Chapter 16

It was a question he really didn't want to answer, I knew immediately. I could feel him, in my mind, casting around for ways not to answer it, for ways to avoid it, even for lies he could invent to conceal the truth.

Ours wasn't, however, the basically one-way mental connection I knew he was accustomed to. It wasn't just him reading me, I could read him, too. Oh, I couldn't quite influence his thinking the way he'd influenced mine, I hadn't the practice for that, this was all too new to me. But his mind wasn't any stronger than mine, and his thoughts were in my head as much as mine were in his. For a moment we exchanged mental probes, each of us seeking to know how much of the other's thoughts were exposed, and then he capitulated.

"You see too much already," he said—a little bitterly, I thought. "I have done that which I have been told, again and again, must never be done, even though it cost a life. But this was my life, and in my arrogance I thought that I, I alone, could do this thing and still live. And it might have been so but for my illness, my injury, though it would not have been for the reason I gave to myself. And now I have betrayed us, and my name will be as a curse among us."

"I— I don't think it needs to be as bad as that," I stammered, more than a little appalled. But my mind was already forming pictures of the answer to my question, and I supposed it might be exactly that bad.

"You see already, is it not so?" he asked.

"You've been watching us, all of you," I said slowly. "Watching for years, longer. And there are quite a lot of you, doing the watching. Your ships are the ones that have been reported as flying saucers, UFOs." I paused, shocked at what I'd just said. "My God, the stories are true!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," he put in unnecessarily; I knew.

"But— But why don't we know about you, know for sure? I mean, I guess we've seen your ships, but it's only been fleeting glimpses. How have you been able to keep it all so well concealed?"

"When ships work correctly, and pilots, they are unseen. The vision is distorted, much as I did with you to make you think I was cat except stronger, much stronger. And your radar that you call it is easy to deceive. It is only when there is malfunction, or pilot is careless, that we are seen, and it is as you have said, it is usually only brief."

"How about crashes, though?" I persisted. "Yours can't have been the only one, not over such a long time."

"Ship that crashes will destroy itself, so that what is left will appear to be only meteor," he told me. "There is small delay, so that pilot may escape if not dead or badly hurt; our people at home demand this. But we here who fly these ships are taught not to make such escape, we are told it is our duty to die with ship." Even hearing his words only in my mind I could perceive a sour overtone. "It was my duty. But I am young, I have only thirty of your years, I did not think of duty but only to escape. That is the first part of my shame."

His "duty to die?" Who the hell were these ... beings? And why?

I put the last into words. "What's so all-powerfully important about keeping yourselves concealed from us, that you're told even to die to avoid discovery?"

"They tell us it is science," he said, his mental voice absolutely ringing with cynicism. "They say we observe you to learn from you, as we might look at other things for that reason, and that if you knew of us it would alter what you did so that observation would be distorted. There was a time when I, too, believed this, it is why I came here to join in watching, I was excited at what I might learn."

His mind told me the rest; it wasn't science at all, or at least not mainly, it was fear. Naked, unbridled terror—of us, the human race. Most of his bosses were scared shitless at the prospect of encountering us.

He saw my knowledge. "Yes. You are a warlike species. In our long-ago we, too, made fighting with ourselves, but it was less, very much less, than you do among yourselves. There is great fear of what might happen when you learn to leave your world. Our home is not far from here in the way of the universe. Do not ask where, for I do not know; they conceal from us where we go when we come here so that we may not ever tell. But I know it is near enough that you might someday go there. We fear deeply what might happen if this is so, that you might make your war against us, and destroy us."