“Well! Right now there’s a truce—of sorts. Great Khrom alone knows how long it will last! But to get to the bones and marrow of the problem: our nonhuman opponents are also natural telepalhs. Pure telepaths,” the Arkadian repeated, stressing the adjective pointedly.
“Pure telepaths?” Melton was interested, puzzled, and faintly skeptical. “You can’t mean—no language, no sensory communication at all?”
“I mean just that,” said Duke Harald flatly. “You see the problem? It’s not a question of screening off a few special operators. Any man of theirs—if you want to call them men!—is a potential spy, once he’s within esper range. And we can’t learn their plans, at least not soon enough or in sufficient detail. Why,” his voice grew harsh, “we don’t even bother to take prisoners any morel What use, when that prisoner can’t be questioned; when he just squats there, dumb and insolent, picks your brains, and relays the information back to his home base?”
“And so, they have an edge?”
“A slight one,” Duke Harald admitted. “Just enough to match our superiority in technical skill, and in sheer fighting ability. Otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted six months—old Homo sapiens is still the fightingest animal of them all!”
And then Duke Harald grinned suddenly, at the look of shocked surprise that crossed the Terran’s face.
“Yes,” he said, still smiling, “I know that’s almost an indecent remark, here on Terra. But it’s still a fact of nature out among the stars. How else do you suppose people from old Nerra managed to grab off so many of the choicest worlds of the galaxy? By sweet reasonableness?”
“But surely,” asked Melton, fascinated despite himself, “if you have no telepaths of your own, you could have had the services of an esper adept from Terra? Would that not have been faster than this lengthy training?”
“Faster, sure.” And almost certainly fatal to his own plans, and perhaps even to the whole present culture of Arkady. For he had not forgotten—if the other had—the rumor that a Terran adept had been in part responsible for the fall of the old kings of Altair. And Arkady, its throne long vacant, ruled by a divided and quarrelsome Council of Peers, was ripe at last to herald a new dynasty. No, this was decidedly not the time to let Terran ideas of “democracy” loose among the commoners.
“Yes, it would be faster,” Duke Harald said again, choosing his words with care. He could not, he reminded himself, afford to become embroiled in political arguments. “But we of Arkady have always tried to make our own way in the universe. And,” he paused briefly, “would any Terran, adept though he might be, either enjoy or be particularly good at military problems?”