The Psionic Menace by John Brunner

The Psionic Menace by John Brunner

Author:John Brunner [Brunner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1963-04-30T21:00:00+00:00


The Old Race had not been quick and greedy, like humanity; they had been change-resistant, conservative, perhaps even cautious. Artifacts which to the casual eye looked as though they might have been made in the same batch sometimes dated out a thousand years apart. It was tempting to think that they used nothing perishable, but of course the soft or friable materials they left behind might have vanished more than fifty thousand years ago.

No one had ever found a skeleton or carapace to show their bodily form. Their associated animals had skeletons, so either they cremated their dead—or they did not die, which was ridiculous. In any case, they were a confident, capable species.

And they had left nothing, anywhere, more than what Jazey Hine could see now: the carefully-exposed stumps of spiral-fluted towers whose foundations were sunk all the way to the rock-layer, with non-native plants wreathing about them as on forty-odd other planets; traces of what men would call public works, like the mysterious cavern-tunnels in the rocks near the river, which might have been sluices for a power-plant; objects of indeterminate purpose which—if they ever “worked” in human terms—had long ago broken or worn out.

But they were here once! Jazey Hine shook his foggy head to clear it. Supposing the shout from the stars actually was a warning, how were those who heard it going to calm their minds enough to understand it before persecution drove them mad?

A mile and a half away, near the tide-mark and the edge of the salt-marshes where the Old Race had once experimented in their own counterpart of terraforming, the Starfolk had gathered in a group headed by Gustus Arraken, the new Zone Dominator, to put questions to Urner from the puppet government’s Department of Archeology. Without shade, the nominal lords of Regnier shifted on their chairs all around Hine, and called on their attendants to fan them more assiduously. How it hurt them, these vainglorious fools, to be neglected by Arraken in favour of a mere scholar.

But Urner was an honest man within his limitations, and he knew about the Old Race on Regnier, and—since Earth had requested permission to send an expert of their own here—the Starfolk wanted hard facts. Hine could sense the balance in their minds between suspicion and acceptance. Despite their discomfort—far worse than Irdus’s or Breckitt’s—in their artificial supports clutching free-fall-weakened limbs, their hot-masks guarding against infection, the Starfolk were thinking coolly.

They too were afraid of going the way the Old Race went. Possibly the psionic shout was affecting them, too. Hine wondered when they would see the sense of employing psions rather than exterminating them as rivals, but fought the depressing divergence of his thoughts.

Now Arraken was moving toward a decision. It was possible that Earth had received word of the threat made to abandon Regnier, but unlikely, Regnier being completely dependent on the Starfolk for off-world communications. The request to send an expert here was high-order coincidence. The need to find out more about the Old Race was very real.



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