by Jerry
All nineteen clamored to be heard, for Hall to relay their voices to Earth, but he held them off and first he told his story.
The Casseiopeian delegate to the Galactic Senate was at the moment finishing his breakfast. He was small and furry, not unlike a very large squirrel, and he sat perched on a high chair eating salted roast almonds of which he was very fond.
Suddenly a voice started talking inside of his head, just as it did at that very second inside the heads of thirteen billion other inhabitants of the northwest corner of Earth. The Casseiopeian delegate was so startled that he dropped the dish of almonds, his mouth popping open, his tiny red tongue inside flickering nervously. He listened spellbound.
The voice told him of the war on Grismet and of the permallium constructed robots, and of the cement blocks. This, however, he already knew, because he had been one of the delegates to the Peace Conference who had decided to dispose of the robots. The voice, however, also told him things he did not know, such as the inability of the robots to commit any crime that any other sane human being would not commit, of their very simple desire to be allowed to live in peace, and most of all of their utter horror for the fate a civilized galaxy had decreed for them.
When the voice stopped, the Casseiopeian delegate was a greatly shaken little being.
Back on the ship, Hall opened the circuit to the nineteen, and they spoke in words, in memory pictures and in sensations.
A copter cab driver was hurrying with his fare from Manhattan to Oyster Bay. Suddenly, in his mind, he became a permallium robot. He was bound with cables of the heavy metal, and was suspended upside down in a huge cement block. The stone pressed firmly on his eyes, his ears, and his chest. He was completely immobile, and worst of all, he knew that above his head for six miles lay the great Grismet Ocean, with the blue mud slowly settling down encasing the cement in a stony stratum that would last till the planet broke apart.
The cab driver gasped: “What the hell.” His throat was so dry he could scarcely talk. He turned around to his fare, and the passenger, a young man, was pale and trembling.
“You seeing things, too?” the driver asked.
“I sure am,” the fare said unsteadily. “What a thing to do.”
For fifteen minutes, over the northwest quadrant of Earth, the words and the pictures went out, and thirteen billion people knew suddenly what lay in the hearts and minds of nineteen robots.
A housewife in San Rafael was at the moment in a butcher shop buying meat for her family. As the thoughts and images started pouring into her mind, she remained stock-still, her package of meat forgotten on the counter. The butcher, wiping his bloodied hands on his apron froze in that position, an expression of horror and incredulity on his face.
When the thoughts stopped coming in, the butcher was the first to come out of the trancelike state.
“Boy,” he said, “that’s sure some way of sending messages. Sure beats the teledepths.”
The housewife snatched her meat off the counter. “Is that all you think of,” she demanded angrily.
“That’s a terrible thing that those barbarians on Grismet are doing to those . . . those people. Why didn’t they tell us that they were human.” She stalked out of the shop, not certain what she would do, but determined to do something.
In the ship Hall reluctantly broke off the connection and replaced the trap door. Then he went back to his cell and locked himself in. He had accomplished his mission; its results now lay in the opinions of men.
Jordan left the ship immediately on landing, and took a copter over to the agency building. His conversation with his superior was something he wanted to get over with as soon as possible.
The young woman at the secretary’s desk looked at him coldly and led him directly into the inner office. The chief was standing up in front of the map of the galaxy, his hands in his pockets, his eyes an icy blue.
“I’ve been hearing about you,” he said without a greeting.
Jordan sat down. He was tense and jumpy but tried not to show it. “I suppose you have,” he said, adding, after a moment, “Sir.”
“How did that robot manage to break out of his cell and get to the power source on the ship in the first place?”
“He didn’t break out,” Jordan said slowly. “I let him out.”
“I see,” the chief said, nodding. “You let him out. I see. No doubt you had your reasons.”
“Yes, I did. Look—” Jordan wanted to explain, but he could not find the words. It would have been different if the robots’ messages had reached Grismet; he would not have had to justify himself then. But they had not, and he could not find a way to tell this cold old man of what he had learned about the robots and their unity with men. “I did it because it was the only decent thing to do.”
“I see,” the chief said. “You did it because you have a heart.” He leaned suddenly forward, both hands on his desk. “It’s good for a man to have a heart and be compassionate. He’s not worth anything if he isn’t. But”—and he shook his finger at Jordan as he spoke—“that man is going to be compassionate at his own expense, not at the expense of the agency. Do you understand that?”
“I certainly do,” Jordan answered, “but you have me wrong if you think I’m here to make excuses or to apologize. Now, if you will get on with my firing, sir, I’ll go home and have my supper.”
The chief looked at him for a long minute. “Don’t you care about your position in the agency?” he asked quietly.
“Sure I do,” Jordan said almost roughly. “It’s the work I wanted to do all my life. But, as you said, what I did, I did at my own expense. Look, sir, I don’t like this any better than you do. Why don’t you fire me and let me go home? Your prisoner’s safely locked up in the ship.”
For answer the chief tossed him a stellogram. Jordan glanced at the first few words and saw that it was from Galactic Headquarters on Earth. He put it back on the desk without reading it through.
“I know that I must have kicked up a fuss. You don’t have to spell it out for me.”
“Read it,” the chief said impatiently.
Jordan took back the stellogram and examined it. It read.
To: Captain Lawrence Macrae Detection Agency, Grismet.
From: Prantal Aminopterin Delegate from Casseiopeia Chairman, Grismet Peace Committee of the Galactic Senate.
Message: You are hereby notified that the committee by a vote of 17-0 has decided to rescind its order of January 18, 2214, directing the disposal of the permallium robots of Grismet. Instead, the committee directs that you remove from their confinement all the robots and put them in some safe place where they will be afforded reasonable and humane treatment.
The committee will arrive in Grismet some time during the next month to decide on permanent disposition.
Jordan’s heart swelled as he read the gram. “It worked,” he said. “They have changed their minds. It won’t be so bad being discharged now.” He put the paper back on the desk and arose to go.
The chief smiled and it was like sunlight suddenly flooding over an arctic glacier. “Discharged? Now who’s discharging you? I’d sooner do without my right arm.”
He reached in a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of old Earth bourbon and two glasses. He carefully poured out a shot into each glass, and handed one to Jordan.
“I like a man with a heart, and if you get away with it, why then you get away with it. And that’s just what you’ve done.”
He sat down and started sipping his whisky. Jordan stood uncertainly above him, his glass in his hand.
“Sit down, son,” the old man said. “Sit down and tell me about your adventures on Earth.”
Jordan sat down, put his feet on the desk and took a sizable swallow of his whisky.
“Well, Larry,” he started, “I got into Earth atmosphere about 2:40 o’clock—”
THE END.
TERROR IN THE STARS
Algis Budrys
Darkly mysterious was the lost spaceship with its mu
mmified crew. But darker still was the dreadful secret of the Truns.
“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
THE DEELAN ship’s rickety overdrive arced out for the next-to-the-last time, and she wallowed into normal space with a sigh from her generators. Thereafter she limped along on planetary drive while the last spares were brought out of their lockers and desperately mounted, the last grog allotment passed around.
“I imagine that just about does it,” Captain Dekkin sighed, nodding at his executive officer.
“Nice try,” the latter conceded. “Better luck on your next. I never did think much of scientists,” he added, with a wry smile. “We’ll have a lot of time to hate ’em, after the next set blows.”
“How far do you think we came?”
Meyl shrugged. “Who knows? It’s easy to forget that hyperspace is another universe—a completely unfathomable universe. We only know with certainty that the generators set up a warp that throws the ship into it. We chug along for a while—theoretically, as long as we want to. Then the generator sets up another warp that throws us back into normal space.”
He frowned thoughtfully, then went on: “According to the scientists, the hyperspatial universe is so constituted as to let us travel farther and faster in relation to our own universe—than we could ever hope to do in normal space. In a way, it’s like taking a shortcut across a field. We can’t even tell what hyperspace looks like. Our screens don’t work on their kind of light, and I’d rather be exiled for life than put on a suit and go outside for a look. But, according to the scientists, mind you, if we point ourselves in the right direction, we’ll be traveling along the same line in relation to our own universe.”
He laughed. “The only trouble is, the generators keep cutting out. Theoretically, we’re about three-quarters of the way across the Galaxy from where we started. On the same pipe-dream hypothesis we ought to be getting reasonably close to the place where they’ve figured the Truns come from. But actually—” He grimaced derisively.
“Actually I wouldn’t bet a burnt-out generator replacement tube on our actual position.”
The Deelan ship inched along infuriatingly between the unfamiliar stars. Dekkin looked at his screens for one last hopeful time. But there was nothing friendly to see—neither the stars he had always known nor the impossible constellations he had memorized, and copied from the charred and crumbling paper on the legendary Turn chart.
Dekkin exchanged a long bitter hopeless glance with Meyl. “Think we might make it on the next jump?” he asked.
Meyl grimaced for the second time. “When we’re not even sure we’re going in the right direction?”
Dekkin acknowledged his first officer’s discernment with a slow nod. But then, he had only been expressing a hope—a whistling-in-the-dark kind of optimism which he knew was forlorn.
Meyl said: “There’s an outside chance the Truns might find us.”
Dekkin smiled sadly. It was his turn to puncture the false hope. “Ten thousand years since the ship reached us—and how many countless centuries of drifting before that?”
No one knew. Even now, with all the centuries in which to conjecture, to study, to postulate and to theorize, there was no Deelan living who would venture to guess how long the mummified Trun ship had been sleeping in the bast cradle of the stars. Finally, it had drifted down to crash on a Deela with an industrial revolution barely under way.
Those first, clumsy Deelan scientists had reconstructed her from her fragments as best they could. They did not do so badly. You could actually see the long, slim shape of her, her metal torn and oxidized where her atmosphere tanks had gouted into space. But it had been decades before they knew enough to understand what liquid oxygen could accomplish, how it could be stored, and what would happen if the tanks were ruptured.
They had found what was left of her crew, some of them dressed in sealed suits that more or less preserved their cadavers. A century later, she had been reconstructed again, and the mistakes of the first effort corrected in the light of Deela’s growing scientific knowledge.
Two centuries after that she had been reconstructed for the second time, while Deela learned the universal laws the Truns had used as casually as a child uses his multiplication tables.
This much they knew: the Truns were a bipedal, hairless—or nearly hairless—race. Their upper limbs were slighter, more dexterous developmental versions of their legs, which terminated in five-fingered hands, with one finger serving as the thumb. They had been, as far as could be determined, a paleskinned race, tending in the main to be a very light brown in color, but with variations ranging from pinkish-white to a definite tan. They were about as tall, apparently, as a Deelan.
The Truns came from a nine-planet solar system—more specifically from that system’s third planet. This the Deelan scientists were able to determine from a careful study of the ship’s charts.
The Truns came from staggeringly far away. This much, also, could be determined from the charts. But no matter how painstakingly Deelan astronomers projected the suns and solar systems inscribed on those charts—no matter what imaginary stand they took for their angle of reference—they could only shake their heads in bewilderment. There was nothing like that, they said, in the sky they knew.
Finally, when the Deelans built their first crude ships, and discovered for themselves what sort of apparatus was required, the Trun ship was reconstructed for the last time. There is a compelling logic in machinery which is universal. There is one supremely efficient way, and only one, for an airlock to operate. It is the same with the design of a rocket motor. And a radio set is a radio set, though the circuitry of one may utilize components different in outward appearance from those of another.
There is a logic to labelling these things, too. For the first time, the linguists had something to work with, even though, at the beginning, it might be no more than the Trun symbology for “airlock,” or “radio.”
A dozen centuries after the ship had smashed herself into a jigsaw puzzle on Deela’s soil, the persevering investigators discovered what the Truns called themselves. Poring over the tattered books from the ship—or, rather, the photographs of pages that had long-ago crumbled and fallen away—peering at the charts, and guided by the symbols inscribed beside that red-marked third planet circling an alien sun, they patiently translated, until they found the key. And with its discovery the skeletons in the ship ceased to be pale monsters. They became Truns, from Tura, Sol’s third planet.
And still, no Deelan knew where to search for that alien sun and planet. No Deelan knew how long the mummified ship had whispered to its dead among the drifting stars. Not for another nine thousand years, and not until Dekkin’s ship, hung, lost and lonely, in the doleful deep of boundless, foreign space.
While Dekkin watched, the trouble lights on the Ship-Condition board turned back to green again. He turned to Meyl, and found his executive officer grinning sardonically.
“The wonders of modern science,” Meyl commented. “They may nek: build reliable equipment, but they certainly devise some wonderful systems for informing you when it collapses.”
Dekkin shrugged. “Let’s admit it, Meyl. We knew we’d be risking our lives on the first hyperspatial ship ever built. We knew the trip would have, at best, an infinitesimal chance of success, even without equipment failure. We knew we might die out here, lost, cut off from all hope of rescue. Yet we volunteered—knowing all that.
“We can’t—or at least, we shouldn’t—make tragic figures out of ourselves simply because our intelligent fears turned out to be well-grounded.”
Meyl nodded slowly. “You’re right, of course. And, who knows? Our n
ext jump could conceivably land us in the middle of the Trun home system.”
Dekkin passed judgment on the sanity of that remark with an ironic smile and the briefest of shrugs. He sighed. “Well . . .” He punched the Hyperdrive stud, and the unfamiliar stars outside dissolved into streaky tears that ran remorsefully across the screens . . .
Meyl, alone in his own compartment, sat behind his chartboard and toyed with his dividers among the sketchy astrography.
Nine thousand years. Nine thousand years, with no help at all from that mass of fused machinery in the Trun ship’s engineroom. A thousand years spent in just exploring the Deelan solar system. Another thousand prodigally expended in getting a foothold on the planets of the nearest neighbor stars. Ships going out with their crews in suspended animation.
Ark ships, designed as miniature universes, breeding and rearing generations in the long flight between the stars. And ships that attained a velocity quite possibly exceeding the speed of light, playing tricks with spacetime, returning with crewmen in their thirties who had been born three hundred years before. All the long, slow methods, consuming time, blunting the star-ward drive of the race, making the conquest of space a patchwork effort, at best.
And then, finally, hyperspace—the drive the Truns had possessed ten thousand years ago, and more. And not even a decent hyperspace, but a rickety, unpredictable thing that concealed, in its ponderously complex workings, mysterious flaws that blew generators at the slightest sneeze.
They had reasoned, on Deela—safe on Deela—that the Trun star must be somewhere in the yellow clusters that hung all around the rim of the Galaxy. They had reasoned, also, that it had to be on the other side of the Galaxy, for it was most assuredly not on theirs.
Meyl cursed harshly and stabbed his dividers into the charts. It was almost as if he could hear himself protesting: “Let’s see them apply reason to this situation! Let them come out here and sit, waiting for the last generators to blow! Let them find a logical solution to the problem of familiar space too far behind ever to be regained, with only strange, wild stars ahead.”