"But now you have," Sir George said flatly.
"For two reasons," the dragon-man agreed. "One was that we were able to do so when neither the Commander, the Hathori, any other guildsmen, nor any of the ship's remotes were in position to observe it. Such a situation had never before arisen. Indeed, we were able to create it only because the one of us who accompanied you back you to your encampment very carefully guided you into the required sensor blind spot."
Sir George nodded slowly, and the dragon-man continued.
"The second reason is that, for the first time, it may be possible for us to win our freedom from the guild... if you will act with us." The alien raised a clawed hand as if he sensed the sudden, fierce surge of Sir George's emotions—as no doubt he had—and shook his head quickly. "Do not leap too quickly, Sir George Wincaster! If we act, and fail, the `Commander' will not leave one of us alive. Not simply you and your soldiers, but your wives and children, will perish, as will all of our own kind aboard this ship."
Sir George nodded again, feeling a cold shiver run down his spine, for the dragon-man was certainly correct. The thought of freedom, or even of the chance to at least strike back even once before he was killed, burned in his blood like poison, but behind that thought lay Matilda, and Edward, and the younger children... .
"Before you decide, Sir George, there is one other thing you should know," the dragon-man said softly, breaking gently into his thoughts, and the baron looked up. There was a new flavor to the dragon-man's feelings, almost a compassionate one.
"And that thing is?" the human asked after a moment.
"We said that two things make your people unique," the dragon-man told him. "One is our ability to make you hear our thoughts. The second is the terrible threat you represent to the Federation."
"Threat? Us?" Sir George barked a laugh. "You say your kind were far more advanced than ours, yet you were no threat to them!"
"No. But we aren't like you. To the best of my knowledge, no other race has ever been like you in at least one regard."
"And that is?"
"The rate at which you learn new things," the dragon-man said simply. "The `Commander's' guild regards you as primitives, and so you are... at the moment. But now that we've established contact with you, we've seen inside your minds, as the `Commander' cannot, and what we see confirms our suspicions. You are ignorant and untaught, but you are far from stupid or simple, and you've reached your present state of development far, far sooner than any of the Federation's `advanced' races could have."
"You must be wrong," Sir George argued. "The `Commander' has spoken to me of the Romans his competitors first bought from our world. My own knowledge of history is far from complete, yet even I know that we've lost the knowledge of things the men of those times once took for granted, and—"
"You've suffered a temporary setback as a culture," the dragon-man disagreed, "and even that was only a local event, restricted to a single one of your continents. Don't forget, we were aboard this ship when the `Commander' carried out his initial survey of your world, and it was well for your species that he failed to recognize what we saw so clearly. Compared to any other race in the explored galaxy, you `humans' have been—and are—advancing at a phenomenal rate. We believe that, from the point your kind had reached when you were taken by the guild—"
"How long?" It was Sir George's turn to interrupt, and even he was stunned by the sheer ferocity of his own question. "How long has it been?" he demanded harshly.
"Some three hundred and fifty-six of your years, approximately," the dragon-man told him, and Sir George stared at him in shock. He'd known, intellectually, that he'd slept away long, endless years in the service of his masters, but this—!
"Are... are you certain?" he asked finally.
"There's some margin for error. None of us are truly trained in the mathematics to allow properly for the relativistic effects of the phase drive, and the guildsmen do not share such information with us. Nor would they permit the ship's computer to give it to us. But they do speak among themselves in front of us, and they frequently forget, in their arrogance, that while we cannot speak as they do, we can hear. Indeed, that our kind has been forced to learn to understand spoken languages so that we can be ordered about by our `betters.' "
"I... see," Sir George said, then shook himself. "But you were saying... ?"
"I was saying that even after so brief a period as that, we would estimate that your kind has certainly advanced at least to water-powered industrial machinery. You are probably even experimenting with steam power and crude electrical generation by now, and we suspect that the earliest forms of atmospheric flight—hot air balloons and other lighter-than-air forms, for example—are within your grasp. But even if you've come only so far as water-powered hammer mills and, perhaps, effective artillery and rifled small arms, you will have advanced at more than double the rate of any of the so-called `advanced' members of the Federation. If you're left alone for only a very little longer, perhaps another six or seven of your centuries, you will have discovered the phase drive for yourselves."
"We will have?" Sir George blinked in astonishment at the thought.
"Such is our belief. And that's also what makes your species so dangerous to the Federation. Compared to any human institution, the Federation is immensely old and stable, which is another way of saying `static,' and possessed of an ironbound bureaucracy and customary usages. By its own rules and precedents, it must admit your world as a co-equal member if you've developed phase drive independently. Yet your kind will be a terribly disruptive influence on the other races' dearly beloved stability. By your very nature, you will soon outstrip all of them technologically, making them inferior to you... and so, by their own measure, justifying your people in using them as they have used us. Even worse, though we think they will be slower to recognize this, your race, assuming that you and your fellows are representative, will not take well to the pyramid of power the Federation has built. Within a very short period of time, whether by direct intervention or simply by example, you will have led dozens of other species to rebel against the `advanced races,' and so destroyed forever the foundation upon which their power, wealth, and comfortable arrogance depends."
"You expect a great deal from a single world of `primitives,' my friend."
"Yes, we do. But should the Federation, or another guild, learn that you, too, are from Earth and return there too soon, it will never happen. They will recognize the threat this time, for they will have a better basis for comparison... and will probably be considerably more intelligent and observant than the `Commander.' They can hardly be less, at any rate!" The mental snort of contempt was unmistakable, and Sir George grinned wryly. "But if they do recognize it, they will take steps to deflect the threat. They may settle for establishing a `protectorate' over you, as with us, but you represent a much more serious threat than we did, for we never shared your flexibility. We believe it is far more likely that they'll simply order your race destroyed, once and for all, although the Federation is far too completely captive to inertia to choose its course quickly. It will undoubtedly take the Council two or three hundred years to make its official decision, but in the end, it will decide that your kind are simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist."