Various Fiction, page 74
He had brought ships, with a faster-than-light drive that would keep the physical sciences happy for fifty years.
Naturally, Earth couldn’t afford to doubt his word. If anyone was going to attack Earth, her people wanted a fighting chance. If that chance could be obtained by joining the Malig Civilization, that’s what Earth was going to do.
But another extraterrestrial, also bringing ships, telling the same story . . .
Earth couldn’t afford to doubt him, either.
Someone was going to attack Earth.
But which one?
“This is an impossible situation,” Carnier muttered, making a bridge of his pudgy fingers and staring at them moodily. “With less than three days to go . . . Why would the barbarians ask us for aid?”
“That’s pretty obvious,” Hendricks said. “They need allies. A hundred years of war must have cut pretty deeply into the manpower on both sides. If the barbarians can trick us into helping them it might swing the entire war.”
“And naturally,” Jenkins said, “they would represent themselves as a peace loving union. No one loves a conqueror except his own people. This is the sort of thing a clever barbarian leader would think of.”
“All we have to do,” Hendricks said, “is find which is the genuine agent of civilization.”
“Well, perhaps it won’t be too difficult,” Tomlinson said. “I suggest that we confront each with the other. Perhaps one will break down.”
The rest of the group agreed, and Irik was led to Almooroa’s room.
THERE was a moment of profound silence as the two aliens looked at each other. Then Almooroa leaped to his feet, upsetting his chair.
“The Horde is cleverer than I had supposed,” he said bitterly. “I suppose he has asked for aid against us?”
“He says he’s the representative of the Orged Civilization,” Jenkins said.
“There is no such thing!” Almooroa shouted. “These barbarians will try any lies, any trickery. Just look at him! Green-gray hide, barbed tail and all! Exactly as I told you!”
“So he got here first,” Irik said, his tail swinging ominously. “I daresay you have discovered by now how shaky his pretensions to civilization are?”
“Just a minute,” Tomlinson said, a light perspiration breaking out on his narrow, dark face. “You both insist that you represent a peace loving, interstellar civilization?”
Almooroa nodded. Irik swung his tail over his head.
“And each accuses the other of being the barbarian?”
“Yes!”
“Of course!”
There was a moment of silence as the scientists looked tragically and bitterly at each other.
“I warn you,” Almooroa said. “The Horde will sweep through in three days time. We cannot help you if your fleets are not joined to ours by then.”
“Remember,” Irik said sadly, “if you join the barbarians, no power of ours can save you. The Pack will occupy your planet as soon as you have helped push us back.”
“Just a moment,” Jenkins said firmly. “I think you can both understand our predicament. Each of you have come with aid, representing a different Civilization. We can only accept the help of one. We cannot afford to make any mistake. But how can we know? Can either of you offer any proof?”
“Proof?” Almooroa roared. “Just look at him!”
Irik smiled sadly and his antennae turned toward each other in an incomprehensible gesture.
“I can only hope you will recognize what is obvious,” he said.
“Now then,” Jenkins said later, when they had returned Irik to his room, “we represent a gathering of anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, psychologists. Certainly there are some tests we can devise to determine which alien is the barbarian?”
“Of course!” Tomlinson said. “After all, one has been brought up in a peace loving democracy, where culture and trade are sovereign. The other is from a people proficient only in the art of war. By questioning both closely, we should be able to determine which comes from where.”
“The barbarian,” Carnier said slowly, “should have little knowledge of the inner workings of an ancient civilization. It’s something he wouldn’t want to know.” Hendricks nodded, but felt uneasy. He hoped it would be as easy as that.
“We’ll have to hurry,” Jenkins said. “It is now almost two A.M. We have all day tomorrow, and about half of the day after. Then the UN must have a definite answer. Suppose you divide yourselves into two teams, and start the interrogation. I’m going to call the UN.”
He walked slowly out of the room.
Irik was seated comfortably on an overstuffed couch, looking out the window at the city lights.
“Could you tell us,” Hendricks asked, “how the Orged Civilization is governed? The division of power?”
“Certainly,” Irik said promptly. “The Civilization is in the form of a loose confederacy. We are held together by mutual trade interests and a like culture.”
“Of course,” Hendricks said sourly. He could have guessed that much himself. “But I mean the actual, detailed chains of command.”
“Well,” Irik said, “I confess I’m rather shaky on that sort of thing. I was bom on a frontier planet, you see, and I went into the Army at an early age.”
Tomlinson was jotting down notes in his tiny, precise script. “Could you tell us the principal movements in philosophy extant in the Civilization?”
“How’s that?” Irik asked.
“What do your people believe?” Hendricks said.
“Oh, let me see,” Irik said, his tail flicking nervously around the rungs of his chair. “We believe strongly in the idea of doing to others what you’d like to have done to yourself. It’s quite a basic idea with us.” For fifteen minutes he expostulated on the Golden Rule.
“Yes, I know,” Tomlinson said impatiently. “But be more specific. I mean, your civilization must have a number of highly structured theories concerning the origin of the universe, the existence of a supreme being, the nature of life, and so forth.”
“Sure we do,” Irik said. “We’ve got all those. But I’ve been in the army all my life.” He laughed nervously. “I mean, everyone’s always talking about the universe and philosophy, and stuff, but I was taught how to lead men and fight the Pack. That’s a full time job in itself. After all, we are at war.”
“You seem a funny choice for a mission like this,” Hendricks said.
“I was a logical choice. This isn’t a cultural mission. It’s a matter of life and death. Of course a soldier would be sent.” The questioning went on for three hours more. Irik couldn’t answer any detailed questions about the economic setup of the Orged Civilization, its philosophy, psychology, laws, or anything else.
He maintained that they had those things, in great abundance, and everyone was very happy with them. He just didn’t happen to know much about them.
TOMLINSON and Hendricks went to see how the other group had made out. They found Carnier jotting down comments on his notes in a vacant room.
“How did it go?” Tomlinson asked. “Not well at all,” Carnier admitted, wearily removing his glasses. “Almooroa showed no detailed knowledge at all. Of course, his story of being raised on an expedition to the interior of the galaxy could e true, and would account for it. After he got back he went into the Army. What did Irik say?”
Tomlinson told him.
“That’s bad,” Carnier said, putting his glasses back on and yawning. He rubbed his broad cheek. “I need a shave.”
“Either story could be true,” Hendricks pointed out “After all, you couldn’t expect the average Army sergeant on Earth to talk fluently about existentialism and the Greek Drama.”
“It’s all damnably confusing,” Tomlinson said, sitting down heavily.
Hendricks lighted a cigarette, and remembered that he hadn’t had any sleep for almost forty-five hours.
Jenkins came in, unwrapping a bar of chocolate. “The UN is equipping both fleets,” he said. “They expect a definite and final answer the day after tomorrow. I mean the day after today. Would anyone care for some chocolate?”
“No thank you,” Tomlinson said. “Would they care to come in and figure it out for themselves?”
“That’s our job,” Jenkins said. “And if we can’t, I don’t know who can.” He looked at his watch. “Getting early,” he said. “You’d better all eat and catch a nap.”
Hendricks pulled himself to his feet and went down to the cafeteria. He wolfed down three hamburgers, then found a row of vacant cots that the Army had set up.
He was asleep almost before he lay down.
Tomlinson shook him awake at noon Hendricks sat up, red-eyed, aware that to morrow was the last day.
“Morgan found that Almooroa doesn’t use a bed,” Tomlinson said. “Sleeps on the floor. Primitive indifference to comfort, would you say?”
“Maybe,” Hendricks said, trying to ease a crink in his neck. “How does Irik sleep?”
“I don’t know,” Tomlinson said. “I think Carnier was checking that.”
Hendricks wiped his eyes and followed Tomlinson down the hall. In a large, empty room three men were wheeling in a lie detector. Carnier was supervising its installation.
“Did you hear?” Carnier asked them. “Irik sleeps hanging by his tail from the ceiling fixture.” He beamed at them. “I believe that’s a pretty good indication of barbarism.”
Hendricks left the two men arguing which form of sleeping was most indicative of what, and went to find Jenkins.
The cultural anthropologist was reading through a four inch pile of notes. Beside him, a coffee pot was chugging merrily on a little burner.
“I hope that the lie detector may show something,” Jenkins said. “But I doubt it. Have some coffee. Do you have any ideas?”
“Not one,” Hendricks said. “I’m still trying to wake up.”
“The trouble is,” Jenkins said, “how can we judge an entire culture by one representative? Could the human race be judged on that basis? Sorry, I don’t seem to have any sugar.”
“Never use it,” Hendricks said. “Have you any ideas?”
“A few dismal ones,” Jenkins said. “The UN is needling me already for a decision. They don’t like to think about the possibility of a mistake.”
“I don’t either,” Hendricks said, feeling himself come alive as the steaming coffee filled him.
“I want to run a few tests in esthetic appreciation,” Jenkins said. “We just might find a point of departure there.”
He stood up and lifted his briefcase. “Coming?”
Hendricks gulped the rest of his coffee and followed.
“I’D LIKE your opinion on this,” Jenkins said to Almooroa in a carefully casual voice. He opened his briefcase and pulled out a book.
“There was blood on the moon that night,” he read, with a complete lack of expression, “as Bat Masterson, spurs jingling, hard heeled his way into Kelley’s Saloon. Hands barely brushing the black butts of his guns, he swept two loungers from his path as he strode to the bar.”
“That’s very nice,” Almooroa said, watching Jenkins’ face carefully. He glanced at Hendricks, then said, “Very nice indeed.”
“How about this?” Jenkins asked. He took another book from his briefcase and read, with. the same lack of expression, a Shakespearean sonnet.
“That’s very nice also,” Almooroa said, still glancing from one face to the other. “I can see that you are a cultured people.”
“Which do you like better?”
“Well, that’s difficult to say,” Almooroa said, after a few moments of thought. “The one has a better feeling of action, I would say. But the other was certainly more rhythmic. I liked them both.”
“How about this?” Jenkins asked. He showed Almooroa a fine reproduction of the Mona Lisa.
“Very pretty,” Almooroa said cautiously.
“And this?” He held up a third grade crayon drawing.
“That has nice color,” Almooroa said.
In music Almooroa liked Bach, Chinese music, and Cole Porter, as well as a tuneless little ditty Hendricks improvised on the spur of the moment.
“I really don’t know much about the arts, though,” he reminded them. “After all, I’m a soldier.”
Outside Almooroa’s room, Hendricks looked at Jenkins and raised an eyebrow. “He seems to have little grasp of the idea of criticism,” he said. Hendricks could feel the scales in his mind starting to tip.
“Remember, though,” Jenkins said, “we’re dealing in our esthetics. His own might be entirely different. It is very possible that he has no base to form his judgments on. What a people like and don’t like, their response to art objects, their degree of interest, their critical faculties, all are dependent on their nervous systems, their environment, and a whole host of imponderables.”
Hendricks nodded dubiously. “But you would think that a representative of the Malig Civilization would have something definite to say.”
“Perhaps we’ll have better luck with Irik,” Jenkins said.
IRIK maintained that the Shakespearean sonnet was meaningless. The cowboy selection was vile. The Mona Lisa was ugly, he insisted, and the third grade drawing wasn’t much better. Bach, Chinese music, Cole Porter and Hendricks’ humming all sounded like so much noise in his ears.
“When you come in contact with the Orged Civilization,” he said, “you’ll see what the Arts really are.” He scratched his forehead with his tail.
“Of course,” he said, “you must remember that I am a rude, untutored soldier. I would naturally tend to deprecate your arts.”
Which didn’t prove anything, either. “The trouble is,” Jenkins told Hendricks later, “a negative finding means nothing. Either of them could be expressing an honest opinion. We must find some better evidence.”
“Perhaps some of the others have found something,” Hendricks said.
“We’ll see,” Jenkins said. “We’ll hold a conference after supper.”
At the conference, a vast amount of data was presented. Potentially, there were some damning things to be said for either alien. But it was impossible to prove conclusively the case for one or the other.
“The stumbling block,” Jenkins said, “is our lack of an absolute scale on which to judge ‘barbariamsm ’ and ‘civilization.’ We have no referents for those labels, no referents which would be positively, unmistakably valid.”
“We have our own standards,” Tomlinson said. “By extrapolation—”
“By extrapolation they’re still our standards,” Jenkins said. “The real Gvilization might have standards incomprehensible to us.”
“Granted,” Carnier said. “We still must use some sort of a yardstick.”
“I know,” Jenkins sighed. “But what yardstick? Suppose we proved one was ‘civilized’ by our standards. We could still be wrong in terms of his own standards.”
“If we could only devise a foolproof test,” Hendricks said dreamily.
“Don’t wait for it,” Jenkins said. “It’s a purely fictional supposition. I suppose most of you art waiting to find one thing that will prove the issue. You’re waiting for one of the aliens to make a simple but revealing error, which will instantly reveal his barbarity. Things don’t happen that way in real life, gentlemen.”
Hendricks tried to suppress a smile. He had been looking for just that.
“The trouble with the ‘revealing error’ theory,” Jenkins went on, “is the possibility that we might condemn an entire race because one of its inhabitants lacks verbal skill.”
“But where does that leave us?” Tomlinson asked.
Jenkins shrugged his shoulders. “All the tests run so far are being mimeographed,” he said. “I want each of you to read a copy thoroughly, and try to form some sort of working hypothesis. By noon tomorrow we’ll have to have our decision.”
Hendricks rubbed his stiff neck. That left them about fifteen or so hours. A night and half a day, before Earth had to cast the dice.
“You are free to run any tests you like,” Jenkins said. “Good luck.”
Hendricks glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty.
WITH the mimeographed notes tucked under his arm, Hendricks found a vacant room and sat down to study.
Biology was first. According to the report, Almooroa showed signs of being a more highly evolved being. He had roughly the same nervous system as a human, but he was lacking an appendix. His digestive tract was simplified, and he had an auxiliary heart.
But, Biology pointed out, he was strictly carnivorous, and a daytime sleeper.
Signs of civilization?
Irik had large claws and an armored hide, a prehensile tail and antennae. Although bipedal, Biology doubted that he sprang from the same root as man. They didn’t have enough evidence to speculate on his origin, but pointed out his reptilian appearance.
Irik also showed a slightly more convoluted brain, and a more complex nervous system.
Biology hastened to say, though, that it was impossible to generalize about a race from a single brain. It could be a case of individual differences.
Were there any signs of civilization there, Hendricks asked himself?
Psychology was incomplete, having no standard to base its findings on. The lie detector results were meaningless.
Physiology pointed out Almooroa’s slightly faster reaction time, which might be interpreted as an instinctive, defensive reflex, or as a highly trained civilized response, depending upon whose theory you were following.
According to Physical Anthropology, Irik had evolved on a hot world, while Almooroa was a cold world inhabitant. Interpret any way you like.
After several hours, facts and figures were spinning through Hendricks’ head. He began to sense a slight leaning toward Irik.
But introspecting, he discovered that he was associating great size with barbarianism, smaller size with civilization.
Then the scales in his mind shifted toward Almooroa. But he found that he was considering reptilism as synonymous with barbarianism.
