Astounding British Edition, Volume 8, No. 11 — page 54: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

= - ae 52 technology is still inferior to ours. They carried a cargo of hate! Our hate, riding with them unrecognized. They couldn’t afford to reveal it.” Hulgruv Jaughed uproariously. The girl shook her head slowly at Roki as if pity- ing him. “It’s true, I tell you! I guessed, sure. But it was pretty obvious they were taking their surgibank supplies by murder. And they contend they’re not men. They guard their ships so closely, live around them while in port. And he admitted it to me.” The second signal came. Roki answered it, then began ignoring the girl. She didn’t believe him. Hulgruv appeared amused, He hummed the signals over to himself—with- out mistake. “You're using polytonal code for chal- lenge, monotonal for reply. That makes it harder to learn.” The Cophian caught his breath. He glanced at the Solarian’s huge, bald brain- case. “You hope to learn some three or four hundred sounds—and sound-combina- tions within the time I allow you?” “We'll see.” Some note of contempt in Hulgruv’s voice gave Roki warning. “T shorten my ultimatum to one hour! Decide by then. Surrender, or I stop answer- ing. Learn it, if you can.” “He can, Roki,” muttered Daleth. “They can memorize a whole page at a glance.” Roki keyed another answer. “Tl cut it off if he tries it,” The commander was enduring the tension of the stalemate superbly. “Ask yourself, Cophian,” he grunted with a smile, “what would you gain by destroying the ship— and yourself? We are not important. If we're destroyed, our planet loses another gnat in space, nothing more. Do you imagine we are incapable of self-sacrifice?” Roki found no answer. He set his jaw in silence and answered the signals as they came. He hoped the bluff would win, but now the saw that Hulgruv would let him destroy the ship. And—if the situation were reversed, Roki knew that he would do the same. He had mistakenly refused to con- cede honor to an enemy. The commander seemed to sense his quiet dismay, and he leaned forward to speak softly. “We are a new race, Roki—grown out of man. We have abilities of which you know nothing. It’s useless to fight us. Ultimately, your people will pass away. Or become ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION stagnant. Already it has happened to man on Earth.” “Then—there are two races on Earth.” “Yes, of course. Did apes pass away when man appeared? The new does not replace the old. It adds to it, builds above it. The old species is the root of the new tree.” “Feeding bitterly. He noticed that Talewa was becoming disturbed. Her eyes fluttered from one to the other of them. “That was inevitable, manthing. There are no other animal foodstuffs on Earth. Man exhausted his planet, overpopulated it, drove lesser species into extinction. He spent the world’s resources getting your ancestors to the denser star-clusters, He saw his own approaching stagnation on Earth. And, since Sol is near the rim of the galaxy, with no close star-neighbors, he realized he could never achieve a mass-exodus into space. He didn’t have the C-drive in its present form. The best he could do was a field-cancellation drive.” “But that’s the heart of the C-drive.” it” the Cophian grunted “True, But he was too stupid to realize — what he had. He penetrated the fifth com- ponent and failed to realize what he had done. His ships went up to five-hundred C’s or so, spent a few hours there by the — ship’s clock, and came down to find several — years had passed on Earth. They never got around that time-lag.”’ “But that’s hardly more than a problem in five-space navigation!” “True again. But they still thought of it in terms of field-cancellation. They didn’t — realize they’d actually left the four-space continuum. They failed to see the blue- shift as anything more than a field-pheno- menon. Even in high-C, you measure light’s velocity as the same constant—because your measuring instruments have changed proportionally. It’s different, relative to the home continuum, but you can’t know it except by pure reasoning. They never found out. — “Using what they had, they saw that they could send off a few of their numbers to the denser star-clusters, if they wanted to wait twenty thousand years for them to arrive. Of course, only a few years would pass aboard ship. They knew they could do it, but the procrastinated. Society was egalitarian at the time. Who would go? And — why should the planet’s industry exhaust itself to launch a handful of ships that no Eomichbooks 6) ffl)