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the left of the screen threw back his own image, and he twisted the catlike whiskers of his round face thoughtfully and with satisfaction, as he reviewed the situation with all sensible speed. The situation could hardly have been more ideal. Aton Maternaluncle was not even a connection by marriage with the family Brutogas. True, he, like the Brutogasi, was of the Hook persuasion politically, rather than Rod. But on the other hand the odds against the appearance of such a Random Factor as this to two men on scientific survey were astronomical. It canceled out Ordinary Duties and Conventions almost automatically. Aton Maternaluncle had he been merely a disinterested observer rather than the other half of the scout crew would certainly consider Kator a fool not to take advantage of the situation by integrating the Random Factor positively with Kator's own life pattern. Besides, thought Kator, watching his own reflection in the bulkhead and stroking his whiskers, I am young and life is before me. He got up from the chair, loosened a tube on the internal ship's recorder, and extended the three-inch claws on his stubby fingers. He went back to the sleeping quarters behind the pilot room. Back home the door to it would never have been unlocked but out here in deep space, who would take precautions against such a farfetched situation as this the Random Factor had introduced? Skillfully, Kator drove his claws into the spinal cord at the base of Aton's round skull, killing the sleeping man instantly. He then disposed of the body out the air lock, replaced the tube in working position in the recorder, and wrote up the fact that Aton had attacked him in a fit of sudden insanity, damaging the recorder as he did so. Finding Kator ready to defend himself, the insane Aton had then leaped into the air lock, and committed suicide by discharging himself into space. After all, reflected Kator, as he finished writing up the account in the logbook, While Others Still Page 113 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html Think, We Act had always been the motto of the Brutogasi. He stroked his whiskers in satisfaction. * * * A period of time roughly corresponding to a half hour later in the time system of that undiscovered race to whom the artifact had originally belonged Kator had got a close-line magnetically hooked to the blasted hull of the artifact and was hand-over-hand hauling his spacesuited body along the line toward it. He reached it with little difficulty and set about exploring his find by the headlight of his suit. It had evidently been a ship operated by people very much like Kator's own human kind. The doors were the right size, the sitting devices were sittable-in. Unfortunately it had evidently been destroyed by a pressure-warp explosion in a drive system very much like that aboard the scout. Everything not bolted down in it had been expelled into space. No, not everything. A sort of hand carrying-case was wedged between the legs of one of the sitting devices. Kator unwedged it and took it back to the scout with him. After making the routine safety tests on it, Kator got it open. And a magnificent find it turned out to be. Several items of what appeared to be something like cloth, and could well be garments, and what were clearly ornaments or perhaps badges of rank, and a sort of coloring-stick of soft red wax. But these were nothing to the real find. Enclosed in a clear wrapping material formed in bagshape, were a pair of what could only be foot-protectors with soil still adhering to them. And among the loose soil in the bottom of the bag, was the tiny dried form of an organic creature. A dirt-worm, practically indistinguishable from the dirt-worms at home. Kator lifted it tenderly from the dirt with a pair of specimen tweezers and sealed it into a small cube of clear plastic. This, he thought, slipping it into his belt pouch, was his. There was plenty in the wreckage of the ship and in the carrying-case for the examiners to work on back home in discovering the location of the race that had built them all. This corpse the first of his future subjects was his. A harbinger of the future, if he played his knuckle-dice right. An earnest of what the Random Factor had brought. Kator logged his position and the direction of drift the artifact had been taking when he had first sighted it. He headed himself and the artifact toward Homeworld, and turned in for a well-earned rest. As he drifted off to sleep, he began remembering some of the sweeps he and Aton had made together before this, and tears ran down inside his nose. They had never been related, it was true, even by the marriage of distant connection. But Kator had grown to have a deep friendship for the older Ruml, and Kator was not the sort that made friends easily. Only, when a Kingdom beckons, what can a man do? * * * Back on the Ruml Homeworld capital planet of the seven star-systems where the Ruml were in power an organization consisting of some of the best minds of the race fell upon the artifact that Kator had brought back, like robber wasps upon the honey-horde of a wild bees hive, where the hollow tree trunk hiding it has been split open by lightning. Unlike the lesser races and perhaps the unknown ones who had created the artifact, there was no large popular excitement over the find, no particular adulation of its discoverer. The artifact could well fail to pan out for a multitude of reasons. Perhaps it was not even of this portion of the galaxy. Perhaps it had been wandering the lightless immensity of space for a million years or more; and the race that had created it was either dead or gone to some strange elsewhere. 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