Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Dumur turned heavily to confer with his psychowarfare chief. “Are they consistent in taking that line? What are they trying to accomplish?”

  “Those we have questioned uniformly express, or simulate, an attitude of surprise at our ‘unprovoked’ attack on them. As for the underlying motives—we have not reached them yet; deep probing technique will eventually destroy the higher brain centers and use up valuable prisoners, so we have delayed—”

  “But we must get to the bottom of this!”

  “Quite so. However, in order to reap the maximum utility from these specimens, it will first be desirable to feed them more information about us, so that in turn their reactions will yield us more information.”

  “Get on with it, then,” said the Great One grumpily.

  The prisoners watched dully as other equipment was moved to the fore—some apparatus evidently for reproducing recordings, a large screen. They eyed the latter, bewildered, as if lit with a star map.

  It was recognizably a chart of this sector of the galaxy. But it was cut by unfamiliar co-ordinates and marked with irregular and obscure symbols.

  A voice croaked explanation, and was echoed in human words by the interpreting machine. The map of the Ratk empire faded out and was replaced by a series of particular scenes—on planets, in space: the vast cities of the Ratk, their fortifications and armaments, their factories spewing out ever greater volumes of materiel; Ratk armadas maneuvering in deep space, making planetary systems quiver at their passage, testing monstrous weapons.

  The focus shifted to Ratk history. The humans saw how the race, in whose power they found themselves now, had responded, a thousand years ago, to the first intimation of a menace to its supremacy in all space. How the effort begun then had continued unremittingly through the centuries, carried on with superhuman determination and thoroughness as generation upon generation labored and died. How building up industrial and military might, framing an iron social order keyed to the grim prospect of the future struggle for galactic dominion, overcoming the immense difficulties of organization across interstellar distances to weld the Ratk empire into a hard defensive core and forge it into an offensive weapon of irresistible power—

  Piet watched with eye-narrowed intentness, striving against weariness to comprehend every clue to the aliens’ psychology which this exhibition might offer. He thought he understood why it was staged—to impress and overwhelm the captives in preparation for whatever variety of mental or physical torture might be next, and at the same time, probably, to study their reactions of fear or defiance to such a show of mobilized might.

  He couldn’t be sure how the other humans were taking it. But for him as he watched their captors’ self-portrait unfold—there came home to him the realization of what manner of creatures these were. It was a realization that brought despair in its train, and helpless fury, and paradoxically at the same time a sort of resigned relief. If there was no hope of humanity’s coming to terms with the Ratk—then he, and Fransi, and the others of this ill-fated expedition were lost; and the crushing burden that Piet had been carrying, the burden of trying to find a basis of understanding with the aliens, had rolled from his shoulders.

  The big screen was blank. The mechanical voice said harshly, “You, who spoke first. Speak now.”

  Piet looked burningly up at the Great Ratk. Yes, he would speak. There was no longer any reason for diplomatic restraint; it was plain now that the Others had chosen and would always choose war.

  He said clearly, “You evidently want to know what we think of you and your works, so you can use that knowledge. All right! I’ve understood one thing: that you’re desperately afraid of us!

  “Since you first found out you weren’t alone in the galaxy, everything your kind has done has been dictated by fear. You’ve armed yourselves to the teeth, shivered behind fortifications that never seemed safe enough’, lashed your population into despairing efforts of preparation. You’ve warped your whole society through fear, like some creature that diverts all its evolutionary energy into spines and poison-sacs, until it perishes choking on its own venom!”

  He paused, half expecting to be interrupted; but the machine, and the glowering Ratk, were silent.

  “And because suspicion is so inborn or ingrained into you, you’ve imagined for a thousand years that we must be preparing likewise, in the same fever of anxiety as, you. You . . . fools! When we first became aware, just as you did, that there was a second intelligent race in the galaxy true, there were a few alarmists who talked of a possible clash; but most of humanity was too busy, with the work of colonizing the stars that was beginning then and has been going on ever since, to worry about it, . . . our wisest men said—and they were right!—that the difficulty of interstellar war would be too great, and its profits too small, for any sane beings to contemplate.

  “Perhaps with the colossal war machine you’ve built out of your fear you can eventually defeat and destroy humanity. Perhaps. But suppose you do! I still think we’ll have had the better of it. We’ve had a thousand years, and they were worth it! A thousand years—while your race has existed in a tortured nightmare of hatred and insecurity—mine has been going on growing, building, achieving such happiness as we are capable of—living. A thousand years that for you has been a living death!”

  The speech-machine said, “That is not clear.”

  Piet laughed, heedless of the armed monsters around him. “Not clear?” he said wildly. “All right, I’ll tell you something perhaps you can grasp! From your star-map I see that your ‘empire’ is less than five hundred light-years across, and from your history that it was almost that large a thousand years ago. You’ve been consolidating, because you were afraid of us, concentrating your power in a radius you thought you could defend and where you could exercise a centralized control. But we’ve been under no such handicap. We’ve simply been expanding freely into the Universe, without concern for discipline or strategy, limited only by our ability to breed—which is excellent—and to build up our colonies as a basis for launching new expeditions outward. So, while a thousand years ago your race was distributed over a greater volume of space than we were, by now our advance posts must be more than two thousand light-years apart, and the Ratk empire is merely an island in the twentyfold greater volume of space through which humanity is distributed. And, because the limiting factor is the velocity of light, you can never overtake out vanguard though you may defeat the rearguard—you’ve lost the race!”

  The Great Ratk looked uncertainly to the psychowarfare expert. “What, in your judgment, does he mean by all that?”

  “How should I know? He could be trying to make some, from his standpoint, advantageous impression on our minds. His last utterances, if truthful, seem to be information of military importance. But we will not know how to evaluate these creatures’ verbalizations till we have gained insight into their thought processes by means of the deep probe.”

  Dumur pondered. His reflections were somehow disturbed—perhaps because he was unpleasantly aware of his Second Greatest standing unobtrusively close to him, and of the probable tenor of Aglur’s thoughts. He said with abrupt decision, “Very well. We will use the probe now. I myself will try it first, on the one who just delivered the harangue.”

  The psychologist—and Aglur—looked at him a little oddly, but he thought coldly, Confound them! He’d show them that the old one still had the enterprise to lead, and the courage—since a certain amount of danger was involved in establishing close rapport with an alien and hostile mind—and before all, he would take no chances of the Second’s being the first to volunteer for this operation.

  While the probe apparatus was being readied, Dumur had time to suspect himself of an additional motive—an almost morbid impatience to learn what lay in truth behind the strange actions and language of the enemy. But that was a legitimate desire, was it not?

  The probe hummed fiercely, and the blinker lights flashed. The face of the subject, held fast by the
clamps, grew slowly distorted in the flickering glare. For minutes the Great Ratk crouched immobile, soaking up the increasing flow of impressions from the victim’s mind, like a huge spider feeding on mental juices—then abruptly he threw the power switch, the humming ceased and the lights died, and Dumur disentangled himself with curiously numbed tentacles from the receiving electrodes.

  “What is it, Great One?” the hovering psychologist inquired. “You can scarcely have begun to make full contact—”

  “It is enough,” Dumur muttered fuzzily. He came to himself, stiffened his flabby body. “I have decided . . . I wish to meditate on what we have found out so far, before continuing the examination. We will resume it one rotation period from now.”

  “But—”

  “You heard me! Take the prisoners back to the cells for the present. That is all!”

  As he had said he intended, the Great Ratk meditated.

  In his locked and guarded private office, which he had inspected meticulously for the traps which Aglur or his creatures might have contrived to set for him in his absence, he felt a doubtful security which left him freer to think than he could feel anywhere else nowadays.

  But his meditations nibbled at and recoiled from the monstrous, the unspeakable discovery which the deep mind-probe had laid bare before him. For a moment, striving not to accept that discovery, he grasped at the notion that the machine had somehow been tampered with—but that was foolish; not only would it have been impossible to produce such a result by interfering with the apparatus, but no one who could conceivably have had access to it could have had any imaginable motive.

  Cravenly—was he growing senile?—the thoughts of the Great Ratk persisted in straying away from the new and indigestible concepts he had encountered in the captive’s mind; straying back into his own memories of a long and successful lifetime, as if to seek some stability there.

  Far back—clearly he remembered the voice and lineaments of the part-parent who had reared him. The voice, coaxing: “Come to me, little one, and I will give you this sweet ichor—” And then the vicious lash of punishing tentacles, cutting like lines of fire into his tender infant-flesh, and the voice jeering, “That . . . and that . . . and that will teach you to be beguiled by soft words and promises!”

  The hard lesson, many times repeated in many forms—and in after life the lesson had served him well. Throughout his schooling, the beginning of his career in the service, the young Dumur had been always alert for the intention behind the mask, the hidden stab of treachery. He had survived in the fierce world of competition where the less wary perished and the less ambitious crawled off to some obscure niche where they would be sheltered from fatal envy. But Dumur had gloried in the envy of others, had parried their undercover thrusts at him and struck back adroitly. How he had rocked with amusement when the elder Aglur lay writhing, his belly afire with the very poison that he himself had intended to use to quench the star of his rising junior!

  And then Dumur was a Great Ratk, a general in the war upon the Svi. For the first time he had fully understood the sense of the harshness of his training and of all Ratk life—when he had walked the face of a world seared lifeless by the power of the Ratk armada, seen the blackened shells of cities and the ashes that alone remained of a whole race and its civilization. The Svi were a menace; when their planet was discovered they were already thinking of space flight; so they had been unhestitatingly exterminated.

  Nineteen, twenty years of his life—not counting, of course, in terms of years foreshortened by interstellar flight—and during all that time he had maintained himself in his high station, shrewdly and ruthlessly striking down this one or that who would have liked to replace him. Hardly ever had anyone held the post of Great Ratk for so long. It was a record to boast of—and he was weary.

  His remembering came round full circle—back to the first moment of pain-racked self-awareness, the slashing tentacles, the jeering voice. That was the beginning. But was there no end? From that, to this: to the gross flesh wailing quiveringly for the envenomed pinprick that might lurk in every crevice, the draught of poison that might be in every drop of nourishment, among the plots, the spies, the assassins—

  Through the murk of his broodings, like a sheet of lightning, flashed again the recollection of what he had perceived in the mind of the alien prisoner. It was insanity, pure and simple. Those creatures trusted one another. Not always, or implicitly—but through all their social relationships, their cooperative enterprises, their exchanges, their matings, ran a degree of confidence in one another’s motives which by Ratk standards was fatuous, imbecilic, totally insane. The utterances of the prisoners—unintelligible from the standpoint of psychological warfare—stood revealed by the mind-probe’s evidence as sincere—the last possibility he would have considered before.

  Their civilization as he had glimpsed it rested squarely on delusion; not a one of them but habitually gambled his fortunes and his very life on the well-intentionedness of others over whom he had no hold of fear or favor. Rivalries among them were apt to break out in open violence—and even in their violence they were prone to act on the assumption of a sort of fundamental understanding between enemies.

  To Ratk eyes it was clear that such a social structure could scarcely last a day, let alone develop a high science and reach out to seize the stars.

  But it had. And that meant—it could only mean—that cold reason was bankrupt, and the Universe itself was mad.

  “Mad,” the Great Ratk said aloud in the deepening shadows of his chamber. The planet’s sun had set outside the windows; the darkness closing in was full of menace. He started to throw the light switch, but halted, afraid, remembering an ingenious lethal device employing a light switch that he himself had once used to dispose of a rival.

  He sat still for several seconds; then he repeated, “Mad!” with a quiet satisfaction in the word spoken for himself alone.

  Recklessly he threw the switch; the office sprang into a blaze of light. With feverish impatience, he opened a communicator circuit connecting him directly with the spaceport.

  The humans huddled together, surrounded by Ratk guards, on the cement-covered plateau of the spaceport under the cold stars. All of them were there, herded out en masse from the dungeon cells—colonists and crew with the exception of the few who had died when the ship was taken. They whispered together, gazing puzzledly toward their own vessel looming white in the glare of floodlights a few hundred yards away, flanked by grim black alien warships and surrounded by Ratk workers and machines.

  Piet and Fransi found each other in the crowd. They clasped hands tightly; she shivered against him. “Piet, what are they about to do with us?”

  “I don’t know,” said Piet somberly. “Our assumptions about the psychodynamics of an encounter with alien races have broken down with these creatures. By human standards they’re insane—so ridden by maniacal suspicion that it’s not possible to find any common ground.”

  A whistle shrilled nearby; the guard-Ratk croaked incomprehensible commands, but the motions with which they prodded the captives forward were understandable enough. They moved ahead toward the ship, and incredulously the humans saw the great locks opening, the landing ramps lowered.

  The ship hurled itself through space, throbbing with the might of its full-fed engines. It was still accelerating at maximum, even though the Ratk-held sun had dwindled to a star behind and the danger of pursuit was clearly past—had, in fact, no longer existed since, minutes after they lifted, they had beheld the explosion that wiped out most of the already depleted fuel reserves of the Ratk fortress. It. would be a year or so before the survivors back there could manufacture enough new stores again to fit out a ship for an interstellar crossing, to carry the story of disaster back to their home bases.

  Fransi hugged her husband’s arm as the two went down a lower-deck corridor. “When we get back,” she said dreamily, “you’ll be famous as the man who—”

  “No,” Piet deni
ed. “I’m not even going to pretend to be the man who. I won’t pretend to have seen the weakness in our self-appointed enemy’s armor, or to have deliberately exploited it, because I didn’t. They knocked themselves out—and they’ll do it again, sooner or later, whenever and wherever they come in contact with humanity. In a conflict of species on a Galactic scale, what they do or try to do is secondary to what they are.”

  The corridor ended in an open door across which stout bars had been welded. Through the grille he who had been the Great. Ratk eyed the two humans as they approached—noting how they walked close together, arm in arm, blissfully confident of each other.

  He croaked, “Hello,” the greeting echoed in human speech by the translator which had been installed here according to one of the Iasi instructions he had given as a Great Ratk—before he had ordered all others of his own kind off the ship and boarded it alone with the liberated prisoners.

  “Hello,” responded Piet. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes. Everything is well. And it will go on being well, will it not?”

  “As I’ve told you so often before,” said Piet gruffly, “we can promise you that, when we reach the human-occupied system we’re bound for, you’ll be kept alive and well-fed and suitably lodged for the rest of your natural life. Our scientists will be anxious to communicate with you.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Dumur happily. “I have implicit faith in your word. Oh, what a relief it is to trust someone!”

  “Of course, we must continue keeping you under some restraint—”

  “Naturally, I understand. You humans are all crazy, but you are not that crazy.”

  “Here,” said Fransi hastily. “We’ve brought your day’s supply of ichor.” The Ratk seized the proffered canister in eager tentacles; he inserted a drinking-tube into it, then hesitated, looking up at the humans. “It is not poisoned?” he demanded slyly.