The screen came to life.

  The being that peered from it stood about waist high to a man in its erect torso. The rest of the body stretched behind in a vaguely caterpillar shape, on eight stumpy legs. Along that glabrous form was a row of opercula protecting tracheae which, in a dense hydrogen atmosphere, aerated the organism quite efficiently. Two arms ended in claws reminiscent of a lobster’s; from the wrists below sprouted short, tough finger-tendrils. The head was dominated by a spongy snout. A Baburite had no mouth. It—individuals changed sex from time to time—macerated food with the claws and put it in a digestive pouch to be dissolved before the snout sucked it up. The eyes were four, and tiny. Speech was by diaphragms on either side of the skull, hearing and smell were associated with the tracheae. The skin was banded orange, blue, white, and black. Most of it was hidden by a gauzy robe.

  The creature would have been an absurdity, a biological impossibility, on an Earth-type world. In its own ship, in strong gravity and thick, cold air and murk through which shadowy forms moved, it had dignity and power.

  It thrummed noises which a vocalizer rendered into fairly good League Latin: “We were expecting you. Do not approach closer.”

  Dalmady moistened his lips. He felt cruelly young and helpless. “G-g-greeting. I am the factor.”

  The Baburite made no comment. After a while, Dalmady plowed on: “We have been told that you…well, you are seizing the bluejack territory. I cannot believe that is correct.”

  “It is not, precisely,” said the flat mechanical tone. “For the nonce, the natives may use these lands as heretofore, except that they will not find much bluejack to harvest. Our robots are too effective. Observe.”

  The screen flashed over to a view of a squat, cylindrical machine. Propelled by a simple grav drive, it floated several centimeters off the ground. Its eight arms terminated in sensors, pluckers, trimmers, brush cutters. On its back was welded a large basket. On its top was a maser transceiver and a swivel-mounted blaster.

  “It runs off accumulators,” the unseen Baburite stated. “These need only be recharged once in thirty-odd hours, at the fusion generator we are installing, unless a special energy expenditure occurs…like a battle, for instance. High-hovering relay units keep the robots in constant touch with each other and with a central computer, currently in the ship, later to be in the blockhouse. It controls them all simultaneously, greatly reducing the cost per unit.” With no trace of sardonicism: “You will understand that such a beamcasting system cannot feasibly be jammed. The computer will be provided with missiles as well as guns and defensive fields. It is programmed to strike back at any attempt to hamper its operations.”

  The robot’s image disappeared, the being’s returned. Dalmady felt faint. “But that would…would be…an act of war!” he stuttered.

  “No. It would be self-protection, legitimate under the rules of the Polesotechnic League. You may credit us with the intelligence to investigate the social as well as physical state of things before we acted and, indeed, to become an associate member of the League. No one will suffer except your company. That will not displease its competitors. They have assured our representatives that they can muster enough Council votes to prevent sanctions. It is not as if the loss were very great. Let us recommend to you personally that you seek employment elsewhere.”

  Uh-huh…after I dropped a planet…I might maybe get a job cleaning latrines some place, went through the back of Dalmady’s head. “No,” he protested, “what about the autochthons? They’re hurting already.”

  “When the land has been cleared, bluejack plantations will be established,” the Baburite said. “Doubtless work can be found for some of the displaced savages, if they are sufficiently docile. Doubtless other resources, ignored by you oxygen breathers, await exploitation. We may in the end breed colonists adapted to Suleiman. But that will be of no concern to the League. We have investigated the practical effect of its prohibition on imperialism by members. Where no one else is interested in a case, a treaty with a native government is considered sufficient, and native governments with helpful attitudes are not hard to set up. Suleiman is such a case. A written-off operation that was never much more than marginal, out on an extreme frontier, is not worth the League’s worrying about.”

  “The principle—”

  “True. We would not provoke war, nor even our own expulsion and a boycott. However, recall that you are not being ordered off this planet. You have simply met a superior competitor, superior by virtue of living closer to the scene, being better suited to the environment and far more interested in succeeding here. We have the same right to launch ventures as you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?” Dalmady whispered. “Who are you? What are you? A private company, or—”

  “Nominally, we are so organized, though like many other League associates we make no secret of this being pro forma,” the Baburite told him. “Actually, the terms on which our society must deal with the Technic aggregate have little relevance to the terms of its interior structure. Considering the differences—sociological, psychological, biological—between us and you and your close allies, our desire to be free of your civilization poses no real threat to the latter and hence will never provoke any real reaction. At the same time, we will never win the freedom of the stars without the resources of modern technology.

  “To industrialize with minimum delay, we must obtain the initial capacity through purchases from the Technic worlds. This requires Technic currency. Thus, while we spend what appears to be a disproportionate amount of effort and goods on this bluejack project, it will result in saving outplanet exchange for much more important things.

  “We tell you what we tell you in order to make clear, not only our harmlessness to the League as a whole, but our determination. We trust you have taped this discussion. It may prevent your employer from wasting our time and energy in counteracting any foredoomed attempts by him to recoup. While you remain on Suleiman, observe well. When you go back, report faithfully.”

  The screen blanked. Dalmady tried for minutes to make the connection again, but got no answer.

  Thirty days later, which would have been fifteen of Earth’s, a conference met in the compound. Around a table, in a room hazed and acrid with smoke, sat the humans. In a full-size screen were the images of the Thalassocrat and the Translator, a three-dimensional realism that seemed to breathe out the cold of the ice chamber where they crouched.

  Dalmady ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll summarize,” he told them wearily. The Translator’s fur began to move, his voice to make low whistles, as he rendered from the Anglic for his king. “The reports of our native scouts were waiting for me, recorded by Yvonne, when I returned from my own latest flit a couple of hours ago. Each datum confirms every other.

  “We’d hoped, you recall, that the computer would be inadequate to cope with us, once the Baburite ship had left.”

  “Why should the live crew depart?” Sanjuro Nakamura asked.

  “That’s obvious,” Thorson said. “They may not run their domestic economy the way we run ours, but that doesn’t exempt them from the laws of economics. A planet like Babur—actually, a single dominant country on it, or whatever they have—still backward, still poor, has limits on what it can afford. They may enjoy shorter lines of communication than we do, but we, at home, enjoy a lot more productivity. At their present stage, they can’t spend what it takes to create and maintain a permanent, live-staffed base like ours. Suleiman isn’t too healthy for them, either, you know; and they lack even our small background of accumulated experience. So they’ve got to automate at first, and just send somebody once in a while to check up and collect the harvest.”

  “Besides,” Alice Bergen pointed out, “the nomads are sworn to us. They wouldn’t make a deal with another party. Not that the Baburites could use them profitably anyway. We’re sitting in the only suitable depot area, the only one whose people have a culture that makes it easy to train them in service jobs for us. So the Baburites have to operate right on the spot where the bluejack grows. The nomads resent having their caravan trade ended, and would stage guerrilla attacks on live workers.”

  “Whew!” Nakamura said, with an attempted grin. “I assure you, my question was only rhetorical. I simply wanted to point out that the opposition would not have left everything in charge of a computer if they weren’t confident the setup would function, including holding us at bay. I begin to see why their planners concentrated on developing robotics at the beginning of modernization. No doubt they intend to use machines in quite a few larcenous little undertakings.”

  “Do you know how many robots there are?” Isabel asked.

  “We estimate a hundred,” Dalmady told her, “though we can’t get an accurate count. They operate fast, you see, covering a huge territory—in fact, the entire territory where bluejack grows thickly enough to be worth gathering—and they’re identical in appearance except for the relay hoverers.”

  “That must be some computer, to juggle so many at once, over such varying conditions,” Alice remarked. Cybernetics was not her field.

  Yvonne shook her head; the gold tresses swirled. “Nothing extraordinary. We have long-range telephotos, taken during its installation. It’s a standard multi-channel design, only the electronics modified for ambient conditions. Rudimentary awareness: more isn’t required, and would be uneconomic to provide, when its task is basically simple.”

  “Can’t we outwit it, then?” Alice asked.

  Dalmady grimaced. “What do you think my native helpers and I have been trying to do thereabouts, this past week? It’s open country; the relayers detect you coming a huge ways off, and the computer dispatches robots. Not many are needed. If you come too close to the blockhouse, they fire warning blasts. That’s terrified the natives. Few of them will approach anywhere near, and in fact the savages are starting to evacuate, which’ll present us with a nice bunch of hungry refugees. Not that I blame them. A low-temperature organism cooks easier than you or me. I did push ahead, and was fired on for real. I ran away before my armor should be pierced.”

  “What about airborne attack?” Isabel wondered.

  Thorson snorted. “In three rattly cars, with handguns? Those robots fly, too, remember. Besides, the centrum has forcefields, blast cannon, missiles. A naval vessel would have trouble reducing it.”

  Furthermore,” interjected the Thalassocrat, “I am told of a threat to destroy this town by airborne weapons, should a serious assault be made on yonder place. That cannot be risked. Sooner would I order you to depart for aye, and strike what bargain I was able with your enemies.”

  He can make that stick, Dalmady thought, by the simple process of telling our native workers to quit.

  Not that that would necessarily make any difference. He recalled the last statement of a nomad Master, as the retreat from a reconnaissance took place, Suleimanites on their animals, man on a gravscooter. “We have abided by our alliance with you, but you not by yours with us. Your predecessors swore we should have protection from sky borne invaders. If you fail to drive off these, how shall we trust you?” Dalmady had pleaded for time and had grudgingly been granted it, since the caravaneers did value their trade with him. But if we don’t solve this problem soon, I doubt the system can ever be renewed.

  “We shall not imperil you,” he promised the Thalassocrat.

  “How real is the threat?” Nakamura asked. “The League wouldn’t take kindly to slaughter of harmless autochthons.”

  “But the League would not necessarily do more than complain,” Thorson said, “especially if the Baburites argue that we forced them into it. They’re banking on its indifference, and I suspect their judgment is shrewd.”

  “Right or wrong,” Alice said, “their assessment of the psychopolitics will condition what they themselves do. And what assessment have they made? What do we know about their ways of thinking?”

  “More than you might suppose,” Yvonne replied. “After all, they’ve been in contact for generations, and you don’t negotiate commercial agreements without having done some studies in depth first. The reason you’ve not seen much of me, these past days, is that I’ve buried myself in our files. We possess, right here, a bucketful of information about Babur.”

  Dalmady straightened in his chair. His pulse picked up the least bit. It was no surprise that a large and varied xenological library existed in this insignificant outback base. Microtapes were cheaply reproduced, and you never knew who might chance by or what might happen, so you were routinely supplied with references for your entire sector. “What do we have?” he barked.

  Yvonne smiled wryly. “Nothing spectacular, I’m afraid. The usual: three or four of the principal languages, sketches of history and important contemporary cultures, state-of-technology analyses, statistics on stuff like population and productivity—besides the planetology, biology, psychoprofiling, et cetera. I tried and tried to find a weak point, but couldn’t. Oh, I can show that this operation must be straining their resources, and will have to be abandoned if it doesn’t quickly payoff. But that’s just as true of us.”

  Thorson fumed on his pipe. “If we could fix a gadget— We have a reasonably well-equipped workshop. That’s where I’ve been sweating, myself.”

  “What had you in mind?” Dalmady inquired. The dullness of the engineer’s voice was echoed in his own.

  “Well, at first I wondered about a robot to go out and hunt theirs down. I could build one, a single one, more heavily armed and armored.” Thorson’s hand flopped empty, palm up, on the table. “But the computer has a hundred; and it’s more sophisticated by orders of magnitude than any brain I could cobble together from spare cybernetics parts; and as the Thalassocrat says, we can’t risk a missile dropped on our spaceport in retaliation, because it’d take out most of the city.

  “Afterward I thought about jamming, or about somehow lousing the computer itself, but that’s totally hopeless. It’d never let you get near.”

  He sighed. “My friends, let’s admit that we’ve had the course, and plan how to leave with minimum loss.”

  The Thalassocrat stayed imperturbable, as became a monarch. But the Translator’s main eye filmed over, his tiny body shrank into itself, and he cried: “We had hoped…one year our descendants, learning from you, joining you among the uncounted suns— Is there instead to be endless rule by aliens?”

  Dalmady and Yvonne exchanged looks. Their hands clasped. He believed the same thought must be twisting in her: We, being of the League, cannot pretend to altruism. But we are not monsters either. Some cold accountant in an office on Earth may order our departure. But can we who have been here, who like these people and were trusted by them, abandon them and continue to live with ourselves? Would we not forever feel that any blessings given us were stolen?

  And the old, old legend crashed into his awareness.

  He sat for a minute or two, unconscious of the talk that growled and groaned around him. Yvonne first noticed the blankness in his gaze. “Emil,” she murmured, “are you well?”

  Dalmady sprang to his feet with a whoop.

  “What in space?” Nakamura said.

  The factor controlled himself. He trembled, and small chills ran back and forth along his nerves; but his words came steady. “I have an idea.”

  Above the robes that billowed around him in the wind, the Translator carried an inconspicuous miniature audiovisual two-way. Dalmady in the car which he had landed behind a hill some distance off, Thorson in the car which hovered to relay, Yvonne and Alice and Isabel and Nakamura and the Thalassocrat in the city, observed a bobbing, swaying landscape on their tuned-in screens. Black leaves streamed, long and ragged, on bushes whose twigs clicked an answer to the whining air; boulders and ice chunks humped among them; an ammonia fall boomed on the right, casting spray across the field of view. The men in the cars could likewise feel the planet’s attraction and the shudder of hulls under that slow, thick wind.

  “I still think we should’ve waited for outside help,” Thorson declared on a separate screen. “That rig’s a real lash-up.”

  “And I still say,” Dalmady retorted, “your job’s made you needlessly fussy in this particular case. Besides, the natives couldn’t’ve been stalled much longer.” Furthermore, if we can rout them with nothing but what was on hand, that ought to shine in my record. I’d like to think that’s less important to me, but I can’t deny it’s real.

  One way or another, the decision had to be mine. I am the factor.

  It’s a lonesome feeling. I wish Yvonne were here beside me.

  “Quiet,” he ordered. “Something’s about to happen.”

  The Translator had crossed a ridge and was gravscooting down the opposite slope. He required no help at that; a few days of instruction had made him a very fair driver, even in costume. He was entering the robot-held area, and already a sky borne unit slanted to intercept him. In the keen Osman-light, against ocherous clouds, it gleamed like fire.

  Dalmady crouched in his seat. He was airsuited. If his friend got into trouble, he’d slap down his faceplate, open the cockpit, and swoop to an attempted rescue. A blaster lay knobby in his lap. The thought he might come too late made a taste of sickness in his mouth,

  The robot paused at hover, arms extended, weapon pointed. The Translator continued to glide at a steady rate. When near collision, the two-way spoke for him: “Stand aside. We are instituting a change of program.”

  Spoke, to the listening computer, in the principal language of Babur.

  Yvonne had worked out the plausible phrases, and spent patient hours with vocalizer and recorder until they seemed right. Engineer Thorson, xenologists Nakamura and Alice Bergen, artistically inclined biologist Isabel da Fonseca, Dalmady himself and several Suleimanite advisors who had spied on the Baburites, had created the disguise. Largely muffled in cloth, it didn’t have to be too elaborate—a torso shaven and painted; a simple mechanical caterpillar body behind, steered by the hidden tail, automatically pacing its six legs with the wearer’s two; a flexible mask with piezoelectric controls guided by the facial muscles beneath; claws and tendrils built over the natural arms, fake feet over the pair of real ones.