A small flame of irritation shot from beneath his eyes, smaller than the day before, but still a respectable, quite noticeable, luminous green jet.

“Sarco!” he said like he was uttering a curse. “That hyperwave disturbance is not important enough to discuss here. My esteemed colleague is a music lover and prone to give those minor disturbances more attention than they deserve.”

She had shot her wad, and at the wrong alien.

“Still,” she said, “that does show how far we are willing to go to avoid disturbing your people. That should reassure you as to our intentions.”

“Proper reassurance can only be supplied by your leader.”

With strangely mixed emotions-longing and irritation inexplicably intertwined-she thought, I am the leader here, mister bat, and you're stuck with me. But I wish my darn partner were here instead of way off cruising down some alien cornfield.

She didn't stop to question where that strange image came from-the vision of Derec at the other end of a green, green cornfield; the yearning for Derec was too intense; and then the answer to the dome problem struck her with that marvelous insight that can come only from one brain hemisphere communicating with the other, passing on the subconscious machinations of the one that are hidden from the other.

For the first time, she felt in command of the situation.

Chapter 10. Neuronius Strikes

Synapo was growing impatient with the she alien. The discussion was becoming tedious and unrewarding, and at the same time had not yet provided a suitable circumstance for embarrassing and discrediting his striking subordinate, Neuronius.

It was becoming more and more obvious that the small alien was in no sense a leader; that Synapo must somehow contrive to bring to his world a true leader of the aliens. In the meantime, he would have to direct Sarco to close the compensator and to start construction of the next one if, as he suspected, they were beginning to construct a second city on the other side of The Plain of Serenity.

Those were the thoughts that had led up to his last remark, and now the small, tedious alien was speaking again.

“There is no need to bring another leader to this world. You are looking at one. I had hoped to continue with the construction of our city, but that appears now to be impossible in view of your irrational fear that we have some insidious and covert plan to irrevocably disturb this planet.”

The manner and bearing of the little alien had changed; her voice had taken on a different timbre. Had Neuronius noticed the subtle changes?

He discounted her attempt to belittle them by use of the adjective irrational. Disparagement was a not uncommon diplomatic ploy that was sometimes effective, but not often so, yet still worth the gamble in her case. He recognized that, but would the haughty Neuronius recognize her ploy and properly discount it? Or would he let irritation distort his analysis?

And would Neuronius recognize those subtle changes in her demeanor that were pure telepathy, transmitting information more effectively than the spoken word.

“We have other, more compatible methods of cohabitating with you on this planet,” she continued. “The city under the dome in its present state would be essentially deactivated and serve merely as a coordination and communications center for the new effort.”

She had switched diplomatic techniques, discarding the superior, haughty manner-every bit as haughty as Neuronius-and was now the companionable, friendly tactician. That was indeed the sign of a genuine leader. Would Neuronius recognize that and be able to switch tactics himself?

She had abandoned her mission's preferred goal, apparently, and was regrouping around an alternative; again the sign of a true leader with full authority to make important field decisions.

“Please describe this compatible method of cohabitation,” Synapo said.

“Let me first ask a question. Do I, by myself, constitute a weather node, or my companion Jacob here, or our vehicle here with us in it?”

She had inclined her head toward the servant and pointed to the creation behind her, the vehicle.

“No,” Synapo replied. “None of those entities, singly or together, create a weather node. The thermal disturbance is too small and quickly dissipates.”

“Good,” she said. “We will switch, then, from an urban, energy-intensive mode to an agricultural, labor-intensive mode; from a centralized society to a dispersed society; from industrial products to agricultural products; from robot cities, which you feel compelled to cover with domes-your node compensators -to robot farms that you will find completely benign.”

Wohler-9 had not provided the agricultural and farm terminology, so Synapo could not immediately translate the small alien's words. He had to extrapolate from all that he had been told by her and by Wohler-9 and from all the previous data he had acquired by monitoring the aliens' hyperwave transmissions, but still it took him only a moment.

“By agriculture you mean the intentional cultivation of grasses and other plants like those growing on The Plain of Serenity and in The Forest of Repose; and by farms you mean the land subdivisions where this takes place. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” the small alien replied.

“We have been exceedingly patient with your invasion of our world. You did not inquire whether this was a reasonable thing to do, nor negotiate ahead of time a suitable program for doing so, and when it did not prove to be reasonable, and we took steps to isolate the disturbance in as minimal a way as possible, you killed two of our people.

“Yes, we have been patient beyond any reasonable translation of that word, and now I'm going to ask that you be as patient with us today as we have been with you these many days past. Your patience will be tried, not by violence and death-as ours has been-but by boredom and ennui as we carry out, as we must, the rituals of our government as they were set up uncounted millennia ago.

“At that time an ancient Cerebronian philosopher by the name of Petero observed that all of our levels of government were filled by incompetents, that indeed government officials rose to their ultimate level of competence and then one level beyond, where they then remained, incompetent, for lack of ability to advance further.

“The observation was so striking and so self -evident that it became known as Petero's Principle, and all government was immediately reorganized to include the strike factor, whereby any official may be declared incompetent and displaced merely by a subordinate showing greater competence at that higher level.

“That, by definition, proves that the former official was incompetent, that is, not as competent as he could have been; and the process of proof, whatever form it takes, is known as striking for the higher position.

“So I now turn responsibility for these proceedings over to my subordinate, Neuronius, so that he may evaluate and respond to your proposal.”

As he made the last statement, Synapo graciously gestured in Neuronius's direction and carefully watched his subordinate for involuntary reflexes, the body language, the telepathy that would tell him what was going through his subordinate's mind.

And if Axonius were competent for command, he would also be studying the mindset that Neuronius would be bodycasting-broadcasting with his body. And Axonius would take that into consideration when he finally rendered his detailed analysis and final judgment of Neuronius in a caucus of the Cerebron elite.

So in a sense, not only Neuronius and Synapo, but Axonius as well, was on trial, for it would be the Cerebron elite, in caucus, who would render the final judgment that would restructure the government of the Cerebrons, if this immediate negotiation proved to be a decisive node in their history.