There were several minor points that nagged at Alan; he wanted them out of the way before someone asked the one big question of McEldownie. "Why didn't Grady control my mind when we tied him up? Why couldn't he save himself?"
"Erin Grady was a weak link. We have 'em in our chain, you know. We're not supermen. He was weak at hypnosis and he couldn't bear pain. I think he was a throwback to the days when we were altogether Earth-style humanity. He called to me, though, and I shot back; but I came just too late. That fool Mariner!" With a savage twist he angled the disk toward earth. Then he laughed. "I've wanted to compliment you on your mutant theory, Alan. It was ingenious as the devil and it accounted for everything you'd seen up to that time. If we could regenerate parts, the loss of pain wouldn't matter, and we could take the treatment we're giving you and lose pain and be thankful. But 'tain't so. We're not supermen. It's only our robots—pardon me, our earthly henchmen—who are immune to pain. Coming in contact with both kinds of 'aliens' must have confused the very living dickens out of you."
"Hold on," said Alan. "I just thought of something. If I'm immune to pain, why did I feel it so excruciatingly when Brave hit me, when he wanted to put me under hypnosis? Tell me that was all in my mind...!"
"It wasn't. You didn't get the pain-destroying rays till your third treatment, on last night's telecast."
"Oh. That's it." He patted Unquote on the head; she was getting restless. Then it became obvious why. "Damn," said Alan, "now I'll have to have this suit cleaned. Puss, couldn't you have waited a little longer?"
Bill asked, "What about the saucers? I mean, they suddenly turned out to be better than anyone suspected. Why?"
McEldownie looked grim. "Some saucers had been sighted that we knew weren't ours. We had a few left from the days when we first came to Earth, in the late 1700s; we used to fly 'em occasionally to keep our hands in. But these weren't ours. So we knew we had to speed things up. Till then we'd been content to go along, giving your scientists an unobtrusive push now and then, so they'd believe they had done it all; our time schedule called for intergalactic-space disks about 1984. Well, we knew when the others were seen that we didn't have all the time in the world, as we'd thought. So we had to jump in feet first, take a lot of men under our controlling wing, start making robots—there I go again, that's a bad word for them—making unkillable soldiers of others, and substitute our own advanced designs for those in use at that time. We were too late; the damned enemy came down too fast. But now that I've got one of theirs—and a beauty it is, too—thanks to your help, I have a fighting chance."
"Who are the enemy?" It was Win, breathless, leaning forward, her breast rising and falling rapidly with the emotion and wonder of this thing. "Who are you going to fight?"
Mac looked at her in the viewplate. "The men from my planet," he said quietly. "The men who cast us out, as if we'd been the fallen angels of Lucifer in your myth, chucked us out of our own world and sent us to wander in the void."