When we returned to the others, there was considerable tension there. The two big guys and Erin were lined up on one side of the room, somewhat nervously fingering their weapons. The rest of the Sunnys were grouped on the far side of the stadium seats, whistling and clicking to each other and looking fearfully over their shoulders at the huge men. Frazzle was still sitting in the command chair, but had turned and was glancing back and forth between the two groups.
“Where the Hell did you go?” demanded Erin, the instant she saw me. “We can't trust these things!” She gestured at the defenseless Sunnys.
“Whoa! What's the problem?” I was taken aback. It seemed like I couldn't leave her alone for a moment without something coming up that set her off.
“They wouldn't talk to us and kept making those noises that you said were their speech. They were probably plotting how to get rid of us!”
“Calm down, Erin, and you guys, too!” I glanced at Ted and Frank. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. These little people are our best friends and allies in this mission.”
“Listen,” she paused for breath, obviously trying to calm herself before continuing. “We don't know anything about this invasion or war or whatever you call it. We were supposed to find out about that spaceship thing that landed and then report back to the Warlord and the Master. Now, you get us involved in some kind of outer-space trip and we don't know what to think!”
“OK. I can see your point, but, remember, Earth was attacked. You know that. You've had to fight off the Pug-bears – ”
She interrupted me, “Only the wild ones. The Master said that some of his kind were smart and would help us just as he does.”
“Erin, you, yourself heard what the Sunnys had to say about their slavery and the plans of the Pug-bears. They're dead set on dominating every planet they can locate.” The blamed woman was just as difficult to deal with as a porky-pine. Nothing seemed to calm her down. Of course, considering my track record with women, at least until Liz came along, I didn't expect much by way of success.
I tried the two men, “Look you guys, you've seen that the Sunnys don't mean any harm. They can't even fight; they're simply unable to engage in violence.” An inspiration hit me, “I found where they keep the food!”
“Oh!” they both said, simultaneously. “Show us! We're starved.”
That finished the discussion. I sent a calming thought to the frightened Sunnys and led the trio to the cafeteria (I don't know what else to call it.) Once they got some food in them, they mellowed out considerably. Even Erin admitted that things could be worse.
I was mildly encouraged by their change of attitude, but I realized that they were too confused at the moment to be an asset to our mission. On top of that, I actually was rather unsure about the Sunnys. My first two contacts were reliable enough and their mental auras were strictly friendly and upright. I couldn't detect any dubious feelings in them. They seemed more than committed to the idea of trying to sabotage the Pug-bears' rule over their race. On the other hand, the six remaining members of the second group of Sunnys somehow didn't have quite the same sense of honesty about them. I couldn't put a finger on what it was, but I, too, distrusted them.
Putting that line of thought into the back of my mind, I suggested to the other three that we look for some cabins. They were tired and the thought of someplace to sleep was welcome. Together we went back to the bridge.
We surprised the Sunnys when we came through the transporter. Frazzle and Whistle were engaged in what appeared to be an argument with the other six. They stopped instantly and the six filed out through the transporter that we'd just exited. I looked inquiringly at Frazzle and he glanced at Whistle before speaking. Whistle made some kind of motion to him and he took it as an assent to address my prior concern, “Will you make mind-talk with me?"
I indicated that I would, but I needed to find a place for my companions to rest before I engaged in an extended dialog. Whistle pointed at the back of the bridge and started walking that way.
I was surprised to find an ordinary door there. It opened into a long and wide hallway that reminded me somehow of the corridors at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. There were rows of closed doors on both sides of the hall.
Whistle turned to me and said, “Dey can sleep in any of these rooms. Dey all good for Sunnys or humans.”
We investigated and he was correct. The rooms weren't terribly large, you wouldn't expect that on a spaceship, but they offered enough space for even Ted to lie down. The floors were cushioned with some fur-like covering and the lights dimmed automatically when the occupant of the room lay down. It was a good sleeping arrangement, although there was a noticeable absence of places to store personal possessions.
The Sunnys didn't require much by way of clothes, sometimes wearing nothing and other times wearing a kind of lightweight pants. They also didn't have much of a sense of ownership regarding the small tools they had. Frazzle was an exception with his metal lunchbox. He held onto it carefully. It represented some kind of rarity in his mind.
Despite the lack of a chest of drawers or closets, all three of my fellow humans exclaimed at the softness of the floor and soon picked out their own rooms. Erin made me promise to rouse her if anything happened and I agreed that I would, although I assured her that we were going to be traveling for a number of days. Ted and Frank just stoically laid their weapons aside and lay down. The lights in their rooms dimmed and I shut their doors.
Now, I was alone with Whistle. We returned to the bridge and he changed places with Frazzle, taking the control seat.
Frazzle came back and sat in the stadium seating while I sat cross-legged on the floor. It was time for us to make some plans. I sank into the half trance that I had found was most effective and sent an image that I was willing to communicate.
He wanted to keep the discussion mental, even though it was difficult for him. I had to do the work of both parties since all he could do was to try and control his surface thoughts so that I could glean a coherent meaning from them. The cause of the disagreement quickly became clear. He was afraid that my companions would become aggressive if they understood that the majority of the Sunnys were dubious about our goals.
The other six hadn't totally rejected the idea that we could provide some assistance to their race, but, in self-protection, they were actively exploring the possibility of capturing us and turning us over to the Pug-bears. They had been arguing with my two friends about this subject.
It was funny that I'd had those same thoughts while in the cafeteria. Thinking it over, I decided that I was doing some type of unconscious monitoring of them and had possibly sensed the discord.
I realized that Whistle was also paying close attention to us, even though he was excluded from our mental conversation. I carefully extended my thoughts and contacted his mind also. It wasn't any harder to communicate with both of them than it had been with one.
I assured the two that I meant what I said about attempting to help. Their minds lit up with gratitude and I knew that they would be reliable and helpful in the effort. They let me know that the others were from a different Sunny world, one that had suffered the depredations of the Pug-bears for far longer than theirs. The Sunnys on that world were now an endangered species and the six were suffering from a version of what I'd call Stockholm syndrome. They had become so fearful of the Pug-bears that they partly identified with them as a self-defense mechanism.
Whistle gave me an insight into their thought patterns. “When your people have been mostly killed and eaten by another group and there is no justification for the destruction in your own philosophy, it becomes easy to assume that the predators are correct. There must be something wrong with your people that makes them deserve their fate. If you think you're wrong, then everything the others do must be correct and you should help them, because the greatest good is for correctness to triumph,” he thought.
“The greatest good is actually in our favor! Your people have become victims of the Pug-bears and their will to destroy all other races. You must help me do something to stop them,” I responded.
They agreed in principle but weren't sure how to go about opposing the Pug-bears. I questioned them at length about the planet that was our destination. It was very similar to Earth but had more water and less land. The major continent was a band around the center of the planet. The two oceans dominated the north and south hemispheres. Two large, coastal mountain ranges divided the land mass into rough halves, north from south and as a result, the climate was very different from that of Earth. The ranges were separated by hundreds of miles and the land between was desert and very dry. The clouds banked up against the sea side of the mountains and dumped their moisture there, but none ever got over the high peaks.
Each hemisphere had two main seasons: winter and summer. Spring and fall were very short. In addition, the mountain ranges largely kept the winds circulating in two discrete climate patterns and hurricanes were common. The temperature range was wider than our average and I judged that there would be times of the year that would be distinctly uncomfortable for humans.
The Sunnys had large cities that stretched out on both shores of the central continent. The cities were connected by transporters, so if winter got too onerous for you, you could easily go to the summer side of the land mass. The Pug-bears hadn't yet finished dominating the planet, having only invaded about twenty of the local years ago. They lived close to the mountain ranges and rarely approached the seashore. They didn't like the higher humidity, especially in the summer. However, they ranged broadly in the long, dry winter and no location was safe from them at that time of year.
The strip of inter-mountain desert provided a perfect breeding place for the Pug-bears. Their eggs were sensitive to humidity and, as I'd seen in Carlsbad Caverns, high humidity caused most of them to rot before hatching.
The Sunnys had tried to build barricades to keep the Pug-bears away from their homes, but the combination of the Sunnys' pacifism and the Pug-bears' mental control made it easy for the Pug-bears to dominate the weaker and smaller creatures. There had been an initial slaughter when the largely feral Pug-bears had killed and eaten many of the Sunnys. The survivors had lived through this period by locking themselves in impregnable buildings and placing the keys out of easy reach. They'd suffered tremendously from the mental compulsions inflicted on them by the hungry aliens. If they'd been able, they would have taken the keys and opened the doors, placing themselves at the disposal of the Pug-bears. Hiding the keys and leaving the access codes in code that required considerable rational power to decipher kept them from giving themselves up.
They had finally determined that the feral Pug-bears didn't like high humidity and they set up huge systems of sprinklers that sprayed ocean water over their cities. This meant that it was always raining on their homes. The Pug-bears that carried the mature symbionts allowed this minimal defense since they wanted to preserve enough of the Sunnys to create weapons, transporters, and space ships.
At times, they allowed the ferals to enter the cities and prey on any Sunny unfortunate enough to be caught. This random predation kept the Sunnys' numbers low and had been responsible for greatly slowing their technological development. The situation had degenerated into an unstable balance with the Pug-bears gradually increasing in number while the Sunnys slowly decreased.
The Sunny birth rate was much lower than that of their enemies. The Pug-bears laid eggs in mass and left them nearly anywhere. As often as one would defend its nest, others would simply walk away and leave the eggs and hatchlings to survive as best they could. They had no strong instinct to preserve their genetic lineage in the way that humans would.
I had understood from our prior conversation that the Sunnys had some sort of resistance movement and I had entertained great hopes for that, but the reality was discouraging. Their idea of resistance was to place locks on the sprinkler timers so that they couldn't be turned off at the Pug-bears mental command. This irritated the Pug-bears but didn't seriously deter them if they were truly motivated to come into the city.
The Sunny resistance had also been building up a stockpile of weapons, all the while knowing that they couldn't really make good use of them. There had been an effort to condition some volunteers to the idea of violence, but it hadn't worked well.
I suggested that they should make automatic controls for their weapons so that they could set them to destroy anything that moved. It turned out that they'd tried that, but the scheme had met with the disapproval of the intelligent Pug-bears. They'd forced the Sunnys to turn off the control systems. The weapons were still in place, but inactive as of the last news my friends had received.
The planetary geology wasn't conducive to some grand strategy such as dropping a large rock on the heads of the Pug-bears. I'd considered towing an asteroid toward the planet, but the creatures were disbursed along the mountains all around the globe. Dropping high-velocity projectiles on their heads was attractive, but it seemed impractical. The Sunny cities, distributed along the seashores, would probably suffer more than the Pug-bears.
There was one possibility that I could think of. If I could somehow increase the humidity on the planet, it would discommode the aliens. Frazzle seemed to think that high humidity would ensure that their eggs wouldn't hatch. I wasn't sure about that, remembering how damp it was in the cave at Carlsbad where we'd first realized the Pug-bears and the spider things were related. Some of the eggs we'd discovered there had hatched, so I thought that some would be able to survive in higher humidity.
I considered that memory and suddenly the memories bequeathed me by the Ancient-One generated an image of new hatchlings that were suffocated by high humidity. I knew from this that they were sensitive enough that my plan might at least slow down their expansion.
It was kind of naive of me, I guess, but I had somewhere read that comets were largely composed of ice. I reasoned that I could find some large icy interplanetary mass and use the ship to pull it to the point where it would fall on the mountains. The resultant vaporization of the ice should greatly increase the humidity of the entire planet.
I explained my thinking to the Sunnys and they were initially aghast at the idea of deliberately dropping something that could kill large numbers of living creatures on their planet, but after they calmed down and thought it over, they admitted that it might just have the effect that I hoped it would.
I asked if their cities could survive the heavy rain that was likely to be generated by such a strategy. They discussed it rapidly in a series of clicks and whistling sounds. Then Frazzle told me that they believed their people would be able to shunt most of the water out into the ocean, provided that they had some warning. They believed that their people could set up a series of dams across the city streets that would allow most of the water to pass through without damaging too much of the infrastructure. The thing that gave me hope for this plan was that the Pug-bears didn't monitor everything the Sunnys did, as long as they created the items the aliens demanded.
We agreed that we'd give the idea a try. As Frazzle put it, “We got nothings else to do.”
It was indirect violence, but I suspected they justified it by pretending that they were dropping water on the mountain rocks with no intention of harming living things.