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out in those library stacks. Why don't you give that up for a while?"
"It's our only chance," said Jase, leaning his head back against the top of
the backrest of his chair and closing his eyes for a second. What
Swanson was saying became a meaningless jumble of words as sleep plucked at
him, trying to drag him down into unconsciousness. He opened his eyes and
Swanson's voice came clear again. "-What have you learned, anyway?"
"A lot," said Jase. "A lot."
"Such as?"
"I'm on the track," said Jase, "of what it is-that wellspring that their
instinctive reactions come from. It's that we've got to understand. Not what
they do, but why they do it."
"Be reasonable!" broke in Coth, suddenly-almost angrily. "They've landed on
the other side of the moon and dug in there somewhere. We'll have them on top
of us any day now. Is there time for that sort of scientific poking around and
nonsense?"
"Nonsense!" Jase straightened up in the chair, taking his head away from the
backrest. "It's because the world didn't have any time for what you call
nonsense-yes, the same sort of nonsense, and the same sort of people like
yourself having no use for it-that we're in this spot. Our neck stuck out into
space ready to be chopped off, while the body of our race's still back down on
plain earth, living and thinking in terms of it's a long way from here to
Tokyo. And the world lying naked to a globe of space six hundred light years
at least in radius around us--"
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He broke off suddenly. He had lost his temper like this before with these
people. It did no good; it did not even begin to open up their closed minds
that thought of the Ruml as something between a horde of black-furred
foreigners and a composite of all the science-fiction movie monsters they had
ever seen on their home screens.
"... What do you want from me now?" Jase asked, wearily.
"We know they landed on the other side of the moon," said Swanson. "We don't
know where. You can tell us where."
"Why?" said Jase. "So you can send one of our space-going vessels over the
spot to drop a nuclear bomb on it?"
"Of course not!" said Swanson. "We'd try to take them alive if at all
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possible."
"It wouldn't be possible," said Jase. "In any case, you're to leave them
alone." He closed his eyes again, tempting himself with the thought of
unlimited slumber. "I won't tell you."
"Won't tell us!" the voice of Coth jerked Jase's eyes open. "Won't tell us?"
"No," said Jase. "As long as you ignore them, they've got no reason to think
you know they exist. They'll go on trying to scout us, instead of messaging
back for an invasion team from their seven worlds. Once they do that, there's
no hope for any of us. As long as they hold off, I've got time to go on
searching for what moves someone like Kator. What makes what he does noble--"
"Noble?" said Goth. "This mindpartaer-this Kator Secondcousin of yours-killed
his scout partner in his sleep, lied about that, stole part of the
artifact-bait from his own authorities, took an unfair advantage to kill
another of his own kind in a duel-and he's just finished executing the one
close relative he liked in order to make his crew on the ship admire him."
Goth breathed sharply for a second. There were two points of color in his
face, high on his narrow cheekbones. "--And that's, according to what you've
seen fit to tell us about him and his race, noble!"
"Noble by his standards, not ours," answered Jase. He looked around the room
at all of them. "Isn't there one of you who's willing to be openminded about
the difference between Ruml and humans?"
"Of course," said Swanson. "Just tell us what those differences are. And what
they mean."
"But that's what I'm breaking my neck to find out!" said Jase, furiously. "I'm
not asking you to listen to a set of differences and then conclude the Ruml
aren't like us! I'm asking you to believe they're not like us to start off
with and use the fact of their not being like us as a starting point to
understanding their differences of beliefs and thoughts and actions!"
"And after we've understood them, what then?" asked Goth. "Will understanding
them stop Kator and his expedition? Or the Ruml that come after them?"
"No," said Jase. "But if we understand, we can maybe explain to them why they
needn't or shouldn't try to kill us and take over our world the way they want
to. Don't you understand?" he glared at Swan-son. "They don't
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en%20Way.txt know any better. Neither do we- yet. But we've got a chance in
me, and my contact with Kator's mind, to find out better. So it's our
responsibility to find the answers, not theirs."
One of the men present, who never spoke, grunted.
"Cut it out," said Jase looking over at him in disgust. "I'm as human as you
are. No alien's speaking through me." The man who had grunted got out a
cigarette, studied it, and lighted it-not looking at Jase or showing he had
heard.
"Go on," said Swanson patiently. "Go on. Explain it to us."
"Look--," said Jase, leaning forward in his chair. "J. P. Scott, in the early
nineteen-sixties, did some research on the critical periods in behavioral
development that was printed in Science magazine. I've just been reading over
that article he wrote, again. It points out that there's an amazing amount of
flexibility in behavioral development. In humans and dogs, for example, the
periods can actually occur in reverse order--"
"What periods?" asked Swanson.
"Well, they vary from species to species. The song sparrow, Scott points out,
for example, has six developmental periods. The dogs-puppies-have four.
There's neonatal, the nursing period, first. Then the transition period, in
which the puppy makes the transition to adult methods of feeding and moving
about. Third, there's the socialization period, in which the puppy first
begins to socialize with his equals, playing and forming primary social bonds.
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The fourth and final stage, juvenile, is characterized by the beginning of
final weaning-independence."
Jase paused and swallowed. His throat was dry with the effort of explaining.
"What about it?" demanded Coth.
"Don't you see?" asked Jase. "Think how different a dog is from a human.
And yet those four periods correspond-though not in that order-to similar
periods in human development. But of those four periods, only one is
comparable to a period of Ruml development. The others are either unconscious,
or not there at all in the development of a young individual as Kator was to
begin with."
"What do you mean?" asked Swanson, taking off his spectacles and beginning to
clean them with a tissue.
"Didn't you read my earlier reports?" demanded Jase. "Kator wasn't even
conscious until, by human standards, he was about ten years old. He was born
after being carried for three years inside his mother, then transferred to a
pouch where he spent the next six years, developing physically but hardly
growing and as unconscious as a human in a deep sleep, nursing and breathing
and all else by instinctive reflex. Then, suddenly, in his tenth year, he
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