“The way I see it,” Pollen began, “the problem we have here takes the form of a classical exercise in logic.”
“It must be catching—he’s talking the same way,” Voysey said, brooding.
“Turn it off Pollen,” somebody shouted angrily.
“All right, all right. But the fact remains that we can think our way out of this one. The basic parameters of the problem are these—we have six unmarked and identical survey modules and, hidden among them, a seventh machine…’
Surgenor pressed his talk button as an idea which had been forming in his mind suddenly coalesced. “Correction,” he said quietly.
“Was that Dave Surgenor?” Pollen sounded impatient. “As I was saying—we’ve only got to be logical. There is a seventh machine and it…’
“Correction.”
“That is Mr Surgenor, isn’t it? What do you want Dave?”
“I want to help you be logical, Clifford. There isn’t a seventh machine—we’ve got six machines and a very special kind of animal.”
“An animal?”
“Yes. It’s a Grey Man.”
For the second time in an hour, Surgenor heard his radio loudspeaker fail to cope with the demands made on it, and he waited impassively for the noise to subside. He glanced sideways at Voysey’s exasperated face and wondered if he, too, had looked like that the first time he had heard about Grey Men.
The stories were thinly spread, difficult to isolate from the Manichean fantasies which abounded in many cultures, but they cropped up here and there, on worlds where the native racial memory reached far enough into the past. There were distortions upon distortions, but always the same recognizable theme—that of the Grey Men and the great battle they had waged with and lost to the White Ones. Neither race had left any tangible traces of its existence to be picked up by Earth’s belated armies of archaeologists, but the myths were there just the same.
And the most significant thing, to one whose intellectual ears were in tune, was that—no matter what the shape of the storytellers, or whether they walked, swam, flew, crawled or burrowed—the name they applied to the Grey Men was always their own name for members of their own species. The noun was often accompanied by a qualifier which suggested anonymity, neutrality or formlessness…’
“What in hell is a Grey Man?” It was Carlen in Module Three.
“It’s a big grey monster that can turn itself into anything it wants to,” Pollen explained. “Mr Surgenor has one for a pet and he never travels anywhere without it—that’s what started all those old stories.”
“It can’t turn itself into anything it wants,” Surgenor said. “It can only assume any external shape it wants. Inside it’s still a Grey Man.” There was another roar of disbelief intermingled with laughter.
“Getting back to this notion of yours about being logical,” Surgenor continued with deliberate stolidity, anxious to get the debate back on to a serious footing, “why don’t you at least think about what I’m saying and check it out. You don’t have to accept my word.”
“I know, Dave—the Grey Man will vouch for everything you say.”
“What I’m proposing is that we ask Captain Aesop to go through the xenological data stores and estimate the probability of the existence of the Grey Men in the first place, and also the probability that Module Seven is a Grey Man.” Surgenor noted that this time there was no laughter and he was relieved because, if he was right, there was no time for irrelevancies. In fact, there was probably no time at all, for anything.
The bright double star, which was the world’s parent sun, was hanging low in the sky beyond the dim bulk of the Sarafand and the distant black hills. In another seventeen months the planet would be threading its way between two points of light, and Surgenor wanted to be far away when that happened—but so did the multi-talented superbeast hidden in their midst.
Candar was astonished to find himself listening to the food creatures’ mental processes with something approaching interest.
His race had never been machine-builders—they had relied instead on the strength, speed and adaptability of their great grey bodies. In addition to his instinctive disregard for machinery, Candar had spent seventy centuries on a world where no artifact, no matter how well-constructed, could survive the annual passage through the binary hell. Consequently he was shocked to realize how much the food creatures depended upon their fabrications of metal and plastics. The discovery which most intrigued him was that the metal shells were not only a means of transport, but that they actually supported the lives of the food creatures while they were on this airless world.
Candar tried to imagine entrusting his life to the care of a complicated and fallible mechanism, but the idea filled him with a cool, unfamiliar dread. He pushed it aside and concentrated all his ferocious intelligence on the problem of getting close enough to the spaceship to paralyse the nerve centres of the creatures within. In particular, it was necessary to immobilize the one they called Captain Aesop before the ship’s weapons could be brought into play.
Gently, delicately, controlling his hunger, Candar prepared the attack.
Surgenor stared at his hand in disbelief.
He had decided to drink some coffee to ease the dryness in his throat and had begun to reach for the supply tube. His right hand had risen only a few millimetres, and then had dropped back on the armrest.
Surgenor’s instinctive reaction was to bring his left hand over to assist the other, but it, too, refused to move—and the realization came that he was paralysed.
The mindless period of panic lasted perhaps a full minute, at the end of which Surgenor found himself exhausted from the conflict with his locked muscles. Serpents of icy sweat were making savage downward rushes over every part of his body. He forced himself to relax and assess the situation, discovering as he did so that he still had control of his eye movements.
A sideways glance showed him that Voysey had been caught, too—the only sign of life being a barely perceptible tremor of the facial muscles. Surgenor guessed the phenomenom was new to Voysey. It was the first time Surgenor had ever experienced it at first hand, but he had been on many worlds where animals of prey were able to surround themselves with a blanket field capable of suppressing the grosser neural activities in other creatures. The deadly talent was most often encountered on high gravity planets whose predators were likely to be as sluggish as their victims. Surgenor tried to speak to Voysey but, as he had expected, was unable to direct air through his vocal cords.
He suddenly became aware that voices were still issuing from the communications speaker, and had listened to them for a while before the full significance of the fact dawned on him.
“There isn’t much to worry about,” Pollen was saying. “This is the sort of exercise in pure logic which is right up your street, Aesop. I would suggest that you lead off by calling out the module numbers in rotation and commanding each to move back a hundred metres. Fifty metres would do, or even five—the distance doesn’t really matter. The point is that by doing this you will separate the original six machines from the seventh, or on one of the commands two of the machines will…’
Surgenor swore mentally at his inability to reach his talk button and cut Pollen off before it was too late. He was desperately renewing his efforts to move one hand when, without warning, Pollen’s voice was lost in a shrill discordant whistle of interference. The noise continued with no sign of abating and Surgenor knew, with a pang of relief, that Module Seven had stepped in to take control of the situation. Surgenor drove the tensions out of his muscles, concentrated on breathing steadily and evenly, and regained most of his ability to think. Pollen had been loudly and confidently signing their death warrants by making the mistake—in this case a fatal one—of confusing a theoretical proposition with the inimical realities of their predicament.