Brad sat at the foot of the long conference table, with Felicia beside him. He’d had to drag up a chair from the ones lining the conference room’s far wall to make room for her at the table. No one objected.
The table was filled by all the department heads, including Ursula Steiner, Felicia’s boss. Even Captain Desai had come for this meeting, sitting up at the left of the empty chair at the table’s head. They were all chatting together, a dozen buzzing conversations up and down the table, as they waited for Kosoff.
Precisely at 1400 hours the door to Kosoff’s office opened and the professor walked briskly to his seat.
The smile on his bearded face looked a little forced, Brad thought, but as Kosoff sat down he opened the meeting with:
“I know you’ve all been going over MacDaniels’s day-by-day reports. I thought it would be useful to hear what he has to say about his mission to the aliens. From the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”
Someone stage-whispered, “A naysayer, no doubt.”
A few chuckles up and down the table.
Brad rose slowly to his feet. “The major impression that I got about the Gammans is that they are nonviolent; peaceable to the point of being suicidal.”
“They allow themselves to be killed without offering any resistance,” said Steiner.
“That’s because they didn’t see any way to save themselves,” Brad pointed out. “When I showed the villagers that the cats from Beta could be killed, they chose to save themselves.”
“They chose,” Kosoff corrected, “to let you save them.”
“Yes,” said Brad. “And now they’re worried that they’ve done the wrong thing and they’re going to be punished for their disobedience.”
“What about the other villages?” asked Littlejohn. “Have any of them survived?”
Olav Pedersen, head of the planetology group, answered, “Apparently not. They all seem to have been wiped out by the cats.”
“And the cats have themselves died off?”
Steiner said, “Yes. It’s as if they’ve been genetically programmed to die after a few days from breaking out of their eggs.”
“Wait a minute,” Brad said. “Each village has a Rememberer, a person who is supposed to survive the death time and educate the new generation of Gammans, once they come out of the ground.”
“But that won’t happen until their long winter is over,” said Elizabeth Chang.
“You mean that one person in each village hibernates through the winter?”
“Apparently so,” Brad admitted. “The Rememberer in the village I contacted was killed by the cats.”
The table went silent.
Then Pedersen, pale and gloomy, said, “Do we have to search those other villages for survivors?”
“It looks that way,” said Littlejohn.
Brad said, “Wait. There’s something else. According to the Gammans’ mythology, their civilization once built extensive cities. But they were wiped out by the Sky Masters, whoever they were.”
“Mythology,” Littlejohn pointed out. “You can’t expect us to try to track down fantasies, Brad.”
“Mythologies have their roots in reality.”
“Yes, but—”
Kosoff broke into the discussion. “Olav, have the surveillance satellites detected anything that might have once been a city?”
Pedersen shook his head. “Most of the planet is too heavily forested for ground-penetrating radar to get decent imagery.”
Quentin Abbott spoke up. “Mythology or reality, one thing is abundantly clear. This planetary system suffered a major upheaval some hundred thousand years ago, perhaps more. The current configuration of the inner planetary orbits is unstable. Alpha is going to be swallowed up by Mithra within another millennium or so; Beta and Gamma are going to be ejected from the Mithra system altogether.”
Kosoff said, “Surely you don’t believe that these mythological Sky Masters did this? Shattered the entire planetary system?”
“Why?”
“How?”
With a grim smile of utter certainty, Abbott said, “I offer one irrefutable item of evidence. Those egg-things that the cats ride in from Beta to Gamma can’t be natural. That’s high technology, people, and we should be trying to determine who created such technology. And why.”