Inside my skull, the Lyranian came to life—struggled briefly—and then quit. Barger, Allardyce and I spent the rest of the trip home in the air-conditioned, radiation-resistant, germproof, dustproof, escape-resistant brig. Alex, of course, wasn't aboard. There aren't many places on a starship where a man can hide, and the crew searched them all.
Even so, I kept worrying about the ship's safety all the way back. It was a miserable trip. I suppose it was just as miserable for the Lyranians in my two companions who kept worrying about how to destroy us. It didn't do them any good either. They never got a chance, and ultimately we reached Decontamination.
Barger and Allardyce are up there now. The medics think they can erase the Lyranians with insulin shock, but it'll take time. Mine, being a nice, tame one, was considered to be more valuable in me than out. We're going to have to know a lot about Lyrane in a hurry if we're going to do anything about those people, and my Lyranian can tell us plenty.
But I'll bet we'll find things different on Lyrane when we go back. They'll have at least ten years, and with the brains they've got—and Alex's brain to pick—they'll do just fine from an engineering point of view. I'll bet they'll even have spaceships.
From what I can gather from my alter ego, they checked Alex's brain and didn't like what they saw. That's the trouble with romantics. They always remember the wars and the fighting, never the stodgy, peaceful interims. But you simply don't spring that sort of stuff on a culture like Lyrane's. And I suppose my anger didn't help things any, but if not for that anger and my primitive bull-headedness, we might not be here.
III
Capt. Halsey hurriedly downed the rum. "Skippers are picked because they're tough-minded and authoritarian. In space you need it occasionally. Fortunately I lived up to specifications. A peaceful sort like my Lyranian just couldn't take it—fortunately."
"Fortunately?" I asked.
"Sure. What else? Possibly those natives we conditioned would help our case, possibly not. And in the meantime the Lyranians would suck Alex dry. And with the Two Two Four gone it'd be maybe a couple of hundred years before we ran into them again, and by then they'd really be ready—loaded for bear with itchy trigger fingers—and we just might have a war on our hands. As it is we'll send out a battle fleet to give some authority to our negotiators so no one will get hurt. They just shouldn't have picked Alex as typical of us. With his attitude and our weapons, they naturally got a lot of wrong ideas."