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skin or whatever it was had been removed.  You heard what I said to him. I
identified myself as a human of the Federation and told him he was a Raceel.
He immediately attempted to destroy me. The weapon, of course, was rigged. If
the trigger was pressed, it would kill the user.
Azard did not reply.
 So you are Raceels, Odun went on.  And you d kill any of us any human
being as readily as you destroyed the
people of Malatlo. We should like to know how this came about. Are you willing
to talk?
 Yes. I ll tell you whatever you want to know. Azard made his voice dull, his
expression listless and resigned. But there was savage anger in him and the
longer he held these three in talk, the more certain their death and eventual
Raceel victory became. The thirty elds he d released had been a select group
of superb fighters, and they must be searching the ship by now, in strong new
bodies and with weapons in their hands. The demonstration here confirmed that
they d know very quickly how to put those bodies to full use.
 We were desperate, he said, and went on, knowing the statement had gained
him their full attention. Before the
Malatlo settlers contacted it, Tiurs had faced the problem of a population
constantly on the verge of expanding beyond the ability of the planet to
support it, and had no adequate techniques of space travel, which might have
helped alleviate the problem. A temporary and unsatisfactory solution had been
the development of methods of preserving a conscious personality indefinitely
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
without the support of a physical body. . . .
 So it was you and not Malatlo, said Sashien,  who originated the eld
sciences.
 They were investigating the subject, Azard told him.  But we accomplished
the eld separation a century before they began to make significant progress in
that direction 
The Malatlo Followers did not push their contacts with Tiurs, believing it
best to let the relationship develop gradually and in a manner which would be
satisfactory to the Raceels. And the Raceels, though hungry for the
information they might get from the humans, remained equally cautious. For
them the situation held both great promise and a great threat.
There were means of practical interstellar space travel, and there were worlds
upon worlds among the stars to which their kind might spread. That was the
promise.
The threat was the prospect of encountering competitors in space more
formidable than themselves. The Followers were harmless, but from what they
had told the Raceels of the species to which they belonged, the species
certainly was not.
Evidently it already controlled an enormous sector of space. Further, there
might be other species equally dangerous to those weaker than they.
The logical approach was to remain unnoticed until one became strong enough to
meet any opposition.
The Raceels immersed themselves in research on many levels, including lines
long since abandoned as being too immediately dangerous to themselves.
Somewhat to their surprise, they found Malatlo completely willing to supply
them with spaceships for study when they indicated an interest in them.
Unfortunately, these craft were not designed to accomplish interstellar
flights, but they advanced the scientists of Tiurs a long step in that
direction. The Raceels kept this as well as their other hopes and fears a
careful secret from Malatlo.
They were a race which had a naturally high rate of reproduction and which
throughout a war-studded history had made a fetish of the expansion of its
kind. That drive became a liability when Tiurs was united at last into a
single rigidly controlled society confined to the surface of its planet. Now
suddenly it might be turned into an asset again. When they burst upon the
stars, it would be in no timid and tentative colonial probes, but in many
thousands of ships, each capable of peopling a world in a single generation.
They worked towards that end with feverish determination. From Malatlo they
learned of the eld-less zombie bodies
Federation science knew how to produce in theoretically limitless quantities,
and they took up that line of investigation.
The disembodied elds in the storage vaults, for whom there had been no room
for normal existence on Tiurs, would come to life again in new bodies on new
worlds. Dormant fertile germ cells of selected strains were stockpiled by the
millions.
Weaponry research moved quickly forwards. The full interstellar drive seemed
almost within reach.
And then [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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