by Jerry
“That changes things,” I said at length. “My advice to you now is to go to Geneva immediately, both of you, to tell some high-ranking police official of your predicament and ask him to give you asylum where you will be safe.”
“Mark is right,” said Giselle. “That is what we must do.”
“Thanks, Mark; we’ll do that,” added Pierre. “Let’s eat something and go on into town.”
Having made the decision, it seemed as though a weight had been lifted from them. There was a bottle of whisky in the cupboard and we drank a toast in silence.
Then the telephone rang, loud and shrill.
“It can’t be for us,” said Giselle, “because nobody knows we are here.”
In order to stop the nerve-shattering noise of the bell, because the others showed no inclination to answer it, I lifted the receiver.
“Is that Professor Duclos?” asked a voice, speaking in French.
“There is no Professor Duclos here,” I replied. “You must have the wrong number.”
“Will you tell the professor,” continued the voice calmly, “that some friends are inquiring when the grass on Kangaroo Island will start to grow again.”
I hung up.
The words uttered were harmless enough, but I find it impossible to exaggerate the sheer malignity they conveyed to me and to the others when I relayed the message.
“It’s easy enough to talk of going to Geneva,” said Pierre, “but how are we going to get there? They know we are here, and nothing is easier than to prevent us reaching the main road. There isn’t a living soul for miles.”
“I think,” I said, “that Pierre should have a chat with the police, now. A police escort looks pretty good to me.”
Pierre agreed. He went to the phone. It was dead.
There was nothing to say. The facts were too painfully obvious. Paradoxically, the phone was more eloquent dead than alive, for no words spoken over it could have so emphasized our isolation. We all wanted passionately to get back to the city, just as, tacitly, we agreed that it was highly improbable that we should be allowed to do so. They—the mysterious of Kangaroo Island; the people who had been instrumental in cutting the phone; the people whose vague existence constituted a menace, who had reduced Giselle and Pierre to nervous wrecks and who had shattered some of my complacency—They would find means of intercepting us. Two miles of the road back to civilization lay through dense, dark pine forest, sinister enough in broad daylight, but in darkness terrifying to contemplate. Not even the two Alsatians or Pierre’s shotgun made the journey more palatable.
“They wouldn’t shoot or try to kill us,” I said hopefully, “because if you are right, you would be no good to them dead.”
Then I became selfish and personal. They would never get anything out of me because, thank God, I knew nothing, but I wondered all the same how they would assure themselves that I knew nothing.
Darkness had fallen more than an hour before we thought of lighting the lamps. The stove was getting low. When I went outside to fetch some wood, it had begun to snow. Big wet flakes were falling. A vast white blanket covered the alpine meadow.
“Giselle and I have had longer to think about all this than you have, Mark,” said Pierre at length. “We are prepared—for anything.”
I let it pass.
“But you will be all right. You know nothing,” he continued. “All the same, old chap, I’m sorry we dragged you into this mess and, as things have turned out, all to no avail.”
Sitting on either side of the dining table, each with a pen and a pad of paper, Giselle and her brother spent the next minutes writing at furious speed. When they had finished writing, they went outside to the woodshed.
“You’ll find what we’ve written—afterward,” said Pierre. “It’s underneath a pile of sawdust. I don’t think They will look there.”
“It isn’t your blasted formula, I hope?” I heard myself say.
“No, Mark,” he replied equably. “What we have written is merely to exonerate you, in case there should be any attempt made to hold you responsible for what may happen to us. That’s all.”
I believed I understood, and I felt mortally ashamed.
Then I went for a short walk. I felt that they might wish to be alone for a little, time. I had turned the car when Giselle and I arrived. I had left it facing downhill, in case there might be difficulty starting it. The snow was several inches deep, but no more was falling. The darkness was intense. I switched on the car’s headlights, which threw a beam of light about half a mile down the hill. Against the white background, four dark figures were plainly visible, plodding stolidly up the hill. I had the impression that they were men to whom snow was no novelty. They could, of course, have been Swiss. Why not? This was Switzerland. The Swiss were used to snow.
I went inside to tell the others what I had seen. My courage had returned. They, I believed, were no longer vague, ephemeral creatures, formless and terrifying. They were now real, for I had seen them.
The two Alsatians had heard the newcomers. They went mad with rage. Pierre turned them loose and, roaring defiance, they went out into the night to do battle. A few seconds later there came the sound of two shots, fired, I judged, from a small-caliber pistol. Silence followed. Imagination conjured up a picture of two faithful dogs lying dead, their life’s blood staining the virgin whiteness of the snow. Two shots, two seconds apart. Result: two dead dogs. Expert work by someone trained to kill. It was so sudden, so ruthlessly efficient that, despite the warmth of the chalet, I felt chilled to the bone.
Once again, I was scared. I cracked a feeble joke to hide my fears. It fell flat. This was an ill-chosen moment for witticisms.
Someone tapped on the window. “Come outside!” a voice said. “We wish to speak with you!”
We had extinguished the lamp. The only light in the room came from the mica door of the stove. Quite calmly, Pierre rose from his seat and kissed Giselle on the forehead. I shook the hand he offered me.
“Good-by!” he said, putting his hand to his mouth, dying as he did so.
Giselle kissed me on the lips and said something I did not hear. Then her hand carried something to her mouth. I could have stopped her, but I did not do so. Then, still smiling sadly, she died.
“Come outside!” called the same voice.
Something crashed through the window, landing with a thud on the wooden floor. Choking and clawing at my throat, I went obediently to the door. Something was put over my face. The next thing I remember, and that dimly, was a voice saying, “He knows nothing. He is no use to us.” The left sleeve of my jacket was slit. The shirt also. There was a dull ache in my arm, like that from a blunt hypodermic needle.
The words echoed in my brain: “He knows nothing. He is no use to us.” How were they so sure?
I heard the crunch of heavy boots in the snow. The sound grew fainter until it died away. I was lying in the snow outside the door of the chalet. When I went inside, the fumes had cleared. I mended the broken window with a sheet of paper and some adhesive tape. Then I relighted the lamp.
Pierre and Giselle were still at the table. They had died in order to save the world from the horrors of the creeping black death they had evolved. This story is their epitaph.
They will not have died in vain if the world understands the message of their deaths. Science has outrun morality. That, I believe, is the true meaning of the Biblical reference to new wine in old bottles. Men, all kinds of men—statesmen, soldiers and airmen, scientists and lesser people—are being confronted daily with decisions beyond their moral capacity. The new wine is too strong; the bottles too weak. Giselle and Pierre dared not go on living, because they would not usurp the prerogatives of God. I live because they did not share their knowledge with me.
Meanwhile, as their memorial, there is a blackened acre in an alpine meadow and a dead, sterile island in the Barrier Reef. When, if ever, will they be green again? When God, who does not have to fumble in a biochemical laboratory, w
ills it so. This, however clumsily delivered, is the message which my good friends left behind them. They died that we may live.
BIG SWORD
Pauline Ashwell
There must be a stage in developing intelligence where one is bright enough to know a terrible problem exists... and to know that the solution requires more intelligence than you have . . .
HE WAS taller than the tallest by nearly an inch, because the pod that hatched him had hung on the Tree more than twenty days longer than the rest, kept from ripening by all the arts at the People’s command. The flat spike sheathed in his left thigh was, like the rest of him, abnormally large: but it was because he represented their last defense that they gave him the name, if a thought-sign can be called that, of “Big Sword.”
He was a leader from his birth, because among the People intelligence was strictly proportional to size. They had two kinds of knowledge: Tree-knowledge, which they possessed from the moment they were born; and Learned-knowledge, the slow accumulation of facts passed on from one generation to another with the perfect accuracy of transmitted thought, which again was shared by all alike. The Learned-knowledge of the People covered all the necessities that they had previously experienced: but now they were faced with a wholly new danger and they needed somebody to acquire the Learned-knowledge to deal with it. So they made use of the long-known arts that could delay ripening of the pods on the Tree. These were not used often, because neighboring pods were liable to be stunted by the growth of an extra-large one, but now there was the greatest possible need for a leader. The Big Folk, after two years of harmlessness, had suddenly revealed themselves as an acute danger, one that threatened the life of the People altogether.
Tree-knowledge Big Sword had, of course, from the moment of his hatching. The Learned-knowledge of the People was passed on to him by a succession of them sitting beside him in the treetops while his body swelled and hardened and absorbed the light. He would not grow any larger: the People made use of the stored energy of sunlight for their activities, but the substance of their bodies came from the Tree. For three revolutions of the planet he lay and absorbed energy and information. Then he knew all that they could pass on to him, and was ready to begin.
A week later he was sitting on the edge of a clearing in the forest, watching the Big Folk at their incomprehensible tasks. The People had studied them a little when they first appeared in the forest, and had made some attempt to get in touch with them, but without success. The Big Folk used thought all right, but chaotically: instead of an ordered succession of symbols there would come a rush of patterns and half-patterns, switching suddenly into another set altogether and then returning to the first, and at any moment the whole thing might be wiped out altogether. Those first students of the People, two generations ago, had thought that there was some connection between the disappearance of thought and the vibrating wind which the Big Folk would suddenly emit from a split in their heads. Big Sword was now certain that they were right, but the knowledge did not help him much. After the failure of their first attempts at communication the People, not being given to profitless curiosity, had left the Big Folk alone. But now a totally unexpected danger had come to light. One of the Big Folk, lumbering about the forest, had cut a branch off the Tree.
When they first arrived the Big Folk had chopped down a number of trees—ordinary trees—completely and used them for various peculiar constructions in the middle of the clearing, but that was a long time ago and the People had long since ceased to worry about it. Two generations had passed since it happened. But the attack on the Tree itself had terrified them. They had no idea why it had been made and there was no guarantee that it would not happen again. Twelve guardians had been posted round the Tree ready to do anything possible with thought or physical force to stave off another such attack, but they were no match for the Big Folk. The only safety lay in making contact with the Big Folk and telling them why they must leave the Tree of the People alone.
Big Sword had been watching them for two days now and his plan was almost ready. He had come to the conclusion that a large part of the difficulty lay in the fact that the Big People were hardly ever alone. They seemed to go about in groups of two or three and thought would jump from one to another at times in a confusing way: then again you would get a group whose thoughts were all completely different and reached the observer in a chaotic pattern of interference. The thing to do, he had decided, was to isolate one of them. Obviously the one to tackle would be the most intelligent of the group, the leader, and it was clear which one filled that position: he stood out among his companions as plainly as Big Sword. There were one or two factors to be considered further, but that evening, Big Sword had decided, he would be ready to act.
Meanwhile the Second Lambdan Exploratory Party had troubles of their own. Mostly these were the professional bothers that always accompany scientific expeditions; damaged equipment, interesting sidelines for which neither equipment nor workers happened to be available, not enough hours in the day. Apart from that there was the constant nag of the gravitation, twenty percent higher than that of Earth; and the effect, depressing until you got used to it, of the monochromatic scenery, laid out in darker and lighter shades of black and gray. Only the red soil and red rocks varied that monotony, with an effect which to Terrestrial eyes was somewhat sinister. Nevertheless, the Expedition were having fewer troubles than they expected. Lambda, apparently, was a thoroughly safe planet. Whatever those gray-and-black jungles might look like it appeared that they had nothing harmful in them.
At thirty light-years away from Earth most personal troubles had got left behind. John James Jordan, however, the leader of the party, had brought his with him. His most urgent responsibility was in the next cabin, in bed and, it was to be hoped, asleep.
There was no doubt about it, a man who made his career in space had no business to get married. Some men, of course, could take their wives with them: there were three married couples on the expedition, though they were with the first party at base on the coast. But for a spaceman to marry a woman and leave her at home didn’t make sense.
He wondered, now, what he had thought he was doing. Marriage had been a part of that hectic interval between his first expedition and his second, when he had arrived home to find that space exploration was News and everybody wanted to know him. He had been just slightly homesick, that first time. The idea of having somebody to come back to had been attractive.
The actual coming back, three years later, had not been so good. He had had time to realize that he scarcely knew Cora. Most of their married life seemed to have been spent at parties: he would arrive late, after working overtime, and find Cora already in the thick of it. He was going to have more responsibility preparing for the third expedition: he was going to have to spend most of his time on it. He wondered how Cora was going to take it. She had never complained when he wasn’t there, during the brief period of their married life: but somehow what he remembered wasn’t reassuring.
Just the same, it was a shock to find that she had divorced him a year after his departure—one of the first of the so-called “space divorces.” It was a worse shock, though, to find that he now had a two-year-old son.
The rule in a space divorce was that the divorced man had the right to claim custody of his children, providing that he could make adequate arrangements for them during his absence. That would have meant sending Ricky to some all-year-round school. There was no sense to that. Cora’s new husband was fond of him. Jordan agreed to leave Ricky with his mother. He even agreed, three years later on his next leave, not to see Ricky—Cora said that someone had told the little boy that her husband was not his real father and contact with somebody else claiming that position was likely to upset him.
Once or twice during his Earth-leaves—usually so crammed with duties that they made full-time exploration look like a holiday—Jordan got news of Cora. Apparently she was a rising star in the social world. He realized, gradually, that she ha
d married him because for a brief time he had been News, and could take her where she wanted to be. He was vaguely relieved that she had got something out of their marriage: it was nice that somebody did. He was prepared to grant her doings the respect due to the incomprehensible. Nevertheless he was worried, for a moment, when he heard that she had been divorced yet again and remarried—to a prominent industrialist this time. He wondered how Ricky had taken it.
His first actual contact with Cora in about seven years came in the form of a request from her lawyer that he should put his signature to an application for entrance to a school. Merely a formality. The insistence on that point roused his suspicions and he made some inquiries about the school in question.
Half an hour after getting answers he had found Cora’s present address, booked a passage on the Transequatorial Flight, and canceled his engagements for the next twenty-four hours.
He was just in time to get aboard the flier. He had taken a bundle of urgent papers with him and he had three hours of flight in which to study them, but he hardly tried to do so. His conscience felt like a Lothomian cactus-bird trying to break out of the egg.
Why on Earth, why in Space, why in the Universe hadn’t he taken some sort of care of his son?
He had never visited Antarctica City before and he found it depressing. With great ingenuity somebody had excavated a building-space in the eternal ice and filled it with a city which was an exact copy of all the other cities. He wondered why anybody had thought it worth while.
Cora’s house seemed less a house than an animated set for a stereo on The Life of the Wealthy Classes. It had been decorated in the very latest style—he recognized one or two motifs which had been suggested by the finds of the First Lambdan Expedition, mingled with the usual transparent furniture and electrified drapes. He was contemplating a curious decorative motif, composed of a hooked object which he recognized vaguely as some primitive agricultural implement and what looked like a pile-man’s drudge—but of course that particular mallet-shape had passed through innumerable uses—when Cora came in.