“Thank you, Charley. But not just yet. I’m not whole enough yet to withstand acceleration, anyway. I have to knit a while longer before they can take me away. So we have some more time to talk. And then, perhaps, you can help me fix the communicator. All right?”

“Whatever you say, Mirtin.”

Charley was looking at the tools again. He picked up another one, the disruptor.

“What’s this?”

It’s a cutting and excavating toot. It gives off an extremely strong beam of light that burns through anything within range.”

“Like a laser, you mean?”

“It is a laser,” said Mirtin. “But a far more powerful one than any used on Earth. At the right opening it can melt rock or cut through metal.”

“You mean it?”

Mirtin laughed. “You want to try it, don’t you? All right, then. Hold it by the rounded end. That’s the control stud. Let me see what range it’s set for. Yes, ten feet. Good enough. Mow, point it at the cave floor, and make sure your feet aren’t in the way, and press the—”

The beam flared out. It consumed a patch of the floor of the cave five inches across and nearly a foot deep in the first moment. Charley yelled and switched the disruptor off. Holding it at arm’s length, he stared in wonder.

“You could do anything with this!” he cried.

“It’s very useful, yes.”

“Even — even kill somebody!”

“If you wanted to kill somebody,” said Mirtin. “We don’t do much killing in our world.”

“But if you had to,” Charley said. “I mean, it’s clean and quick, and — listen, I don’t think about killing much. Will you tell me how this works? I suppose I can’t open this one up either, but—”

He was full of questions. The disruptor excited him even more than the power tool had, perhaps because he could comprehend the basic principles of the generator, more or less, but the concept of destroying matter through optical pumping baffled him. Mirtin did his best to explain. He used analogies and images, and even a few evasions where the technology of the device was beyond his own grasp. Charley already knew about lasers, but he knew of them as bulky machines requiring an input of light. What .puzzled him about this one was, for one, its small size, and for another, its self-contained nature. Where did the light beam come from?

Where was the source? Was it a chemical laser, or a gas laser, or what?

“Neither,” Mirtin said. “It doesn’t work on the same principles as the portable lasers Earth now has.”

“Then-what-?”

Mirtin was silent.

“It’s something we aren’t supposed to know about? Something we have to discover for ourselves?”

“To some extent, yes.”

Charley brimmed with curiosity. They talked for a while; and then Mirtin visibly tired. The boy got ready to take his leave.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised, and flitted off into the night.

Some time later, Mirtin discovered that the disruptor was gone. He had seen Charley put it back with the other tools, or at least he thought he had; but there was no sign of it now. Mirtin felt a stab of alarm, only briefly. In a way, he had expected something like this. It was the risk he had run by showing Charley his tools.

Would Charley use the disruptor as a weapon? Hardly.

Would he show it to anyone else? Certainly not.

Would he try to get it open and study its mechanism? Quite probably, Mirtin admitted.

However, he could not bring himself to see that as any menace to anyone. Let the boy have it, he thought. He may benefit from it. And in any case there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Vorneen had begun to ask himself wonderingly how it had happened, and when. He was in love with Kathryn Mason, there could be no doubt of that. What he felt for her was as strong as what he felt for Mirtin and Glair, and since he loved them, he must love her. But was it possible? Did it make any sense? Where had it begun?

He had wanted to have sexual relations with her, of course, right from the start. But that was not at all the same thing as being in love with her.

Vorneen was by nature a seducer. That was his role in the sexual group: he was the predator, the aggressor who initiated the matings. Mirtin would never take an active role, while Glair provoked sexual activity only in the feminine facet of the healer, the consoler, the soother. Vorneen sought passion for its own sake. That was acceptable, and moreover necessary to the continuity of the group. Within the group, he kindled, he galvanized. If sometimes he found it needful to go outside the group, neither Glair nor Mirtin objected. Why should they?

Of course, all that had to do with Dirnan mores and the specifically Dirnan type of sexual activity. Vorneen had never considered the possibility of extending his range of seductions to the Earthborn female. Like any watcher, he assumed that there would never be an occasion for him to come in contact with an Earthman, and certainly he had never visualized himself thrown into such intimate circumstances as he now had entered with Kathryn Mason. Nor had it ever crossed his mind that he might feel physical desire for a woman of Earth.

Yet he wore an Earthman’s body. It was anatomically perfect, at least externally. Its inner drives were purely Dirnan, or so he thought; his body could ingest Earth food, but if he ate something that Earthmen loved which happened to make Dirnans ill, he would get ill. He had assumed, too, that the governing sexual nature of his outer body would remain purely Dirnan. He went on feeling desire for Mirtin and Glair, even though they were hidden beneath synthetic Earthman flesh. When they had made love aboard the ship, they did so in the Dirnan fashion, making no use of their external Earth-type sexual organs. Why, then, should he expect his counterfeit Earthman body to feel authentic desire for an Earthman female?

Was it simply his inner drives, his Vorneen-drives, seeking an outlet in a different context?

That was it, he told himself at first. As seducer, he was primed to seduce, and his drives related to the appropriate context. With no Dirnans at hand, this female Earthman would have to suffice.

And there was the sense of challenge. Could he seduce her as he seduced so many of his own kind? Would his present body function properly? How successful would he be? Would he give her pleasure? Would there be pleasure for him?

A game, then. No emotional content. Seduction for its own sake, pursuit merely to find out certain aspects of his present condition.

That was not love, Vorneen knew. That was sport.

How then, had this unwanted, unexpected, troublesome element of emotion entered the situation?

It had begun sometime during the second week of his stay with her. He could reconstruct the outline of the process, but not the emotional sequence. He knew what he had done, but not how, or why. Especially not why.

From the day of her visit to the Contact Cult office, Vorneen had been fully aware that she knew of his extraterrestrial origin. Of course, she must have realized what he was almost as soon as she had begun to care for him; she was an intelligent woman, and his body was only an approximate imitation of an Earthman’s, beneath the surface. She could gather from the metabolic evidence alone — his body temperature, his lack of any need to excrete wastes — that he was an alien. But until that day, Kathryn had given no outward sign of any awareness. He had seen the look in her eyes, though, when she tossed the bundle of Contact Cult literature on the bed. He had listened to the words between her words as she told him of her visit to the cult’s headquarters. Unmistakably she had been telling him, “Those people are frauds, but I know what a real alien is like, because I’ve got one living in my house!” So the pretense was over. She did not make a point of exploiting her knowledge; she never said a word about his origin, or asked a question; but she knew, and he knew that she knew, and now they were beyond a certain barrier that had separated them.