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  “Nothing,” She spoke mechanically. “I was surprised, that’s all.”

  Cemp finished dressing, then went over to her, and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He said, “I sense that you are involved in a love relationship.”

  She shook her head. “Not now. Not since—” She paused. She seemed bewildered.

  It was no time to check on a woman’s love life. If ever a man was in a hurry it was he.

  When Cemp had gone, the boy came in. “You almost gave me away,” he said in a tone that was wholly unchildlike.

  She cringed. “I’m only a V,” she pleaded.

  He began to change, to grow. Presently, a fully adult human male stood before her. He directed toward her an energy wave that must have exerted an enormous attraction to her, for in spite of the deepening expression of distaste on her face she swayed toward him. When she was within a foot of him, he cut off the wave. She drew back immediately. The man laughed.

  But he turned away from her, and for a few moments then he opened a communication line to someone on the planet of a distant star. He said in a silent interchange:

  “I have finally risked confrontation with a Silkie, one of the powerful inhabitants of this system. He is guided by an idea called Levels of Logic. I discovered that his had to do with his only offspring, a boy he has never seen. I distorted his interest in this child in a subtle way. I think I can now land safely on the principal planet, which is called Earth.”

  “To distort it, you must have had to use him as a channel.”

  “Yes. It was the one risk I took with him.”

  “What about the other channels you have used?”

  The man glanced at Mensa. “With one possible exception, they would resist any attempt of a Silkie to explore their minds. They’re a rebel group called V’s, and are suspicious of and hostile to the other peoples in this system. The exception is a V woman who is completely under my control.”

  “Why not annihilate her?”

  “These people have some kind of a sensitive telepathic connection, which they seem to be able to manipulate but which I have not wholly solved. If she died I think the others would know instantly. Therefore I cannot do what I normally would.”

  “What about the Silkie?”

  “He is heading to Earth in a state of delusion. Equally important, he is due to suffer a physiological change which will strip him of all his present offensive and defensive powers. I intend to let this physical process run its course—and then kill him.”

  V

  Cemp had relayed the story through Satellite-Five-R to his contact, Charley Baxter, at the Silkie Authority. When he reached the satellite, and transformed to human, he found a radiogram from Charley waiting for him. It said:

  HAVE PICKED UP BOY. AUTHORITY FORBIDS YOU TO LAND UNTIL THIS IS ALL SETTLED.

  “Till you’ve done away with him, you mean!” Cemp thought angrily. The official action surprised him: an unexpected obstacle.

  The commander of the satellite, a normal intelligent human being, who had handed him the message, said, “Mr. Cemp, I have received instructions not to let you on any ferry to Earth until further notice. This is very unusual.”

  “Unusual” was an understatement. Silkies ordinarily moved freely to and from Earth.

  Cemp made up his mind. “I’m going out into space again,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Aren’t you due for the change?” The officer seemed doubtful about letting him go.

  Cemp smiled wryly and told the Silkie joke about such things, about how Silkies were like some mothers-to-be who kept having false labor pains. Off to the hospital they went. Lay there in bed. At last returned home. And so, after several false alarms, baby finally was born in a taxicab.

  “Well, sir,” said the man unhappily. “You do as you please. But there aren’t any taxicabs in space.”

  “It’s not that instantaneous; you can fight it off for hours,” said Cemp, who had been fighting it off for hours.

  Before he left, Cemp sent a radiogram to his wife:

  DEAR JOANNE: DELAYED BY DISPUTE. WILL ADVISE WHEN TO MEET, BUT SOON. CALL CHARLEY. HE‘LL FILL YOU IN. ALL MY LOVE. NAT.

  The coded message would upset her, he knew. But he did not doubt that she would meet him at their pre-arranged rendezvous, as he wanted. She would come if only to find out on behalf of the Special People what he was up to.

  VI

  Once out in space, Cemp headed for a point over the South Pole, and then he began his entry.

  He came in fast. According to theory, that was the only way an unprotected approach should be made. The poles were relatively free of radiation. There, where the magnetic field of the planetary body was bent inward right down to the ground, the potent Van Allen radiation belt was a minimum threat.

  Nonetheless, there were two periods of severe bombardment, one of high energy stripped nuclei, the other of X-rays. The X-rays did him no harm, and for the most part, the stripped nuclei passed right through his body as if it were a hard vacuum. Those nuclei that hit, however, left a small wake o’f radioactivity. Hastily, Cemp expelled the more seriously damaged cells, with that special ability Silkies had of eliminating damaged parts of their bodies.

  As he entered the atmosphere, Cemp gradually activated the planet’s magnetic force lines behind him. Even as they began to glow brightly, he felt the radar beams from below bouncing from him. But they were not a problem now. Radar would register the movement of his body and the pyrotechnic display to his rear as one phenomenon. The outward appearance was of a meteorite shooting toward the ground.

  His entrance being slantwise in the direction of Earth’s rotation, his speed of entry was within his capacity to absorb, or radiate from him, the heat of his passage through the air. At ten miles up, he slowed even more and came down in the sea north of Antarctica about a thousand miles from the lower tip of South America. The cold waters quickly washed from his Silkie body the radioactive debris that still clung to the outer bone. He darted along about five hundred feet up, using the water as a coolant by slowing and diving into it whenever he got too hot. It was a fine balancing of extremely rapid acceleration and deceleration. But he made it to near where he lived at the lower tip of Florida in slightly more than forty minutes, the last five of which were wholly underwater.

  As he surfaced within sight of the beach, he transformed to his fish stage, and then—two hundred feet from shore—to human. He had already seen Joanne’s car parked on the road behind a sand dune. He did the overhand crawl to get to shallow water, and ran against the surging waves up the embankment to where she lay on a blanket, watching him.

  She stood up, a slender, very pretty woman, blonde and blue-eyed. Her classically even features were white and set now; but she handed him a towel. Cemp dried himself, and climbed into the clothes she had brought. A few minutes later they were in the car; and at this point she accepted his kiss. But she still withheld her thoughts, and her body was rigid with disapproval.

  When she finally communicated, it was verbally and not by direct energy. She said, “Do you realize that if you persist in this you will be the first Silkie in a hundred years to get himself punished or executed?”

  That she spoke out loud confirmed Cemp’s suspicion. He was now certain that she had reported his illegal entry to the Silkie Authority, and that people were listening in to this conversation. He felt no blame of Joanne. He even surmised that all the Special People were prepared to help him through this trying period. They were probably also speeding up the investigation of Tem, so that the execution would be quickly over with.

  “What are you going to do, Nat?” She sounded anxious now, rather than angry. There was color in her face for the first time.

  At some depth within, Cemp felt vaguely surprised at how determined he was. But the awareness did not trigger any question in him. He said coolly: “If they kill that boy, I’ll know the reason why.”

  She said softly, “I never realized that a Silkie could have s
o much feeling for his child, whom he has not seen since birth.”

  Cemp was irritated. “It’s not personal,” he said curtly. She said with sudden emotion: “Then you know the reason very well. This boy evidently has a method of concealing his thoughts, and of reading minds—according to your own account—that even you could not penetrate. With such a person, the Special People will not have their historic protection. It becomes a matter of policy.”

  “In making my report,” said Cemp, “I advised a five year study and re-education program for the boy. That’s the way it’s going to be.”

  She seemed not to hear. She said as if thinking out loud: “Silkies were mutated by humans, on the basis of the great biological discoveries of the last half of the twentieth century. When the basic life chemical unit, DNP, was isolated, major advances in life forms, other than those naturally spawned in Nature, became possible. Because the first transformations were to the fish stage, the new beings were called Silkies—after an old song.

  “But it had to be done carefully. The Silkie could not be permitted to breed as he pleased. So his genes, which endow him with so many marvellous senses and abilities, also contain certain limitations. He can be a man, a fish, a Silkie at will. So long as he does it by body control, he has nearly all his Silkie abilities in any of these forms. But every nine and a half years he has to become a human being again, in order to mate. It’s built into him, where he can’t interfere with it. Silkies who long ago tried to eliminate this phase of the cycle were executed. At the time of such a compulsive change to human form, he loses all his Silkie abilities, and becomes fallibly human. That’s the great hold we have over him. Then we can punish him for anything illegal he did as a Silkie. Another hold is that there are no female Silkies. If the issue of a Silkie mating with a woman of the Special People is a girl, she is not a Silkie. That, too, is built into his genes—”

  She broke off. “The Special People are a tiny, tiny portion of the main human stream who—it was discovered—had a spontaneous ability to read the minds of Silkies. They used this to establish administrative ascendancy while there were still only a few Silkies, and thus they protected themselves and the human race from beings who would otherwise have overwhelmed them.”

  She finished in a puzzled tone: “You’ve always agreed that such protection was necessary, for human beings to survive. Have you changed your mind?” When Cemp did not reply, she urged: “Why don’t you go to the Silkie Authority and talk to Charley Baxter? A single conversation with him will get you further than any rebellion.” She added quickly, “Tem is there. So you’ll have to go there anyway. Please, Nat.”

  It wasn’t so much, then, that Cemp agreed with what she said. He thought of her suggestion very distinctly as offering a way of getting inside the building—But he was not too surprised as his helijet came down on the roof to see Charley Baxter waiting for him, tall, rather good-looking, thin, unusually pale.

  As they rode down in an elevator, Cemp felt himself pass through an energy screen—which instantly sealed off the pulsations from the outside world. And that was normal enough except for the force that was driving the screen. He sensed that the power backing it was enormous enough to protect a city, or even a part of the planet.

  Cemp glanced questioningly at Baxter, and met a pair of sober, serious eyes. The man said seriously, “At this point, you may read me.”

  What he read in Baxter’s mind was that his own radiogram about Tem had caused a hasty examination of Tem’s record. Result: they decided the boy was normal, and that something very serious had happened to Cemp.

  “At no time,” said Baxter, “has your son been in danger. Now, take a look at that TV picture. Which one is Tem? One is.”

  They had walked from the elevator into a large room. On the TV screen on one wall was a street scene. Several boys were approaching what must have been a hidden camera, for they showed no awareness of its presence.

  Cemp’s gaze flicked across the strange faces. “Never saw them before,” he said.

  “The boy to your right is your son,” said Baxter.

  Cemp looked, then turned and stared at Baxter. And because his brain had energy relationships that by-passed mere neuron connections, he got the whole picture in a single flash of understanding. The instantaneous comprehension included analytical awareness of how his duty to protect all Silkie children had been skillfully twisted by his pseudo son. It leaped on to a lightning examination of the energy level that had signaled to him. Almost immediately, he realized that the signal was the only direct contact that had been made by the boy on the V ship. In every other way, the fraudulent Tem had merely been a recipient of signals.

  He grew conscious of Baxter’s bright eyes watching him. The man asked breathlessly: “Think we can do anything?”

  It was too soon to answer that. Cemp was gratefully realizing how skillfully he had been protected by the Special People. It seemed to him that if he had suspected the truth at any moment before being taken behind the energy screen that now guarded him—the false Tem would probably have tried to annihilate him.

  Baxter was speaking again. “You sit down here, and let’s see what the computer makes of the one signal you received.”

  The computer extrapolated three structural frames that might fit the false Tem. Cemp and Baxter studied the coded messages with amazement, for they had not actually considered anything beyond an unusual V frame.

  All three formulated structures were alien.

  A quick analysis established that two of the three did not require secrecy on the part of so powerful a being as the invader undoubtedly was. Therefore the third frame, involving a gruesome form of esoteric sex climaxed by the ritual murder of one partner by the other, spiderlike, was the most likely.

  Baxter’s voice had in it a desire not to believe. “That picture of their needing a lot of love objects—could that be real?” He finished in a subdued tone: “I’ll alert all Silkies, mobilize our other forces—but can you do anything at once?”

  Cemp, who had already adjusted his sensory system to include all three alien frames, was tense and afraid. He said aloud, “I asked myself where he would go and of course it would be to my home. Do you think Joanne would have gotten there yet? Was she supposed to head somewhere else?”

  He saw that Baxter’was shaking his head . . .

  Cemp hurried through a door that led to a wide balcony, transformed to Silkie, did a partial cut-off of gravity combined with control of magnetic force lines . . .a man in a far greater hurry than he had ever been in before.

  He entered the large house by the sea in his human form, the better to run the last few yards and maneuver in corridors. And because he had adjusted to the alien sensory structure his arrival was only partly signaled.

  He found Joanne in the master bedroom, half-undressed.

  She had never seemed so attractive. Her smile, warm, inviting, friendly, drew him. Some state of excitement she was in communicated to him, stirring an impulse so basic that it was as if a fine translucent sheath dropped over his senses, blurring his view of reality. The woman, almost luminescent in a fleshly radiance, lay on the pink bed and his whole being focused on her. For a long moment, nothing else existed. They were two people intensely in love.

  Breathless, astounded by that instant, hideous power, Cemp put his thought on the possible fate of the real Joanne, put his attention on fear for her—and broke the spell.

  The rage, hate and violence that had been building up in him broke through.

  But the magnetically controlled radiation that Cemp launched at the creature crackled harmlessly against a magnetically controlled energy screen . . . Frothing, he plunged at the being, grabbed at him with his bare hands.

  For seconds they grappled, the almost nude woman and the wholly naked Cemp. Then Cemp was flung back by muscles that were ten times as strong as his own.

  He bounded to his feet, but he was sobered, thinking again.

  He began to consider the entire pro
blem of Earth in relation to this creature and the threat it represented.

  The duplicate of Joanne was changing. The body in front of Cemp became that of a man with the frilly clothes of a woman’s underdress still draped on the lower part of his body. But there was nothing feminine in his manner. Eyes blazing with the infinite violence potential of the male, the entity locked gazes with Cemp.

  Cemp was feeling a desperate anxiety for the real Joanne. But it did not even occur to him to ask this creature about her. He said, instead, “I want you to leave. We’ll communicate when you’re a million miles out in space.”

  The handsome human face of the other broke into a disdainful smile. “I’ll go. But I sense in you a plan to learn from me where I come from. That will never happen.” ‘ Cemp replied in a level tone: “We’ll see what two thousand Silkies can get out of you.”

  The being’s skin glistened with health, shone with confidence and power. He said: “Perhaps I should remind you that we Kibmadine have achieved a total control of all the forces that Silkies control only partially.”

  Cemp said, “Many rigidities can envelop one flexibility.” The other said in an uncompromising voice, “Don’t attack me. The price is too high.”

  He started to turn away. And there was a moment, then, when Cemp had another thought, another feeling: a reluctance to let this being go without some attempt to reach across the abyss that separated them. Because this was man’s first contact with an alien intelligence. For a few fleeting seconds Cemp remembered the thousand dreams that human beings had had for such a meeting. His hesitation came to its inevitable end. The infinitely hostile reality moved in to fill the endless void between them.

  Instants later the alien was out on the patio, dissolving, changing—and was gone.

  Cemp contacted Baxter and said, “Line me up with another Silkie so that he can take over. I’m really awfully close to my change.”

  He was lined up through the Silkie communications hub with a Silkie named Jedd. Meanwhile, Baxter said, “I’m on my way over. I have been given a lot of governmental power.”