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“Spies among us,” Petty muttered.

Granny waved a stern finger in front of his face. “Let the man talk. He’s the President.”

“He’s been deposed.”

The old woman said with a smirk, “Until you have
your
picture on a ten-credit bill,

Mr. Petty, you’d better listen to him.”

Gray continued, “The tendrilless offshoot could live as humans, among humans, and act as

humans. Because of their superior intelligence and physical strength, the tendrilless wouldn’t

take long to work their way into important positions, running governments and industries.

Before the normal humans knew it, slans would have a tight hold on society. By the time the

tendrilless began to have true slan babies again, once the genetic clock brought the

chromosomes back to the forefront and they bred true, our disguised sleeper agents would

have made another slan war impossible. They would have created an environment where slans

and humans really could live together.”

“Sounds like that whole idea backfired.” Granny slurped her own coffee.

“The tendrilless convinced themselves that we had betrayed them, that we had robbed

them of their telepathic abilities. By depriving them of tendrils, they felt as if we had”—he

searched for a word—“
castrated
them in a way. They claimed that we had stolen their

birthright. And so, when true slans came to teach them what they needed to know, the

tendrilless turned on them. They declared open war and killed any true slan they could find.

That erupted in a terrible slaughter—and it’s never stopped.”

Kathleen gave him a puzzled frown. “But if the tendrilless were indistinguishable from

normal humans, how could they know each other?”

“Oh, they could still sense the differences,” Gray answered. “Jommy found that out when

he tried to approach them as a young boy, thinking they were allies. And because the

tendrilless were as intelligent as any other slan, they developed devices to detect us. They could

track us down, ambush true slans. Many were murdered before we knew they had this ability.

In turn, some radical slans declared open war on the tendrilless. And it got worse from there.”

“People never seem to get tired of killing. It’s one of the things we do best.” The old woman

gulped more coffee. “This is good. Maybe I should go burn another pot.”

Gray, Petty, and Kathleen all spoke out in a quick chorus. “No, no thank you. We’ve had

enough.”

The President leaned back in his chair. “Numerous tendrilless lost contact with each other

over the centuries. Plenty of their descendants don’t even know what they truly are. And right

now, all across the race, the dominant genes are beginning to manifest themselves. Once

embedded in their chromosomes, the modifications can’t be changed. Even the militant

tendrilless who want to destroy all true slans are beginning to give birth to babies with tendrils.

In another generation or two, they’ll all be true slans.”

“Then they would have killed us all for nothing,” Kathleen cried. “By killing us, they’ll be

killing themselves. If we could just explain to the tendrilless leaders what happened, they’ll

stop trying to exterminate slans and humans.”

“If they’ll listen to us,” Gray said.

The secret police chief made a rude noise, then cringed as if expecting Granny to smack

him again.

“I’m still the President. I’ll try to contact the leaders of the tendrilless.” He turned to the old

woman. “I can use the equipment in Jommy’s laboratory to boost the signal and build a

powerful transmitter. I’ll hold out an olive branch to the tendrilless. Then it’ll be in their

hands.”

*

*

*

Gray, Kathleen, Granny, and even Petty worked together to erect a tall signaling tower on

the roof of the back shed. Announcing himself as the President of Earth, Commander-in-Chief

and head of the legitimate government in exile, Kier Gray transmitted a bold message to Mars,

where they knew the tendrilless had established their base. He hoped his words would fall

upon receptive ears.

Gray requested a peace conference, a summit to discuss the current war on Earth. He was

careful not to phrase it in terms of a proposed surrender, though he was sure the tendrilless

would view it as such.

Then they waited. Because of the sheer distance between Earth and Mars, a signal would

take hours to cross space and come back. Even so, someone monitored the shortwave

constantly, waiting for an answer. The Tendrilless Authority would be surprised, even

horrified, by Gray’s revelations. They would argue and disagree, but the tendrilless scientists

were intelligent enough to discover their own proof. With the invaders bombarding cities and

setting up occupation headquarters, Gray hoped the enemy council would at least give him the

benefit of the doubt.

Petty took his own shift waiting by the shortwave. He was grudgingly cooperative, even

helpful. Gray found it suspicious, and he wondered about the slan hunter’s true motives. The

secret police chief had been trying to gather his scattered operatives into a full-fledged defense,

but so far claimed no success. The President would have to rely on diplomacy, because he had

no military strength to fall back on.

Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, the crackling answer came when a sleepy Kathleen

was waiting at the radio, missing Jommy. “This is Authority Chief Altus Lorry representing the

tendrilless slans on Mars. We have received and considered your message. Your claims are as

unexpected as they are unbelievable. However, it is the feeling of this council that we should

give it due consideration. Therefore, we will send a representative to meet with you and hear

your case. After so many centuries of betrayal and distrust, you should expect no more than

that.”

Kathleen frantically answered. “Of course. We accept! I will have President Gray transmit

his suggestions to you.” She switched off the unit and ran through the house to wake everyone

up.

«
^
»

Under the great glass sky-ceiling of Cimmerium, the woman sat by herself on a red-rock

balcony. Peaceful, she looked out over the deep dry canyon, then turned her face upward and

closed her eyes, basking in the distant sunshine. Her light brown hair had grown back in

bristly patches, not long enough to be attractive but sufficient to cover the large scars on her

scalp.

Ingrid Corliss had been dead, or at least brain-dead, after a terrible spaceship accident on

Mars. Tendrilless medical knowledge had restored her, regrown the damaged parts of her

brain, and returned her to some semblance of life. With conditioning, mental priming, and

careful therapy, she had reached the limits of what her people could do for her. The doctors

had said that Ingrid would never be normal, that nothing could be done.

Until Jommy Cross came.

While infiltrating the city on Mars, Cross had found the injured woman. He had disguised

himself as Ingrid’s husband and used that deception to gather vital information about the

tendrilless plans for taking over the Earth. And, though he didn’t have to, he had helped to put

her brain back together…

Now, in the quiet and near-empty city, Jem Lorry stepped up behind the too-peaceful

woman, frowning. He could see what she must be thinking. Cross had a way of manipulating

people, brainwashing them into forgetting how evil he was.

Ingrid opened her eyes. She stiffened when she saw him. “I’m aware of what you want,

Mr. Lorry, but I can’t help you. I don’t know where Jommy Cross is.”

“You don’t know—or you refuse to tell us?”

She languidly reached up to scratch the scars on her scalp. “I won’t lie to you—I have no

desire to see him caught and punished.”

“Sympathizing with slans is treason, Mrs. Corliss.”

Her eyes lit up with anger. “You don’t understand, do you, Mr. Lorry? Jommy Cross gave

me my life back. He restored my mind. I would still be a vegetable were it not for him. He had

no obligation to help me, and no reason to. The tendrilless mean to destroy him and all true

slans. Why should he care about me? And yet he did.”

Jem wondered what it would feel like to strangle her. “Friendship and bleeding-heart

dreams have no place in politics. That young man doesn’t even know his own powers. He must

be stopped.”

“I owe him an obligation I can never repay. Given what he did for me, can you truly believe

that every slan is bad? The evidence does not lead to that conclusion.”

“The evidence I have is centuries of true slans killing the tendrilless, preventing us from

achieving a rightful place among the superior races of humanity. You know they bred us

without tendrils to prevent us from having powers like theirs. And then they began to kill us

off, one by one.”

“I believe there was killing on both sides, Mr. Lorry. So we should condemn Jommy Cross

and all other surviving slans for the sins of the fathers? Why not trace the crime all the way

back to Samuel Lann?”

Jem looked over the sheer drop to the bottom of the dry red gorge. Though the filtered

sunshine was warm enough, he continued to feel a chill in his bones. His father was a

doddering fool, the Authority members were passive and ineffective, and now this woman, a

tendrilless, seemed to be siding with the enemy.

“If you think we have nothing to fear from the true slans, then you haven’t realized the

insidious ways they continue to strike at us. In the past two months, sixteen babies have been

born with tendrils in Cimmerium—
here
, on our very doorstep! Somehow the slans have been

transmitting their mutation rays to Mars. That’s the only explanation.” He pointed a stern

finger at her. “Of course we couldn’t allow those babies to live. They would have grown up to

be spies among us, so we quickly destroyed them. Their parents have been arrested and are

currently undergoing detailed genetic profiling. I suspect they were true slans all along,

surgically modified to fit in among us.”

“You’re paranoid, Mr. Lorry.”

“I’m a realist.” He stormed away.

Unbothered, Ingrid Corliss lay back in the sun and closed her eyes, continuing to heal.

*

*

*

The Tendrilless Authority had called an emergency session to talk about the news they had

just received, the unexpected proposal from the President-in-hiding on Earth. When Jem

barged in, uninvited, his father looked down his nose at him. “You are not a member of this

council, my son.”

But I certainly should be. And one day after Earth is conquered, no one will deny me my right
.

He forced a respectful expression on his face. “But I’m sure I could help, given my

background. What is the basis for this session?”

His father scratched his neat white beard. “We’ve received a direct communication from

President Gray requesting a summit. He’s provided some rather disturbing historical

information that explains a great deal about our background. It even explains the babies

recently born with tendrils.”

“We already have an explanation for that. Anything Gray says is bound to be a trick.”

“Nevertheless, we should consider this carefully. Gray has requested that we send a

delegation to hear what he has to say.”

Jem leaned against a stone column, casual in front of his leaders. “It’s bound to be a trap.

You do not know Kier Gray the way I do, Father. None of you Authority members do. I

worked with him for years. If he truly is a slan, then he was working against us all along. As

President he pretended to be human, while plotting against his own kind. If he’d known I was

a tendrilless among them, he probably would have hurled me from the highest tower of the

palace.” Jem smiled. “Fortunately, there aren’t any towers left.”

One of the old men said in a creaky voice, “Nevertheless, President Gray has revealed

historical explanations that makes us question many of our preconceptions.”

“Take it with a grain of salt,” Jem said. “Gray is trying to save his skin. He’s working with

Jommy Cross, as far as we know.”

Altus seemed intrigued, and expected his son to be as well. “Ah, but hear him out, Jem. It