Zilli knew, however, that among the aficionados of the token-exchange the House of Morgu was a name to conjure with.
Morgu finished assembling a pile of documents, and shoved the rest to one side. “These are the items currently requiring Your Fertility’s signature.”
The senior coordinator lowered herself stiffly to the kneeling-cushion beside the desk, and picked up the stylus which her secretary placed ready to her hand. For a time the only sounds in the office were Zilli’s asthmatic breathing and the rustle of papers. Morgu stood gazing out the window which gave a lofty view over the gleaming towers and parklands of the metropolis. His tame hamster squeaked and hopped from the window ledge to its master’s arm; he held it up and stroked its fur absently.
Directive to Local Forest Administrators . . . Signature. Schedule of Manufacturing Quotas for Region 12 . . . Signature. Requisition for Equipment of Urban Police Force . . . Zilli hesitated briefly over this one; it seemed to her that such appropriations had been coming with remarkable frequency. But she dismissed the thought, and signed. Humans—perhaps because they were a male-dominated species—were prone to sporadic violence; it was fortunate that they were capable of channeling that tendency to violence so as to keep order among themselves. Semiannual Program for Nitrate Recovery Plant No. 4 . . . Something about that dry title jogged Zilli’s memory, though she couldn’t say just why. The document, like so many nowadays, was in the Human longue, made officially equal to Thagathlan by a decree of some decades ago. Sighing, Zilli began laboriously perusing the angular-lettered text, replete with figures on sample densities of nitrogen-fixing swamp bacteria, on available water-circulating and evaporation facilities—
Zilli’s thoughts persisted in straying to the man standing at the window. She wondered: What does he see out there?
Not that there was much doubt, of course, that human and Thagathlan eyes saw the same images in much the same way. But sometimes, in uneasy moments, Zilli wondered. Those biped creatures who swarmed in ever-increasing numbers in the streets where once only her kind had trod, who increasingly performed the functions in whose exercise the older civilized race had once been unique—did they see behind the superficial reality of this city, of this world, to the essence which must he obvious to any intelligent life form capable of performing those functions? In the beginning she had correctly judged the species adaptable; at. the time no one could have guessed the full scope of its adaptability, the almost fantastic facility of imitation by which humans had transformed themselves successively, in a few brief centuries, into functional equivalents and supplanters of the thrin, of the zgi, and finally of the thagathla themselves. Mimicry was a trait alien to the thagathla; among humans, Zilli vaguely knew, it had subjective values ranging from fiallery to mockery.
But, subjectively, “functional equivalence means “essential identity”; that was a basic tenet of Thagathlan philosophy. What mattered now, as it always had, was not the survival of any particular species as such, but the preservation of the one world pattern, the balanced pyramid of the whole planet’s life, potentially immortal as species and individuals are not. From that viewpoint, Man on Thegeth was a success. As originally foreseen, he had acted as an enduring check upon the hamsters which, six hundred years ago, had menaced the ecological balance; the further—and unforeseen—consequences of the importation of Man were immaterial, since they involved only displacements within the system, as irrelevant to the relationships making up that system as the substitution of different values for variables in an equation is to the form of the equation.
Thus it was in Thagathlan eyes. But the question still nagged at Zilli: How do they see it?
She forced her attention back to the document before her, and suddenly remembered what about it had disturbed her. She had a queer, sinking, panicky feeling. She said sharply, “Morgu!”
The man set the hamster back on the window ledge and turned, face bland as always. “Yes, Your Fertility?”
“This program for Nitrates 4,” Zilli said slowly. “It is . . . a mistake. It calls for a two-fold increase in production, whereas the survey commission reported that any increase now would amount to destructive exploitation.”
Still Antan Morgu’s expression betrayed nothing. That impassive exterior, Morgu well knew, was one of his chief intangible assets.
But behind the mask he bitterly cursed his luck. Now, of all times!—just when he was at death-grips with Yano, when Yano was using every means fair and foul to drive him and the other Morgusi to the wall, when it was absolutely essential that Morgu’s speculations in nitrate fertilizers be made to pay, furnish the capital to bolster up his other ventures and to strike back at Yano.
Zilli was eying him fixedly. “Morgu! Answer me—what is going on here?”
Fleeting, sardonically, Morgu wondered what the senior coordinator would do if she did know all that was going on—if she knew, for instance, that this very building, housing the central offices of the Ecological Bureau, was mortgaged to the hilt to shore up Morgu’s schemes, or that certain interested, but carefully anonymous, parties had offered her confidential secretary up to a million and a half to resign from his strategic post. But it would be almost impossible to explain these things to Zilli. Intelligent as the thagathla were, in some respects they were merely like lower animals, moving about the world in blissful oblivion of finance and politics.
His mind raced, seeking a way out. At another time he would have acknowledged the “mistake” and taken the loss—but the present crisis in his affairs ruled that course out. It wouldn’t do to point out that there was an increased demand for fertilizers—Zilli would want to know why, and that could bring up the embarrassing question of what had happened to certain farmlands supposedly lying fallow according to the regular rotation plan. Nor could he argue that, even if exploitation of the nitrate swamps resulted in their exhaustion, one could fall back on known artificial processes for the fixation of nitrogen—in his position, Morgu was aware that a cardinal principle of the Ecological Bureau dictated that technology should supplement, not supplant, the functions of living organisms. He had never been able to grasp the concept behind that doctrine—according to the Thagathlan theoreticians, technological unemployment of even a swamp-slime would constitute betrayal of the organic community by its intelligent members, or something like that.
There was no possibility of selling the program to Zilli now—nothing to do but stall. Fortunately, the order for increased production had already gone out on Morgu’s own authority, through human channels to human managers who had long since learned to regard the official dispositions as belated formalities; and if Morgu handled it right to gain time, his financial situation could be secured by the time a reckoning came.
Morgu allowed an air of worried concern to appear on his face. “Perhaps there has been a mistake, Your Fertility,” he admitted. “Let us defer action until the question can be cleared up; I myself will re-examine it thoroughly.” Unobtrusively he stretched out a hand for the offending document. But Zilli’s delicately-clawed digits rested firmly on it, and she shook her crested head sternly, still regarding him with that peculiarly fixed stare. For Zilli things were falling into place: things noted and forgotten, discrepancies passed over, evidences of—
“No,” said Zilli flatly. “I demand an explanation—now!”
This, then, was it. Morgu squared his shoulders and took a deep breath to utter words that would blow the lid off—and matters were taken out of his hands, abruptly and unpleasantly.
The door was wrenched open, squeaking protest. Three men flung themselves into the office; they were uniformed as Urban Police, and long knives gleamed in their hands.
Morgu started to lunge, then recoiled before the menacing blades.
Two of the interlopers backed him against the wall; the third, ignoring the frozen Zilli, bent over the desk and began rummaging among the documents there.
“Zilli!” Morgu jerked out. “Button . . . underneath on the righ
t—”
His voice choked off as a knife-point pressed hard against the pit of his stomach.
Zilli, numbed by the unheard-of situation, groped beneath the desk top; but she did not know where Morgu had installed the button that would summon police in his pay from the floor below.
The intruder who had begun searching straightened and growled, “Back against the wall. You, too.” He did not meet the thegethli’s eyes, but his tone was as chill and threatening as the cold steel he held. Zilli stumbled shakily backward. She gasped, “What . . . is the meaning . . . of this?”
It was Morgu who answered her, in a taut voice: “These are Arak Yano’s daggermen. Sent to forestall that Nitrates order. I knew he knew about it, but I didn’t think he’d try anything so raw—”
“Shut up!” snarled one of the thugs.
Morgu’s eyes were riveted to the man bending over the desk. As certainly as if he had heard Yano giving these hirelings their orders, he knew what those orders must have been—to assassinate Antan Morgu just as soon as they were sure of having found the vital paper, but not till then, in case they should have to force its location from him. With Morgu dead and the Nitrates deal shorn of official sanction, Yano would be unstoppable.
Luckily the searcher must have been barely literate; he studied the topmost document for crawling seconds, moving his lips, before he realized that it was the one they sought. As he picked it up and wheeled with an air of triumph, Morgu tensed himself.
The door on the opposite side of the office slid silently open, and framed the bulky figure of Cousin Rodon. He no longer had his pnidskin case; a grotesque mask covered his mouth and nose, and in his hand was an object which he tossed with lumbering precision. It hit the farther wall and burst with a plop in the faces of the pair who held Morgu at knife-point.
They reeled backward. One slashed wildly at Morgu as he dodged, then dropped the knife and folded at the knees. The third, paper in hand, took an uncertain step and a half before the gas hit him and he, too, crumpled.
Morgu reached the desk in two strides, ripped open a drawer, hastily donned a second mask and, purpling, exhaled violently to clear it before drawing breath again. Then he pressed the signal button and turned shakily to survey the scene.
“Good work!” he said to Rodon, who was methodically gathering up the enemy’s scattered weapons. “You’ll be well rewarded for this. Are you all right, Your Fertility?”
Zilli had recognized the gas as the same which the Bureau’s chemists had invented for use against Terrestrial organisms at the time of the Second Earth Expedition; Morgu must have found the formula in the old tiles. Its effect on Thagathlan metabolism was not so marked—nevertheless, Zilli felt faint and might have fallen if she had not had four legs. She wheezed, “Yes. I am all right.”
That was more nearly true fifteen minutes later, when Rodon and a squad of Morgu’s trusted men had dragged out the would-be assassins—whether the police uniforms the latter wore belonged to them or had merely been a ruse to gain entry was still not known, but it didn’t greatly matter—and the ventilators had cleared the coordinator’s office of gas.
Zilli sat, looking somehow shrunken, and watched Morgu pace excitedly up and down. His tame hamster, still dazed from the gas, rode unsteadily on his shoulder.
“This time,” he exulted, “Yano has overstepped himself. With the confessions we’ll get from his agents, I can use the criminal law against him. The human law, you understand.”
“Yes,” said the thegethli tonelessly.
“Whether he can wriggle out of the charges or not, his hands will be tied long enough for me to close in on him financially.” Morgu halted and looked closely at Zilli. He said in a different voice, choosing his words, “This incident has no doubt opened your eyes to . . . certain facts; facts which I should have been at a loss to have explained before.”
“Yes,” said Zilli.
“But I hope it will make no real difference. We can go on working together as before. That’s been one of the issues between the groups I represent and Yano’s criminal faction. Yano has boasted openly that, once he became financially and politically powerful enough, he would—dispense with the thagathla. But we are now in a position to wipe out that threat and guarantee continued interspecies cooperation. To be sure, there are some changes which ought to be made; in dealing with the present danger I’ve been uncomfortably hampered by some of the Bureau’s obsolete regulations—”
Zilli said nothing. Morgu hesitated; he stooped and picked up the paper which lay crumpled on the floor, smoothed it out, then tore it.
“You can stop worrying about exploitation of the nitrate swamps. That’s no longer necessary, now that we have a more potent weapon against the opposition.”
“No longer necessary—until the next emergency arises?”
A pained shadow crossed Morgu’s face, the look of one who sees his magnanimity go unappreciated. “Well, of course, no one can be sure what may happen.”
“But with you humans in control,” said Zilli, “something will always happen. You will go on from crisis to crisis, now that you have the power. Power—that’s important to you, isn’t it? Where we thagathla erred—at the time, the many limes when we might still have stopped you—was in supposing that all intelligent life must follow the same pattern.”
She paused, short of breath; Morgu broke in, “But I’ve explained that nothing is changed. We can go on cooperating.”
“Yes,” said Zilli heavily. “We’ll go on cooperating, until the thagathla are extinct. We were never alarmed because you might replace us; in the last analysis that would not matter. Our mistake was to think you would be satisfied with merely replacing us. For us the final goal was always the balanced community, the ecological pyramid; but for you that is only a means to an end. To what end? That’s what I’ll never understand.
“But this I do know. Now that you’ve reached the summit of the pyramid, you’ll not rest till you’ve torn it all down and built something more, or possibly less, to your liking, on the ruins. And your race will never make the same mistake. You will never quietly move over and allow yourselves to be supplanted, whether by some other intelligent species or by some new breed risen from among yourselves. When your time comes, as it must because no species is immortal, when finally you meet conditions changed even beyond your power to adapt—you will perish ungracefully, with as much noise and destruction as possible.”
An tan Morgu stared puzzledly into the filmed old eyes of the thegethli. Thagathlan philosophy had always baffled him. He started to protest once more, then changed his mind, shrugged impatiently, and turned away; downstairs they would be ready to begin extracting some confessions, an affair he should supervise.
But in the open doorway he hesitated and faced round again. One utterance of Zilli’s had stuck in his mind, he couldn’t quite say why.
“What makes you say,” he demanded, frowning, “that we’ve reached the top?”
THE END
THE MARVELOUS MOVIE
These were the strangest movies that anyone had ever seen—and they were free!
SHERIFF SEEGER left his car at the edge of the parking-lot, not far from the highway, and, ignoring the misty drizzle and the trampled mud, advanced with purposeful strides on the floodlit building that loomed up beyond ranks of parked, wet-slick cars. His raincoat hid his badge and gunbelt, and he wasn’t wearing his cowboy boots on account of. the mud; no stranger would be apt to recognize him as a law officer.
The red-neon sign glared in his face. Free Movies, it said simply; no more, no name even. The Sheriff grinned to himself for a moment, recalling how Jesse Hupsman had almost had apoplexy telling him about that sign. Of course Jesse’s excitement was understandable—his El Dorado Theater had been the county seat’s one and only, until this crazy Yankee—Bullock, his name was according to the recorder’s office where he’d filed title to the land here—turned up and started showing pictures for nothing.
When the She
riff had allowed he didn’t know as there was any law against doing that, Jesse had exploded: It was against nature and bad for business; and if it wasn’t illegal it ought to be. Besides—said Jesse in so many words—there would be another election one of these days . . . The sheriff’s grin faded, and he sighed; standing under the glaring sign, he surveyed the entrance dose at hand. The wildcat theater was a big, graceless, barnlike structure, built in evident haste out of raw unpainted lumber. “Might be able to get him on the fire-laws,” muttered Seeger to himself.
Plainly Bullock was doing a thriving business, if you could call it that when he wasn’t charging admission. In spite of the weather a sizeable crowd was funneling in—mostly young folks from El Dorado and the country round. Some of them recognized the Sheriff and nodded hello with a suddenly-furtive air; one or two looked as if they wished they hadn’t come.
If fire-laws wouldn’t work—after all, the place washout in the country—then there were the charges the Daughters of Decency had indignantly offered to bring. The Sheriff grimaced, remembering the half-hour he had spent with the ladies—that had been considerably worse than Jesse Hupsman’s needling. Of course none of the Daughters had actually seen any of the shows, but they’d heard rumors—everybody had. The rumors were passed on with snickers by the young fellows who’d been there: some of the pictures that were showing for free were hot stuff, French movies—‘French’ signifying ‘pornographic’ in the vocabulary of El Dorado’s youth.
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