Выбрать главу

I let that one pass. “So you have no medical science whatever?” I mused aloud. “With your obvious high technology in other areas, one would expect―”

“Pah!” he squeaked. “As well to demand a science of weather control. Doubtless you’ve noted that across all the phases, or A-lines as you say, the weather is unchanging.”

I agreed I’d noticed that.

“Even here, so far outside the formal limits of the Governance,” he added. “The sole exceptions are the areas of the Devastations, where the very landforms have been disrupted, modifying the air and water currents.”

“And you crossed the Blight, or Devastation if you prefer, to seek out our phase, above all others,” I stated. “Why? Why not some closer line, one more like your own home-worlds? And what do you mean, ‘Devastations’? There’s only one Blight.”

“At the fringes of our jurisdiction,” Swft told me, readily enough, “we found repeated evidence of the presence of a rival power―your own, I now perceive. By mathematical methods, we deduced the focal point of this interference―the Other Devastation. We already knew, of course, of the strange Devastation surrounding our own home-phase. When I explored here in this second Devastation, I had no reason to expect to encounter rational beings. We assumed your nexus had perished in the terrible upheaval that created your ‘Blight.’ ”

“Your ‘Devastation,’ ” I told him, “is no doubt the result of failed displacer experiments in the closely allied lines. You should have realized that a second such area of destruction indicated another Net-traveling line. But you just started in to claim some vacant real estate,” I finished sarcastically.

“Once our enterprise was launched,” he told me as if stating the obvious, “using, as it had, the last of our resources, there was no turning back. Can you imagine me, the originator of the scheme, returning to Ylokk mere days after our gala embarkation, to report to the Noblest of All that it had turned out to be inconvenient to pursue the plan further?”

“Awkward,” I agreed. “But you’ll have to do it anyway. You’ve seen enough to realize you can’t make it stick.”

“Perhaps,” he remarked. “Perhaps not as originally conceived, but there are other approaches, more subtle ones, that might yet prevail. Not all your local phases are as well-organized and informed as this, your Zero-zero coordinate.”

“You’re talking yourself into a short life stretch in solitary,” I warned him. “All this is being recorded, of course, and there are those in the Imperial government who would be extremely cautious about releasing an agent of the enemy to continue activities prejudicial to the peace and order of the Imperium. We, too, have noticed traces of Net operations―yours, I presume―beyond the edge of our Zone of Primary Interest. We had planned some day to trace you to your source, and…”I broke off, thinking suddenly of a bleak region we called Zone Yellow.

“And invade us,” the alien supplied. “The idea of a preemptive strike had been mentioned,” I had to concede. “But we hoped to establish a cooperative relationship, as we have with still other Net powers.”

“I fear the carnage here obviates that possibility,” he declared. “Both from our viewpoint and your own. Unfortunate, perhaps. But, to be candid, I doubt our people would ever have been able to overcome their instinctive distaste for the mong tribe.”

“You and I seem to be doing all right,” I pointed out. “I hardly ever think of you in terms of bristly sewer rats anymore.”

“I’ve had the opportunity to read in your literature, during a null-time TDY,” the alien general told me. “I was revolted by the cruel treatment you have accorded the distant relatives of the Noble Folk. But I confess our own persecution of the vile yilps has been no less genocidal.”

“Maybe we’ve both made mistakes,” I suggested. “But right now, the problem is that your people are still pouring in here at the rate of over a million a day.”

“Three million,” he corrected crisply. “Our overcrowding is acute,” he added in explanation.

“Not via the staging depot on Strandvagen,” I challenged. “We’ve monitored it long enough to know.”

“There are eleven major mass-transfer portals,” he told me, “including a few in truly deserted areas. The one you know and are doubtless prepared to destroy with your curious active-at-a-distance projectile weapons, was the first. We realized we’d erred in imagining the phase to be uninhabited, and placed others in areas remote from your population centers.”

“Not quite,” I corrected. “Your troops have been reported from all major capitals. You’re not warlike, but you started a war,” I summed up wearily. “You wouldn’t think of invading the territory of a sentient species, but here you are. Your story lacks credibility, General.”

He wagged his narrow head, a gesture of assent he’d apparently picked up from us humans, and said, “I can readily understand your confusion, Colonel. But it is not enough merely to identify apparent inconsistencies in my account of affairs. You must,” he was very serious now, “must understand this much: the needs of the Noble Race are paramount. Your feckless resistance to our peaceful occupation of needed living space must cease at once! It is an inconvenience not to be borne!”

“You were doing the ‘reasonable’ number, remember, General?” I countered. “What about our living space? And after all, we humongs are the rightful owners of the territory in question.”

“By what right?” he came back, as if he’d been hoping I’d say that.

“By right of birth, prior occupation and development, and human need,” I told him, as if I’d been waiting for the question.

“ ‘Prior occupation…’ ” he mused. “I think your local ‘rats,’ as you call these humble folk, have at least as ancient a claim.”

“Not to our granaries!” I told him; I was beginning to get a little impatient with his bland absurdities.

“How not?” he riposted. “The produce of the soil knows no ‘natural’ exploiter. The plants grow for whoever can reap them.”

“We plant them,” I told him, “and reap them, too. We built our cities and stocked them, and that’s too obvious to talk about!”

He gave me an oblique look. “You ‘planted’ them, you say. I fear we’re entering an area touched on only lightly in my autobriefing―another curious concept, implying manipulation of the Will.”

“You’re telling me you don’t practice agriculture?” I queried incredulously.

He hesitated before replying. “I know the term, of course, but fail to comprehend it. ‘To cause plants to grow in concentration in a specified area.’ It is beyond belief. Plants grow where they will.”

I talked to him for another half hour, without any notable progress. He still held to the view that humanity ought to get out of the way of the Noble Folk, thereby ending hostilities.

“You claim you know nothing of us,” I reminded him, “and yet you arrived here fully briefed and with command of both Swedish and English. How do you explain that?”

“I am,” he replied stiffly, “under no compulsion to explain anything. However,” he continued, “I see no harm to my cause in clarifying what I perceive must seem mysterious to you. Very welclass="underline"

“We have developed a technique of rapid transfer of information to deep memory, a development, actually, of the ancestral ability to remember the location of buried nuts. My discovery-contact with your plane gave, as I’ve explained, no indication of habitation, since I arrived, as we now know, in a great desert―the ‘Sahara,’ I’ve learned you call it. At home the site is that of a shallow sea. The subsequent routine follow-up crews, however, found primitive temporary camps of your kind, those of nomadic tribes, it developed; so naturally the follow-up teams went on to scout more widely. It was they who assembled the briefing materials, with the exception of the linguistic data on the two related dialects extant here at my designated point of entry, which coincides, of course, with the position of the Noble City. Those last data were, of course, hastily gathered at the last moment before our scheduled jump-off; hence the imperfections in my command of the tongues.”