“Saving me?” asked Deborah.

“So far,” said Noxon, “that’s working out pretty well. But duplicating the professor, here? I’m not sure he’s thrilled about the philologist version of himself.”

Wheaton shrugged. “It’s like finding out what I’d be like if I had never grown up.”

“I liked him,” said Deborah.

“How ironic,” said Wheaton, “since it’s clearly you that made me different from him.”

“I have much to answer for,” said Deborah.

“Should I open the box?” asked Ram.

“They can hear us already,” said Noxon. “So here are the rules. The mice will all come out of the box and stay in a group, approaching nobody. Ram will close the box and rebury it.”

“I have to do all the manual labor?”

“You’re the trained pilot,” said Noxon. “I have no skills.”

Ram grinned.

“If the mice deviate from these instructions,” said Noxon, “I’ll kill them all.”

Deborah looked skeptical. “Have you ever tried to catch mice?” she asked.

“In my previous life as a cat, yes,” said Noxon.

“The facemask makes him very, very quick,” said Ram.

“And I could go back and kill them in the past,” said Noxon. “They understand that.”

Ram opened the lid.

The mice swarmed out and formed a writhing heap on the bare dirt in front of the box.

“They look perfectly ordinary.”

“Look again,” said Noxon. “Their heads are quite large, for mice, and their bones and musculature are sturdier in order to bear the added brain weight. Also, they have tiny electrical connectors at the tip of each toe. Or finger. Or whatever. They can stick their paws into computer sockets and link up directly to their brains.”

“So they’re all computer peripherals?” asked Wheaton.

“No,” said Noxon. “All computers are mouse peripherals.”

“You came back,” said a mouse.

“They’re talking to me now,” said Noxon. “You’ll only hear my side of the conversation. I may switch languages.”

“The mice talk,” said Deborah.

“In very high voices,” said Noxon. “And most of it is lying.”

“So unfair,” said a mouse.

“Judgmental,” said another.

“Glad you’re back,” said a third.

“One of you at a time,” said Noxon. “Who speaks for all?”

“For the moment,” said one, “me.” It was a female, and she moved toward him, away from the pack.

“No,” said Noxon. “I know what you are. I want the alpha.”

“You’ll kill him,” said the spokeswoman.

“That’s quite possible,” said Noxon. “But it’s not my plan at the moment, because I need you, and I need to be able to assess your intentions and your capabilities.”

“If you think you can possibly understand us . . .” said the spokesmouse.

“I understand you at least as well as you understand us,” said Noxon. “The alpha, now.”

Another mouse came forward.

“You hide your maleness well.”

“Huge testes didn’t suit our purposes,” said the alpha. “We bred them out. What do you want with us?”

Noxon explained about the alien attackers.

“So you want us to prevent their computer infiltration,” said the alpha.

“That might be interesting, but it wouldn’t solve the problem,” said Noxon.

“You’re going to journey to their world before they evolved and destroy them,” said the alpha.

“Now you’re getting closer.”

“Is there any way to assess their biology before we make that voyage?”

“No,” said Noxon. “We never saw them come out of their airships and we’re not interested in going back into the future to lure them out. We’re going to leave from now and make the voyage.”

“I understand your fear that they might overpower you,” said the alpha. “It should give you some idea of how we feel about you.”

“I know that you betrayed me regularly long before I gave you any reason to do so,” said Noxon. “So now you see my dilemma.”

“I don’t,” said Deborah.

The alpha rattled off his answer. “You need us to be free allies, but you can’t trust us not to take over the ship during the voyage.”

“I want to travel with you now as equals,” said Noxon. “I want you to have full access to the ship’s databanks. I don’t see how you can be useful if you don’t have your full range of information and power.”

“All you have to do is explain why we need you now,” said the alpha.

“Because I still have the power to decide whether to turn the alien world into a home for humans and mice of your kind, or simply another colony world for humans.”

“So our alliance is based on your ability to kill us,” said the alpha.

“Your physical powers are limited,” said Noxon. “And your mental abilities depend on achieving a critical mass larger than the one you currently have.”

The alpha said nothing.

“I know that every mouse except you is a pregnant female. But they are not actually gestating—the embryos are not developing.”

“That thing doesn’t give you X-ray vision,” said the alpha.

“I know their hormones smell like pregnancy, but there are no fetal heartbeats and they haven’t grown since the beginning of the voyage. My guess is that you’ve found a way to enclose a litter of fertilized ova into a sac and keep them from attaching to the uterine wall. So they can be pregnant the moment you decide.”

“Close,” said the alpha.

Noxon thought for a moment. “No, I’m exactly right. But instead of just one sac, each one contains several. And each sac of ova will produce a litter that’s bred for different capabilities. So you can spawn—what, electronics whizzes? Spacetime displacers? Fast-maturing baby-breeders?”

“We’re all fast-maturing baby-breeders,” said the alpha. “But yes, you have the idea.”

“When you were loose in the ship during the voyage here, before the expendable rounded you up, what did you do?”

“We were exploring the possibility of doing a displacement of the ship during the voyage.”

“If you moved the inbound ship out of its one-to-one correspondence with the outbound version of the ship, it would have annihilated us.”

“Unless we displaced the ship so that it didn’t overlap with the original in any way.”

“That would kill all living things aboard the ship,” said Noxon.

“That’s why we were going to try to move the outbound ship.”

Noxon shook his head. “You aren’t stupid,” he said. “That might undo everything.”

“We didn’t actually do it,” said the alpha.

“For smart mice, you’re pretty stupid.”

“Be fair,” said the alpha. “We’re only a couple of dozen. We don’t get really smart until we have a few hundred.”

“And that’s another reason for you to want time to have a lot of babies.”

“It would be nice if you didn’t slice time the whole way to the alien world.”

“I’m not going to let you have any babies until we’ve reached the alien world,” said Noxon. “Until we see what we’re facing.”

“I think you need us to reach maximum intellectual capacity before then.”

“Not until I know what I want you to do,” said Noxon.

“Are you capable of such a decision without our advice?” asked the mouse.

Noxon immediately realized that they were manipulating him. Because the moment the mouse said it, Noxon was filled with anxiety that he knew would not go away until he agreed to let the mice reach the alien world in hundreds instead of two dozen. That anxiety was not rational. It was what the mouse wanted him to feel.

“Interesting,” said Noxon. “You aren’t behaving like a potential ally.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” said the alpha.

The other mice were echoing him. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” they bleated.

“Why are they all squeaking?” asked Deborah. “What are they saying?”

“They’re apologizing for their naked attempt at forcing me to obey them by influencing my emotions,” said Noxon. “I’m pretty sure we can eliminate the alien threat without the help of the mice. The main reason I want to bring them is because I wanted them to exist on a second world, too. And that second world will not be Earth. Earth is the sanctuary for the pure, unmodified human species. The mice have two wallfolds on Garden. Apparently that’s all they’re ever going to get.”