But self-preservation always intervened.
Then he got his first real surprise.
One of his widespread Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs reported peculiar behavior on the part of a star in its neighborhood. The thing had flared.
Well, that in itself wasn't very interesting. Stars were flaring somewhere in his galaxy all the time; it was a thing that some stars did. But this one was different. Frighteningly different. It wasn't behaving in the normal fashion of any proper flare star, but very much the way Wan-To and his earlier family had caused in their jolly little war of brothers. It was what Earthly astronomers had briefly called a "Sorricaine-Mtiga object"—
And it was not natural.
For a moment Wan-To felt stark terror. Had some of the others survived and sought him out here? Had some of his new brood somehow, impossibly, managed to break through their programming? Was there a threat?
If it was, it was not from any of his children. He queried each one of them, sternly, carefully, and their innocently wondering replies were convincing. "Oh, no, Wan-To, I haven't destroyed any stars. How could I? I don't know how." And, "We wouldn't do anything like that, Wan-To, you wouldn't let us."
Nevertheless another star flared.
The alternative possibility was even more frightening. Could one of that old crew of ingrates have followed him here? But there were no signs of it—none of any intelligence in any of the four hundred billion stars of his new galaxy. Not even a whisper of tachyon transmission, not anywhere.
As a last, baffled resort, it occurred to Wan-To to check some of the planets in systems near the flared stars … and what he then found was the most incredible thing of all.
There were artifacts there! On planets! There were planets where energy was being released, sometimes quite a lot of it, in forms and with modulations that were never natural!
There was alien life in his galaxy, and it was made of solid matter.
For the first time in many millions of years Wan-To thought of his lost doppel on the little planet he had sent speeding off into infinity. That had told him of solid-matter life, too, and he had dismissed it. But what was going on here was something else. These—creatures—were using quite high-order forces. If they could flare stars, then they knew how to manipulate the vector bosons that controlled gravity. And that meant that they might someday threaten Wan-To.
There was only one thing to do about that. Horrified, Wan-To did what any householder would do when he discovered loathsome pests in his backyard. It was a job for an exterminator.
It was only when Wan-To had made quite sure that none of those pesky little things survived that he thought of his lost doppel again. His good humor recovered, he thought with amusement of the way the doppel had tolerated them.
Well, if it had, Wan-To thought, it probably by now had learned the error of its ways.
But in fact the doppel hadn't.
It had been a long time for the doppel to be out of contact with Wan-To—not nearly as long, in its time-dilated frame of reference, as it had been for Wan-To himself, of course, but still long enough. It had been quite long enough for the doppel to realize, with a real sense of loss, that there weren't ever going to be any fresh orders from its master.
The doppel had no way of communicating with Wan-To's murderous rivals, either. Even if they hadn't been cut off by the relativistic effects of the system's all-but-light velocity just as Wan-To himself had, Five had no Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky mechanisms for reaching them anyway. Wan-To had made sure of that. In fact, there was not any intelligent being, anywhere within the range of the doppel's senses, at all—except for those few strange solid-matter creatures it had permitted to live (for a while) on the surface of its planet.
The doppel certainly had very little in common with such rude entities. But they were there, and even a doppel can get lonesome.
It was for that reason that Five had permitted the survivors among the creatures that fell out of the destroyed Ark to reach the surface of Nebo without being annihilated. One of them, unfortunately, had gotten seriously broken when Five bashed its container, but there were three others.
In its first casual "glance" Five saw that there was nothing about the three surviving little monsters that constituted any kind of a threat. If they had been a little more technologically advanced—if they had carried with them any of that worrisome antimatter that the ship held, or any kind of weaponry more advanced than mere chemistry—then they would have died before they touched ground.
Five was not very intelligent, but it was smart enough to be assured that these things represented no danger at all.
Well, then, what did they represent?
When Five reported them to its master, Wan-To's response was not very helpful. Wan-To didn't tell it what to do about them. Wan-To left the matter discretionary.
So Five did what it was best equipped to do. It studied the things.
From the point of view of little Luo Fah, the first in the landing party whom Five chose to examine, that process was terrifying, agonizing, and fatal. Luo had hardly stepped out of the lander, mask pumping oxygen into her faceplate, pistol at the ready, when she was snatched brutally into the air and—well—disassembled. The clothes, the gun, and the air mask were the first to go, as Five methodically dismantled its curious little specimen to see what it was all about. There was stark fear and a lot of pain as things were wrenched off her with little concern for what they did to her clutching fingers and resisting limbs. The next part was far worse, but fortunately for Luo she didn't feel it. She was dead by the time the interior of her body was opened up for study.
The other two in the team were luckier—for a while.
One specimen had been enough for Five to deduce, roughly, how these things worked. They had a chemical basis, it perceived. They required an influx of gases (it didn't call the process "breathing," but it understood the necessity from the distress Luo had exhibited when it took her mask away). So it determined simply to observe the others for a while.
Five was cautious, of course. When it detected electromagnetic radiation, definitely patterned in nonnatural ways, coming from something inside the lander it could not permit that—who knew what the purpose of it was? So it destroyed the lander's radio transmitter with one quick, controlled bolt. That was bad luck for the man who happened to be the one transmitting, because the blast burned his face quite horribly. But it wasn't quite as bad for Jake Lundy, because Five then perceived that it had to be more careful with these things.
Five did not exactly have emotions. What Five had was orders. They were the commandments written in stone. They could not be violated … but what a pity that they hadn't included instructions for dealing with these solid-matter creatures and their artifacts.
Five also had a good deal of resourcefulness. What it didn't know it was quite capable of trying to learn. It was always possible, it reasoned, that at some time Wan-To would call again and would want to be fully informed about these unexpected visitors.
So it permitted those two to live. They were fascinating to watch. Five was fascinated to observe, as the burn victim's wounds slowly began to heal, that they seemed to have some sort of built-in repair systems, like Five itself. (But then why hadn't the two earlier ones managed to put themselves back together?) As Five learned more and more about their needs it even provided them with the kinds of air they seemed to want—the kinds, at least, that they kept inside their vehicle. When it deduced they also needed water—by observing how carefully they measured it out to each other in captivity—it made them some water. When it discovered they needed "food"—which took quite a while longer, and the two survivors were cadaverous by the time Five got to that point—that was harder, but Five had of course long since investigated the chemistry of the things the specimens had eaten, and of the excrement they insisted on carrying outside and burying. It was no impossible task for Five to create a range of organic materials to offer them; and some, in fact, they did seem to be willing to "eat."