At Callahan's Place we were used to sharing, to letting down barriers, to opening up to and for one another. Callahan's frequently proclaimed policy of violently discouraging snoopy questions had always been a sham, a custom honored more in the breach than in the observance, a prohibition which we now perceived was designed to teach us to learn how to circ.u.mvent it-h.e.l.l, the Cheerful Charlies had it down pat. Not to mention the MacDonalds. Or Callahan himself, who sucked secrets out of you with his twinkling eyes. We thought that we already knew what it meant to be one together; we had been students of sharing here for many years together.

This was more, deeper, stronger, better. A sizable fraction of the people there were folks I didn't know well or at all, ex-regulars from before my time who had still been alive and around to hear The Call, and Walter the failed suicide: while devoting the bulk of our individual and collective attention to the thing that we were building, we became blood brothers and sisters without wasting time or words.

Words. It is interesting that none of us perceived the thing we built in terms of a structure o words. It was sheer pattern-recognition-images, gestalts, sensory impressions and emotional rhythms, a nonstop cascade of data that reached even the subvocalized level only in scattered, fragmentary form, like verbal buckshot: (warm!/and so when she died I/Heavenly Father ... I merry, by G.o.d!/roll 'em baby! you're beautiful/thank you/ you're beautiful too/thank you/It's beautiful/always wanted to tell you that I/do that again/ain't it?/never thought it could be like/pulsing/steady now/ere do I remember this fr/ fast//would have done the same thing my/take it/strong!! remember remember remember remember/more treble, we're losing the highs/hi!/hie! hai!/never lose the/high!I/eye/ aye! ILOVE/U! ewe! hue/yew/YOU! too /U2/ to / two / whoo!/ who?/hew/Hugh/yoo hoo!/YOU!) It went on forever, for whole seconds, repeating and changing and building like a series of choruses in jazz without any of us ever forming a coherent sentence in words. And yet when the time came to speak, we found that we could-although we were one, we retained our individual voices and the personalities they represented.

No, put quotes around "speak" and "voices." If there been a stranger in the room, he would not have heard seen or felt a thing. To him we would have been a roomful of strange and twisted people, standing around a snoring basketball player, smiling dementedly at nothing at all, silence ...

"All right, ladies and gents," Callahan said, his voice clear and strong in my skull, "Let's get this show on the road. We need a plan. The floor is open."

"There ain't but the one plan," I said. "We get the Roach on the phone and invite 'em over for a beer."

"Here?" two or three minds yelped.

"Sure. We badly lack data, and short of waking up Finn the only source is the c.o.c.kroaches themselves."

(A funny little thing happened then, entirely below the surface, that was over in an instant. I'm rather ashamed it-but it's ill.u.s.trative of something that was happening around the room, so I'll tell it. A primitive ape who din, to my brainstorm still wanted Mary Callahan, still perceived Finn as a rival-worse, a successful rival-worst, a superior rival. That ape heard me calmly trying to cope with a problem that had Finn catatonic with fear ... and smile displaying the kind of teeth that apes only have on Frazel covers for Tarzan books. For an instant, it felt smug-I felt smug. For a picosecond or two, the ape fantasized an outcome in which all of us survived except Finn, in which-just once, oh, Lord!-I ended up with the girl I wanted.

And then I saw Mary looking at Finn, and I beat the ape to death with a club. Maybe Finn was paralyzed with fear, not because he was more of a coward than I, but because he knew more about the situation. Or faced more stringent penalties than I did. My smugness rested on my courage on ignorance.

Why I mention it is this: There were no unburied hatchets in Callahan's Bar-there never had been for very long. But now even the buried hatchets were starting to decompose underground, to rust away to nothing. I would always want Mary-but the best I could ever hope for would be to help her get what she wanted. I guess I was learning to live with that. Similar mini-epiphanies were happening all around the room.) "But why should they give us any data?" Mary asked. "What's our leverage?"

"We've got data they want."

"We do?"

"Locked up between Finn's ears, I'm sure of it. I don't know what it is he knows; apparently he doesn't know either. But the bugs came one Jesus long way to learn it. They're a cowardly race; they don't go in person to any place that a scout has failed to report back from without some powerful motivation; that's why Finn is so baffled. Well, they can't be that curious about us because they don't know us from pond sc.u.m, so it has to be Finn. Something in his memory tapes is worth the risk. Maybe we can cut a deal."

"I wouldn't bet on it," the Drink said.

"McGonnigle, you are going to have to. Right now."

"Jake's right," Callahan said. "Unless anybody here knows how to disable a bunch of invisible satellites and convince NORAD to go to DEFCON ONE within the next half hour, we haven't got much choice." He frowned. A telepathic frown itches. "Another thing. We have to call the c.o.c.kroaches right away, and get them to come directly here from Mars, as quietly as possible. If they just come look over the whole planet, NORAD is going to spot them-and find out that its ABMs don't work anymore."

"So what?" several people asked.

"Suppose we resolve this c.o.c.kroach situation somehow-but meanwhile the Joint Chiefs find out that all their warheads are worthless. So do the Soviets. Unstable situation. And it leaves the USSR dominating Europe. Finn was right: his scheme only works if the players don't know about it. It's too late to undo the scheme, so we've got to go with it. That means the defense of Earth has to be handled in this room."

That brought a buzz of voices so sharp that it spilled over into the thing that we were building with the other ninety percent of our minds, sending a small ripple of discord through the sonic tapestry, as though there was a printer's error in the sheet music. And then was felt the presence of Lady Sally McGee, a warm, competent, rea.s.suringly strong and calm voice in our heads.

"Lighten up, darlings! This is a party-we're here to usher in the new year! It turns out we'll have to actually do something to accomplish that for a change, but there's no reason we can't enjoy ourselves, is there? This could be fun! Now, I think it would be a good idea if all those without concrete useful suggestions were to shut the h.e.l.l up."

Fast Eddie spoke up in the silence. "De foist t'ing we gotta do is hide Finn."

Even Callahan blinked. "Hide Finn?"

"He's de only card we got-so we slip it up our sleeve. Den we dummy up."

In my head I saw (and therefore everybody saw) a little cartoon, with word balloons and borders and crosshatching and everything, in which a comic caricature of a c.o.c.kroach in a pressure suit spoke to Callahan: "Where is Txffu Mpwfs?"

"Never heard of him."

"An extremely powerful and dangerous scout; he would have fought valiantly."

"Sorry, haven't seen him."

"Then how is it that you seem to know who I am?"

"Oh, I've made a study of lower life forms."

It did seem like a gambit with some distinct possibilities.

"Eddie, you're a genius," I said. "There's one hitch. Jim, Paul-can you lie telepathically?"

They looked troubled. "We could lie to you; we've got years more experience. To a mind as trained and experienced as ours-possibly. It would be like playing forty-two chess games at once: there's so much to keep track of in a telepathic lie. To an alien critter that's never touched a human mind before-," their eyes met briefly, "-no sweat."

"Maybe," Tommy Janssen said, "we should tell the Roaches we spotted Finn before he got near us, and annihilated him-make us look more powerful, like."

Callahan shook his head. "Just wrong, son. That would make us the equals of a c.o.c.kroach. We're superior-we never even noticed Finn. Some little automatic system swept him up and we paid no mind, interstellar invasion didn't even make the papers." He grinned. "Yeah, I think maybe we could pull this off-for a few minutes, anyway. We might just put them enough off-balance to find out what we need to know."

Doc Webster spoke for all of us. "You're our spokesman, Mike."

He kept grinning and quoted Lord Buckley again. "Well if I ain't, I'm a great big fat groovy pole on a rough hill on the way there. Okay, while I'm planning the con, you boys hide Finn somewheres."

Gee, that sounds easy, doesn't it? I mean, compared to trying to map out a strategy for outsmarting alien monsters, hiding a guy doesn't sound like a big deal.

A guy who stands d.a.m.n near seven feet tall and weighs about the same as a Harley-Davidson ...

The best thought we had was to lay him down on the floor behind the bar, but the c.o.c.kroaches might very well burn their way in from above-and besides,' Finn snored. In three stages.

Then I happened to think of what Finn's physique had always reminded me of. It was a chilly January night; we had plenty of coats. What cinched it was that his shirt had two breast pockets that snapped closed: coats hung from that low reached to the floor. When we were done, you could hardly hear the m.u.f.fled snore; it sounded like a failing fridge compressor somewhere in the next room.

"How do we know the Roaches will hear a telepathic call?" Doc Webster asked worriedly.

"They will," Jim and Paul a.s.sured him. "They're not telepaths any more than you folks are, but they'll hear just as you did. We got their 'address-code' from Finn before he went bye-bye."

"Are you sure you can reach them? Last I heard your range was still pretty limited."

"That was years ago, Doc. And this time we have twice as many minds around to help drive the signal. We're within. ... uh ... Roach's Limit."

The Doc glared at them. "Obviously you don't understand the gravity of the situation."

Telepathy has its drawbacks. Ordinarily most of us would have missed puns that esoteric.

"All right," Mary said, "by now they've finished checking out Mars and they're shaping orbit for Earth. How do we do this?"

"It breaks down into three parts," her father told her. "Message, target location, and delivery. Me and Jim/Paul'll do the talking. Mary, you and Josie and Joe and Ben and Stan savvy planetary ballistics: you folks aim the beam- you're in charge, darlin', you're the only one of us that's actually been off Earth. Jake, you and the rest of the gang push the message where it's pointed-the way we did back when we first met Jim, get it? Any questions?"

There were none.

"Okay, let's do it."

Our music grew, built, swelled, gathered energy from nameless places and expanded in all directions, churned itself to a mighty crescendo, began to throb and pulse and crackle with contained power. As it did so, vision faded. Reality faded. Physically impossible though it was, suddenly we were all touching each other at the same time. I had been to an orgy once, and found it disappointing; this was what I had wanted it to be. It felt like what the Sixties had tried, and failed, to be. Like my childhood conception of the Catholic Heaven. Like making love with G.o.d.

The last time I'd been on this plane, helping Jim MacDonald to find and reach his lost, tormented, terrified brother Paul, it had been pleasurable, but not nearly this ecstatic. On that occasion, we had all perceived ourselves as standing behind an imaginary truck, stuck in an imaginary ditch, and had put our shoulders and backs into helping get it unstuck. There was no truck now, and whatever was in its place was not stuck-but in some fashion we strained now as we had strained then, put all our strength behind a ma.s.sive, convulsive common effort.

We tried to hide that. Have you ever lifted a very heavy object in front of a stranger you wanted to impress, and, tried not merely to lift the crushing weight, but to make it look easy? In just that fashion, we drew figurative breath, fashioned a mighty Shout-and then tried to couch it in quiet, conversational tones, as though we could shout much louder than that if we wanted to.

This time period (*) is a second, we bellowed calmly. You have thirty of them in which to bargain for your life.

In the instant that contact was established, we knew just how flimsy our bluff was.

There was only one Master. We didn't even know then just what a break that was. The telepathic aspect of the creature was largely untranslatable, but you might think of it manifesting as a kind of giant s.p.a.ce-going shark, a moving appet.i.te, a vast, fast, terrible eating-machine which saw its purpose to be turning everything edible in the universe into shark s.h.i.t. Like a shark it was implacable, remorseless, unreachable. What made it much more terrible than any shark was that it was highly intelligent and very learned.

This doesn't begin to convey it. The thing was alien, and nothing on Terra is as old or cold or deadly as it was. If I'd been alone, I think I'd have snapped like a twig and begged it to kill me quickly. But Mike Callahan was with me, legs planted wide, thumbs hooked over his ap.r.o.n, jaw outthrust challengingly ... I could see him through my eyelids ...

It must have known telepathic races in the past; mental contact did not startle it. Its answering "voice" was no "louder" than ours, but it really was sending at the low end of its strength-it was much more powerful than we combined were. But it didn't know that we bluffed it!

"WHO ARE YOU THAT A MASTER SHOULD BARGAIN WITH YOU FOR ITS LIFE?"

"-twenty-nine-" Callahan said for all of us.

STATE YOUR ASKING PRICE."

"One: full and candid disclosure of your purpose and intentions here. Two: your promise not to disturb any sentient in this system. Three: your immediate departure. Four: your promise never to return unsummoned."

None of this was in English. That is, it left Callahan's mind as English but pa.s.sed through the minds of Jim and Paul, who knew as much of the Masters' language as Finn did, and by hearing it through their "ears," we understood it independent of any grammar or vocabulary. The English of it doesn't begin to convey the monstrous arrogance of the bluff Mike was running.

"No MASTER HAS EVER BEEN 'SUMMONED.' I GO WHERE I WISH, AND DISTURB ALL WHO PERCEIVE ME. WHAT-"

"Countdown resumes. Twenty-eight--," Mike interrupted -and a telepathic interruption is ruder than any other kind, I think.

I tried to imagine the situation from the creature's perspective. Humans were sufficiently advanced as a race to be able to hang out a telepathic No Trespa.s.sing sign for it, seemed completely unawed by its own majestic power- yet they restricted themselves to a single planet, of a single star system, and the only technology visible thereon seemed primitive. They were either suicidally brave-or they had something up their sleeves. The Masters were, as Finn had told us, remorselessly logical: its safest move was to play along until such time as it determined positively that we were bluffing, and then implode our planet, leaving no witnesses to its humiliation.

But it hated acknowledging any non-Master life form as an equal, even as a bargaining ploy. Mike got all the way down to twenty-five------ and my heart got about three-quarters of the way up my esophagus-when it said: "IT SUITS ME TO DIVULGE MY PURPOSE HERE. SUBSEQUENTLY, WE MAY DETERMINE TOGETHER WHETHER IT'S FULFILLMENT WILL DISTURB LOCAL SENTIENTS, AND THE PROBABLE T1ME OF MY DEPARTURE."

"Speak. And make it snappy."

"I SEEK A MISSING SLAVE SENT TO SCOUT THIS SYSTEM, IT FAILED TO REPORT BACK. I SEEK IT, OR ITS REMAINS. ONCE I HAVE IT, I HAVE NO FURTHER INTEREST IN REMAINING OR RETURNING HERE."

"Goodbye, then. Neither your slave nor its remains are here."

You might reasonably translate the Master's reply as "SHARKs.h.i.t." It had raised its "voice" slightly: it was getting angry.

We kept our tone level. "-Twenty-four-"

When I was a kid in school, I always sat in the back of the cla.s.sroom. If things got too boring, I'd do a Slow Fade. You move your desk back and to the right imperceptibly slowly, about six inches per minute, toward the back door and out into the hall. If you do it slowly enough, the teacher never notices you leave. In a similar manner, Paul MacDonald began now to withdraw from the thing we had all built in Callahan's Place, without advertising his departure. It helped that his brother's telepathic aspect was so nearly identical to his own. I don't think anyone else noticed- maybe they never played Slow Fade-and I kept my own realization from the common awareness, did my best not to think about it even to myself. While we were talking to the front of the alien's mind, Paul was sneaking around the back ...

"THE SLAVE WAS WELL-DEFENDED," it was saying. "I CAN BELIEVE YOU OVERCAME IT~ BUT IF SO IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A MEMORABLE EVENT."

"Perhaps for one such as you," Callahan agreed. "Our automatic defenses are capable, and do not require our attention."

"THEN WHY YOU SPEAKING TO ME?"

"Amused curiosity. Your mind is singularly ugly."

Oddly, it did not take offense. Every ent.i.ty it had ever met in its centuries of existence had feared it; it did not know how to react to a direct insult. But it did get angrier because we were wasting its time. "EVEN IF YOU HAD ANNIHILATED THE SLAVE, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN A COMPONENT LEFT, INDESTRUCTIBLE BY ANY KNOWN FORCE.. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN LOCATED HERE-" It sent a sort of three-dimensional X-ray picture of Finn's head, and clearly visible beneath and behind his right ear, between skull and brain; was a little nodule that looked like a marble.

"IT IS A DATAPILE CONTAINING EVERYTHING PERCEIVED BY THE SLAVE SINCE ITS LAST MILKING. I REQUIRE IT IMMEDIATELY."

"You grow boring," Callahan said. "Countdown resumes-"

"I WILL TEAR APART YOUR STAR!"

Callahan made no reply. He made a throat-cutting gesture to us, and we broke the connection.

There was no chatter. Less than half a minute on the countdown, on our bluff.

"What did you get, Paul?" Callahan snapped, and I became aware for the first time that Paul MacDonald was back among us telepathically as well as physically. He tended to "blend in" with Jim's aspect, like an echo, which was why it had been possible for him to get away with a Slow Fade.

He made a convulsive mental effort, and did something like a file memory dump, sending information in a block rather than bit by bit, to all of us at once. In a matter of a second, we knew everything he had learned. Grasping it took me a few seconds more.

I have to put it in figurative terms. A lot of this stuff doesn't go into words; worse, the memories turn insubstantial as I try to translate them. Paul had sneaked in an unguarded back window of the creature's mind, while we occupied it at the front door. He had strolled around in some of the mustier back files of an immense storehouse of memories for a matter of whole seconds, teaching himself how to understand the operating language, the file-finder system, the retrieval commands-reconnoitering while keeping a low profile. He didn't get all he'd hoped for, he ran out of seconds, but Paul was a seasoned professional at tiptoeing through human minds, and he came away with more from this alien mind than I would have believed possible.

The majority of what he learned was incomprehensible or irrelevant or otherwise useless. The creature's name, to pick a basic example, was utterly untranslatable. We could no longer think of it as a. c.o.c.kroach, and like Mary we refused to call it a Master. We reached an instant group consensus on what to call it: The Beast. (And hoped that we had its number.) The Beast was a pervert. Don't ask me to describe what kind of pervert it was, or what const.i.tuted "normal" for its race. I don't want to think about either one. Please just take my word for it that it was, by its own lights, disgusting. It was not ashamed of itself. Shame is a kind of self-hatred,, and no Master is capable of hating-or loving-itself. But it did wish strongly that it could be other than it was, and that is as close as such a being can come to shame. (Not close enough, in my opinion.) Its perversion had recently become known to its kind. Social faux pas on a cosmic scale: it was now and forever an outcast, a renegade, to be slain on sight. Its slaves had been reprogrammed to others. It was alone. To one of its race this fate was simply intolerable. Masters cannot live in Coventry. This is weird, since they are not a gregarious race under the best of circ.u.mstances. They don't need each other's attention, the way humans do, but they positively require each other's respect. The Beast had exactly two psychologically feasible alternatives: to suicide, or declare war on its entire race.

In the billion or so years of Master-recorded history, only a very few of the very few outcasts had ever chosen the latter alternative, and their-names were metaphoric symbols for evil itself. But The Beast was a real pervert.

It was also a logical pervert. No force or combination of forces it knew could seriously threaten its race. But it wasn't (The Beast was prepared, being a pervert, to admit to itself) strictly true that everything was known to the Masters. For instance, once in -a very long time (even by Master standards), a scout slave failed to report back. Scouts were so heavily armed and defended that it was difficult to imagine anything capable of destroying one before it could get of a report. (No Master in the Universe was permitted to be as heavily armed as a typical scout, since a Master, unlike a slave, could bring himself to turn a weapon on another Master. I know that doesn't make sense-in human terms Very little about the Masters does.) An AWOL scout mean either that someone had destroyed it, someone who could perhaps be used, or that the scout had incredibly malfunctioned in some way, in which case its own weaponry might be salvageable.

The risk was horrible. A Master is not defended as well as a scout either.

It was a mad gamble, and The Beast knew it, but it was a pervert and doomed. Desperate and raging, it had followed the trail of Txffu Mpwfs across the big empty s.p.a.ces to the place where he was known as Mickey Finn, hoping to find some terror weapon it could use to avenge itself, and found a bunch of barflies, a few time traveling Micks, two telepathic psychiatrists and a talking dog. Callahan's Bar on New Year's Eve.

"All right," Callahan said in our heads as we finished a.s.similating the burst of largely useless data that included this, "we've got it right where we want it. At T minus ten seconds, we tell it we've changed our minds: we're not going to kill it after all. It's too disgusting to kill. We're going to ignore it-and call the other Masters and demand that they come remove their garbage from our system at once. That should-"

He screamed then, with his mind and with his throat. I don't suppose I'd ever thought to hear Mike Callahan scream. I didn't hear the physical scream, of course, because sounds drown each other out and I and everyone else in the room were screaming, too, but mental screams don't drown each other out, each one registered with individual clarity. Amazing that I had time to register such trivia, with The Beast loose in my brain ...

"ENTROPY!"

The beast was very angry; that was the strongest curse it knew.

"JUST AS I FEARED! IT- WAS NOT A WEAPON WIHCH DISABLED TXFFU MPWFS, BUT A DISEASE. THAT 'LOVE' FUNGUS. USELESS TO ME!"

Paul hadn't been as careful as he thought. We should have remembered: Finn thought faster than a human being; so would his Masters. Probably they thought even faster than him.