INTERVENTION Read Online Free PDF Page A

merely because both races are so revoltingly fecund."
    "So speed the great day of Earth's Coadúnate Number," Pilti said, lowering her eyes in piety. And then she grinned at the female Simb. "By the way, my dear, did I tell you I was pregnant again?"
    "Is this a time for vulgar levity?" cried Adalasstam, gesturing at the wall-screen.
    "No," Pilti said. "But not a time for despair, either."
    Rimi said, "The Amalgam of Poltroy has confidence that the human race will pull back from the brink of Mind destruction. In friendship, let me point out to our esteemed Simbiari Uniates that we of Poltroy belong to a very old race. We have studied many more emerging worlds than you have. There has been at least one exception to the correlation between atomic weaponry and racial suicide. Us."
    The three green-skinned entities assumed a long-suffering mental linkage. Elder Laricham acknowledged the point with cool formality.
    "Oh, that's so true!" burbled the Gi. It wore a sunny smile, and its pseudomammary areolae, which had been bleached and shrunken by its horrific experience, began to re-engorge and assume their normal electric pink color. "I'd forgotten what bloodthirsty brutes you Poltroyans were in your primitive years. No wonder you feel a psychic affinity to the Earthlings."
    "And no wonder
we
don't," Elder Laricham growled. He crinkled his features to stem the flow of green. "Earth is a lost cause, I tell you." He pointed melodramatically to the screen. "The principals in the current conflict, Islanders and Westerners, are certain to remain deadly antagonists for the next three generations at the very least. There will be fresh wars of vengeance and retaliation between these two nations so highly charged with ethnic dynamism, then global annihilation. The Galactic Milieu's overly subtle educative effort has been in vain. We will surely have to abandon Earth—at least until its next cycle of high civilization."
    "It's the Concilium's decision, not yours," Rimi said flatly. "Any word yet, Doka'eloo Eebak?"
    The fearsome-looking officer sat motionless except for a single tentacle that flicked emerald mucus blobs toward the floor scuppers in nonjudgmental but relentless tidiness. Doka'eloo opened his stupendous farsensing faculty to the others so that they might envision the Concilium Orb, a hollow planetoid more than four thousand light-years away in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. In the central sanctum of the Orb, the governing body of the Coadúnate Galactic Milieu had finally completed its deliberation upon the fate of Earth's Mind. The data had been analyzed and a poll of magnates was taken. The result flashed to the receptor ultrasense of Doka'eloo with the speed of thought.
    He said, "The Poltroyan Amalgam voted in favor of maintaining the Milieu's involvement with Earth. The Krondak, Gi, and Simbiari magnates voted to discontinue our guidance—giving a majority in favor of disengagement."
    "There!" exclaimed Adalasstam. "What did I tell you?"
    "We can't let their music die," NupNup Nunl grieved. "Not Sibelius! Not Schoenberg and Duke Ellington!"
    But the Krondaku was not finished. "This negative verdict of the Concilium magnates was summarily vetoed by the Lylmik Supervisory Body."
    "Sacred Truth and Beauty!" whispered Elder Laricham. "The
Lylmik
intervened in such a trivial affair? Astounding!"
    "But wonderful," cried the two little Poltroyans, embracing.
    The Gi shook its fluffy head. Its ovarian externalia trembled on the verge of cerise. "A Lylmik veto! I can't think when such a thing ever happened before."
    "Long before your race attained coadunation," Doka'eloo told the hermaphrodite. "Before the Poltroyans and Simbiari learned to use stone tools and fire. That is to say, three hundred forty-two thousand, nine hundred and sixty-two standard years ago."
    In the awestruck mental silence that followed, the Krondaku signaled Adalasstam to change the image on the wall-screen. The picture of the devastated Island city melted