Collected Short Fiction, page 597
His greater fear was that he might appear too eager.
“I have been very happy here, sir,” he agreed, in a voice which he tried to make regretful. “I hate to leave my marriage group, and I’ve a number of hobbies that I don’t like to interrupt.”
The metal god nodded sympathetically.
“Sun-diving, for one.” Actually, he detested the sport because his imperfect integration had left him dangerously inept with the psionic diving gear. But a nervous compulsion drove him on. “Just bought an outfit from a friend who got transferred. He’s been diving into sunspots, looking for the famous living lights. He had a theory they’re intelligent—”
“Perhaps they are.” The director’s nod froze his apologetic grin. “I don’t know how any complex of ions and electromagnetic energy can support intelligence, but I’ve brought back some queer psio-graphs from my own dives.”
“Anyhow, I’ll be selling my gear.” Alarmed, Scarlet retreated as hastily as if the director had suddenly become a hissing solar fireball. “I wasn’t quite prepared for such a mission. But the service comes first.”
“We’re living for the worlds we watch.” The steel man intoned that old slogan so solemnly that Scarlet felt an uncomfortable prickling at the back of his neck. “We left our own worlds behind once and for all when we took the service oath.”
“I’m not looking back, sir.” His palms were clammy from a sudden fear that he had overdone his appearance of reluctance, but his eyes were on the new worlds ahead. “Though I suppose I’ve been here a little too long. I had almost forgotten how it feels to board a neutrionic flyer to skip down across a dozen or a hundred years, knowing that you can’t come back.”
“That’s our destiny.” The magnificent man paused to study the records Scarlet had altered, so closely that he shuddered. “A bad situation, out there on Sol III. Frankly, Scarlet, I was hesitant to send a man of your incomplete conditioning. Especially one without field experience. But we’ve too many planets to watch, and too few dedicated men.”
SCARLET gulped and decided not to trust his voice. He sat sweating, trying not to think of the rivals who should have ranked above him.
“I’m a little surprised that we’ve kept you here so long.” The director gave him a quicksilver smile. “But this situation is apt to call for all you’ve learned in these hundred years.”
Scarlet scanned the little stack of psionic dispatches that he pushed across the desk, trying to absorb them as swiftly as if he really rated five. Thornwall’s briefing helped him decide upon a troubled frown.
“This last report from Sol III is already fifty years old.” His concern grew swiftly genuine. “I’ll be at least that long getting there by the regular routes. What can I expect to find?”
“Your problem, Warden.” The director was already turning, reaching for another stack of dispatches. “The finite speed of our communications is all that makes your mission necessary. In a contact crisis, we must have a responsible man on the spot.”
“Trust me, sir.” Scarlet spoke with a pious gratitude for that finite limit upon the velocity of every sort of signal, even upon the flash of the intergalactic blinker. By the time any report of his decision could come back here, he would be so far beyond Sol that no possible pursuit could ever overtake him. “I’ll be on guard.”
“You’ll need to be,” the steel man admonished him. “A contact crisis draws all sorts of people. Some pure as light. Some more savage than the savages we guard.”
He boarded the supply ship next morning, carrying most of his material possessions in one small bag. The true rewards of the service were the joys of service itself. So they said. Certainly he had received very little besides.
He was glad enough to abandon what he had to leave behind, the too-risky sun-diving and the dabbling in psionic art and the aimless multiculture with which he had tried to kill the idle years. He couldn’t help feeling a secret relief even at the separation from his marriage group, although he tried to make a convincing display of regret.
He even asked Glade to come with him. She was the sultry if somewhat shallow blonde who had always insisted that she was simply fascinated with his phenomenal ugliness, but now he was not surprised when she chose to remain with her more handsome husbands and the civilized amenities of the station.
THE flyer caught the neutrionic streams, the vast winds of invisible neutrinos that burst from the novas and blow through the galaxies at almost the speed of light. Velocity foreshortened time. A long quarter-century on the planets ahead and behind was only a few weeks for Scarlet.
He was still elated with the wine of one more triumphant escape from all the perfection he hated, when the flyer touched at Procyon Station.
In the spaceport bar, he bought a drink for a service courier from the Regulus region and asked for news of Earth.
“Light’s so damned slow,” he grumbled, disguising the casual boast about his mission. “A contact crisis comes up on a world like Earth, and it’s out of hand before you can get there to do anything about it. What about Earth?”
The courier looked blank.
“Sol III,” Scarlet said.
“Oh, we touched there.” The courier grinned maliciously. “Better take along a durable woman and a good library, if you’re waiting for those quarrelsome apes to civilize themselves.”
“Huh?” Scarlet downed his drink uncomfortably. “Aren’t they near contact?”
“Not that I heard about.”
“They were firing military rockets a hundred years ago.” he protested hopefully. “They’ll be getting into space.”
“But not for any peaceful purpose. They were groping toward fusion bombs, when we picked up those dispatches. They’ll soon be blowing the crust off their grubby little planet. Even if they do blunder into our outpost, it doesn’t mean that they’re fit for civilized society.
“Time for another?”
Scarlet blinked at his time ring. “Thanks, but my ship will be lifting.”
He hurried back aboard, frowning gloomily.
After a few worried weeks of ship time, he watched Sirius flare out ahead like a natural nova. The news of Sol III was twenty years fresher, but still distressing.
“Larger tribes are fighting bigger wars with better weapons.” The post communications officer grinned sardonically. “If they do make contact, they’ll probably attack us with fusion bombs. We’re the ones who need protection!”
“They may be troublesome.” Slowly tightening muscles accented the ugliness of Scarlet’s pinched and chinless face, until the better-integrated man looked uncomfortably away. “But I’ll civilize them,” he muttered defiantly. “If they are human at all!” Perhaps they were not, he reflected silently. Perhaps he would have to approve the blinker project, after all. But, before he decided to let the supernova flash, he intended to be well paid for his decision. His first concern was the source of his payment.
II
HE was alert for the scent of money when the flyer touched at Proxima Station. He got off to sniff for it, and caught only the odor of trouble. The restless anthropoids had fired rockets into space, but the radiation zones had slowed their efforts to reach the satellite of Earth.
Wandering unhappily back to the flyer, he found a girl at the lock ahead of him. A deck officer had blocked her way. She was protesting in some liquid-toned tongue he had never heard before, so vehemently that he snapped on his psionic translator.
“—unconditioned blunder!”
The sense of her ringing words came suddenly through. “You can see that my passage was cleared through your own transportation office.”
“You may come.” The officer nodded grudgingly. “But not your rubbish.”
Scarlet heard the indignant catch of her breath, as the officer gestured stubbornly at a mountain of packing cases stacked beside the ramp. In response to his glance, their blank labels flashed with words that he could read as if in his native tongue:
CONTENTS: PSIONIC CONDITIONING EQUIPMENT
CONSIGNOR: BRIARSTONE MISSION
CUSTODIAN: CORAL FELL DESTINATION: SOL III
The labels faded as his eyes went back to Coral Fell.
“It isn’t rubbish and it isn’t mine,” she was warmly informing the officer. “It belongs to the people of Sol III. They’re near a contact crisis. The moment the quarantine is raised, they’ll need help. I’m going out there to open a psionic training center, to help them make the difficult jump to civilization. All this is just the barest essential equipment for our first clinic—”
“No matter if it’s a captive living light, this is not a common carrier,” the officer snapped. “Our limited cargo space is already filled with supplies for Sol Station. Wait for a freighter.”
“But there won’t be any fre-freighters.” A sob shattered her well-conditioned confidence. “Not till the quarantine is raised. Nor another supply ship for three whole years—”
“Too bad.” He shrugged unsympathetically. “But we’re lifting off.”
“Wait!” Her desperate voice fell, but the translator still caught her words. “I’ve funds of my own. Maybe we can reach some private understanding.”
“I’m the wrong man to bribe!” The officer recoiled in indignation. “I can see to it that you aren’t allowed off any ship at Sol Station!”
SHE turned, and Scarlet shrank from her angry loveliness. Her long hair shone with blue psionic moons, and her mouth was a quivering golden slash across her exquisite lean face. With tears burning in her violet eyes, she stalked toward him blindly.
“Warden Scarlet!” The deck officer moved to meet him with an unexpected graciousness. “So you’re already seen the sights of Proxima—”
“You’re a service executive?” Suddenly she saw him—but somehow not his ugliness. Her smile illuminated him. “Could you help me?”
“Perhaps I can.” He turned briskly to the officer. “When the quarantine is lifted, the natives will need all the help they can get. We’re taking Coral Fell and all her cargo. In my own suite, if necessary.”
“Yes, sir.” The officer had become somewhat purple, but he nodded stiffly. “I’ll arrange the space, sir.”
“Thank you, Warden!” Her kiss took his breath, before he had time to reflect that she must have come from a world of more casual conventions than his own. “How can I ever repay you?”
“I wish no pay.” Uncomfortably, he disengaged himself. In his judiciary position, he could hardly ask outright for the bribe the deck officer had refused. Dealing with her was going to require a delicate tact. “But—uh—shall we meet aboard for dinner?”
She met him for dinner, wondrous in a gown of woven psionic filaments that reflected all his thoughts and moods in their flow of patterned color, and always amplified his responses to her beauty. She was far more, he soon discovered, than merely a dedicated missionary.
He cringed from her shimmering perfection, with his old uneasy defiance, but she was somehow neither fascinated nor repelled by his total ugliness. She simply failed to notice. Perhaps, he thought, she had lived on some frontier where aesthetic surgery was not the fashion. Or perhaps his very deformity appealed to the same generosity that had brought her to aid the natives of Earth.
“So the whole future of these planets is yours to decide?” Her warm admiration overwhelmed his remaining defenses. “Isn’t that an awfully important decision to be left to just one man?”
He caught his breath to assure her that he had been long trained for his task, and his fitness carefully tested. But when he remembered how he had secretly insured his own selection, a wave of shame submerged him.
Fortunately, their food was being served. There were dishes he had never seen before, and by the time she had informed him that these were multicultured bioforms from Proxima II, he had begun to recover from his unexpected confusion.
“THE service is a volunteer organization,” he muttered awkwardly. “Though of course we do have official status. Our trouble is that so few people ever volunteer to leave their own times and planets, to go voyaging down through strange worlds and ages, giving their lives to guard ignorant savages. We never have men enough. But we do what we can.”
“We are volunteers, ourselves,” She nodded sympathetically. “I joined the mission because of my father. A galactic buccaneer, my mother used to call him. He owned a great fleet of neutrionic flyers. He used to operate out toward the Edge, looting new worlds of everything portable, using his profits to build more flyers and loot more worlds. All legal enough, but Mother taught me not to like it. When I inherited his fortune, I came back to these forgotten worlds at the Center, to return what he had taken.”
Inwardly elated at this news of all she had to give away, Scarlet began cautiously trying to convey the idea that he would be receptive. He admitted over the wine that he had long ago lost the youthful illusions that led him to volunteer.
“I can remember when the feeling of it made me tingle all over,” he told her. “Skipping down the centuries, watching over all the retarded worlds as they clamber up out of the jungle. The trouble is, they take too long. They stumble too often, and fall back too far. We’ve been guarding Earth for five thousand years.”
He tingled again, in her admiring glow.
“Frankly, Coral, I have decided to leave the service as soon as I can afford it. I’m sick of the discipline, the long monotony, all the sacrifices. I want a decent living and a permanent family.”
As she smiled, the psionic fibers of her gown made a veil of rosy flame in which their reflected pleasures in each other flowed into a mingled radiance. He thought for an instant that he had made his point.
“To your new future!” She clinked her glass against his. “I think you’re wise to resign, because I’ve never agreed with the quarantine philosophy. It seems almost criminal to let a world like Earth stumble in the dark for five thousand years, when psionic training could civilize it in two or three generations.”
“To your mission on Earth!” He drained the wine, trying not to think of all the young civilizations that had been destroyed by premature contact. “If I can lift the quarantine.”
That was as plain as he dared to be, but still she failed to understand. His own dismay quenched all the burning glory of her gown, leaving her nearly nude beneath the dead gray filaments, as she leaned to kiss his glass again with her own.
“To our new Earth!” she breathed. “Let’s make it that! You’ll find yourself again, in the exciting work of civilizing the planet. You and I, together—” Panic shook him.
“Wait for my decision!” he muttered desperately. “You’re forgetting that Sol III has not yet qualified for civilization. Unless I find grounds for granting galactic citizenship, the planet will be incinerated.”
III
HER glowing gown faded pale with shock, when he told her about the blinker project.
“Wain, how can you consider that?” Her widened eyes were black. “The murder of a world? Murder multiplied three billion times!”
“The extinction of the native culture may appear deplorable,” he told her. “But it won’t be murder, really. Not unless the natives are granted human status.”
“But they are people, Wain!” Her face glowed again, with a pleading urgency. “One social worker from our mission spent months there, bundled up in their horrid fiber clothing, disguised as a medical student. He examined hundreds of them. Physically, they’re as fully human as we are.”
“Human status depends on mental attainments,” he reminded her craftily. “Or, to be more accurate, it depends in this particular case upon my own considered judicial decree.”
Even then, she didn’t understand. To her well-conditioned innocence, a deputy warden stood far above any possibility of corruption. Her pure illusions were immune to the boldest hints he dared to make, as red Proxima dimmed behind and died.
The bribe he wanted, she might never pay. But all her innocence failed to restrain her from using the arts of psionics to press upon him another kind of bribe, which included herself. She seemed to mind neither the jut of his rodent teeth nor the squint of his yellow eyes nor even his own sadly botched conditioning.
All the way to Sol, she talked of her magnificent plans for Earth. The equipment he had rescued would barely fit out the first psionic training center. But she had funds to purchase more. Her staff would be pitifully inadequate at first, even if he decided to join her mission, but the natives they trained would soon be scattering out to open new centers in every jungle village.
At the end of the flight, they were sitting together in the ocular dome when the airless satellite eclipsed the driving glare of Sol. Earth still burned in the black space ahead: a thin, green-veined crescent, one horn tipped with a dazzle of ice. Watching, Coral caught her breath with a tiny gasp of pure delight.
“So beautiful!” she breathed. “So wonderful and new! Every opportunity I’ve come so far to find!”
Scarlet nodded, but his eyes hardly left her. With an ultimate missionary zeal, she had rinsed her hair with a psionic wash that came to flaming life with her joy, and powdered her body with a dust that caught and amplified all his feelings of desire in a glitter of diamond points.
“Say you’ll stay, Wain!” She caught his hand. “In a couple of hundred years, we’ll have civilization blooming here!”
“But I’m not—uh—completely conditioned,” he reminded her uncomfortably. “In that time, I’d be getting into—uh—middle age.” Watching her hair turn dull with his own discomfort, he muttered bleakly, “I’m getting out where life is worth living, as soon as my duty here is done.”
“But, Wain!” The psionic dust turned cold and blue upon her, reflecting her distress. “I can’t just abandon the mission. And you know that our work here will take a good two or three hundred years.”
“Your work,” he said unhappily.
HOWEVER magical it might seem to those without it, psionic training required toil and time. To become fully effective, the pre-conditioning had to begin at the instant of conception, guided by pre-conditioned parents. The first generations were always awkward half-things, lost between worlds, as he himself had been. He wanted no more of their hopeless yearnings and inevitable defeats.
