Three days later Bill Norden took his hands from the back of his neck,
and sat up. He joined Miles and Pat at the screen of the big life-force
"radar." Far out in space, a group of swiftly moving objects were
drawing together, according to the pips that traced their course. They
formed into clusters and began heading outwards.
The pips grew dimmer almost instantly, though they should have lost
only half their brightness after a billion miles of traveling.
"Obviously faster than light, and heading straight toward Sirius,"
Miles said slowly. "The poor devils! Until some darned fool from Earth
goes there one day to try to make peace with them, they're going to
live every hour of their lives in the horrible certainty that we can
wipe them out whenever we choose--and that the best their race could
do was a total failure. They'll probably have sunk back to being
scared, unhappy savages before we reach them."
Norden thought of the charts that had been shown him while he lay in
the communicating position. Earth had enough life-force projectors to
sweep the skies with lethal radiation already, and she had just begun
to tool up.
The Aliens had guessed wrongly about every step--they'd followed a
logical pattern against a race that defied logic.
And somehow, his hatred of them was gone. "You'll have the superlight
drive next year, probably," he guessed. "There are enough of their
ships out there now with Aliens who died before they could set off
their bombs for you to figure that out. Earth will be sending a ship
there before they can revert to complete savagery."
"And I suppose you want to be on it?" Pat asked. She looked at her
father, smiling thoughtfully as he grinned in answer to her lifted
eyebrow. "I imagine the three of us could swing permission, at that."
Norden nodded. He'd planned it all out. He'd have to go back to
university work, pretending to explore the new trails of science that
had opened with the discovery of Hardwick's spectrum. The formulae he'd
developed had been destroyed, but he could always remember enough to
keep up with the eager young men who would go plunging into the field.
Maybe, that way, by the time the probable levels of telepathy and other
psi-phenomenon had been discovered, the world would be ready for them.
He had no intention of acting as a super-brain, however well equipped
he might be. With the emergency over, the human race could discover
enough by itself.
Miles and his daughter would be busy with the long and difficult job of
trying to re-settle the planets that the Aliens had despoiled. But all
three of them would be ready when the first ship capable of reaching
the stars had been built.
Norden drew himself up.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I guess I want to be on it. I helped teach the
Aliens enough about human beings as enemies. Now I'd like to teach them
about us as friends."