Galactic Empires 2, page 30
Kelburn stiffened, mingled pride and chagrin on his face. His math had been correct, as far as he had figured it. But had there been any reason to assume that they would confine their exploration to one direction? No, they would want to cover the whole Milky Way.
Taphetta paled. Four times as many humans to contend with! He hadn’t met the other three-fourths yet—and, for him, it wasn’t at all a pleasant thought
‘After long preparation, we sent several ships to settle one of the nearer planets that we’d selected on the first expedition. To our dismay, we found that the plague was there—though it hadn’t been on our first visit!’
Halden frowned. They were proving themselves less and less expert biologists. And this plague—there had to be a reason to leave, and sickness was as good as any—but unless he was mistaken, plague wasn’t used in the strict semantic sense. It might be the fault of the translation.
‘The colonists refused to settle; they came back at once and reported. We sent out our fastest ships, heavily armed. We didn’t have the time to retrace our path completely, for we’d stopped at innumerable places. What we did was to check a few planets, the outward and return parts of all four voyages. In every place, the plague was there, too, and we knew that we were responsible.
‘We did what we could. Exhausting our nuclear armament, we obliterated the nearest planets on each of the four spans of our journeys.’
‘I wondered why the route came to an end,” crinkled Taphetta, but there was no comment, no answer.
‘We reconstructed what had happened. For a long time, the plague had lived in our sewers, subsisting on wastes. At night, because they are tiny and move exceedingly fast, they were able to make their way into our ships and were aboard on every journey. We knew they were there, but because they were so small, it was difficult to dislodge them from their nesting places. And so we tolerated their existence.’
‘They weren’t so smart,’ said Taphetta. ‘We figured out that angle long ago. True, our ship is an exception, but we haven’t landed anywhere, and won’t until we deverminize it’
‘We didn’t guess that next to the hull in outer space and consequently exposed to hard radiation,’ the message went on, ‘those tiny creatures would mutate dangerously and escape to populate the planets we landed on. They had always been loathsome little beasts that walked instead of rolling or creeping, but now they became even more vicious, spawning explosively and fighting with the same incessant violence. They had always harboured diseases which spread to us, but now they’ve become hot-houses for still smaller parasites that also are able to infect us. Finally, we are now allergic to them, and when they are within miles of us, it is agony to roll or creep.’
Taphetta looked around. ‘Who would have thought it? You were completely mistaken as to your origin.’ Kelburn was staring vacantly ahead, but didn’t see a thing. Meredith was leaning against Halden; her eyes were closed. ‘The woman has finally chosen, now that she knows she was once vermin,’ clicked the Ribboneer. ‘But there are tears in her eyes.’
‘The intelligence of the beast has advanced slightly, though there isn’t much difference between the highest and the lowest—and we have checked both ends of all four journeys. But before, it was relatively calm and orderly. Now it is malignantly insane.’
Taphetta rattled his ribbons. ‘Turn it off. You don’t have to listen to this. We all are of some origin or other and it wasn’t necessarily pretty. This being was a slug of some kind—and are you now what is describes? Perhaps mentally a little, out of pride, but the pride was false.’
‘We can’t demolish all the planets we unthinkingly let it loose on; there are too many and it lives too fast. The stars drift and we would lose some, and before we could eliminate the last one, it would develop space travel—it has little intelligence, but it could get that far—and it would escape ahead of us. We know an impossible task when we see it. And so we’re leaving, first making sure that this animal will never make use of the products of our civilization. It may reach this planet, but it will not be able to untangle our code—it’s too stupid. You who will have to face it, please forgive us. It’s the only thing that we’re ashamed of.’
‘Don’t listen,’ said the Ribboneer and, bending his broad, thin body, he sprang to the translator, shook it and banged with his ribbons until the machine was silent. ‘You don’t have to tell anyone,’ crackled Taphetta. ‘Don’t worry about me—I won’t repeat it.’ He looked around at the faces. ‘But I can see that you will report to everyone exactly what you found. That pride you’ve developed—you’ll need it.’
Taphetta sat on top of the machine, looking like nothing so much as a huge fancy bow on a gift-wrapped package.
They noted the resemblance vaguely. But each of them knew that, as a member of the most numerous race in the Milky Way, no longer feared for their mysterious qualities—despised, instead—wherever they went, there would never be any gifts for them—for any man.
There’s a great difference between potential and developed power. The one is clearly visible and can be awe-inspiring. The other may take a demigod to recognize.
THE INTERLOPERS
By Roger Dee
For the brief time that the intercepting craft hung on the ship’s foreign-body screen, Clowdis felt himself pulled taut as wire with the strain of uncertainty. When the expected finger of the communications beam reached across the distance and he saw the reddish reptilian face of the other commander, and the faces of others like him ranked in the alien control room behind, his sigh of relaxing tension was not an expression of relief but of resignation.
‘Korivians,’ Vesari said, unnecessarily, from the navigator’s place beside him. T’sai bodyguards—and from the number of them, there’s bound to be some T’sai aboard. We’re going to meet the galactic masters at last, Ed.’
Without turning his head, Clowdis called: ‘Shassil!’
Their Cetian interpreter came forward at once, his oddly angled body tensing and his narrow goatish face taking on the galactic’s inevitable air of deference when he saw the faces on the screen.
‘Find out what they want of us,’ Clowdis said.
The Cetian touched his beard respectfully—not to himself, Clowdis noted, but to the Korivian captain on the screen—and spoke in a swift rush of sibilance. The Korivian answered in turn, beaked lizard-face expressionless as reddish stone.
Shassil touched his caprine beard again and turned from the screen. ‘You are to shut down the ship’s engines,’ he said to Clowdis, ‘and gather all hands below.’
Neither Clowdis nor Vesari, knowing themselves as far out of their depth as kittens in a computing room, considered demanding why. But Vesari paused at the down-spiraling ramp of a companionway and Clowdis, feeling a curiously unreal sense of experiment, paused with him.
‘What do you think they want, Shassil?’ Vesari asked.
The Cetian considered him gravely with long-pupilled eyes. ‘When a T’sai is near,’ he said, ‘I do not think at all.’
A literal truth, Clowdis thought as he went with Vesari down the steep twist of helicline, and not one confined to Shassil nor to Cetians alone. A hundred thousand races from rim to rim of the galaxy—the least of them, so far as Clowdis had seen, older and wiser and infinitely stronger than his own upstart culture—suspended opinion when the T’sai spoke.
As if the T’sai were not flesh like other creatures, but gods. But were they flesh?
Clowdis smothered an incipient flare of resentment by reminding himself that he was after all a newt in strange waters, a minnow among sharks.
When in Rome one does as the Romans do, he told himself wryly. When in space—
‘First things first,’ he said aloud. We’d better break the news to Buehl in the engine room before we see Barbour and the colonists.’
Powermaster Buehl took the T’sai order with a bellicose impatience that was an index to his temper. A thick-bodied and heavy-minded man of middle age, given when off duty to solitary drinking and deadly serious absorption in his collection of Wagnerian tapes, he was devoted to his atomic charges with a singleness of soul which Clowdis, who had gone to space for the sheer restless love of seeing, had never been able to understand.
‘Draw my men from their stations?’ Buehl demanded angrily when Clowdis found him at his engine-room desk. ‘Damp the piles, kill the ship?’
He had an incredulous mental picture of the ship not driven but drifting, helpless as a crippled fish in treacherous waters, an image sharply defined within the familiar bounds of his power section but growing vaguer when extended to minor reaches of cargo holds and crew quarters and many-tiered bunking cubicles filled with chattering, cow-eyed colonists. Control section and hydroponics, galley and hospital bay did not register at all in Buehl’s regard because they lay in the seldom-visited and dispensable upper level; the power that drove the ship like a metal thunderbolt through space was everything to him, and he would no more have throttled it voluntarily in midflight than he would have taken a blade to his own throat.
‘This is the moment we’ve dreaded since we first touched at Sirius ten years ago,’ Clowdis reminded him. ‘There are T’sai out there, Buehl. Get your men to crew quarters on the double, or I’ll iron you and put Simmonds on the engines.’
The threat defeated Buehl as no other could have, as Clowdis had known it must. The Powermaster gave the order from his desk communicator, but did not follow when his puzzled subordinates filed past him out of the power room. He remained in place, glowering through the uneasy silence that followed the sudden cessation of engine noise, long after the others had gone.
And slowly he began to realize something of the gravity of their position, piecing it together gradually from those accumulated bits of experience that had reality for him. The aesthetic had no existence for Buehl beyond his instinctive response to Wagnerian clamor; the social and economic intricacies of alien cultures left him as unmoved as did those of his own, and for the emotional drives that made men and not-men what they were he had only contempt.
But Buehl respected Power. He thought of it as an entity spelled out in upper-case symbols, a name synonymous with deity.
For Buehl was powermaster in his own sphere, and he had seen power beyond imagining.
His first stunning surmise as to what power could be like had come at the end of man’s initial stellar jump—Buehl had been an engine-room member of that original expedition, but the glory of pioneering meant nothing compared to the feeling of mastery over the surging forces under his hands—to the far-swinging Sirian worlds. He recalled vaguely a swarming society of upright anthropoids, disturbingly manlike for all their chitinous jointure and wonderfully, if incuriously, courteous.
Their engines he remembered better.
The Sirians had outgrown atomic energy millennia before.
Somehow they tapped the force reservoirs of their giant sun, and a single monolithic station on each planet supplied power that could have pulverized a world but which instead drove their beautifully mechanized economy with the purring smoothness of a fine chronometer.
The Eridanians had used subatomic binding forces to make a perpetual paradise of their single slow-freezing world, and the Cetians, Shassil’s people, drew limitless energy from the gravitic strain-currents that permeated space. A single building there housed a power more formidable than the total output of Earth’s straining generators.
The hundred thousand other peoples of whom Earthmen had heard, but into whose spatial backyards they had not yet penetrated, had power as great and as varied. And over them all loomed the T’sai, the masters and mentors, the teachers and governors, who owned the secret of instantaneous transfer and who ruled with a word.
What, Buehl wondered, was power to the T’sai?
To the T’sai his own shining converter plant would be more primitive than Hero’s steam engine. To them he was not a powermaster but a savage, squatting vacantly over the first-kindled spark of atomic force.
For the first time in his career Buehl, with his beloved engines silent under his feet, felt the frustration of utter insignificance.
Rumors of the emergency had already reached Barbour in his quarters, and he was—as Clowdis had expected, understanding as he did the agile thoroughness of his psychologist-propagandist’s mind—busily organizing a program to reassure crew and colonists alike.
We expected to meet the T’sai eventually,’ Barbour said. He was a tall man, stooped and spectacled and balding, his mild light eyes normally veiled with habitual introspection. ‘As well get it over with now as later, Ed.’
‘They’ll know about us from cultures we’ve visited already,’ Clowdis pointed out. ‘We’re going to be weighed and judged and perhaps fitted into their scheme of things, Frank. The lot we draw is going to be largely up to you.’
Barbour sighed. ‘I know, Ed, I wish they had caught us earlier, before we started to bring out colonists—we’re trespassers to begin with, and to unload our surplus population out here without T’sai permission may prejudice them against us.’
Clowdis shrugged. He had anticipated such a development from the first and had opposed the colonization project; but political pressure at home, the necessity of justifying the enormous expense of interstellar exploration, had defeated his objections.
‘We had to make the try, with that perfect oxy-nitrogen planet of Regulus lying unclaimed,’ he said. ‘And we’ll have to do the best we can with the T’sai now.’
Clowdis moved on to the task he hated most, explaining to the colonists what might be expected of them.
Barbour, left alone, took off his spectacles and wiped them thoughtfully, his trained mind running carefully over the possibilities. Barbour, like Clowdis, had come to space under the lash of curiosity; not in his case to satisfy any restless yearning for adventure, but to push his investigations into the minds and manners of alien races as he had pursued them into his own society. The fact that intelligence was galaxy-wide instead of confined to his own insular sphere had fired his imagination from that first flight to Sirius—that that intelligence should follow such divergent paths, yet should always arrive at the same conclusion in the end, at once challenged and perplexed him.
Each culture they had touched, he considered, was older and wiser and immensely more powerful than Earth’s, so far superior as to put his own handful in the position of a canoe-load of savages paddling wide-eyed through the harbors of a great city.
Yet these aliens were different after a fashion the nature of which had persistently eluded him.
The galactics traveled widely in pursuit of trade, making jumps of a magnitude inconceivable to an Earthman’s mind. They lived in comfort and peace, without want or war, each society presenting a new variation of Utopia which only emphasized the homogeneity of the whole.
The nature of that unity came to Barbour now of itself, and he cursed himself with academic invective for not having seen it earlier.
There was no real progress out here—and had been none, obviously, for millennia. Each culture was balanced precisely to suit the demands of its own peculiar mores, but he had yet to skirt the fringes of an alien philosophy which was not founded on fatalism and laissez-faire resignation.
The galaxy was static. And what made it so?
The T’sai.
The realization brought Barbour a feeling of profound depression. So many promising beginnings intercepted and channeled to ultimate mediocrity by the super-race, so many vaulting young ambitions crushed to compliance with superior will!
And Earth?
Earth, Barbour thought, was the newest entrant to this cosmic kindergarten, the downiest yokel coming afoot in brash ignorance daring to blink at the bright lights of civilization. To be monitored and graded and assigned a niche, if found worthy of the trouble, in the T’sai economy.
To Barbour the truth behind the universal resignation he had seen was suddenly and chillingly clear. Why struggle, why toil and sweat for an ideal when the striving is doomed to failure from the start?
Earth, again.
Men, reckless of odds and intolerant of opposition, were never a docile people. Taken in hand by the T’sai, they might resent such regimentation forcibly. And then—
Barbour, like any good psychologist, knew when to drop a line of thought and close his mind to an unpleasant conclusion.
Clowdis was waiting with Shassil and the others at the conference-room table—Vesari fidgeting over an unwanted cigarette, Buehl a little drunk and more surlily taciturn than usual, Barbour humped moodily with his mild eyes fogged in thought—when Wilcox hurried in to take his place, ‘Sorry to be late,’ Wilcox said. His voice betrayed an habitual diffidence, an unconscious surprise that he should have been chosen to sit in consultation with the powers of the ship. I’ve been elected to represent the colonists, sir. I’ll do the best I can.’
Clowdis accepted his presence without comment, avoiding his eyes because the man’s meekness was somehow offensive to a spaceman’s sense of fitness. Wilcox was a small, pale man with neutral hair and troubled eyes, a former hydroponics operator who had sold his job-registry rights in Greater Pittsburgh to raise fare for his wife and himself to Regulus. He had been chosen now, Clowdis knew, for the reason that Wilcox was the average colonist—anxious to please, inoffensive and without initiative or ambition beyond his own small interests.
‘Good enough,’ Clowdis said, and looked across the table at Shassil. ‘What can you tell us now, Shassil?’
The Cetian sighed, revealing twin rims of cartilage that served him in lieu of teeth. ‘Little, beyond the fact that the T’sai will board us soon for an interview. After that—’
‘After that,’ Buehl interrupted, ‘the little gods of space will give us their word, and the word is Power.’ There was a growl in his voice which he did not try to conceal.
