The Star Virus

"No such luck." Sinnt broke into his creaking laughter. "Tell me," he continued calmly, "have you never thought how extraordinary it is that there should be only two star-faring races in the galaxy?"

Indeed, Rodrone had exercised his mind with his question often. Other life there was in plenty, and numerous other species with intelligence—of a kind. But it was intelligence without the spark, the fire, that had enabled man— and presumably the Streall—to reverse his natural subservience to the environment. Thousands of civilizations in the Hub had risen to high levels, but always slowly and painfully, imbued with a passive acceptance of their limitations. It amazed Rodrone that nowhere—with the one exception—was man's technological explosion repeated. True, there were a few who had succeeded in traveling to nearby moons and planets in huge, clumsy rockets; but where this happened it was invariably as the final triumph of a dying race. And Rodrone had always felt sympathetically for the occasional species which, on the last verge of extinction, had wonderingly discovered atomic energy much too late to save itself.

"You seem to think you know the answer," he said somewhat sullenly to Sinnt.

"I know the answer, but I don't know the reason. Man's brain is constructed differently from that of any other intelligent species. That's why he is so abnormally quick to discover, to invent, and to spread through the universe. In general the sentient brain conforms to a basic pattern throughout the galaxy. It is a logical, predictable pattern. Only man is the maverick, the sport, the freak that has broken nature's rule. I say 'rule,' but for man's presence, one would probably call it a law."

"And you attribute it to the cortical connections?"

"Yes."

This idea was new to Rodrone. He was pleased and intrigued by it. "But what about the Streall? They equal us in everything. They must also have these illogical 'connections.' "

"The Streall? Not a bit of it. Their brains are pretty much like the others."

"Then I'd say your theory breaks down, unless you have yet another explanation for their superiority."

Sinnt grimaced, an extraordinarily ugly spectacle. "They've been around for a long time. They did it all slowly. If you think about it, they must find us pretty bewildering. A million years ago we couldn't even add two and two, yet suddenly we jump up and challenge them."

"I'm not challenging anybody," Rodrone said. "Furthermore it seems to me that your last answer is a pure evasion. There must be some evolutionary principle at work here."

He would have continued further, but a sharp whistling tone sounded. Sinnt pressed a lever under the edge of the table, at which the faces of Clave and Redace appeared on a small screen.

The scientist pressed another lever to admit them. "I only mention these matters," he said casually, turning his shoulder apparatus towards Rodrone, "because the, er, lens your friends are bringing seems in some roundabout way to relate to them. At any rate, I have an idea that it may give us a new angle on this, er, evolutionary principle, as you call it." He spoke haltingly, as though hedging around something he did not wish to speak about.

"So you think my theory that the lens is a galactic observing instrument is wrong?"

"Oh, not necessarily. I think your theory is a very good one. But in view of the Streall's desperate attempts to recover it—using tactics reminiscent of a political power struggle—it is more than likely that it will be able to tell us something fundamental about the confrontation of the two races."

At that moment Clave and Redace entered pulling the lens on a small trolley. Swiveling and bowing, Sinnt's camera turned to look at it. Then he rose, beckoned, and stiffly led them through a sliding panel and down a short, light-less corridor. Lights sprang into being to illuminate a large, cavern-like space.

This, Rodrone guessed, must be his main laboratory. The floor space was strewn with a maze of radiation baffles arranged around banks and humps of apparatus. Many of the pieces he recognized; and from the look of it, Sinnt possessed every item of equipment he had ever heard of, and many he had not.

Sinnt gestured irritably, telling them where to place the lens. The lenses on his shoulder glowed and flashed in changing colors. "Remarkable," he murmured. "Quite an entertainment."

"At one time we thought the lighted part in the center represented a map of the galaxy," Rodrone informed him, "but it doesn't check out."

"Indeed?" Sinnt stroked his chin, then stepped to a nearby computer and pulled out an extensible cord. With a slight shudder Rodrone watched him lift a lock of his hair and plug the end of the cord into a tiny silver socket embedded in his skull, after which he returned to the lens, trailing the cord behind him.