Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Finally it was over. One or two misguided Earthmen clapped, but quickly subsided into embarrassed silence when everyone else sat in deathly quiet.

  Then a Google with a reed pipe—perhaps the very one, Sheldon thought, upon which Greasy had done his consultative engineering—squatted in the center of the circle and piped away with a weird inconsistency that would have put to shame even the squeakiest of Earthly bagpipers. It lasted for a long time and seemed to get nowhere but this time the ship’s crew, perhaps in relief at the ending, finally, of the number, whooped and clapped and yelled and whistled as if for an encore, although Sheldon was fairly sure they meant quite the opposite.

  The chief turned to Sheldon and asked what the men were doing. Sheldon had a reasonably hard time explaining to him the custom of applause.

  The two numbers, it turned out, were the sum total of the entertainment program whomped up by the Googles, and Sheldon would have liked to ask the chief if that was all the village could muster, a fact which he suspected, but he refrained from inquiring.

  The ship’s crew took over, then.

  The engine-room gang gathered together, with their arms around each other’s shoulders in the best barbershop tradition and sang half a dozen songs, with Greasy laboring away on the squeeze box to accompany them. They sang old songs of Earth, the songs all spacemen sing, with unshed tears brightening their eyes.

  It wasn’t long before others of the crew joined in, and in less than an hour the ship’s entire complement was howling out the songs, beating the ground with the flats of their hands to keep time and flinging back their heads to yelp the Earth words into the alien sky.

  Then someone suggested they should dance. One of the tube-men called the sets while Greasy humped lower over his squeeze box, pumping out “Old Dan Tucker” and “Little Brown Jug” and “The Old Gray Mare” and others of their kind.

  Just how it happened Sheldon didn’t see, but all at once there were more sets. The Googles were dancing, too, making a few mistakes, but their Earthmen teachers guided them through their paces until they got the hang of it.

  More and more of them joined in, and finally the entire village was dancing, even the chief, while Greasy pumped away, with the sweat streaming down his face. The Google with the reed pipe came over after a while and sat down beside Greasy. He seemed to have got the technique of how to make the music too, for his piping notes came out loud and clear, and he and Greasy hunkered there, playing away like mad while all the others danced. The dancers yelled and hollered and stamped the ground and turned cartwheels which were totally uncalled for and strictly out of place. But no one seemed to care.

  Sheldon found himself beside the god-house. He and Hart were alone, pushed outward by the expanding dance space.

  Said Hart: “Mister Co-ordinator, isn’t that the damnedest thing that you have ever seen.”

  Sheldon agreed. “One thing you have to say about it: The party is a wingding.”

  Greasy brought the news in the morning when Sheldon was having breakfast in his cubbyhole.

  “They’ve dragged something out of that there god-house,” Greasy said.

  “What is it, Greasy?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Greasy. “And I didn’t want to ask.”

  “No,” said Sheldon, gravely. “No, I can appreciate you wouldn’t.”

  “It’s a cube,” said Greasy. “A sort of latticework affair and it’s got shelves, like, in it, and it don’t make no sense at all. It looks something like them pictures you showed me in the book one time.”

  “Diagrams of atomic structure?”

  “That’s exactly it,” said Greasy. “Except more complicated.”

  “What are they doing with it?”

  “Just putting it together. And puttering around with it. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing with it.”

  Sheldon mopped up his plate and shoved it to one side. He got up and shrugged into his coat. “Let’s go down and see,” he said.

  There was quite a crowd of natives around the contraption when they arrived, and Sheldon and Greasy stood on the outskirts of the crowd, keeping quiet and saying nothing, being careful not to get in the way.

  The cube was made of rods of some sort and was about twelve feet on each side, and the rods were joined together with a peculiar disc arrangement. The whole contraption looked like something a kid with a full-blown imagination might dream up with a super-tinker-toy set.

  Within the cube itself were planes of glasslike material, and these, Sheldon noticed, were set with almost mathematical precision, great attention having been paid to the exact relationship between the planes.

  As they watched, a heavy box was brought out of the god-house by a gang of Googles, who puffed and panted as they lugged it to the cube. They opened the box and took out several objects, carved of different materials, some wood, some stone, others of unfamiliar stuff. These they set in what appeared to be prescribed positions upon the various planes.

  “Chess,” said Greasy.

  “What?”

  “Chess,” said Greasy. “It looks like they’re setting up a game of chess.”

  “Could be,” said Sheldon, thinking, if it is a chess game, it is the wildest, most fantastic, toughest game I have ever seen.

  “They got some screwy chess games, now,” said Greasy. “Fairy chess, they call it, with more squares to the board and more pieces, different than the ones you use just regular. Me, I never could rightly get the hang of even normal chess.”

  The chief saw them and came over.

  “We are very confident,” he said. “With the help you gave us, we can’t help but win.”

  “That is gratifying,” Sheldon said.

  “These other villages,” said the chief, “haven’t got a ghost. We have them pegged dead center. This will be three times, hand-running.”

  “You are to be congratulated,” said Sheldon, wondering what it was all about.

  “It’s been a long time,” said the chief.

  “So it has,” said Sheldon, still very much at sea.

  “I must go now,” said the chief. “We start now.”

  “Wait a second,” Sheldon asked him. “You are playing a game?”

  “You might call it that,” the chief admitted.

  “With these other villages—all the other villages?”

  “That’s right,” said the chief.

  “How long does it take? With all those villages, you and the other thirty-six…”

  “This one won’t take long,” the chief declared, with a knowing leer.

  “Good luck, chief,” said Sheldon and watched him walk away.

  “What’s going on?” asked Greasy.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Sheldon. “I have work to do.”

  Hart hit the ceiling when he learned the kind of work that Sheldon had to do.

  “You can’t third-degree my men!” he shouted. “I won’t have it. They haven’t done a thing.”

  “Master Hart,” said Sheldon, “you will have the men line up. I’ll see them in my quarters, one at a time, and I won’t third-degree them. I just want to talk to them.”

  “Mister Co-ordinator,” said Hart, “I’ll do the talking for them.”

  “You and I, Master Hart,” said Sheldon, “did our talking last night. Much too much of it.”

  For hours on end, Sheldon sat in his cubbyhole while the men filed in one at a time and answered the questions that he shot at them:

  “What questions did the Googles ask you?”

  “How did you answer them?”

  “Did they seem to understand?”

  Man by man the notes piled up, and at last the job was done.

  Sheldon locked the door, took a bottle from his desk and had a liberal snort; then he put the bottle back again and settled down to work, goi
ng through the notes.

  The communicator beeped at him.

  “The scouts are in,” said Hart’s voice, “and every single village has one of those cubes set up in front of their god-house. They’re sitting around it in a circle and they seem to be playing some sort of game. Every once in a while someone gets up from the circle and makes a move on one of the planes in the cube and then goes back and sits down again.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nothing else,” said Hart. “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Sheldon, “I guess that was what I wanted.”

  “Tell me one thing,” asked Hart. “Who are they playing?”

  “They’re playing one another.”

  “One another what?”

  “The villages,” said Sheldon. “The villages are playing against one another.”

  “You mean thirty-seven villages?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Would you tell me just how in hell thirty-seven villages can play one single game?”

  “No, I can’t,” said Sheldon. But he had the terrible feeling that he could. That he could make a guess at least.

  When it had become apparent that the retrogression was a planned affair, he remembered, he had wondered about the problem of communications which would have been necessary to have thirty-seven villages simultaneously retrogress. It would have taken, he had told himself, a higher order of communications than one would expect to find in a Type 10 culture.

  And here it was again—an even tougher communications job, an odd, round-robin game in which these same thirty-seven villages played a game upon a complicated board.

  There is one answer for it, he told himself. It simply couldn’t be, but there is no other answer for it—telepathy—and that is almost unthinkable in a Type 10 culture, let alone a Type 14.

  He clicked off the squawk box and went back to work. He took a large sheet of paper to serve as a master chart and thumbtacked it to the desk, then started on the notes, beginning with the top one and going through to the very last. And when he had finished the chart, he sat back and looked at it, then put in a call for Hart.

  Five minutes later Hart climbed the stairs and knocked at the door. Sheldon unlocked it and let him in. “Sit down, Hart,” he said.

  “You have something?”

  “I think I have,” said Sheldon. He gestured at the sheet thumbtacked on the desk. “It’s all there.”

  Hart stared at the chart. “I don’t see a thing.”

  “Last night,” said Sheldon, “we went to the Google pow-wow, and in the short time we spent there, we gave that particular village the most complete and comprehensive outline of a Type 10 culture that you have ever seen. But what really scares me is that we went somewhere beyond Type 10. I haven’t worked it out completely, but it looks nearer Type 9M than Type 10.”

  “We what?”

  “They pumped it out of us,” said Sheldon. “Each of our men was questioned about certain cultural matters, and in not a single instance was there duplication. Each of the set of questions asked was a different set of questions. Just as if those Googles were assigned certain questions.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Hart.

  “It means,” said Sheldon, “that we have interfered in one of the slickest social setups in the entire galaxy. I hope to God…”

  “Slick social setup! You mean the Googles?”

  “I mean the Googles,” Sheldon said.

  “But they never amounted to anything,” Hart said. “They never will amount to anything. They…”

  “Think hard,” said Sheldon, “and try to tell me what is the most outstanding thing about the Google culture. We have a history of five hundred years of trade with them. During those five hundred years there is one fact about them that sticks up like a bandaged thumb.”

  “They’re dumb,” said Hart.

  “Not from here, they aren’t.”

  “They never got anywhere,” said Hart. “Weren’t even going anywhere, far as I could see.”

  “That’s part of it,” said Sheldon. “Static culture.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Hart, “if I’ll play guessing games with you. If you have something on your mind…”

  “I have peace on the mind,” said Sheldon. “In all the five hundred years we’ve known the Googles, there has been no dissension among them. They’ve never fought a war. That is something that cannot be said for any other planet.”

  “They are just too dumb to fight,” said Hart.

  “Too smart to fight,” said Sheldon. “The Googles, Master Hart, have done something no other people, no other culture, has ever been able to do in all galactic history. They’ve found a way in which to outlaw war!”

  For thousands upon thousands of years, empire after empire had been built among the stars and upon the many planets that circled round the stars.

  And one by one, lonely and beaten, each empire had fallen, and one by one other empires had risen to take their place and in their turn had fallen. And those that existed in this day would fall in time.

  This is the old, old cycle, Sheldon told himself, the ancient disease of force and arrogance and desperation—the ageless pattern of cultural development.

  Never had a day existed since the first beginning that there had not been war at one place or another within the galaxy.

  War came about because of economic pressure, mostly, although there were other causes—the ambitions of a certain being or of a certain race, the strange death-wish psychology which bloomed in certain cultures, an overweening racism, or a religion that spoke in terms of blood and death, rather than in terms of love and life.

  Break down the causes of war, Sheldon thought, and we would find a pattern—certain factors which made for war and certain other factors which made for victory, once war had been invoked.

  Now, suppose we made a study of war, its causes and the winning of it. Suppose we worked out the relevant relationships which each factor held to all the other factors, and not only that, but the relevant power of certain groups of factors against other groups of factors—factors of racial ingenuity and technology, of the human spirit, of logistics, of cultural development and the urge to protect and retain that culture, and hatred or the capacity to hate, all the many factors, tangible and intangible, which went into the making and the winning of a war.

  And broken down into concrete terms, what would some of those factors be? What factors pushed a culture to the point of war? What factors made a victor? Certainly not just steel and firepower, certainly not courage alone, or generalship alone, or logistics or any other thing that could stand alone.

  There would be other things as well, little, inconsequential, homely items, like sitting in a chair instead of squatting on the floor to eat, or using a knife and fork and not fingers. And other things, like dirty stories and better-drinking likker and a better pipe fashioned from a reed. For into all of these would go certain principles—the principle involved in the making of a better beer might light the way to manufacture a chemical that could be used in war; the perverted wit that shaped a dirty story might be turned to more destructive use in the propaganda section; the knowledge that made a better musical instrument might be extended to fashion an instrument that was not musical, but deadly.

  It would be abilities such as these which would supply the economic pressure that might start a war, or contribute to that sense of superiority and intolerance and invincibility which might incline a tribe to war.

  And if we watched the factors which represented these and other abilities, we would know when a war was about to pop.

  And it was these same basic abilities and attitudes, plus a million other factors, which would determine who would win if a war should start.

  Knowing this, we could assign certain actual values to all th
ese cultural factors, although the value, as in a hand of cards, would be increased or decreased as they occurred in combination.

  Sheldon got up and paced the tiny room, three steps up and three steps back.

  Suppose then, he thought, we made a game of it—a game of war, with all the factors represented by game pieces assigned sliding values. Suppose we played a game instead of fighting a war. Suppose we let the game decide which side would have won if there had been a war.

  Suppose, furthermore, that we watched cultures and detected the rise of those factors which finally lead to war. Suppose we could say that if the rise of certain factors should continue, war would then be inevitable in five years or ten.

  Suppose we could do this—then we could catch a war before it started. We could see the danger signals and we would know the crisis point. And when we reached the crisis point, we played a game—we did not fight a war.

  Except, Sheldon told himself, it wouldn’t work.

  We could play a game and decide a war, and once it had been decided, the factors that made for war would still be there; the crisis point would stand. We would be right back where we started; we would not have gained a thing. For the game, while it might decide who would have won the war, would not upset or correct the economic pressure, would not erase the crisis point.

  No doubt the game could show which side would have won. It could predict, with a small percentage error, the outcome of a war. But it could not wipe out excess populations, it could not wrest trade advantages from the opposing side—it wouldn’t do the job.

  It wouldn’t work, he told himself. It was a beautiful theory, a great idea, but it just wouldn’t work.

  We’d have to do more than play a game. We’d have to do a great deal more than play a game.

  Besides determining who would have won the war if there had been a war, we would have to remove voluntarily the factors which had brought about the war—the solid, substantial facts of economic pressure, of intolerance, of all the other factors which would be involved.