"There were some weapons among the artifacts they collected, but the sophisticated ones were permanently disarmed. ..."
Dilullo said, "Don't play vague with me. I don't care what they collected. I'm only interested in their own weapons, the weapons of this ship."
Labdibdin set his jaw and answered, biting his words off one at a time as though he hated them: "We have not found any weapons in this ship, except the useless articles in the specimen cases."
"I can't blame you for lying," said Dilullo. "You wouldn't want to give us a weapon to use against your own people. But half the Cluster is talking about what you have here ... the superweapon that's going to conquer Kharal. ..."
A faint pinkness crept into Labdibdin's cheeks, the nearest thing to a flush that Chane had seen in these marble-skinned people. His fists clenched and he pounded them up and down on the railing in a kind of desperation.
"Weapons," he said. "Weapons." His voice choked. "My own people keep pushing and pushing and pushing, wanting me to find weapons for them, and there aren't any! There is not a sign of a weapon in this ship. There is no record of a weapon of any kind. The Krii did not use weapons! I keep telling them that and they will not believe ..."
"The Krii?"
"The ... people who built this ship." He shook his hand in a wild gesture intended to take in all the collection stacks. "In all these, in all of them, there is not one single specimen of a living thing, not a bird, not an animal, not a fish nor an insect. They didn't take life. I'll show you something."
He went away from them, half running. Dilullo looked at Chane. They both shrugged, puzzled by the man's violence, not at all believing what he said.
"Keep a close eye on him," Dilullo muttered, and they ran after the Vhollan, Dilullo a bit slowly on the canted metal walk— it was a long way down—Chane skipping lightly on Labdibdin's heels.
He led them to a service lift, rigged by the Vhollans and run by a portable generator. They got into it and it dropped them rattling down and down, past level after level of the stacks with the bits and pieces of a galaxy hoarded in them. Then it stopped and Labdibdin led them forward into a great oblong chamber that had obviously been a coordinating center for the ship and was now serving the same purpose for the Vhollan technicians.
Some of the original furniture was still there, though the Vhollans had moved in a few sketchy conveniences. It gave Chane a start when he looked at it. The height of a table made him feel like a child in grown-up land, but the contoured chairs that went with it were too narrow to accommodate even his lean bottom. No wonder the Vhollans had brought their own.
He saw the smooth-worn places on the chairs and table, the many subtle marks of use. Here someone or something had sat and worked, manipulating a built-in mechanism of some sort with banks of keys that were not intended for human fingers, had worn the keys smooth and bright, and worn a deep hollow in the unidentifiable padding of the chair.
"How long?" asked Chane. "I mean, how long would they have been on the ship?"
"That's a silly question," Labdibdin answered tartly. "How long is long? By their reckoning or ours? Years or decades, or perhaps only months. And I wish I knew. I wish I knew! Look here."
He stood in front of a pedestal, quite high, made from the pale-gold metal. It had a console in front with an intricate arrangement of keys. "It has its own power-unit, independent of the ship," he said, and stretched his hand out to it.
Chane laid his own hand on the back of Labdibdin's neck and said softly, "I can snap it between my fingers. So be careful."
"Oh, don't be a fool," snarled Labdibdin.
"Weapons, weapons! You're the same as they are at Vhol; it's all you think of."
A shimmering appeared in the air above the pedestal. Labdibdin turned to Dilullo and demanded, "Will you allow me to proceed?"
Dilullo was watching everything, the Vhollan, the room, Chane, the array of unfamiliar and unguessable articles ranged here and there for study. He seemed to be watching outside the ship as well, picturing the ugly green sky in his mind and wondering when the cruisers would appear in it. He seemed to be listening for something, beyond the great engulfing silence of the ship.
He nodded to Chane, who stepped back. Labdibdin, muttering, picked up a pair of very odd gloves with long slender rods curving out from some of the fingers. He pulled them on and began pecking delicately at the console keys.
A three-dimensional image took shape in the shimmer on top of the pedestal. Chane stared at it and asked, "What is the thing?"
"You're an Earthman and you don't know?" Labdibdin said. "It's keyed from there."
Dilullo said, "It's a species of bird on Earth. But what's the purpose of this demonstration?"
Labdibdin snarled, "To prove what I was saying. The Krii did not take life, not of anything. They collected images only."
He pecked with the rods at the console. In quick succession images appeared and vanished ... insects, fish, worms, spiders. Labdibdin shut the instrument off and turned, flinging his gloves away. He looked at Chane and Dilullo, a haggard, harried man beneath his scholarly arrogance.
"I wish to heaven somebody would believe me. There seems to have been some kind of a defensive system, a powerful screen that they could use to protect the ship. We couldn't get it to work."
Dilullo shook his head. "It wouldn't work here, even if you had the power for it. A screen works in space but not when a ship has landed ... the force is instantly grounded and dissipated."
Labdibdin said, "That's what our technicians said. But anyway, one thing is sure ... the Krii did not use offensive weapons!"
Chane shook his head. "That just isn't possible."
"I'm beginning to believe him," said Dilullo. "The Krii, you called them? You've deciphered their records, obviously."
"Some of them," Labdibdin admitted. "I have the best philologists on Vhol here, working themselves into breakdowns. I tell you, they've pushed us and pushed us until we're all ready to drop, insisting that we come up with what they want, something to knock a world apart with. They don't seem to care half as much about the ship itself ... or the real knowledge we might gain from it." He ran his hand lovingly over the table edge. "Stuff from another galaxy, another universe. A different atomic table ... totally alien life-forms ... what we could learn! But we have to waste time with all research oriented toward finding the weapons that don't exist. We're going to lose so much...."
"Another galaxy," said Dilullo. "Different atomic table ... I made a pretty good guess. How much do you know about these ... Krii?"
"They were devoted to learning. Apparently they had embarked on a project to study all of creation ... one guesses at other ships in yet other galaxies, performing the same task of collecting samples. Their technological level must be unbelievably high."
"Still, they crashed."
"Not quite. A crash landing, rather ... and of course this ship was never meant to land. Something happened. The relevant parts of the ship are pretty well demolished, and the records relating to the crash naturally very brief and sketchy, but it seems obvious there was an explosion in one of their power-cells, which damaged their life-support system so extensively they could not hope to make the voyage home. Of course nothing in this galaxy would do them any good in the way of substitute or repair. They seem to have chosen this world deliberately, because it is isolated and uninhabited, well hidden in the nebula ... and it was only by the merest accident that a Vhollan prospector looking for rare metals happened to find it."
"Suitable place for a graveyard," said Dilullo. "Did you find any bodies of the Krii in the wreck?"
"Oh, yes," said Labdibdin. "Yes, indeed, we found a number of them." He looked at Dilullo with haunted eyes and added, "The only thing is ... they don't seem to be dead."
XVII
They were deep in the very heart of the ship, walking down a long corridor with their footsteps ringing hollow from the metal vault, echoing away behind them to be lost in silence. The lights were sparse here, w
ith long dim intervals between.
"We don't come here very often," said Labdibdin. He spoke very softly, as though he were anxious not to be heard by anyone or anything but the two Earthmen. From his first bristling hostility, the Vhollan had softened to an astonishing degree.
He's a driven man, Dilullo thought. It's a relief to him to talk to anyone, even us ... to break that stifling bond of secrecy. He's been imprisoned here for too long a time, practically entombed in this ship with... with whatever I am about to see, which is enough to make his shoulders droop and his knees give way a little with every step. He's ready to crack, and small wonder.
The footsteps sounded indecently loud in Dilullo's ears, and somehow dangerous. He was acutely conscious of the silence around him, the vast dark bulk of the ship that enclosed him. He saw his own smallness: an insect creeping in the bowels of an alien mountain. What was worse, he felt like an intruding insect, impertinently making free with someone, or something, else's property.
Dilullo wondered what Chane was thinking. He didn't give much away. Those bright black eyes seemed always to be the same, alert to every sensation, interested in everything, but never introspective. Perhaps that was a better way to go through life, just taking everything as it came, day to day, minute to minute, never worrying and never trying to get beneath the simple outward surface of things. It was when you got to thinking that things became complicated.
Or was Chane really as matter-of-fact as he always seemed? Dilullo suddenly doubted it.
Labdibdin held up his hand. "We're almost there," he whispered. "Please go carefully."
The smooth floor and sheathing of the corridor became a series of overlapping collars. "To take up the shock," Labdibdin said, making a telescoping motion with his hands. "The chamber is mounted in a web of flexible supports, so that almost nothing short of complete annihilation of the ship could harm it."
Dilullo went carefully, lifting his feet high so as not to stumble.
There was a doorway, open, and more of the dim Vhollan lights beyond. The doorway was exceedingly tall and narrow. Dilullo stepped through it, his shoulders rubbing on both sides.
He had some idea of what he was going to see. And yet he was not prepared at all for what he saw.
Beside him Chane uttered a Varnan oath, and his hand strayed automatically to his stunner.
If he were truly a wolf, Dilullo thought, he would be snarling with his ears flat and his hackles up and his tail tucked under his belly. And I feel like that right now, myself ... or perhaps, more accurately, I feel like a shivering ape-ling huddled in the night while Fear stalks past.
Because these things were Fear. Not rational fear, which is a survival mechanism. No. This was the blind and mindless fear that cringes in the flesh, the xenophobic shrinking of the protoplasm from what is utterly alien and strange.
He could see why the Vhollans did not come here often to visit the Krii.
There were perhaps a hundred of them. They sat in orderly rows, each one upright in a high and narrow chair, in something of the attitude of the old Pharaohs: the nether limbs close together, the upper ones, with the long delicate appendages that served them for fingers, resting on the arms of the chairs. They wore only a simple drapery, and their bodies had the appearance of dark amber, not only in color but in substance, and in form they might have been either animal or vegetable, or a combination of the two, or a third something that defied analysis in the terms of this galaxy. They were very tall, very slender, and they seemed to have neither joints nor muscles but to flow all together like the ribboned weed that sways in tidewater pools.
Their faces consisted mostly of two big opalescent eyes set in a tall narrow head. There were breathing slits at the sides of the head, and a small puckered mouth that seemed pursed in eternal contemplation.
The eyes were wide open and they seemed to stare, all one hundred pairs of them, straight into Dilullo's heart.
He turned to Labdibdin, to get away from that staring, and he said, "What makes you think they're not dead? They look petrified."
But in his bones he knew that Labdibdin was right.
"Because," answered Labdibdin, "one of the records we deciphered was a message sent by them after they crash-landed here. It gave the coordinates of this system, and it said"— he ran his tongue nervously over his lips, looking sidelong at the rows of eyes—"it said they would wait."
"You mean they ... sent for help?"
"It would seem so."
"And they said they'd wait?" asked Chane. "Looks to me as though help never came and they waited too long." He had gotten over his first shock and decided the things were harmless. He went to examine one more closely. "Didn't you ever dissect one, or do any tests, to make sure?"
"Try touching it," Labdibdin said. "Go ahead. Try."
Chane put his hand out tentatively. It stopped in midair some eighteen inches from the body of the Krii, and Chane caught it away, shaking it. "Cold!" he said. "No, not really cold ... icy and tingling. What is it?"
"Stasis," Labdibdin said. "Each chair is a self-contained unit with its own power supply. Each occupant is enclosed in a force-field that freezes it in space and time... a little warp-bubble wrapped around it like a cocoon, impenetrable. ..."
"Isn't there any way to shut it off?"
"No. The mechanism is self-encapsulating. This was a survival system, very carefully constructed and thought out. In a stasis field they require no air, and no sustenance, because time is slowed to a stop and their metabolic processes along with it. They can wait forever if they have to, and be safe. Nothing can get at them, or harm them in any way. Not that we wanted to harm them." Labdibdin looked at the Krii, hungering. "To talk to them, to study them, to know how they think and function. I've been hoping ..."
He stopped, and Dilullo asked him, "Hoping what?"
"Our best mathematicians and astronomers have been trying to work out some kind of a time-factor. That is, to translate their time of transmission of the call for help and their estimate of how long it would take the rescue ship to reach them. It isn't at all easy, and our people have come up with four possible dates for the arrival of the rescue ship. One of them is ... approximately now."
Dilullo shook his head. "This is all going a little too fast for me. I have an intergalactic ship, then I have its whole crew sitting here staring at me, and now I have another intergalactic ship on the way. And it might be coming, like now?"
"We don't know," said Labdibdin despairingly. "It's only one of four estimates, and a 'now' might mean yesterday or tomorrow or next year. But that's the reason Vhol has been pushing us so hard here, just in case.... For myself, I've been hoping it would come while we're here, hoping I'd have a chance to talk to them."
Chane smiled. "Don't you think they'll be angry when they find you've been meddling with their belongings?"
"Probably," Labdibdin said. "But their scientists. I think they'd understand ... not the weapons part, but the rest of it, the wanting to know. I think they'd understand that we had to meddle."
Again he was silent, and very sad. "This whole thing has been a terrible waste," he said. "Rushed and hurried and all for the wrong objectives. The only chance we'll ever have in my lifetime, certainly, to learn even a little about another galaxy, and the stupid bureaucrats back on Vhol can't think of anything except their piddling little war with Kharal."
Chane shrugged. "Everybody has his own idea of what's important. The Kharalis would be more interested in knowing that there isn't a super-weapon out here than they would be in learning about fifty galaxies."
"The Kharalis," said Labdibdin, "are a narrow and ignorant lot."
"They are that," Chane said, and turned to Dilullo. "The Krii aren't being much help either. Don't you think we'd better get back up?"
Dilullo nodded. He took one more look at the ranks of the not-dead but not-alive creatures, sitting so patiently in hope of their resurrection, and he thought that their alienness went deeper than the matter of form or
even substance. He couldn't quite analyze what he meant by that, and then he thought, It's their faces. Not the features. The expression. The look of utter calm. Those faces have never known passion of any kind.
"Do you see it too?" Labdibdin said. "I think the specie must have evolved in a gentle environment, where it had no enemies and no need to fight for survival. They haven't conquered anything ... I mean in themselves. They haven't suffered and learned and turned away from violence to seek a better path. It just was never in them. Love isn't in them either, by the way, judging from their records. They seem to be completely without visceral emotions of any kind, so they can be good with absolutely no trouble at all. It makes me wonder if their whole galaxy is different from ours, without all the natural violences that obtain on our planets... climatic changes, drought, flood, famine, all the things that made us fighters in the beginning and gave us survival as the victor's crown ... or whether the world of the Krii was an isolated case."
"As a human I have to stick with my visceral emotions. They may make us a lot of trouble but they're also all what makes life worth living. I don't think I envy the Krii too much," Dilullo said.
Chane laughed and said, "I don't want to be irreverent, but our dead look more alive than they do. Let's go. I'm tired of being stared at."
They went, back along the hollow-ringing corridor, and this time Dilullo had a queer cold prickling at his back, as though the hundred pairs of eyes still watched, piercing through metal and dim light to follow him.
How they must have wondered, studying the strange wild natives of this star-jungle, the lovers, the killers, the saints, the sufferers, the triumphant damned.
"I don't think it means very much," he said suddenly, "to not do something, unless you've wanted very much to do it."
"That's because you're human," said Labdibdin. "And to a human perfect peace is as good as death. The organism decays."
"Yes," said Chane, with such vehemence that Dilullo was startled into smiling.
"He doesn't mean just war, you know. There are other kinds of fighting."
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