Time Thieves

was no intention of later restoration. And he was never going to restore them. He was going to leave them very, very dead.
        
        They knew that and rebelled from it.
        
        And even in this last moment, they could not gather themselves for a lethal retaliation. He was a sentient being. They could never kill him, never knowingly destroy him for all time, without a hope of rebuilding him as he had been.
        
        He bored into a second alien consciousness, struck deep, shattered it and sent the blazing fragments into the void. The creature did not even have time to cry out for a last minute reprieve from the eternal sentence.
        
        “Stop! Stop!”
        
        The third one exploded, ashed and was gone as if he had never existed.
        
        The fourth cowered, begging for mercy.
        
        “I can't leave you,” he thought.
        
        “Why?” it asked.
        
        “You mentioned a mother ship. You may already have called for aid.”
        
        “We haven't.”
        
        “I can't believe you.”
        
        “We do not lie!” it said, still capable of anger.
        
        “But we do,” Pete said.
        
        “It was another of our miscalculations. We had insufficient time to study you. But if I should promise you freedom, and that promise is genuine, why kill me?”
        
        “Because you haven't promised Della freedom. And I will want to liberate her mind as well.”
        
        “We will let the two of you have telepathic abilities.”
        
        “And if we wish to widen the mental ranges of friends?”
        
        “You ask too much!”
        
        “And you can't promise enough.”
        
        “You will kill me as you killed the others.” The poli-tin's mental voice was permeated with disbelief, a lack of understanding.
        
        “Yes.”
        
        “But why?”
        
        “You are a threat to the things I want.”
        
        “But how?” it asked. “They cannot restore us. You will not restore us. You are condemning us to eternal, extinction, to an end of life and all the joys it contains. You are giving us no room for reconsideration. You are' behaving brutally, savagely, coldly. How can you live; with yourself; how can you justify what you do?” •;
        
        “Della,” he said.
        
        “I do not understand.” i
        
        “Love,” he said. '
        
        “You kill for love?”
        
        “I wouldn't have believed it myself, a month ago. A week ago. Even yesterday.”
        
        “You can't kill for love,” the politin argued. He could feel the surge of hope it contained, and he felt sorry that its hope was founded on such swampy ground.
        
        “You can do anything for love,” he said.
        
        “Limits restrict all-”
        
        “For love, there are no limits. Men and women have killed for it, died for it, debased themselves for it. And, they have been acting out their plays for half-love, strangled, untelepathic love. But once I have killed you and have insured my freedom, I'll never have to kill for • love again. I will only have to liberate the minds of* others.”
        
        The alien's hopes had died. “Still-” it began.
        
        “Death, even eternal death, is not the worst thing a sentient being can suffer,” Pete said.
        
        “What else?”
        
        “Loneliness.”
        
        “I do not understand the word.”
        
        “I know.”
        
        “Will you-explain it?”
        
        The politin was only trying to postpone the moment of its final death, but he permitted it extra seconds while he explained the word.
        
        “You cannot understand the word easily,” he said. “You come from a culture which has been telepathic for thousands of years. No one of you need ever crave companionship or affection and be unable to obtain it. Each of you needs only to drop your voluntary veil of privacy and accept the conscious emanations of those around you, absorb a free-flowing love open to everyone. When a male meets a female of your species, you play no games. You meet, read minds and know. If you want each other, there is no comedy or tragedy of manners to be played out, as with us. If you are alone at night and want someone of similar interests to talk to,