“And it is strange. Elsewhere in the universe the fear of death is proportionate to the length of life. Well, it will make for an easier conquest of Earth, his planet, if they are afraid to die. Ah, not too easy—perceive what he is thinking now. They will fight.”
SUDDENLY you wish they’d killed you rather, than stripped you of your thoughts this way. Or is there any way you can kill them?
“Don’t try it,” Camelon thinks at you. “You are without weapons and although smaller than you we are approximately as strong. Besides, one of us can paralyze you with mind—or make you unconscious. „ “We do not, in fact, use physical weapons at all. The idea is repugnant to us. We fight with our minds only, either in individual combat or when we conquer a lesser race. Yes, I perceive you are thinking this would be information your race would like to know. Unfortunately you cannot live to warn them.”
“Camelon—” Borl’s thought “—I’ll bet you twenty units that we are physically stronger than he.”
“Taken. The proof? Ah, he came in carrying those two cases, one in either hand, easily. Lift them.”
Borl tried. He could and did but with some difficulty. “You win, Camelon.”
You think how much these—well, you suppose they’re people, in a way— like to make bets. They seem to bet on everything.
“We do.” Borl’s thought. “It is our greatest pleasure. I perceive you have others beside gambling. Gambling in a thousand forms is our passion and our relaxation. Everything else we do is purposeful. Yes, I perceive that you have other pleasures—you escape reality with stimulants, narcotics, reading.
“You take pleasure in the necessary act of reproduction, you enjoy contests of speed and endurance—either as participants or spectators—you enjoy the taste of food, whereas to us eating is a disgusting but necessary evil. Most ridiculous of all you enjoy games of skill even when there is no wager involved.”
You know all that about yourself and what you enjoy. But are you ever going to enjoy any of it again? “No, we are sorry, but you are not.”
Sorry, are they? Maybe if you take them by surprise—
But you don’t. Suddenly you’re paralyzed. You can’t move even before you really try. You can’t act before you think. And it’s useless otherwise. The paralysis ends the minute you think that.
You can move again but you’ve never been more helpless in your life. If you could only raise an arm to swing…
You can—and then you realize that it’s too late. The Aliens have gone and you’re here alone and dying but you’re maybe a little delirious and you are here now and not then, and that part of it is all over. All over but the dying— and the hoping that you won’t die, that your gamble worked. Sure, you can gamble too.
You pant for breath and your insides gripe and you’re cold and hungry and thirsty because they left you barely enough of everything to survive and then—as they thought, and maybe they were right—they stacked the odds hopelessly against you through thirty-nine days of hell and left you alone to die without even a book to read. But you’ve got to keep your mind clear in case by some miracle you do survive.
And suddenly you realize how you can tell how long it’s been and how long there is to go. You decided, when your mind was still clear enough for you to decide things, that you’d divide the food into thirty-nine even portions and the water into thirty-nine even portions and consume one portion of each per day.
That had been a good idea for the first two days but then you’d forgotten once to wind your watch and it had run down and when you wound it you were nervous and mad at yourself and already in almost more pain than you could stand and you wound it too tightly and broke the spring.
And now you haven’t any way of telling time and you decided you’d adopt the system of eating only when you were so hungry you couldn’t stand it any longer—and then never eating more than half of a day’s food at one time and water to match.
And you think—you hope—that you’ve stuck to that even in the periods when you were delirious and not sure where you were or what you were doing. But how much food there is left and how much water will be a clue at least to how long it’s been.
You get off the cot and crawl—walking is too much of a waste of energy even if you were strong enough to walk —over to where the supply of food and water is. There are twenty portions of each—the time’s almost half up. And it’s a good sign that the portions are even. If you ate and drank all you wanted in delirium it’s not likely that you’d have consumed an even number of portions of food and of water.
You look at them and decide you can wait a little longer, so you crawl back to the cot. You lie as quietly as you can. Can you live another twenty days? You’ve got to…
There was that flash into the mind of Camelon, the leader. It was accidental, some barrier slipped. It happened just after they’d shown you how helpless you were and had released the paralysis.
Some barrier slipped and you saw not only the surface thoughts that he, was thinking, but deep into his mind. It lasted how long? A second perhaps and then Borl flashed a mental warning to Camelon and a barrier suddenly was there and only the surface thoughts showed and the surface thoughts were anger and chagrin at himself for having been careless.
BUT A second had been long enough. The Tharn were from the only planet of a Sol-type sun about nineteen light-years from Sol and almost due north of Sol—somewhere near the pole star. Its intrinsic brightness was a little less than that of our sun.
From those facts the approximate distance, approximate direction, approximate brightness, a little research — a very little research—would show what our name for that star was. Their name for it was Tharngel. And the Tharn, the inhabitants of Tharngel’s one planet, were looking for other planets to which they could expand.
They’d found a few but not many. Our Sun had been a real find for them because there were two planets suitable for their occupancy, Mars with a little less air than they needed, Earth with a little more. But both factors could be adjusted. Such planets— planets with any oxygen atmosphere at all—were extremely rare. Especially with Sol-type suns and only in the radiation of a Sol-type sun could they survive.
So they were returning to their own planet to report and a fleet would come to take over. But it wouldn’t arrive for forty years. Their maximum drive was a little under the speed of light and they couldn’t exceed that. So the return trip would take them twenty years— then another twenty for their fleet to come and take over.
Nor had they lied about their only weapons being mental ones. Their ships were unarmed and they themselves had no hand weapons. They killed by thought. Individually they could kill at short-range. In large groups, massing their minds into a collective death-thought, they could kill many miles away.
You saw other things too in Camelon’s mind. Everything they’d told you had been true, including the fact.that they couldn’t lie, could barely understand the concept of a lie. And gambling was their only pleasure, their only weakness, their only passion. Their only code of honor was gambling —aside from that they were as impersonal as machines.
You even got a few clues—a very few —as to how that death-thought business operated. Not enough to do it yourself but—well, if you had time and expert help to work it out…
The help, say, of all the scientists— the psychologists, the psychiatrists, the anatomists—on Earth a new science just might be developed in forty* years. With the few slight clues you could give them and the knowledge that there must be a defense and a counter-offense—particularly a defense if Earth wasn’t going to be a Tharn colony—Earth’s best brains ought to be able to do it in forty years.