"We want knowledge," it said. "Our race has found that the method of gleaning information from the future is far preferable to the painstaking and laborious task of slowly gaining that knowledge through millennia of blind searching.
"We want to make our civilization the greatest that ever has or ever will exist. We want to forestall the evolutionary phenomenon in one phase of the future which apparently brought about a retrograde change in our race, and an astounding evolutionary development and ascendance of your species of warm-blooded vertebrates!"
Randall frowned. He couldn't quite grasp the inference of those words. He had read fantastic stories to Time Travel, to be sure. But this was something else again. This was a wholesale pilfering of precious knowledge which only millions of years of miraculous evolution and heartbreaking effort would in the future eventually produce!
And the Kralon spoke of the future, Randall's future, as only a phase of the Times to Come. Did the creature mean that the past controlled the future at will? That if the past were altered, his, Randall's future, could be wiped out, and a fantastic future of insect supremacy be substituted?
Randall snorted. It was the age-old paradox of the Time Traveler who goes into the past and kills his grandfather. Only in this case, the Kralons were gleaning from a future civilization the knowledge which would prevent the development of that same civilization!
Sublime absurdity! Things which had sprung into being from Time's capacious womb could not be relegated to oblivion merely by the selfish ambitions of the Kralons or any other creatures!
Then Randall remembered with a pang of fear that his own presence in this fantastic world of the past was apparently a contradiction to that same logic. If he and his companions could be catapulted into a time preceding their birth by millions upon millions of years, was it then so fantastic that the Kralons could alter a future which now existed only as a memory of Randall and his companions?
He closed his eyes for a moment, then turned again to the huge creatures who were waiting for him to speak.
"And if we refuse to give you the information you desire?" he asked tonelessly.
The Voder sputtered in an expression of wrath.