THEY HIDE, WE SEEK

ROBERT SILVERBERG

NOBODY HAD ANY GREAT INTEREST IN ALTERING TM long-established galactic

balance of power, least of all Captain Hayn Wing-Marra of the Achilles.

But one thing does lead to another, and immense consequences have a way

sometimes of hinging on very small pivots. In this case, the pivot was

nothing more than the fact that Captain Wing-Marra, who was eleven

cycles old, had spent one lifetime as an organic chemist and another as

an archaeologist before he had gone to space.

It was the passion for organic chemistry, still alive in him after all

those years, that had brought his Erthumaregistry starship and its crew of

nine, seven Erthurnoi and two Naxians, to the vicinity of the gaseous

nebula W49. What they had set out to do was to explore a large molecular

cloud, a spacegoing soup of complex hydrocarbons, which was certainly of

scientific interest and probably had some economic value as well.

What they found nearby, hidden on the far side of the cloud, was a

main-sequence star, which had four or five planets, most of which had

moons. That was unexpected but not particularly surprising. The galaxy is

full of stars, hundreds of millions of them, and nearly all of them have

planets.

At first glance neither the star nor its planets nor any of the moons

seemed particularly out of the ordinary, either, though one of the planets

was close enough to Earth-type to be of potential use to Erdiurnoi. There

are, however, plenty of worlds like that.

 2 ROBERT SILVERBERG

But a second glance revealed that a Locrian ship was already present in the

unknown star system. It was parked in orbit around the second planet, and

Locrian scouting parties were apparently at work both on the planet and its

moon. That didn't make a great deal of sense, because the second planet was

the Earth-type one, with a dense oxygennitrogen atmosphere very low in neon

and other noble gases. Locrians are not at all comfortable in places like

that. Nor would the airless moon be any more inviting to them.

So it seemed appropriate for Captain Wing-Marra to take a third and rather

less casual glance. Which he did; and after that nothing would ever be

quite the same for any of the six races of the galaxy that were capable of

interstellar travel.

Until the discovery that a Locrian exploration force was working the same

territory he was, the molecular cloud-nearly thirty light-years across and

laden with marvels-had seemed quite interesting enough for Captain

Wing-Marra.

"Do you see?" he said to Jorin Murry-Balff, who was his Communications.

"Not just piddling little hydroxyls and ammonias. That's

cyano-octa-tetrayne there- HB9N. Eleven-atom chains, Murry-Balff! And

there! That's methanol, by all the stars! CH30H!" Wing-Marra reached toward

the spectrometer's dazzling screen, shining with swirls of amber and topaz

and carnelian and amethyst, and tapped this brilliant swirl and that one.

"And this-and this-"

Murry-Balff didn't seem impressed. "Doesn't every molecular cloud have

stuff like that in it?"

"Not this intricate, most of them. Those are very big molecules out there.

Formaldehyde--112CO- Vinyl cyanide--H2CCHCN. "

"Formaldehyde? Cyanide? Sounds pretty deadly to me.

"Don't be an idiot. Those are the chemicals of life, man! " Wing-Marra

leaned close, staring into the screen. Information moved in dizzying whorls

before him. The spectrometer, whipping its scan-beam tirelessly across the

vastness of the molecular cloud, provided color-analog

 They Hide, We Seek 3

displays of each organic compound it detected, reports on mass

configuration, a three-dimensional distribution arc, and an assortment of

other quantifiable factors. "Look, there's formic acid. And five or six

amino acids, or I miss my guess. You and I and the snakes downstairs and

everything else that breathes and metabolizes are built out of that stuff.

And for all we know, we're alive at this moment only because wandering

clouds like this seeded the newbom planets they encountered with just this

sort of organic material. "

Murry-Balff shrugged. "I'll take your word for it, Captain. Chemistry was

never my field. Cosmology neither." A red glow blossomed on his wristband.

"If you'll excuse me, sir-there's data coming in now from our planetary

probes-"

"Dismissed," Wing-Marra murmured.

It was embarrassing for him to see the speed with which Murry-Balff, who

ordinarily was in no rush, left the observation deck. Perhaps I was too

ebullient for him just now, Wing-Marra thought. Or too intemperate.

Certainly I was running off at the mouth a little about those molecules.

He wondered whether an apology was in order. They were old friends, after

all. Murry-Balff and Wing-Marra were natives of the same Erthuma world,

Hesperia in the St. Dominic's Star system. The other five Erthumoi - on

board came from five different worlds, none within a hundred light-years of

any other; that fact alone gave the two Hesperians a certain sense of

fellowship that went beyond the pseudomilitary shipboard formalities. On

the other hand, Wing-Marra thought, it's Murry-Bafff s problem, not mine,

if the contents of that molecular cloud don't interest him. The cloud is

what we came here to investigate. Before we're through with it he'll have

had to learn the formulas for a hundred different hydrocarbons, like it or

not.

Wing-Marra peered at the spectrometer screen once again, and within moments

he was lost in wonder.

His capacity for wonder--exultant, transcendent intellectual excitement-was

one of the many contradictions

 4 ROBERT SILVERBERG

out of which he was constructed. Wing-Marra was quiet and self-contained, a

tall, pale, ascetic-looking man who believed in setting limits and abiding

by them. To some that seemed odd and even quaint, considering that he had

spent the last three cycles of his long life roaming the virtually limitless

reaches of the galaxy. Wing-Marra himself saw no inconsistency in that. The

way to cope with the crushing weight of infinity, he thought, was to behave

as though one were capable of setting boundaries to it.

And though he seemed in many ways a passionless man, his fascination with

the intricacy of the organic molecules was intense to the point of

obsessiveness.

Six cycles back-his life now had encompassed eleven all told, a span of

nearly a thousand Erthuma year"e had been struck suddenly by a waking

vision, a startling hallucinatory display. He was living then on the sultry

world called Atatakai, where the air seemed as thick as fur. Suddenly in

the red evening sky he saw inexplicable pulsing points of light, which

cavorted and leaped about in a wild whirling dance.

As he watched, astounded, he saw two of the shimmering light sources come

together to form a pair, and then a third and larger one seize them both,

and then even more complicated unions take form. And all the while the

giddy dance went on. The whirling lights were strung like serpents across

the sky. He had never seen anything so awesome. The patterns of their

sinuous movements were elegant, compelling, sublimely beautiful. It was a

revelation. It seemed to him that he was looking right into the heart of

the universe, into the deepest secrets of creation.

Then, to his even greater amazement, one serpent seized its own tail in its

mouth, and, ringlike now, began a fierce gyration so imperious that he fell

to his knees before it, stunned and shaken. There was a powerful truth in

that furiously whirling serpentine fonn--the truth of what, he had not the

vaguest idea-and under the impact of that vision of the innerness of all

things he trembled like a leaf in a storm. After a time he could no longer

bear to watch. He closed his eyes; and when he opened them again he beheld

only the cloud-choked crimson sky of Atatakai.

 They Hide, We Seek 5

But the memory of the bewildering, overwhelming vision would not leave

Wing-Marra's mind; and in the end he had had to seek help in regaining his

mental balance. A zigzag trail through a variety of therapists and

therapies brought him at last to a flat-faced dome of silvery metal that

listened to him for a time and said finally in a brusque impersonal voice,

"Your hallucination is not original. You are not the first to experience

it. "

Wing-Marra felt as though the autoshrink had spat in his eye.

"Not-original? What the hell do you mean?"

"Another has had this vision before you, in early times, in the very

distant past. It is the dream of Kekule. This is true. I have consulted the

archives."

"Kekule?"

"You are a chemist. This is true."

"Why-no," said Wing-Marra, puzzled. "Not true. Not at all."

"Then you have studied chemistry," said the machine, sounding a little

irritated. "This is true."

Wing-Marra thought. "I suppose so, yes. Long ago. In my first cycle, when

I was at the university. But--

"A datum buried since your student days has surfaced in you. You have

recapitulated the dream of Kekule," the machine told him again. "Such

things happen. It is not a sign of serious mental disturbance. This is

true."

"Kekule, " Wing-Marra said wonderingly. "Who's that?"

There was the momentary hum of data-search. "Friedrich August Kekule.

Erthuma of the Earthborn. Professor of chemistry at Ghent and later at

Bonn."

4 'Where?"

"Ancient Earth places. Do not pursue irrelevances. Kekule, pondering

questions of molecular structure, saw atoms dancing before his eyes,

forming a chain. Later he dreamed again and perceived the pattern of the

benzene ring. This is true. The episode is well-known."

"To chemists, maybe,",said Wing-Marra. "I'm not a chemist." He felt

disgruntled and obscurely let down at having paid good money to discover

that the vision that

 6 ROBERT SILVERBERG

had so irradiated his consciousness was a second-hand one. On the other

hand, he told himself, probably it was better to hear that a phantom memory

had come floating up out of some lecture of his student days than to be

informed that he was going out of his mind. Still, he was in a sour mood as

he left the autoshrink's cubicle.

His annoyance passed, though, and his fascination with the images that had

so spontaneously leaped from the recesses of his brain remained and even

deepened. He looked up Kekule and his work. Nineteenth century--my God,

practically prehistoric! The dawn of science! A forgotten man, but for one

great accomplishment, the theory of organic molecular structure. Kekule had

demonstrated the tendency of carbon atoms to link together and to snare

other atoms in their quadrivalent embrace.

And so that vision, second-hand or not, led Wing-Marra from one thing to

another and another, forging ever deeper throughout all the years that

remained to him in that lifetime into the study of organic chemistry. It

was his hope to recapture some of the splendor and wonder of those dancing

lights in the sky. It was his hope to know again that sense of being in

contact with inarguable truth. His head was aswini with isomers and

polymers, with alkanes and olefins, with aromatics and heterocyclics and

aliphatics, with esters, ethers, aldehydes, ketones. The crisp symmetries

of their bonding patterns offered him ineffable joy and held him in an

ineluctable grip. And here he was, five lifetimes later, still pursuing the

mysteries of the carbon compounds out here in this remote arm of the

galaxy, forty thousand light-years from the home world of all Erthumoi and

even farther from the planet of his own birth.

Now, throat dry, eyes wide and scarcely flickering, Wing-Marra gripped the

handles of the spectrometer screen and guided its scanner this way and that

across the face of the great molecular cloud. Radiant bands of colored

light leaped out at him from the smoky vastness. He was staring into the

miraculous core of creation.

Stars were being bom in that dense black pit. Future worlds were

coalescing. The unimaginable life-forms of a

 They Hide, We Seek 7

billion years hence would be assembled from those rich whorls of molecular

soup.

Wing-Marra felt his spirit soaring, felt his soul expanding, going forth

into the cloud, walking among the drifting wonders. It was an almost

godlike sensation.

"Sir?"

Murry-Balff. The intrusion was maddening, painful.

Scowling, Wing-Marra made an impatient gesture without turning away from

the screen. Whatever Murry-Balff wanted, it could wait.

"Sir, this is important."

"So is this. I'm scanning the cloud."

"And we've been scanning this nearby solar system, sir. The planetary

probes have pulled in something very strange. Seems that we have company."

Wing-Marra spun around swiftly.

"Company?"

"Let me show you," Murry-Balff said. He touched his wrist-plate to a wall

terminal. Instantly a data screen came to life across the room. It showed

a green planetary ball. Another, somewhat smaller ball, bleak and lifeless

looking, orbited it at an inclination of about sixty degrees.

"This is the second planet of the system," said MurryBalff. "And its moon.

I call your attention to the right side of the screen, near the planetary

equator. "

Wing-Marra thought he could see a dark speck.

Murry-Balff fingered his wrist-plate. The screen zoomed into enlargement

mode. Now the green world filled nearly all of the picture. Something like

a black spider hung beside it. Murry-Balff made another tuning adjustment,

and the spider occupied the center of the screen.

It wasn't a spider. It looked more like some narrowwaisted wasp now: three

dark, gleaming elongated cylinders, linked by narrow communication tubes.

Six fragile leglike appendages trailed from the hindmost cylinder. At the

other end were two faceted domes, rising like huge insect eyes from the

front. Spiral rows of hexagonal ports wound across each cylinder's sides.

The thing was a starship. And not of Erthuma design.

"Locrians," Murry-Balff said quietly.

 8 ROBERT SILVERBERG

"So I see." Wing-Marra pressed his fists together until his knuckles

cracked, and swore. Murry-Balff brought the magnification up to the next

level. It was pretty grainy, but at this level Wing-Marra thought he could

actually make out the insectlike figures of the aliens moving about behind

the ports. He shook his head. "What in God's name would Locrians be doing

here?"

The crew assembled fast, all but the Naxians, who needed more time. Snakes

always needed more time, no matter what. Wing-Marra didn't feel like

waiting for them. He kept the data screen lit and ordered Murry-Balff to

maintain real-time tracking surveillance of the Locrian ship.

"We're under no obligation to withdraw," Wing-Marra said. "This is

unclaimed territory and remains that way until they've established valid

possession. Simply being the first to get here doesn't constitute valid

possession. "

"They aren't under any obligation to withdraw either," Linga Hyath, his

Cosmography, pointed out.

"Understood. I I

"T'hey might not agree that they don't have valid possession," said his

Diplomacy, Ayana Sanoclaro.

Hyath and Sanoclaro looked at each other and exchanged quick, smug nods of

satisfaction. Wing-Marra could usually count on them to think the same way

and to express essentially the same ideas at approximately the same time.

They were both wiry, long-limbed women with the gaunt, attenuated look that

natives of low-gravity worlds generally have, and they appeared to be not

merely sisters but twins: the same pale blue eyes, the same immense cas-

cades of golden hair, the same thin, pinched features. The odd thing was

that they were not at all related, but came, in fact, from worlds a

thousand light-years apart. Some genotypes are strikingly persistent.

Wing-Marra said, "Are you suggesting that they might make trouble for us?"

"They might have serious objections to our hanging around here," Sanoclaro

said.

"If they think there's something really worthwhile here,

 They Hide, We Seek 9

they might defend their claim in a way we wouldn't like," said Hyath.

Mikoil Karpov, the Biochemistry, said, "You imply that they'd take hostile

action?"

"They might," said Sanoclaro.

Karpov blinked. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man, heavy jowled, densely

bearded, from the chilly world of Zima, and his Erthumat was thickened by

strong Russkiye inflections~ "You are talking about acts of war? And you

are actually serious? The idea's absurd. Nobody makes war. 11

"Erthumoi used to, not all that long ago."

Karpov gestured emphatically. "It was plenty long ago. Nobody fires on

peaceful ships."

"Especially across species lines," said the Navigation, a dark, soft, tiny,

deceptively feminine-looking woman named Eslane Ree, who came from Doppler

IV. "The Locrians can see that this is an Erthuma ship. Maybe the

Crotonites still like to squabble among themselves, or, from what I hear

from our two, the Naxians. But those are Locrians over there. They don't

even have a history of intraspecies warfare-why would they take a shot at

us? I'm with Karpov here. We're spinning horrors out of nothing at all."

"Maybe so. But what are Locrians doing here, though?" Linga Hyath asked.

"Locrians don't ordinarily go sniffing around high-oxygen worlds. And from

the looks of it, this one is particularly badly suited for them. Six gulps

of that atmosphere and they'd be drunk for a month. They must have seen

something out of the usual here that got their attention in a big way."

"Who says?" Eslane Ree demanded. "Have we?"

Hyath shrugged. "We've only just arrived."

"Perhaps so have they."

"But they'd have taken one look and moved on, since this world is plainly

useless to them," said Ayana Sanoclaro. "Unless they've spotted something.

And if they have, my guess is that they'll go to great lengths, maybe to

surprisingly great lengths, to keep us away from it."

 10 ROBERT SILVERBERG

Eslane Ree gave the elongated blond woman a sour glare. "Paranoia!

Hyperdefensiveness!"

"Foresight," Sanoclaro retorted. "Prudence."

"What are you advocating?" asked the Maintenance, Septen Bolangyr, who came

from a high-ultraviolet world in the Nestor Cluster and whose skin,

artificially hyped with melanin, was a lustrous purple green. "Should I

activate the defensive screens, sir? Do you want me to get the cannons

ready? If we are to go on a war footing, Captain, then tell me so right

now. But I want the order in writing, and I want it with a date and a seal.

"

"Stay easy," Wing-Marra said. "We're a long way from fighting any space

battles. What I'm going to do is contact these Locrians and find out

whether we have a problem with them. But I hope you'll go along with my

feeling that we ought to take a firm position about staying here,

regardless of what they say."

"Even if they threaten us?" Hyath asked.

"They won't," said Karpov. Eslane Ree nodded in vigorous agreement.

"If they do?" Wing-Marra asked.

Eslane Ree said, "It would depend on the nature of the threat. We'd be

foolish to stay here if they're willing to blow us out of he sky."

"Locrians?" Karpov said incredulously.

"Sufficient greed can turn any species warlike," Ayana Sanoclaro said,

looking to her friend Hyath for support. "Even Locrians. The fact that the

Six Races have avoided serious conflict with each other up till now is

irrelevant. The evolutionary imperatives that have carried all six species

this far have plenty of aggression buried in them, and the right motivation

surely can bring that aggression to life. 'Locrians or no, if what they've

found here is so valuable that-"

"We don't know that they've found anything, and--

"How can we assume---

"The unmotivated adolescent belligerence of these arguments is utterly-"

"The nalvet6 of-"

"More than fifteen hundred years of peaceful space

 7hey Hide, We Seek 11

exploration behind us and we still regard ourselves as capable of reverting

to the level of-"

"Not us, them!"

"Us too! Who began this whole-"

"Enough!" Wing-Marra said sharply. "Sanoclaro, tell those two snakes of

ours--excuse me, those two Naxians--4o get themselves on deck without any

further delay. Brief them on what's going on. Murry-Balff, I want to be

talking to those Locrians in five minutes or less. Bolangyr, work up an

inventory of our battle stores, just for the hell of it, but don't activate

anything, you hear, not a thing. The rest of you stand by and hold your

peace, will you?" He glowered at the spectrometer screen, where clumps of

gorgeous amide radicals and polyhydric alcohols were circling in a stately

sarabande of astonishing colors. Whatever the Locrians were doing here, he

thought, it ought to be possible to work out some kind of territorial

agreement with them in half an hour or so, and then he would be able to get

down to his real work. We are all rational beings. Reason will prevail. We

of the Six Races have all managed to coexist in interstellar space for a

very long time without any serious conflicts of interest. Why start now?

Why, indeed?

The Locrian gave its name as Speaker-to-Erthumoi. Murry-Balff had asked to

talk to Ship-Commander, but Speaker-to-Erthumoi was the best he was able to

get. Of course, they might be the same person, Wing-Marra knew. Locrians

change their names as often as they change functions. Perhaps it was not

even legitimate to regard Locrian 41nanies" as names.

He put the transmission into image-stasis, freezing the communication

channel. The Locrian would simply have to sit there on hold until the

Erthuma captain had a clearer idea of the situation. Turning to one of his

Naxians, Wing-Marra said, "Is this meant as an insult, Blue Sphere? Should

I insist on speaking to Ship-Commander?"

The Naxian studied the motionless image of the Locrian that glittered from

the frozen screen for a long while, assessing the information visible to

it-her on the insectoid

 12 ROBEKr SILVERBERG

creature's seemingly impassive face. It is the extraordinary gift of Naxians

to be able to read the emotional outputnot the minds, only the emotions--of

any life-form, no matter how alien to it. Greed, anger, lust, shame, compas-

sion, whatever: All creatures are open books to Naxians. Even when all they

have to work with is a static image on a screen. How they did it, no Erthuma

knew. The various stargoing species of the galaxy had many sorts of

intuitive powers that were difficult for Erthumoi to comprehend.

The Naxian seemed to be working hard, though. Meditative ripples and

quivers ran the length of its-her pink, narrow snakelike body. So intense

was Blue Sphere's concentration that it-she went into flipper mode for a

few moments, extruding stubby fringed grasping organs from its-her

otherwise limbless form, then absorbing them again.

"You may proceed, Captain," Blue Sphere announced after a time. "The

Locrians intend no insult. Mere efficiency of communication is the most

likely purpose. I suspect Ship-Commander is less fluent in Erthurnat than

this one. At any rate the Locrian's emotional aura is benign. 11

"But apprehensive," offered the other Naxian, Rosy Tetrahedron. "Definite

anxiety is evident. The Locrian feels strong uncertainty as to Erthuma

motivations or intentions in this sector of space. "

"Fine," Wing-Marra said. "If they're as nervous about us as we are about

them, there's hope for working something out. Reciprocity is the mother of

security, eh, Sanoclaro? Eh? Old diplomatic proverb."

Sanoclaro didn't smile. But he hadn't really expected her to.

He killed the image-stasis and the screen came to life again. The Locrian

could have walked away from the transmitter while Wing-Marra's colloquy

with the Naxians was going on, but it was still there. At least Wing-Marra

assumed that it was the same one. He stared at it. What he saw was a

fleshless angular head much longer than it was wide, a lipless V-shaped

beak of a mouth, a single giant glaring eye shielded by a clear bubblelike

plate hinged at

 They Hide, We Seek 13

each side, a thin tubular neck sprouting out of a flimsy, skeletal

six-limbed trunk.

'Me Locrian looked for all the world like a giant insect, a dry parched

chitinous thing that would probably crunch if you hit it with the e4ge of

your hand. Very likely they had evolved from some kind of low-phylum

insectlike arthropods on their dry, chilly home world, which belonged to an

orange K5 sun in the- Cygnus arm of the galaxy. But there was nothing

low-phylum about them now. They were chordate vertebrates with tough

siliceous spinal columns to support their scaly gray green exoskeletons.

And they had tough, shrewd brains in their narrow, elongated skulls.

The moment the stasis broke the Locrian said, "We request clarification,

Erthuma representative. Do we speak with Diplomacy or Administration?"

"Administration. I am Hayn Wing-Marra, captain, Erthuma of Hesperia in St.

Dominic's Star system."

The Locrian made a crackling sound that seemed like displeasure. "We

request Diplomacy. It is a point of protocol. Transspecies discussions are

protocol matters."

Wing-Marra felt like screaming. The last thing he wanted was to have to

conduct this discussion by way of Ayana Sanoclaro, considering the wild

suspicions she had just been voicing. But the Locrian was right: Contact

across species lines in open space had to follow protocol. Reluctantly

Wing-Marra beckoned to Sanoclaro, who gave him a little smirk of triumph

and stepped into the pale yellow glow of the communications field.

"What we want to know, Speaker-to-Erthumoi,' ' ' she said without preamble,

"is whether you're staking a claim to the solar system that lies adjacent

to our present position. "

"Negative," said the Locrian immediately. Though the two ships were

eighty-eight million kilometers apart at that moment, the communications

field--a modulated-neutrino carrier wave operating through

hyperspace--permitted instantaneous communication between them. For that

matter, it would have permitted communication at essentially the same

response time even if the ships had been at opposite

 14 ROBERT SILVERBERG

ends of the galaxy. "No claim to this system has been rlecor~ded. I I

Wing-Marra held up both his hands. Making two circles out of his thumbs and

forefingers, he moved them in an elaborate pantomime that he hoped would

suggest the orbital relationship of the second planet and its huge moon.

But Sanoclaro, without even looking at him, had aheady begun to ask the

obvious next question.

"Are you claiming just the second planet, then? Or its moon?' 9

"Is there Erthuma interest in the second planet?" the Locrian countered.

The Naxian who called it-herself Blue Sphere moved outside the field's

scanner range and signaled to WingMarra that it was picking up increased

ambiguities and uncertainties. Wing-Marra, peering at the screen, sought to

detect some change in the Locrian's expression, but Speakerto-Fxthumoi's

rigid features showed not a flicker of movement. An integument that

chitinous wasn't capable of much movement, or perhaps of any at all.

Whatever clues the Naxians used in doing their little trick, facial expres-

sions didn't seem to play an important role.

Sanoclaro looked to Wing-MarTa for a cue. He indicated the spectrometer

screen, ablaze with drifting hydrocarbon masses.

"We are purely a scientific mission," Sanoclaro told the Locrian. "We're

here to study the molecular cloud. We have no territorial intentions

whatsoever. "

"Nor do we," said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. "We require only unhindered

completion of our research. "

Wing-Marra frowned. He was beginning to wonder if any of this was any

business of his at all. If the only thing the Locrians wanted was to be

left alone to snoop around the second world, and all that he wanted was to

be left alone to study the molecular cloud-

No. The directives were very clear. When an Fxthuma ship encountered a ship

belonging to any of the other five races in open space, the Erthuma vessel,

regardless of its own purpose, was required to file a report on the

activities of the other spacecraft. Even though no one saw any

 They Hide, We Seek 15

serious risk of anything so farfetched and implausible as interstellar

warfare breaking out, it behooved the Erthurnoi=_ as the youngest and least

experienced of the six starfaring peoples-to keep close watch on everything

that their rivals might be up to. Assuming that their activities would never

be anything but benign, regardless of the generally peaceful relationships

that had prevailed among the Six Races since the first Erthuma entry into

interstellar space, was folly.

He needed more information.

Making the planet-and-moon gesture again, Wing-Marra tried to depict the

orbiting Locrian ship by moving his nose in a circle around the equator of

the finger and thumb that represented the planet. Sanoclaro shot him a

mystified look. Abandoning the pantomime, Wing-Marra whispered angrily,

"Try to find out what the hell they're doing here, will you?"

Sanoclaro said, "May we inquire into the nature of your mission?"

Blue Sphere, still out of scanner range, signaled that increased agitation

was coming from the Locrian. Or so Wing-Marra thought the Naxian was trying

to tell him.

It was maddening for the captain to have to deal through this many

intermediaries. Every ship carried a Diplomacy as a matter of course, but

Wing-MarTa hadn't expected to need to make use of Sanoclaro's services in

this remote region. And the Naxians, though they were valuable interpreters

of nonverbal messages in tricky situations like this one, weren't always

easy for non-Naxians to understand.

Speaker-to-Erthumoi said after a long pause, "Our mission is exploratory

also."

Wing-Marra pantomimed drunkenness.

Sanoclaro looked puzzled again. Then, smiling to show that she understood,

she said, "But surely a high-oxygen world such as the one nearby can be of

little practical use to Lociians. "

Speaker-to-Erthumoi was silent.

"May we inquire whether the nature of your exploration is exploratory?"

Sanoclaro said. "Or is there perhaps some other purpose?"

 16 ROBERT SILVERBERG

"Other," said the Locrian.

"Other than scientific?"

"Other, yes. "

"Is its nature such that our presence here will disrupt your work?"

"Not necessarily."

"Then it is proper to conclude that the representative of the Galactic

Sphere of Locria has no objection to our continuing to remain in this

region?"

Another long silence.

"No objection," Speaker-to-Erthumoi replied finally.

Both Naxians now signaled that they were picking up distress, resentment,

suspicion, general contradiction of spoken statement.

Wing-MarTa fumed. He hoped Sanoclaro didn't think that having obtained the

Locrians' permission for them to stay here was any sort of wonderful

achievement. This was, after all, open territory.

He said under his breath, "I need to know what they're up to!"

Sanoclaro said, "Our captain instructs me to obtain data from you

concerning the nature of your mission.

"I will reply shortly," said Speaker-to-Erdiumoi. There was yet another

lengthy pause. Then the image froze. This time it was the Locrians who had

imposed the stasis, no doubt so Speaker-to-Erthumoi could engage in a quick

off-screen strategy session with Ship-Commander.

Wing-Marra said to Sanoclaro, "If it's just a routine mapping mission, they

shouldn't be as edgy as the Naxians say they are. When they come back on,

see if you can pin them down about their reasons for landing scouts on that

planet and its moon."

"What do you think I'm trying to do?"

"What I think," said Linga Hyath, "is that they probably were just on a

routine mapping mission, but they found something on the second world or

its moon that was way out of the ordinary, and so they're sticking around

to take a close look at it, and they wish we'd get the hell out of here

before we find it too."

 They Hide, We Seek 17

"Ilank you," Wing-Marra told the Cosmography. "Your grasp of the obvious is

extraordinarily profound."

Hyath glared and began to reply.

"Save it," said Wing-Marra. The screen was alive again.

Speaker-to-Erthumoi-if that indeed was who was on the screen now-looked

astonishingly transformed, as though it had been wearing a mask before and

now had removed it. The hard, sharp-angled gray chitin of its all but

featureless face had been opened back like the two doors of a cabinet, and

what was visible now was the bare surface of its great staring glassy inner

eye, the immensely penetrating organ that Locrians revealed only when they

needed to see with particular clarity. Facing that eye was like facing

fifty Naxians at once. -It seemed to be seeing right into him. Wing-Marra

felt stripped bare, down to bone and tendon. He had never seen a Locrian in

full percept mode before, and he didn't like it.

To hell with it, he thought. I don't have anything to hide.

He met the glare of that terrible eye without flinching.

The Locrian said, "Ship-Commander requests face-toface contact with

Erthuma-captain in order to continue the discussion in a more fruitful way.

He proposes stochastic choice to determine which ship is to be the site of

the meeting. 11

Sanoclaro looked inquiringly toward Wing-Marra, who nodded at once.

"Agreed," the Diplomacy told the alien. "Shall we flip a coin?"

"That method is acceptable."

"Do you want us to flip one?"

"We prefer to do that," said the Locrian.

Again Wing-Marra nodded. His irritation was mounting rapidly. Let them use

a coin with two heads, for all he cared. What did it matter whether the

meeting took place on his ship or theirs? He just wanted to get on with his

work.

" Select your choice," said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. It held up its claw,

revealing a shining six-edged coin of some bright coppery metal grasped

between two of its numerous

 18 ROBERT SILVERBERG

many-jointed fingers. One face of the coin showed some Locrian's beaky

big-eyed head, and when the alien turned it over Wing-Marra saw jagged

abstract patterns on the reverse.

"I'll take tails," Wing-Marra said.

I 'Tails?"

"The side that doesn't have the head."

"Ah. "

Something happened off screen. Speaker-to-Erthumoi said, after a moment,

"We have tossed the coin. Your selection proved to be correct. We will send

a boarding party. How soon can you receive us?"

There was more grumbling, of course. Hyath and Sanoclaro, the suspicious

ones, were convinced that the whole coin-tossing gambit had been nothing

but a ploy to insinuate a Locrian force aboard the ship, perhaps so that

they could seize it. Eslane Ree thought that was crazy, and said so. Mikoil

Karpov, too, wanted to know why the two women were taking such an alarmist

position. Even MurryBalff, who usually went along with anything Wing-Marra

said, thought it would have been a better idea to have sent the Diplomacy

over to the alien vessel to conduct the conference. "If they're up to

anything funny, better that they do it over there," Murry-Balff said. "And

to her, not

US. 11

Annoyed as he was by the paranoia of Sanoclaro and Hyath, Wing-MarTa found

nothing to amuse him in his old friend's frivolity. He was a cautious man

but he saw no reason for fear. The risk was all on the Locrians' side. They

were the ones who would be boarding a strange ship, after all. He couldn't

bring himself to believe that they had anything so wild as an armed

takeover in mind. No, the coin toss had probably been honest, and the

Locrians could probably be trusted. Or else they were working up something

so devious that no sane person could be expected to be on guard against it.

Within the hour a beetlelike hypershuttle brought a fourLocrian delegation

across the gulf between the two ships.

 They Hide, We Seek 19

It popped back into normal space astonishingly close to the Achilles and

coasted in for a docking.

Four Locrians came scrambling through the access lock. They were taller

than the tallest of Erthumoi, but so light and frail were their bodies-six

pipelike limbs and hardly any thorax--that they seemed little more than

walking skeletons.

By way of protection against the intoxicating richness of the Erthuma

ship's atmosphere, they were wearing ftanslucent spacesuits that hung about

them in loose, awkward folds, like old baggy skin. Anything beyond a 10

percent oxygen concentration was dizzying to them, and furthermore they

preferred to breathe air that was thinned by a substantial neon component,

which the Achilles was unable to supply.

The first thing the Locrians saw was the spherical golden grille and

trembling corkscrew antennae of the simultrans machine that Murry-Balff had

set up in the center of the meeting room. They obviously didn't like it.

"There is no real need to employ this device," said one of the Locrians

coolly, giving the translating gadget a fiercely contemptuous stiff-necked

glare. "Your language holds no mysteries for us."

Wing-Marra had expected that. The other races were always scornful of

Erdiuma artificial-intelligence gadgets, because in one way or another they

were able to manage most things without such mechanical assistance. The

simultrans was capable of rendering real-time translations of anything said

in any of the six galactic languages into any or all of the other five.

Erthumoi, notorious for their general incapacity to master the ancient and

intricate languages of most alien species, found the machine extremely

useful. The others didn't.

But Wing-Marra suspected there was more to the Locrian objections to the

simultrans than simple racial prejudice. With the simultrans offering

instantaneous translation of anything said, no members of either species

would be able to speak to each other in surreptitious asides unintelligible

to the other party. Wing-Marra saw that as a distinct advantage for him,

since some or all of the Locrians

 20 ROBERT SILVERBERG

appeared to be fluent in Erthumat, but no one aboard the Achilles understood

more than a smattering of Locrian. Evidently the Locrians saw things the

same way.

Smiling grandly, he said, "Ah, but we feel it is only courteous to offer

you this small assistance. You are already under the stress of having come

aboard a strange ship, and you are compelled to conduct this meeting clad

in spacesuits that doubtless must cause you some discomfort. We would not

burden you with the obligation to converse in an alien tongue as well."

"But it is not necessary that we-"

"Permit me to insist. I am overwhelmed by your unselfishness but I could

not bear the shame of having inconvenienced you so deeply. "

There was a frosty silence. The Locrian looked-so far as Wing-Marra was

capable of telling-extremely annoyed.

But after a moment the Locrian said, "Very well. Let us use the translator.

You know me as Speaker-to-Erthumoi. I am accompanied by Ship-Commander and

Recorder."

Three names, four Locrians, no indication of what was what or which was

whom. Wing-Marra didn't even try to get an explanation.

"I am Captain Wing-Marra," he said. "This is my Diplomacy, Ayana Sanoclaro.

These Naxians travel with us and will observe. They call themselves Blue

Sphere and Rosy Tetrahedron. Jorin Murry-Balff, my Communications, will

record our conversation. With your permission, of course."

"Granted," said Speaker-to-Erthumoi.

Within the helmet of its suit its head split open, revealing the great

luminous beacon of its inner eye.

Wing-Marra shivered.

One of the other Locrians opened its eye also. WingMarra could not decide

whether that one was Recorder or Ship-Commander. Did it matter? Perhaps

they were all Recorder. Or all four were Ship-Commander.

Aliens, he thought. Go and figure.

The other two remained sealed. A safety measure, WingMarra suspected.

Locrians were terribly vulnerable when their inner eye was exposed. The

slightest pressure against

 They Hide, We Seek 21

it-the touch of a hand --- could blind or even kill. There

fore they opened their facial hinges only when they deemed

it absolutely necessary to do so.

Even in normal visual mode, Wing-Marra had heard, Locrians saw

three-dimensionally, penetrating into the interiors of things. With the

inner eye unveiled, he imagined that they could see right into his soul.

The two unveiled ones were watching him from opposite sides, as though

trying to read all aspects of him. It was like being in the crossfire of

two brilliant lasers. Wing-Marra understood now why they had asked for this

face-to-face meeting. They wanted a chance to evaluate the nature of the

Erthuma they were dealing with in a way that long distance conversation via

neutrino wave could not provide.

Well, let them look, Wing-Marra thought. Let them look as long and as hard

and as deep as they like.

The silent surveillance went on and on and on.

After a time he stopped finding it merely disagreeable and began to find it

worrisome. He glanced toward the Naxians for an opinion. But they were

calm. They lay motionless, placidly coiled side by side in a comer of the

room, watching with unblinking eyes. They were in their limbless relaxation

state. Evidently they saw no cause for alarm in this peculiar wordless

interrogation.

At len

.gth one of the unveiled Locrians-not the one who had identified itself

as Speaker-to-Erthumoi--said, "We believe that you are trustworthy-"

"I am deeply grateful for that," Wing-Marra said, trying hard not to sound

sarcastic.

"These are delicate matters in which we find ourselves enmeshed," another

of the Locrians intoned. "We must operate from a position of absolute

assurance that you win not abuse our confidence."

"Of course," Wing-Marra said.

"Let us come to the point, Captain Wing-Marra," said the fourth alien.

"What we would prefer is that you leave this region at once, making no

further investigation."

Ayana Sanoclaro uttered a muffled, undiplomatic grunt of surprise and

anger. Wing-Marra's own reaction was

 22 ROBERT SILVERBERG

closer to amusement. Was that why they had given him this elaborate

scrutiny? That seemed a preposterous buildup for such a straightforward,

almost simpleminded demand. Did they think he was a child?

But he restrained himself

Carefully he said, "We have come a great distance, and we have significant

research goals that we wish to carry out. Leaving here now is out of the

question for us. "

"Understood. You will not leave and we do not expect you to. As we have

said, the problem we face here is delicate, and we would prefer to handle

it without the complications that the intrusion of another galactic species

can bring. But we state only a preference."

Wing-MarTa nodded. He had forgotten how literal minded Locrians could be.

"Aside from our going away from here right away, then, what is it you

really want from us?" he asked.

The two Locrians who had not opened their inner eyes now drew back the

hinges of their faces. Wing-Marra found himself confronting four great

blazing orbs. Within the translucent helmets, four sharp-edged alien beaks

were slowly opening and closing-a sign, he supposed, of intense

concentration. But he suspected also that it might connote Locrian tension,

disquietude, malaise. Something about their stance suggested that: They

held themselves even more stiffly than usual, practically motionless, limbs

rigid.

The Naxians too now seemed distressed, probably from having picked up

jittery auras from the Locrians. They had uncoiled and lay stretched taut,

side by side, their eyes gleaming and bulging, their little transient

flipper-limbs shooting in and out of their sides.

"It may be the case," said one of the Locrians finally, just as the silence

had begun to seem interminable, "that we are not able to deal with the

problem that we see here unaided. Indeed, we are quite certain of this.

What we propose, therefore, is an alliance."

"What?' I

"We will recapitulate. There is a problem in this solar system that causes

us much concern. We would rather

 They Hide, We Seek 23

conceal it from you than share it with you; but because we have come to feel

that we are incapable of solving the problem without assistance,

specifically without Erthuma assistance, we are willing to regard the

arrival of Erthumoi at just this moment as providential. And invite you to

work with us toward a solution."

Wing-Marra felt a faintly sickening sensation, as though he were teetering

on the rim of an infinitely deep mine shaft. What, he wondered, was he

getting into here?

He looked from one Locrian to the next, four fleshless, forbidding

insectoid heads whose alien eyes blazed like frightful torches.

"All right," he said. "Tell me something about this problem of yours."

"Let us show you," said the Locrian who was Speakerto-Erthumoi.

The alien gestured to another of the Locrians-perhaps it was Recorder-who

drew from the folds of its spacesuit a small brassy-looking metallic object

that Wing-Marra recognized as an Locrian image-projecting device. The

Locrian set it on the floor in front of itself.

"We came here," said Speaker-to-Erthumoi, "much as you did, simply to

explore. We had no military or economic purpose in mind. As you already

recognize, the planets of this solar system would be of little value to us.

But in the course of our reconnaissance, we came upon something in the

vicinity of the second world that aroused our curiosity. We investigated

more closely, and this is what we observed."

Speaker-to-Erthumoi nodded. Recorder-if that was who it was-stared at the

image projector until a warm golden glow, like that of a little sun, began

to come from it. The device, Wing-Marra knew, was tuned to the Locrian's

brain waves.

Suddenly the room blossomed into vivid color. A threedimensional scene, so

immediate in its presence that it seemed almost as though the wall of the

Achilles had opened to reveal another world just outside, took form before

Wing-Marra's eyes.

It was another world. Heavy-bellied orange clouds hung

 24 ROBERT SILVERBERG

low in a deep turquoise sky. The vantage point at which Wing-Marra found

himself was just below the clouds, perhaps a kilometer above the surface. He

saw dense blue-green forests below, broad rivers, a chain of huge shimmering

lakes.

Far off on the horizon a smallish G-type sun was setting, streaking the air

with brilliant bands of violet and gold. On the opposite side of the sky a

moon had already begun rising, huge and oppressively close, perhaps no more

than one hundred thousand kilometers away. Its bare, smooth, gleaming face

was marked with the dark, rugged lines of what must surely be immense

mountain ranges ringing shining ovals that might have been the beds of

long-dry seas.

"What you see is the second world of the nearby system on a summer

evening," Speaker-to-Erdiumoi announced. "It is not an agreeable place. The

mean temperature at the altitude of observation is approximately 315 K. It

is slightly cooler at ground level, but still unpleasantly warm, at least

by our standards. The atmosphere is composed almost entirely of nitrogen

and oxygen, with substantial water vapor and minor components of argon and

carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure is equally displeasing, approxi-

mately seven times as great, at surface level, as on Locriannorm worlds.

There are strong tidal effects, caused by the proximity of a satellite

unusually large in relation to its primary, and a vortex of relatively cool

air descending permanently from the poles creates constant strong cyclonic

winds. Ordinarily we would not have continued our observations of such a

planet beyond this point. However-"

The other Locrian made a barely perceptible movement. The focal intensity

of the image changed, and Wing-Marra abruptly found himself looking at the

second world from a point not far above the tangled canopy of a tropical

jungle.

Winged creatures were moving slowly through the air.

"Native life?" Wing-Marra asked.

"No. Look again."

He narrowed his eyes against the brightness of the sky, doubly fit by the

spectacular sunset and the cold white glory of the gigantic shining moon.

What had seemed to

 They Hide, We Seek 25

him at first quick glance to be huge birds now appeared something quite

other: humanoid figures with small stubby legs and two slender arms held

close against their chests. From bulging humps below their shoulders rose

two powerful limblike projections heavily banded with muscle and anchored by

jutting keels on their chests; and out of those came the giant fleshy wings,

far larger in area than the creatures themselves, whose steady stately

flapping motions held them aloft.

Then one of the flying creatures turned so that its narrow, tapering head

was clearly outlined against the sky, and Wing-Marra could plainly see the

great curving bony crest rising from its forehead and the equally

astonishing jut of its elongated chin. He had no further doubt. Another of

the galactic races had preceded both Locrians and Erthurnoi to this place.

"Crotonites?" he said, with a little involuntary shudder.

"Indeed. See, now, their base." Focus shifted once again, and Wing-Marra

beheld the elaborate webwork weave of a Crotonite nest, spreading through

the treetops to cover perhaps a hectare. The winged aliens, equipped with

breathing masks to help them deal with an atmosphere whose chemistry was

not much to their liking, moved busily back and forth, swooping down to

land, disappearing within the strands of the delicate structure, emerging

again and rising skyward with strong, unhurried strokes of their great

wings.

"If there are Crotonites here," Wing-Marra said, "why haven't we detected

any signs of a Crotonite starship in the vicinity?"

"No doubt it has been here and gone," said the Locrian. "So far as we can

determine, the Crotonite base here has been established for quite some

time. We regard it a semipermanent outpost."

Wing-Marra looked toward Sanoclaro. The Diplomacy's expression was solemn.

She said, "It might just be a world they could use, I suppose. Thick

atmosphere, warm climate. Though the atmosphere doesn't seem poisonous

enough to make them really happy, but they could work out some kind of

 26 ROBERT SILVERBERG

adaptation to help them cope with all that oxygen. They seem to be doing all

right with those breathing masks. Well, if they've filed a claim, we'll have

to apply to them for permission if we want to make a landing and set up a

base. But not if we're only going to make a ship survey of the molecular

cloud. This solar system lies completely outside the cloud. Their claim

wouldn't give them any rights to adjacent space."

"T'hey have filed no claim," Speaker-to-Erthumoi said.

Wing-Marra frowned. "No?"

"Nothing. Nor have they made any response to our presence here. They seem

to be making an elaborate point of ignoring us. It is as though they have

not noticed us. Or you, we presume, since you evidently have not heard from

them. They simply go about their business, setting out every day from that

base and exploring the planet in an ever widening circle."

"Then I fail to see the difficulty," the Erthuma captain said. "if they

don't care that others are here, why should you care so much that they are?

This whole solar system's a free zone for everybody. And in any case there

doesn't seem to be much here of any importance. "

"You have not heard the entire story yet," said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. "They

also have a base on the moon. "

Another tiny movement by the Locrian operating the projector, and the lush

tropical scene vanished in an instant. Its place was taken by something far

more harsh: the barren, airless landscape of the second planet's moon. Now

Wing-Marra found himself at the edge of what must have been an ancient sea.

A shallow, barren basin of some white limy rock stretched to the horizon.

Colossal mountains, their lofty summits unexpectedly eroded and rounded as

they might have been on a world that had an atinosphere, rose to one side.

The dazzling green bulk of the second world hung close overhead, filling

the sky, terrifyingly near, seemingly about to plunge down upon him.

The Crotonites had woven a seven-sided Crotonite dwelling that sprawled

over the brightly lit plain just at the edge of the mountains' shadow. And

Crotonites, swaddled in individual pressure-bubbles that covered them,

wings and

 They Hide, We Seek 27

all, from crested heads to stubby legs, were driving about in land-crawlers.

But their movements were incomprehensible. They seemed to be circling a big

empty area a dozen or so kilometers from their base. From time to time one

of the crawlers would abruptly disappear, as though it had been devoured by

some unseen lurking monster, or one would wink suddenly into existence in

the middle of the plain, as if popping out of nowhere.

"I don't understand," Wing-Marra said. "Where are they going? Where are

they coming from?"

"We ask ourselves the same thing," said Speaker-toErthumoi. "Our answer is

that the Crotonites believe they must go to great pains to conceal whatever

they are doing on that lunar plain. And so they have generated a zone of

invisibility around it. "

"Can they do such a thing?" Wing-Marra asked, surprised.

"It would appear that they can. We see nothing; and yet we feel the

presence of living beings in that empty zone."

Murry-Balff said, "What do your instrument readings show? If there are

Crotonites moving around out there, you'd be getting infrared output. And

if they've set up some kind of invisibility gadget, there might be some

measurable light-wave distortion around its edges. Or various other forms

of data corruption."

"We do not have instruments capable of measuring what cannot be seen, "

replied the Locrian, and there was a distinctly icy edge to its flat,

unemotional voice. "What we detect is the emanations of intelligent beings,

radiating in the Crotonite mind-spectrum, coming from a place that seems to

be uninhabited and uninhabitable. "

Wing-Marra said, "What do you think they're trying to hide? A weapons

factory? A center for espionage activities? A laboratory for secret

scientific research?"

"We have considered all those possibilities. They have varing orders of

probability. But what we think is most probable of all is that they have

discovered something of great value on that moon, and do not want any other

galactic race to know what they have."

 28 ROBERT SILVERBERG

"That might explain why they haven't filed a claim to this system,"

Sanoclaro said. "Even though their occupation of the planet and the moon

would ordinarily validate any claim. Maybe they didn't want to call this

place to anybody's attention even to the extent of claiming it. They

gambled instead that nobody else would find it."

"This is our belief also," said the Locrian.

Sanoclaro shook her head. "Bad luck for them that not one but two different

galactic races stumbled on it right after diem, against all odds. But

sometimes it does happen that the needle in the haystack gets found."

Speaker-to-Erdiumoi said, "What it is the Crotonites have discovered here,

we have no idea, any more than we know how they are able to conceal it. But

Crotonites would not remain in so hostile an environment without strong

motivation. We wish to know what that motivation is: that is, what it is

that they are concealing."

Wing-Marra laughed. "We thought you were the ones who had found something

valuable here."

"What we found was Crotonites working here secretly in a zone of mystery.

We wish to know what that zone of mystery contains. And so we invite you to

enter into partnership with us. "

"So you've already told us. But just what kind of partnership do you mean?"

"We have one asset to offer: the discovery that the Crotonites are hiding

something. But we are unable to proceed beyond that. You Fxthumoi can

provide, perhaps, the asset we lack: the technology by which the

Crotonites' shield of concealment can be penetrated. Let us work together

to expose and exploit their secret. And we will share, half and half, in

such profits as come from the venture. "

"Half and half?" Wing-Marra said. "If there's something valuable on that

moon, don't you think the Crotonites are entitled to a share, too? Or are

you planning to cut them out of it altogether?"

"To be sure," said Speaker-to-Erthumoi. "We may have to divide the profits

in thirds."

 They Hide, We Seek 29

The discussion aboard the Achilles that followed the depart= of the Locrian

boarding party was very possibly the loudest and most vociferous that

Wing-Marra had ever known in all the eleven cycles of his life.

Sanoclaro, of course, was horrified at the notion of entering into any kind

of deal with Locrians, and urged Wing-Marra to head for the nearest

Erthurna world at once and turn the affair over to the authorities there.

But her friend Linga Hyath, to everyone's amazement, disagreed completely

with her: She was all for finding out without any delay what it was that

the -Crotonites were hiding onthe second planet's moon. If the cool and

unemotional Locrians were so churned up over it, she said, then it was

important to know what they had. Mikoil Karpov took the same position, and

so did Murry-Balff, who was already bubbling with notions of how to break

through the Crotonite data screen.

Eslane Ree, though, was on Sanoclaro's side. "Tbis is simply none of our

business," the Navigation said quietly, and when Hyath and Murry-Balff took

issue with her, she said it again less quietly, and then very loudly

indeed. For a small woman she was capable of astonishing ferocity when she

thought the occasion warranted it, and apparently she thought this one did.

"We're here to do scientific research. Not to strike bargains with aliens."

"You look on aliens as enemies?" Karpov asked.

"I don't look on them as friends," Eslane Ree shot back. "They tolerate us

in the galaxy because they have no choice. We came muscling into a system

that they had carved up into five nice slices while we were still using

stone axes, and demanded our piece of it. Well, because interstellar war is

currently obsolete, and the galaxy is so big that even the Five Races

hadn't had time to explore it all, they graciously allowed us to become the

Sixth Race. But they don't trust us and they don't like us, and they all

think they're a whole lot wiser than we are, and maybe they are. We haven't

been out in the galaxy long enough to know. "

"We have achieved so much in such a very short time," said Karpov

ponderously. "Is that not-"

 30 ROBERT SILVERBERG

Eslane Ree glared at him.

"In a short timb, yes, we've figured out black holes and pulsars and

hyperdrives and neutrino-wave communication, and maybe all that makes us

think we're pretty hot stuff. But when it comes to galactic politics we're

still strictly novices. If the Locrians want to do something dirty to the

Crotonites, let diem. Why should we risk getting drawn in? Because the

Locrians tell us they'll cut us in on the profits? W/un profits? When have

the bugs ever gone out of their way to cut us in on anything? How do we

know what they're really up to? What they want to do is use us. And when

they're through using us, they might very well get rid of us, if it turns

out what we've stumbled across is something that's inconvenient for us to

know

"Madness," Karpov muttered.

"I don't think you have any right-"

"Please," said Septen Bolangyr. "It is my turn to speak. I #

Bolangyr, who usually was indifferent to discussions of policy, also argued

in favor of keeping out of potential trouble. "We don't understand much

about Locrian psychology and we don't even begin to understand the

Crotonites," he argued. "All we know, really, is that both of them are

older and probably shrewder races than ours, and that, as Eslane Ree says,

neither of them have much respect or liking for us. Eslane Roe is correct.

We're likely to find ourselves way over our heads if we get mixed up in

some squabble between them."

"Wrong!" Karpov cried. "Such a great opportunity to

learn! We must not turn our backs' Not only the mystery

of this moon, but the mystery of Locrians, the mystery of

Crotonites! Go among them, is what we must do! Engage

them! Entangle ourselves! How else can we learn? How

can we simply turn our backs at such a time?" 11

"Easily," said Eslane Ree. "We're scientists, not spies.

"And to involve ourselves in any such irregular transspecies dealings is

completely unwise," said Ayana Sanoclaro.

"And for all we know the bugs are the bad guys and the bats are the good

guys," said Septen Bolangyr. We'll be

 They Hide, We Seek 31

putting our noses into something we don't remotely understand. That doesn't

feel very healthy to me."

"But can't you see--"

"Won't you realize-"

"If you'd only stop to consider-"

And so on until Wing-Marra, running out of patience at last, cut through

the uproar to say, "I make it three in favor, three against. All right. I

cast the tie-breaking vote. We go in with the Locrians. "

"No!" The word came from Eslane Ree and Ayana Sanoclaro in the same

instant. "Impossible! Unthinkable!"

"And very stupid," said Bolangyr.

"Those who don't like it," Wing-Marra replied, "can place formal objections

on file. We will take official notice and proceed as planned." To Eslane

Ree he said, "This is a scientific mission, yes. But it's also an Erthuma

spacesh!p, and all Erthuma ships have the responsibility of protecting

Erthuma interests in space, which sometimes involves monitoring the

activities of the other five stargoing species. That's what we're supposed

to do, and that's what we're going to do. Clear? Good. Murry-Balff, I want

to talk to you about what instruments we're going to use to scan the

Crotonite lunar base. Sanoclaro, put together a Crotonite master

psychological profile for me. I need to know what makes those bats tick.

You have twenty minutes. Eslane Ree, park us around that second planet's

moon and compute a landing orbit that'll put our groundship down somewhere

in the neighborhood of the Crotonite base. Bolangyr, run the usual

maintenance checks on all extravehicular-activity equipment. I think that's

all for now. " He paused a moment. "No. There's one thing more. Hyath, go

down below and tell the snake xcuse me, the Naxians-what we've just

decided. Ask one of them to volunteer for the landing party.

"And me?" Mikoil Karpov asked.

Wing-Marra realized that he had provided an assignment for everyone except

Biochemistry. But he couldn't see any immediate role for Karpov in any of

this.

Then, with a pang, the captain remembered that they had all come to this

obscure comer of the galaxy for a

 32 ROBERT SILVERBERG

reason that had nothing to do with Locrians or Crotonites or galactic power

politics. For a long sad moment he stared at the glowing screen of the

spectrometer. Neglected though it was, it was still flashing bright-hued

reports from the nearby molecular cloud. Tbrough Wing-Marra's mind went

roiling visions of esoteric hydrocarbons, life-giving amino acids, complex

polyvalents of a thousand kinds, stirring about tantalizingly in that

mysterious ocean of intricate gases that lay just beyond his reach.

He sighed.

"You keep an eye on the spectrometer screen," he told Karpov. "Ibere's no

telling what sort of significant stuff is going to turn up inside that

cloud. And we aren't going to stop the whole mission dead in its tracks

while we deal with this distraction. Not if I can help it. Okay? Okay.

Adjourned.

They set up their camp in the long shadow of the great mountains, fifty

kilometers from the Crotonite moon base: close enough so that the curvature

of the lunar surface would not interfere with Murry-Balff's instruments,

but not so close that the Crotonites would come running right over to put

up a fuss.

The first thing Wing-Marra did was to send out an all-frequencies

neutrino-wave announcement telling the entire galaxy that a joint

Erthuma-Naxian-Locrian expedition had landed to investigate certain

"anomalies" on a moon of the second planet of an unclaimed main-sequence

star in the W49 nebula, where a Crotonite exploration team appeared to be

already at work.

Murry-Balff said quizzically, "Sir, is that such a- good idea? The

Crotonites can't fail to pick that message up. Should we really be letting

them know we're here?"

"They already know we're here," Wing-Marra said, .amused. "Do you think we

can put a groundship down right in their backyard without their noticing?

What the message does is tell everyone else that we're here. In case the

Crotonites have any idea of defending their turf against intruders. If we

were to attempt a secret landing, they

 They Hide, We Seek 33

might feel it was safe to respond with an immediate lethal attack. "

"Against a transspecies ship? But that would be an act of war!" Murry-Balff

exclaimed.

"Yes, it would. That's why I want to make it difficult for them to proceed

with it. Most of us operate under the sane and reasonable assumption that

one species will never attack another, but I suspect the Crotonites may

operate under the assumption that they shouldn't attack another species

unless they think they can get away with it. If everybody for fifty

thousand light-years around knows we've landed here, the Crotonites are

less likely to undertake military action against us. Or so I hope."

In fact he had no real idea how the Crotonites were likely to react to

anything, but he was prepared for the worst. The psychological profile of

them that Ayana Sanoclaro had drawn up for him was profoundly disturbing in

that regard.

Of the five senior races of the galaxy, the Crotonites were the least

predictable and, potentially at least, the most dangerous. Only their

preference for. worlds with thick atmospheres heavily laced with ammonia

and hydrogen cyanide, evidently, is what had kept them out of serious

conflict with the other races. The worlds they inhabited were unendurable

to the other species; the worlds they coveted were worlds that none of the

others would want.

What set them apart from the other intelligent species of the galaxy,

possibly even more than their metabolic differences, was the fact that they

were the only one that had wings. Locrians and Erthumoi walked upright;

Naxians were wrigglers; Cephallonians, aquatic; the ponderous Samians, when

they deigned to move at all, rolled. But Crotonites were fliers.

On their home worlds they lived primarily airborne lives, moving slowly but

with a strange grace through the heavy atmosphere, swooping and rising,

rising and swooping. Lesser winged creatures were their food, caught always

while in flight. They had no cities, only small transient

 34 ROBEKr SILVERBERG

settlements fashioned of twisted fiber, which they abandoned after only

short periods of occupation. How they had ever attained the technological

capacity to achieve interstellar travel was hard for Erthumoi to understand;

but, then, it was hard for Erthumoi to see how any of the Five Races, except

perhaps the Locrians, had managed to cross that difficult-to-attain

threshold. Yet they all had, where thousands of other intelligent species

had not. Some force had driven them, often against all biological and

mechanical probability, to reach outward not only to their neighboring

worlds but to the stars themselves.

Could it be, Wing-Marra wondered, that the force that had impelled the

Crotonites outward was hate?

Certainly they manifested plenty of that in their dealings with the other

races. They scarcely troubled to conceal their contempt for beings who had

no wings. "Groundcrawlers," they called them or "mud-lickers" or "land-

slugs. " So great was their disdain for all things wingless that they could

not bear even to eat the meat of the unwinged, predatory carnivores though

they were: It was shameful, they explained, to incorporate the flesh of

landslugs into their own high-soaring bodies.

Once they had learned that various sorts of wingless mud-lickers had found

a way of traveling between the stars, therefore, the Crotonites must have

felt that they too would have to go forth into that vast darkness. And they

had not rested until they also had solved the mysteries of hyperspace

travel.

Once they did enter the community of starfaring races, they accepted the

presence of those who already roamed the galaxy, because they had no choice

about it. There was no way for them to maintain absolute isolation from the

rest. Interstellar commerce requires a certain amount of contact with alien

creatures, and it is economically suicidal to let racial prejudices get in

the way of that. But they made it plain that they did no more than tolerate

any of the others, and that in fact what they felt for them was loathing

and enmity.

They did not, of course, carry those feelings to the extent of actual

warfare. If there ever had been any such

 They Hide, We Seek 35

thing as interstellar warfare, it had gone out of fashion long before the

first Erthurna starfarers had come upon the scene. One reason for that was

the logistical difficulty of waging war on a galactic scale, even with

hyperdriveequipped vessels. Another was that in a galaxy of effectively

infinite size there was very little motive for serious territorial disputes

among six intelligent life-forms whose environmental requirements were all

mutually incompatible. But the main reason, probably, why the Crotonites

never acted upon their hostility toward the wingless was that they knew the

wingless would not permit war to break out. Nothing was apt to draw the

separate races together more swiftly than any sort of conflict that might

lead to war. War was an expensive nuisance; war was a messy disruption; war

simply could not be allowed. The Crotonites probably knew that they would be

annihilated at once by a united all-species force if they ever gave vent to

their deepest emotions, and that helped to keep the galactic peace.

Instead they cheated wherever they could, they swindled, they behaved

toward the wingless in all ways as though matters of morality were

unimportant. The wingless in turn bore little love for them. Erdiumoi, who

had their own not very -complimentary nicknames for each of the other

galactic races, called the Crotonites "bats," or sometimes even "devils."

And now Wing-Marra found himself camped fifty kilometers from a nest of

them.

"This moon can't have been airless very long," Linga Hyath was saying.

"Probably it was just as habitable as its primary world, once upon a time."

"You think so?" Wing-Marra said.

They stood, spacesuit-clad, arrayed in a semicircle around Murry-Balff as

he bent over the bank of instruments that he had set up on the bed of the

dry sea. There were eight in the group: Wing-Marra, Hyath, Sanoclaro,

Murry-Balff, Eslane Ree, the Naxian Blue Sphere, and two of the Locrians.

Septen Bolangyr, Mikoil Karpov, and Rosy Tetrahedron had remained behind on

the Achilles.

 36 ROBERT SILVERBERG

Hyath indicated the towering mountain range that loomed behind them. "Those

are very big mountains," she said. "The sort you'd expect to find on a moon

like this. But look at the way they've been worn down. For most of their

existence they've been subjected to wind and rain and the other geological

forces of a living world. But of course an atmosphere will wander off into

space if a world's not big enough to hold it by gravitational force and if

it's warm enough so that the atmospheric molecules can move faster than the

local escape velocity. There was a time when this place must have had an

atmosphere pretty much like its primary's, I'd guess--these two are really

a double-planet system, most Rely with similar outgassing history--but the

moon, large though it is, was too small, and too warm, to keep its air.

Little by little the entire atmosphere was able to break free of the

gravitational field here and escape. And eventually there was none left at

all. "

"How long ago did that happen, would you say?" Eslane Ree asked.

"Oh, quite recently, quite recently indeed," said Hyath "Within the last

two or three hundred million years, is my top-of-the-head answer. "

Eslane Ree chuckled. "Oh. Only two or three hundred million years ago!

That's your idea of quite recently?"

"Surely you understand that on the geological time scale that's only-"

"Hold it," Wing-Marra said. "I think Murry-Balff's got something."

The Communications had been leaning forward over his control panel,

muttering to himself, shaking his head, tapping in data setups, wiping them

out, tapping new ones in. Suddenly the board was alive with flashing

lights.

"Okay,'-' Murry-Balff said. "I think we have data capture. I I

Wing-Marra peered close. The readout was analog, but he could make nothing

of the patterns he saw.

"What I've done," said Murry-Balff, "has been to plot light-wave deviation

first. That's this information here. Assuming there's a zone of significant

surface mass in that supposedly empty zone, it ought to have at least some

 They Hide, We Seek 37

relativistic effects on photons traveling through its vicinity, regardless

of the visual data corruption that the Crotonites are managing to throw up

around it. Okay. There it is." He pointed to a pattern in green and red at

the side of his panel. It meant nothing at all to Wing-Marra. Murry-Balff

said, "It's next to imperceptible, but that's what you'd expect of any sort

of mass smaller than a continent, anyway. But the fact is that it isn't

imperceptible. What I'm picking up is the bending I expected, right

here--and here-4hat's an inferred computation of the required size of

whatever's causing the perturbation. Those are the boundaries of the

concealed object, see?"

"Show me that again," Wing-Marra said.

Murry-Balff made a quick gesture with his light pen.

"But that's enormous!" said Wing-Marra. "It's the size of a small city!"

"That's right. Not such a small one, either. The area is_imim~sixty-four

square kilometers, plus or minus four. Now, we get the sonar in there and

we try to see whether it'll penetrate the Crotonite data shield; and we

discover that we can, more or less, although the perimeter data is likewise

corrupt and has to be factored for a standard distortion deviation, which

the little brain here in this box has been kind enough to work out for me.

We bounce the sound waves through the invisibility shield, and luckily for

us, the shield doesn't screen them out once we're inside and so far as I

can tell does not corrupt our data, but returns us a clean readout. Which

gives us the horizon profile of the concealed object."

"Where?"

"Here. You see? These ups, these downs. The skyline, so to speak, of the

hidden city. And the mean elevation is-well, rooftop level, I make out to

be eleven and one half meters, with a deviation of--umm-4he tallest build-

ing is, let's say, twenty-one and one half meters, but there aren't many of

those, and most of the others are, well, single-story structures--"

"Structures?" Ayana Sanoclaro said. "You've got actual buildings showing on

that screen?"

The two Locrians were murmuring now in their own

 38 ROBERT SILVERBERG

harsh, clicking language. The Naxian, agitated, was rapidly thrusting its

little flipper-limbs forth and retracting diem.

"Didn't you hear me?" Murry-Balff said. "There's a city under the Crotonite

screen. Now that I'm past their corruption line, I'll have the whole thing

mapped out for you in less than fifteen minutes. "

"A city?" Sanoclaro said in wonder. "The Crotonites have built a city on

this airless moon? Under some sort of dome, do you mean?"

Murry-Balff looked up at her. "Did I say it was a Crotonite city? Do the

Crotonites even build cities? There's no dome that I can see, at least not

an actual physical one, though of course all I'm getting is shadow images,

and it's possible that a dome viewed edge-on might somehow not show up on

my screen. I can check that out from another angle. But you can see the

building profiles, can't you?" He waved his hands grandly over the panel,

which was still entirely incomprehensible to Wing-Marra. "There's nothing

Crotonite-looking here. Look, these are streets and avenues. Crotonites

don't ordinarily have streets and avenues, do they? And those are solid,

rounded structures with vaulted roofs. I don't have the foggiest idea what

they are, but Crotonite they aren't.'~

"But who-?" Sanoclaro demanded, gesturing bewdderedly. "It isn't one of

ours, or we'd have had records of a landing here. It can't be Locrian. The

Cephallonians would hardly build a settlement on a world that doesn't have

a drop of water. The Samians--the Naxians-"

"Why does it have to be a city belonging to any of the Six Races?"

Wing-Marra asked suddenly.

Everyone stared at him.

"What are you saying?" asked Eslane Ree. "That there's a seventh

interstellar race somewhere that nobody knows about yet?"

"I don't know," Wing-Marra told her. "Right now all I can do is ask

questions, not answer them." To Hyath he said, "You believe that this place

once was as habitable as its companion planet, but that it's been airless

like this for-how long? Three hundred million years?"

 They Hide, We Seek 39

"Plus or minus a hundred million," said Hyath.

"Same difference." He closed his eyes a moment. Then, turning to the

Locrians, he said, "You people were the first of the Six Races to achieve

star travel, right? How long ago was that?"

"It was in the Eighteenth Era," one of the Locrians began.

"Translate that into Galactic Standard Years. Please."

After a moment the Locrian said, "You would think of it as approximately

three hundred fifteen thousand years before the present time."

Wing-Marra nodded. By Linga Hyath's geological way of reckoning things,

that was only a heartbeat ago.

He said, "And when you first got out into interstellar space, did you

encounter any other starfaring races then, older races that are extinct

now?"

"No," said the Locrian. "We did, of course, come upon the ruins of ancient

civilizations which perhaps had been galactic in nature, though we do not

believe that they were. But of living galactic races-no, no, we were the

first of our epoch. And perhaps the first in the history of this galaxy."

"I'm not so sure of that," said Wing-Marra, half to himselL

His mind was racing. Knowledge he had not called upon in hundreds of years

came bubbling now out of its deep hiding place.

In the second cycle of his life, flushed with the new youth of his first

rejuvenation, he had turned his attention toward the remote past with much

the same intensity as he had much later taken up organic chemistry.

Archaeology then had been the center of his energies, and for decades he

had pored backward into the yesterdays of his species, digging into the few

hundred years of history that his native world of Hesperia could provide,

then onward, deeper, to Earth, the mother world of all Erthumoi, where

antiquity was measured in hundreds of centuries: Chich6n ItzA, Pompeii,

Babylon, Troy, Luxor, Lascaux. But even that had not satisfied his hunger

for antiquity, for Earth was a young world as galactic worlds went, and the

Erthumoi

 40 ROBERT SILVERBERG

a very young race: The mother planet offered no more than thirty thousand or

forty thousand years of past that had the richness and complexity he sought,

and beyond that lay nothing but stray scraps of bone, scatterings of stone

tools, the charred ashes of ancient hearths.

So he had gone out into the galaxy again, digging on worlds beyond the

Erthuma sphere. At least ten thousand of the worlds of the galaxy had

evolved intelligent lifeforms. Only a relative handful of those had gone on

to develop technological civilizations, and some of those were extinct:

dead by their own hands, so it would appear. Of the survivors, only five,

before the Erthumoi, had reached the level of interstellar travel. It was

not generally thought that any of the extinct races had succeeded in

traveling beyond their own solar systems. A widely held theory argued that

there was a critical technological threshold that every race had to pass;

the ability to achieve self-destruction invariably came sooner than the

ability to attain interstellar flight, and only those races able to master

their own self-destructive impulses would last long enough to master the

mysteries of hyperspace travel. Many had not.

Wing-Marra had probed the ruins of dead alien civilizations in a dozen

different star systems. But they too were disappointing to someone seeking

vivid and immediate insight into the look and texture of the distant past.

Even in the best preserved of them, not much had withstood the inroads of

time: a faint line of stone foundations here, an empty burial vault there,

some shattered walls, a battered fragment or two of strange jewelry,

perhaps a bit of some unfamiliar and unrecognizable fossil, and not much

more. That was all that remained. The youngest of those lost civilizations

was one hundred thousand Galactic Standard Years old, according to his

dating instruments; the oldest was five times as ancient as that. Mere

traces, outlines in the sand.

But now--on a world where no one could have lived for hundreds of millions

of years-

A city? A complete city, with a discernible street plan and buildings still

so intact, after whole geological eras, that roofs still remained and the

number of stories could be

 They Hide, We Seek 41

counted? No, that was archaeological nonsense, WingMarra thought. Whatever

lay out there on that dead plain, it could not possibly be a settlement that

went back to a time when this world still had air and water and vegetation.

But what, then? Perhaps, in the stillness and void of this lifeless moon,

the familiar forces of erosion would not operate as they did elsewhere, and

whatever was built here would remain through all the ages, undecayed. Why

would anyone bother, though, to build a fair-sized city on so absolutely

inhospitable a place as this world had become once its atmosphere had fled?

And who would have done it? Norte of the Five Races, that seemed certain.

And surely not Erthumoi.

A seventh galactic race, unknown to all the others?

It had to be.

It could not be.

This makes no sense, Wing-Marra thought. None whatsoever.

"What are you thinking?" Sanoclaro asked.

"A lot of things," said Wing-Marra. "But I don't have enough information.

Do you know what we need to do now? We need to get into our buggies and

ride over across there to take a close look at whatever it is that the

Crotonites don't want us to see."

It was, of course, an outrageous thing to be doing. The ground vehicles

were equipped with weaponry, and both Wing-Marra and Murry-Balff were

carrying hand-model blasters, which were not uncommon items of male orna-

mental dress on their home world. The Locrians, too, were armed. But in all

the cycles of his life Wing-Marra had never once had occasion to use his

blaster against another living creature, and he doubted that Murry-Balff

had either. As for using it against a member of one of the other galactic

races-no, no, it was unthinkable for a member of one race to injure a

member of another.

He was counting on the fact that the Crotonites were likely to feel the

same way.

Besides, this solar system was unclaimed. If the Crotonites

 42 ROBERT SILVERBERG

had taken the trouble to claim it, they could have closed both Ae second

planet and its moon to all other races, and backed that up, if necessary, by

force. But they had filed no claim. Whether they had chosen that course for

some unfathomable sneaky Crotonite reason or simply because they had been

too confident that no other race would find this place was something

Wing-Marra did not know. Either way, as things stood, they had no legal

right to bar anyone else from landing here.

They could, naturally, keep trespassers from entering any base they had

established themselves. But Wing-Marra had no intention of going anywhere

near the Crotonite base. All he wanted to inspect was that big empty place

out on the bed of the vanished lunar sea. That was no Crotonite base, was

it? That was simply an empty place. How could they stop him from driving

right up to it? From peering in? From entering it, if he could?

11ey would have to admit that there was something there, after all, before

they could keep him from trying to look at it.

I At first, it seemed as though the Locrians would not buy any of his

reasoning and were going to refuse to accompany him into the plain. They

were afraid of some violation of Crotonite territorial rights that would

lead to big political trouble. The Naxian, too, was uneasy about going

along. Naxians, because of their keen intuitive sense of what might be going

on in any organism's mind, were usually confident of their ability to handle

themselves in all sorts of bothersome situations. But Blue Sphere, like the

Locrians, indicated that it-she would just as soon stay away from the

Crotonite outpost.

Wing-Marra was unhappy about that. He wanted the Locrians and the Naxian

along for a show of solidaritythe Crotonites were less likely to commit

some hostile act if they saw that they'd be stiffing up trouble with three

of the Six Races at once--and also he valued Naxian intuition and Locrian

cold-blooded intellectuality. But they would not give in.

"Very well," Wing-Marra said finally. "We'll just have to go without you,

I guess."

 They Hide, We Seek 43

Which broke the impasse, for the Locrians did not trust their Erthuma

partners sufficiently to want them to get first look at the enigma on the

plain without them, and Blue Sphere, although it-she plainly suspected that

Wing-Marra was bluffing, apparently did not want to take the risk that he

was crazy enough to mean what he said. So in the end they all went: a

tri-species expedition, setting out in two ground vehicles across the hard

flat limestone floor of the ancient dry sea.

They were still twenty kilometers or so from the zone of mystery when

Eslane Ree pointed out a Crotonite landcrawler coming up on their left.

"Everyone into defensive mode," Wing-Marra ordered. "All weaponry armed and

ready, but don't get overanxious. Let's just see what they do."

What the Crotonites did was to swing into a path parallel to theirs at a

distance of perhaps half a kilometer, and ride alongside them. A little

while later, a second Crotonite vehicle took up the same escort position on

the right. Then a third appeared, hanging back to the rear. All dime

maintained constant distances from the Erthuma vehicles as they traveled

over the plain.

"The bats watch us, and we watch the bats," WingMarra said. "And neither

side makes the first move. All right. We wait and see, and so do they. How

far are we from the edge of the zone, Murry-Blaff?"

"Seven hundred meters."

"Well, we'll have some answers pretty soon."

"Here," MurTy-Balff said. "This is it."

Wing-Marra signaled and the caravan came to a halt. They seemed to be in

the middle of nowhere. Behind diem, far behind, lay the mountains and their

camp, and some distance off to the soudi the Crotonite camp. Ahead of them,

stretching out almost endlessly, was the bright, chalky, almost featureless

plain that once had been the floor of a prehistoric ocean. The green second

world, hanging overhead, seemed closer than ever, a massive, looming

weight; and its brilliant light cast an eerie, chilling glow.

 44 ROBERT SILVERBERG

Right in front of us, Wing-Marra thought, is a city that may be half a

billion years old. And we can't see a damned thing.

"Here come the Crotonites," Eslane Ree said.

"Yes. I'm aware of them. Let's get out and sniff around a little. "

He was the first out of the vehicle. After a moment, one of the Locrians

jumped out also, and then the other. Sanoclaro and Eslane Ree followed.

Murry-Balff remained with his instruments. Blue Sphere, looking fidgety and

troubled, stayed in the vehicle also. Wing-Marra beckoned to it-her to get

out. Murry-Balff could do his work from the vehicle, if he wanted to, but

Wing-Marra needed the Naxian by his side.

He took a few steps forward, wondering if he would feel resistance. But

there was nothing. Nothing at all.

"Am I near it?" he asked.

"Another ten meters," Murry-Balff replied. "But the Crotonites---

"Yes. I know."

From the right, the left, the rear, the three Crotonite land-crawlers came

zeroing in, and pulled up in an open are around the two Erthuma vehicles.

Wing-Marra, though he knew the gesture was preposterous, let his hand rest

lightly on the blaster strapped to the side of his spacesuit. God help us

all, he told himself, if it comes down to stuff like that. But he felt he

had at least to make the gesture.

The Crotonites were out of their land-crawlers, now, six of them,

approaching him in the peculiarly dismaying waddling shuffle that they

employed when they were forced to walk on the surface of a world. Seen

close up, they were less frightful looking than when flying like devils

through the air, because their huge wings were furled and swaddled within

their pressure suits. That way, they appeared as short, plump, almost

comical little beings, standing no more than waist high to an Erthuma. But

they were, Wing-Marra thought, pretty evil looking all the same. The great

ungainly bulk of the folded wings behind them provided an ominous reminder

of their true forms, and their

 They HIde, We Seek 45

long sharp-featured heads, crested and bony chinned, had a harsh, repellent,

monstrous look.

"Turn on the simultrans," Wing-Marra said to MurryBalff.

The Crotonites, he knew, would never deign to speak Erthumat. And he knew

only seven words in Crotoni, four of them obscene and the others profane.

"Who is the leader here?" asked the shortest and fiercestlooking of the

Crotonites, one with diabolical yellow eyes streaked with bands of red.

Wing-Marra raised his hand. "I am. Captain Hayn WingMarra of the Erthuma

research vessel Achilles."

"I am Hiuptis," said the Crotonite. "What are you doing here, Captain

Wing-Marra?"

"Why, we've been out for a drive. And now we're taking a little walk."

"I mean what are you doing in this solar system."

"Carrying out chemical research. We're studying the molecular cloud

nearby."

"And does the molecular cloud extend to the surface of this moon?"

"Not at all. But while we were in orbit up there we ran into some old

friends from Locria, who suggested that we all come down here for a little

rest and relaxation."

"Indeed," said the Crotonite coldly. "This moon is an extremely relaxing

place. But I suggest that you enjoy yourselves elsewhere. If you continue

in the direction you are traveling, you will very shortly be trespassing on

a research center established by and operated for the exclusive use of the

Galactic Sphere of Crotonis."

"Will we?" Wing-Marra said. "A research center, you say? Where? I don't see

anything here at all." He took a deep breath and began to move forward,

indicating with a small movement of his hand that the others should come

with him. "It's absolutely empty out here, so far as I can tell. "

Murry-Balff said softly, "You're within two meters of the shield perimeter

now, sir."

"Yes. I know."

Wing-Marra took another step.

 46 ROBERT SILVERBERG

The Crotomtes began to look extremely agitated. 1"heir bright, beady eyes

glearned and flickered, and they shifted their weight awkwardly from one to

the other of their short, bhVRe legs. Wing-Marra imagined that they would

be flapping their wings, too, if their wings were not pinioned within their

pressure suits. As he walked forward, the Crotonites hopped along beside

him, keeping pace.

"One meter, sir," Murry-Balff said.

Wing-Marra nodded and stepped across the invisible line.

It was like walking through a wall. Inside, everything was different. He

was standing in a kind of antechamber, an open space that curved'off to

either side at a wide angle. Behind him was the barren plain, still

visible, and straight ahead of him, perhaps fifty meters ahead, lay a zone

of absolute blackness, so dense and dark that it could well have been the

outer boundary of the universe. The space between the invisible wall to his

rear and the blackness ahead formed the antechamber, which was brightly lit

by drifting clusters of glowfloats and cluttered everywhere with

alien-looking instruments. It was full of Crotonites, too, who were staring

at him with a look on their demonic bony faces that was surely the

Crotonite equivalent of the most extreme astonishment.

Murry-Balff, still monitoring everything from the vehicle, said, "There's

a second shielded zone within the first one, sir. "

"I'm looking right at it. It's black as the pit."

"It's totally light absorbent. But the sonar goes through. The city starts

just on the other side."

The Crotonite who called itself Hiuptis tapped WingMarra urgently on his

thigh. "Now do you see, Captain? Plainly this is a research zone, and

delicate observations are in progress."

"Fascinating," said Wing-Marra. "I never would have believed it. "

"You concede that we are carrying on research here?"

"Yes. Yes, of course you are. That's plain to see."

"Then I call upon you to cease this trespass at once!"

"Ah, but we're not trespassing, are we?" Wing-Marra

 They Hide, We Seek 47

said lightly. "We're only visiting. It's a purely social thing. This is such

a forlorn dead place, this moon. It's good to have the company of one's

fellow creatures for a little while in a place like this. And as long as

we're here, you really don't mind if we look around a bit, do you? What sort

of research did you say you were doing, by the way? I don't seem to recall."

Hiuptis turned to the Locrians. " Ship-Commander! " the Crotonite cried

sharply. "Will you be a party to this detestable intrusion also? I warn you

that you will thereby involve the Galactic Sphere of Locria in the

culpability, and our inevitable demand for reparations will extend to your

sphere as well as that of Erthuma. You have been warned. "

"We take note of the warning," said one of the Locrians solemnly. "To which

we reply that we are here only because we wish to pay our respects to the

representatives of the Galactic Sphere of Crotonis, now that we have become

aware that you too are present in this unknown and unclaimed solar system

where both we and the Erthumoi have separately been carrying out research

programs of our own. I I

The Locrian's emphasis on unclaimed was subtle but unmistakable. Hiuptis

made a sputtering sound. It was shifting from foot to foot again, so

quickly that it seemed almost to be hopping.

Wing-Marra glanced around. The Crotonites within the research station were

unarmed, but the six who had come out to intercept the Erthuma vehicles

carried blasters. He wondered what the chance was that they would use them

if he continued to press forward. Certainly Hiuptis seemed furious, but so

far the only threat it had made was that there would be a demand for

reparations. Did that mean the Crotonites were ruling out any kind of

attempt to end the intrusion by force? Or was Hiuptis merely trying to lull

him with some slippery Crotonite sleight of tongue?

He looked toward Blue Sphere. The Naxian seemed to be aware of what

Wing-Marra needed to know. It-she signaled relative calm: The Crotonites

were angry, were,

 48 ROBERT SILVERBERG

in fact, fuming mad, but there seemed to be no immediate danger of actual

violence.

Of course, even Naxians weren't infallible. But WingMarra decided to risk

it.

He began to move forward again, toward the strange zone of blackness that

lay before him.

Hiuptis and the other five blaster-equipped Crotonites hopped frantically

along at his side. "Captain Wing-Marra! Captain Wing-Marra! Captain

Wing-Marra! " Hiuptis cried, again and again, in increasingly excited

tones.

The other Crotonites, those who had been operating the myriad scanning

devices that were aimed toward the wall of darkness, were staring at him,

frozen with astonishment.

"Do you mean to go in there?" Hiuptis asked. "Surely not! Surely not,

Captain Wing-Marra!"

Wing-Marra turned toward his Naxian again. Blue Sphere looked troubled now.

They are afraid, it-she told Wing-Marra with a silent gesture. They are

angry that you are in here where they do not want you to go, but they are

afraid, also, of what may happen if you go in there. It is for your sake

that they are afraid.

"MurTy-Balfff' Wing-Marra said. "Do you have any reading on what's going on

on the other side of the inner screen? Do you pick up the presence of any

Crotonites over there?"

"I don't, sir, no. But that doesn't mean there aren't any, only that the

sonar doesn't-"

"Right," Wing-Marra said. He looked toward the Locrians. "What about you?

Can you try to see through that darkness and tell me what's behind there?"

The Locrians, after a moment's hesitation, unveiled their inner eyes, and

turned their piercing three-dimensional vision toward the black void ahead.

"Buildings," reported one of the Locrians, its voice sounding oddly

strangled.

"Buildings, yes," said the other. "Streets. A whole city is there."

"No Crotonites?"

 They Hide, We Seek 49

"No living thing at all," the first Locrian said. "It is very quiet in

there. It is extremely still. "

"Fine," Wing-Marra said. "I'll take a look."

"Captain!" Esiane Ree cried, in horror. "No!"

"Captain Wing-Marra! " said Hiuptis, practically squawking with rage and

frustration. "I forbid-I utterly forbid-"

"Excuse me," Wing-Marra said. "I'll be right back, I promise you."

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he stepped into the zone of

darkness.

The first thing he noticed on the far side was that he was still alive. He

had been prepared to die-eleven cycles might well be quite enough, he had

often thought-but that had not happened.

The second bit of information that came to him was the amber glow on the

arm-monitor of his suit that told him he was now in the presence of an

atmosphere. An oxygenbased atmosphere, at that. He could probably take his

spacesuit off altogether in here, though he did not intend to. This place

was like a world unto itself, sealed off within the screens that shielded

it. Perhaps the atmosphere in here was the one the city had had when this

moon was still alive.

Then, as his vision adapted to the low light level within the inner shield,

he saw the city.

It was stunning beyond his comprehension. Low buildings, yes-Murry-Balff's

readouts had been right about that. In a perfect state of preservation,

absolutely new looking, and so totally strange in their architecture that

he felt as though he had wandered into a land of dreams. Everything seemed

to melt and flow: domes became parapets, walls became balconies, windows

turned to arches. All was fluid, and yet everything was fixed, solid,

eternal.

Unfamiliar colors teased his eyes. He could almost have believed that he

was seeing in some far comer of the spectrum, that these were the hues

beyond violet, or perhaps the ones below red.

Wonderstruck, he moved forward, down a narrow street that seemed to widen

invitingly as he entered it.

 50 ROBERT SILVERBERG

The movement, he realized, was an illusion. Nothing moved here. All was in

stasis: timeless, silent, free from any sort of decay. There was no dust.

There were no cracks in the walls. This was a city outside time, shielded

against all harm. No tectonic movement within the depths of this moon had

left its mark on these flawless structures. No meteors had come plunging

through the airless sky to crash through these roofs. No spider had spun

here. Moth and rust were strangers here. An eternity and a half might have

passed since the builders of this place had taken their leave of it, but

nothing about it had changed.

How was that possible? What spell of enchantment kept this place

invulnerable against the tooth of time?

He went close, peering through windows that seemed opaque and translucent

at the same time. There were objects in the buildings: artifacts,

mechanisms. He saw things on shelves that baffled and awed and astounded

him. Wing-Marra began to tremble. Should he go in? No, he thought. Not now.

Not yet. He might be pushing his luck too far. Who knew what traps awaited

him in there, to guard those ancient treasures against intruders? And yet,

to think that all the wonders of an unknown technology were just on the far

side of those shimmering walls-

He was choking with amazement. There was no place to compare with this in

all the galaxy.

He touched a wall. It seemed to give slightly against the pressure of his

fingertips. And then suddenly the sky above him was ablaze with the

whirling snakes of the Kekule ring. The fiery vision of a gigantic organic

molecule danced before him. It was none that he had ever seen or even

imagined before; immense, bewilderingly intricate, joined in a thousand

thousand places, holding forth the possibility of infinite complexity. He

stared into it and it was like staring into a new universe. After a time he

let go of the wall and took a few tottering steps backward.

The vision faded at once and was gone.

But the impact, lingering, was overwhelming. WingMarra's mind throbbed. He

had to get away. He needed to

 They Hide, We Seek 51

come to terms with what he had seen. He could not bear to remain in this

place any longer.

He swung about and ran through the silent streets toward the blackness, and

burst through it, and stumbled out into the antechamber. The bright lights

dazzled him painfully and he shrank away from them, covering his face for

a moment, closing his eyes. When he felt able to open them again, he saw

them all staring at him in wonder, Crotonites, Locrians, his own people,

all of them appalled, all of them aghast.

"You are alive?" Hiuptis whispered.

"Alive, yes. How long was I in there?"

Eslane Ree said, "A minute or so. No more."

"It seemed like- years."

"What was in there?" Ayana Sanoclaro asked.

Wing-Marra gestured. "Go in and see for yourself."

"Are you serious?"

"Go in!" he cried. "All of you! You've never imagined anything like that!

I wasn't hurt-why should you be?" He looked down at the Crotonite

commander. "You mean to say that you never went in there, not once, not any

of you?"

"No," Hiuptis murmured. "Never. We thought it was too dangerous. We only

scanned it from outside, and nothing more. The shields-we were not sure if

they were lethal. Finally we risked a penetration of the outer one. But the

other-the other-"

"So you didn't put the shields up yourselves?"

The Crotonite made a gesture of negation.

"No," Wing-Marra said. "Naturally you didn't. Neither the invisibility

shield nor the decay-proof shield inside it. We couldn't figure out how you

had done it, and of course you hadn't done it. You don't have the

technology for that. Nobody in the galaxy does. You just stumbled on the

whole thing, and you've been dancing around the edges of it. Well, go on in

now! All of you! Go and see! My God, there are miracles in there! And who

can even guess how old it all is? Fifty million years? A billion? It can

sit like that forever ... right to the end of time."

 52 ROBERT SILVERBERG

"Captain-" It was Linga Hyath. "Captain, you're getting too excited. "

"Damned right I am!" Wing-Marra cried. "Go in there and see! Go in, will

you? See for yourselves!"

Afterward, when everyone had come stumbling out, hushed and dazed and

dumbfounded, a strained silence fell. The vastness of the wonders that they

had seen seemed to have overcome them all.

Only the Locrians appeared able to come to terms immediately with that

grand and staggering experience. To Wing-Marra's amazement they joined

hands and pranced about in a weird, jubilant dance, rubbing their antennae

together as they cavorted. No doubt they were already counting the profits

that could be mined from the hoard of treasure beyond the shield.

It was then that Hiuptis came to Wing-Marra and said, in a dark, cold tone

the Erthuma had not heard from it before, "You wingless ones will leave our

research center now, and you will not return. You will obey without further

discussion."

Theie was insistence in Hiuptis's crackling voice and menace and something

else; the implication, perhaps, that everyone there needed a time to

retreat and digest the meaning of the discovery. But mainly there was

menace and insistence. Wing-Marra suspected that there might be real

violence, despite all taboos, if they tried to remain any longer; and Blue

Sphere backed up his suspicions with the blunt warning that the Crotonites

were reaching a point of exasperation that might prove explosive.

"Don't worry," Wing-Marra told Hiuptis. "We're going to go. You can have

the place to yourselves again."

The Locrians halted their strange dance instantly. One of them turned to

Wing-Marra in amazement, its great eye gleaming, and said, "But our

agreement-I"

Wing-Marra met its glare with one of his own. "We can discuss that later.

I'm calling for a withdrawal. I'm not ready to take any further steps here.

You can do as you please. 99

 They Hide, We Seek 53

"Leaving this find to them?" the Locrian said, astounded. "Incredible! You

actually mean to withdraw and let them have- "

"For the time being," said Wing-Marra. "Only for the time being."

The Locrian rose to its full height and waved its forelimbs furiously in

protest. But Wing-Marra, turning quickly away, began to walk toward the

perimeter of the outer screen, toward the ground vehicles waiting just

outside it.

Sanoclaro came up beside him. "Are you serious? You're really just going to

pull out now?"

He whirled to face her. "What do you think I'm going to do? Start a war

with Crotonis over it? These Crotonites are half crazy with confusion and

rage and greed and outraged pride and God knows what other emotions, all of

them dangerous. They're right at the point where they'll kill to get us out

of here, now. Do you want to see if they will?"

"But to allow them sole possession of such a find--

"For the moment," said Wing-Marra. "Only for the moment. They're in

possession, but they don't have ownership. Nobody does. They discovered it,

sure. But they didn't claim it, which they probably thought was very

clever. Then the Locrians found out about it and got us involved. I went in

on my own hook, which the Crotonites hadn't dared to do, and discovered

that it's accessible and full of incredible things. You understand this

sort of stuffYou can see how muddled the claim is by this time. Let higher

authorities figure it out now. The only thing that's certain is that

nothing's ever going to be the same again in this galaxy."

"But what do you think the city is?" Sanoclaro asked.

"Something left behind by a race greater than any of the Six," said

Wing-Marra quietly. "That's all I- know. I couldn't begin to guess who they

were. Or are."

"Are? But you said the site might be a billion years old! "

"It might, yes. Or a million. And its builders might have become extinct

before there was vertebrate life on

 54 ROBERT SILVERBERG

Earth. Or they might still be out there somewhere, hidden away in some

unexplored arm of the galaxy, or in some other galaxy entirely. Maybe we'll

stumble upon them. Or maybe they'll come back from wherever they are and pay

us a visit. Or maybe they'll never be heard from again. In any case, the

damage is done."

911

"'Me damage.

"There's a city full of a superior alien technology sitting here. Now that

we know what to look for, we may find that there are fifty more invisible

cities just like it stashed around the galaxy too, or five hundred, full of

the most astounding gadgets anyone has ever dreamed of. You can bet that

all that technology, if anybody can figure out what to use it for, is going

to destablize the equilibrium among the Six Races that keeps this galaxy

peaceful. Or worse: Suppose the builders themselves ever come back and de-

cide to play with us---choosing sides among the Six Races, picking allies,

making enemies, maybe looking for vassalscan you imagine what that will

do?"

"Yes," said Sanoclaro quietly. "I can."

They reached the ground vehicle. Wing-Marra turned for one last look at the

place where the city lay hidden.

He saw nothing. Nothing at all, only the bare bright expanse of the flat

stark plain, and a few Crotonite groundcrawlers. He shook his head.

Everything will be different from now on, he thought. Nothing will ever be

the same again.

"Let's get back to the ship," he said wearily. All his people stood waiting

by the vehicles, each one of them seemingly lost in astonished recollection

of the vision they had seen. "I need to put together some sort of a

report," he said. "The whole Erthuma sphere will know about this place by

tomorrow. The whole damned galaxy, I suppose. "

"And then?" Eslane Ree asked. "What will we do after that?"

"Who knows? That's not my concern right now. I've had enough excitement.

l9ve got other work to do, you know. I still want to see what sort of

hydrocarbons are floating around in that molecular cloud. " He allowed his

eyes to close, and the alien city sprang to life behind his

 They Hide, We Seek 55

lids, strange dreamlike buildings stretching on and on to the horizon, and

every one of them laden with implements and devices of unknown and perhaps

unknowable use. He saw the vision again, bearing promise of chemistries

beyond any chemistry he had ever known. His whole being throbbed with the

recollection of what he had seen and felt behind that wall of darkness. A

magical place, he thought. A place of wonders. And, maybe, of terrors. Time

would tell.

Yes, he thought, everything is going to be different now, all throughout

the galaxy. And, he suspected, he, too, would never be quite the same

again. After such a vision, how could he be?

He smiled. Eleven cycles old, and he could still feel a little shiver of

wonder now and then. That wasn't so bad. Of course, it -took something

pretty spectacular to get that kind of response out of him: a cloud thirty

light-years wide loaded with complex organic molecules, say, or an alien

city a billion years old. But he had lived eleven lifetimes, after all.

After eleven cycles he couldn't be expected to react in a. big way to

anything ordinary. He had seen all the ordinary things before, too many

times.

He shrugged. It would be interesting to stick around for another cycle or

two, and see what was going to happen next.

"Okay," he said, beckoning them all to get back into the ground vehicles.

"I think we're finished here for the time being. Let's go."