Fear that man

unquestioned and-ten months after the act-generally unthought of. But what Crazy was saying was correct. Men should be less able to kill than ever. The perpetrator of aggression was gone. Man was saner than ever. This sort of atrocity should be impossible. Men should not have the ability to… and of course, Sam thought, men didn’t do it!
        “Not men,” he said aloud.
        “What?” they all said, almost together.
        “I’ll wager that it wasn’t men. Not men as we know them.”
        “Talk sense,” Coro said. “You’re worse than Crazy.”
        Sam strained at his seat belt. “These… killers are from another galaxy, not this one. They might not be men at all.” His mind ran backward to the time in the ship when he still had only a first name and Gnossos had proposed the idea that he was being controlled by extra-galactic forces. Gnossos had been wrong then. But now the theory seemed to fit. He could think of no contradiction with what evidence they now had. Was he just as wrong as Gnossos? “It sounds crazy,” he said, trying to say it all aloud and give it more validity than it now had in the tenuous thought-concepts of his mind. “But think about it. First of all, we do not have men in this galaxy who could perpetrate such violence. Secondly, there is absolutely no way, even if an army of these men existed, that they could secure the weapons to level a city to ashes. They have to be from Outside.”
        The others regarded him, trying to find some chink in the reasoning. Crazy spoke first: “But wouldn’t the God who gave us aggression give it to all intelligent species in the universe? I was under the impression that men were actually basically good and sensible and that their bad qualities came from God’s schizoid personality. Now wouldn’t this God from the higher universe control this entire universe?”
        Sam started to answer, closed his mouth when he couldn’t think of anything to say. His reasoning seemed sound. When Hurkos had killed the pink grub, the holy worm, then all intelligent species in this universe should have benefited from it. Perhaps God had controlled only part of the universe and… But, no. He had been the entire higher dimension. There had been no other gods with him. That was a fact. Breadloaf’s scientists said it was a fact, and they were hard boys to find fault with. Accordingly, these extra-galactics should not be able to kill, void of blood lust.
        But below, a city lay in ruin, concealing two million bodies.
        “It must have been fast,” Coro said. “There don’t seem to be any survivors.”
        “Let’s take a look at Chaplin-Beta,” Lotus suggested.
        “It’ll be the same.” Coro began bringing the floater around in a one hundred and eighty degree turn.
        Lotus folded her wings around her pert breasts, hiding her arms and shoulders in a shell of velvet membrane. “Let’s look anyway.”
        Coro completed the turn, and all four of them gasped at once when they saw it: a mountain in flight. Rather, a plateau. It was a flat slab of a ship, miles across. The floater was a small pebble beside it, an infinitesimal grain of sand.
        “What-” Coro started.
        The vast ship was over three thousand feet high, and that was but a fraction of its length and equal to its breadth. It seemed to be a solid piece with no seams and no windows to break its perfect sheen. It appeared to be powered by some magnetic system, as the ground beneath it reverberated in answer to the silent call of its star-shattering engines. The only scars on the great bulk were three rows of tiny holes (tiny from where they sat, but very likely feet across when viewed closely), five hundred holes per row. From the center of the middle row of holes there was a puff of white, and a silver missile like the one that had downed their last ship came spinning lazily toward them.
        “Dive!” Sam shouted.
        Coro hit the controls, pushing the floater down under the missile.
        The projectile whirred past, thrumming like a torpedo. Arcing delicately, it turned back on them, correcting its course.
        “It’s self-propelled!” Coro gasped between his teeth like gas escaping from a split pipe. “And has its own radar!”

----

    VI
        
        In the shells of corridors and maze rooms directly out from the Ship’s Core, the mother-slugs were writhing in the throes of racial creation. Their great soft bodies bulged with