Time Travel Omnibus, page 479
“In other words,” Courtland said faintly, “you repairmen are the only controlling influence over the swibbles. You represent the total human agency standing above these machines.”
The repairman reflected. “I suppose so,” he admitted modestly. “Yes, that’s correct.”
“Except for you, they pretty damn well manage the human race.”
The bony chest swelled with complacent, confident pride. “I suppose you could say that.”
“Look,” Courtland said thickly. He grabbed hold of the man’s arm. “How the hell can you be sure? Are you really in control?” A crazy hope was rising up inside him: as long as men had power over the swibbles there was a chance to roll things back. The swibbles could be disassembled, taken apart piece by piece. As long as swibbles had to submit to human servicing it wasn’t quite hopeless.
“What, sir?” the repairman inquired. “Of course we’re in control. Don’t you worry.” Firmly, he disengaged Courtland’s fingers. “Now, where is your swibble?” He glanced around the room. “I’ll have to hurry; there isn’t much time left.”
“I haven’t got a swibble,” Courtland said.
For a moment it didn’t register. Then a strange, intricate expression crossed the repairman’s face. “No swibble? But you told me—”
“Something went wrong,” Courtland said hoarsely. “There aren’t any swibbles. It’s too early—they haven’t been invented. Understand? You came too soon!”
The young man’s eyes popped. Clutching his equipment, he stumbled back two steps, blinked, opened his mouth and tried to speak. “Too—soon?” The comprehension arrived. Suddenly he looked older, much older. “I wondered. All the undamaged buildings . . . the archaic furnishings. The transmission machinery must have misphased!” Rage flashed over him. “That instantaneous service—I knew dispatch should have stuck to the old mechanical system. I told them to make better tests. Lord, there’s going to be hell to pay; if we ever get this mix-up straightened out I’ll be surprised.”
Bending down furiously, he hastily dropped his equipment back in the case. In a single motion he slammed and locked it, straightened up, bowed briefly at Courtland.
“Good evening,” he said frigidly. And vanished.
The circle of watchers had nothing to watch. The swibble repairman had gone back to where he came from.
After a time Pesbroke turned and signaled to the man in the kitchen. “Might as well shut off the tape recorder,” he muttered bleakly. “There’s nothing more to record.”
“Good Lord,” Hurley said, shaken. “A world run by machines.”
Fay shivered. “I couldn’t believe that little fellow had so much power; I thought he was just a minor official.”
“He’s completely in charge,” Courtland said harshly.
There was silence.
One of the two children yawned sleepily. Fay turned abruptly to them and herded them efficiently into the bedroom. “Time for you two to be in bed,” she commanded, with false gaiety.
Protesting sullenly, the two boys disappeared, and the door closed. Gradually, the living room broke into motion. The tape-recorder man began rewinding his reel. The legal stenographer shakily collected her notes and put away her pencils. Hurley lit up a cigar and stood puffing moodily, his face dark and somber.
“I suppose,” Courtland said finally, “that we’ve all accepted it; we assume it’s not a fake.”
“Well,” Pesbroke pointed out, “he vanished. That ought to be proof enough. And all the junk he took out of his kit—”
“It’s only nine years,” Parkinson, the electrician, said thoughtfully. “Wright must be alive already. Let’s look him up and stick a shiv into him.”
“Army engineer,” MacDowell agreed. “R.J. Wright. It ought to be possible to locate him. Maybe we can keep it from happening.”
“How long would you guess people like him can keep the swibbles under control?” Anderson asked.
Courtland shrugged wearily. “No telling. Maybe years . . . maybe a century. But sooner or later something’s going to come up, something they didn’t expect. And then it’ll be predatory machinery preying on all of us.”
Fay shuddered violently. “It sounds awful; I’m certainly glad it won’t be for a while.”
“You and the repairman,” Courtland said bitterly. “As long as it doesn’t affect you—”
Fay’s overwrought nerves flared up. “We’ll discuss it later on.” She smiled jerkily at Pesbroke. “More coffee? I’ll put some on.” Turning on her heel, she rushed from the living room into the kitchen.
While she was filling the Silex with water, the doorbell quietly rang.
The roomful of people froze. They looked at each other, mute and horrified.
“He’s back,” Hurley said thickly.
“Maybe it’s not him,” Anderson suggested weakly. “Maybe it’s the camera people, finally.”
But none of them moved toward the door. After a time the bell rang again, longer, and more insistently.
“We have to answer it,” Pesbroke said woodenly.
“Not me,” the legal stenographer quavered.
“This isn’t my apartment,” MacDowell pointed out.
Courtland moved rigidly toward the door. Even before he took hold of the knob he knew what it was. Dispatch, using its new-fangled instantaneous transmission. Something to get work crews and repairmen directly to their stations. So control of the swibbles would be absolute and perfect; so nothing would go wrong.
But something had gone wrong. The control had fouled itself up. It was working upside down, completely backward. Self-defeating, futile: it was too perfect. Gripping the knob, he tore the door open.
Standing in the hall were four men. They wore plain gray uniforms and caps. The first of them whipped off his cap, glanced at a written sheet of paper, and then nodded politely at Courtland.
“Evening, sir,” he said cheerfully. He was a husky man, wide-shouldered, with a shock of thick brown hair hanging over his sweat-shiny forehead. “We—uh—got a little lost, I guess. Took a while to get here.”
Peering into the apartment, he hitched up his heavy leather belt, stuffed his route sheet into his pocket, and rubbed his large, competent hands together.
“It’s downstairs in the trunk,” he announced, addressing Courtland and the whole living room of people. “Tell me where you want it, and we’ll bring it right up. We should have a good-sized space—that side over there by the window should do.” Turning away, he and his crew moved energetically toward the service elevator. “These late-model swibbles take up a lot of room.”
THE WAITABITS
Erik Frank Russell
There are a lot of reasons why a race might be unconquerable. Sometimes it isn’t that you haven’t the courage to do it, but something quite different . . .
He strode toward the Assignment Office with quiet confidence born of long service, much experience and high rank. Once upon a time a peremptory call to this department had made him slightly edgy exactly as it unnerved the fresh-faced juniors today. But that had been long, long ago. He was gray-haired now, with wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, silver oak-leaves on his epaulettes. He had heard enough, seen enough and learned enough to have lost the capacity for surprise.
Markham was going to hand him a tough one. That was Markham’s job: to rake through a mess of laconic, garbled, distorted or eccentric reports, pick out the obvious problems and dump them squarely in the laps of whoever happened to be hanging around and was considered suitable to solve them. One thing could be said in favor of this technique: its victims often were bothered, bedeviled or busted but at least they were never bored. The problems were not commonplace, the solutions sometimes fantastic.
The door detected his body-heat as he approached, swung open with silent efficiency. He went through, took a chair, gazed phlegmatically at the heavy man behind the desk.
“Ah, Commodore Leigh,” said Markham pleasantly. He shuffled some papers, got them in order, surveyed the top one. “I am informed that the Thunderer’s overhaul is complete, the crew has been recalled and everything is ready for flight.”
“That is correct.”
“Well now, I have a task for you.” Markham put on the sinister smile that invariably accompanied such an announcement. After years of reading what had followed in due course, he had conceived the notion that all tasks were funny except when they involved a massacre. “You are ready and eager for another trip, I trust?”
“I am always ready,” said Commodore Leigh. He had outgrown the eagerness two decades back.
“I have here the latest consignment of scout reports,” Markham went on. He made a disparaging gesture. “You know what they’re like. Condensed to the minimum and in some instances slightly mad. Happy the day when we receive a report detailed with scientific thoroughness.”
“You’ll get that only from a trained mind,” Leigh commented. “Scouts are not scientists. They are oddities who like roaming the loneliest reaches of space with no company but their own. Pilot-trained hoboes willing to wander at large, take brief looks and tell what they’ve seen. Such men are useful and necessary. Their shortcomings can be made up by those who follow them.”
“Precisely,” agreed Markham with suspicious promptness. “So this is where we want you to do some following.”
“What is it this time?”
“We have Boydell’s latest report beamed through several relay stations. He is way out in the wilds.” Markham tapped the paper irritably. “This particular scout is known as Gabby Boydell because he is anything but that. He uses words as if they cost him fifty dollars apiece.”
“Meaning he hasn’t said enough?” asked Leigh, smiling.
“Enough? He’s told us next to nothing!” He let go an emphatic snort. “Eighteen planets scattered all over the shop and not a dozen words about each. He discovers a grand total of eighteen planets in seven previously unexplored systems and the result doesn’t occupy half a page.”
“Going at that speed, he’d not have time for much more,” Leigh ventured. “You can’t write a book about a world without taking up residence for a while.”
“That may be. But these crackpot scouts could do better and it’s time they were told as much.” He pointed an accusative finger. “Look at this item. The eleventh planet he visited. He has named it Pulok for some reason that is probably crazy. His report employs exactly four words: ‘Take it and welcome.’ What do you make of that?”
Leigh thought it over carefully. “It is inhabitable by humankind. There is no native opposition, nothing to prevent us grabbing it. But in his opinion it isn’t worth possessing.”
“Why, man, why?”
“I don’t know, not having been there.”
“Boydell knows the reason.” Markham fumed a bit and went on, “And he ought to state it in precise, understandable terms. He shouldn’t leave a mystery hanging in midair like a bad smell from nowhere.”
“He will explain it when he returns to his sector headquarters, surely?”
“That may be months hence, perhaps years, especially if he manages to pick up fuel and replacement tubes from distant outposts. Those scouts keep to no schedule. They get there when they arrive, return when they come back. Galactic gypsies, that’s how they like to think of themselves.”
“They’ve chosen freedom,” Leigh offered.
Ignoring that remark, Markham continued, “Anyway, the problem of Pulok is a relatively minor one to be handled by somebody else. I’ll give it to one of the juniors; it will do something for his education. The more complicated and possibly dangerous tangles are for older ones such as yourself.”
“Tell me the worst.”
“Planet fourteen on Boydell’s list. He has given it the name of Eterna and don’t ask me why. The code formula he’s registered against it reads O/M/D. 7. That means we can live on it without special equipment, it’s an Earth-type planet of one-tenth greater mass and is inhabited by an intelligent life form of different but theoretically equal mental power. He calls this life form the Waitabits. Apparently he tags everything and everybody with the first name that pops into his mind.”
“What information does he offer concerning them?”
“Hah!” said Markham, pulling a face. “One word. Just one word.” He paused, then voiced it. “Unconquerable.”
“Eh?”
“Unconquerable,” repeated Markham. “A word that should not exist in scout-language.” At that point he became riled, jerked open a drawer, extracted a notebook and consulted it. “Up to last survey, four hundred twenty-one planets had been discovered, charted, recorded. One hundred thirty-seven found suitable for human life and large or small groups of settlers placed thereon. Sixty-two alien life forms mastered during the process.” He shoved the book back. “And out there in the dark a wandering tramp picks a word like unconquerable.”
“I can think of only one reason that makes sense,” suggested Leigh.
“What is that?”
“Perhaps they really are unconquerable.”
Markham refused to credit his ears. “If that is a joke, commodore, it’s in bad taste. Some might think it seditious.”
“Well, can you think up another and better reason?”
“I don’t have to. I’m sending you there to find out. The Grand Council asked specifically that you be given this task. They feel that if any yet unknown aliens have enough to put the wind up one of our own scouts then we must learn more about them. And the sooner the better.”
“There’s nothing to show that they actually frightened Boydell. If they had done so he’d have said more, much more. A genuine first-class menace is the one thing that would make him talk his head off.”
“That’s purely hypothetical,” said Markham. “We don’t want guesses. We want facts.”
“All right.”
“Consider a few other, facts,” Markham added. “So far no other life form has been able to resist us. I don’t see how any can. Any creatures with an atom of sense soon see which side their bread is buttered, if they eat bread and like butter. If we step in and provide the brains while they furnish the labor, with mutual benefit to both parties, the aliens are soon doing too well for themselves to complain. If a bunch of Sirian Wimpots slave all day in our mines, then fly in their own helicopters back to homes such as their forefathers never owned, what have they got to cry about?”
“I fail to see the purpose of the lecture,” said Leigh, dryly.
“I’m emphasizing that by force, ruthlessness, argument, persuasion, precept and example, appeal to common sense or any other tactic appropriate to the circumstances we can master and exploit any life-form in the cosmos. That’s the theory we’ve been using for a thousand years—and it works. We’ve proved that it works. We have made it work. The first time we let go of it and admit defeat we’re finished. We go down and disappear along with all the other vanished hordes.” He swept his papers to one side. “A scout has admitted defeat. He must be a lunatic. But lunatics can create alarm. The Grand Council is alarmed.”
“So I am required to seek soothing syrup?”
“Yes. See Parrish in the charting department. He’ll give you the coordinates of this Eterna dump.” Standing up, he offered a plump hand. “A smooth trip and a safe landing, commodore.”
“Thanks.”
The Thunderer hung in a balanced orbit while its officers examined the new world floating below. This was Eterna, second planet of a sun very much like Sol. Altogether there were four planets in this particular family but only the second harbored life in any detectable form.
Eterna was a pretty sight, a great blue-green ball shining in the blaze of full day. Its land masses were larger than Earth’s; its oceans smaller. No vast mountain ranges were visible, no snow-caps either, yet lakes and rivers were numerous. Watersheds lay in heavily forested hills that crinkled much of the surface and left few flat areas. Cloud-banks lay over the land like scatterings of cotton-wool, small in area, widely dispersed, but thick, heavy and great in number.
Through powerful glasses towns and villages could be seen, most of them placed in clearings around which armies of trees marched down to the rivers. There were also narrow, winding roads and thin, spidery bridges. Between the larger towns ran vague lines that might be railroad tracks but lacked sufficient detail at such a distance to reveal their true purpose.
Pascoe, the sociologist, put down his binoculars and said, “Assuming that the night side is very similar, I estimate their total strength at no more than one hundred millions. I base that on other planetary surveys. When you’ve counted the number of peas per bottle in a large and varied collection of them you develop the ability to make reasonably accurate guesses. One hundred millions at most.”
“That’s low for a planet of this size and fertility, isn’t it?” asked Commodore Leigh.
“Not necessarily. There were no more of us in the far past. Look at us now.”
“The implication is that these Waitabits are comparatively a young species?”
“Could be. On the other hand they may be old and senile and dying out fast. Or perhaps they’re slow breeders and their natural increase isn’t much.”
“I don’t go for the dying out theory,” put in Walterson, the geophysicist. “If once they were far bigger than they are today, the planet should still show signs of it. A huge inheritance leaves its mark for centuries. Remember that city-site we found on Hercules? Even the natives didn’t know of it, the markings being visible only from a considerable altitude.”
They used their glasses again, sought for faint lines of orderliness in wide tracts of forest. There were none to be seen.
“Short in history or slow to breed,” declared Pascoe. “That’s my opinion for what it’s worth.”
Frowning down at the blue-green ball, Leigh said heavily, “By our space-experienced standards a world of one hundred millions is weak. It’s certainly not sufficiently formidable to turn a hair on a minor bureaucrat, much less worry the Council itself.” He turned, lifted a questioning eyebrow as a signals-runner came up to him. “Well?”
