Protector

“Race memory?”

“Probably. It’s hard to believe a tradition could survive that long.”

“South Africa,” said Luke. “They must have landed in South Africa, somewhere near Olduvai Gorge National Park. All the primates are there.”

“Not quite. Maybe one ship landed in Australia, for the metals. You know, the protectors may have just scattered radioactive dust around and left it at that. The breeders would breed like rabbits without natural enemies, and the radiation would help them change. With all the protectors dead, they’d have to develop new shticks. Some got strength, some got agility, some got intelligence. Most got dead, of course. Mutations do.”

“I seem to remember,” said Luke, “that the aging process in man can be compared to the program ru

“—Evolution is through with you. You’re moving on inertia only, following your course with no corrective mechanisms.” The Bre

Nick said, “Any idea what went wrong with the root?”

“Oh, that’s no mystery. Though it had the protectors of Pak going crazy for awhile. No wonder a small colony couldn’t solve it. There’s a virus that lives in the root. It carries the genes for the change from breeder to protector. It can’t live outside the root, so a protector has to eat more root every so often. If there’s no thalium in the soil, the root still grows, but it won’t support the virus.”

“That sounds pretty complicated.”

“Ever work with a hydroponics garden? The relationships in a stable ecology can be complicated. There was no problem on the Pak world. Thalium is a rare earth, but it must be common enough among all those Population H stars. And the root grows everywhere.”

Nick said, “Where does the Outsider come in?”

A hiss and snap of beak: Phssth-pok. “Phssthpok found old records, including the call for help. He was the first protector in two and a half million years to realize that there was a way to find Sol, or at least to narrow the search. And he had no children, so he had to find a Cause quick, before the urge to eat left him. That’s what happens to a protector when his blood line is dead. More lack of programming. Incidentally, you might note the heavy protection against mutation in the Pak species. A mutation doesn’t smell right. That could be important in the galactic core, where radiation is heavy.”

“So he came barreling out here with a hold full of seeds?”

“And bags of thalium oxide. The oxide was easiest to carry. I wondered about the construction of his ship, but you can see why he trailed his cargo section behind his lifesystem. Radiation doesn’t bother him, in small amounts. He can’t have children.”

“Where is he now?”

“I had to kill him.”

“What?” Garner was shocked. “Did he attack you?”

“No.”

“Then — I don’t understand.”

The Bre

The two men looked at each other. Luke seemed about to speak, closed his mouth.

“That’s a tough one, right? But you can guess what Phssthpok expected, can’t you?”

Phssthpok dreamed.

He knew to within a day just how long it would take for Bre

Knowing how long he had, Phssthpok could time his dreaming. The martians were no threat now, though something would have to be done about them eventually. Dreaming was a fine art to a protector. He had about ten days. For a week he dreamed the past, up until the day he left the Pak planet. Sensory stimulation had been skimpy during the voyage. He moved on into the future.

Phssthpok dreamed…

It would begin when his captive woke. From the looks of him, the captive’s brain would be larger than Phssthpok’s; there was that frontal bulge, ruining the slope of the face. He would learn fast. Phssthpok would teach him how to be a protector, and what to do with the roots and seeds of tree-of-life.

Did the breeder have children? If so, he would take the secret for his own, using tree-of-life to make protectors of his own descendants. That was all right. If he had sense enough to spread his family around, avoiding inbreeding, his blood line should reach out to include most of this system’s Pak race.

Probably he would kill Phssthpok to keep the secret. That was all right too.

There was a nightmare tinge to Phssthpok’s dreaming. For the captive didn’t look right. His fingernails were developing wrong. His head was certainly not the right shape. That frontal bulge… and his beak was as flat as his face had been. His back wasn’t arched, his legs were wrong, his arms were too short. His kind had had too much time to mutate.

But he’d reacted correctly to the roots.

The future was uncertain… except for Phssthpok. Let the captive learn what he needed to know, if he could; let him carry on the work, if he could. There would come a day when Earth was a second Pak world. Phssthpok had done his best. He would teach, and die.

Bre

“I wonder if I can make you understand how fast it all was,” said the Bre

“In two days we learned each other’s language. His is much faster than mine and fits my mouth better, so we used it. He told me his life story. We discussed the martians, working out the most efficient way to exterminate them—”

“What?”

“To exterminate them, Garner. Hell, they’ve killed thirteen men already! We talked practically nonstop, with Phssthpok doing most of the talking, and all the time we were hard at work: calisthenics to build me up, fins for Phssthpok’s suit so he could swim the dust, widgets to get every atom of air and water out of the life support system and take it to the base. I’ve never seen the base; we had to extrapolate the design so we’d know how to re-inflate it and protect it.

“The third day he told me how to get a tree-of-life crop growing. He had the box open and was telling me how to unfreeze the seeds safely. He was giving me orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, ‘Don’t I get any choices at all?’ And I didn’t.”

“I don’t follow,” said Garner.

“I didn’t get any choices. I was too intelligent. It’s been that way ever since I woke up. I get answers before I can finish formulating the question. If I always see the best answer, then where’s my choice? Where’s my free will? You can’t believe how fast this all was. I saw the whole chain of logic in one flash. I slammed Phssthpok’s head hard against the edge of the freezer. It stu