Watchers of the Dark by Lloyd Biggle jr.

ago.”
    EIGHT returned and joined him on the terrace. “The others have arrived,” he said. “The Council awaits you.”
    They sat around the huge cylindrical table in numerical order: eight monsters and, located between ONE and EIGHT, Jan Darzek. After his initial shock Darzek did not look at them directly. His mind refused to assimilate the details that his senses provided. He saw them as eight grotesque blurs, each with a characteristic or two that overlapped into stark reality: the long, tapering tentacles that bristled out of the SIX blur; the three protruding antennae of TWO that blossomed into large eyes at their tips; the two faceless heads of THREE. SEVEN was a bundle of sticks behind a tinted, vaguely transparent light shield, and his stringy body pulsated with ceaseless internal grindings. FOUR was a detached voice emitted by a box that he placed on the table in front of him. FIVE was a collapsed ball, almost indistinguishable from the hassock it perched upon. Chameleon-like, his leathery body had assumed the hassock’s dull-brown color as soon as he landed upon it with a dull plop. ONE was a double row of appendages, each equipped with suckerlike discs.
    They were eight animates, of contrasting and contradictory form and tissue, and their origins were eight widely separated, contrasting and contradictory worlds. They held in common only their galaxy, their Councillorships, their presence around the Council table, their fluency in large-talk, and, in relative degree, their consternation. Darzek hesitated to call them frightened—he would more readily have assigned emotions to the chair he sat on—but as the meeting progressed all showed signs of agitation.
    They were severely divided upon the subject of the Dark and what should be done about it. More specifically, they had sharply conflicting opinions as to the role to be played by Jan Darzek.
    SIX waved his tentacles despairingly. “I disapproved of this when it was proposed. I still disapprove. How can one uncertified creature thwart the Dark?”
    “Supreme knows,” EIGHT intoned.
    “Supreme knows!” SIX hissed scornfully. “Supreme knows nothing about the Dark! It admits that!”
    EIGHT turned on him angrily and half rose from his hassock. “Supreme expects us to make some feeble use of that inert cell tissue we choose to call our brains. The uncertified creature’s mission is not to thwart the Dark, but to learn about it, to identify it, above all to discover what weapon it uses. That was our question: by what means, or through what medium, can we find out these things, and Supreme named this uncertified creature. Why I have no more idea than you. Supreme never explains. Until now no Councillor has ever questioned its judgment.”
    “Until now it has never had the Dark to contend with,” SIX muttered.
    TWO leaned forward to point his remote eyes at Darzek. “The Dark’s weapon is almost certainly mental. Does the uncertified creature possess a defense against mental weapons?”
    “He says that he does not,” EIGHT said.
    “Does his kind embrace death eagerly?” SEVEN asked. “Desperate our need is, but we cannot send him to what I consider certain death unless he knows the risk he assumes and goes willingly.”
    “He asked for payment according to the standards of his kind, and the certification group responsible for his world has tendered the requested solvency. He knows the risk he assumes, and he goes willingly.”
    “We’re wasting time,” SIX rumbled gloomily. “With each movement the Dark digests what it has consumed more quickly. And with each movement it consumes more.”
    They fell silent, all of them looking at Darzek—all except FIVE, the eyeless one, who remained collapsed in his headless mound of folded membrane. SIX braided and unbraided his long, sinewy tentacles. TWO—Darzek could not decide whether he wore tightly fitting garments or loosely fitting skin—hunched an enormous, pulsating abdomen over the edge of the