The Galaxy Primes by Edward Elmer Smith (short novels to read TXT) 📕

of course planets are probably pretty much the same everywhere—Tellus-type ones, I mean, of course. Is all the Xenology as cockeyed as I'm afraid it must be?"

"Check. The one basic assumption was that there are no human beings other than Tellurians. From that they derive the secondary assumption that humanoid types will be scarce. From there they scatter out in all directions. So I'll have to roll my own. I've got to see Atterlin, anyway. I'll be back for supper. So long."

At the Port Office, Grand Lady Neldine met him even more enthusiastically than before; taking both his hands and pressing them against her firm, almost-bare breasts. She tried to hold back as Garlock led her along the corridor.

"I have an explanation, and in a sense an apology, for you, Grand Lady Neldine, and for you, Governor Atterlin," he thought carefully. "I would have explained yesterday, but I had no understanding of the situation here until our anthropologist, Lola Montandon, elucidated it very laboriously to me. She herself, a scientist highly trained in that specialty, could grasp it only by referring back to somewhat similar situations which may have existed in the remote past—so remote a past that the concept is known only to specialists and is more than half mythical, even to them."

He went on to give in detail the sexual customs, obligations, and limitations of Lola's purely imaginary civilization.

"Then it isn't that you don't want to, but you can't?" the lady asked, incredulously.

"Mentally, I can have no desire. Physically, the act is impossible," he assured her.

"What a shame!" Her thought was a peculiar mixture of disappointment and relief: disappointment in that she was not to bear this man's super-child; relief in that, after all, she had not personally failed—if she couldn't have this perfectly wonderful man herself, no other woman except his wife could ever have him, either. But what a shame to waste such a man as that on any one woman! It was really too bad.

"I see ... I see—wonderful!" Atterlin's thought was not at all incredulous, but vastly awed. "It is of course logical that as the power of mind increases, physical matters become less and less important. But you will have much to give us; we may perhaps have some small things to give you. If we could visit your Tellus, perhaps...?"

"That also is impossible. We four in the Pleiades are lost in space. This is the first planet we have visited on our first trial of a new method—new to us, at least—of interstellar travel. We missed our objective, probably by many millions of parsecs, and it is quite possible that we four will never be able to find our way back. We are trying now, by charting the galaxies throughout billions of cubic parsecs of space, to find merely the direction in which our own galaxy lies."

"What a concept! What stupendous minds! But such immense distances, sir ... what can you possibly be using for a space-drive?"

"None, as you understand the term. We travel by instantaneous translation, by means of something we call 'Gunther'.... I am not at all sure that I can explain it to you satisfactorily, but I will try to do so, if you wish."

"Please do so, sir, by all means."

Garlock opened the highest Gunther cells of his mind. There was nothing as elementary as telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, or the like; it was the pure, raw Gunther of the Gunther Drive, which even he himself made no pretense of understanding fully. He opened those cells and pushed that knowledge at the two Hodellian minds.

The result was just as instantaneous and just as catastrophic as Garlock had expected. Both blocks went up almost instantly.

"Oh, no!" Atterlin exclaimed, his face turning white.

The girl shrieked once, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed on the floor.

"Oh, I'm so sorry ... excuse my ignorance, please!" Garlock implored, as he picked the girl up, carried her across the room to a sofa, and assured himself that she had not been really hurt. She recovered quickly. "I'm very sorry, Grand Lady Neldine and Governor Atterlin, but I didn't know ... that is, I didn't realize...."

"You are trying to break it gently." Atterlin was both shocked and despondent. "This being the first planet you have visited, you simply did not realize how feeble our minds really are."

"Oh, not at all, really, sir and lady." Garlock began deftly to repair the morale he had shattered. "Merely younger. With your system of genetics, so much more logical and efficient than our strict monogamy, your race will undoubtedly make more progress in a few centuries than we made in many millennia. And in a few centuries more you will pass us—will master this only partially-known Gunther Drive.

"Esthetically, Lady Neldine, I would like very much to father you a child." He allowed his coldly unmoved gaze to survey her charms. "I am sorry indeed that it cannot be. I trust that you, Governor Atterlin, will be kind enough to spread word of our physical shortcomings, and so spare us further embarrassment?"

"Not shortcomings, sir, and, I truly hope, no embarrassment," Atterlin protested. "We are immensely glad to have seen you, since your very existence gives us so much hope for the future. I will spread word, and every Hodellian will do whatever he can to help you in your quest."

"Thank you, sir and lady," and Garlock took his leave.

"What an act, my male-looking but impotent darling!" came Belle's clear, incisive thought, bubbling with unrestrained merriment. "For our Doctor Garlock, the Prime Exponent and First Disciple of Truth, what an act! Esthetically, he'd like to father her a child, it says here in fine print—Boy, if she only knew! One tiny grain of truth and she'd chase you from here to Andromeda! Clee, I swear this thing is going to kill me yet!"

"Anything that would do that I'm very much in favor of!" Garlock growled the thought and snapped up his shield.

This one was, quite definitely, Belle's round.

Garlock took the Hodellian equivalent of a bus to the center of the city, then set out aimlessly to walk. The buildings and their arrangement, he noted—not much to his surprise now—were not too different from those of the cities of Earth.

With his guard down to about the sixth level, highly receptive but not at all selective, he strolled up one street and down another. He was not attentive to detail yet; he was trying to get the broad aspects, the "feel" of this hitherto unknown civilization.

The ether was practically saturated with thought. Apparently this was the afternoon rush hour, as the sidewalks were crowded with people and the streets were full of cars. It did not seem as though anyone, whether in the buildings, on the sidewalks, or in the cars, was doing any blocking at all. If there were any such things as secrets on Hodell, they were scarce. Each person, man, woman, or child, went about his own business, radiating full blast. No one paid any attention to the thoughts of anyone else except in the case of couples or groups, the units of which were engaged in conversation. It reminded Garlock of a big Tellurian party when the punch-bowls were running low—everybody talking at the top of his voice and nobody listening.

This whole gale of thought was blowing over Garlock's receptors like a Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did not address anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city—and it did not take long—no one paid any more attention to him than they did to each other.

Probing into and through various buildings, he learned that groups of people were quitting work at intervals of about fifteen minutes. There were thoughts of tidying up desks; of letting the rest of this junk go until tomorrow; of putting away and/or covering up office machines of various sorts. There were thoughts of powdering noses and of repairing make-up.

He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for guardians—he'd have to call them that until either he or Lola found out their real name. Same as at the airport—the more people, the more guardians. What were they? How? And why?

He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn't make sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it was. It seemed to be a mass-detector ... no, two of them, paired and balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other guardians—balanced across a sort of bridge—that was how they kept the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range receptors there, too, but nothing seemed to be coming in....

While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone's far-flung receptors. Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock, directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insistent, low-pitched, whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of one eye, a yellowish something flashing downward through the air.

At the same moment the woman immediately in front of Garlock stifled a scream and jumped backward, bumping into him and almost knocking him down. He staggered, caught his balance, and automatically put his arm around his assailant, to keep her from falling to the sidewalk.

In the meantime the guardian, having landed very close to the spot the woman had occupied a moment before, leaped again; this time vertically upward. The thing, whatever it was, was now braking frantically with wings, tail, and body; trying madly to get away. Too late. There was a bone-crushing impact as the two bodies came together in mid-air; a jarring thud as the two creatures, inextricably intertwined, struck the pavement as one.

The thing varied in color, Garlock now saw, shading from bright orange at the head to pale yellow at the tail. It had a savagely-tearing curved beak; tremendously powerful wings; its short, thick legs ended in hawk-like talons.

The guardian's bowed legs had already immobilized the yellow wings by clamping them solidly against the yellow body. His two lower arms were holding the frightful talons out of action. His third hand gripped the orange throat, his fourth was exerting tremendous force against the jointure of neck and body. The neck, originally short, was beginning to stretch.

For several seconds Garlock had been half-conscious that his accidental companion was trying, with more and more energy, to disengage his encircling left arm from her waist. He wrenched his attention away from the spectacular fight—to which no one else, not even the near-victim, had paid the slightest attention—and now saw that he had his arm around the bare waist of a statuesque matron whose entire costume would have made perhaps half of a Tellurian sun-suit. He dropped his arm with a quick and abject apology.

"I should apologize to you instead, Captain Garlock," she thought, with a wide and friendly smile, "for knocking you down, and I thank you for catching me before I fell. I should not have been startled, of course. I would not have been, except that this is the first time that I, personally, have been attacked."

"But what are they?" Garlock blurted.

"I don't know." The woman turned her head