“Just a minute!” interrupted another reporter. “If you tell your story they'll let you see Kria again."
Warden Baker roared. “I said you folks would have to be quiet and wait your turn!"
They were quiet then, because they were watching their victim's face. They had him, emotionally, where they wanted him. Two flashbulbs popped. And they all waited.
“This is quite officially authorized,” said Colonel Bigsby.
Sanders glared at him and saw an elderly warhorse with Lord Calvert gray at the temples and a highball tan.
“We are here to corroborate the statement made by the President's agent."
Sanders clutched at the bars and glared out at all of them. He looked the colonel up and down, his lips tightening. The crowd could see the tension mounting in him like an earthquake.
“What would be the use!” he finally blurted out. More flashbulbs went off. “Even if my story got me acquitted? What would be the use! Do you think I give a damn about living in a world inhabited by idiots? You had Utopia handed to you on a golden platter and you sliced the throats of your benefactors! Why? Did they threaten you with invasion?"
“Look!” said the colonel. “We can understand, in part, how you feel about what happened. But what you do not seem to be able to grasp is that we could take no chances. And living next door to a superman civilization like that was taking too big a chance..."
“So you used the very technology they gave you and massacred them!” yelled Sanders. More flashbulbs.
“Another thing you seem to forget,” put in the Provost Marshal, who looked more like a shorebound admiral, “is that you were a citizen of the United States of America when you warned the Vanyans about our attack. You endangered your own world. That makes you a traitor, Sanders. I'd get down off that martyr's pedestal if I were you."
“May I speak a moment, Warden?"
A distinguished looking, elderly reporter from the New York Times stepped forward wearing a powder blue suit, a pink boutonniere and a pocketful of slim, expensive cigars. When the warden looked at the government men and received a triple nod of approval he passed the nod along and the Times representative continued, addressing Sanders. “Whether you become acquitted or not,” he said, “your story will be important to the world, especially in times to come. We cannot say here whether you are really right or wrong. The court-martial will have to decide that for the present. But let future generations judge you-and let them judge us. That is what will really count."
Sanders left the bars and paced his cell, brushing a hand through his hair. He thought of Kria, struggling against death in a hospital. And he thought of the times they had spent together on her own world. He had to see her again...
“All right!” he said, suddenly. “I'll give you the story, but I'll write it myself. I'll give it all to you, in every detail. But don't come back and say I opened your eyes. Just remember one thing.” He came back to the bars and glared at them. “When you realize the cataclysmic mistake you have made, you will have to live with the knowledge that now there is no remedy. You have obliterated the Vanyans. One golden chance in eternity, one ray of light out of space and time, never to return."
No flashbulbs now. Only silence, while they stared at him and he glared at them, his forehead beaded with cold perspiration. Prisoners along the cell block stood behind their bars and waited, watching and listening.
“It's too late for conscience,” he continued. “You can't take back a barrage of atomic bombs and magnetic disintegration. I've seen the Vanyan city. I lived in it. I learned the language of the people you killed. I know what they stood for! There is only one conclusion you will be able to draw from my story. It is that you are the traitors, not against your country alone, but against humanity!"
Three days later, the world read Raymond Sanders’ story.
* * *
CHAPTER III
YOU all know when they landed-August 17, 1956 on the lawn of the Capitol Building, in Washington, D. C., shortly after eleven P.M., Eastern Standard Time. Three traditional flying saucers, complete with peripheral observation panels and the shallow dome on top.
They came smiling before the tanks and artillery and machine guns lined up to greet them, and they offered gifts. Their greatest gift was one of vital knowledge. Within one month, by means of sign language and mathematics, they proved that we were poisoning ourselves with mere practice blasts of atomic energy. Even the Russians agreed to universal control of atomic energy after that.
The Vanyan mission was one of peace. How could the world ever come to fear such a people when they offered Utopia and asked for nothing but good neighbors?
But you did come to fear and suspect, didn't you? And I know why now. It was instinctive egotism. Since we had all become accustomed to benevolence in the form of a false front behind which somebody was always paid off, it was perhaps a natural reaction in the beginning. Nobody could be that benevolent, you told yourselves. They wanted something. The whole thing was a trap.
But when time went on and the deception never revealed itself, you still could not accept pure benevolence at face value. You had to reduce the Vanyans to the level of your own understanding. The only way you could understand them was as a threat to your own existence. And so you destroyed them! But perhaps this was to be expected. Christ was crucified...
* * * *
By the end of that first day, many more discs had arrived, all over the world, and by the second day you all knew in general what the situation was. They had come from Mars but they were not Martians. Mars was the poor little oxygen-depleted world that astronomers always said it was. But the Vanyans had come to the solar system from interstellar space, searching for a new home, because their scientists had predicted that their own sun would soon become a nova. They had searched for centuries to find a suitable world, and at last they had found Earth-and Mars. Venus was still too hot and stormy. Earth was green and fair, but heavily populated. Mars possessed oxygen locked in a chemical state with its soil. Being benevolent and believing in fair play, the Vanyans did not come to Earth and tell us to make room for them, which they certainly could have done. Instead, they had set up machinery on Mars, developing a heavier gravitational field, building plants to release the oxygen again into the atmosphere and placing artificial sun satellites in orbits around the planet to give them the proper temperatures to support life as we and they knew it.
They had worked with Mars for fifteen years and established their own form of civilization there before they decided to establish contact with us. At first they investigated us without contact, in order to learn more about us, so the flying saucer reports of previous years turned out to have an actual basis in fact. When they became aware of our advances in the field of nuclear energy and finally saw us teetering on the brink of atomic war they knew they could wait no longer. So they landed and started negotiations.
After they had succeeded in freeing us from the fear of atomic warfare, tensions began to be relieved among the nations of the world regarding themselves-but a new tension was arising-a fear of the Vanyans. What was their real purpose and intent? What did they really want? You watched them and discussed them daily, and as time passed without their giving any basis for your fears this fact only served to heighten your suspicions more. The Vanyans were fiendishly clever!
They were small in number and, great in science. They offered us technological knowledge in exchange for various useful materials and products we could give them. They readily instructed us how to overcome gravitation and build spaceships exactly equivalent to theirs. They even gave us their own weapons.
At first this latter move on their part was considered to be incredibly naive, but then the doubters came forth again and said that such naiveté was wholly incompatible with such advanced mentalities. The Vanyans were accused of allowing us to build our own booby trap.
Yet they opened Mars to us and allowed us to come and go at will. They hid nothing from us and answered every q
uestion. Except one thing. They would not permit themselves to be X-rayed or carefully examined, physiologically. Since they were obviously flesh and blood humans, we wondered what they were hiding.
Just that one mystery fanned universal doubt and fear to overwhelming proportions. The Vanyans came to us offering a new era, but they reserved one little right to privacy-and for that they were sinister monsters masquerading in human form. Imagination ran riot. Superstitious dread mounted to the point of insanity. If a Vanyan smiled and held out a precious gift of knowledge to us, we would tremble inwardly, instinctively fearing to accept and thus contribute another choking strand to the imaginary web they were supposed to be weaving about us, inexorably, day by day and month by month.
In regard to my own reactions during those first weeks of wonder, I was more or less neutral, willing to give them the benefit of a doubt, searching through their deeds and their way of life for some wisdom lying beyond our comprehension which would in the final analysis explain the things they did that seemed irreconcilable with our own realities.
Then, in early September of that year just prior to the opening of the public schools, a group of Vanyans visited Los Angeles...
* * * *
They came in one of their saucers, as they had come to Washington and New York and Chicago, or to London, Paris and Moscow. They came happily, cheerfully, trustingly and without subterfuge-simply to learn what they could about us and enable us to get acquainted with them.
At first it was impossible to get a close look at them except on television, because it was worse than the Rose Parade or the Rose Bowl by far. I wanted to see them in the flesh, but milling crowds were anathema to me. I waited and finally my opportunity came.
It came because of one outstanding difficulty, which was, of course, the vital matter of communication. In that one respect their arrival on Earth differed from wishful thinking. They were not telepathic, nor did they have any of those convenient machines that you fit on your head in order to get your languages translated automatically. Their language was extremely difficult and involved. Up to this time they had been indulging in a very rapidly developed and publicized system of sign language, in addition to mathematical symbology for expressing scientific concepts. But communication was slow, and they were vitally interested in solving this problem, as were we.
So it was that by the natural process of groping their way and making their wants understood they gravitated toward the institutes of learning and especially toward the teachers. For some reason which we were to understand at a later date, they treated teachers with an unusual amount of respect-even deference. Second only in popularity with them were the linguists, the first being of course the teachers of the physical sciences. And in a way this still had a lot to do with language. They could understand the language of science most readily, although art and music were also highly favored media for expression. But they recognized the fact that if they were to expand their concepts and understanding of us they would have to get down to the business of actual word ideation. And so, at last, the Vanyans and the local linguists got together-and I was included, as a fairly well recognized comparative philologist.
* * *
CHAPTER IV
IT was at the banquet given by the Alpha Phi Gamma, a national teachers’ honorary society for philologists, that I first met Kria. Not all the visiting Vanyans were present, but we had three of them, which was enough to put us in the television spotlights during the whole evening-or at least up to that point when the evening was violently interrupted.
There was a bright young male Vanyan named Drganu who turned out to be Kria's brother, and there was an apparently young man of much graver bearing, named Sanal. We were not quite sure at the time what the Vanyan lifespan was, but I later found out that Sanal was over fifty Earth years old. He was the father of Kria and Drganu.
I wish that I were telling this story to someone who had not experienced the visitation of the Vanyans, because a description of their well known peculiarities would be of particular interest. I mean such things as, of course, their clothing, or lack of it, those hundred and one little differences in the sense of value, or etiquette, or morality, which were the result of a much different social system, and which more often than not resulted in considerable embarrassment on our part before we could make an adjustment to their ways.
For example an uninformed reader might be shocked to know that our three guests sat almost in the nude at our banquet, nor did any amount of sign language appear to influence them. They were not stubborn about it. They merely laughed the whole thing off and continued brightly with the intellectual pursuits at hand.
Not that their semi-nudity was repulsive to any of us. On the contrary. Like all Vanyans, our three guests were almost breathtakingly beautiful. Indeed, if we learned academicians had possessed one-half the physical attributes of our guests we might have considered relieving the tension by at least removing our shirts. These were a golden people, both inside and out. It was a tonic to associate with them. On their faces and in their eyes one could detect a great intelligence coupled with the enviable insouciance of a child.
To me a most satisfactory arrangement was the fact that I was seated at the table within only two places of where Kria was sitting. Before I became involved directly in the sign language and other meager forms of communication, I was perfectly content to study her, wearing an expression of purely academic interest but not feeling it in the least.
I do not wish to appear facetious, but I must say that I stopped thinking like a bachelor the moment I laid eyes on her. To say she was beautiful would be as vacuous an expression as to say that the sun shines. Her bluish hair was parted in back and done up in those thick braids that they slip under the double ringlets on their arms-a very practical method of getting it out of the way and yet very decorative. She wore a tiara of precious metal and sparkling jewels which had been fashioned into the likeness of living flowers; her eyes were slightly more lavender than blue. Her brows were black and perfectly formed, and her lashes were thick and long, without mascara. I've seen women play with men with their eyes in an effort to express their sophistication and feminine prowess in general, but Kria played a breathtaking game with her eyes that was just exactly that. A happy, innocent game. But deep behind the game you could see what seemed to be mirrored vistas of interstellar space—something vast, terrifying and unutterably beautiful, like a fleeting sense of Nirvana, grasped only for a moment and leaving you dedicated thenceforth to the single purpose of finding out the meaning of it.
Her lips were full, above and below, like those of the Grecian gods, and there was a mystically pagan tilt to them and her smiles were as comprehensive as a Thesaurus. Those lips were enviable, too, to Earthwomen, because they possessed a natural hue of deep rose, and an apparently velvety texture that would have been spoiled by lipstick.
I could go on and on. You have seen her. You know of the golden texture of her skin, her supple grace, the single, veil-like garment all Vanyan women wear that is only half a sarong and much more transparent. To complete the picture, there were her perfect breasts, only partially covered by the veil. In fact, one was and one wasn't. Her bearing and her sparkling personality made you somehow accept her as she was, but you could never take those beautiful young breasts for granted.
You all know why I am dwelling upon the fact of her near nudity here. It has an important bearing on what I was to discover later in relation to their whole attitude on the subject of sex-which is one of the greatest differences between Vanyans and Earthmen.
Then on the other hand their concept of love was another story. In that regard we could meet on a common ground. More or less...
* * * *
I have mentioned that a wave of superstitious dread was developing throughout the world in regard to the Vanyans. Whether or not certain economic or political factions helped to augment that wave of fear and distrust and resentment is a subject which need not be elaborated on at present, b
ut the fact remains that the adherents to this ideology of alienation were already taking matters into their own hands-a fact which actually brought Kria and myself together. In fact, our banquet that night at the Town House turned out to be one of the focal points of attack for the now historical anti-Vanyan uprising.
I believe we had just finished the shrimp cocktails and the bouillon was just being served when I made my first direct communication with Kria. By means of sign language I was indicating a curiosity in her reaction to our kind of food and trying to get her to describe to some extent what they ate on Mars. My two colleagues on my right were doing their best to help me out.
Kria beamed at me in a way that positively embarrassed me. Furthermore, she seemed to be oblivious of my would-be assistants. In a few moments, so was I. I was wallowing in her eyes and gamboling with her through pristine glades of thought engendered by her smile, her facial expressions, her manual gesticulations, and her whole personality. We did not seem to require a language of word symbology. Nothing crude enough to create sound waves and tickle our eardrums would have served to convey the consciously indefinable yet subconsciously delectable impressions she passed on to me. It was not telepathy, I insist, but rather a form of communication achieved through sheer personal magnetism.
I was thinking: My God but you're beautiful! Who cares what you eat?
And with her eyes and lips and her radiant personality she laughed soundlessly. Yet I heard that laughter echoing through the thought-glades of the extra-dimensional sort of little world that was a-building between us. I saw myself running with her, hand in hand, through dreams more vivid than reality.
I came to, with a start, to find Anderson, my colleague who sat next to me, pulling at my arm. He was on his feet. Others were on their feet, too, and there was shouting. On Kria's face I saw a look of alarm as she stared at the main entrance to the banquet room.
“What is the meaning of this?” I heard our master of ceremonies shout.
Martian Honeymoon and Beyond the Darkness Page 2