Collected Short Fiction, page 598
“Stay!” She leaned toward him, bathed in a sudden glow of devotion. “We’ll be married the day you leave the service. My own conditioning will help complete yours. And you will find our work worth everything. A thousand years on Earth won’t be too long, now that we’re in love.”
In spite of himself, he almost took her in his arms.
Less than half conditioned, he had little immunity to her psionic lure. Yearning to kiss the cold green blaze of her mouth, he shivered with despair. He thought everything was lost.
But darkness fell across the dome. He looked out to see the black-toothed rim of the moon rising to gnaw the jeweled Earth away, as the flyer fell to land. Grateful for the interruption, he squirmed desperately away.
“What’s wrong, Wain?”
Her wounded voice tore at him, but he refused to look back at her psionic charms. He stood watching the crescent Earth until its last glitter was gone.
“Tell me, dear,” she begged him. “Whatever’s wrong, I want so to help you. But your late conditioning disturbs your reactions. You’re hard for me to understand.”
He felt grimly thankful for that dark veil across his mind. He couldn’t tell her, but he was getting back his balance. She had swayed him dangerously, but he would surely find other lovely women glad enough to overlook his ugliness after he was rich. He had already squandered far too much of his short life for the hollow rewards of the service; he didn’t intend to give up the rest of his youth for her. Surely, somebody else would pay him to raise the quarantine.
“Darling—” Alarm caught her voice. “Don’t ever think I feel above you!”
“Of course I don’t.” He stared into the dark, afraid to look at her. “But we’re landing now. I’ve—I’ve just recalled my duty.”
“I don’t see—”
“I am a deputy warden.” He was deliberately gruff. “I have come here to decide the future of a planet. The rules and traditions of the service do not allow me to become intimate with anyone who has a special interest in my decision.”
“Is that all?” She laughed breathlessly. “You silly dear! You don’t know how much you need re-conditioning. But I do respect your principles. I’ll stop pestering you until Earth has been admitted to civilization.”
He gave her an uneasy glance, and found her only normally alluring. The flyer lurched and swayed, settling upon the satellite. They turned together to look for Sol Station. Here it was night. As his eyes adjusted to the cold starlight, apprehension touched him.
UPON the dead plain, a few small hummocks of naked stone stood clustered around a cruel black peak. Far away, a curving wall of ragged rock closed them in.
He saw nothing else.
“It’s all magnificent!” she whispered, before her first delight was clouded with bewilderment. “But where is the station?”
“Still camouflaged.” He pointed. “Those rock hummocks are painted membranes, if you know how to look, inflated to hide the neutrionic flyers on the field. The main installations are in that peak, and underneath. See!”
He nodded toward a glint of moving metal in a dummy craterlet. A hidden airlock opened. Belted spacemen rose into view, riding the arms of a multiple crane, hoisting billowing membranes.
“What are they doing?”
“Rigging a screen to hide us,” he told her. “We’ll be getting off as soon as it’s inflated.”
She said she had to go below to finish packing, and then lingered in the dome, watching him so sharply that he stiffened. Although he understood that advanced conditioning included a taboo against uninvited mental prying, he couldn’t help an uneasy resentment of her psionic superiority.
“Go ahead,” he snapped. “I’ll meet you down at the lock.”
“You’re worried, Wain.” Her warm concern assured him that she had not been picking any guilty secrets from his mind. “Why?”
“That camouflage.” He gestured at the hummocks clumped below the mountain. “It’s too good. The station is still concealed. I see no native rockets. I’m afraid we’re here too soon.”
When he walked down the ramp from the lock, a few minutes later, into the cavernous tent that had been rigged to hide the flyer, the station commandant was waiting to greet him with the formalities due his rank and mission.
Commander Newbolt was a lean blond giant, who enhanced his virile presence with a liberal use of psionic cosmetics. Scarlet heard the sharp intake of Coral’s breath when she first saw the shining mantle of magnified masculinity that revealed his muscular beauty, and hated him instantly.
Had Earth made contact?
Scarlet was asking that urgent question, with every anxious glance at everything around him, but he refused to speak it. He answered each austere formality in kind, until Newbolt had completed the ritual.
“Your accommodations are ready, sir. Down in Tunnel Seven. I hope you find them adequate, because I believe you’re going to be here for some time.”
“The crisis?” He couldn’t stop the question now. “Have the natives arrived?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Why not?” He tried to gulp his panic down. “They were reported entering a contact crisis a hundred years ago. I expected to find their rockets here.”
REVULSION from his ugliness and contempt for his judgment was thinly veiled behind the smug satisfaction of Newbolt’s thin-lipped smile.
“I’m afraid you’ll discover that my predecessor was badly mistaken when he prepared for such an early crisis here. I urged him at the time not to send for you.” Scarlet glared up at the towering commander, bracing himself for trouble. He could already see that Newbolt was stupid enough to take a very dangerous attitude toward bribery.
“How’s that?” he rapped. “Weren’t the natives about to reach this satellite.”
“They have grashed their clumsy little rockets here.” Newbolt nodded contemptuously. “But even if they ever lived to discover us, they aren’t fit for civilization. Their culture is sick with a pathological militarism.”
“I’ll give due weight to your opinion,” Scarlet jabbed. “When I come to judge their fitness.” Newbolt remained undevastated.
“We have been assembling evidence for Your Equity’s consideration. When your flyer was sighted, I ordered all human beings in the solar system to gather for your inquiry.”
“Thank you.”
“My own recommendation will be that you approve the signal project,” Newbolt added. “I’m convinced that our long vigil here has been a waste of time. The natives have been growing more numerous and more destructive, but hardly more human.”
“I’ll ask for your advice when I require it,” Scarlet told him. “Please have my luggage taken to my quarters. Arrange for the hearing to begin without delay.”
“Yes, Your Equity.”
“Wain!” Coral Fell came floating toward them in a pink glow of admiration, her wide eyes fixed on Newbolt. “I want to meet the commander.”
“I don’t think you’ll like him,” Scarlet warned her. “He is advising me to approve the blinker project.”
“Is he, though?”
Unhappily, Scarlet introduced them. Her psionic powder shone like galactic dust, reflecting her delight and Newbolt’s manly pleasure. When she asked to go with them to the hearing, Newbolt agreed without waiting for Scarlet’s permission.
A crude mechanical elevator dropped them from the lock tower into the moon, so fast that Scarlet, not yet used to the light gravitation, had to snatch at a hand rail to keep his feet on the floor.
A mile below, Newbolt escorted them briskly through a long gallery that was a museum of the guarded planet. Crystal cases stood filled with stone axes, rust-eaten blades and primitive robot missiles.
“Our newest exhibit.” Newbolt paused at a niche where a sleek aluminum rocket hung against star-dusted emptiness above the ice-gemmed splendor of the crescent planet, “The first space ship from Earth.”
“How’d you get it here?”
“We followed it out from Earth. The natives were trying for the moon, but they ran into a burst of solar radiation too hot for their shielding. After they were dead, we salvaged their equipment.” He chuckled. “If they had known how closely we were watching—”
“ ‘You let them die?” Scarlet interrupted. “Out here in space?”
“You know the Covenants.” Newbolt shrugged, not very respectfully. “They had failed to make contact. Consequently, we couldn’t interfere.”
IV
EIGHTY-SEVEN galactic citizens had responded to his call. Most of them were attached to the quarantine service, but others had sought these wilderness worlds for ends as varied as their interstellar culture. A trio of prospectors had been sifting through the asteroids. A primitive artist had been recording an epic fantasy of a wrecked flyer down on a rocky moon of Saturn, surrounded by the “phantom lights” of space legend. A mystic on Pluto had interrupted a hundred years of solitary contemplation, to attend the hearing. An archeologist had abandoned a dig on Mars. Half a dozen outside agents had hastily discarded their disguises as inhabitants of Earth.
Waiting under the old stone dome of the little auditorium, these legally human beings had sorted themselves into three contending factions.
“Beasts of prey!” Newbolt gave the nearest group a snarl of contempt. “Rumors of the crisis have been spreading out through space for a century now. These wolves have come swarming in, howling for leave to loot the planet.” He chuckled. “The signal project serves them properly!”
Scarlet made no answer. Robed in his blue official light, he mounted to his bench and waited sternly for Newbolt to silence the chamber. His feral eyes narrow with his most judicial scowl, he studied the three hostile factions.
Newbolt was marching toward the neatly seated contingent from the quarantine station. Coral shimmered beside him, clad in golden dust and the cascade of psionic fire falling from her waist. Scarlet tightened his bony jaws, turning painfully away from her magnified allure.
The hermit, his detached head blind and cadaverous in its crystal cell, had wheeled himself to join the three lean young men in the plain space dress of the signal service. Scarlet frowned disapprovingly at their contented poverty, and looked for the beasts of prey.
The straggling group down at his left included the bearded artist and the spaceworn prospectors, among half a dozen others. They looked like feeble beasts. He saw no evidence of the wealth he wanted.
HUNCHED and ugly on the bench, he droned the official formula which invoked the olden justice of man. His voice was as ugly as his knobby angularity, slurred and harsh and high.
“A routine affair,” he rasped, and paused again to savor the pain of the beautiful men. “We’ll dispense with formality, to get at the facts. I’ll summarize the briefs. The natives of Sol III are reported near contact crisis. Social workers are waiting to usher them into civilization. Their qualifications for human status have been challenged, however, and the signal service has filed notice of intention to appropriate Sol for use as an intergalactic beacon.” Looking sourly for Coral, he found her now at the back of the room, glowing over a stooped little stranger. “A few individuals have seen fit to protest—”
“Certainly we protest!” She started toward the bench, towing the stranger. “Because Sol is not a barren star. Earth has three billion native inhabitants, whose human rights must be protected.”
“Human?” He let his voice grate unpleasantly. “I understand that all human beings on these threatened planets were ordered to assemble here. I don’t count three billion.”
“Of course they can’t obey psionic orders, because they don’t know psionics! But now I know they’re human.” She hauled the wispy stranger toward him. “This is Mark Whitherly, the anthropologist. He found on Mars—”
“Please, Miss Fell!” Newbolt intercepted her. “You’re here as a guest. You can’t interrupt the proceedings.”
“Never mind, Commander.” Scarlet smiled to welcome a possible bribe. “I won’t be bound by any red tape. I intend to explore every source of evidence.”
Newbolt muttered and sat down.
Scarlet waited, watching Coral and her discovery. The anthropologist, with his shuffling gait and his trembling hands and his dry yellow skin drawn tight over fine old bones, looked a good five hundred years overdue for euthanasia. The dull blue dust of his scholarly robe reflected nothing of Coral’s bright excitement.
“Listen, Wain!” she was bubbling. “Mark has found evidence—proof you can’t ignore! Now you will have to lift the quarantine at once. And you will disapprove the blinker project.”
“I’ll listen.” Scarlet frowned doubtfully. “To any actual evidence.”
“I DO have evidence.” The old scholar spoke slowly but clearly, in a child’s high voice. “Your Equity, I have been watching this planet at intervals for two thousand years. It is my great experiment.”
“What sort of experiment?”
“A study in cultural collision.” The dull dust brightened now with an eagerness that made the old man seem oddly boyish. “You hear a lot of theories about what happens when our galactic civilization impinges upon primitive societies. You hear that the primitives are usually benefited, and you hear that they are usually destroyed. I have been waiting for this crisis, preparing to settle that question scientifically. Now that the moment has come—”
“Has it come?”
“It has!” A single comic lock of yellow hair waved above old Whitherly’s bobbing head. “I have been watching the natives fumble closer to contact. They have observed our psionic monitors—which they call dirigible dishes. They have written books about us. Their rockets have reached this satellite. All they lack is your formal recognition of their human status.”
“Your Equity, I object!” The signal officer was alertly on his feet, tanned and handsome even though he wore no cosmetics, almost insolent. “I must inform you that our corps did not select suns at random for the intergalactic beacon. We traced the records of early migration, and chose a sector which was evidently bypassed. If Whitherly is a real authority, I challenge him to show you one shard of evidence that human colonists ever landed anywhere on Earth.”
Scarlet looked inquiringly at the worn old man.
“I can’t do that,” Whitherly said.
“Then how can you claim human status for these filthy anthropoids?” Smugly confident, the tall signalman turned to Scarlet. “Your Equity, since Whitherly admits that he has discovered no evidence of biological relationship, which is the first essential qualification for human status, I move that this inquiry be closed with a formal order approving our signal project.”
“Wain, wait!” Blue alarm shivered around Coral. “You haven’t heard about Mark’s great discovery.”
Scarlet looked impatiently back at the lean old man, noting sourly that he looked too poor to pay for the least satellite of these worlds he wished to save.
“Penwright jumped to a false conclusion.” Whitherly nodded feebly toward the signal officer. “I do have proof that the natives of Earth are our human kin. If no colonists ever landed here, that is simply because the movement was in the other direction.”
A PUZZLED hush whispered through the chamber.
“Listen, Wain!” Coral breathed.
“The first civilized observers here noted the odd fact that all life on Earth appears to have sprung from a single family tree,” Whitherly’s high voice resumed. “Now I know why. All my evidence supports the obvious explanation that this world is where human life evolved.”
Swaying unsteadily, he paused for breath.
“Tell them!” Flickering with a purple urgency, Coral caught his sticklike arm. “Tell them what you found on Mars.”
“In the last few centuries,” he labored slowly on, “I have extended my search to the desert planets. On Mars I found a buried human site, dating from more than twenty thousand years ago. My excavations reveal that primitive neutrionic flyers landed at the site. Some of them remained there, abandoned. But some of them went on, after they had been refitted to cross interstellar distances.”
The blue dust glowed around him.
“The first neutrionic ships!” he whispered thinly. “They had brought primitive men from Earth to Mars. They carried our ancestors out to claim the galaxy.” Unsteadily defiant, Whitherly blinked at Penwright. “You can’t be allowed to murder our mother world!”
“That is loaded language.” Penwright chuckled tolerantly.
“Y our Equity, I submit that every planet within two hundred light-years has been claimed as the original cradle of mankind. On none of them, unfortunately, has any reliable evidence survived. The wave of migration has left these Center worlds too far behind. The few that were ever civilized have been abandoned for twenty thousand years.”
“I know galactic history,” Scarlet reminded him frostily. “I am competent to rule upon the evidence.”
“You will act promptly?” Old Whitherly peered up anxiously. “You can see that my own time is running out. My younger associates scattered when they heard of the blinker project. If there is any long delay, my chance to observe the crisis will be lost.”
“Your own misfortunes are irrelevant.”
“But, Wain! Why wait?” Coral’s urgency washed her with rainbow opalescence. “Since the natives are our proven kinsmen, and since they are already landing their rockets on the moon, can’t you end the quarantine now?”
Sadly, Scarlet shook his head. Whitherly’s sociological research, like her own educational program and Penwright’s signal project, seemed inconsistent with bribery. Their noble claims might make a useful cover for him when he came to pronounce his decision, but that would have to wait until he had found a purchaser for Earth.
