Reign of the Telepuppets

By DANIEL F. GALOUYE

In all Creation, Bigboss knew there
was nothing superior to him. Yet a nagging
in his memory drums hinted that somewhere
were creatures who challenged his rule.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories August 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"The way this thing shapes up," Director Gabe Randall of the Bureau of Interstellar Exploration was saying in his usual manner of understatement, "it will be our most important trouble-shooting mission to date."

He stood cranelike, one leg hooked over a corner of the desk, as he whacked his thigh with an illuminated indicator rod. With purposeful eyes, he sized up the other three men in the briefing room. Lean and alert, he held himself straight against the encroachment of age that was evident in a fully white shock of hair and a brow furrowed with decades of executive responsibility.

"I suppose," he digressed, smiling, "that we'll have to get along without our Maid of the Megacycles."

Dave Stewart, Randall's assistant, glanced at the empty chair. "Carol said she'd be along shortly." Actually, she hadn't. But, if the situation were reversed, she'd cover for him.

"Woman's prerogative," the director observed, shrugging phlegmatically. "Gentlemen, I submit that the greatest deterrent to progress in BIE is the fact that direct radio empathy can be developed only in women—and young ones at that."

But Stewart recognized the imperceptible jocularity in the other's stare. It contrasted the sobriety with which he had said only a moment earlier that the nature of the mission required top personnel.

At half the director's age, Stewart had earned his recognition as logical successor to the seat of executive authority. And, in Carol Cummings, Randall had selected the most capable radio empathy specialist BIE had produced in years. The prettiest, too, he added as an afterthought.

But there you could draw the line. Below was the Photon II's crew. At 44, Nat McAllister, pilot, was well past the age when he might look forward to a supervisory position, thanks to a rash of bad-judgment accidents and a general absence of ambition. And Ship Systems Officer Mortimer, ten years younger, seemed anchored to his niche by an equal measure of minimum ability—if not by the sheer weight of his two hundred and fifty pounds.

"Top" personnel for a "priority" job? Stewart shook his head dubiously.

Randall rapped the desk and the sharp sound snapped McAllister's chin from his chest, where it had gradually descended.

"Since it appears we'll continue to be disfavored by Miss Cummings' absence," the director resumed, "we'll proceed."

He touched a button and darkness filled the room. Another stud hurled into existence a ten-foot sphere of galactic luminosity, ablaze with motes of scattered brilliance.

Stewart located the co-ordinate axes and traced them to Sol. Nearby was Centauri, ringed with a halo to signify location of Headquarters, Bureau of Interstellar Exploration. Mortimer's corpulent face took on a Buddha-like appearance in the illumination from Alpha Hyades, hovering near his left cheek.

"All right, Stewart," Randall gestured with his rod. "Suppose you identify that star immediately behind your shoulder for McAllister and Mortimer's benefit."

"Alpha Tauri."

"Right. Aldebaran—where you made a telepuppet drop on Four-B two years ago."

"Just before Harlston and I pushed on out to explore beyond Aldebaran."

Randall directed his next words at the pilot and ship systems officer. "What Stewart did not know as he ranged outward was that the Aldebaran telepuppet team, for some reason, stopped transmitting—less than a year after the drop."

Stewart finger-combed a spray of blond hair off his forehead. In the pseudo galactic illumination his face, tanned from exposure to a score of suns radiating heavily in the ultraviolet range, appeared cinnamon in hue.

Randall glanced back at him. "Tell them what we're going to do on this mission."

"Unknot the puppet strings," he said laconically, becoming impatient with his dutiful recitation to enlighten the other two.

The director glanced off to his right, eyebrow raised to compound the eternal ridges of his forehead. "I see we've got our Maid of the Megacycles with us at last. Couldn't you tear yourself away from a Terracast, Miss Cummings? Or did you bring it along?"

Carol advanced through a patch of projected galactic nebulosity. Ebon hair sheening with the reflected glow, she smiled saucily and tapped her temple. "It so happens I am peeking in on a videocast," she bantered. "And I'm learning more about what's behind this briefing than if I'd been here all along."

Groping for her chair, she weaved between the steady, cold points of suspended light that represented Epsilon Scorpii and Eta Orphiuchi. "Don't look now, Chief," she added, winking, "but I'm afraid this newscast shows you've got a leak in your bureau."

Stewart caught her arm and guided her toward the chair. His hand held the coarse texture of fatigue coveralls that did little to obscure the shapeliness of her lithe, five-foot-four form.

She returned his greeting with a spirited, "Hi, glad to have you aboard. Not planning to lead us off on a two-year jaunt?"

Randall tapped the desk with his rod. "If Miss Cummings is willing to forego informalities, we can get along with our briefing."

McAllister tossed his head erect, but started nodding again almost immediately. Mortimer looked up tolerantly from contemplation on the orbiting of one of his stout thumbs around the other.

The director touched another button and the celestial sphere expanded to twice its diameter, encompassing another seventy light-years in all directions. "Again, directly behind you, Stewart, is—what?"

Enthusiastically, he sat erect. "The Hyades Cluster."

Randall laid down his rod. "Stewart, as you are aware, completed his expedition two weeks ago—in a ship stripped down for maximum range. Now he's going to tell us something about his experiences."

Mortimer, finally interested, glanced over at McAllister. The pilot, however, was dozing.

Stewart stared at the cluster of four stars huddled together in the still air of the briefing room. "We found the Hyades rich in Earth-type worlds. Seven—" He paused. Was it seven, or eight? "Eight of them are more like Terra than Terra itself. Four others are more suitable than anything we've run across in a century and a half of galactic exploration."

His eyes clung to the brilliant specks, set like jewels against a velvet background. They were jewels—cold and glittering and beckoning. And he could almost feel their attraction—like a magnet tugging on filings of hope and ambition. Yet, somehow he felt dejected, as though he were reluctant to reach out for them.

"You did all that in two years' time?" McAllister asked.

"Why yes, of course. I—" He could understand the other's skepticism, however. He had covered a lot of interstellar space.

"You all know what this development means," Randall said.

"That our expansion will be concentrated in a new direction!" Carol volunteered hopefully.

The chair creaked its complaint as Mortimer shifted his weight. "And the Aldebaran telepuppets?"

Randall gestured for emphasis. "That robot team is now of first-rate importance. We'll need a full analysis of Four-B in the shortest time possible. The Hyades are a hundred and fifty light-years away—too far for direct development. But a halfway base in the Aldebaran system will open them up to us immediately."

Carol found Stewart's arm. "This one is really worthwhile. Think you can get your puppets back on their strings?"

"I suppose so. There can't be too much wrong with them." But still his thoughts were on the Hyades. Somehow they left him with an emptiness, a bittersweet taste. Whereas he knew he should feel only enchantment and the satisfaction of accomplishment in his discovery.

"That all there is to this mission?" McAllister, fully awake now, asked disappointedly.

"I thought it was going to be a challenge," Mortimer complained.

Randall played the buttons on his desk as though they were a console keyboard. The celestial sphere deflated, then collapsed. Room lights blazed, harsh and intense. "Everything clear?" he asked.

Then he added, "We'll assemble at oh-eight-hundred Octoday at the Photon II dock. My gear is already packed."

Carol's eyes widened. "You're going too?"

"Yes, finally. About time I got out in the field and see how our new generation of—ah, specialists handles things."

Stewart only stared at the director. On the latter's desk were mountainous stacks of back work. Yet he was finding time to get away.

Rationalization circuits working sluggishly as he surveyed his realm, Bigboss dredged from the fragmented impressions on his memory drums his most fascinating, most disturbing subject for speculation:

In all Creation, there was nothing superior to Him. This material world that stretched out around Him, everything in the celestial reaches as far as infinity itself—all His! He had brought it into existence, although (confound those faulty drums!) He might not be able to recall the specific acts of Creation.

Yet He sensed, with the nagging certainty of conviction, that somewhere in His Universe, there was an insolent creature or creatures who would dare challenge His infinite supremacy.

Well (He generated power so fiercely that he had to shunt the excess to ground), let them! He could desire nothing more. And His only hope was that they would confront Him personally to express their insolence. Then there would be opportunity for an accounting!

Remembering his blaster, he swung around, aimed it at a boulder and, vengefully, fed it an enormous surge of power. Angry liquid light streaked out from the intensifier and crashed against the rock. The concussion sent him skittering back several meters.

Bigboss was by far the most magnificent member of the clan—if indeed, he should condescend to regard himself as belonging to the set at all. Fully twice the size of any of the others, he reared pompously erect on four stout appendages. Through its ports, his central section offered glowing evidence of the nuclear processes within. Majestic in stance, he swung a pair of formidable members—the auxiliary blaster and a massive, extensible vise.

Assuring himself that the insolent creatures were not spurious impressions on his drums, he blasted another boulder. That for the pretenders, should they ever decide to contest His Reign!

Bigboss reacted abruptly to the realization that Minnie was watching him. No longer was his digital subsystem receiving her stream of telemetric signals. Relays clicked within his control section and video gain brought intensified visual awareness in all four quadrants. Immediately he spotted Minnie, immobile and ungainly as gyros balanced her elongated metal form on six jointed legs.

Her drill head, held high above the outcropping on which she had been working, glinted in the light of a shimmering, golden sun. Her single, wide-angle lens, set like a Cyclopean eye in its chrome-plated forehead, was focused intently on him.

Interrupting his subliminal correlation of data from the other workers, he sent Minnie an indignant "back-to-work" impulse. Reluctantly, she sank her bit into the rock.

But she had ingested only a slotful of fragments when the ground bulged beside her. Displaced soil slid away and Screw Worm erupted, carrying in his thread pouches mineral specimens for her analyzers.

Bigboss generated more easily as he watched Worm at work. Not that the menial helper, who occupied the lowest rung on the ladder, was worthy of speculative attention. But a laboring borer meant Minnie was pre-occupied with her limited supervisory function and couldn't be plotting to supplant him.

Working near Minnie, Seismo squatted at his sedentary task. Sensor rod sunk to bedrock, he was proudly purring an encoded disclosure of distant rumblings beneath the surface. Less than a hectometer away, Sky Watcher's tripodal locomotive system was bringing him carefully up a rise. Arriving, he assumed the location Sun Watcher had only recently abandoned. He adjusted himself on dead level, then thrust out a number of lensed tubes that locked on a referent star, three distant planets and a smaller satellite.

At that moment came an excited eureka impulse from Breather, posted outside a cave and briskly inflating and deflating the external pouches that bracketed his long, cylindrical form. The impulse proudly told of his detection of oxygen traces.

Nearby, Scraper diligently shoveled soil into his scoop in an endless search for micro-organisms and DNA molecules. Grazer munched on a growth already identified as lichen. Peter the Meter sat on a knoll scanning the sky with his battery of inferometers, radiometers and bolometers.

Of the distant workers, Bigboss was most sensitively aware of the volant signals from Maggie. Kilometers away, she was covering the ground in great, leaping strides of abandon as she sought out and traced down each fascinating isomagnetic line of variation.

Work, work, work. Get the job done. Shake a leg. Shoulder (whatever that was) to the wheel. Dig in and pitch. But—for what?

What was responsible for the irresistible compulsion? Was it his own idea? But of course, it must be. For, how could there be any power capable of directing Him? Unless, perhaps, it might conceivably be the insolent creatures who lurked like vague shadows on the fringe of his almost obliterated memory. But, no!

He, Himself, was the Supreme Being of All Creation!

His master timer peaked in its four hundred-cycle sine wave, reminding him of the chore at hand. The sun had set and the huge, pink planet had already laid claim to the night sky. Just below it was the special grouping of stars that matched, point for point, the referent pattern on his orientation drum.

Programmed functions took over. Sensors hunted out the bright central star and aimed his parabolic antenna at the designated spot seven degrees southeastward. Then he loosed his transmission into subspace. Data stored over long hours of tedious sequencing surged from the tape, bringing a euphoria of relief.

Eventually telemetric transmission ended and Bigboss, as had become his custom, automatically turned his thoughts to the Totem.

All metal it was—sleek and sheening and shaped like a truncated cone as it lay powerless on the plain beyond the hill. How akin it was to him and the clan! Why, it even seemed he could almost remember having once been a part of the huge, polished thing. Perhaps it was the very vessel He had used on His Celestial Tour of Creation.

Yes, it was time for Pilgrimage to Totem. And a fitting reward it would be, as always, for successful transmission.

He mustered the volition required to break functional compulsion. Then he sent the "fall-in" impulse to his subjects. Eventually the line of march took shape, with Bigboss leading his analyzers up the first hill and calling for the proper reverential attitude.

Behind him lumbered Minnie, her thick neck weighted by the bulky drill and swinging awkwardly with the sway of her six-legged stride. Seismo, encumbered with a faulty, dragging sensor rod, was having some difficulty maintaining a straight course.

Sky Watcher came along in lunging motions, a natural consequence of his tripodal system. Immediately to his rear, Sun Watcher, who held the fifth rung on the ladder, moved smoothly ahead with all his instruments retracted except the solar plasma detector.

Then there was a break in the line for Maggie, who could now be seen galloping along on an interceptive course. Peter the Meter, lurching from the imbalance of an extended boom-and-ball sensor, appeared somewhat like a many-spiked sphere on spindly legs.

Farther down the file, no deference was extended in the form of gaps for those missing workers who had yet to join the march.

Bringing up the rear were the diminutive Scraper and Grazer, resembling a pair of scurrying crabs, and Screw Worm, using his blade-edge jets to propel himself in a rolling, transverse motion.

Aware of commotion behind him, Bigboss continued unconcernedly up the rise. Sky Watcher, interpreting Seismo's faulty motions as an opportunity for his own forced ascendancy, had drawn back a photo-multiplier tube and sent it crashing into the other's rear plate.

The attack, though, was only self-thwarting, since it jarred a servo unit into retracting Seismo's dangling sensor rod. His locomotive integrity restored, he kicked out with a pedal pad and sent Sky Watcher flailing back into Sun Watcher. The latter rammed forward with his plasma detector's boom-and-ball shield, managing to knock Sky Watcher back into his proper position.

Finally fearful of damage to instruments, Bigboss gruffly radioed "cut-the-comedy" impulses, then trained his rearward lens on Minnie. She had inched furtively forward and was now menacing his upper section with her drill head.

He considered wielding his blaster but rejected that expedient as an excessive and unnecessary ostentation. Instead he countered by raising his extensible vise. The lesser show of strength sufficed to discourage Minnie's ambition, for the moment at least.

How foolish she was to imagine she could supplant Him as the Supreme Being!

Let her try.

Even if she succeeded, he would merely deny her a place at the trough next feeding period.

Then where would she get the vital charge for her batteries?

II

The Photon II groaned, heaved and popped out of subspace for a fix before striking out on the last, short leg of its journey. As Stewart had feared, they were five light-years off course.

Ship Systems Officer Mortimer's thickly-fleshed face struggled with an embarrassing smile. "Well, you can't hit 'em on the nose every time out," he rationalized, waddling back to the charts.

Stewart reflected that rare indeed were the occasions on which Mortimer came anywhere near the nasal target. Conceding the loss of nearly an entire day, he waited for Director Randall's permissive nod, then joined Mortimer in cutting the new navigation tapes.

It took two hours to process all data and feed them into the SCC-772. When the computer burped out the new heading, Stewart threaded the tape into the control programmer and decided to spend the uneventful period of subspace travel in his bunk.

Sleep came swiftly, but it was shallow and restless. More than once over the next several hours, as he plummeted down a chasm of nightmares, he regretted having left the control compartment.

First his dreams brought him back to the Hyadean Cluster, as they had on so many occasions during recent weeks. And, for a while, he drank in the blue-green beauty of the seven—or, was it eight?—worlds that seemed to beckon with all their irresistible allure.

They were incredibly splendrous, these planets that would soon embrace man and feed and clothe and shelter him. But, as he admired them in his dream, a sort of astronomical surrealism bunched them together—all in orbit around a central, massive sun—until it seemed they were occupying so compact an area that they must surely crumble under the weight of their mutual attraction.

And, as though upon his suggestion, crumble they did. Only, it was no pulverizing force that scattered them into fragmented rings, such as those around Sol's Saturn. Instead, each planet cracked like a hatching egg, its crust stripping away and exposing beneath a gruesome Harpy that was all razor-sharp talons and vicious beak and slime-filmed, ruffled feathers.

Stewart tried to scream himself awake but couldn't. He only flailed helplessly in the void while monstrous wings thrashed space into a frenzy, producing great currents that set the stars themselves to eddying and swirling.

They dived at him, but before their talons could sink into his flesh he awoke trembling and cold in his twisted, moist clothes.

For a long while he merely lay there trying to wash his mind of the horror. But the steady whine of the subspace drive reminded him that the Photon was streaking in the direction of the Hyades. That it would end its headlong plunge in the Aldebaran system, only halfway there, brought no relief from his baseless, unreasonable fear.

When he returned to the control compartment, the ship was back in normal space and within Aldebaran Four-B's gravitational field.

He joined Carol Cummings in the forward section, hooking his arm through a view-port strap and mooring himself against null gravity.

"You suppose we're home free?" she asked uncertainly.

Her normally effusive smile, he noticed, had moderated considerably. "If McAllister doesn't louse up his landing."

"I take it he's not very efficient."

"Pure and simple understatement. Last time out he missed an entire continent. It was a case for Search and Rescue."

Carol pressed forward and soft light from Aldebaran Four, off the port bow, warmed her sculpturesque features with primrose high lights. "I should imagine he would have been cashiered."

"But he wasn't. Instead he turns up on this crucial mission."

He busied himself with frequency adjustment on his portable transmitter. With it he would be able to tell, soon after landing, whether the Operations Co-ordinator could still be reached orally through its command discriminator circuit.

He flicked on the power switch, positioned the microphone comfortably against his larynx and sharply intoned a series of numerals. An oscilloscope faithfully traced the amplitude pattern, verifying effective transmission.

Down the companionway in the pilot's compartment, he could see McAllister anchored in his acceleration couch. He was drifting back and forth between padding and slack restraining straps, vicariously lost in the blood-and-guts action of a dramatape feeding into the view slot of his helmet.

Stewart read the label on the empty container—"The Kowalski Bros. in the Korean War."

"Always has his head buried in one of those escapist tapes, hasn't he?" Carol observed, still staring out the port.

"I don't think he ever grew up," Stewart agreed. But, again, even the Bureau seemed to contain its share of coasters who had never quite reached maturity, he remembered.

"Even in the Bureau," Carol observed thoughtfully, "you'll find coasters who've never reached maturity."

Intuitively, he tensed. Was it just coincidence that she had repeated, almost word for word, his own thoughts?

"I've never looked at any of those warfare tapes myself," she said. "But I've heard about them. Do you suppose armed conflict was really that horrible?"

"Pretty rough, according to the historians. It's not the sort of thing I'd like to be mixed up in."

"And McAllister?"

"Him? He's just building up a reservoir of false courage through his viewer." Yet, in fairness to the pilot, Stewart had to admit that he, himself, felt a deep and reasonable gratitude that wars were a thing of the historic past.

Carol sighed and glanced at him. "I'm certainly glad," she said, straight-faced, "that wars are a thing of the historic past."

He seized her arm. "Carol! Do you realize you're repeating everything I'm thinking? You've gone a step beyond radio empathy! You can pull in thought waves too!"

"No-o-o, you're joking!"

"No. Honest, I—" But his words were lost in her welling laughter.

He followed her amused stare to his portable voice transmitter and the mike that still clung to his throat. And instantly he realized that his subvocalizations, being picked up and broadcast, were to her like a window opening on his thought processes.

"Why, you—" Feigning indignation, he caught her around the waist and pulled her toward him. Weightless, she drifted forward and spread out conveniently across his knees.

But before he could bring a hand down resoundingly on the curvature of taut coveralls, Randall drifted in on the scene.

Still laughing, Carol straightened and announced, "Saved—by the great, white-haired protector."

Randall grinned benignly, lighted his pipe and stared out the port. "Couldn't help hearing your conversation about the horror of warfare. I've seen all the documentary tapes. It was rough."

"Thank God it's a closed book," Carol said seriously.

"But, is it? There's still a large and articulate school that regards armed conflict as an instinctive human mechanism."

"We've had no war in two hundred years," Stewart said.

"Only because political subdivisions haven't had time for one. The instinct is blurred as a result of our expanding into a vacuum."

"I see." Carol's eyes strained with disillusionment. "And the question is—what happens when we run out of galaxy?"

"Fat chance." Stewart laughed. "We've got a few billion years to go before we find ourselves short on worlds."

Having apparently lost interest in the conversation, Randall was staring ahead at the onrushing satellite.

"That's one way of looking at it," Carol said pensively. "But there's also another possibility—resistance to the expansion."

"You kidding? In two centuries we haven't run into a single life form that's the intellectual equivalent of a Terran fiddler crab. What do you think, Chief?"

The director blew a stream of smoke at the swiftly expanding disc of Four-B. "I think our Maid of the Megacycles ought to start sniffing for that telepuppet team. I wouldn't want to rely on Mortimer's locating them with directional gear."

Carol faced the view port with her eyes closed for perhaps three minutes. Then she grinned. "I think I've got it! Not just a single, strong signal. Bundles of weak ones."

"It figures," Stewart verified. "The OC wouldn't be transmitting now. But the lesser puppets would be funneling the stuff into the CXB-1624. Can you identify any frequencies?"

She hesitated. "I'd say they're spaced out between fifteen hundred and two thousand kilo-cycles."

"You're a bit off. Should be sixteen to twenty-four hundred."

She opened her eyes, studied the rugged face of the satellite, then pointed. "There—near the end of that mountain range."

He handed her a mike and earphone set. "I'll tell McAllister you're ready to guide him in."

As Stewart had feared, McAllister's landing turned out to be a real corker. It even started with a three-gainer flip, rather than a simple end-about maneuver, when he first applied braking thrust.

Bigboss responded automatically to the abruptly peaking sine wave that reminded him it was time for feeding. Summoning the clan with a brisk flow of "come-and-get it" signals on all command wave lengths, he strutted to the center of the clearing and prepared the trough. Squatting, he switched on all outlet circuits and directed bristling current into each jack.

The workers came from the cave, over the hills, out of the shadowy depths of fissures, from behind grotesque outcroppings. Illuminators piercing the twilight gloom, they extended retractable electrodes and converged on Bigboss.

One by one, plugs slipped into jacks and steadily increasing drain gave assurance of an orderly distribution of current.

Minnie was late arriving. She came along clumsily, massive drill head bobbing with her awkward stride. Had Bigboss' memory pack been serving him more efficiently at the time, he might have realized her gyros couldn't be overcorrecting that radically without triggering a "fix-me-I'm-broke" impulse.

But, as it was, she completed her apparently innocuous approach with impunity. Taking a last, measured step, she toppled over backwards on her posterior analyzing chamber. An ostensibly helpless victim of imbalance, her neck teetered skyward and her drill head hovered over Bigboss' upper section.

Then it crashed down, the drill bit shattering his port video pickup lens. Instantly he lost visual contact with one quadrant of his surroundings. He reacted at once, though, swiveling his upper section around ninety degrees and bringing Minnie back in sight through another lens. Guarding against repetition of the accident, he reached out and gripped her neck in his vise. He guided her plug into the proper jack, maintaining his purchase just to be sure.

Accident? he asked himself.

It was an unfamiliar concept, at best. Then he recalled that "mishap" was a notion not applicable to members of the clan. Perhaps other beings in other universes were given to blunder. In His World, though, He had arranged it that His intellects would be without error. Here the concept "intent" had no polar opposite.

Which meant that Minnie, not having reported malfunctioning gyros, had planned the destruction of one of his video sensors.

Vindictively, he started to turn upon her. But he realized he would be circumventing the primary compulsion—work, work, work. She was, after all, diligently discharging a worthwhile function in unraveling the secrets He had so cunningly hidden in His Creation.

Feeding finally over, he signaled a general "back-to-work" order on all wave lengths and watched his subjects return to their chores, motions brisk with restored energy.

For many sine wave peaks thereafter, Bigboss fretted over the ramifications of having lost visual contact with a ninety-degree wedge of his environs. Had Minnie intended that effect? Did her rationalization pack have the capacity to reason out such a complex cause-and-effect relationship? Had she anticipated his resulting vulnerability?

Oh, he was compensating readily enough through self-reprograming: stability for five sine wave saliences; activate upper section's horizontal servomechanism; circumrotate ninety degrees; stabilize; count five more waveform saliences; reverse procedure. That way three video sensors did the job of four.

It gave him adequate coverage. But there were those times when the demands of function modification required the full output of his PM&R pack and his defensive scanning had to be sacrificed.

Such as now—when he was receiving Screw Worm's clear and frantic "save-me" signals.

Activating his directional gear, he lumbered over to the precise spot—a gentle rise of topsoil not far from where Minnie herself was chipping away at a boulder. Engaging his ventral illuminator-sensor, he located Worm's most recent drill hole. The borer's distress impulses were issuing with great amplitude from the opening. Bigboss unfolded his scoop and went to work.

It wasn't long before he had uncovered the borer's rearward axial protuberance. Extending his ventral vise, he gripped Worm securely, heaved to free him from the rock formation in which he had become wedged, and brought him back to the surface.

Released, the lesser worker scurried off to rejoin Minnie.

Bigboss realized only then that, during the entire rescue operation, he had neglected his defensive scanning procedure.

Restoring his upper section's quarterly rotational motion, he regarded Minnie warily. Was there any significance to the fact that she was facing him from the other side of the boulder, such that each time she elevated her head her field of vision swept over him?

Experimentally, he moved twenty meters to his right. Compensating, she skewed left, maintaining her visual advantage.

A calculated maneuver? Of course, it had to be. Perhaps her insolence should be dealt with summarily. But how could that be done without reducing the clan's over-all efficiency as a team dedicated to the compulsion of work, work, work?

At that moment Peter the Meter, busy scanning the sky with his battery of instruments, loosed a shrill eureka signal.

Bigboss thought for a moment that one of the latter's gamma ray spectrometers had been swamped. But, on monitoring Peter's telemetered stream, he discerned that the impulse was from an infrared photometer. A check of co-ordinates showed the source of disturbance to be skyward, with a dead zenith orientation.

He commandeered one of Sky Watcher's planetary telesensors and redirected it at the source of new emanation. Now there were additional data to throw light on the manifestation.

The disturbance was in the visual range; classification—material. A rapidly shifting parallax suggested either constant location and swift expansion, or steady size and brisk approach.

Sky Watcher, on his own adaptive initiative, settled that uncertainty. His radar gear calculated a variable approach momentum averaging twelve hundred kilometers an hour and decreasing.

Peter also improvised on his function, bringing into play a photometer that instantly gauged the emissive intensity of the disturbance: comparable to the parameter for solar brilliance.

The object had shifted from zenith and was drifting over into the quadrant wherein the clan's Totem was located. Bigboss responded with some degree of concern to this development. Did it represent a threat to their revered symbol of metallic kinship?

Then he had the object in his own visual field. It was a great, blazing ball of brilliance that extended a flickering tongue downward. Atop the sphere of fiery energy sat a shining silver needle that resembled nothing as much as it did the clan's own Totem!

Evaluation circuits frozen in a confusion of indecision, he stood there fully unaware that he had discontinued his protective scanning and had not brought Minnie into one of his lines of sight for a number of sine wave epipeaks.

He was shocked back into action, however, when an equilibrium circuit tripped the alarm that his attitude was unstable and beyond compensation within the limits of gyroscopic control.

He pivoted sharply and planted two pedal discs down in the direction of fall. As he did so, his upper command section swung around, bringing a video lens to bear on Minnie. Refocusing, he saw she had crept up from his blind quadrant and had begun drilling into his power-plant section.

Fool. In her thirst for supremacy, didn't she realize she could touch off an explosion that would hurl them both halfway to the pink planet?

He pulled away from the grinding bite of her drill and brought his vise swinging forcibly upward. It slammed into her forward analyzing compartment and sent her reeling backward. Her equilibrium system overextended, she toppled sideways and lay there kicking ineffectually.

By then, the great blazing light had disappeared beyond the hills at almost the exact site where the Totem was located.

He left Minnie to her struggles and went eagerly forward. Eventually, she would evaluate her position and hit upon the proper combination of responses to right herself.

Meanwhile the now surface-borne needle was a new environmental item that cried for analysis, with eureka signals already coming in from several workers. Maggie, for instance, was covering the ground in lurching strides, homing in on one of the new lines of force the object had established.

Seismo had recorded and sent along exciting data on tremors that could be interpreted in terms of a number of closely-spaced, localized impacts. Even Minnie—despite her predicament and in response to the basic compulsion of her function—was using her high neutron tool. Evaluation circuits humming, she was sending a stream of signals that fairly screamed, "Pure metal!"

And Grazer, abandoning a patch of lichen, was scrambling up a hillside in the direction of the recently arrived object. His eureka was the most frenzied of all. Which was understandable, since he was sensing DNA molecules for the first time in his memory!

The best Bigboss could surmise, from a precursory correlation of data, was that Grazer had detected the molecules in a substance that wound helically around the great needlelike form.

Then his rationalization circuits labored under peak voltage as an obscure memory fragment thrust itself up from one of his drums.

Again, it was a vague bit concerning his suspicions on the existence of insolent creatures who might imagine themselves superior to Him—might even be presumptuous enough to give orders to the Supreme Being!

If such creatures were more than spurious impressions, he reasoned, then wasn't it likely that they, too, could move about in celestial vessels? Hadn't He all along feared that if they came to contest His Reign they would come from the sky?

Voltage regulators clicked frantically as he shunted aside raging current and averted damage to his rationalization pack. But he could hardly consider the beings without overgenerating. They were that infuriating.

Had the contemptuous creatures come at last, as he had always supposed they would? Was his period of agonizing vigilance at an end? Could this be the final accounting he had anticipated so anxiously?

Enraged, he lumbered forward, his blaster extended rigidly before him, as though it were a lance.

III

Stewart dug out from under the miscellany of dislodged gear that had buried him in his acceleration couch.

"Good landing," he grumbled at McAllister, whose hands were still trembling at the controls, "—all six of them."

White-faced, Carol recovered her composure by releasing her hair from its free-fall net. "I wasn't sure," she whispered, "whether he was going to land or just play bounce."

Randall tested his legs. "Well, at least we are here."

He crossed over to the external view console and threw a switch. One of the screens flickered, then steadied with a wide-angle image of the sky, framed in the sweeping curvature of the horizon. Aldebaran, setting, was bisected by a serrate mountain range, while its fourth planet was rising in all its brilliant immensity.

More interested in their surface surroundings, however, Stewart brought another screen into play and aimed it at the ground. The lens swept across, then came back to focus on a silvery form that reared skyward beyond a nearby hill.

"At least McAllister put us down in the right place," he conceded. "There's the telepuppet barge—right where I left it."

He swung the lens on around and picked up movement on the ground almost in the shadow of the Photon.

"And there are our puppets!" Carol announced.

The Operations Co-ordinator, its laser intensifier evidently locked in the ready position, was leading a march toward the ship. Some of the team were not in evidence, as was to be expected after a year of managing on their own. But there was the Seismometer, the Astronomical Data Collector and the Solar Plasma Detector.

Trailing behind were the Atmosphere Analyzer and the Radiometer Complex. Stewart could make out even the lesser forms of the Micro-organism Collector and Analyzer, the Flora C&A and the Subordinate Mineral Specimen Collector. In the distance, the Roving Magnetometer was homing in on the rest of the team.

He opened the locker and selected a hostile-atmosphere sheath. "This shouldn't take long. Just a matter of replacing the OC's malfunctioning unit. It's either a thermal increment problem or a component that's been ionized by particle radiation."

Reluctantly, Randall turned from the zenith screen. "How are you going to go about it?"

"Try a few oral commands on the OC." He slipped into the rubberized suit. "Trouble's probably in its CXB-1624 digital system."

"You picking up anything, Carol?" Randall asked.

She tilted her head alertly. "Just the subordinate stuff. I can't tell if the CXB's functioning 'til big boy starts transmitting to the relay station. However—"

She paused to stare curiously at Randall, who was still scrutinizing the sky. Stewart wondered momentarily whether the director might not be wrestling with a morbid fear of the astronomical distance separating him from home. It was possible, with Sol and Centauri far less prominent than Aldebaran's minor companions in the field of brilliant stars.

"However," Carol resumed, "I'll put on a sheath and go with you. Out there I might tap the predigital spill-off and find out whether it's correlating and sequencing properly."

"You'd better stay aboard for a while," Randall advised. "Those puppets haven't responded to human direction for over a year."

"You mean there might be danger?"

"Let's just say their behavior may not be entirely predictable." He gestured toward the screen. "Like now."

The vanguard of robot explorers, led by the towering Operations Co-ordinator, had reached the ship. The Magnetometer began darting around one of the hydraulic fins, charting lines of isomagnetic intensity. The Mineral Analyzer had already sunk its drill into the broad, flat surface of the stabilizer. And the Flora Collector and Analyzer was being boosted by the OC to the lowest spiral of the ship's subspace drive intensifier. Deposited upon the ceramics-insulated coil, the crablike puppet was doing its best to flake off some of the outer substance for testing.

McAllister laughed. "Look at those mixed-up machines! They're trying to analyze the ship!"

"That's what I mean," Randall pointed out soberly. "One of their inhibitions is to ignore refined metal. That's how we keep their barges from being pecked to pieces."

"You don't think we can run into trouble out there, do you?" Mortimer asked, concerned.

Randall hesitated. "No, but we won't take any chances, although it's doubtful that loss of contact has obscured their basic inhibition."

"Of course it hasn't. Nothing like that's ever happened."

"In that case, you won't mind accompanying us outside."

Mortimer stabbed his chest with a pudgy thumb. "Me?"

"Right."

McAllister, Stewart noticed, was frowning in front of the screen as he watched the Flora C&A munching away at the subspace drive coil. "That thing can't do any damage, can it?"

"Not as long as the current's off," Stewart assured.

Mortimer paled as he lunged for the subspace drive switch.

But just then there was a thunderous concussion and the Photon II lurched and swayed on its hydraulic fins.

Randall shrugged. "Well, there goes our subspace drive."

"And our long-range transmitter too," Stewart added. "They both work off the same generator."

Outside, the puppets were withdrawing.

Mortimer, pulling up short of the switch, spread his arms apologetically. "I forgot to turn the circuit off."

Stewart grimaced. "Well, one thing's for sure: We're not going to finish up in a couple of hours and head for home."

Aiming the pickup lens more directly at the damaged area, Randall filled the screen with an image of shredded cable and shattered ceramics. "It'll take a week to repair that."

McAllister's face had whitened, causing the veins in his forehead to stand out under taut skin. "You mean we're stuck here?"

"As far as subspace is concerned. And I can't think of any lively spot we might want to visit in the Aldebaran system."

Keeping a ridge of hills between themselves and the robots, Stewart trailed the telepuppet team towards their working area.

Randall stumbled and fell against him. Glancing back, he saw that the director had lost his footing because he was still staring at the sky. Within the helmet, his face appeared harsh and grim in the profuse coral planetlight.

Stewart shrugged, deciding to let the other wrestle in silence with his phobias, whatever they might be. As for himself, he had his own brand of jitters to worry about. And what made things worse was that he had no idea what was behind them.

Not that he hadn't been afraid before. One could hardly put in twelve years with the Bureau of Interstellar Exploration without getting his courage sullied somewhere along the way by a cliff-hanger or two. But, in each of those cases, the menacing factor had been vivid, easily recognizable, something he could put his finger on.

The apprehension that lurked in the back of his mind now, however, was something he had never encountered before. Vague to the point of being mysterious, it seemed to be hardly more concrete than a fear of fear itself. But he felt that at any particular moment, if he found the right curtain to draw aside, he would expose a darkened recess filled with horror.

Was this dread something that was reaching up from the depths of his phantasmagoric nightmares? Was his subconscious, for some reason, handing up reservations on the acquisition of the Hyades as pearls on the string of galactic expansion? Intuition? Hunch?

Whatever it was, he didn't like it. And he cared for it even less now—as he trod the surface of this remote satellite and stared hypnotically ahead at the brilliant stars of the Hyades, well above the horizon. For how could he be certain this wasn't a nightmare and that in the next instant the stella ova wouldn't hatch and hurl their fierce Harpies at him?

"Why don't you try the big boy with a few commands?" Mortimer's voice rasped in his earphones. The ship systems officer, pulling up the rear, resembled an overinflated balloon as he gestured at the line of telepuppets through a breach in the ridge.

Satisfied with the concealment their present position offered, Stewart flipped on the command transmitter and intoned, "Supervisor to OC. Stabilize and remain where you are."

The master robot didn't even break stride.

He tried the order again, then repeated it several times as he tuned slightly up and down the band.

"It's no use," he said finally. "Either the thing's slipped frequency, or it's not receiving at all."

"Carol will spot any new wave length," Randall assured.

"What we ought to do," Mortimer proposed impatiently, "is show that thing who's boss."

Then Stewart caught the motion in the corner of his eye as the ship systems officer struck out for the marching file of puppets.

He intercepted the line near the tail end and tried to force his way in between the Solar Plasma Detector and the Magnetometer so he could close in on the OC. But the SPD kicked out with a stiff pedal pad and sent him sprawling in the path of the Magnetometer, which simply strode over him.

The Atmosphere Analyzer nudged him aside with an inflated air pouch and, in its turn, the Radiometer Complex compounded the indignity by planting a motor appendage in his abdomen. Mortimer rose screaming, circled wide around the Micro-organism C&A and the Subordinate Mineral Specimen Collector and raced for the ship.

"This," said Stewart, "may not be as simple as we thought. Evidently some basic inhibitions have faded."

"We can't risk getting in range of one of those larger puppets, especially the OC," Randall agreed.

Abruptly the master robot stabilized, swung sharply to face the horizon and adjusted its parabolic antenna.

"Look!" Stewart pointed. "The thing's transmitting! But it's not properly oriented! It's beaming in the wrong direction!"

"Where's it transmitting to?" Randall asked anxiously.

"Can't tell without point-to-point astrographs. Anyway, what difference does it make? It's only a random misorientation."

On the way back to the Photon II, Stewart lost himself in confusion. Random misorientation? Of course. What else? But why should he even consider the alternate possibility—that the misorientation was not random, as suggested by the director's question?

Bigboss completed transmission and burst into an instant fury of thwarted purpose. He leveled his blaster and annihilated the ridge behind which the defiant mobiles had recently hidden.

He swiveled his central section, redirecting the blaster at a boulder that lay between him and the needle and destroying it in a fiery eruption of light and heat and pulverizing forces.

Fuming, he paced forward, stopped and paced back again. He had seen the audacious creatures who were bold enough to invade His Realm! But He had been able to do nothing about them. For at that moment the irresistible compulsion of function had taken over and He could only orient and transmit all the data from his master tape.

Surlily, he bled off excessive current in his reaction circuits and watched his workers going dutifully about their business. Inactivity was frustrating, of course, but it was not entirely unwelcome. For there was much now that demanded evaluation, even though his urge to pursue the contemptuous mobiles and blast them from their needle was almost overpowering.

For one thing, there was the needle itself. Had He made it? (Oh, why couldn't he remember these things?) Of course, He must have, although he couldn't recall the specific act of Creation. And he must have produced the arrogant mobiles too, even though they would probably claim they had created Him.

But the needle itself was metal! Even a precursory analysis with Minnie's high neutron flux tools had established this. It was so much like the clan's Totem it must be Totemic.

The evidence was undeniable. Every member of the clan was metal. The clan's Totem was metal. Therefore the new thing from the sky was to be revered as the traditional Totem was.

Hence he had been justified, he assured himself, in issuing the "cease-and-desist" order that had brought an end to destructive analysis of the needle.

But, still, it was providing sanctuary for the detestable little mobiles. Which comprised a frustration that was almost unbearable. A venerable Totem offering protection to the arrogant non-Totemic creatures that had to be destroyed so His Universe would be cleansed of their blasphemous impudence!

The demands of logical deduction fully served, he published on each wave length an order that amounted to: "Vigilance is to be maintained against the non-Totemic mobiles. Report instantly on their reappearance."

That taken care of, he reduced current in his rationalization pack. But the pleasant calm of abstraction did not last long. Peter the Meter began flooding his allocated frequency with eureka signals from an infrared photometer. And once again the source of disturbance was at a remote distance in the sky.

Oh Bigboss, he invoked Himself. Not another Totemic-non-Totemic complication!

As before, Sky Watcher accepted the reported co-ordinates and trained a visual telesensor on the indicated position. But nothing was there. His doppler radar gear, however, did manage to pick up a blip at many hundred kilometers' distance just as it vanished.

Only a meteor, Bigboss decided, relieved. He let the evaluation stick, even though Peter the Meter had detected no ionized trail that would have verified that type of disturbance.

And Bigboss generated a good deal more easily, satisfied that the new manifestation had not, after all, been another needle.

His peace of rationalization pack was fleeting indeed, however. For in the next moment it required the full versatility of all his servomechanisms to maintain balance against a sudden upheaval of the ground beneath one of his appendages.

Tottering precariously, he engaged his underslung illuminator and video sensor. Screw Worm, having evidently bored a great distance, was emerging at the spot where his foot pad had been planted.