by Hal Clement
“I didn’t know.” The answer was sullen despite the grudging respect. “How was I supposed to?”
“Did you get an education or not?” There was some heat in the query. “I can’t imagine what the primary teachers do these days. Even though you are so young, I understood that you had some qualifications and even a bit of promise in agriculture. That’s why I thought you could be trusted without supervision for a few years. Am I to assume that you became dissatisfied with the yield of this farm?”
“Of course. Why else study agriculture?”
“Until you can answer that for yourself, I won’t try to. Tell me in detail what you did. Did you try to step up the output of the central radiator?”
“What do you think I am?” The younger being’s indignation flared abruptly.
The other remained calm and exhibited faint traces of amusement, permitting the feeling to show in his answer rather more plainly than was strictly tactful.
“Don’t boil your crust off. You might not be able to spare it next time you go in to harvest. People still do try the stunt I mentioned, you know. Every now and then it works for someone after a fashion, so the rest feel it’s still worth trying. If it wasn’t that, just what did you do? You’re missing a culture unit, if I remember this solar system correctly.”
THE student took a moment to find just the right words. “One of the lots seemed to be practically ideal. When it first solidified, it was just far enough from the radiator and just large enough to retain a thin surface film of light elements; and it responded beautifully to culturing with water-base growths. On the colder ones, by the way, I had good luck with ammonia cultures.”
“Quite possible, in that sort of bed. I noticed a couple of them were bare, though. Was that another result of this experiment of yours?”
“Indirectly, yes.” The young farmer looked a trifle apprehensive. “There was another plot, a good deal farther out and colder than my ideal one. But it was too hot for ammonia growths and too small to furnish the pressure they seem to need—at least the ones I’m familiar with.” The addition was made hastily.
“I judged that it should have a good supply of food elements, cooling where it did; and since it wasn’t doing well where it was, I thought it would be a good idea to move it farther in.”
The listener’s manner lost some of its amused aspect.
“Just how did you decide to go about that? The energy involved would have demanded several times the mass of your own body, even with total conversion—which I can’t believe you’ve mastered.”
“I don’t suppose I have. It seemed to me that the unit itself could furnish the mass without serious loss, though.”
“I see.” The comment was grim. “Go on.”
“Well, I went in and set up a conversion reaction. I touched it off as well as I could on the forward side of the unit, though that was a little hard to arrange—the thing was spinning like mad, as most of them do. Maybe that was the reason I let a little too much mass get involved, or maybe the globe wasn’t as massive as I had thought.”
“You mean you were uncertain of its mass? Is something wrong with your perceptive faculties as well as your judgment? Just how old are you, anyway?”
“Fifteen.” The sullenness, which had began to depart from the youngster’s tone as he warmed to his narrative, returned in full strength. The questioner noted it and realized that he was not being as tactful as he might be; but under the circumstances he felt entitled to a little emotion.
“Fifteen years on what scale?”
“Local—this furnace, around the mass-center of the system.”
“Hmph. Continue.”
“Most of the sphere was volatilized, and most of what wasn’t was blown completely out of the system’s gravitational influence. The rest—well, it’s still circling the furnace in quite a wide variety of orbits but it’s not much good to anyone.”
THERE was a pause while the nearly useless outermost unit swung beneath the two speakers, then on to the far side of the glowing sphere of gas that held it with unbreakable fingers of gravity. The supervisor was not actually boiling—that would be difficult even for a body composed largely of methane, oxygen, and similar solids when it is at a temperature of about half a degree absolute—but his temper was simmering. After a moment he spoke again.
“Let me get this straight. You sent a slave with a message that your farm had gotten out of hand and that you would like advice. Am I to understand that you spent so much time ruining one of your units that some of the others developed culture variations whose taste didn’t appeal to you? I’m afraid my sympathy grows rapidly less.”
“It’s not that I don’t like the stuff; it’s that I can’t eat it.” The youngster must have been angry, too; there was no other imaginable reason why he should have made a statement at once so true in fact and so misleading in implication. The superintendent, swallowing the implication whole, permitted the remains of his temper to evaporate completely.
“You can’t eat it? That is really too bad. Pardon me while I go to sample some of this repulsive chemical—or perhaps you would like to come along and show me what you have been eating. There is hardly enough drift in this area to support you, particularly with a decent-sized crew of slaves. What have you been feeding them? Perhaps you ought to let someone else take over this farm and get yourself a research job out in one of the drift clouds, soaking up your nourishment from a haze of free atoms ten parsecs across for a few years. You youngsters!”
“I’ve been eating from the ammonia units. So have the slaves.”
“Very well, then I shall look over your water culture, which by elimination must be the one that’s been giving trouble. On second thought, you needn’t come along. It’s the third plot from the furnace. I can find my way.” He moved off abruptly, not even waiting for an answer.
And the student, with no slightest shadow of an excuse, simply because of his own childish loss of temper, let him go without a word of warning.
It might, of course, have made no difference if he had spoken. The superintendent was annoyed, too, and might understandably have chosen to ignore his junior. His attention, as he permitted himself to fall toward the central radiator, was divided between his own irritation and the condition of the various plots. Only gradually did the latter feeling predominate.
HE had to admit the outermost was too cold for much chemical action except actual life processes which were too slow to be useful. The fact that the youngster he had left above had induced anything at all to grow there was at least one point to his credit. It swung past only once while he was falling by its orbit. Though his gravity-given speed was slow, its speed was slower—and it had farther to go.
The next two he had noted earlier were bare of useful growths. He remembered now that the student had admitted this fact to be an indirect result of his experiment. The superintendent could not see the connection. The plots themselves, on closer inspection, seemed physically undamaged, and the student himself could not possibly have eaten them both clean, no matter what his hunger. Of course, a crowd of slaves might—but he was not going to accuse anybody yet of letting slaves get that far out from under control. They were not even allowed to approach a culture plot in person, being fed from its produce by their master.
The plots themselves were large bodies, though not the largest in the system, with their solid bulks veiled under mile after mile of hydrogen compounds. The superintendent’s senses probed in vain for the enormously complex compounds that were the preferred food of his kind. Several much smaller bodies were gravitating about each of these plots, but none was large enough to hold the light elements in the liquid or gaseous form necessary for food culture.
The next unit had the merit of interesting appearance, if nothing else. In addition to the more or less standard quota of bodies circling it, it possessed a regular halo of minute particles traveling in a solidly interwoven maze of orbits just outside the atmosphere. On the surface, and even in the a
tmosphere itself, its cultures were flourishing. The superintendent paused to take a sample, and had to admit that once again the youngster had not done too badly.
His temper cooling, he rode the farm plot most of the way around its orbit, taking an occasional taste and growing calmer by the moment. By the time he left the limits of his atmosphere, he was almost his normal self.
This, however, did not last long enough even for him to get rid of the globe’s orbital speed, to say nothing of resuming his drop toward the Sun. He had slanted some distance inward and fallen well behind the ringed sphere when his attention was drawn to another, much smaller object well to one side of his line of flight.
Physically, there was little remarkable about it. It was less massive even than his own body, though a short period of observation disclosed that it was in an orbit about the central furnace, just as the farm plots were. Sometimes its outline was clear, at others it blurred oddly. Its brightness flickered in an apparently meaningless pattern. Merely on its physical description, there was nothing remarkable about it, but it seized and held the superintendent’s puzzled attention. Off his planned course though it was, he swung toward it, wondering. The student had mentioned no friends or coworkers—
Gradually, details grew clearer and the superintendent’s feelings grew grimmer. He did not like to believe what he saw, but the evidence was crowding in.
“Help! Please help! Master!”
THE bubble of horror burst, and one of anger grew in its place. Not one of his own kind, injured or dying and an object of terror and revulsion thereby; this thing was a slave. A slave, moreover, well within the limits of the farm, where it had no business to be without supervision; a slave who dared call on him for help!
“What are you doing here?” The superintendent sent the question crackling along a tight beam toward the apparently helpless creature. “Did you enter this region without orders?”
“No, Master. I was . . . ordered.”
“By whom? What happened to you? Speak more clearly!”
“By—I cannot, Master. Help me!” The irregular flickering of the slave’s auroral halo brightened fitfully with the effort of radiating speech.
Unsympathetic as the superintendent normally was to such beings, he realized that help must be given if he were to learn anything. Conquering a distinct feeling of repugnance, he moved up beside the slave to investigate its injuries. He expected, naturally, to find the visible results of a thorough ion-lashing, that being the principal occupational hazard faced by the slaves; but what he actually saw almost made him forget his anger.
The unfortunate creature’s outer crust was pitted—dotted and cratered with a pattern of circular holes which resembled nothing the superintendent had ever encountered. He knew the long, shallow scars of an ion-lashing and the broad, smoothed areas which showed on the crust of one of his people when close exposure to a sun had boiled away portions of his mass. These marks, however, looked almost as though the slave had been exposed to a pelting by granules of solid matter!
A ridiculous thought, of course. The stupidest slave could detect and avoid the occasional bits of rock and metal which were encountered in the interstellar void. After all, they had the same sensory equipment and physical powers as the masters. An unprejudiced judge might even have said they were of the same species as the masters.
Whatever had caused the creature’s injury, there was little that could be done for it. Grudgingly, inspired far more by curiosity than by sympathy, the superintendent did that little, supplying hydrocarbons and other organic matter lately skimmed from the ringed planet.
Food, however, was not enough. Bits of extraneous metal were imbedded in its body, altering the precise pattern of charged metal nodes that spelled life to these beings. Some of its own field nodes had apparently been chipped or blown away, and others were discharged. The creature’s body was only a fraction of its normal size—the regular reserve of “food” compounds that ordinarily made up so much of even a slave’s bulk had long since been consumed or had evaporated.
There was no doubt that it was dying. But there was some chance that it might gain strength enough to impart information if it were fed. It was—sparingly, of course.
“No sense wasting food on a slave that’s about to die,” the superintendent explained without brutality.
“Certainly not, Master,” the slave agreed without resentment.
“WHAT happened to you?” the superintendent repeated. The slave was in no condition to be coherent; but a lifetime of conditioning brought some order to its agony-dazed mind, and it answered.
“I was ordered to the inner plots—to harvest.” The word-symbols came haltingly, but with sufficient clarity to be unmistakable, shocking as their implication was.
So the student had trusted slaves near a food supply! Perhaps that accounted for the two stripped planets.
“You went to harvest when a young fool like this orders it?”
“He was a master, and he gave the order. Many of us went; many of us have been going for years—and seldom returning. We did not wish it, Master, but he ordered it. What could we do?”
“You could have asked the first superintendent who came here whether it was better to disobey a Prime Order or a young master.”
“You are the first to come, Master, as far as I know. And the young master said we were not to speak of this order to anyone. It is only because you command me to speak that I do so now—that and the fact that there is little more that he could do to me, anyway.”
The overseer ignored the pointed closing sentence. “You say many of you have been ordered to do this, but few have returned from the errand? What happened to them? What happened to you?”
“They die. I did not know how; now I suppose it must be—this way.”
There was a pause, and the supervisor was moved to sarcasm. “I suppose they are struck by meteoric particles, as you seem to have been. Do slaves absorb personal characteristics such as stupidity from their masters? Could you not dodge the meteors?”
“No, not all of them. The region near the central furnace has more of such matter than any other place I have ever seen. Some pieces are iron, some are of other matter; but they cannot be avoided. They strike too hard. They cannot be absorbed in normal fashion, but simply boil off one’s body material into space. The shock is so tremendous that I, at least, could do nothing toward recovering the material until it had dissipated beyond hope of salvage. That is the reason so much of my mass is gone; it was not merely starvation.
“Some of the other slaves did better than I—as I said, some of them have survived—but others did much worse. They would dive in toward the furnace, and their bodies would come falling back out in just about the shape I am.”
“And still he sends his slaves in to harvest?”
“Yes. We did not do too badly, actually, on the largest plots; but then he got interested in the others farther in. After all, they’re hotter. He ventured in himself almost to the orbit of the plot that was destroyed—did you know that?—but came out very quickly and sent us on all such journeys thereafter.
“We—or, rather, those who preceded me—cleaned off the next inner plot, the fourth from the central furnace, fairly well, though the loss of slaves was high. Then he wanted to start on the third. I was one of the first to work on this project.
“I did not expect to live, of course, after what I had heard from the others; but the order came, and I let myself fall toward the sun. My orbit passed close to the greatest of the plots, which the master has been harvesting himself, and I hoped to strengthen myself with a little food from it as I passed.”
THAT confession showed how certain the slave felt of his own imminent death, as well as the state of demoralization into which the student’s activities had permitted his servitors to fall.
“But I did not dare take any food when the time came,” the slave went on feebly. “As I passed through the region where the destroyed plot had been, drifting particles b
egan to grow more numerous. At first there would be an occasional bit of stone or iron, which I could dodge easily. Then they came in twos and threes, and sometimes I would have to change an escape curve in mid-maneuver. Then they came in dozens and clusters, and at last I could avoid them no longer. I was struck several times in rapid succession.
“For a moment I almost turned back—I had never dreamed that anything could feel like that—and then I remembered the order and went on. And I was struck again, and again, and each time the order faded in my mind. I reached the orbit of the fourth planet, crossed it—and turned out again. It didn’t seem to help; I was still being pelted. For a time I must have almost lost orientation; but at last I won out to a place near the orbit of the giant planet. That was where I remembered the order again.
“I had never disobeyed a master before, and I didn’t know what to do, or say, or think. I’d start back toward the Sun, and remember what had happened, and come back out. Then I’d remember the master, and head in again. I didn’t dare go out in the cold where he would be waiting. I didn’t dare dive back into that storm of rock and metal from the old fifth planet. But I had to do something. I couldn’t float by the orbit of the Giant Planet forever. He would find me there sooner or later, and that would be worse than if I had come out to him. I had to think.”
That word struck the superintendent like a shock. The very idea of a slave’s thinking—making a decision for himself concerning an action he was to perform—was repugnant to a member of the dominant race. They preferred to think of their slaves as mindless creatures relying on their masters for the necessities of existence—a comforting fiction that had been maintained for so many rotations of the Galaxy that its originators had come to believe it themselves. He had suspected that this particular slave must be an unusual specimen in many ways; now he was sure of it.