This was the heart of the strange structure. All the rooms, passageways and halls existed just to give form to this gigantic hall. The walls rose sharply, the room circular in cross section and growing narrower towards the top. It was a truncated cone since there was no ceiling; a hot blue disk of sky cast light on the floor below.
On the floor stood a knot of men staring at Brion.
Out of the corner of his eyes, and with the very periphery of his consciousness, he was aware of the rest of the room. Barrels, stores, machinery, a radio transceiver, various bundles and heaps that made no sense at first glance. There was no time to look closer. Every fraction of his attention was focused on the muffled and hooded men.
He had found the enemy.
Everything that happened to him so far on Dis had been preparation for this moment. The attack in the desert, the escape, the dreadful heat of sun and sand. All this had tempered and prepared him. It had been nothing in itself. Now the battle would begin in earnest.
None of this was conscious. His fighter’s reflexes bent his shoulders, curved his hands before him as he walked softly in balance, ready to spring in any direction. Yet none of this was really necessary. All the danger so far was nonphysical. When he gave this thought conscious thought he stopped, startled. What was wrong here? None of the men had moved or made a sound. How could he even know they were men? They were so muffled and wrapped in cloth that only their eyes were exposed.
No doubt existed in Brion’s mind. In spite of muffled cloth and silence he knew them for what they were. The eyes were empty of expression and unmoving, yet filled with the same negative emptiness as a bird of prey. They could look on life, death, and the rending of flesh with the same lack of interest and compassion. All this Brion knew in an instant of time, without words being spoken. Between the time he lifted one foot and walked a step he understood what he had to face. There could be no doubt, not to an empathetic.
From the group of silent men poured a frost-white wave of unemotion. An empathetic shares what other men feel. He gets his knowledge of their reaction by sensing lightly their emotions, the surges of interest, hate, love, fear, desire, the sweep of large and small sensations that accompany all thought and action. The empathetic is always aware of this constant and silent surge, whether he makes the effort to understand it or not. He is like a man glancing across the open pages of a tableful of books. He can see that the type, words, paragraphs, thoughts are there even without focusing his attention to understand any of it.
Then how does the man feel when he glances at the open books and sees only blank pages? The books are there—the words are not. He turns the pages of one, then others, flipping pages, searching for meaning. There is no meaning. All of the pages are blank.
This was the way in which the magter were blank, without emotions. There was a barely sensed surge and return that must have been neural impulses on a basic level. The automatic adjustments of nerve and muscle that keep an organism alive. Nothing more. Brion reached for other sensations and there was nothing there to grasp. Either these men were apparently without emotions or they were able to block them from his detection, it was impossible to tell which.
Very little time has passed in the objective world while Brion made these discoveries. The knot of men still looked at him, silent and unmoving. They weren’t expectant, their attitude could not have been called interest. But he had come to them and now they waited to find out why. Any questions or statements they spoke would be redundant, so they didn’t speak. The responsibility was his.
“I have come to talk with Lig-magte. Who is he?” Brion didn’t like the tiny sound his voice made in the immense room.
One of the men gave a slight motion to draw attention to himself. None of the others moved. They still waited.
“I have a message for you,” Brion said, talking slowly to fill the silence of the room and the emptiness of his thoughts. This had to be handled right. But what was right? “I’m from the Foundation in the city, as you undoubtedly know. I’ve been talking to the people on Nyjord. They have a message for you.”
The silence grew longer. Brion had no intention of making this a monologue. He needed facts to operate, to form an opinion. Looking at the silent forms was telling him nothing. Time stretched taut and finally Lig-magte spoke.
“The Nyjorders are going to surrender.”
It was an impossibly strange sentence. Brion had never realized before how much of the content of speech was made up of emotion. If the man had given it a positive emphasis, perhaps said it with enthusiasm, it would have meant, “Success! The enemy is going to surrender!” This wasn’t the meaning.
With a rising inflection on the end it would have been a question. “Are they going to surrender?” It was neither of these. The sentence carried no other message than that contained in the simplest meanings of the separate words. It had intellectual connotations, but these could only be gained from past knowledge, not from the sound of the words. There was only one message they were prepared to receive from Nyjord. Therefore, Brion was bringing the message. If that was not the message Brion was bringing, the men here were not interested.
This was the vital fact. If they were not interested he could have no further value to them. Since he came from the enemy he was the enemy. Therefore, he would be killed. Because this was vital to his existence Brion took the time to follow the thought through. It made logical sense—and logic was all he could depend on now. He could be talking to robots or alien creatures for the amount of human response he was receiving.
“You can’t win this war—all you can do is hurry your own deaths.” He said this with as much conviction as he could, realizing at the same time that it was wasted effort. No flicker of response stirred in the men before him. “The Nyjorders know you have cobalt bombs, and they have detected your jump-space projector. They can’t take any more chances. They have pushed the deadline closer by an entire day. There are one and a half days left before the bombs fall and you are all destroyed. Do you realize what that means—”
“Is that the message?” Lig-magte asked.
“Yes,” Brion said.
Two things saved his life then. He had guessed what would happen as soon as they had his message, though he hadn’t been sure. But even the suspicion had put him on his guard. This, combined with the reflexes of a Winner of the Twenties, was barely enough to enable him to survive.
From frozen mobility Lig-magte had catapulted into headlong attack. As he leaped forward he drew a curved, double-edged blade from under his robes. It plunged unerringly through the spot where Brion’s body had been an instant before.
There had been no time to tense his muscles and jump, just space to relax them and fall to one side. His reasoning mind joined the battle as he hit the floor. Lig-magte plunged by him, turning and bringing the knife down at the same time. Brion’s foot lashed out and caught the other man’s leg, sending him sprawling.