"Do you think it's actually alive, sir? In a place like this?"
"I'm sure of it. Watch carefully."
It struck the barrier and stopped. That is, its forward motion stopped, but its rolling did not. Its rate of revolution did not change; it either did not know or did not care that its drivers were slipping on the smooth, hard sand; that it could not climb the vertical metal plate; that it was not getting anywhere.
"What a brain!" Northrop chortled, squatting down closer. "Why doesn't it back up or turn around? It may be alive, but it certainly isn't very bright."
The creature, now in the shadow of the 'Troncist's helmet, slowed down abruptly went limp collapsed. "Get out of his light!" Jack snapped, and pushed his friend violently away; and as the vicious sunlight struck it, the native revived and began to revolve as vigorously as before. "I've got a hunch. Sounds screwy never heard of such a thing but it acts like an energy–converter. Eats energy, raw and straight. No storage capacity on this world he wouldn't need it a few more seconds in the shade would probably have killed him, but there's no shade here. Therefore, he can't be dangerous."
He reached out and touched the middle of the revolving shaft. Nothing happened. He turned it at right angles to the plate. The thing rolled away in a straight line, perfectly contented with the new direction. He recaptured it and stuck a test–prod lightly into the sand, just ahead of its shaft and just inside one paddle wheel. Around and around that slim wire the creature went: unable, it seemed, to escape from even such a simple trap; perfectly willing, it seemed, to spend all the rest of its life traversing that tiny circle.
"'What a brain!' is right, Mase," Jack exclaimed. "What a brain!"
"This is wonderful, boys, really wonderful; something completely new to our science." Samms' thought was deep with feeling. "I am going to see if I can reach its mind or consciousness. Would you like to come along?"
"Would we!"
Samms tuned low and probed; lower and lower; deeper and deeper; and Jack and Mase stayed with him. The thing was certainly alive; it throbbed and vibrated with vitality: equally certainly, it was not very intelligent. But it had a definite consciousness of its own existence; and therefore, however tiny and primitive, a mind. Although its rudimentary ego could neither receive nor transmit thought, it knew that it was a fontema, that it must roll and roll and roll, endlessly, that by virtue of determined rolling its species would continue and would increase.
"Well, that's one for the book!" Jack exclaimed, but Samms was entranced.
"I would like to find one or two more of them, to find out…I think I'll take the time. Can you see any more of them, either of you?"
"No, but we can find some Stu!" Northrop called.
"Yes?"
"Look around, will you? Find us a couple more of these fontema things and flick them over here with a tractor."
"Coming up!" and in a few seconds they were there.
"Are you photographing this, Lance?" Samms called the Chief Communications Officer of the Chicago.
"We certainly are, sir all of it. What are they, anyway? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
"I don't know. Probably no one of the three, strictly speaking. I'd like to take a couple back to Tellus, but I'm afraid that they'd die, even under an atomic lamp. We'll report to the Society."
Jack liberated his captive and aimed it to pass within a few feet of one of the newcomers, but the two fontemas did not ignore each other. Both swerved, so that they came together wheel to wheel. The shafts bent toward each other, each into a right angle. The angles touched and fused. The point of fusion swelled rapidly into a double fist–sized lump. The half–shafts doubled in length. The lump split into four; became four perfect paddle–wheels. Four full–grown fontemas rolled away from the spot upon which two had met; their courses forming two mutually perpendicular straight lines.
"Beautiful!" Samms exclaimed. "And notice, boys, the method of avoiding inbreeding. Upon a perfectly smooth planet such as this, no two of those four can ever meet, and the chance is almost vanishingly small that any of their first–generation offspring will ever meet. But I'm afraid I've been wasting time. Take me back out to the Chicago, please, and I'll be on my way."
"You don't seem at all optimistic, sir," Jack ventured, as the NA774J approached the Chicago.
"Unfortunately, I am not. The signal will almost certainly come in from an unpredictable direction, from a ship so far away that even a super–fast cruiser could not get close enough to her to detect just a minute. Rod!" He Lensed the elder Kinnison so sharply that both young Lensmen jumped.
"What is it, Virge?"
Samms explained rapidly, concluding: "So I would like to have you throw a globe of scouts around this whole Zabriskan system. One detet* [*Detet the distance at which one spaceship can detect another, EES.] out and one detet apart, so as to be able to slap a tracer onto any ship laying a beam to this planet, from any direction whatever. It would not take too many scouts, would it?"
"No; but it wouldn't be worth while."
"Why not?"
"Because it wouldn't prove a thing except what we already know that Spaceways is involved in the thionite racket. The ship would be clean. Merely another relay."
"Oh. You're probably right." If Virgil Samms was in the least put out at this cavalier dismissal of his idea, he made no sign. He thought intensely for a couple of minutes. "You are right. I will have to work from the Cavenda end. How are you coming with Operation Bennett?"
"Nice!" Kinnison enthused. "When you get a couple of days, come over and see it grow. This is a fine world, Virge it'll be ready!"
"I'll do that." Samms broke the connection and called Dronvire.
"The only change here is for the worse," the Rigellian reported, tersely. "The slight positive correlation between deaths from thionite and the arrival of Spaceways vessels has disappeared."
There was no need to elaborate on that bare statement. Both Lensmen knew what it meant. The enemy, either in anticipation of statistical analysis or for economic reasons, was rationing his small supply of the drug.
And DalNalten was very much unlike his usual equable self. He was glum and unhappy; so much so that it took much urging to make him report at all.
"We have, as you know, put our best operatives to work on the interplanetary lines," he said finally, half sullenly. "We have secured quite a little data. The accumulating facts, however, point more and more definitely toward an utterly preposterous conclusion. Can you think of any valid reason why the exports and imports of thionite between Tellus and Mars, Mars and Venus, and Venus and Tellus, should all be exactly equal to each other?"
"What!"
"Precisely. That is why Knobos and I are not yet ready to present even a preliminary report."
Then Jill. "I can't prove it, any more than I could before, but I'm pretty sure that Morgan is the Boss. I have drawn every picture I can think of with Isaacson in the driver's seat, but none of them fit?" She paused, questioningly.
"I am already reconciled to adopting that view; at least as a working hypothesis. Go ahead."
"The fact seems to be that Morgan has always had all the left–wingers of the Nationalists under his' thumb. Now he and his man Friday, Representative Flierce, are wooing all the radicals and so–called liberals on our side of both Senate and House a new technique for him and they're offering plenty of the right kind of bait. He has the commentators guessing, but there's no doubt whatever in my mind that he is aiming at next Election Day and our Galactic Council."
"And you and Dronvire are sitting idly by, doing nothing, of course?"
"Of course!" Jill giggled, but sobered quickly. "He's a smooth, smooth worker, Dad. We are organizing, of course, and putting out propaganda of our own, but there's so pitifully little that we can actually do look and listen to this for a minute, and you'll see what I mean."
In her distant room Jill manipulated a reel and flipped a switch. A plate came to life, showing Morgan's big, sweating, passionately earnest face.