Slan

Kier Gray said, "So you got caught. That wasn't very clever."

It was the words that did it. For with them came surface thoughts, and those surface thoughts were a deliberate screen held over a mind shield as tight as his own. No leaky tendrilless slan shield this, but an enormous fact. Kier Gray, leader of men, was a man who believed himself to be-

"A true slan!"

That one explosive sentence Cross uttered, and then the fluidity of his mind chilled into an ice of quiet thought. All those years that Kathleen Layton had lived with Kier Gray, and not suspected the truth. Of course she had lacked experience with mind shields, and there had been John Petty with a similar type of shield to confuse the issue, because John Petty was human. How cleverly the dictator had imitated the human way of thought protection! Cross shook himself mentally and, determined to get reaction this time, repeated:

"So – you are a slan!"

The other's face twisted sardonically. "That's hardly the right description for a man without tendrils who ca

He paused, then continued earnestly: "For hundreds of years we who knew the truth have existed for the purpose of preventing the tendrilless slans from taking over the world of men. What more natural than that we should insinuate our way into control of the human government? Are we not the most intelligent beings on the face of the Earth?"

Cross nodded. It fitted, of course. His own deductions had told him that. Once he knew that the true slans were not, actually, the hidden government of the tendrilless slans, it was inevitable they would be governing the human world, for all Kathleen's belief and the tendrilless slam X-ray pictures showing Kier Gray to be possessed of a human heart and other nonslan organs. Somewhere here there was still a tremendous mystery. He shook his head finally.

"I still don't get it all. I expected to find the true slans ruling the tendrilless... secretly. Everything fits, of course, in a distorted fashion. But why antislan propaganda? What about that slan ship which came to the palace years ago? Why are true slans hunted and killed like rats? Why not an arrangement with the tendrilless slans?"

The leader stared at him thoughtfully. "We have tried on occasion to tamper with antislan propaganda, one such attempt being that very ship to which you have referred. For special reasons I was forced to order it down in the marshes. But in spite of that apparent failure, it succeeded in its main purpose, which was to convince the tendrilless slans, who were definitely contemplating their attack, that we were still a force to be reckoned with.

"It was the palpable weakness of the silver ship that convinced the tendrilless slans. They knew we could not be that impotent and so once more they hesitated and were lost. It has always been unfortunate, the number of true slans being killed in various parts of the world. They are the descendants of slans who, scattered after the War of Disaster, never made co

"We tried our best, naturally, to contact such wanderers. But the only ones who really got through were those who came to the palace to kill me. For them we provided a number of easy passageways into the palace. My instruments tell me that you came the hard way, through one of the ancient entrances. Very daring. We can use another bold young man in our small organization."

Cross stared at the other coolly. Kier Gray obviously did not suspect his identity nor did he know how near was the hour of tendrilless slan attack. It made the moment a great one as he said: "I'm amazed that you allowed me to catch you by surprise like this." Kier Gray's smile faded abruptly. He said in a tight voice.

"Your remark is very pointed. You assume that you have caught me. Either you are a fool, a possibility refuted by your obvious intelligence, or else, in spite of your apparent imprisonment, that imprisonment is not actual. And there's only one man in the world who could nullify the hard steel of the handcuffs in that cubicle."

Amazingly, the strong face had gone slack, the hard lines were faded, but it was the eyes that showed strength now. A glad, eager, wide-eyed joy. He half whispered:

"Man, man, you've done it! in spite of my being unable to give you the slightest help... atomic energy in its great form at last."

His voice rang out then, clear and triumphant:

"John Thomas Cross, I welcome you and your father's discovery. Come in here and sit down. Wait a minute while I get you out of that damn place! We can talk here in this private den of mine. No human being is ever allowed here."

The wonder of it grew with each passing minute. The tremendousness of what it meant, this world-wide balancing of immense forces. True slans with the human beings, who knew not of their masters, against the tendrilless slans who, in spite of their brilliant, far-flung organization, had never guessed the truth behind the mystery.

"Naturally," said Kier Gray, "your discovery that slans are naturals and not machine-made is nothing new to us. We are the mutation-after-man. The forces of that mutation were at work many years before that great day when Samuel La

"We have always assumed far too readily that no cohesion exists between individuals, that the race of men is not a unit with an immensely tenuous equivalent of a blood-and-nerve stream flowing from man to man. There are, of course, other ways of explaining why billions of people can be made to act alike, think alike, feel alike, given a single dominating stimulus, but slan philosophers have, through the ages, been toying with the possibility that such mental affinity is the product of an extraordinary unity, physical as well as mental.

"For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, the tensions had been building up. And then in a single stupendous quarter of a mille

"So far as we know, very few of those ultra-normal births were alike. Most were horrible failures, and there was only an occasional perfection. Even these would have been lost if La

"An example of the enormous strength of that biological tide, and also of the fundamental unity of man," Kier Gray continued, "is shown in that nearly all slans born in the first few hundred years were triplets or, at lowest, twins. There are few such multiple births now. The single child is the rule. The wave has spent itself. Nature's part of the work ended, it remained for intelligence to carry on. And that was where the difficulty came.