Half a minute liter the altar area of the cathedral lit up, gave off an amazing sound, and exploded into a flour-like dust-which towered up over the plaza and came down all over everybody.

In the melee the Siggies withdrew to the far side of the plaza and formed a circle. It was shortly discovered that they were now protected by some kind of force-shield, presumably generated by a large box which they always carried with them. Defense R&D had identified it as a musical amplifier.

While we were digesting this, news came that the East Hemisphere Siggie group had pulled an almost identical stunt, resulting in the obliteration of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto.

The fact that the Cignian ship's auxiliary flyers were both out on what was described as routine maintenance tests had up to now escaped notice. After a pause, it became apparent where they were flying to. Harry's evaluation sources had been quite right; they were slow. It took the one on our side over six hours to make the seven thousand air miles from Quebec to the little group in the plaza at Sao Paulo. En route, one of our more enterprising neighbors discovered that it too was now protected by an unknown form of shielding. As it made its weary Mach I way home with the West Hemisphere Siggies inside, our Air Force confirmed this the expensive way.

Somewhere along the line the main ship had englobed itself too, with eight Terran technical people aboard.

"Well, I guess we know what the generators are for now," I remarked next morning, roaming restlessly around Harry's office.

"An interesting tactical problem," I mused. "What can you do with a measly few old badly guided fusion bombs-provided you can carry them anywhere you want in perfect safety?"

Harry slammed his papers down hard and inhaled and, exhaled explosively. Just as he inhaled again his phone rang.

"Huh? Who? Get him down here. We've got to get him down here! What? All right, I'll go through your d.a.m.n channels-" He banged the phone down.

"Max. They opened the ship long enough to turn loose our techs. S'serrrop came out with them.

He's been hurt. Get the chief to get him."

It was Tillie who got him, but how she did it I don't know because our chief, like everybody else, was caught up in the runaway oscillation over the Siggie atrocities.

The media caught on a bit slow and generated more confusion than anything else at first. By nextday, when the Siggies had leisurely vaporized Milan Cathedral and the BaHai Temple in Chicago, the newscasters. .h.i.t stride. From there on-you'll remember-it was just one bewildered yell of outrage. The Moslem world held aloof until Friday, when the Blue Mosque of Ahmed at Istanbul went up in flour. For all that first week no one was killed or even badly hurt.

Except S'serrrop.

We met his stretcher at Andrews Air Base. He seemed glad to see Harry.

"I trite," he shrilled feebly. "I trite explait-" He thrashed a bit, under the blankets. What we could see of his hide was deep yellow, but we couldn't see much. They had treated him to an acid ma.s.sage.

Our medicos couldn't do much for the alien biology beyond the obvious topical applications. Like a burned human, he was in toxemia.

That was the morning the Cygnians started their broadcasts. It was now clear why they had been so eager to learn our languages, but even so, you'll recall that the first messages were more stimulating than enlightening. Our shop had the advantage of an early copy of the eight technicians' reports. The Cygnians had given them an intensive briefing before they let them go.

"Delusions of nonpersecution... Harry, I'm sorry."

He was head-in-hands, down.

"When you look at the history of the early Christian missionaries, say in Polynesia, or Africa-"

"d.a.m.nation, Max, do you think you're the only one who's read history? It was just that-my fault-I saw the gestalt the wrong way. From their point of view, we're the heathen. You don't need to rub it in. They never even bothered to try to understand-"

"How many missionaries ever tried to understand the native religions? They just threw down the idols, burned the ju-jus, destroyed the temples... unspeakable savage rites, I believe was the standard phrase."

"Only S'serrrop. He tried."

"Yes, he tried. He's a believer too, of course, but liberal. What it adds up to, Harry, is a bunch of dedicated, primitive fundamentalists who bought themselves a boat and set out to bring the word to the heathen. With atomics."

"Missionaries with fissionaries," squeaked Mrs. Peabody, and shut up abruptly.

"I blame myself-"

"Don't, Harry. What could a Bushman make of a gun until he'd seen it fired? He'd have put it down as a clumsy kind of club. We'd never seen a generator used to throw a standing energic whatsis."

"But how can they hope to succeed?" Tillie asked. "It's so crazy! To make the whole population of Earth worship the Great Pupa? We aren't even the same kind of animal. It's insane."

"What do you think the Holy Family looked like to a polygamous culture where a man's father was his mother's brother? No. Insane or not, conversion by the sword can work. What's our price for saving St. Peter's, or Westminster, or Santa Sophia, for starters? Or the Kremlin? Friends, don't be too sure.

You'll be attending Great Pupa services in Carter Barron Amphitheatre in the near future, I promise you."

"What about you?" snapped Tillie.

"Purification," Harry was muttering. "Fire."

His eyes were pale and clear, like a Weimeraner's.

"The early Christians survived, Max: Underground, in the catacombs. In the days of the martyrs.

From persecution will come rebirth."

I refrained from asking him to name a few aboriginal religions which had survived the Society of Jesus. I had something else to worry about.

"Can S'serrrop talk at all, Tillie? It's urgent."Well, you recall what went on then, the public convulsions, the predictable and pathetic brave responses we made to the Cygnian's simple ultimatum. I guess what riled people the most was the level of their pitch. They had apparently tagged us as Stone Age Stanley.

"You can see the Great Pupa is the true G.o.d, because our weapons are stronger than yours. Your false G.o.ds cannot protect themselves, or you." Right off page one of a nineteenth-century missionary handbook.

The part about them ending our local strife in universal brotherhood as children of the Great Pupa wasn't so bad, although I don't think people went for the idea of themselves as larvae. But when they got into the higher doctrinal mysteries-and what they proposed to do about our s.e.x and mating customs, they being biologically rather different...

It was while they were explaining that aspect that the British CinC up in Quebec laid our biggest nuclear egg neatly on the Cygnian ship. The broadcast stopped. Two days later when things settled down, the ship was still sitting there englobed with debris. After awhile, a new type of transmission came out of the force-sh.e.l.l, and every piece of metal several kilometers beyond the blast-hole went to vapor.

Then the religious broadcasts resumed. The Great Pupa was indeed a strong G.o.d.

Over everybody's protests, I tried to get S'serrrop to locate and decipher any Cygnian text he could find on my photos of George's missile.

"What in h.e.l.l do you expect to prove, Max? Even if there's a Cygnian text, so what? We know the story now."

"Do we? I thought you said you'd read history."

But S'serrrop was nearly blind, and terribly weak. He did appear to recognize the photos.

"Too bad!" he whispered again. "Kchch! Too bad-"

"Leave him alone, Max."

"Wait! S'serrrop-Tillie, ask him this: are there others? More like him? Coming here?"

We couldn't get his answer, but as you know, we were not left long in doubt.

Since this is just the inside story we'll skip the history-makers, the steady attrition of our religious monuments (don't think Chartres didn't rock me)-the efforts of the Vatican, Israel and the International Council of Churches of Christ to negotiate some kind of coexistence for the West at least-the day the Siggies, by an understandable theological error, took out the New York Stock Exchange-the United Arab kamikazi attempt-the successful a.s.sault on two isolated Siggies in Chili-the Sino-Soviet proposal-you know all that. The inside story isn't much, here: sixteen long go-arounds between me and our chief, ending in stalemate. And then the second Cygnian ship arrived.

It put down in the North African desert. Same general type, a bit newer and k.n.o.bbier and copper rather than gold. The same opening ceremonies, but these Siggies were definitely orange-Red Siggies as they were dubbed. As you can imagine, the welcoming committee was conspicuously absent.

"Reinforcements?" Tillie asked.

"I devoutly hope so," I said. She gave me the look I was getting used to those days.

"I've got to see S'serrrop."

"You'll kill him, Max."

She was right. When S'serrrop saw the photos of the new Cygnians he went-or tried to go-into his shivering and stridulating act. It seemed to be involuntary, like uncontrollable sobs. He couldn't stop himself from knocking the dressings around. Not that they were doing him any good, but the result was horrible. In his agony he could barely be understood. What came through clearly at the end was: "I trite!

I trite!" And then something so obviously a private prayer that I snapped the recorder off. He died that night.

I spent the night with that tape and was waiting on the chiefs doormat with my reconstruction in themorning. At noon he was still not in. His hotline girl told me about the fire-fight between Yellow Siggie and Red Siggie flyers, in which most of Ma.r.s.eilles had come up missing.

At 1500 the chief was still going 'round in the high level whirlwind. I decided to take-it says here on my citation-independent initiative. What the h.e.l.l, how much Cla.s.s A office furniture do you get in a catacomb? I had nothing to lose.

The independence took the form of a structure of tastefully forged directives and speciously worded coordinating concurrences, at the end of which chain of duplicity there emerged in about sixty hours' time one live Astromarine lieutenant. He looked exactly like a video s.p.a.ce hero except he had cold-sores. He contributed the action.

By this time the Red Siggies, who seemed to be faster workers and more practical-minded, had decided that it would make for more togetherness if we evacuated our lunar bases. There was to be just one shuttle-run per each, and Mersenius was unluckily scheduled as Number Two. You'd be up all night if I told you what it took to get that boy into a disguised cargo-pod. Harry, who knew I was nuts but was too far gone to argue, helped a lot. After that we could only hope.

By this point the bands were so loaded with Red and Yellow Siggie broadcasts and counter-broadcasts and doctrinal trumpetings and counter-counter-jamming that we were virtually blind and deaf, electronically speaking. To this day, I don't understand the difference between their versions of the Great Pupa religion. Something about the powers of the clergy and the existence of other lesser Pupas or prophets. Harry is making a study of it.

I was trying to keep score of the accidental damage sustained by Earth when the Yellow and Red missionary flyers tangled. You remember how the media kept saying that they were decimating each other? People outside really hoped that one faction would eliminate the other, at least; or maybe they might even kill each other off. The inside reports gave no such hope. We had no concrete evidence that they could do each other any serious damage and the side-effects on us were brutal. People were getting killed now, as well as churches. Ma.r.s.eilles was the start; next came Altoona, of all places, and poor old Coventry, and Tangiers. And a lot of smaller places.

"This phase won't last," I pontificated. "The history of religious wars is like any other. Your main attack is not on the enemy leaders but on their followers. That'll be us, when they get organized. We'll have to sign up with one lot or the other, and when we do we get it. What's the matter, Harry? In particular, I mean?"

"Houston's picked up a new type of transmission from both ships, beamed off-planet."

"Calling for reinforcements?"

"Probably."

"And alles ganz kaput.... Did you ever identify that planet S'serrrop described?"

"Not positively. I personally think that was Cygnus 61. I don't believe these creatures are Cygnians; they just came from Cygnus 61 in the sense that that was the last place they stopped. Perhaps they were there quite some time-"

"Before they and their compet.i.tion managed to fracture the planetary crust."

"I wonder what the real Cygnians were like," sighed Tillie.

"What I wonder is where Lieutenant Sternhagen is. At least he wasn't brought down in the Mersenius evacuation."

As it turned out, of course, Leiutenant Sternhagen was right where he was supposed to be. He had cleverly managed to unpack himself undetected after his ghastly trip in the pod and had slipped away on his trek around to the far side. All we had been able to give him was a d.i.n.ky personnel jato unit. After 120 hours of hoping, sliding, gliding and tumbling he reached George, who was blissfully holed up with his life work and a nice little hydroponics set-up he had w.a.n.gled out of his Mersenius pals. The young Marine, as directed, asked George one or two pointed questions.The answers being on the right trajectory, Lieutenant Sternhagen stayed not to argue but injected a little dream-juice into George's airlines. Then he had a busy time boosting the missile-carefully-out of the cave, carrying George over a couple of rim-walls and stowing him, and laying a remote-control laser line.

The thing went up beautifully as demonstrated, three shorts and a long, but of course we couldn't see from Earth. After that the young Marine, who had received only minor radiation burns in addition to his previously acquired contusions, had nothing to do except hop, slide and tumble 120 hours back to the empty Mersenius base hauling a hysterical George, who was undamaged except in his aspiration-level.

By a miracle, Mersenius had registered our covert signal and left sufficient supplies to allow the pair to survive until rescue, during which time George had the opportunity to say everything he wanted to, about fifteen thousand times. It doesn't tell half enough on Lieutenant Sternhagen's medal.

After this, there was nothing at all to do but wait. And wait. And wait. The rest of the world, who weren't waiting for anything, just reacted. You know. Fortunately the loss of human life was relatively low as yet, except for Ma.r.s.eilles, Jaipur, and Altoona where the Yellow Siggies had been holding a ma.s.s outdoor Great Pupa baptism ceremony.

I'll say this for the Siggies, they were brave. The Yellow Siggie conducting services didn't even look up when the Red flyer came over-just sang harder. Glory, glory.

The weapon they chiefly used was a variant of the catalytic vaporizer business. R&D had not guessed that it could be produced as a rather bountiful fuel by-product. We counted a total of only five actual missiles expended to date. If the Red Siggies had brought in another fifty, that left ninety-five to go.

Their fallout proved to be rather more copious than the best art, too.

During the next week, two of our tracking stations got melted and we were down to our last ear-flaps when we caught a new ship coming in.

"The reinforcements," Harry said. He had taken to shadow-boxing the eraser, very softly.

"Why?"

"Both Siggie ships are transmitting nonstop."

But it wasn't their reinforcements.

The little blue ship made one orbit and then came in low over North Africa and on to Quebec.

When it had pa.s.sed, both Siggie ships were still there and apparently undamaged, but they had lost some of their shine. On the ground the Siggie groups were scrambling first for cover and then for their ships.

We only caught part of the saurian transmission in Cygnese-something about one planetary rotation.

Thirty hours later both Red and Yellow Siggies were on their way out of our system, leaving us with five smashed cities, innumerable wrecked houses of religion, and more maypole effigies of the Great Pupa than could be counted before they were melted down. The blue lizards left too-we still don't know where they're from.

"You guessed they were cops... how?" said Harry. We were at Rapa's back table, celebrating George's return. After blowing out his outrage on Sternhagen, George had more or less run down about the criminal destruction of his galactic key.

"My glands. Primitive response to the fuzz aura. Once you saw them as two guys in a squad car it all fit. They couldn't stick around. They set up call-boxes. One demonstration of how to work it, good-bye.

Holler if you need help, right, George? Tell me, old brother, how long had you known? Never mind, don't answer that. I respect a man who values knowledge more than the mere survival of his culture, not to say his race. I won't ask you if you would ever have got 'round to triggering it-"

"Max!" shouted Tillie.

"All right.... Say there was a report that these so-called Cygnians and such are messing around with backward planets. Somewhere, there's a minor policy directive. Pressure from a Society to Save Our Seminoles. Low budget. Two guys to cover a sector. Probably left a set of flares around any number oflikely planets. The Siggies knew d.a.m.n well what they were, too."

"Is that like history?" ventured Mrs. Peabody.

"Not really. Certainly not in the old days. The poor benighted heathen caught in sectarian wars just suffered. Did any of you read about what happened to people who happened to be in the path of a crusade, by the way? We've missed that, so far."

"Their religion was sort of poetic in a way. I mean, changing to wings-"

I saw Harry wince.

"Tell you what isn't so beautiful, if you want more history. This is all early-stage stuff, informal. Like when Tahiti or the Congo were months away from Europe, and North America was half wild. A few private schooners wild-catting around. What happens now we got saved? Do we go back to our palm trees and peace?"

"Why not?" shrugged Tillie. Then she said, "Oh."