Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

“You have been demonstrating your instrument to the Chedal,” he said, “previous to the scheduled Demonstration and without consulting us.”

Ty opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing he could say.

The Observer turned and spoke to the Consul with his translator switched off. The Consul produced a roll of paper-like material almost identical with that the Chedal had handed Ty earlier, and passed it into Ty’s hands.

“Now,” said the Laburti Observer, tonelessly, “you will give a previous Demonstration to me…”

The Demonstration was just ending, when a distant hooting called the Laburti Consul out of the room. He returned a minute later—and with him was Mial.

“A Demonstration?” asked Mial, speaking first and looking at the Laburti Observer.

“You were not to be found,” replied the alien. “And I am informed of a Demonstration you gave the Chedal Observer some hours past.”

“Yes,” said Mial. His eyes were still dark from lack of sleep, but his gaze seemed sharp enough. That gaze slid over to fasten on Ty, now. “Perhaps we’d better discuss that, before the official Demonstration. There’s less than an hour left.”

“You intend still to hold the original Demonstration?”

“Yes,” said Mial. “Perhaps we’d better discuss that, too—alone.”

“Perhaps we had better,” said the Laburti. He nodded to the Consul who started out of the room. Ty stood still.

“Get going,” said Mial icily to him, without bothering to turn off his translator collar. “And have the machine ready to go.”

Ty turned off his own translator collar, but stood where he was. “What’re you up to?” he demanded. “This isn’t the way we were supposed to do things. You’re running some scheme of your own. Admit it!”

Mial turned his collar off.

“All right,” he said, coldly and calmly. “I’ve had to. There were factors you don’t know anything about.”

“Such as?”

“There’s no time to explain now.”

“I won’t go until I know what kind of a deal you’ve been cooking up with the Chedal Observer!”

“You fool!” hissed Mial. “Can’t you see this alien’s listening and watching every change your face makes? I can’t tell you now, and I won’t tell you. But I’ll tell you this—you’re going to get your chance to demonstrate Annie just the way you expected to, to Chedal and Laburti together, if you go along with me. But fight me—and that chance is lost. Now, will you go? ”

Ty hesitated a moment longer, then he turned and followed the Laburti Consul out. The alien led him to the room where Annie and their baggage had been placed, and shut him in there.

Once alone, he began to pace the floor, fury and worry boiling together inside him. Mial’s last words just now had been an open ultimatum. You’re too late to stop me now, had been the unspoken message behind those words. Go along with me now, or else lose everything.

Mial had been clever. He had managed to keep Ty completely in the dark. Puzzle as he would now, Ty could not figure out what it was, specifically, that Mial had set out secretly to do to the Annie Mission.

Or how much of that Mial might already have accomplished. How could Ty fight, completely ignorant of what was going on?

No, Mial was right. Ty could not refuse, blind, to do what he had been sent out to do. That way there would be no hope at all. By going along with Mial he kept alive the faint hope, that things might yet, somehow, turn out as planned back on Earth. Even if—Ty paused in his pacing to smile grimly—Mial’s plan included some arrangement not to Ty’s personal benefit. For the sake of the original purpose of the Mission, Ty had to go through with the Demonstration, even now, just as if he was Mial’s willing accomplice.

But—Ty began to pace again. There was something else to think about. It was possible to attack the problem from the other end. The accomplishment of the Mission was more important than the survival of Ty. Well, then, it was also more important than the survival of Mial—And if Mial should die, whatever commitments he had secretly made to the Chedal against the Laburti, or vice-versa, would die with him.

What would be left would be only what had been intended in the first place. The overwhelming commonsense practicality of peace in preference to war, demonstrated to both the Laburti and the Chedal.

Ty, pausing once more in his pacing to make a final decision, found his decision already made. Annie was already prepared as a lethal weapon. All he needed was to put her to use to stop Mial.

Twenty minutes later, the Laburti Consul for the human race came to collect both Ty and Annie, and bring them back to the room from which Ty had been removed, at Mial’s suggestion earlier. Now, Ty saw the room held not only Mial and the Laburti Observer, but one other Laburti in addition. While across the room’s width from these, were the Chedal Observer in blue harness with two other Chedals. They were all, with the exception of Mial, aliens, and their expressions were almost unreadable therefore. But, as Ty stepped into the room, he felt the animosity, like a living force, between the two groups of aliens in spite of the full moon’s width of distance between them.

It was in the rigidity with which both Chedal and Laburti figures stood. It was in the unwinking gaze they kept on each other. For the first time, Ty realized the need behind the emphasis on protocol and careful procedure between these two races. Here was merely a situation to which protocol was new, with a weaker race standing between representatives of the two Great Ones. But these robed, or yellow-furred, diplomats seemed ready to fly physically at each other’s throats.

“Get it working—” it was the voice of Mial with his translator turned off, and it betrayed a sense of the same tension in the air that Ty had recognized between the two alien groups. Ty reached for his own collar and then remembered that it was still turned off from before.

“I’ll need your help,” he said tonelessly. “Annie’s been jarred a bit, bringing her here.”

“All right,” said Mial. He came quickly across the room to join Ty, now standing beside the statistical analysis instrument.

“Stand here, behind Annie,” said Ty, “so you don’t block my view of the front instrument panel. Reach over the case to the data sorting key here, and hold it down for me.”

“This key—all right.” From behind Annie, Mial’s long right arm reached easily over the top of the case, but—as Ty had planned—not without requiring the other man to lean forward and brace himself with a hand upon the top of the metal case of the instrument. A touch now by Ty on the tape control key would send upwards of thirteen thousand volts suddenly through Mial’s body.

He ducked his head down and hastily began to key in data from the statistic roll lying waiting for him on a nearby table.

The work kept his face hidden, but could not halt the trembling beginning to grow inside him. His reaction against the other man was no less, but now—faced with the moment of pressing the tape control key—he found all his history and environmental training against what he was about to do. Murder —screamed his conscious mind— it’ll be murder!

His throat ached and was dry as some seared and cindered landscape of Earth might one day be after the lashing of a Chedal space-based weapon. His chest muscles had tensed and it seemed hard to get his breath. With an internal gasp of panic, he realized that the longer he hesitated, the harder it would be. His finger touched and trembled against the smooth, cold surface of the tape control key, even as the fingers of his other hand continued to key in data.