H. Beam Piper, page 16
“Thank you, Citizen Tav-Jarov,” Skrov-Rogov said. “You and your scientists have done well, and will be rewarded.” He turned to the table. “Our rocket technicians assure me that it will be quite possible to build remote-controlled space rockets which can deliver, on the Horizon Object, bombs several thousand times more destructive than the conventional fission bomb. It is well within the power of the Organic State to create enough such rockets, with the fusion warheads devised by Tav-Jarov, to totally depopulate the Horizon Object. Furthermore, the lingering radiation will be of extremely short duration.
In a matter of several years we will be able to go there and find a world, intact, but burned clean of the vile life which now infests it.”
“And how long is it estimated that it will take to build this quantity of remote-controlled rockets and fusion bombs?” somebody asked.
“The rockets are the responsibility of Citizen Shev-Yorov’s Bureau,” Skrov-Rogov said. “He will be given everything he needs. Citizen Tav-Jor-ov assures me that his Bureau will be able to produce the actual bombs in three years at the most. Isn’t that right?”
Tav-Jorov nodded. “That is so, Citizen Successor-Controller,” he said.
Skrov-Rogov stood up. “Then we will proceed with this plan,” he said. “The Horizon Object must be wiped clean! But all of you keep in mind that, until the moment comes, we must do everything to avoid open conflict with the Outsiders.”
Vandro Hannaro, grimly sad, looked down the long table. Everybody who would be taking part in the conference was seated: the whole board of advisers of Shining Sister Combine, the leading advisers of the Trading Combine, the Board of the Banking Combine, the big industrial and ranching and agricultural combines, the Rendezvous Combine. Less than a hundred men and women were gathered here, and they were prepared to speak for the entire world. This was a moment unique in the history of his people, and Vandro Hannaro didn’t like it. What was worse, any decision reached around this table would affect every gang and individual on the planet. The thing that a few conservatives had feared back when the Trading Combine was formed, three centuries before, was now coming to pass.
“Well, that’s the situation,” Arvo Zaganno, the spokesman for his gang, told the group. “We beat off the first attack on our mining outpost quite easily; probably because they didn’t expect any resistance. They certainly weren’t prepared to face remote-control rockets with nuclear warheads. But they’ll be back; and we won’t be able to face another attack alone. We can’t put a radar screen around the whole planet; and we can’t site missile launchers every twenty kilolances in every direction. They could land an army on the planet, once they build enough space-suits, and deploy and attack from several directions. Nuclear rockets designed to take out space ships aren’t much use against a ground army, especially on an airless planet. We need your help to form a Grand Combine, and we believe it’s in your interest.”
“How does this affect us?” one of the Trading Combine demanded.
“If the grass-heads get onto the First Planet,” Arvo said, “the fissionables monopoly is smashed. Ifthey control the planet,they won’t sellus any fissionables. They’ll just build weapons with the surplus from their power-stations. And when they have enough nuclear weapons-does anyone want to guess what they’ll do with them?”
“That might be a bit alarmist,” one of the Banking Combine people said. “But he’s right about the rest of it. All the fissionable ore on Shining Sister comes from those low-grade uranite mines on Thurv. If they get a foothold on the First Planet, we can close the books on any trade with them.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?” an elderly representative of the Rendezvous Combine asked. “It seems to me, judging from past experiences, that we’d be better off without any dealings with them.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Zalgo,” a woman from the Trading Combine said. “We’d have dealings with them-a kind we wouldn’t like. If they get hold of the fissionables on the First Planet, they’d be invading us inside of ten years. I’m absolutely sure of that.”
“Oh, rubbish, Nalla! They have a planet of their own—”
“With one-tenth our land-surface and ten times our population. This lovely planet of ours is just right to siphon off their surplus population to. And you don’t know those snakes the way I do, Zalgo. When we make a deal, we try to come out even; everybody happy. They can’t do that, can’t stand the thought of it.
They can’t be even with anyone, they have to dominate. And, since they’ve brought their own world under a single tyranny, we’re all they have left to conquer.”
“Why? Why would they do that? Why would anyone want to-control-anybody else?”
“Some of them seem to thrive on controlling other people; it’s a kind of sickness, I suppose. As for the others, it is their duty to Vran and theOrganicState.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to get across for the past thirty years,” Yssa Balkadranna said. She was an old woman now, almost as old as Vandro himself; her dark red fur was beginning to assume the uniform whitish surface tinge of age, and her voice was sharp and petulant. “They’re all crazy, every last one of them. And the ones who run theOrganicState are the craziest of all. They hate and fear us; they can’t even conceive that we came to them in love and friendship thirty years ago. Since they want so badly to dominate us, they have to believe that we want to dominate them. If we don’t do something to stop them, they will be here; with guns and bombs and armored trucks, and all the weapons they can build with all the technology they learned from us!”
“Yes,” Nalla took up the argument. “And if they get a foothold on the First Planet, they’ll have all the fissionables they need; they can start building an invasion fleet and stockpiling fission bombs. This idea of a Grand Combine is all right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. We need aWorld Combine; with every gang in the world in it, to build a big enough space-fleet to pro tect both this and the First Planet against any attack. If we cut off trade with them, they’ll attack us. Maybe not at once, but sooner or later, and I’d bet on sooner. They have plenty of fissionables now, that we were fools enough to sell them.”
Yssa stood up silently, and waited until the cross-talk had died away, and everyone had turned to look at her. “We can do better than that,” she said, clearly and firmly. “We can solve their population problem for them, by a one-hundred percent reduction-and then we can stop worrying about a raid on the First Planet, or an attack on us here. And, I tell you, it’s the only way to prevent them from attacking us, as Nalla says, sooner or later.”
“That would take quite a little doing, Yssa,” Vandro said.
“Not too much. We can bombard their planet with radio-guided rockets from here,” she said. “And we can case the bombs in cobalt.”
“Cobalt? What would that do?” Zalgo asked.
“The energy-release of an ordinary fission-bomb would be enough to convert a cobalt casing-of ordinary cobalt-5&-into radioactive cobalt-60. That’s a gamma-emitter, with a five-year half-life. A thousand or so of them would drench that planet with lingering radiation for the next five centuries; the whole planet would be literally sterilized, as far as any air-breathing life was concerned. And that would be the end of Tizzy-Puzzy and theOrganicState , and lying and cheating and trying to Halzorro the whole planet; and we could go back to living like civilized people.”
There was a stir about the table; everybody, even the Zaganno representatives, looked at her aghast.
“You’re not serious about that, Yssa?” Vandro asked. Then he nodded. “Yes, you are.”
“But if we were to do anything like that-could we go on as before?” Zalgo asked. “Bearing the guilt of a billion murders?”
“I suppose,” Yssa said, sadly, “what I’m offering you is a choice of guilt. Doing this would not be easy; none of us would ever forget it. We would have to bear it with us all the rest of our lives. But, if we don’t, what do we then have to live with? The knowledge that our children will surely be born into a world of fear and tyranny. Fear of the grass-heads, and tyranny of the World Combine we’ll have to organize in self-protection. And the ever-present possibility that the grass-heads might break through whatever protective ring we form; and then our children would either be slaves or dead.”
She looked slowly around the group. “There are very few of us here who haven’t been forced, at one time or another, to kill somebody in self-defense, or defense of our property. None of us think of that as murder. Well, neither is this. It’s a matter of our whole world defending itself against murderers and thieves and tyrants.”
“But after all, Yssa,“the old man said, “they are Our Sister’s Children.”
“Tisse and Puzza and Vran!” Yssa fairly screamed the obscenities. “After all these years, and all that’s happened in them, are we still tangling ourselves in that silly metaphor? Our Sister’s Vermin, you mean.
Shining Sister has bugs in her fur. And I think we should scrub them out for her! And, speaking of that, there’s an old saying: If you sleep with dirty people, you’ll wake with your fur full of bugs. Well, look at what’s crawling on us! Here we are talking about setting up a World Combine-eighty or ninety of us, making plans for everybody on the planet. And, since everybody never goes along with anything, no matter how good for them it’s supposed to be, the plans will take coercion to carry out. The next thing, we’ll be setting up orders and regulations, telling people what they must do, and what they can’t do, and organizing a world-wide police gang to enforce our decisions. Why don’t we just call it an organic state and be done with it?”
There was a long silence, while those about the table stared at each other. Then Yssa continued: “Well, Citizen brain-cells? What do you see when you look at each other? What have these vermin of Shining Sister done to us even without attacking?”
“Yssa’s right,” Vandro said. “I’d sooner see our planet depopulated than see our children enslaved to a government. What an obscene concept this ‘government’ business is. When one person has power over another, he is corrupted by it. On Shining Sister both the power and the corruption are total. We must never let the filthiness of one person dominating another by some kind of hereditary bondage-called ‘government’-come to this world. And the best-the only-way to prevent it is to sterilize the source of the infection.”
Zalgo took a deep breath, and then nodded. “It’s a decision that will be hard to live with,” he said, “but it’s the right decision. I vote for-sterilization.”
Vandro turned to Yssa. “How long will it take to produce the bombs, and the rockets to carry them.”
Yssa sat down, suddenly looking very old and vulnerable. “About two years for the bombs,” she said.
“But, even if we start work at the same time on the rockets and launching sites, they’ll take longer. I’d say about three years, total. Three years.”
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
Captain Absalom Carpenter consolidated some of his hand-written notes and spoke some more of his report into the expedition log, and then fixed himself another cold drink. From somewhere near at hand came the steadychuck, chuck, chuck, of machetes and the intermittent howl of a chain-saw as a working-party cleared the jungle away from the main entrance of the big temple, or palace, or whatever it was. The giant ruined structure was in better condition than anything else they’d found on the planet so far, and even it didn’t look too promising.
“Man, this isn’t anything!” Benedict Sokolov, the sociographer, declared, gulping a slug of rum and waving his cigar. He was short and fat, and aggressively unshaven and rumpled to advertise his civilian status. “Wait until you see Hetaira; that planet really got clobbered! There isn’t a city, or even a really big town anywhere. But every place where a city or town ought to be, there’s one of those great goddam big puddles of fused glass.”
The captain nodded. “Most of the bombs that came down on this planet must have burst in the water.
We’ve found surprisingly few craters on land. Of course, the Hetairans were using cobalt fission-bombs; a water burst would spread more radioactivity around, which must have been what they had in mind.
There must have been some pretty impressive tidal waves; probably swept right across all but the biggest land-masses.”
“What this crowd, here, used on Hetaira was thermonuclears,” Kent Pickering, the physicist, said. He was slender and gray; and as foppishly neat and well-groomed as Sokolov was untidy.
“Lithium-Hydrides; real king-size jobs. The fusion-mass of each one must have been on the order of four or five tons.”
“I’ll bet they made something to see, when they went off,” Gert van Zyl, the biologist, said.
“From a long, long distance,“Pickering told him. “I was on Beta Hydrae II when Carlos von Schlichten bombed Keegark; fact is, I was aboard the gun-cutter that dropped the bomb. To give you some sense of comparison, a round of pistol ammunition is to the Keegark bomb as the Keegark bomb is to one of the ones used on Hetaira. I haven’t even tried to estimate the temperature at the center of one of those blasts, but the entire planet must have been swept by storms of incandescent gas, at from five hundred to a thousand degrees Centigrade.”
“How does the isotope-decay dating compare with the dating here on Thalassa?” Carpenter asked.
“As we expected,“Pickering said. “Some six hundred years, give or take ten percent. It’s obvious that the rockets must have been launched si multaneously from both planets. The two flights must have passed each other in space. Neither planet would have had a chance to do anything more after they started landing. You know, that wasn’t really a war. That was a suicide pact. Like a duel with submachine guns at two paces.”
“These two peoples must have really loved each other,” Carpenter said. He turned his attention to the biologist. “What’s the life situation?” he asked. “I only glanced at your report; I got it a couple of hours ago.”
“Well,” van Zyle said, “there’s a variety of invertebrate life in some of the larger bodies of water. And, surprisingly, we found quite a few insects. I should imagine their eggs are highly cold-resistant and were protected by having been frozen into deep ice, maybe hundreds or thousands of years before the blast.
There is a wide variety of plant life, all deep-rooted perennials. At a hasty guess, I’d say that they had spread from no more than five or six places on the planet, which escaped the worst of the heat-storms by some fluke. And we found one form of mobile land-life-a nasty crawling thing like a ten-centimeter leech, in the mud flats around the small sea on the outside hemisphere. It seems to be the highest form of life on the planet. Has Ozukami made any progress on the first planet since I left?”
“Why, yes,” Carpenter said, picking up his glass. “It’s really quite extraordinary. It’s been-what?-four days, and they can already communicate to some extent. Seem to be a really intelligent people. Look a lot like us-humanoid, I mean-but covered with fur. It was a mining colony from what we’ve called Hetaira. Been stranded there for six hundred years. They’ve been quite clever about surviving under those conditions, but they’re slowly dying off. Probably lowered reproduction rates due to the natural radioactivity in the rocks they’re surrounded by.”
The Captain paused for another pull at his drink. “They have no real idea of what’s happened here,” he said. “They’re out of sight of either planet. All they know for sure is that, six hundred years ago, their space-ships stopped coming. They surmise that there was an atomic war, and that their people’s technological base was so knocked out that they could no longer build space-ships. They’re wondering what’s taking the re-building so long.”
“How did they react when Ozukami told them?”
“He hasn’t told them yet,” Carpenter said. “They want to go home. How do you tell them that their home-planet is now a sheet of glass? Or that their nearest living relative is now a ten-centimeter leech?”
“I certainly don’t know,” van Zyle said. “I would say that’s Zucker’s job. He’s the ship psychologist.
Where is he?”
Carpenter indicated the sleeping-shelter behind him with his thumb. “In there,” he said. “He’s been drinking, which he is not used to, so I had to put him to bed. He doesn’t know, either.”
The End
Table of Contents
First Cycle
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
The End
First Cycle, H. Beam Piper
