by Jerry
I turned back to the cube. I explained that advice, that most plentiful commodity in the galaxy, was our limit. But if it wanted the benefit of our vast and varied experience, it was available for the asking.
“Boy, you’re corny,” Pegleg said, and I guess I was.
The cube was gratified, though. Apparently it hadn’t expected or even wanted anything more. At this point it quit serving as solitary ambassador to us, the Earth visitors. It asked for and got assistance.
IX
You can get used to anything.
I’ve proved that to myself on a dozen worlds, and over and over again. It almost seemed natural, then, when cubes materialized on all sides of us in a hollow square, with Pegleg and me in the middle.
The new arrivals seemed almost exactly the same size as the black cube. I counted them. There were fifteen, each a different glowing color. Particularly striking was a chalk white one, the center cube in the wall of the square exactly opposite the black cube. The black, of course, was a part of the square, the sixteenth member. And the square itself seemed as geometrically perfect as the individual cubes.
I checked that. I undipped a tape and measured the distance between cube and cube. Each sat exactly equidistant from its neighbor on either side. Intrigued, I measured the cubes. In size they were identical, to the smallest fraction on my tape. Any two adjacent sides of the square were as true as an engineer could have drawn. And they materialized like that, out of nothing.
I sat down again on the lettuce.
“Pegleg,” I said, “council rings are out of fashion. The newest thing is a square so true that the best tape can’t find a jiggled dimension. The deliberations of such a council are bound to be orderly.”
“And that, I think,” said Pegleg slowly, “is what this council is all about. Order versus disorder. Discipline versus license. Planned progress versus chaos. And at the same time, individual freedom versus mass folly.”
“One would almost think,” I said, “that you were an educated man. Let’s see what they have for us.”
I faced the black cube again and started to speak. But I didn’t have to. Feeling welled up around me in a soundless clamor, a groundswell of energy. My viscera knotted. Sweat popped out all over me. Pegleg’s eyes opened wide. An incredulous look slowly spread over his face.
“Wait a minute! Hold it!” My voice was half choked, my nerve ends in spasms. “Don’t let’s everybody talk at once! We can’t take that!” The wave receded; the ground-swell died. I could see Pegleg slump as he sat. On my naked chest and arms the sweat began to dry.
Then we got it again, from one source surely, perfectly modulated to our tolerance, and clearer than any communication we had ever had before. It was concise, it was efficient, and it told us in clean sequence what we needed to know. I wished Lindy could have been there, to “hear” it as we did. I could sense my subconscious groping about for the lead paragraph for my paper on the Fourth Evolutionary System. It was in the bag.
In thirty minutes the story was finished, and we sat limp. The cubes sat in their perfect square, colorful, immobile, inert. No test could have shown them to be alive. Finally I roused myself.
“Let us think about it,” I said wearily. “Let us talk with our co-workers. From what I gather, tomorrow will not be too late. Look for us then, Dr. Peterson, Dr. Williams, and me and the jeep. We’ll be headed for the beaches opposite the Strait.”
Pegleg said: “It’s definite, now, that the gray cubes have a shorter materialization range than you do, and that they can barely clear the Strait? And that they must rest and recharge before moving on.”
We got an affirmative pulse. Because of their greater bulk, it seemed that this was so. They would also have to eat. And their diet would be what it apparently had been for thousands of years of isolation: a little lettuce, a little sea water, some elements from the air—and each other. There would be one addition—any colored cube that they could surround and absorb.
If this crisis could be met and solved, I promised myself lovely weeks of working out the details of nutrition and metabolism, interaction and reproduction. Because the colored cubes had two great fears: usurping of their space by uncontrolled hordes and contamination of the geometrical perfection of their race.
I stood up and stretched, and suddenly I had an idea.
“The millwheels!” I said.
I got an ugly pulse of energy that made my teeth click.
The millwheels had been no part of the story. We had only seen the one, but they evidently existed in sufficient numbers to get themselves hated. They seemed to be a form of life over which the cubes had no control.
I pursued my idea, preceding it by an insult.
“You are unreasonable,” I said deliberately, “about the wheels. You are prejudiced. You are, I think, blocking off a possible solution to your own dilemma. The wheels may be a part of the answer.”
I got an angry mental picture of a millwheel rolling swiftly past a cube, releasing its spurt of white poison; of the cube slowly disintegrating into an amorphous, viscous, colorless slime, and of the wheel rolling back and forth in the mess until it had soaked it all up.
“Perfect!” I said.
The energy storm began again, but there was puzzlement in it. Somehow the “minds” of the cubes, which gave every evidence of advanced competence, were unable to clear this elementary hurdle. They could not comprehend the use of the antagonistic species for their own benefit. The absence of life variety probably contributed to this mental blank spot.
“Are there millwheels on the Island?”
I got a sulky negative.
“I thought not. Probably the gray cubes, having been isolated for so long, retain no memory of their existence. They won’t know how to contend with them. They won’t get out of the wheels’ way, as you do. If there are enough wheels, and they could be assembled, they might do the trick.”
If I had been addressing a meeting of old ladies and had suggested that we all go out and collect live scorpions and rattlesnakes, the air would probably have felt pretty much as it did here. I would never have expected these cold intellects to be appalled. But they were.
“Can you communicate with the millwheels?”
There was a great pulse of revulsion, but there was also a grudgingly admitted affirmative. I divined that contact was possible.
“Get across the idea of food. Food in abundance on the beaches opposite the Straits. Get them together. You probably know how. Anyway, it’s your job. Would there be many?”
In my mind a picture grew of thousands and thousands of underground burrows, the entrances neatly plugged with soil, and soon healed over and rendered invisible by the swiftly growing lettuce. Of course it was that simple. I should have figured it out long ago.
“One thing more!” Pegleg’s narrow face was interested and intent, and I’d have sworn he had forgotten all about the no-interference rule. At any rate, he was taking sides as much as I was. “What can you do in your own defense? You must have been able to handle them once, since your ancestors confined them to the Island in the first place.”
The answer was not clear. It was evident that the cubes themselves didn’t know. But they seemed to feel that theirs was a far more refined energy output and control, that weight unit for weight until they could beat down the grays into permanent disintegration. The size factor made it tricky.
“Then don’t go down on the beaches at all,” Pegleg advised. “Keep to the dunes and the slopes back of them. Let the wheels sweep the beaches. And when the grays materialize on the slopes, attack them with organized groups of fours, one from each of the four sides. They’ll probably be scattered enough to make that possible, and four of you can take one of them, can’t you?”
The wave of comprehending wonderment that washed over us was something I can’t describe. It was like the delighted look on a child’s face when he first is shown how two and two make four.
Maybe we shouldn’t have done it. Perhaps i
t was wrong. For there is no doubt that with our simple battle plan we interfered with the logical progress and ultimate end of the life of a planet, a decimating process that already had reduced the myriad ancestral species to four life forms. Had we not involved the wheels, it is likely that the gray imperfects would have overrun the mainland and swallowed up or contaminated completely the rainbow race. With their lack of awareness of the deadliness of the wheels, they may in their turn have been harried out of existence. Then the wheels would have become extinct. For they couldn’t exist on lettuce alone.
But that’s second-guessing. That’s looking back. Technically, or at least physically, we didn’t interfere. Advice was our limit. And when we had given it, and the satisfaction and relief had welled up around us, suddenly we were alone on the crest of the little slope. A feeling of thanks lingered in the air. On all sides of us, in a series of sixteen neat squares, the lettuce was crushed out of existence. That was all. And when we looked down the slope toward the ship, and across the rolling prairie in all directions, not a cube was in sight.
X
We strolled back to the ship. Our good co-workers were clustered about in small groups, chattering like kindergartners. Seeing was believing, and not seeing, they had learned, also had to be believed.
“What spooked them, Roscoe?” Pinky Ames was our psychologist, and naturally he usually knew less about what was going on than anybody.
“Gather ’round,” I said, “and Pegleg and I will make speeches. We’re all in the middle of something big. We’ve got some deciding to do. With the energies that these things can command, we may even toe in danger.”
Johnny Rasmussen came up and took over, and we had a full staff meeting out there on the prairie. We didn’t form a square; just sat in a big. irregular group on the lettuce. Pegleg and I told our story. We predicted what we thought was going to happen and that it would happen soon. From what the council of cubes had communicated, tomorrow perhaps.
“And maybe sooner,” said Ursula Potts. She was sitting on her camp stool at the edge of the group. Her strange sixth sense must have picked up the thing the minute it appeared. She pointed. We all gaped.
It had materialized so close that it had practically joined the meeting. Massive, craggy, with deep striations in its dull gray surfaces, it sat as inertly as its colorful relatives. But there was a different feel about it. It exuded a toughness, a wary malevolence, like a battle-scarred old tomcat in an alley. Its huge size and fact that one corner was completely missing intensified the resemblance.
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Dr. Rasmussen asked a question. “How far are we from the beaches near the Island?”
“Fifty miles or so.”
“Then the invasion must be on,” the chief decided. “What do you suggest, Dr. Kissinger?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that I disagree about the invasion. The colored cubes would have known. This fellow must be a loner, or a scout.” I studied it thoughtfully. “I never thought I’d ever see a meanlooking stone.”
It couldn’t hear me, but something in my attitude must have reached its consciousness. It was in an alien environment; its objectives were conquest and destruction, it expected no friends. That we were things completely foreign to its experience made no difference. Whether it had any curiosity about us we never knew.
The energy didn’t come as a sudden blast. If it had it might well have been the end of all of us. But as I stared at the misshapen cube, the intention forming in my mind to go over and examine it, I began to sweat. My jaws seemed to stiffen. My joints ached. The muscles of my arm and legs jerked in spasms, and my vision blurred.
I heard her sigh and sensed rather than saw Ursula Potts as she crumpled on her camp stool and slid senseless onto the lettuce. Around me men were trying to rise, making futile, uncoordinated movements. And the silent energy that was tearing our nervous systems to pieces grew stronger, changed nature, as though the cube were questing the proper application to destroy us.
I could barely hear Lindy’s choked cry:
“Roscoe, do something quick!” I’m a tough boy, and I think I proved it then. I don’t know why I thought of it. I couldn’t stand on my legs, but I forced my fingers to tear open a belt pouch and scoop out the handful of aspirin tabs I’d put there days before. With the last bit of energy and coordination I possessed I flung them in a shower at the cube.
In a split second it was over. Our bodies sagged with the sudden relief; we had control again. I couldn’t have dented the cube with a sledgehammer, but the aspirin tabs went through it like hot coals through ice. The energy was cut as though a switch had been thrown. Before our eyes the cube slumped and collapsed into a spreading, creeping excrescense of colorless slime. The complex molecular interactions that had held it together were jolted askew. It was undeniably “dead.”
We devoted some minutes to the blessed privilege of taking deep breaths. Before anyone thought to help her, Ursula Potts sat up suddenly on the lettuce, and intelligence and cold curiosity came back to her pale eyes.
“Close shave, eh?” Ursula said.
It was the understatement of all time, and it broke the spell. Everyone began to babble, but Johnny Rasmussen took swift charge.
“Everybody back to the ship,” he ordered. “What in the name of all space did you do, Roscoe?”
“Aspirin,” I said briefly. “Issue everybody a pouchful, Johnny. It’s deadly to them.” I turned to one of the zoological collectors. “Scoop us up a bottleful of our erstwhile friend here, Eric. We ought to learn something from analyzing it.”
From the undisciplined way men and women shoved and tumbled through the ports and locks into the Stardust, no one would have known them for a veteran exploration crew. They behaved like a rabble. That’s what the unknown will do to the best of us. The peaceful, empty landscape, where we had deplored the lack of life, was as peaceful and empty as ever. But into it alien shapes could come out of nothing, with energies the extent of which we could only vaguely guess. And suddenly it was a landscape of foreboding and menace.
But still I lingered outside. Pegleg, always a cold fish when the chips were down, stayed with me. And because we always worked together, I wasn’t surprised that Lindy was standing quietly by. She finally broke the silence.
“No danger now, I think,” she said. “We know them best, and we could feel it. But we’d better go in and help make decisions. Dr. Rasmussen has given an order. We won’t help by ignoring it.”
She was right, and we strolled slowly toward the port nearest our quarters. We had to show everybody that there was no profit in panic. I hoped that they were ashamed of themselves.
The decisions to be made called for talk. Rasmussen proposed to raise ship and watch developments from a safe ten miles up.
“At least,” he amended, “we will assume it’s safe. There are millions of the gray cubes, and you saw what one can do. The colored ones are, by their own report, more powerful weight unit for weight unit. The wild energy from strife might well be completely unbelievable.”
“I don’t agree,” Pegleg said. “I doubt that there will be any wild energy at all. It’ll be focused, directed. There’ll be purpose in every unit of it. And when a cube is destroyed, it doesn’t explode energy. It collapses. What do you think, Roscoe?”
I had made up my mind. In fact, I had never had but one point of view.
“I think you’re right. And I want to be there, on the ground, in the middle of it. What about the jeep, Pegleg? Would the forcefield be effective?”
Pegleg shook his head slowly.
“I’ve got no basis for an opinion,” he said. “These energies are new. But you wouldn’t want to take my jeep and leave me sitting in the grandstand, now would you?”
Lindy grasped my arm.
“Me, too!” she said emphatically. “We won’t even need the forcefield. We’ll have a bodyguard rows deep on all sides of us. We’ve helped, remember? We’ve got friends. And the grays don’t kn
ow who or what we are, anyway. They don’t know we exist.” She turned to Rasmussen. “Please, Johnny!”
Rasmussen’s mustaches quivered. I didn’t blame him for hesitating. And before he could speak, another voice cut in.
“Jeep’s got a wide back seat, ain’t it? Room for two. I could strap canvases on the side. Can’t miss a chance like this, Johnny. Can’t possibly.”
That tipped it. Twenty minutes before, Ursula had been lying senseless on the lettuce. Now her pale eyes were gleaming with anticipation of going into millions of times the amount of energy that had laid her low. Rasmussen’s grin was wry.
“It figures,” he said. “You’ll make me famous in spite of myself. What do you propose?”
What we proposed just grew like Topsy, but it couldn’t help but be simple. There was no way of complicating it. In brief, Cap’n Jules would up ship and for the rest of the day we would cruise the area of invasion, the end of the Island next to the Straits, the fifty-mile stretch of the Straits themselves, and the beaches and slopes of the mainland opposite. From what we could see, we’d try to guess what was going to happen.
I held to the idea that we’d got from the cubic council. They expected the invasion tomorrow. I went along with that. Of course, there was no evidence that the cubes would need light, that they were any less active in the night than in the day. But I rather thought that they were diurnal. Color is a light phenomenon. And even the gray cubes may once have been many shades. The activity of any planet’s population is geared to its sun. We had never found an exception to that, anyhow.
In the morning, well before dawn, the Stardust would land the jeep ten miles or so behind the beaches.
We’d be on our own, but we’d be watched, of course. We wouldn’t use radio, radar, or any energy that might affect or be picked up by the cubes. We wouldn’t interfere. Probably we couldn’t.