A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “He gave us too much information. He told me that he had connected the artificial nerves of the ship, the control nerves, to the nerve-ends running from the parts of his own brain that he had used. And he said that he’d had to make hundreds of such connections. That’s the trouble with allowing a computer to act as an independent agent—it doesn’t know enough about interpersonal relationships to control its tongue . . . There we are. He’ll be coming to before long, but I don’t think he’ll be able to interfere with us now.”

  He set down his torch with a sigh. “I was saying? Oh, yes. About those nerve connections: if he had separated out the pain-carrying nerves from the other sensory nerves, he would have had to have made thousands of connections, not hundreds. Had it really been the living human being, Bennett, who had given me that cue, I would have discounted it, because he might have been using understatement. But since it was Bennett’s double, a computer, I assumed that the figure was of the right order of magnitude. Computers don’t understate.

  “Besides, I didn’t think Bennett could have made thousands of connections, especially not working telepathically through a proxy. There’s a limit even to the most marvelous neurosurgery. Bennett had just made general connections, and had relied on the segments from his own brain which he had incorporated to sort out the impulses as they came in—as any human brain could do under like circumstances. That was one of the advantages of using parts from a human brain in the first place.”

  “And when you kicked the wall—” Powell said.

  “Yes, you see the crux of the problem already. When I kicked the wall, I wanted to make sure that he could feel the impact of my shoes. If he could, then I could be sure that he hadn’t eliminated the sensory nerves when he installed the motor nerves. And if he hadn’t, then there were bound to be pain axons present, too.”

  “But what has the autopilot to do with it?” Powell asked plaintively.

  “The autopilot,” Brant said, grinning, “is a center of his nerve-mesh, an important one. He should have protected it as heavily as he protected the main computer. When I smashed it, it was like ramming a fist into a man’s solar plexus. It hurt him.”

  Powell grinned too. “K.O.,” he said.

  TEST OF THE GODS

  Raymond F. Jones

  The Earthmen were taken for gods—but had to act in a way the Venusian reptiles would think godly! And what was the moral sense of a Venusian apt to demand—

  THE VENUSIAN rains spume down from the skies as if there’s nothing in that hell-hound world but water. Warm water. Green, slimy water that trickles through the fern mesh and drips tunelessly onto the oil-soaked roofs of the aborigines’ huts.

  Spud Agill stood slump-shouldered by the open door. His breath was short in the steam that enveloped them. Hot sweat rolled down his forehead into the bush of his eyebrows.

  “We’ve got to break for it tonight,” he muttered decisively. “They’re just waiting for us to die! Can’t you hear them out there? The slimy devils—”

  An echolike chuckle came out of the fog across the hut. “And just where will you go, my good Agill?”

  It was the Deacon talking. “To the north and west are a thousand miles of ocean crawling with ichthyosaurs. To the east is twelve hundred miles of jungle—thick, beautiful jungle, alive with stegosaurs, triceratops—before you get to Aspia. Southward is the swampland. You don’t mean to try that?”

  “We don’t have to!” Spud snapped. “We were fools to leave the ship. We could have starved until we repaired the lifeboat. It was only five days’ job at the most for the three of us. But we can go back to it. Are you with me?”

  “Yes! Yes! Let’s do anything! But let’s get out of this hell!” paunchy Joe Spencer breathed heavily from his corner. His bulk shifted fearfully before the mist of light that was the window across the hut. He shuddered at the scaly forms that oozed out of the fog momentarily, then were folded back into it. “They’re watching us!” he whispered hoarsely. “Maybe it’s too late.”

  The three men watched, haunted by the unending soft hush of rain about them. Rain that condensed rather than fell.

  Three weeks ago they had boarded the Minos, Agill’s dilapidated flier, for a trip to the newly open two hundred thirty-five fields, halfway around the planet from Aspia.

  There was always good pickings in new mining fields—suckers to buy gold bricks, Joe Spencer’s specialty, lucky prospectors to be chiseled out of their finds by guns, fists, or any other means available. Spud Agill wasn’t particular in these matters.

  And the Deacon could manage a good confidence racket behind the flaps of a revival tent in almost any environment.

  But with only twelve hundred miles of their journey behind them, the Minos gave up and dropped them in the depths of the Venusian jungle, where no man of Earth or Mars had ever penetrated, and of which there were only legends and rumors among the more advanced peoples of Venus.

  Making a hunt for food to last until the lifeboat could be repaired, they had been captured by the reptilian inhabitants of the jungle.

  All of the men had seen life in thousands of forms and degrees of intelligence on the three planets they knew, but their captors baffled them. Three-toed, or rather, clawed, they walked upright. Their forms resembled the tyrannosaurus, yet they were only slightly larger than the men. Their bodies were finely scaled or plated, and dripped constantly with foul-smelling water that condensed on their cold forms and absorbed their dank animal odor.

  But they were intelligent. They spoke to each other in high, piping voices, and for three weeks had been patiently teaching the men their weird language. They called themselves Igoroes.

  Joe Spencer came away from the window and resumed his endless pacing across the narrow hut.

  “Agill! You’ve got to get us out of here. It’s driving me crazy. This rain and those slimy, ghostly—”

  “Oh, shut up!” snapped the Deacon. “You know we can’t get past those guards. Besides, we don’t know that they plan to harm us. It seems to me that we’ve been treated rather royally, according to their ideas of royalty—especially after Spud was so anxious to try to prove to them that he was a god. Where’d you get that flash of genius, Spud? Out of those wild yarns you read, or is it just a hidden superiority complex breaking out?”

  “It worked.” Spud thrust his chin out defensively. “They were impressed enough by a few old-fashioned card tricks to feed us the best they’ve got for three weeks—even if it is pig swill—instead of burying our heads in the ground with our feet sticking up.”

  “Yes, maybe they figured your show was worth more ingenious treatment and they’ve spent these three weeks figuring it out.”

  “Stop it!” Joe screamed at them. “Don’t stand there arguing. Do something—let’s get out of here!”

  “Maybe—” The Deacon began, then he closed his mouth and stared silently out the window.

  Through the gray billows of fog and steam a host of scaly forms was moving. The squoosh of their feet in the mud and slime was like the sound of distant, stampeding cattle.

  Still half hidden by the curtains of vapor, the horde paused, then stopped. After a moment, a trio of Igoroes stalked slowly forward.

  “The delegation of honor,” murmured the Deacon. Spud remained silent, jaws clenching and relaxing.

  Joe was in hysteria. “Don’t let them take us! Don’t—”

  “Quiet, you fool!” Spud ordered.

  THE THREE approached the hut. Just outside the door, they carefully laid their hardwood spears on the ground. They knelt on one knee in the doorway.

  “God—and devils, come,” the middle Igoroe hissed. His whole body seemed to quiver as if from extreme nervous tension.

  The Deacon hunched in his corner. “God and devils? Where do they get that stuff? Just because Joe and I can’t do card tricks—”

  “I think we’d better go,” said Spud.

  Joe was near collapse. The Deacon rose with rheumatic stiffness and joined Spud in wrapp
ing a supporting arm around Joe. The three sloshed into the rain ahead of their reptile escorts.

  Stumbling through the mist, they made out the forms of hundreds of assembled Igoroes. Silent and motionless, the horde looked upon them as if in impassive judgment. The occasional lightning flick of their inner eyelids was the only sign of expression.

  The stench of their bodies was sickening.

  “Looks serious,” the Deacon admitted.

  The group began slowly closing in behind. Those in front knelt before the pressing reptiles in back. At last, one of the three escorting Igoroes raised his scaly arms for attention. He began hissing in their sibilant tongue.

  The three Earthmen strained their ears to catch the meaning of the words. To their minds it was:

  “O Igoroes! The greatest of days has befallen us, when the legend of a thousand fathers ago is fulfilled. Our god has come among us, falling from the skies as was foretold. But, even as was also foretold, the two devils have accompanied him.

  “Upon us is the greatest of honors and the most sorrowful of responsibilities since the planets flamed. We must discover which is our god and which are the two devils we must annihilate. If we fail, our god will buy his freedom with us and flee, and the devils will rule over us and our children until the worlds flame again!”

  A shrilling, mingled hiss of approval and heart-tearing despair came from a thousand reptile throats.

  “We must make the test of the gods,” they intoned.

  “What’ll we do? What’ll we do?” Joe moaned over and over again.

  “Figure out how to pass the test of the gods.” The Deacon leered at him.

  “Lay off,” Spud growled. “We’re going to need all we’ve got to get out of this.”

  The Igoroe turned and addressed them. “You know which of you is our god and which are the devils we must destroy. We do not know. May our god forgive us the humiliation of having to make a test to identify him and help overcome those who hold him in power.

  “We will ask three questions, each to be answered by one of you. Only our god can know the answer, because the devils cannot pronounce that which is good.”

  The Earthmen stood in rigid surprise. What kind of aborigines were they? No primitive torture. No pagan ceremonials—only three questions.

  The Deacon glanced about. He sensed in the tense forms of the reptiles that this was the greatest event in the lives of any of them. He silently cursed the fate that had dropped them as ready-made answers to a wild, dream-founded legend. But it had happened before—Cortez and the Incas on Earth—he reflected. Only things were a little backward here on Venus. The Venusians weren’t as gullible as the Incas.

  He looked at his companions. Blubbering Joe, stiff as a corpse with fear. Spud, silent, worried and burning with rage. Only one of them could get-out of this—

  “What is the first question?” Spud asked quietly.

  The lizard man spoke reverently. “The question: What must an Igoroe do if he injures or sees an injured Igoroe?”

  Spud frowned. “That’s a hell of a question,” he said in English.

  But Joe had blossomed like a poppy. “That’s easy. What would a god tell ’em to do? I’ll give that one!”

  He shifted to hissing Igoroe. “The Igoroe must help—”

  Spud slapped a hand against Joe’s mouth. “You damned, brainless idiot, shut up!”

  “Stall for time,” whispered the Deacon. “Get a day.”

  Spud addressed the Igoroe. “None of us will answer now. We require one day. Give us until tomorrow at this time, then come to our hut and receive our answer.”

  A ripple of hissing went through the assemblage. Evidently this was not according to the books. After a moment of consternation the three leading Igoroes conferred in calm, deliberate discussion.

  The Deacon watched through narrowed eyes, studying intently the Igoroe’s reactions.

  He could distinguish males and females side by side in the crowd. Little monsters of baby Igoroes moved restlessly in and out, but even they were attentive and comparatively still. The Deacon observed half a dozen mothers with tiny, squirming lizards in pouches at their waists. An insane cross between reptile and marsupial.

  One fact centered itself in the Deacon’s mind: the lack of frenzy and bloodlust. The Igoroes were on an infinitely higher plane of emotions than their filthy animal surroundings would indicate. At least, judging by Earth standards.

  But another possibility clamored for recognition in his unwilling mind. Perhaps the Igoroes were simply emotionless. Yet that seemed impossible. Fear and excitement left clues in their manner. He shrugged off the idea. The Igoroes were emotional enough. Where was the key to unlock their emotional pattern?

  At last the discussion ended and the Igoroe leader announced: “We will come for our answer and bring the next question in one day. One of you will answer. If it is the answer of a god, he will be asked the next. If it is the answer of a devil, he will be destroyed.”

  Endlessly, the rain sprinkled the steaming soil.

  JOE’S craven fear had vanished, and he blustered confidently. “What is there to worry about? Boy, how you pushed ‘em over with those card tricks and that god business. They even went out and dug up an old legend to fit us. All we gotta do now is answer their questions, and one of us will be the head man of the whole mob. The other two will be safe enough, because whatever the head man says goes. Then we’re sitting on top—pick up any crown jewels that might be laying around, fix up the Minos and take off.”

  Spud glanced down at his little fat sweating companion. “The wheels don’t go around often, do they, Joe? But when they do, they sure buzz.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with my idea? Why wouldn’t you let me answer them? Naturally, the nice thing for a god to say would be that when an Igoroe is hurt, the others help him. You haven’t been slitting throats so long you couldn’t figure that out.”

  “How do you know?” grinned the Deacon. “Were you ever god, Joe?”

  “Aw, you’re both crazy. What are von driving at?”

  “Nothing,” said the Deacon, “except I wondered if you’d ever seen a pack of wild dogs turn cannibal when one of them showed blood.”

  “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Nothing, except that our friends outside might have a similar code of ethics, and it might be the social thing to take a nip out of anybody who is down.”

  Joe paled. “The—Then how are we going to know what answer to give them?”

  The Deacon laughed in Joe’s face, a laugh of wholehearted amusement at the panic this simple thought brought to Joe’s mind in which walls of Earth standards were built so high that Joe was incapable of thinking in any other terms.

  Spud was pacing the room, trying to think logically, but his rage prevented that.

  He stood at the door, wiping the sweat from his face. “Were in for it now. They’re ten deep nil around us. They’ll probably be there all night. I don’t think they ever sleep.”

  “I hope you still aren’t thinking of breaking for it!” exclaimed Joe. “Not with everything working our way.”

  “It would have been a hundred to one chance before. Its zero now. But finding the right answers to their fool questions isn’t, more than one in a million. Out of thirty known races on Mars and Venus, only one has a code of ethics that can be anywhere near duplicated on Earth. A mathematical physicist had no business discovering relativity; it was a sociologist’s job. There’s only one thing in this cockeyed universe more relative than social customs, and that’s ethics.

  “These Igoroes know the ‘right’ answers to these little ethical problems they’re giving us. From a few weeks’ observations of the few specimens we’ve been able to see through this haze and muck we’ve got to identify their whole ethical pattern—or else toss a coin to get the answers. What’s the chances, Deacon?”

  The Deacon had slumped down in his corner, thinking hard. What he was thinking most was that only one of them c
ould survive. There was nothing to fear from Joe, but Spud had to be led off.

  The Deacon’s Ph. D. had come from his work on comparative ethics—before he discovered wits were more lucrative than wisdom. That made him the logical survivor in this insane contest, he reflected.

  Joe cut in with injured dignity. “I don’t care what you think! If they ask me, I’m going to tell them to help the damned, infernal injured Igoroe until he gets well!”

  With that he retired from the discussion.

  “We’ve got to know at least three more factors,” said the Deacon. “First, how does their ethical code rate according to our own standards? Have they any science? Do they believe in an afterlife?”

  His narrowed eyes watched Spud’s face closely.

  “I’d say they were a peculiar mixture,” Spud answered. “They lack developed artifacts, but their lore and natural science are high. Their use of herbs has developed into a fairly good traditional medicine. Geometry and astronomy have probably reached the Euclidean stage. I’d say their ethical system is high according to Earth standards.”

  “Why?”

  “Hunch, maybe. But it seems that way—no howling or war dancing around us out there. Their attitude was one of high devotion rather than fanaticism. And the family-group stuff—did you notice that?

  The Deacon nodded. “I think you’re right about the ethics, but if they had geometry they’d have buildings and artifacts. No, they don’t know anything about the sciences. Just about the reverse of Earth a couple of centuries ago—they’re long on ethics, but short as zero on science.”

  “Perhaps, but in that case their traditional medicine must be advanced. Living in the jungle, having the intelligence they have, they must have a great herbological lore.”

  “You didn’t see any medicine men hanging around our little ceremony out there.”