Protector

Bre

An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only backup for the autopilot: it didn’t matter what happened to him, he was only a safety device. The autopilot would get this crop to where it was going.

To Earth? But a crop meant other Outsiders, following.

He had to warn Earth.

Right. Good thinking. How?

Bre

Despair was a mistake. The smell of the roots had been waiting to pounce.

…It was the pain that brought him out of it. His hands were bleeding from cuts and abrasions. There were sprains and blisters and bruises. His left little finger screamed its agony at him; it stuck out at a strange angle, and it swelled as he watched. Dislocated or broken. But he’d torn a hole in the net, and his right hand gripped a fibrous root.

He threw it as hard as he could and instantly curled in upon himself, hugging his knees as if to surround his pain and smother it. He was angry, he was scared. Why, that damnable smell had turned off his mind as if he were no more than a child’s toy robot!

He floated through the cargo space like a football, hugging his knees and crying. He was hungry and angry and humiliated and scared. The Outsider had seared his mind with his own unimportance. But this was worse.

Why? What did the Outsider want with him?

Something smacked him across the back of the head. In one fluid motion Bre

In a last lucid moment Bre

Phssthpok tracked a chain of answers with dogged persistence; but behind every answer there were more questions. His native captive smelled wrong: strange, animalistic. He was not of those Phssthpok had come seeking. Where were they, then?

They had not come here. The natives of G0 Target #1-3 would have offered little resistance to colonists, judging by this one sample. But protectors would have exterminated them anyway, as a precaution. Some other star, then. Where?

The natives might have astronomical knowledge enough to tell him. With ships like these they might even have reached nearby stars.

In pursuit of answers, Phssthpok poised and leapt toward the native’s vehicle. It was an hour’s jump, but Phssthpok was not hurried. With his superb reflexes he did not even need the reaction pistol.

His captive would keep. Presently Phssthpok would have to learn his language, to question him. Meanwhile he would not hurt anything. He was too terrified, and too puny. Bigger but weaker than a breeder.

The captive ship was small. Phssthpok found little more than a cramped life support system, a long drive tube, a ring-shaped liquid hydrogen tank with a cooling motor. The toroidal fuel tank was detachable, with room for several more along the slender length of the drive tube. Around the rim of the cylindrical life support system were attachments for cargo, booms and folded fine-mesh nets and retractable hooks.

Several hooks now secured a lightweight metal cylinder which showed signs of erosion. Phssthpok examined it, dismissed it without knowing its purpose. Obviously it was not needed for the ship to function.

Phssthpok found no weaponry.

He did find inspection panels in the drive tube. Within an hour he could have built his own crystal-zinc fusion tube, had he the materials. He was impressed. The natives might be more intelligent than he had guessed, or luckier. He moved up to the lifesystem and through the oval door.

The cabin included an acceleration couch, banks of controls surrounding it in a horseshoe, a space behind the couch big enough to move around in, an automatic kitchen that was part of the horseshoe, and attachments to mechanical senses of types frequently used in Pak warfare. But this was no warship. The natives’ senses must be less acute than Pak senses. Behind the cabin were machinery and tanks of fluid, which Phssthpok examined with great interest.

If these machines were well designed, then G0 Target #1-3 was habitable. Very. A bit heavy, both in air and in gravity. But — to a people who had been travelling for five hundred thousand years, it would have looked irresistible.

Had they reached here, they would have stopped.

That cut Phssthpok’s region of search in half. His target must be inward from here, back toward the galactic core. They simply had not got this far.

The life support system was most puzzling to Phssthpok. He found things he flatly didn’t understand, that he would never understand.

The kitchen, for instance. Weight was important in space. Surely the natives could have provided a lightweight food, synthetic if necessary, capable of keeping the pilot fed and healthy indefinitely. The saving in effort and fuel consumption would have been enormous when multiplied by the number of ships he’d seen. Instead they preferred to carry a variety of prepackaged foods, and a complex machine to select and prepare them. They had chosen to cool these foods against decomposition rather than reduce them to powder. Why?

Pictures, for instance. Phssthpok understood photographs, and he understood graphs and maps. But the three works of art on the back wall were neither. They were charcoal sketches. One showed the head of a native like Phssthpok’s captive, but with longer crest of hair and with odd pigmentation around eyes and mouth; the others must have been younger editions of the same uncomfortably Pak-like species. Only heads and shoulders were shown. What was their purpose?

Under other circumstances the design on Bre

Phssthpok had noticed that design and understood in part. For members of a cooperative, space-going subgroup, it would be useful to code spacesuits in bright colors. Others would recognize the pattern at great distances. The native’s design seemed overcomplex, but not enough so to rouse Phssthpok’s curiosity.

For Phssthpok would never understand art or luxury.

Luxury? A Pak breeder might appreciate luxury, but was too stupid to make it for himself. A protector hadn’t the motivation. A protector’s desires were all co

Art? There had been maps and drawings among the Pak since before Pak history. But they were for war. You didn’t recognize your loved ones by sight anyway. They smelled right.

Reproduce the smell of a loved one?

Phssthpok might have thought of that, had the painting on Bre

But what could he make of Bre

Its chest was a copy in fluorescent dyes of Salvador Dali’s Mado

One thing he understood immediately.

He was being very careful with the instrument panel. He didn’t want to wreck anything before he found out how to pull astronomical data from the ship’s computer. When he opened the solar storm warning to ascertain its purpose, he found it surprisingly small. Curious, he investigated further. The thing was made with magnetic monopoles.