Free Meeting at Infinity by John Brunner Page B

him over thousands of square miles. Someone dropped in on the people of Akkilmar, to ask if they had seen the scout. They had not, they answered gravely, but they knew where he was and gave directions.
    The scout was within a mile of the spot they indicated, and after that Lyken looked into Akkilmar. He had no cause toregret the decision. Except, perhaps, that the people there made him feel inferior.
    Once his attention had been drawn to the place, he did not take long to realize that he had perhaps the most amazing and valuable prize in any known franchise: a society that by some process other than scientific logic, by intuition or direct perception, had arrived at scientific principles. And could make them do tricks.
    He had, even now, only a vague picture of what they could achieve. He had had nothing commercially useful out of them apart from the rho function field perceptor—and to date, no one had succeeded in making that work except for cocoonees cut off from the outside world. He had visualized it being employed as a kind of transmitterless television, and it was fairly certain that in Akkilmar it was used as such, but no normal person who had tried it had succeeded in interpreting its data properly. It would take a long time to understand Akkilmar’s nonscience. But it existed, and it was powerful.
    He was playing a hunch in hoping that it was powerful
enough.
    The sages were waiting for him when his heli sliced down out of the evening sky and purred to a landing on the level sand of the beach. They might just have come out to sit and watch the sunset, but Lyken felt that was not so. They were waiting for him.
    They were such a
friendly
people! As he came towards them over the sand, Lyken remembered how he had had to press them to accept anything in exchange for the perceptor. They had agreed at last to take some musical instruments, and nothing more.
    They exchanged greetings, and indicated that he should join the group. It was in the form of a shallow horseshoe, facing the sunset; the place they assigned to Lyken was in the opening of the curve. They
had
been waiting for him Whenhe sat down, they were facing him without having had to move.
    He had never been able to establish which of them was a leader, or indeed if they had a leader at all, and while turning over in his mind what he had to say he wondered which of them he should address his appeal to. Before he had decided, a plump man with a perpetual smile, whom he had met before, cleared his throat and spoke up.
    “Beware of Allyn Vage,” he said pleasantly.
    The others chuckled, a rippling, rich sound. Bewildered, Lyken shook his head. There was no possibility of his having misheard; the people of Akkilmar had learned the language of the intruders on their world with astonishing speed and perfect accuracy. Allyn Vage. A name. It meant nothing to him, and he apologized and said so.
    “Never mind,” said a woman sitting next to the man who had spoken. Her hair was going gray, and her almost bare body suggested that she was childless. There were rather few children in Akkilmar, and that was another unsolved problem about this culture.
    “We know why you have come,” said a man sitting on the first speaker’s other side. “Of course we will help you. You have been friendly to us, when you might have been brutal and exploited us through your strange powers. Go in peace and we will follow.”
    Lyken had not been prepared for this; he had expected a long discussion and a hard task of persuasion. Taken aback, he glanced around the assembly.
    “But how do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know what I want?”
    The first speaker put out his hand and scooped up some dry fine sand from the beach. Letting it trickle between his fingers in a thin stream, he traced a symbol with it. All of them chuckled again.
    “Go!” said the first speaker, and to his own amazementLyken found himself obeying. It was much later, when he was almost back at the trading post,