The Human Edge

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Not a chance," said Jerry.

  "You can't be sure of that."

  "Yes I can." Jerry heard his own voice sounding harshly beyond the darkness of his closed eyelids. "It wasn't just that I knew my cosmological view was too tough for them. It was the fact that their minds were closed—in the vat they had no freedom to change and adapt themselves to anything new."

  "What's that got to do with it?" demanded the voice of Milt.

  "Everything," said Jerry. "Their point of view only made us more uncomfortable—but our point of view, being individually adaptable, and open, threatened to destroy the very laws of existence as they saw them. An open mind can always stand a closed one, if it has to—by making room for it in the general picture. But a closed mind can't stand it near an open one without risking immediate and complete destruction in its own terms. In a closed mind, there's no more room."

  He stopped speaking and slowly exhaled a weary breath.

  "Now," he said, without opening his eyes, "will you finally get oot of here and let me sleep?"

  For a long second more, there was silence. Then, he heard a chair scrape softly, and the muted steps of Milt tiptoeing away.

  With another sigh, at last Jerry relaxed and let consciousness slip from him.

  He slept.

  —as sleep the boar upon the plain, the hawk upon the crag, and the tiger on the hill . . .

  THE HARD WAY

  Once again, the story is told from the alien viewpoint, and Dickson excels at building up the alien society, and the viewpoint character's motivations. Said character is not at all safe to be around, even in the case of members of his own species, yet the reader is liable to have a sneaking urge to root for such a clever alien anti-hero to succeed, even though his success would be very bad news for the Earth and its inhabitants. Of course, the trouble with being clever and having a cunning plan that cannot fail is that someone even more clever just may have incorporated your cunning plan into their cunning plan. . . .

  Kator Secondcousin, cruising in the neighborhood of a Cepheid variable down on his charts as 47391L, but otherwise known to the race he was shortly to discover as A Ursae Min.—or Polaris, the pole star—suddenly found himself smiled upon by a Random Factor. Immediately—for although he was merely a Secondcousin, it was of the family of Brutogas—he grasped the opportunity thus offered and locked the controls while he set about planning his Kingdom. Meanwhile, he took no chances. He fastened a tractor beam on the artifact embodying the Random Factor. It was a beautiful artifact, even in its fragmentary condition, fully five times as large as the two-man scout in which he and Aton Maternaluncle—of the family Ochadi—had been making a routine sampling sweep of debris in the galactic drift. Kator locked it exactly in the center of his viewing screen and leaned back in his pilot's chair. A polished bulkhead to the left of the screen threw back his own image, and he twisted the catlike whiskers of his round face thoughtfully and with satisfaction, as he reviewed the situation with all sensible speed.

  The situation could hardly have been more ideal. Aton Maternaluncle was not even a connection by marriage with the family Brutogas. True, he, like the Brutogasi, was of the Hook persuasion politically, rather than Rod. But on the other hand the odds against the appearance of such a Random Factor as this to two men on scientific survey were astronomical. It canceled out Ordinary Duties and Conventions almost automatically. Aton Maternaluncle—had he been merely a disinterested observer rather than the other half of the scout crew—would certainly consider Kator a fool not to take advantage of the situation by integrating the Random Factor positively with Kator's own life pattern. Besides, thought Kator, watching his own reflection in the bulkhead and stroking his whiskers, I am young and life is before me.

  He got up from the chair, loosened a tube on the internal ship's recorder, and extended the three-inch claws on his stubby fingers. He went back to the sleeping quarters behind the pilot room. Back home the door to it would never have been unlocked—but out here in deep space, who would take precautions against such a farfetched situation as this the Random Factor had introduced?

  Skillfully, Kator drove his claws into the spinal cord at the base of Aton's round skull, killing the sleeping man instantly. He then disposed of the body out the air lock, replaced the tube in working position in the recorder, and wrote up the fact that Aton had attacked him in a fit of sudden insanity, damaging the recorder as he did so. Finding Kator ready to defend himself, the insane Aton had then leaped into the air lock, and committed suicide by discharging himself into space.

  After all, reflected Kator, as he finished writing up the account in the logbook, While Others Still Think, We Act had always been the motto of the Brutogasi. He stroked his whiskers in satisfaction.

  * * *

  A period of time roughly corresponding to a half hour later—in the time system of that undiscovered race to whom the artifact had originally belonged—Kator had got a close-line magnetically hooked to the blasted hull of the artifact and was hand-over-hand hauling his spacesuited body along the line toward it. He reached it with little difficulty and set about exploring his find by the headlight of his suit.

  It had evidently been a ship operated by people very much like Kator's own human kind. The doors were the right size, the sitting devices were sittable-in. Unfortunately it had evidently been destroyed by a pressure-warp explosion in a drive system very much like that aboard the scout. Everything not bolted down in it had been expelled into space. No, not everything. A sort of hand carrying-case was wedged between the legs of one of the sitting devices. Kator unwedged it and took it back to the scout with him.

  After making the routine safety tests on it, Kator got it open. And a magnificent find it turned out to be. Several items of what appeared to be something like cloth, and could well be garments, and what were clearly ornaments or perhaps badges of rank, and a sort of coloring-stick of soft red wax. But these were nothing to the real find.

  Enclosed in a clear wrapping material formed in bagshape, were a pair of what could only be foot-protectors with soil still adhering to them. And among the loose soil in the bottom of the bag, was the tiny dried form of an organic creature.

  A dirt-worm, practically indistinguishable from the dirt-worms at home.

  Kator lifted it tenderly from the dirt with a pair of specimen tweezers and sealed it into a small cube of clear plastic. This, he thought, slipping it into his belt pouch, was his. There was plenty in the wreckage of the ship and in the carrying-case for the examiners to work on back home in discovering the location of the race that had built them all. This corpse—the first of his future subjects—was his. A harbinger of the future, if he played his knuckle-dice right. An earnest of what the Random Factor had brought.

  Kator logged his position and the direction of drift the artifact had been taking when he had first sighted it. He headed himself and the artifact toward Homeworld, and turned in for a well-earned rest.

  As he drifted off to sleep, he began remembering some of the sweeps he and Aton had made together before this, and tears ran down inside his nose. They had never been related, it was true, even by the marriage of distant connection. But Kator had grown to have a deep friendship for the older Ruml, and Kator was not the sort that made friends easily.

  Only, when a Kingdom beckons, what can a man do?

  * * *

  Back on the Ruml Homeworld—capital planet of the seven star-systems where the Ruml were in power—an organization consisting of some of the best minds of the race fell upon the artifact that Kator had brought back, like robber wasps upon the honey-horde of a wild bees hive, where the hollow tree trunk hiding it has been split open by lightning. Unlike the lesser races and perhaps the unknown ones who had created the artifact, there was no large popular excitement over the find, no particular adulation of its discoverer. The artifact could well fail to pan out for a multitude of reasons. Perhaps it was not even of this portion of the galaxy. Perhaps it had been wandering the lightless imme
nsity of space for a million years or more; and the race that had created it was either dead or gone to some strange elsewhere. As for the man who had found it—he was no more than a second cousin of an acceptable, but not great house. And only a few seasons adult, at that.

  Only one individual never doubted the promise of reward embodied in the artifact. And that was Kator.

  He accepted the reward in wealth that he was given on his return. He took his name off the scout list, and mortgaged every source of income available to him—even down to his emergency right of demand on the family coffers of the Brutogasi. And that was a pledge he would eventually be forced to redeem, or be cut off from the protection of family relationship—which was equivalent to being deprived of the protection of the law among some other races.

  He spent his mornings, all morning, in a salle d'armes, and his afternoons and evenings either buttonholing or entertaining members of influential families. It was impossible that such activity could remain uninterpreted. The day the examination of the artifact was completed, Kator was summoned to an interview with The Brutogas—head of the family, that individual to whom Kator was second cousin.

  Kator put on his best kilt and weapons-harness and made his way at the appointed hour down lofty echoing corridors of white marble to that sunlit office which he had entered, being only a second cousin, only on one previous occasion in his life—his naming day. Behind the desk in the office on a low pedestal squatted The Brutogas, a shrewd, heavy-bodied, middle-aged Ruml. Kator bowed, stopping before the desk.

  "We understand," said The Brutogas, "you have ambitions to lead the expedition shortly to be sent to the Home world of the Muffled People."

  "Sir?" said Kator, blandly.

  "Quite right," said The Brutogas, "don't admit anything. I suppose though you'd like to know what's been extracted in the way of information about them from that artifact you brought home."

  "Yes, sir," said Kator, standing straight, "I would."

  "Well," said the head of the family, flicking open the lock on a report that lay on the desk before him, "the deduction is that they're about our size, biped, of a comparable level of civilization but probably overloaded with taboos from an earlier and more primitive stage. Classified as violent, intractable, and probably extremely dangerous. You still want to lead that expedition?"

  "Sir," said Kator, "if called upon to serve—"

  "All right," said The Brutogas, "I respect your desire not to admit your goal. Not that you can seriously believe after all your politicking through the last two seasons that anybody can be left in doubt about what you're after." He breathed out through his nose thoughtfully, stroked his graying cat-whiskers that were nearly twice the length of Kator's, and added, "Of course it would do our family reputation no harm to have a member of our house in charge of such an expedition."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Don't mention it. However, the political climate at the moment is not such that I would ordinarily commit the family to attempting to capture the Keysman post in this expedition—or even the post of Captain. Something perhaps you don't know, for all your conversations lately, is that the selection board will be a seven-man board and it is a practical certainty that the Rods will have four men on it to three of our Hooks."

  Kator felt an unhappy sinking sensation in the region of his liver, but he kept his whiskers stiff.

  "That makes the selection of someone like me seem pretty difficult, doesn't it, sir?"

  "I'd say so, wouldn't you?"

  "Yes. sir."

  "But you're determined to go ahead with it anyhow?"

  "I see no reason to change my present views about the situation, sir."

  "I guessed as much." The Brutogas leaned back in his chair. "Every generation or so, one like you crops up in a family. Ninety-nine per cent of them end up familyless men. And only one in a million is remembered in history."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Well, you might bear in mind then that the family has no concern in this ambition of yours and no intention of officially backing your candidacy for Keysman of the expedition. If by some miracle you should succeed, however, I expect you will give due credit to the wise counsel and guidance of your family elders on an unofficial basis."

  "Yes, sir."

  "On the other hand, if your attempt should somehow end up with you in a scandalous or unfavorable position, you'd better expect that that mortgage you sold one of the—Chelesi, wasn't it?—on your family rights will probably be immediately called in for payment."

  The sinking sensation returned in the region of Kator's liver.

  "Yes,. sir."

  "Well, that's all. Carry on, Secondcousin. The family blesses you."

  "I bless the family," said Kator, automatically, and went out feeling as if his whiskers had been singed.

  * * *

  Five days later, the board to choose officers for the Expedition to the Homeworld of the Muffled People, was convened. The board sent out twelve invitations for Keysman, and the eleventh invitation was sent to Kator.

  It could have been worse. He could have been the twelfth invited.

  When he was finally summoned in to face the six-man board—from the room in which he had watched the ten previous candidates go for their interviews—he found the men on it exactly as long-whiskered and cold-eyed as he had feared. Only one member looked at him with anything resembling approval—and this was because that member happened to be a Brutogas, himself, Ardof Halfbrother. The other five judges were, in order from Ardof at the extreme right behind the table Kator faced, a Cheles, a Worna (both Hooks, politically, and therefore possible votes at least for Kator), and then four Rods—a Gulbano, a Perth, a Achobka, and The Nelkosan, head of the Nelkosani. The last could hardly be worst. Not only did he outrank everyone else on the board, not only was he a Rod, but it was to the family he headed that Aton Maternaluncle, Kator's dead scoutpartner, had belonged. A board of inquiry had cleared Kator in the matter of Aton's death. But the Nelkosani could hardly have accepted that with good grace, even if they had wanted to, without losing face.

  Kator took a deep breath as he halted before the table and saluted briefly with his claws over the central body region of his heart. Now it was make or break.

  "The candidate," said The Nelkosan, without preamble, "may just as well start out by trying to tell us whatever reasons he may have to justify awarding such a post as Keysman to one so young."

  "Honorable Board Members," said Kator, clearly and distinctly, "my record is before you. May I point out, however, that training as a scout, involving work as it does both on a scientific and ship-handling level, as well as associating with one's scoutpartner . . ."

  He talked on. He had, like all the candidates, carefully prepared and rehearsed the speech beforehand. The board listened with the mild boredom of a body which has heard such speeches ten times over already—with the single exception of The Nelkosan, who sat twisting his whiskers maliciously.

  When Kator finally concluded the board members turned and looked at each other.

  "Well?" said The Nelkosan. "Shall we vote on the candidate?"

  Heads nodded down the line. Hands reached for ballot chips—black for acceptance, white for rejection—the four Rods automatically picking up black, the three Hooks reaching for white. Kator licked his whiskers furtively with a dry tongue and opened his mouth before the chips were gathered—

  "I appeal!" he said.

  Hands checked in midair. The board suddenly woke up as one man. Seven pairs of gray eyes centered suddenly upon Kator. Any candidate might appeal—but to do so was to call the board wrong upon one of its actions, and that meant somebody's honor was due to be called in question. For a candidate without family backing to question the honor of elders such as sat on a board of selection was to put his whole future in jeopardy. The board sat back on its collective haunches and considered Kator.

  "On what basis, if the candidate pleases?" inquired The Nelkosan, in far too pleasant a tone of voice
.

  "Sir, on the basis that I have another reason to urge for my selection than that of past experience," said Kator.

  "Interesting," purred The Nelkosan, glancing down the table at the other board members. "Don't you think so, sirs?"

  "Sir, I do find it interesting," said Ardof Halfbrother, The Brutogas, in such an even tone that it was impossible to tell whether he was echoing The Nelkosan's hidden sneer, or taking issue with it.

  "In that case, candidate," The Nelkosan turned back to Kator, "by all means go ahead. What other reason do you have to urge? I must say"—he glanced down the table again—"I hope it justifies your appeal."

  "Sir. I think it will." Kator thrust a hand into his belt pouch, withdrew something small, and stepping forward, put it down on the table before them all. He took his hand away, revealing a cube of clear plastic in which a small figure floated.

  "A dirt worm?" said The Nelkosan, raising his whiskers.

  "No, sir," said Kator. "The body of a being from the planet of the Muffled People."

  "What?" Suddenly the room was in an uproar and there was not a board member there who was not upon his feet. For a moment pandemonium reigned and then all the voices died away at once as all eyes turned back to Kator, who was standing once more at attention before them.

  "Where did you get this?"

  It was The Nelkosan speaking and his voice was like ice.

  "Sirs," said Kator, without twitching a whisker, "from the artifact I brought back to Homeworld two seasons ago."

  "And you never turned it in to the proper authorities or reported the fact you possessed it?"

  "No, sir."

  There was a moment's dead silence in the room.

  "You know what this means?" The words came spaced and distinct from The Nelkosan.

  "I realize," said Kator, "what it would mean ordinarily—"

  "Ordinarily!"

  "Yes, sir. Ordinarily. My case, however," said Kator, as self-possessedly as he could, "is not ordinary. I did not take this organism from the artifact for the mere desire of possessing it."