Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail Read Free Page A

job to evaluate the information subjectively, only to report the truth. The evaluation will be made by others—many others, better equipped to do so. You are assuming a godlike egocentric personality that is neither warranted nor justified. Now—who did you call?”
    “Yatek Morah,” he responded.
    “Why?”
    “I wanted him to know that I knew. I wanted his masters to know that as well. I find war inevitable. However, I also find that his side loses everything, while we lose a great deal but hardly all. It was my decision to face him with that fact and to give the ball to him, as it were. Either he and his masters come up with a solution, or war is inevitable.”
    “This is a questionable tactic, but it is done. How did he take it?”
    ‘That’s just the trouble. He took it. It didn’t seem to worry him or bother him. That’s what I had to know. He is, I believe, sincerely interested in avoiding war for his own purposes, but he is not worried about it from the viewpoint of those who employ him. It was the one thing I could not get from the field reports—a direct sense of how the aliens view the war threat.”
    “It was only a viewing scanner on a single individual,” the computer noted. “He could be bluffing. All things considered, how else could he react?”
    He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No. Call it gut instinct, call it hunch or intuition, or whatever you wish—but also call it, too, experience. Reading the length of pauses, the slight tone of Voice, the subtle shifts in the body to bad news and flawless reasoning. There is still something missing in our information. He as much as said it himself.”
    “That is interesting, however. He confirmed the basics?”
    He nodded. “We’re right—dead on. That was the other reason for the call. Still, I feel no joy in it—for if we’re completely right, then what factor has been overlooked? To have all one’s deductions and inferences confirmed is gratifying. But to discover that, being right on the wildest stretches of logic, you have missed a factor that they consider decisive—that is frustrating.”
    “I believe I understand. This is what made you return, was it not? You fear the Confederacy and me as much as the aliens—perhaps more. Yet you came back. Such conviction, when faced with your brilliant deductions, carries weight. All right. We are missing a factor. What is it?”
    “There’s no way to know. Morah came out and told me that I’d not carried my deductions to their logical conclusions.” He sighed and drummed his fingers against a desk top. “It must have to do with the nature of the aliens. He called them incomprehensible, basically, yet he said he understood what they were doing. That means it is a question not of deed but motivation.” The fist slammed down hard on the desk. “But we know their motivation, dammit! It has to be!” Again he struggled to get hold of himself.
    “We are still handicapped in one way,” the computer noted. “We have not yet met the aliens, not yet seen them. We still know nothing about them other than the inference that they breathe an atmosphere similar to human norm, and are comfortable within normal temperature ranges.”
    He nodded. “That’s the problem. And that I’m not likely to get from Medusa, either, unless there’s some miracle. A psychotic killer who sees them thinks of them as evil. A psychotic Lord thinks of them as funny-looking but hardly evil, just self-interested. And intellects like Kreegan and Morah see them as a positive force. And that’s all we really know, isn’t it? After all this …”
    “No race lasts long enough to reach the stars and do all that this one has done unless it first acts in its own self-interest,” the computer noted. “We can probably dismiss the evil concept of the criminal on one of dozens of bases, the most probable being that these aliens are subjectively terrifying to look at, or smell putrid, or something of that sort. It is