Complete Short Fiction, page 178
Quadrillions of the beads formed; and, though once again they seemed no different from similar acids created as a result of other irritations, the difference began to manifest itself half an hour after the brontosaurus grunted its final agony.
The ibis tree and its companions exuded a fragrance in the form of billions on billions of tiny dust motes. Some of these motes drifted down to the, dinosaur, and were gulped into its lungs from where, in due course, they were absorbed into its bloodstream.
The response was not instantly apparent. After several hours, the dinosaur’s gigantic stomach was satiated. It stalked off to wallow and sleep in a mudhole, quickly made extraodorous by its own enormous droppings and passings, a process that continued as easily in sleep as during consciousness.
Waking, it had no difficulty scenting the unrefrigerated meat of its recent kill. It raced over eagerly to resume feeding, slept and ate again, and then again.
It took several days for its untiring digestion to absorb the brontosaurus to the extent that it was once more ravenously hungry.
Oddly, then, it didn’t go hunting, Instead, it wandered around aimless and terribly restless, looking for carrion. All around, amphibians and snakes moved and had their being—ideal prey. The dinosaur showed no interest.
Except for hopelessly inadequate carrion of small reptiles, it spent the next week starving to death in the midst of plenty.
On the fifteenth day a trio of small, common dinosaurs came across its wasted body, and ate it without noticing that it was still alive.
On the wings of a thousand breezes, the fragrant spores drifted. There was no end to them. Eighty-three ibis trees had started manufacturing that for which they had been created; and, once started, there was no stopping.
The spores did not take root. That wasn’t what they were for. They drifted; they hung in the eddies above quiet glades, sinking reluctantly towards the dank earth, but always swift to accept the embrace of a new wind, so light, so airy themselves that journeys halfway around the earth proved not beyond their capabilities.
In their wake they left a trail of corpses among the killer reptiles. Once tantalized by the sweet-scented motes, the most massive murderers in the history of the planet lost their brutality, their will to kill—and died like poisoned flies.
It took time of course, but of that at least there was a plenitude. Each dead carnivore provided carrion meat for the hungry hordes that roamed the land; and so after a fashion, over the decades, tens of thousand of individuals lived on because of the very abundance of dead meat eaters.
In addition there was a normal death rate among the non-meat eaters that had always provided a measure of easy food; and since there were fewer meat eaters every year, the supply of meat per capita increased, at first gradually, and then with a suddenness and totality that was devastating.
The death of so many killers had created an imbalance between the carnivore and their prey. The vegetarians in their already huge numbers began to breed almost without danger. The young grew up in a world that would have been idyllic except for one-thing: There was not enough food.
Every bit of reachable green, every root, vegetable and shoot was snatched by eager jaws before it could begin to mature.
For a time the remnants of the killers-feasted. And then, once more, a balance was struck—that ended again and again as the prolific vegetarians dropped their young into a world made peaceful by the exudation of plants that couldn’t stand brutality, yet felt nothing when death came by starvation.
The centuries poured their mist of forgetfulness over each bloody dip of that fateful seesaw. And all the while, as the millenniums slipped by, the ibis maintained their peaceful existence. For long and long it was peaceful, without incident of any kind. For a hundred thousand years the stately silver trees stood on their almost-island, and were content.
During that vast expanse of time, the still unstable earth had rocked many times to the shattering and re-forming fury of colossal earthquakes, but it was not until they were well into their second hundred thousandth year that they were again affected.
A continent was rift and torn. The gap was about a thousand miles long, and in some places as much as twenty-five miles deep. It cut the edge of the island, and plummetted the ibis tree into an abyss three miles deep.
Water raged into the hole, and dirt came roaring down in almost liquid torrents. Shocked and buried, the ibis tree “succumbed to its new environment. It sank rapidly to the state of a root struggling to remain alive against hostile forces’;
It was three thousand years later that the second last act of the ibis, trees was played out on the surface of the planet.
A ship clothed in myriad colors slipped down through the murk and the gloom of the steaming jungle planet that was Cretaceous earth. As it approached the silverhued grove, it braked its enormous speed, and came to a full stop directly over the island in the marsh.
It was a much smaller machine than the grand liner that had crashed to a fiery destruction so many, many years before. But it was big enough to disgorge, after a short interval, six graceful patrol boats.
Swiftly, the boats sped to the ground.
The creatures who emerged from them were two-legged and twoarmed, but there the resemblance to human form ended.
They walked on rubbery land with the ease and confidence of absolute masters. Water was no barrier; they strode over it as if they were made of so much buoyant fluff. Reptiles they ignored; and for some reason, whenever a meeting threatened, it was the beasts that turned aside, hissing with fear.
The beings seemed to have a profound natural understanding of purposes, for there was no speech among them.
Without a sound or waste motion, a platform was floated into position above a small hill. The platform emitted no visible or audible force, but beneath it the soil spumed and ripped. A section of the drive chamber of the old, great ship catapulted into the air, and was field captive by invisible beams.
No dead thing this. It sparkled and shone with radiant energy. Exposed to the air, it hissed and roared like the deadly machine it was. Torrents of fire poured from it until something—something green—was fired at it from a long gunlike tube.
The greenness must have been a-energy, and potent out of all proportion to its size. Instantly, the roaring, the hissing, the flaring of the energy in the drive chamber was snuffed out. As surely as if it were a living thing mortally struck, the metal lost its life.
The super-beings turned their concentrated attention on the grove of ibis trees. First they counted them. Then they cut incisions into several roots, and extracted a length of white pith from each. These were taken to the parent ship, and subjected to chemical examination.
It was in this way that the discovery was made that there had been eighty-three trees. An intensive search for the missing tree began.
But the mighty rent in the planet’s great belly had been filled in by drift and mud and water. Not a trace of it remained.
“It must be concluded,” the commander noted finally in his logbook, “that the lost ibis was destroyed by one of the calamities so common on unfinished planets. Unfortunately great damage has already been done to the natural evolution of the jungle life. Because of this accelerated development, intelligence, when it finally does emerge, will be dangerously savage in its outlook.
“The time lapse involved precludes all advance recommendations for rectification.”
Eighty million years passed.
Wagner hurried along the quiet suburban road and through the gate. He was a thick beefy soldier with cold blue eyes, coming home on leave; and at first, as he kissed his wife, he didn’t notice that there had been bomb damage to his house.
He finally saw the silver tree.
He stared.
He was about to exclaim, when he noticed that one whole wing of the house was an empty shell, a single wall standing vacuously in a precarious balance.
“Die!-!?!-!?!? Americannerin!” he bellowed murderously. “!-!?-!!?!-?-!”
It was less than an hour later that the sensitive ibis tree began to give off a delicious perfume.
First Germany, then the rest of the world breathed the spreading “peace.”
It all worked out as beautifully as that.
THE END.
1945
THE MIXED MEN
It was a mad sort of position for him; he was hereditary ruler of one side, and rightful ruler by marriage of the other. But both sides, distrusting him—used him as a pawn!
The globe was palely luminous, and about three feet in diameter. It hung in the air at approximately the center of the room, and its lowest arc was at the level of Maltby’s chin.
Frowning, his double mind tensed, he climbed farther out of the bed, put on his slippers, and walked slowly around the light-shape.
As he stepped past it, it vanished.
He twisted hastily back—and there it was again.
Maltby allowed himself a grim smile. It was as he had thought, a projection pointing out of sub-space at his bed, and having no material existence in the room. Therefore, it couldn’t be seen from the rear.
His frown deepened with gathering puzzlement. If he didn’t know that they did not possess such a communicator, he’d guess that he was about to be advised that the time had come for action.
He hoped not, fervently. He was as far as ever from a decision. Yet who else would be trying to reach him?
The impulse came to touch the button that would connect the control center of the big spaceship with what was going on in his room. It wouldn’t do to have Gloria think that he was in secret communication with outsiders.
Maltby smiled grimly. If she ever got suspicious, even the fact that he was married to her wouldn’t save his two minds from being investigated by the ship’s psychologist, Lieutenant Neslor. Still—
He had other commitments than marriage. He sat down on the bed, scowled at the thing, and said:
“I’m going to make an assumption as to your identity. What do you want?”
A voice, a very strong, confident voice spoke through the globe:
“You think you know who is calling, in spite of the unusual means?”
Maltby recognized the voice. His eyes narrowed, he swallowed hard; then he had control of himself. Memory came that there might be other listeners, who would draw accurate conclusions from his instant recognition of a voice. It was for them that he said:
“The logic of it is comparatively simple. I am a Mixed Man aboard the Earth battleship Star Cluster, which is cruising in the Fifty Suns region of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Who would be trying to get in touch with me but the Hidden Ones of my own race?”
“Knowing this.” said the voice pointedly, “you have nevertheless made no attempt to betray us?”
Maltby was silent. He wasn’t sure he liked that remark. Like his own words, he recognized that these were aimed at possible listeners. But it was not a friendly act to call the attention of those listeners to the fact that he was keeping this conversation to himself.
More sharply than before it struck him that he had better remember his political situation both here on the ship, and out there. And weigh every word as he uttered it.
Born a Mixed Man, Maltby had been captured as a child by the Dellian and non-Dellian robots of the Fifty Suns, and educated to a point where he felt a semiloyalty to his captors. Years of a life in which he was never quite trusted had culminated in his being assigned to destroy the Earth battleship.
In this he had only been partially successful, the end result having been a forcible re-shaping of his minds to be sympathetic to Earth. And this, in its turn, had ended in marriage to the youthful and dynamic Lady Laurr, commander of the mightiest war machine that had ever entered the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
As a result of his varied experience, he now had three sympathies.
That was the trouble. Three sympathies. He understood the motivations and beliefs, not only of the Dellian and non-Dellian robots, but also of the hidden race of Mixed Men and of the human beings from the main galaxy.
Literally, he couldn’t take sides against any of them. His only hope, long held now, was that somewhere amid the welter of conflicting fears and desires was a solution that would be satisfactory to all three groups.
He knew better than to expect that such a hope would occur to any of the three. It was time he spoke again, and it would be advisable to bring the identity of the man beyond the light-tiling into the open. He stared at it, and said curtly: “Who are you?”
“Hunston!”
“Oh!” said Maltby.
His surprise was not altogether simulated. There was a difference between an inward recognition of a voice, and having that recognition verbally verified. The implications of the identity somehow sank in deeper:
Hunston, his enemy among the Mixed Men, and for many years now the acting leader.
Softly, Maltby repeated an earlier question: “What do you want?”
“Your diplomatic support.” Maltby said: “My what?”
The voice grew resonant and proud:
“In accordance with our belief, which you must surely share, that the Mixed Men are entitled to an equal part in the government of the Fifty Suns, regardless of the smallness of their numbers, I have today ordered that control be seized of every planet in the System. At this moment the armies of the Mixed Men, backed by the greatest assembly of super-weapons known in any galaxy, are carrying out landing operations, and will shortly attain control. You—”
The voice paused; then quietly: “You are following me, Captain Maltby?”
The question was like the silence after a clap of thunder.
Slowly, Maltby emerged from the hard shock of the news. He climbed to his feet, then sank back again. Consciousness came finally that, though the world had changed, the room was still there. The room and the light-globe and himself.
Anger came then like a leaping fire. Savagely, he snapped:
“You gave this order—”
He caught himself. His brain geared to lightning comprehension, he examined the implications of the information. At last, with a bleak realization that in his position he could not argue the matter, he said:
“You’re depending on acceptance of a fait accompli. What I know of the unalterable policies of Imperial Earth, convinces me your hope is vain.”
“On the contrary,” came the quick reply. “Only Grand Captain, the Lady Laurr must be persuaded. She has full authority to act as she sees fit. And she is your wife.”
Cooler now, Maltby hesitated. It was interesting that Hunston, having acted on his own, was now seeking his support. Not too interesting though. What really held Maltby silent was the sudden realization that he had known something like this would happen—had known it from the very instant the news had been flashed that an Earth battleship had discovered the robot civilization of the Fifty Suns many months ago now.
Ten years, five years, even one year hence, the seal of Earth’s approval would be set forever on the Fifty Suns democratic system as it was.
And the laws of that government expressly excluded the Mixed Men from any participation whatsoever. At this moment, this month, a change was still theoretically possible. After that—
It was clear that he personally had been too slow in making up his mind. The passions of other men had surged to thoughts of action, and finally to action itself. He would have to leave the ship somehow, and find out what was going on. For the moment, however, caution was the word. Maltby said:
“I am not averse to presenting your arguments to my wife. But some of your statements do not impress me in the slightest. You have said the greatest assembly of superweapons in any galaxy. I admit this method of using sub-space radio is new to me, but your statement as a whole must be nonsense.
“You cannot possibly know the weapons possessed by even this one battleship because, in spite of all my opportunity. I don’t know. It is a safe assumption, furthermore, that no one ship can carry some of the larger weapons that Earth could muster at short notice anywhere in the charted universe.
“You cannot, isolated as we have all been, so much as guess what those weapons are, let alone declare with certainty that yours are better. Therefore, my question in that connection is this: why did you even mention such an implied threat? Of all your arguments, it is the least likely to rouse any enthusiasm for your cause. Well?”
On the main bridge of the big ship, the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily turned from the viewing plate, which showed Maltby’s room. Her fine face was crinkled with thought. She said slowly to the other woman:
“What do you make of it, Lieutenant Neslor?”
The ship’s psychologist said steadily: “I think, noble lady, this is the moment we discussed when you first asked me what would be the psychological effects of your marriage to Peter Maltby.”
The grand captain stared at her subordinate in astonishment. “Are you mad? His reaction has been correct in every detail. He has told me at great length his opinions of the situation in the Fifty Suns; and every word he has spoken fits. He—”
There was a soft buzz from the intership radio. A man’s head and shoulders came onto the plate. He said:
“Draydon, Commander of Comimmications speaking. In reference to your question about the ultrawave radio now focused in your husband’s bedroom, a similar device was invented in the main galaxy about a hundred and ninety years ago. The intention was to install it into all the new warships, and into all the older ships above cruiser size, but we were on our way before mass production began.
“In this field at least, therefore, the Mixed Men have equaled the greatest inventions of human creative genius, though it is difficult to know how so few could accomplish so much. The very smallness of their numbers makes it highly probable that they are not aware that our finders would instantly report the presence of their energy manifestation. They cannot possibly have discovered all the by-products of their invention. Any questions, noble lady?”
