Collected Short Fiction, page 540
Still standing there he saw the point of sudden light that burst out like a blue star near the center of the lunar disk. Voiceless with wonder he caught Wick’s arm and pointed. They watched together as that far light yellowed and reddened and faded away.
“That was it,” Wick whispered softly. “The nuclear mine we planted in the bluff above their lunar base. I think their foreign policy will change.”
It did. The costly effort to reach the moon and establish that base must have drained their resources and the disaster at Arzachel apparently left them unprepared for any more primitive sort of war. Their propagandists discovered a sudden admiration for democracy and peace.
That’s the story as far as we know it, except for the question of how Mr. Wick was able to dig his tunnel to the moon. Harry Thorwald went to see him in his den to ask him that.
“Here’s your answer, Harry.”
Wick grinned at him, his sharp gray eyes squinted from the glare of the long lunar days, and fumbled in the desk to find a dusty little carton packed with the nine plastic pieces of a Wix-Stix puzzle.
But Harry wasn’t satisfied.
“Take a world of one dimension,” Wick told him cheerfully. “Take a piece of string. No matter how far apart two knots are tied, you can put them very close together in another dimension outside the string.”
“You mean—” Harry gulped. “That tunnel in the blue rock—where was it?”
Wick merely tapped the puzzle in the box and perhaps that’s the answer. Perhaps that short black stick fits around that long crooked hole in the cube in the same way that the tunnel was a short cut around the vaster distance from Earth to the moon. Perhaps that’s it, but Wick explained no farther.
“Help yourself.” Grinning, he offered cigarettes in a new silver case. “Juliana says she doesn’t mind my smoking in the house any more,” he added happily. “I don’t know why but she says she doesn’t mind at all.”
1951
The Man From Outisde
When children play with matches, it’s dangerous. But when older9 more experienced people put ideas in their heads, it can be even more dangerous . . .
The quarantine station lay hidden in a crater on the face of the moon that Earth never sees. Dummy craterlets of inflated fabric disguised the small field where the yearly supply flier landed, and all the other installations were sunk deep in a lonely peak within the dead ring-mountain.
The lieutenant saw the explosion on Earth, from the lookout center there. He stood beneath a thousand feet of lunar rock, but that savage burst of gamma radiation had triggered relays in the orbital spy cells, and they transmitted a dozen views of that fateful flash and the ominous cloud that mushroomed and faded above it.
He burst into the commander’s office, breathless with the news.
“An atomic explosion, sir!” he gasped. “On Sol III—in the southwestern desert of North America.”
The commander was a cold, unbending man, a competent officer but hard to know. The psionic translators rendered his name as Bowman, but its original clicking consonants were unpronounceable. Though he was only eighty, his straight black hair was already silvered at the temples and his thin dark face was deeply lined as if with age. He looked up at the younger officer with an air of absent inquiry.
“So it’s you, lieutenant?” His quiet voice became mildly reproving. “Weren’t you taught how to approach your commanding officer?”
The lieutenant turned first white and then pink with fury. He was too new in the service to recognize the problems of discipline at this remote outpost, thirty light-years and more from regional headquarters. He had already come to regard this silent, icy man with a secret antagonism, which exploded in him now.
“I was taught—sir.” He saluted stiffly, but his incredulous resentment echoed in his voice. “Do you want me to ring and wait for your official permission to tell you that I’ve seen an atomic blast?”
“I do.”
“A uranium fission reaction!” A bitter amazement shook him. “Don’t you know what that means, sir? It means that these people have reached a very dangerous crisis in their development—or else that somebody has given them dangerous illicit information from outside.”
“Leave the room.” The commander’s voice had lifted very slightly. “Come back properly.”
The lieutenant shook his head unbelievingly, and stumbled back into the corridor. He paused a moment there, struggling to control his anger. He had honestly tried to understand the commander, but they came from different worlds. Although they could talk easily enough, with the tiny psionic translators they wore like hearing aids, Bowman’s hawk-nosed, black-pigmented face seemed as forbiddingly foreign as his life was strange.
The commander lived inside himself. His mental horizons were apparently limited to the service directives for the operation of a Class F outstation. He was obeyed and even respected, but he had no friends. While the younger officers fretted through their dull tours of duty and went eagerly back to civilization, he had stayed on here at his own request.
The lieutenant couldn’t understand why, but he dismissed that private mystery with a shrug of puzzled annoyance. All that mattered now was the life or the death of the new civilization coming to birth on this planet they watched. He tried to smooth his face, and set his finger on the announcer button.
The tiny convex screen beside the door instantly showed the commander’s impatient face, and his voice snapped from the speaker.
“Yes?”
“Lieutenant Woods, asking permission to report, sir,” he said huskily. “With reference to the atomic explosion observed on Sol III.”
“Come in, lieutenant.”
He walked inside, came to attention, and saluted. The commander returned the salute with a mechanical correctness, but left him at attention. He stood painfully erect, hating the black tyrant at the desk.
“So the first fission bond has exploded here?” The commander shrugged. “What are we to do about it?”
The lieutenant caught his breath unbelievingly.
“I was taught, sir, that the liberation of atomic energy is one of the most dangerous turning points in the history of any planet.”
“But Sol III is not an important planet,” the commander said coldly. “The natural resources are worthless. The people are nondescript savages, remarkable for nothing except the variety and virulence of the malignant viruses and germs they allow to ravage them.”
“Any planet is important to me.” Resentment quickened the lieutenant’s voice. “Especially this one, because our own ancestors are supposed to have taken to space from here, fifteen thousand years ago.”
“I doubt that theory.” The commander straightened impatiently. “Even if the Atlantean culture did arise here, these squalid savages have left no trace of it. I see no reason for much concern over anything they do.”
The lieutenant tried to quiet his angry breathing.
“I’m new here,” he answered quietly, “but I had supposed it would be our duty to investigate that explosion promptly and then take the necessary steps to protect these people.”
“What sort of steps?”
“In cases where dangerous clandestine technological information has been received from outside,” he said carefully, “I believe the Covenants provide that it should be discredited or suppressed.”
“It’s true that an outsider has recently been operating on this planet.” The commander’s flat dry voice showed no feeling. “In fact, I have spent several years on the planet myself, assigned to the case as an undercover agent. You’ll find my reports in our files. Unfortunately, the outsider escaped.”
“To reveal the secret of nuclear fission?”
“You are still at attention.” The commander’s lean jaws tightened in reproof. “The reaction you saw is the logical climax of some centuries of independent progress. The energy equation was published here forty years ago, by a mathematician named Einstein. I investigated him. He is a native, and he derived the equation for himself.”
The lieutenant shifted his weight uncomfortably and straightened again. He knew he ought to keep silent, hut he couldn’t help blurting impulsively:
“Can’t we do something, anyhow—sir? Even though these people did stumble on the secret by themselves, can’t we help them learn to use it?”
“We can’t.” The commander’s black face stiffened. “You ought to know that.”
“Why not?” He frowned with a troubled astonishment. “Isn’t Sol HI our responsibility, sir? Now that these people have come to the time when atomic energy will either lift them out of barbarism or else’ destroy all they’ve accomplished—can’t we help them at all?”
“We can’t,” the commander repeated. “I have been watching the struggles and the blunders of these people longer than you have lived. I try to remember that what they do is none of my business.”
“Isn’t it?”
The commander studied him thoughtfully. “Why do you think we are stationed here?”
“Fundamentally, to assist these people in their climb toward civilization.”
“Fundamentally, you are wrong.” The commander’s voice turned brittle with impatient. “The Quarantine Service exists to enforce the Covenants of Non-Contact. The Covenants were set up to prevent the damaging collisions of cultures at incompatible levels of social evolution. Our duty here is to ward off all cultural contact with the outside. That is all. Whether these people use atomic energy to reach the stars or to commit race suicide, we can’t interfere. Understand?”
“I suppose so.”
Yet the lieutenant held on to a private reservation, which the commander must have seen.
“I’ve been watching you. Woods.” The probing eyes of Bowman were cold and keen as a scalpel. “Though you came here with an excellent record, your attitude is disappointing.” Pale with resentment, the lieutenant held himself erect and silent.
“We’re all uprooted people, in I he service,” the austere officer continued, “Each change of post carries us a dozen or a hundred years ahead in relative time, and there is no turning back. Every one of us has given up his home and his friends and his family.” Though the service offers compensations, they must be earned.”
The lieutenant stood listening with a frozen impatience. He had left his own native place and time with a painful sense of loss. Vega IV had been a good planet, a hundred years ago. His father had begged him to take over the family’s prosperous shipping firm. There had been a girl who begged him to stay. Against all that, there had been only his imperative desire to join the great organization that guarded civilization. He had volunteered—and he thought of that hard decision with a pang of cruel disillusion now.
“Do you want to stay in the service?”
Flinching from the harshness of that question, he said he did.
“Then you had better watch yourself.” The dark eyes searched him dispassionately. “Have you ever known a man broken from the service?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I have,” the commander said. “They are pathetic figures. We still have our demanding duty and our own small world of men and women dedicated to it. If you lose those, you’ve nothing left. The service will pay your way back to the place where you joined, but you are still lost in time. There are no fliers to the past.”
“I understand,” the lieutenant answered.
Yet he had not entered the service for his own benefit, and he left the commander’s office still determined to investigate the atomic explosion he had seen. He was assigned to routine clerical work, but he began to spend his spare time searching the files of the case the commander had mentioned.
Thirty years ago, those records showed, a patrol flier commanded by Bowman had found a shipment of cultured viruses cached on Pluto. The malignant microorganisms had been gathered on Earth, obviously for military use on some planet whose people were not immune to them.
Such a bold violation of the Covenants demanded vigorous action. The web of spy cells was widened. Another patrol flier was sent out to intercept any outlaw craft approaching the cache on Pluto. Bowman, then a lieutenant, volunteered for the dangerous undercover mission to trap the outsider still presumably operating on Earth.
That effort had run through twenty years, but no unidentified craft had ever disturbed the spy cells. The trap on Pluto had not been sprung; Bowman and the other agents sent to Earth had brought back voluminous reports but no outsider.
The lieutenant neglected his meals and his sleep for nearly two years, exploring those reports. He finally found the clues he wanted, and took them at once to the commander’s office.
“Lieutenant Woods, asking permission to report, sir.” This time he was carefully correct. “I have found promising leads in the outsider case that don’t seem to have been followed up. I request permission to carry my own investigation to Earth, as an undercover agent.”
“That matter was dropped ten years ago.” The commander scowled at him with an annoyed impatience. “Where did you find these new clues?”
“In the files, sir.”
The black man’s annoyance changed to a guarded watchfulness. “Where in the files?”
“In your own reports, among others.” The lieutenant’s knees and voice were trembling, but he went on stubbornly. “Chiefly in those from the Soviet tribe.” He caught his breath. “I believe an outsider has been advising the tribal council called the Politburo, probably as a member of it.”
“Impossible!” The commander seemed almost angry. “Where is any evidence of that?”
“It appears first in the recorded psionic translations of the unpublished writings of the native revolutionist named Lenin.”
The commander’s dark face thinned and hardened. “Do you think Lenin was an outsider?”
“I think he was taught by one.”
“But he wasn’t even a scientist.”
“Not a physicist,” the lieutenant said. “He didn’t invent the fission bomb. But he did introduce methods of violent revolution unknown on Earth before. In some of his private writings about the science of revolution, I found direct quotations from the interstellar histories I studied at the service academy.”
“History repeats itself.” The black man shrugged impatiently. “A million decaying empires have been toppled by a million revolutionists. Is it very remarkable that a few of them happened to develop similar methods?”
“But there are other clues,” the lieutenant insisted. “Such as the devious shifts of tribal economic and military policy. One by one, they mean nothing. Taken all together, they do show outside influence.”
“I doubt it.” The commander’s voice had lifted harshly. “That outsider must have stopped here to arm himself with an illegal biological weapon, but I can’t believe he stayed long. The planet is too backward and filthy to be a very desirable hide-out.”
“An accident, perhaps,” the lieutenant suggested. “He must have intended to rejoin his confederates on Pluto, but I suppose our search scared them off. He was left marooned, and he had to make the best of it.”
The commander shook his head, unconvinced.
“Anyhow,” the lieutenant persisted, “I believe these leads are worth investigating. May I have the assignment, sir?”
The commander was evasive. He wanted time to review the files himself. He challenged minor points. He proposed to send a more experienced agent. He even hinted at last that he could consider recommending the lieutenant for promotion and transfer to a more desirable station.
Outraged, the lieutenant refused to be bribed. Each new delay heightened his suspicion that Bowman had stayed on here to keep something covered up. He was careful to make no reckless charges, but he renewed his pleas until finally the black man yielded.
“All right, Woods,” the commander said. “I’ll send you down to Sol III.” Bleakly, he added, “If you expect to stay in the service, you had better bring back your elusive outsider.”
Two years later, the lieutenant stood again at attention in Bowman’s plain, gray-walled office. lie had spent that interval on Earth. A neutrionic flier had landed him by night on the frozen tundra of northern Asia, clothed and equipped for his mission. He had carried a portable psionic telephone with which to call the station when he was ready to be picked up, but lie had never called. Two more agents had been landed at last, to track him down and bring him back.
“Well, lieutenant?” Bowman looked him up and down with black, sardonic eyes. “Did you find the outsider?”
“I’m not certain.”
The lieutenant was thinner and visibly older. His eyes were red-rimmed with strain and restless with a puzzled unease. He held himself erect, but his flushed skin and his hurried breathing showed his agitation.
“But I dill find something else,” he added quickly. “Something more important now. A danger to the birth of freedom on this planet.”
“Due to outside influence?”
“Indirectly, yes.”
“What is it?”
“An accidental atomic explosion, about to happen.”
“We’ve observed quite a number of fission explosions during the past four years,” the commander said. “None of them has been unduly disastrous—or set off by outsiders, either.”
“But this one is different,” the lieutenant insisted. “I’m afraid it will extinguish this young civilization—unless you let me go back and prevent it.”
“You have been on Sol III too long already.” Disapproval hardened the commander’s dark face. “You had better give me an excellent excuse for your long absence, unless you want to be charged with desertion.”
“But I didn’t desert!” The lieutenant wet his lips nervously. “I simply found such a desperate situation that I couldn’t leave, even to report.” His voice shook urgently. “You must let me go hack, sir—in time to stop that tragic accident!”
“I’m afraid you’ve forgotten the Covenants.” The commander scowled at him severely. “But let’s hear about this coming explosion.”
