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"Well," said his Opposite Number, whose name was Harrigan or Hargan, or some
such, "that is something to be decided on in executive committee. Meanwhile,
suppose I show you around here; and you can tell me more about the galaxy."
* * *
There followed several weeks in which the Envoy found himself being convoyed
around the planet which had originally been the seat of the former Bahrin
ruling group. It was quite obviously a tactic to observe him over a period of
time and under various conditions; and he did not try to resist it He had his
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own observations to make, and this gave him an excellent opportunity to do so.
For one thing, he noted down as his opinion that they were an exceedingly
touchy people where slights were concerned. Here they had just finished their
war with the Bahrin in the last decade and were facing entrance into an
interstellar society of races as violent as themselves; and yet the first
questions on the tips of the tongues of nearly all those he met were concerned
with the Shielded Worlds. Even
Harrigan, or whatever his name was, confessed to an interest in the people on
the Invulnerable planets.
"How long have they been like that?" Harrigan asked.
The Envoy could not shrug. His pause before answering fulfilled the same
function.
"There is no way of telling," he said. "Things on Shielded Worlds are as the
people there make them. Take away the signs of a technical civilization from a
planet turn it all into parkland and how do you tell how long the people there
have been as they are? All we ever knew is that they are older than any of our
histories."
"Older?" said Harrigan. "There must be some legend, at least, about how they
came to be?"
"No," said the Envoy. "Oh, once in a great while some worthless planet without
a population will suddenly develop a shield and become fertile, forested and
populated but this is pretty clearly a case of colonization. The Invulnerables
seem to be able to move from point to point in space by some nonphysical
means. That's all."
"All?" said Harrigan.
"All," said the Envoy. "Except for an old Submissive superstition that the
Shielded Peoples are a mixed race sprung from an interbreeding between a
Conqueror and a Submissive type something we know, of course, to be a genetic
impossibility."
"I see," said Harrigan.
Harrigan took the Envoy around to most of the major cities of the planet. They
did not visit any military installations (the Envoy had not expected that they
would) but they viewed a lot of new construction taking the place of Bahrin
buildings that had been obliterated by the angry scars of the war.
It was going up with surprising swiftness or perhaps not so surprising, noted
the Envoy thoughtfully, since the humans seemed to have been able to enlist
the enthusiastic cooperation of the Submissives they had taken over. The
humans appeared to have a knack for making conquered peoples willing to work
with them. Even the Bahrin, what there were left of them, were behaving most
unlike a recently crushed race of Conquerors, in the extent of their
cooperation. Certainly the humans seemed to be allowing their former enemies a
great deal of freedom, and even responsibility in the new era. The Envoy
sought for an opportunity, and eventually found the chance to talk to one of
the Bahrin alone. This particular Bahrin was an assistant architect on a
school that was being erected on the outskirts of one city. (The humans seemed
slightly crazy on the subject of schools; and only slightly less crazy on the
subjects of hospitals, libraries, museums, and recreation areas. Large numbers
of these were going up all over the planet.) This particular Bahrin, however,
was a male who had been through the recent war. He was middle-aged and had
lost an arm in the previous conflict. The Envoy found him free to talk, not
particularly bitter, but considerably impressed emotionally by his new
overlords.
" . . . May your courage be with you," he told the Envoy. "You will have to
face them sooner or
later; and they are demons."
"What kind of demons?" said the Envoy, skeptically.
"A new kind," said the Bahrin. He rested his heavy, furry, bear-like forearm
upon the desk in front of him and stared out a window at a changing landscape.
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"Demons full of fear and strange notions. Who understands them? Half their
history is made up of efforts to understand themselves and they still don't."
He glanced significantly at the Envoy. "Did you know the Submissives are
already starting to call them the Mixed People?"
The Envoy wrinkled his furry brow.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he said.
"The Submissives think the humans are really Submissives who have learned how
to fight."
The Envoy snorted.
"That's ridiculous."
"Of course," said the Bahrin; and sighed heavily. "But what isn't, these
days?" He turned back to his work. "Anyway, don't ask me about them. The more
I see of them, the less I understand."
* * *
They parted on that note and the Envoy's private conviction that the loss of
the Bahrin's arm had driven him slightly insane.
Nonetheless, during the following days as he was escorted around from spot to
spot, the essence of that anomaly over which he was later to puzzle during his
trip home, emerged. For one thing, there were the schools. The humans,
evidently, in addition to being education crazy themselves, believed in
wholesale education for their cattle as well. One of the schools he was taken
to was an education center for young Bahrin pupils; and evidently due to a
shortage of Bahrin instructors following the war a good share of the teachers
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