But the Kalquoi gave him little time for such observation. While he watched, a small group of them moved out into the arena and took places in a semicircle close before him.
Dane's guards fell back before the newcomers. In the seating area up along the amphitheatre's sloping sides, the assembled crystalline, light-emitting aliens eddied closer, glowed brighter. A hush seemed to fall over the hollow. Tension climbed like a spaceship at escape velocity.
Dane stood very still. There was nothing he could do but wait.
Then, suddenly, one of the Kalquoi in the tight arc close before him pulsed vivid scarlet. A familiar impulse leaped into Dane's brain ... a patterned, rhythmic groping: John Dane ... John Dane ... John Dane....
Dane sighed; tried to concentrate upon his answer: "Not John Dane. Clark Dane. Clark, not John...."
From then on, there was tumult and fumbling and confusion. Wordless and incoherent, alien intelligences probed every fold and convolution of Dane's brain.
Out of it all, for Dane, came not words, but feelings; not intelligibility, but insight. Slowly, deep within him, there began to grow the weird panorama of a race so alien man could never hope fully to understand it. A concept took form—the concept of a life-type composed wholly of radiant energy, without permanent shape or body ... beings that found their only reason for existence in the acts of shape-building and light emission. In his mind's eye, Dane saw how they replenished their life-force, transmuting into energy whatever convenient objects came to hand.
And because these aliens, these Kalquoi, themselves had no need for bodies or possessions, they'd been unable to conceive that other species might require such things ... might even be harmed if bodies and possessions were transmuted.
But now, at last, glimmerings of this truth had reached them. They'd begun to see the harm they'd done; were sorry for it.
Would man, in his turn, meet them half-way? If they'd stay clear of him and his possessions and allow him to return to the outer planets, would he abandon the disconcerting brain-drain that prevented their shape-changing and transmuting? True, the magnetic shield they'd developed protected them from it, after a fashion. But it was a nuisance. If possible they'd prefer to operate without it....