Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  Again is big debate, and wote is close. But we win.

  So now we are trained again, as pilots. All dis so high top secret, nobody anywhere knows, only UN to which we are attached. Already unmanned space-ships—dat no secret, you all know dat—go out beyond Soon. Most are destroyed. But some come back. And same wit animals— dogs, monkeys, once chimpanzee—and out of maybe fifty, two return and are alive. Instruments bring back much knowledge, we know for sure are habitable planets not so far away in Galaxy. But only wit human pilot could ship land and take off again. . . . Yes, yentleman in second row?

  Where, precisely, are such habitable planets located?

  I am sorry, if I knew I could not tell you, is so high classified I do not know. I do not even know if where I landed was one of planets already recorded. And I tell you now, before I go on, I cannot give you least idea where in Galaxy is planet on which I was first Eart bein to set foot. Is not so, Mr. Rasmussen?

  It certainly is.

  Well, comes time—now is four years ago—when first of us leaves. Is time of tremendous anxiety, you can tink. We tree have been so long, so close togeder, is like our own sister goes. And dat ship is lost.

  So goes de second, and dat ship survives, but it misses any planet and is forever lost in space, coffin of our second sister. Everyting, everyting, now is on me.

  And den dey send me. Dat is two and a half years ago. You can calculate light-years if you want to guess, but I will not tell you direction. You know what day I return. Is when I enter solar system again dat for first time UN makes public.

  Now before I answer questions about what I find, I tell you what I do not say. I am not allowed give you technical details of flight. Dat is all high classified. I tell you what I do myself—I eat, I sleep, I check instruments, most of time I yoost tink—but I do not talk about spaceship itself, or equipment, or log of flight, same way I do not tell you where I land. Mr. Rasmussen here to stop me, is all high classified. De way nations used to make sure security against each udder, now must planets do, so tinks Eart. I tink udder planet not tink same as Eart, dough—ciwilized peoples, not afraid of backward ones.

  Now, Miss X, steady on! Let’s not go into controversial matters.

  I am sorry. Now you ask me, I tell you what I can.

  Miss Lhor-kang—

  Tank you. Is nice to hear my own name again.

  Was the planet on which you landed inhabited by intelligent beings?

  Oh yes, wery. Far more adwanced as us.

  Are they human, or humanoid?

  You mean, do dey look like us—do dey have two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs? No, not like dat. I cannot describe wery good, dey are so unlike. Dey are not mammals.

  Are they insects, birds, reptiles?

  Reptiles is nearest, but whole ewolution is different. I am physicist, not biologist. I say reptiles because dey are long and tin, and covered wit like bark or scale. But I tink maybe dey skip whole animal dewelopment, and are like plants what move. Dey get deir nourishment from air.

  But they could communicate with you?

  Oh yes. Dey do not talk wit mout, like us. Dey talk wit—we would call hands. In two hours, dey teach me how.

  How long were you there?

  A mont, it would be.

  And you had a chance to see that they really have an advanced civilization? Is it industrial, technical, scientific, like ours?

  Plenty chance, dey show me everything. Is far more scientific as ours. Is ahead of us also polit—

  Please, Miss X!

  Den can I say, Mr. Rasmussen, is also wery high psychologically? Can—let me whisper to you a minute. Tank you. Mr. Rasmussen say is all right tell you planet is one of group made up of all planets in its system, like UN is made up of nations on Eart.

  But Miss—excuse me, I can’t remember your name—

  Is all right, Miss X is O.K.

  If they’re so far advanced as you say, why haven’t they discovered space travel? Why haven’t they come here, before we went to them?

  Dey have space travel. More I cannot say.

  You mean we weren’t worth their bothering to visit us?

  Just a minute, please. I’m afraid that’s the kind of question we can’t go into at present. Let’s just stick to the facts, and forget opinions.

  Excuse me, sir. Let me word it another way. Are they aggressive people? Do they lead the planetary league of which you spoke? Have they invaded and conquered other planets, either within or outside their own solar system?

  I answer as much as I can, if Mr. Rasmussen do not stop me. Dey are not aggressive, but dey tink is duty, obligation, to bring high ciwilization to more backward planets. So yes, dey have colonized udder planets, and yes, dey lead dat league.

  Then, if they’re as near to us as, say, Alpha Centauri—

  I did not say dat.

  All right, if they’re within reaching distance of us, why haven’t they tried to invade and colonize us?

  Is all right, Mr. Rasmussen? ... Is because dey have not tought us ready to receive and understand. But now we have ourselves space travel, and—

  Stop right there, Miss X. Any other questions? Yes, madam—you from the Venus Globe?

  Miss Lhor-kang, so far as you have been allowed to speak of these—I suppose we should call them people— everything you have said has been in the highest praise of them. Will you answer a direct personal question?

  Certain, Miss, if I can.

  Did they brainwash you? Have they sent you back here as a traitor to your own world, to soften us up? Is that why the UN has been keeping you under wraps from the press, and why Mr. Rasmussen here is watching every word you say and stopping you whenever you are about to say too much?

  Don’t answer that question, Miss X!

  Oh, but I will answer. What is dis brain-wash? What you mean, am I traitor? I am human bein, I want best for all human beins, all we can learn, all we can get. I—

  Ladies and gentlemen, please, Miss X is not here to be insulted, and neither is my committee. I deny categorically that—

  Miss Lhor-kang, I am from theLondon-New York Times, and I want to know if an invasion is imminent and what Earth is doing to—

  I am amazed, sir, that a representative of your great news tape should ask such a question. Surely you must know that any such information, if it existed, would be absolutely top—

  What preparation? Dey are inwincible!

  Miss X, do as I say. Be silent!

  The public has a right to know—

  When are they coming? How soon?

  What kind of weapons have they? Have we any defense against them?

  Ladies and gentlemen, this press conference is concluded.

  Miss X, are they sending you on another flight, there or elsewhere? When?

  No more questions, ladies and gentlemen; the conference is over.

  Take your hand off me, Mr. Rasmussen. Yes, I am prisoner, because I want best for Eart—because I want our solar system part of great league so mooch farder along as us. If dat make me traitor, I am traitor. I tink no. Let me go, Rasmussen! Is to hide I am prisoner dey show me off, let me talk little bit, like slip off corner of gag—

  Let go of her!

  Give her a fair chance!

  We have a right to know!

  Dirty traitor!

  Shame—manhandling a midget!

  I tell you—you hear me—dey kill me now, maybe—I tell you what I don’t tell dem. No, I go no more flights. You know why? Because people better as us, better every way even if dey descended from wegetables, dey come now! Dey start soon as I reach Eart. Dey come any minute, and dey are inwincible!

  Don’t listen to her! If you print one word of this we’ll break you! The woman’s mad—her experience has driven her insane.

  Ha, you tink? When I know how backward is Eart, when dey offer come here—nobody killed, nobody hurt, yoost everybody belong to dem, learn from dem—I accept for us all, I accept for Eart, I help. You call traitor, dirty traitor,
what I care? No traitor to humanity—me. Dor-je Lhor-kang from Tibet. Some day you understand!

  Damn you, you bit me! For heaven’s sake, somebody help me get this fighting wildcat off me!

  Ha, you big man, you can’t shut up midget, like me? I tell you—

  Let her go, you! Shame!

  Grab her, Rasmussen—she’s an out-and-out traitor! Wait, I’ll help you.

  Take your hands off me, Smith!

  No you don’t—I won’t let you—

  She’s been brainwashed. I was in Korea: I ought to know.

  Cut it out, fellows—we’re press; we can’t take sides.

  We’re human, aren’t we? I can’t—

  I tell you, gentlemen of press, I no traitor! I not brainwashed! Dey good—good. Dey make Eart so never again crazy wit fear, crazy wit hate, fighting like—

  Shut up, you! I’ll shut your mouth for you if it’s the last thing I ever—ouch! Look, you reporters, if you print one word of this display of insanity, I’ll sue your papers for everything you’ve got. I’ll—hey, what’s happened?

  Say, who turned the lights off?

  Damn it, I’m getting the hell out of here!

  Where the devil is that phone? Wow, what a story!

  What the—for gosh sakes, now somebody’s locked the door!

  Wh-what’s that—

  I can’t move, Bill! Can you?

  No, I—

  Neither can Rasmussen—look!

  Oh, my friends, I tink you never— Oh, tank Lord Buddha, you come!

  But why you— No, no! No use blasters on us!

  Oh, Mr. Rasmussen, my heart break! Dese not our friends, dese tings like crocodiles! Dese somebody from somewhere else, follow deir trail and get here first . . .

  <>

  * * * *

  Look about you, Reader! Glance at your television set, riffle through your check stubs, study the cigarette you are about to smoke. There is no need to scan the sky for UFOs, for the enemy is already at hand. Howard Koch warns us that the attack has begun, as all about us Earth reels under the-

  INVASION FROM INNER SPACE

  by Howard Koch

  My present contemporaries regard me as one of the last of the die-hards, which I suppose is a fair description of a man who has put off dying for two hundred and twenty-seven years and still longs for the world he knew when he was a youngster of forty-five.

  That was my age when the invasion occurred in the spring of 1976.

  It always seemed to me ironic that we lost our independence on the two hundredth anniversary of the year we Americans had won it. But when I mention this to the others, they only smile tolerantly as though indulging an old man’s whim. Let them smile. Very few were alive then. I secretly pity them for having missed the golden age which I now propose to record—how it flourished and how it came to an untimely end.

  I realize that my prose style may seem a little rusty and old-fashioned compared to the austere simplicity that is fashionable today. Also, this must necessarily be a minority report since my opinions on the subject are shared by only a few duocentenarians like myself. Yet I feel impelled to make the effort to put my twentieth century compatriots in a better light than the one in which history now regards them. No, this is not strictly true. (See how the truth has infected even me when I imagined myself immune from its contagion.) Frankly, I don’t really care what anyone thinks of anyone else. Probably this testament amounts to no more than a gesture, a desire to pay a last tribute to a generation, now gone and almost forgotten, with whom I shared the vivid and adventurous years of my youth.

  In those bygone days we had a saying about truth (in fact, we had a saying about almost everything) that one day it would set us free. What a travesty! As events turned out, it was the truth that undid us, that drove literally millions to take their lives rather than submit to its tyranny, that, in short, swept away the last vestiges of our freedom. But I am getting ahead of my story.

  April was the month of the great disillusionment. I remember remarking that the weather was more unsettled than usual. One day it was too warm for a light jacket, on the next you needed an overcoat to ward off the chill of a northeast wind. However, I always enjoyed matching my wits against the vagaries of an intemperate climate, trying to outguess its sudden shifts. And the uncertainty of the weather was reflected in everything else. I think I can safely say that no previous generation had been blessed with more stimulating anxieties. And my own country, the United States, as it led the world in every other way, was also far ahead of all in the opportunities it offered for peril and adventure. Danger was in the air—quite literally. You couldn’t turn on your radio or television set, or glance at the daily news headlines, or even talk to your next-door neighbor without a vague sense that some crisis was impending and that all you possessed or hoped to possess, including life itself, was hanging by a thread.

  None of this, I hasten to add, affected our material welfare. Oversized cars bulged out of our garages; our giant refrigerators were crammed with more food than we could possibly consume. Not only did most of us have all we needed, but the great producing organizations employed experts who figured out new things for us to need. The prefix “super” invaded on our vocabulary, inflating old trade names with a sort of second wind—supermarkets, super-colossal films, super-de luxe this and super-duper that. For example, no motorist worth his salt denied his car the super-extra-tetra ethyl when the gas station attendant cheerily inquired, “Which kind, sir?” Not that there was more mileage in the super but it seemed degrading to a three-toned, dynaflow stratocruiser to make it open its tank to a hose attached to an unadorned pump whose gasoline could boast of nothing better than just being “regular.” Besides, it would have been an admission that the four cents a gallon saving was more important than motoring prestige. Adroit advertisers had needled us into a welcome awareness that our social position depended on our having the best and latest of everything. Not to consume as much as your neighbors was unenterprising, slovenly, even unpatriotic.

  I realize that such widespread opulence might be expected, in the long run, to induce a lulling sense of satiety and security. This, I am proud to say, never occurred. The saving grace was the fact that most of what we possessed was not paid for. We were in debt to each other, to the credit companies and banks that financed our purchases and often to the government for taxes on earnings we had already spent. Most of us worked in some department of the dozen super-corporations that had managed to absorb their smaller rivals and, since they were by then the only sources of employment, it is understandable that we clung to these jobs for dear life. If our income stopped for even a month, we would fall hopelessly behind in our installment payments, like a swimmer who suddenly finds himself too far out to make shore. With diligence and luck we were usually able to keep afloat, but there was always the exciting possibility that we might become ill or be laid off. I remember how anxiously we followed the fluctuations in the market price of shares, since we knew that our livelihood depended on the prosperity of the corporation we worked for. When the stock exchange ticker skipped a beat, so did our hearts. Alas, that institution has vanished: that delicious thrill is no longer possible.

  To do full justice to the complexity of our financial machinery would go beyond the scope of this history, but I have yet to mention its most ingenious feature—the unbalanced budget. When I was a child and alone at table, I used to erect lofty pyramids with my eating utensils, saucer on cup, glass on saucer, cereal bowl on glass, fork on bowl and two spoons perched on either end of the fork until something added, perhaps as small as a toothpick, upset the precarious balance and brought the whole tower crashing to the table with the inevitable broken china and parental displeasure.

  I think tins is something of the thrill we had watching what we called our national debt mount as each new billion was delicately poised on the apex of hundreds of billions already obligated. During the three decades between 1945 and 1975 this public debt grew to such a
staggering figure that only bankers and astronomers could comprehend it. And even they couldn’t explain its significance. Most of us were vaguely conscious that the U.S. government owed Someone an incredible amount of money and, should that Someone ever refuse to extend further credit, the whole structure of values would come tumbling down like my china tower. Since theoretically we, the people, were the government, we felt some responsibility to see that the debt was eventually paid off. However, in view of the perilous state of our personal finances, it was never apparent how this was to be done. Nor did we even know precisely to whom this vast obligation was owed. Was it to the banks? In that case, the banks being merely repositories for our funds, it seemed to follow that in the final analysis we owed this money to ourselves. Since this was rather a confusing hypothesis, I believe most people preferred to assume that there was some Atlas-like colossus of finance who supported the vast structure on his shoulders and understood all its intricacies. However, I secretly suspected that there was no one there at all and that the debt itself was nothing but a huge bubble which could go on inflating indefinitely so long as no one pricked it. This seemed to me a charming notion—that the value of everything we owned, if indeed we owned anything in the strict sense, rested on nothing more tangible than a myth.