He ran around the corner of the building, and stopped dead.
A little distance away was the man named Harvey, and with him were the five men who had left the meeting hall so hurriedly a few minutes before.
And at their feet lay the body of Cahann.
The small band marching out from the ship in the sunlight looked hard and lean and impressive. In the lead, herculean in his golden uniform, marched Glorring. Directly behind him Strull, and next back two officers marching abreast, Majors Londin and Corse, respectively in green and black. Behind them, Captains Rink (his left arm in a sling) and Stimmel and Pleque, in blue and maroon and pale rose. Next, Lieutenants Braldor, Chip, Sassen, Kommel and Koll, in the multicolored uniforms preferred by most junior officers. And, bringing up the rear, the flight of Marines in dress gray, S/1st Loretta two paces ahead of them and S/2nd Kallett at the head of the middle squad.
There was no music, there were no flags. These were considered frills, and an Exploration & Discovery ship was notoriously devoid of frills.
But they were impressive any way The Marines looked deadly and the officers in their grim, bright colors hearkened back to the bright-plumed or feather-decorated or body-painted warriors of the dim past. These were the warriors of the Empire, respecting no one but themselves, desiring nothing but conquest, owing allegiance only to the Empire which equipped them and sent them on their missions.
Glorring, in the lead, breathed the sweet air and cast an eye of ownership over his world.
And it was his world, much more so than any other Lost Colony he had bagged for the Empire. Here was a verdant globe, already stocked with colonists, its existence unsuspected at home.
Glory came to the men who shepherded the stray Colonies back to the flock. How much more glory for the man who discovered a brand new stray!
Perhaps he might bring a few specimens of the local colony back with him. Say ten of them. Unusual, of course, but this was an unusual world, an unknown world. Yes, he would bring ten of the natives back to Earth with him.
As they came closer to the settlement, Glorring spied Cahann and the enlisted man, waiting near the closest of the buildings. They were too far away for the vice-marshal to be able to read their expressions, but he knew what they must be. Admiring envy on the part of Cahann. Military pride on the part of the Marine.
And, on the faces of the group of natives waiting with them, could there be any expression possible other than a wonderful awe?
Beneath the silver skirts, he all at once executed a little hop, the time-honored method for changing step.
Simultaneously, all the marchers behind him did exactly the same thing.
He didn’t pay any attention to that at all.
Cahann’s expression was somewhat greenish, but not with envy. It was more the greenish tinge of seasickness. He had a lot to recover from.
His memory of — the thing, it, the beloved, whatever it had been — was dim and blurred, and he had the feeling he didn’t want to remember it any more clearly than he did.
There had been an urge, a compulsion, that had seemed at the time to be right and proper and natural, and that had also seemed to come from within, to be his own invention and own decision.
He remembered the urge, remembered with a shudder what the urge had been, even remembered to some extent the all-inclusive compulsion of the thing. But his memory was pedantic and unreal, as though he were remembering a particularly vicious torture which he had never seen practiced on anyone but about which he had read graphic and detailed accounts. They were second-hand memories; he was buffered to some extent from their impact.
On regaining consciousness, the first thing he had seen had been Harvey’s face, almost comically worried. And through a surrealistic damping, he had vaguely heard Harvey’s voice:
“Cahann! Come out of it, Cahann, it’s all over! Come on, man, it’s over now, the thing doesn’t want you any more.”
The last phrase had done it. He had sat bolt upright, prepared to scream, and Harvey’s hand had clapped tight to his mouth, holding him rigid until the need to scream had passed. Then the hand had fallen away. Harvey, hunkered down beside him, said, “I’m sorry, Cahann, more sorry than you know. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” Cahann raised a shaking hand to wipe his forehead. “I don’t know yet what you did to me,” he confessed.
“I had no idea,” Harvey told him, “just how strong the enticer could be for somebody who didn’t have any preparation. No wonder it killed so many in the first few generations.”
“What was it?” Cahann asked I him. He felt stronger now, but his limbs ached as though he’d been tensing them too hard for too long. “What in time was it?”
“Our ancestors called it ‘enticer’,” Harvey told him. “When they came here, the plant infested the whole planet. There’s only a few left now, except around the jungle belt of the equator. We haven’t bothered to clean them out down there. We can’t use the land anyway, and their range isn’t very far.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s an enticer,” said Harvey. “It entices animal food, broadcasting a kind of telepathic beam that attracts anything that moves. We think the beam is connected with the flowers’ smell, but we’ve never proved it one way or the other.”
“All right,” said Cahann shakily. “It got to me, so it does work. But why doesn’t it go after you people? Why only me?”
“It does go after us,” Harvey told him. “It goes after every living thing that gets close enough.”
“You mean you’ve built up resistance to it? I don’t see how you get the chance.”
“It doesn’t work quite that way.” Harvey seemed to consider for a moment, and then he said, “Have you ever heard of mental telepathy?”
“Of course.”
“What do you think of it, as a possibility?”
“I think it’s nonsense,” said Cahann promptly. So did Harvey, saying it right with him word for word.
Cahann frowned. “What was that all about?” he asked, and Harvey asked the question in harmony with him.
Cahann pondered, then nodded his head, saying, “Oh, I get it. But that doesn’t—” He stopped, rather precipitately. Because every one of the twenty or twenty-five natives around him had been saying exactly the same words, in chorus with him.
Harvey smiled slightly. “You think that doesn’t prove anything,” he said, “because those are the words you might have been expected to say. All right, say something unexpected.”
Cahann looked at him, thinking furiously. He glanced at the enlisted man, who was gaping at everything with such a complete look of blank astonishment that Cahann at once felt better. At least there was one person present who was more baffled than he.
Cahann gnawed on the inside of his cheek, trying to think. Telepathy? The word was known, the field existed, but the researchers in the field were, so far as Cahann had ever known, exclusively crackpots and panacea-peddlers.
Could the thing really exist? All he had to do was open his mouth and say one word, any word at all, and he would know.
He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to know.
Mind-readers.
Peeping toms.
No privacy at all.
“It isn’t as bad as all that,” Harvey told him. “Shields do develop. Go ahead, say something.” Cahann took a deep breath and said: “Canteloupe!”
Twenty-five voices bellowed it with him: “Canteloupe!”
Harvey smiled. “Okay?”