went slowly, and Titus often saw the alien’s frustration with the best of Earth’s equipment. But he never compared the hardware to what he was used to. He only worked harder to master the primitive tools and to understand the hazy images the microscopes produced in color schemes all wrong for his eyes. Titus believed the luren’s boast that he knew seventy or eighty different scientific systems and was undaunted by learning one more, even one based on an “oddly disjointed model of reality.”
Titus could never get H’lim to elaborate on that observation, and in fact the luren apologized profusely, trying to convince Titus that he hadn’t meant to disparage Earth’s achievements. “Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t had time to investigate all your uniquely divided specialities. And you are a devoted specialist, Titus. There are so many of your world’s disciplines that you know nothing of-not even the basic vocabularies. When this war is over, I expect I’ll have plenty of time to learn all of Earth’s other ways of studying the relationship of space, time, will, vision, and the life force.”
Titus allowed that mysticism was indeed not his field, but that Earth had a plethora of such disciplines. Not wanting to start an argument by revealing his aversion to the sloppy thinking of mystics, Titus dropped the subject. In retrospect, he later realized that he’d missed his chance to convert H’lim into an ally of Resident policy at a point where it would have saved a lot of lives.
One afternoon soon after that, in H’lim’s lab when the Cognitive people had finally left and H’lim had secured their privacy, the luren commented, “It’s only a question of time, now, Titus. Abbot’s had to start using Mirelle again, but I’ve asked him to go easy on her. A few hundred hours, and I should have a test quantity of this formula to try.”
“The war could be resolved before then.” When Inea sees Mirelle fading, what will she do?
As H’lim worked, they discussed the war. The luren understood that W. S. might not win, but in that event, he intimated, the Tourists had a plan for smuggling his dormant body to Earth. H’lim did not believe he was revealing any secrets when he told Titus that the Tourists had infiltrated the blockaders, and could just about guarantee his safety regardless of who won, provided he could manage to die with his spine and brain intact.