more likely to have been the one who was arrested.
Trying to keep all this new information straight was a lot of trouble. The things that Giyt felt he had to do kept getting in the way of the things he wanted to do, and Evesham Giyt wasn't used to that. It wasn't the work he minded. Giyt thrived on work, but the kind of work he thrived on was the heady challenge of matching wits against the best security programs anybody had devised, or solving some tricky problem in the net someone else had given up on.
Of course, there were a few tricky problems waiting for him if he ever got around to them—fixing up those crappy translation programs, for instance, or maybe taking the time to solve the protocols for the Slug and Centaurian and all the other alien communications systems. But that was just another kind of drudgery. Protracted drudgery, too, because any of that would take a lot of time; just writing a conversion program for the net belonging to the Petty-Primes had used up several of those priceless pre-dawn mornings.
Giyt almost longed for the old days in his Bal Harbor slide, when he could daydream or scheme about the conquest of Guatemala or Thailand in as much detail, and for as long, as he liked, with no constraints on his time except the ones he imposed on himself.
Actually, Giyt did manage a little of that daydreaming. It came from his tap into the Petty-Prime system.
The things that Giyt saw when he looked in on the Petty-Primes weren't all that interesting in themselves; in fact, they were almost always either hopelessly confusing or terminally dull. The Petty-Prime local news programs were even less interesting than the humans'. Perhaps the Petty-Primes themselves thought so, too, because most of their transmission time was spent on those interminable soap-opera things or on sports events or on horrible cacophonous music. The dramatic programs he couldn't figure out and the music he couldn't stand at all, but the sports kept him interested for a while. He tried to deduce the rules of the games—the one, for instance, in which two teams of eighteen or twenty Petty-Primes confronted each other in an arena. Each of the players carried a little live reptile the size of a shrew, and when they released them the creatures streaked for the opposite team, which did its best to stomp them into mush. That much was clear, but how the game was scored or who won, Giyt could not tell. Or the other kind of contest in which two Petty-Primes engaged in barehanded combat—but had their work cut out for them if they wanted to do each other any real harm, because they were tied to each other, back to back. Or the one—
Well, they were all pretty weird, but then, Giyt thought, probably the Petty-Primes would feel the same way about, for instance, ice hockey or sumo wrestling. What the Petty-Prime sports events did for Giyt was to give him a feeling for the funny little creatures as real people, with all their own habits and faults and relationships and interests.
That was where the new varieties of daydreams started. Giyt wondered if the Petty-Primes had their own history of wars and invasions and conquests. And then he began to think of how you might go about conquering the world of the Petty-Primes.
Thinking of it purely as an intellectual enterprise, it didn't seem that it would be all that hard to do. There didn't appear to be any large military forces among the Petty-Primes, though to be sure, a sports arena was not the most probable place to look for them. But even if they had combat-ready troops and an arsenal, surely Earth weaponry could take them out in a fair fight.
He considered how you could go about getting Earth forces to a place where that fair fight could happen. The first thing to do, he decided, was to transmit some heavy-duty mass killer weapon through the terminal to wipe out all the Petty-Primes nearby, then a couple of divisions of fast : moving armor to establish a beachhead. What sort of weapons
Trying to keep all this new information straight was a lot of trouble. The things that Giyt felt he had to do kept getting in the way of the things he wanted to do, and Evesham Giyt wasn't used to that. It wasn't the work he minded. Giyt thrived on work, but the kind of work he thrived on was the heady challenge of matching wits against the best security programs anybody had devised, or solving some tricky problem in the net someone else had given up on.
Of course, there were a few tricky problems waiting for him if he ever got around to them—fixing up those crappy translation programs, for instance, or maybe taking the time to solve the protocols for the Slug and Centaurian and all the other alien communications systems. But that was just another kind of drudgery. Protracted drudgery, too, because any of that would take a lot of time; just writing a conversion program for the net belonging to the Petty-Primes had used up several of those priceless pre-dawn mornings.
Giyt almost longed for the old days in his Bal Harbor slide, when he could daydream or scheme about the conquest of Guatemala or Thailand in as much detail, and for as long, as he liked, with no constraints on his time except the ones he imposed on himself.
Actually, Giyt did manage a little of that daydreaming. It came from his tap into the Petty-Prime system.
The things that Giyt saw when he looked in on the Petty-Primes weren't all that interesting in themselves; in fact, they were almost always either hopelessly confusing or terminally dull. The Petty-Prime local news programs were even less interesting than the humans'. Perhaps the Petty-Primes themselves thought so, too, because most of their transmission time was spent on those interminable soap-opera things or on sports events or on horrible cacophonous music. The dramatic programs he couldn't figure out and the music he couldn't stand at all, but the sports kept him interested for a while. He tried to deduce the rules of the games—the one, for instance, in which two teams of eighteen or twenty Petty-Primes confronted each other in an arena. Each of the players carried a little live reptile the size of a shrew, and when they released them the creatures streaked for the opposite team, which did its best to stomp them into mush. That much was clear, but how the game was scored or who won, Giyt could not tell. Or the other kind of contest in which two Petty-Primes engaged in barehanded combat—but had their work cut out for them if they wanted to do each other any real harm, because they were tied to each other, back to back. Or the one—
Well, they were all pretty weird, but then, Giyt thought, probably the Petty-Primes would feel the same way about, for instance, ice hockey or sumo wrestling. What the Petty-Prime sports events did for Giyt was to give him a feeling for the funny little creatures as real people, with all their own habits and faults and relationships and interests.
That was where the new varieties of daydreams started. Giyt wondered if the Petty-Primes had their own history of wars and invasions and conquests. And then he began to think of how you might go about conquering the world of the Petty-Primes.
Thinking of it purely as an intellectual enterprise, it didn't seem that it would be all that hard to do. There didn't appear to be any large military forces among the Petty-Primes, though to be sure, a sports arena was not the most probable place to look for them. But even if they had combat-ready troops and an arsenal, surely Earth weaponry could take them out in a fair fight.
He considered how you could go about getting Earth forces to a place where that fair fight could happen. The first thing to do, he decided, was to transmit some heavy-duty mass killer weapon through the terminal to wipe out all the Petty-Primes nearby, then a couple of divisions of fast : moving armor to establish a beachhead. What sort of weapons
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