Emrys was a long time in answering. When he finally spoke, his voice
was flat and dead. "All right, I gave them the blueprints for the
space-warp engines. What else did I have to give them in exchange?"
Hubbard expelled a long breath. He had answered this question for
himself many minutes before. Still, the shock of confirmation was too
great. All hope was gone now. "Perhaps you had a right to sell your own
soul, Jan, but you had no right to sell humanity's." His good breeding
held up all the way. This man had betrayed the whole of mankind, and so
he, Peter Hubbard, reproached him gently for it. Though, come to think
of it, what good would savage recrimination--or anything--do?
"But _you_ don't have to worry about it, Peter!" Emrys cried. "Listen,
the Morethan technology is so alien, so different from ours, because
it's based on mental rather than physical forces, that it'll take
centuries before they can acquire the techniques they'll need to build
the engines. And they'll have trouble getting the materials. We'll both
have been long in our graves by the time they'll reach Earth."
"And that makes it all right? It doesn't matter to you what happens to
your own home planet once you are dead?"
* * * * *
The young-looking face was flushed. "Why should it? Does Earth care
what happens to me? During the plague, they cursed my name because I
invented the star-engines. That's the only time Earth remembered me."
"During the plague, men were insane, Jan," Hubbard said, knowing his
own sweet reasonableness was ludicrous under the circumstances, "not
responsible for what they said. They don't curse your name any more."
"No, they've forgotten it." Emrys looked at Hubbard with blazing,
unhuman eyes. "Why should you expect me to put their welfare before my
own?"
"You must, if the race is to survive."
Hubbard expected Emrys to say, "Why should it survive?" but apparently
there was a grain of emotion left here. "It will survive. The Morethans
are not--" the word seemed to stick in Emrys' throat--"monsters."
"Jan," Hubbard said in a monotone, "eleven years ago, after you came to
Earth for your inheritance, I became interested in Morethis--naturally
enough, I suppose. I started scanning everything I could lay my hands
on, and I learned a great deal about it--as much, I believe, as anyone
off Morethis knows. Except, of course, you."
Emrys rose and began to pace the floor. "Nobody really knows anything
about Morethis. Most of what has been written is a--a pack of lies. One
liar copied from another, and so they perpetuate the lie. Scandal has
always sold better than truth!"
Hubbard said, "There is a legend that the Morethans once had limited
space travel, though no way of warping space to bring the distant stars
closer, since they did not use engines. But there were many stars close
to them, and they traveled from system to system, sucking each one dry.
Then there were no living planets left in their sector of space, and
their engineless ships could not bridge the gap to the next cluster, so
they found themselves trapped on a dying planet that revolved around a
dying star, and they, as a race, began to die themselves."