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                         IS THAT YOU XELUCHLI?

                           By DICK HETSCHEL

                _Orena and Xeluchli meant well. But had
               they obeyed the rules, had they remained
               bodiless observers, they would have saved
            BUP, that .O2F star, a hellaceous catastrophe._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories March 1952.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


It was a perfectly conventional tour, once around the Milky Way with
stops at several of the major stars. It was supposed to take about
eighty-eight million years so they planned to be back for supper.

In the beginning the students had remained in a fairly close knot
around mundo Karftahiti, their instructor, but as the tour progressed
some of the more venturesome strayed further and further from the rest
of the class.

Dro Orena and Dro Xeluchli had wandered a greater distance than usual
from the crowd and were jamming experimental thought webs into a large
space vortex when Xeluchli signalled to Orena to tune her mind off the
lecture frequency. It was against the rules, of course, but then Orena
supposed Xeluchli would take the blame for her if they were caught, so
she switched over to the conversational band.

"Want to have some fun?" asked Xeluchli.

Orena continued to stare into the space vortex. "How?" she asked.

Xeluchli waved a visible thought fragment in a circle about him. "The
stars," he said. "Let's explore a little on our own. They never hit the
really good spots on these tours."

Orena had been thinking for a long time of doing that very thing so she
hardly argued at all before letting Xeluchli convince her.

"We'll be gone only a little while and they'll never miss us," said
Xeluchli as they headed for a nearby star-cluster.

       *       *       *       *       *

Everything would have been all right if they had obeyed the rules.
"Hands off the planets," the rules said, and that was really a
reasonable and intelligent demand. In all fairness to them, it must be
admitted that Orena and Xeluchli had no intention of breaking that rule
when they strayed away from the rest of the crowd.

They found this little planet which was listed in the textbook as
"BuP"; an .02F star with nine planets. By a lucky chance they were just
in time to see a transient little civilization spring into being on its
third planet. This was too wonderful a chance to miss so they decided
to stay a few hundred thousand years and see how it would end. They
would catch up with the rest of the tour afterward.

The creatures entering into civilization were bipeds and of a physical
appearance rather low on the aesthetic scale but Orena and Xeluchli
soon discovered that they were bi-sexual. This pleased them very much
and made them feel that they had something in common with this little
civilization, for Orena and Xeluchli were bi-sexuals too, and bi-sexual
civilizations were rare. Orena and Xeluchli had, in fact, been the
only bi-sexuals in the touring group, which had been composed mostly
of the slow-moving amoeboids from Procyon and the emotionally unstable
penta-sexuals from Antares.

It was a land civilization which they had found and, just as the
textbooks said, it was having its beginning in the river deltas of
the continents. The bipeds were both herbivorous and carnivorous and
the duration and bloodiness of their early wars was almost exactly as
predicted by Globnung's food-war formula. The speed of advance of the
civilization was a little slow, but still comfortably within the lower
limits of the Atati equation.

Everything went well for the first five thousand years, but then Orena
and Xeluchli began to catch signs of Gibrait's anachronism. They
watched anxiously for a while, and soon they saw that their fears
had been justified. Sociological advance had fallen so far behind
technological advance that the Law of Socio-Martial Flux had been
brought into play. The little civilization would almost certainly die a
premature death.

Orena and Xeluchli watched the invention of greater and greater weapons
and the hopeless retardation of the social system and were saddened.
They had hoped to watch a real civilization and this one was not even
going to go past the one-planet stage. They did not see how it could
last half a century more.

"And they're bi-sexuals, too," said Xeluchli. "It's a shame. I wish we
could do something."

"Yes, but you know what the rules are," reminded Orena. "We can only
watch. We can't help them."

"I know," said Xeluchli a little crossly. "A bunch of poly-sexuals and
sixth-degree intellectuals make rules and we're supposed to obey them.
You know, I'm tempted to interfere. No one would know."

Orena objected, but she was really in favor of violating the rule, too,
and after a while she let Xeluchli have his way.

"We'll start the civilization over," he suggested. "It was low in some
qualities at the very start, but if we begin it over again with two
above-average specimens I'm sure it will turn out better this time."

"We'll save one of each sex and destroy the rest of the race," agreed
Orena. "It will be just like one of the controlled experiments in the
laboratories of Arcturus 7, but on an even larger scale. Oh, this will
be interesting!"

"We'll go down to the planet ourselves," said Xeluchli, "and pick the
two creatures we'll use. We'll guide them and their descendants for a
while until we're sure they'll turn out all right."

They had been heading down toward the planet and now they landed on a
mountaintop. "Shall we stay together?" asked Orena.

"No, let's each of us observe the creatures separately at close range
for a while. Then, after we've seen enough to make a good choice, we'll
pick two of them and destroy the rest."

"We'll each pick one," suggested Orena. "You pick the female and I'll
pick the male."

Xeluchli agreed, and added, "When you've found him, enclose him in a
bubble of mental protection and turn your mind to wavelength OEC. I'll
turn my mind to wavelength HHW when I have a female protected and the
combination of these waves, each harmless by itself, will result in
a .0008w wave which will destroy the rest of the race. Afterward we'll
meet on this hill."

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a city at the foot of the mountains and Orena headed there.
She intermingled her atoms with those of a building for a while and
watched from one of its inner walls, trying to get some idea of the
habits of the bipeds.

At first she was puzzled by the fact that only one sex of the creatures
entered the room she was watching. After a while, though, she began to
suspect its true nature. She was learning little here, so she went out
into the streets of the city where she could observe all phases of life.

At first she assumed a shape that the bipeds could not see, but after
a while she decided that she could best accomplish her purpose in the
guise of one of the bipeds themselves. She turned herself into a female
of the species and began in earnest her search for a desirable male.

She found that the society was very primitive in most respects and
that it was not at all difficult to integrate herself into it. This
was a new experience for her and one of the most thrilling things that
had ever happened to her. One by one she dropped the use of senses
and mental ranges not possessed by the bipeds to make the game more
exciting. Soon her senses and thoughts were operating on a level hardly
above that of the creatures themselves.

       *       *       *       *       *

She often found herself wishing that she had paid more attention to
her classes in the lower civilizations so she could better understand
the things she was seeing. She was in no hurry to bring this adventure
to an end, so for several weeks she investigated male after male,
looking for one with a high socio-kinetic rating and a low or average
techno-kinetic rating.

It was about thirty days later that she made her decision. She had been
talking to a young male biped in a bookstore when she realized that he
would do at least as well as any she had come across so far. She found
that his name was Adam Henessey and she proceeded to sound him out a
little further.

"And literature, then," she asked, picking up a book from one of the
tables, "wouldn't you say that great literature should be placed above
science?"

"Yes," Adam agreed, "the _material_ is emphasized too strongly at
present. We must pay more attention to the _spiritual_." He adjusted
his eyelenses. "I believe that that is one of the major troubles of
civilization." He tapped the ashes from his cigarette and looked at her
for confirmation.

"Hell, yes!" she agreed heartily. "We are concentrating on the means
and forgetting the ends."

"We are concentrating on the transient," he echoed, "and forgetting the
eternal."

This bit of conversation was enough to convince the somewhat satiated
Orena. She cast a web of mental protection over the biped and set her
mind to an OEI wavelength.

Obviously Xeluchli had already made his choice and set his mind to the
HHW wavelength, for all the bipeds she could see except the protected
Adam Henessey immediately fell to the ground and lay still. The effect
was odd and uncheerful.

Now came one of the most interesting games she had played in her stay
on the planet. She tried to match the biped's state of bewilderment and
terror with one of her own and at the same time lead him to the top of
the mountain. She could, of course, have transported him, protective
web and all, to the mountaintop in a split second, but that would have
seemed like cheating at the game. The web protecting Adam Henessey was
invisible to his eyes and Orena continued to play the part of a fellow
biped.

In his confused state, it was not difficult to lead Adam up the
mountain by little suggestions or, often by merely taking the first
step. She suggested that from the mountaintop they could see better
what had happened and whether anyone else was alive. He even added
the idea that they might get out of the area of contamination or
whatever it was by climbing. "Heavy gases stay low," he said, assuming,
apparently, that another war had been declared.

They were the first to reach the top, Xeluchli and his find were not
yet in sight. Orena kept up her act while they waited. She and Adam
Henessey searched out over the valleys below and chattered worried
ideas at each other.

Orena was secretly watching for Xeluchli whenever she looked down the
mountain but soon the sun set and the light faded. It was very dark
in the valleys and she did not wish to use any but biped eyes in the
presence of Adam Henessey, at least not until Xeluchli arrived, so she
gave up looking.

As time went by she began to get worried. It was cold on the mountain
and she grew impatient to change to some other form. She searched the
valleys below again, but not even a light of the dead city was visible.

The biped was growing nervous and she was not sure how much longer she
could keep him here. He was standing sheltered by a crag of rock and
gazing out into the dark spaces where the city had been, and for a long
while Orena stood near him and looked far out into the valleys to the
left.

Time passed and finally the sun began to rise and she grew more worried
than ever. A terrible thought hit her and she shivered. She stole
glances at Adam Henessey from time to time and she noticed that he was
glancing queerly at _her_ now and then. This continued for some time.

Finally she could stand it no longer.

She turned to him and asked:

"Heavens, is that you, Xeluchli?"

She really did not need an answer.