Possible Tomorrows

by Groff Conklin (Ed. )

  He had made an error there. He had guessed the intelligence, but he hadn’t known it could use the weapon he had put within reach. A tiny thing with an inch-long knife was not much more dangerous than the animal alone, but he didn’t like the idea of it loose on the ship.

  The metal knife would have to be replaced with something else. Technicians could compound a plastic that would take a keen edge for a while and deteriorate to a soft mass in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, he had actually given the animal a dangerous weapon—the concept of a tool. There was only one way to take that away from them, by extermination. But that would have to wait.

  Fortunately, the creature had a short life and a shorter breeding period. The actual replacement rate was almost negligible. In attaining intelligence, it had been short-changed in fertility and, as a consequence, only in the specialized environment of this particular ship was it any menace at all.

  They were lucky; a slightly higher fertility and the thing could threaten their existence. As it was, the ship would have to be deverminized before it could land on an inhabited planet.

  Halden took the data to the Ribboneer pilot and, after some discussion, it was agreed that the plastic knife should supplant the metal one. It was also decided to allow a few to escape with the weapon; there had to be some incentive if the creature was to visit the trap more than a few times. Besides, with weapons there was always the chance of warfare between different groups. They might even exterminate each other.

  Gradually, over a period of weeks, the damage to hydroponics subsided; the pests were under control. There was nothing to worry about unless they mutated again, which was unlikely.

  Kelburn scowled at the pilot “Where are we now?” he challenged, his face creased with suspicion.

  “You have access to all the instruments, so you should know,” said Taphetta. He was crouching and seemed about to spring, but he was merely breathing relaxedly through a million air tubes.

  “I do know. My calculations show one star as the most probable. We should have reached it two days ago—and we’re nowhere near it”

  “True,” admitted Taphetta. “We’re heading toward what you would consider the fifth or sixth most likely star.”

  Kelburn caught the implication. They all did. “Then you know where it is?” he asked, suspicion vanishing.

  “Not in the sense you’re asking—no, I’m not sure it’s what you’re looking for. But there was once a great civilization there.”

  “You knew this and didn’t tell us?”

  “Why should I?” Taphetta looked at him in mild astonishment “Before you hired me, I wouldn’t tell you for obvious reasons. And afterward—well, you engaged all my skill and knowledge and I used them to bring you here by the shortest route. I didn’t think it necessary to tell you until we actually arrived. Is that wrong?”

  It wasn’t wrong; it merely illustrated the difference in the way an alien mind worked. Sooner or later, they would have found the place, but he had saved them months.

  “What’s it like?” Emmer asked.

  Taphetta jiggled his ribbons. “I don’t know. I was passing near here and saw the planet off to one side.”

  “And you didn’t stop?” Emmer was incredulous.

  “Why should I? We’re great navigators because we do so much of it. We would never get very far if we stopped to examine everything that looks interesting. Besides, it’s not a good policy in a strange region, especially with an unarmed ship.”

  They wouldn’t have that problem. The ship was armed well enough to keep off uncivilized marauders who had very recently reached the spaceship age, and only such people were apt to be inhospitable.

  “When will we land?” asked Halden.

  “In a few hours, but you can see the planet on our screens.” Taphetta extended a head ribbon toward a knob and a planet came into view.

  There weren’t two civilizations in the Milky Way that built on such a large scale, even from the distance that they could see it. Great, distinctive cities were everywhere. There was no question as to what they had found.

  “Now you’ll learn why they ran away,” said Taphetta.

  “A new theory,” Kelburn said, though it wasn’t, for they had left. “What makes you think they were afraid?”

  “No air. If your calculations are right, there must have been an extensive atmosphere a few hundred thousand years ago and now there isn’t any. A planet this size doesn’t lose air that fast. Therefore, it’s an artificial condition. Who takes the trouble to leave a planet uninhabitable except someone who’s afraid others will use it—and who else runs away?”

  “They may have done it to preserve what they left,” suggested Halden.

  “Perhaps,” said Taphetta, but it was obvious he didn’t think so.

  The lack of air had one thing to recommend it—they needn’t worry about their pests escaping. The disadvantage was that they had to wear spacesuits. They landed on top of a great building that was intact after thousands of years and still strong enough to support the added weight And then—

  Then there was nothing.

  Buildings, an enormous number and variety of them, huge, not one of them less than five stories high, all with ramps instead of stairs. This was to be expected, considering the great size of the people who had lived there, and it followed the familiar pattern.

  But there was nothing in those buildings) On this airless world, there was no decay, no rust or corrosion—and nothing to decay or corrode. No pictures, tools, nothing that resembled sculpture, and while there were places where machines had stood, none were there now. Here and there in inaccessible locations were featureless blobs of metal. The implication was dear: Where they hadn’t been able to remove a machine, they had melted it down on the spot.

  The thoroughness was bewildering. It wasn’t done by some enemy; he would have stood off. But there was no nibble and the buildings were empty. The inhabitants themselves bad removed all that was worth taking along.

  A whole people had packed and moved away, leaving behind only massive, echoing structures.

  There was plenty to learn, but nothing to learn it from. Buildings can indicate only so much and then there must be something else—at least some of the complex artifacts of a civilization—and there was none. Outside the cities, on the plains, there were the remains of plants and animals that indicated by their condition that airlessness had come suddenly. Sam Halden, the biologist had examined them, but he discovered no clues. The unknown ancestor was still a mystery.

  And the others—Emmer, the archeologist and Meredith, the linguist had nothing to work on, though they searched. It was Kelburn who found the first hint Having no specific task, now that the planet was located, he wandered around in a scout ship. On the other side of the planet he signaled that there was a machine and that it was intact!

  The crew was hurriedly recalled, the equipment brought back into the ship, and they took off for the plain where Kelburn waited.

  And there was the machine, immense, like everything on the planet It stood alone, tapering toward the sky. At the base was a door, which, when open, was big enough to permit a spaceship to enter easily—only it was closed.

  Kelburn stood beside the towering entrance, a tiny figure in a spacesuit. He gazed up at it as the three came near. “All we have to do is open it” he said.

  “How?” asked Meredith. She seemed to have forgotten that she disliked him. He had made a chance discovery because he had nothing to do while the others were busy, but she regarded it as further proof of his superiority.

  It was hard to watch the happiness that her face directed toward Kelburn. Halden turned away.

  “Just press the button,” he said.

  Emmer noticed his expression. “It’s such a big button,” he objected. “It’s going to be hard to know when we find it.”

  “There’s an inscription of some sort,” said Kelburn loftily. This thing was left for a purpose. Somewhere there must be operating instructions.”


  “From here, it looks like a complex wave-form,” a voice crinkled in their radio—Taphetta from the spaceship. “All we have to do is find the right base in the electromagnetic spectrum and duplicate it on a beam broadcast and the door should open. You’re too close to see it as clearly as I can.”

  Perhaps they were too close to the big ancestor, decided Halden moodily as they went back. It had overshadowed much of their thinking, and who really knew what the ancestor was like and what had motivated him?

  But the Ribboneer was right about the signal, though it took several days to locate it And then the huge door swung open and air whistled out Inside was another disappointment a bare hall with a ramp leading upward, closed off at the ceiling. They could have forced through, but they had no desire to risk using a torch to penetrate the barrier—in view of the number of precautions they’d already encountered, it was logical to assume that there were more waiting for them.

  It was Emmer who found the solution. “In appearance, it resembles a spaceship. Let’s assume it is, minus engines. It was never intended to fly. Listen.

  “There’s no air, so you can’t hear,” said Emmer impatiently. “But you could if there were air. Put your hands against the wail.”

  A distinct vibration Tan through the whole structure. It hadn’t been there before the door opened. Some mechanism had been triggered. The rumbling went on, came to a stop, and began again. Was it some kind of communication?

  Hastily rigged machines were hauled inside the chamber to generate the air supply so that sounds would be produced for the recorders. Translating equipment was set up and focused and, after some experimentation with signals, the door was slowly closed. No one remained inside; there was no guarantee that it would be as easy to get out as it had been to get in.

  They waited a day and a half while the sounds were being recorded. The delay seemed endless. The happiest of the crew was Kelburn Biologically the highest human on the expedition, he was stimulated. He wandered aimlessly and smiled affably, patting Meredith, when he came to her, in the friendliest fashion. Startled, she smiled back and looked around wanly. Halden was behind her.

  If I bad not been there, thought Halden—and thereafter made it a point to be there.

  Meredith was excited, but not precisely happy. The work was out of her hands until the translating equipment was retrieved. As the second highest biological type, she, too, was affected, until she pointedly went to her room and locked it from the inside.

  Halden kept himself awake with anti-fatigue pills, in part because Meredith could change her mind about Kelburn, and because of that locked door.

  He tried to be phlegmatic and seemed to succeed. Taphetta alone was unconcerned; to him, it was an interesting and perhaps profitable discovery, but important only because of that He would not be changed at all by whatever he learned.

  Hours crawled by and at last the door opened; the air came rushing out again. The translating equipment was brought back to the ship and Meredith was left alone with it.

  It was half a day before she admitted the others to the laboratory.

  “The machine is still working.” she said. “There seems to have been some attempt to make the message hard to decode. But the methods they used were exactly the clues that the machine needed to decipher it. My function as a linguist was to help out with the interpretation of key words and phrases. I haven’t got even a little part of the message. You’ll know what it is as soon as I do. After the first part, the translator didn’t seem to have much trouble.”

  They sat down facing it—Taphetta, Kelburn, Meredith, Halden and Emmer. Meredith was midway between Kelburn and himself. Was there any significance in that, wondered Halden, or was he reading more in her behavior than was actually there?

  “The translation is complete,” announced the machine.

  “Go ahead,” Meredith ordered.

  “The words will be speeded up to human tempo,” said the translator. “Insofar as possible, speech mannerisms of the original will be imitated. Please remember that it is only an imitation, however.”

  The translator coughed, stuttered and began. “We have purposely made access to our records difficult. If you can translate this message, you’ll find, at the end, instructions for reaching the rest of our culture relics. As an advanced race, you’re welcome to them. We’ve provided a surprise for anyone else.

  “For ourselves, there’s nothing left but an orderly retreat to a place where we can expect to live in peace. That means leaving this Galaxy, but because of our life span, we’re capable of it and we won’t be followed.”

  Taphetta crinkled his ribbons in amusement Kelburn frowned at the interruption, but no one else paid any attention.

  The translator went on. “Our metabolic rate is the lowest of any creature we know. We live several thousand revolutions of any recorded planet and our rate of increase is extremely low; under the most favorable circumstances, we can do no more than double our numbers in two hundred generations.”

  “This doesn’t sound as if they were masters of biological science,” rustled Taphetta.

  Halden stirred uneasily. It wasn’t turning out at all the way he had expected.

  “At the time we left” the message continued, “we found no other intelligent race, though there were some capable of further evolution. Perhaps our scout ships long ago met your ancestors on some remote planet We were never very numerous, and because we move and multiply so slowly, we are in danger of being swept out of existence in the foreseeable future. We prefer to leave while we can. The reason we must go developed on our own planet deep beneath the cities, in the underworks, which we had ceased to inspect because there was no need to. This part was built to last a million generations, which is long even for us.”

  Emmer sat upright annoyed at himself. “Of course! There are always sewers and I didn’t think of looking there!”

  “In the last several generations, we sent out four expeditions, leisurely trips because we then thought we had time to explore thoroughly. With this planet as base of operations, the successive expeditions fanned out in four directions, to cover the most representative territory.”

  Kelburn stiffened, mingled pride and chagrin on his face. His math had been correct, as far as he had figured it. But had there been any reason to assume that they would confine their exploration to one direction? No, they would want to cover the whole Milky Way.

  Taphetta paled. Four times as many humans to contend with! He hadn’t met the other three-fourths yet—and for him, it wasn’t at all a pleasant thought.

  “After long preparation, we sent several ships to settle one of the nearer planets that we’d selected on the first expedition. To our dismay we found that the plague was there—though it hadn’t been on our first visit!”

  Halden frowned. They were proving themselves less and less expert biologists. And this plague—there had to be a reason to leave, and sickness was as good as any—but unless he was mistaken, plague wasn’t used in the strict semantic sense. It might be the fault of the translation.

  “The colonists refused to settle; they came back at once and reported. We sent out our fastest ships, heavily aimed. We didn’t have the time to retrace our path completely, for we’d stopped at innumerable places. What we did was to check a few planets, the outward and return parts of all four voyages. In every place, the plague was there, too, and we knew that we were responsible.

  “We did what we could. Exhausting our nuclear armament, we obliterated the nearest planets on each of the four spans of our journeys.”

  “I •wondered why the route came to an end,” crinkled Taphetta, but there was no comment, no answer.

  “We reconstructed what had happened. For a long time, the plague had lived in our sewers, subsisting on wastes. At night, because they are tiny and move exceedingly fast, they were able to make their way into our ships and were abroad on every journey. We knew they were there, but because they were so small, it was difficult to dislodge them f
rom their nesting places. And so we tolerated their existence.”

  “They weren’t so smart,” said Taphetta. “We figured out that angle long ago. True, our ship is an exception, but we haven’t landed anywhere, and won’t until we deverminized.”

  “We didn’t guess that next to the hull in outer space and consequently exposed to hard radiation,” the message went on, “those tiny creatures would mutate dangerously and escape to populate the planets we landed on. They had always been loathsome little beasts that walked instead of rolling or creeping, but now they became even more vicious, spawning explosively and fighting with the same incessant violence. They had always harbored diseases which spread to us, but now they’ve become hothouses for still smaller parasites that also are able to infect us. Finally, we are now allergic to them, and when they are within miles of us, it is agony to roll or creep.”

  Taphetta looked around. “Who would have thought it? You were completely mistaken as to your origin.” Kelburn was staring vacantly ahead, but didn’t see a thing. Meredith was leaning against Halden; her eyes were closed. “The woman has finally chosen, now that she knows she was once vermin,” clicked the Ribboneer. “But there are tears in her eyes.”

  “The intelligence of the beast has advanced slightly, though there isn’t much difference between the highest and the lowest—and we’ve checked both ends of all four journeys. But before, it was relatively calm and orderly. Now it is malignantly insane.”

  Taphetta rattled his ribbons. “Turn it off. You don’t have to listen to this. We all are of some origin or other and it wasn’t necessarily pretty. This being was a slug of some kind—and are you now what it describes? Perhaps mentally a little, out of pride, but the pride was false.”

  “We can’t demolish all the planets we unthinkingly let it loose on; there are too many and it lives too fast. The stars drift and we would lose some, and before we could eliminate the last one, it would develop space travel—it has little intelligence, but it could get that far—and it would escape ahead of us. We know an impossible task when we see it. And so we’re leaving, first making sure that this animal will never make use of the products of our civilization. It may reach this planet, but it will not be able to untangle our code—it’s too stupid. You who will have to face it, please forgive us. It’s the only thing that we’re ashamed of.”