All the Colors of Darkness

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  “No—no—”

  “Heat is a source of power, isn’t it?” Darzek persisted. “You certainly have all kinds of supplies here, including electronic stuff—or stuff that serves the purpose of what we call electronic stuff. Your technicians should be able to build a radio that would send out a simple SOS signal.”

  “Even if that were possible, we could not.”

  Darzek looked at him searchingly. For all of his provocative prodding and careful analysis, the mind that lay behind those strange facial features was as much a mystery to him as ever.

  “Too bad I’m not a psychiatrist,” he said. “I believe all five of you are possessed of some kind of death compulsion. I can’t understand anyone’s wanting to die.”

  “We do not want to die.”

  “Then put Alice and Gwendolyn to work on that radio. Maybe one of the Moon stations could send help, and if not, we might be able to get help directly from Earth. My government has invested millions in the rescue of plane crash or shipwreck survivors. It ought to be ready to spend billions to rescue someone gone astray on the Moon.”

  “No. We could not do that.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to die.”

  “We do not. But * * * has considered all the possibilities, and there is nothing we can do. We cannot permit ourselves to be rescued by your people.”

  Darzek stared at him in amazement. “You mean—you wouldn’t let my people rescue you even if they were to try?”

  “We cannot. We have a Code. We have sworn to follow it.”

  “Tick…tock,” Darzek said scornfully.

  Ysaye fled up the ladder.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ted Arnold invited Jean Morris and Ed Rucks to have dinner with him. Ostensibly the occasion was to enable them to report progress. Arnold knew that the two had no progress to report, but he reasoned that they might have urgent need for a couple of shoulders to cry on, and he had two that were amply padded and had withstood deluges of tears from frustrated Universal Trans engineers that they were virtually waterproof.

  He took them to the small executive’s dining room of the Terminal Restaurant. They had the room to themselves, and two bowing waiters to serve them, and soft music in the background, and a corner table with candlelight that did bewitching things with a tint of red that Arnold was noticing for the first time in Jean’s hair.

  The two of them read the menu almost distastefully. “I’m not hungry,” Jean announced finally.

  “Nonsense,” Arnold said. “There’s no point in being miserable on an empty stomach.”

  He ordered for the three of them, and then he leaned back, waved his arms comfortingly, and said, “Tell all to Papa Arnold.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Ed Rucks said. “It’s hopeless.”

  “It’s never hopeless. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

  Jean choked on a mouthful of water.

  “The police were very co-operative,” Rucks said. “They got the point right away—a clandestine transmitter opened up all kinds of possibilities for theft and kidnapping and what have you. They gave it the works.”

  “Confidentially, I hope,” Arnold said.

  “Oh, yes. They got that point, too. Of course we didn’t tell them that anything had happened. Just that we were afraid it might happen. They fine-combed the area around the terminal, and got absolutely nothing. We couldn’t expect any more than that of them. Brussels is no village, and it would take them years to cover the whole city.”

  “I’ll see that they get an official expression of thanks from the company.”

  “Yes. Well, we don’t really know that the bootleg transmitter was in Brussels, or if it was, that it was located anywhere near the terminal. And even if it was located near the terminal, the odds are that it was moved before they started to look for it. If that doesn’t add up to a hopeless situation, Jean’s an ugly old hag, and I’m a dashing young optimist.” He ruffled his gray hair disgustedly.

  “Do you have anything in mind for your next step?” Arnold asked.

  “After Brussels, the world,” Rucks said. “I suppose we could try the same thing in New York.”

  “If Brussels was difficult, New York would be impossible. There are just too many places to hide a transmitter.”

  “A fine consolation you are!” Jean snapped. “What shall we do, then?”

  “Keep looking for Darzek.”

  “Just like that,” Jean said. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack when you haven’t any idea where the haystack is.”

  “Did that guy Grossman give out with any information?” Rucks asked.

  “Nary a thing. His knowledge begins and ends in the bookkeeping department—or so he says. The two lie detector tests he took didn’t contradict him.”

  “I’d like to use a good thumb screw on him,” Jean said.

  “Don’t,” Arnold told her. “It wouldn’t become you. Nevertheless, children, in these days of great and solemn tragedy I see one tantalizing ray of hope. Built into my ingenious little safety device that prevents this sort of thing from happening again, there is a signal light that screams red if anyone so much as tries to cut in on one of our transmitters. To date not one of those lights has flashed. I regard that as highly significant. The parties responsible for this outrage invested a lot of money, time, and inventiveness in the attempt to wreck Universal Trans, and they wouldn’t be giving it up if they could help it. Their transmitter is still hors de combat and they haven’t been able to build another one.”

  Jean Morris sniffed disgustedly. “I suppose all this time Jan has been sitting in a cellar somewhere, holding a gun on them.”

  “He probably has them strung up by the toes, and he’s tickling their feet to extract a confession.”

  Jean smiled—the first time that evening.

  “Now, then,” Arnold said, as the drinks arrived. “To Darzek, wherever he may be. May he never run out of feathers.”

  They drank solemnly.

  CHAPTER 14

  The realization came as a shock to Darzek.

  He had succumbed to his surroundings, and the aliens no longer looked grotesque to him. Worse, Alice’s weird, unending cacophony had begun to sound musical. He found himself listening absently, even following her voice with pleasant anticipation on one of the several songs she repeated frequently. He wondered what the music was supposed to express—what the words might mean.

  Understanding came accompanied by a veritable tidal wave of astonishment: they were love songs.

  Alice and Xerxes were in love, or some oblique alien equivalent of love. The relationship was, as far as Darzek could tell, entirely nonphysical. Except for the hasty first-aid treatment Alice had supplied to Xerxes’s wounded arm, he had never seen them touch one another. They rarely spoke. They did not even look at each other, and yet Darzek was certain that the word “love” took him as close as he would ever come to an understanding of their strangely remote intimacy.

  He consulted Ysaye about this, and Ysaye, after grappling long with the subtleties of comparative philology, firmly denied it.

  “What else would you call it?” Darzek demanded, and Ysaye had no answer.

  “I need to do some thinking,” Darzek said.

  “Certainly,” Ysaye said, and politely withdrew to the level above. Darzek seated himself on his sleeping pad, lit one of his rapidly dwindling stock of cigarettes, and ordered his mind to think.

  The awareness that Alice’s strident caterwauling was actually a tender love message brought home to him for the first time the horror of the thing that he had done. Blindly and impulsively, with no thought for the consequences, he had taken action that doomed five living beings. Since then he had been flitting about the capsule like a lunatic on a holiday, treating the aliens with no more consideration than he would have extended to a few denizens of the zoological gardens with whom he had been locked up by mistake, deliberately contriving actions and comments to shock them into responses that he could
analyze and classify. He had not thought of them as highly intelligent beings with their own intensely personal aspirations, and sorrows, and frustrations, and depth of emotional response.

  He had not thought of them as—as human beings, and they were. They were intensely human. They merely revealed their humanity in ways that were strange to him.

  “They don’t seem to have the grit to face up to a crisis,” he mused. “Which isn’t by way of condemning them, because I’ve known businessmen and college professors and bus drivers to lose their heads under far less pressure. The point is, I cooked up this mess we’re in, and getting us out of it is my responsibility. And just how the devil am I going to manage that?”

  He wondered if the fantastic supply horde contained anything that could serve as a distress signal. A flare, perhaps, or a signal rocket, or—he brushed the idea aside with a gesture of disgust. He had set off a sizable flare when he blew up the power plant, and if that brought no response, anything less than an atomic holocaust would go unnoticed.

  Further, the aliens did not want to be rescued in that way. As he understood their enigmatic Code, rescue by an expedition from Earth would constitute a failure worse than death. He could not expiate his blundering by wresting them from their present fate, only to push them into one they regarded as incomparably more dreadful.

  And he did not blame them. Code or no Code, he could foresee what would happen if the United States Space Administration, or its Russian equivalent, got its hands on these aliens. They would end their days in a custom-built zoo, giving regular performances for scientists and politicians, with matinees twice weekly for reporters.

  “If I save them,” he told himself, “I’ll have to do it on their terms. And just for a starter, I’d better find out what their terms are.”

  He went looking for Ysaye, found him squatting meditatively on the level above. “This Code of yours,” Darzek said. “Tell me about it.”

  “I cannot do that,” Ysaye said.

  “Why not?”

  “The Code does not allow it.”

  Darzek turned away to conceal his frustration. “Since we have to die together,” he said, “it’s unfortunate that we can’t trust each other.”

  Ysaye gave a clipped utterance of agreement in his own language.

  “How about another game?” Darzek asked.

  They descended to the first level, and Darzek went to his bin for his pocket secretary and pencil. In a moment of whimsy he had taught Ysaye the child’s game of ticktacktoe. It fascinated and delighted him. He was so utterly naïve at the game that he never won without Darzek’s contrivance, but no number of defeats could discourage him. They quickly filled Darzek’s memo pad with scribbled diagrams, and now they were going through it a second time utilizing every modicum of blank space. The alien’s ineptness intrigued Darzek quite as much as his enthusiasm.

  And Ysaye was the lonely one, the outsider. Darzek reasoned that he must be the weakest of the five, and the one most likely to tell him what he wanted to know. Could he find a means of exploiting that weakness?

  “Wrong approach,” Darzek told himself. “The problem is to find out if he has a weakness that can be exploited.”

  He passed the memo pad to Ysaye. “I must concede that your people have outstanding technology and wonderful medical science,” he said. “I’ve seen ample evidence of both. It’s your ethics that bother me. You realize, don’t you, that they are decidedly second-rate?”

  Ysaye paused with an X half finished, and carefully looked past Darzek at the ladder. As familiar as Darzek had become with the aliens, they still avoided his eyes. “Ethics?” Ysaye said. “Second-rate?”

  “Second-rate,” Darzek said firmly.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Take this Code of yours. You say you are sworn to uphold it. You’re even ready to die upholding it, if necessary, because that was your oath. And you seem to think that makes you a highly ethical people.”

  Ysaye waited with pencil poised.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Darzek went on. “But look at it this way. Am I sworn to uphold your Code?”

  “Certainly not,” Ysaye said. “You do not even know the Code.”

  “Right. But you are forcing me to die to uphold this Code that I know nothing about. How do you reconcile that with your ethics?”

  “You do not understand,” Ysaye said.

  “I certainly do not, but I would like to understand. If I have to die to uphold your Code, I think I’m entitled to understand. Don’t you?”

  Ysaye did not answer.

  “Is it just for your Code to condemn me to death when I don’t know anything about it? Can you have ethics without justice?”

  “I’ll ask * * *,” Ysaye said.

  Darzek laughed. “Don’t you know what she’ll say?”

  “Yes—yes—”

  “Then why ask her? Ethics—” Darzek pointed a finger. “Ethics is not something you look up in a book, or run to ask advice about every time you’re challenged. Ethics is something you feel deep within yourself. Feel, and act upon. Does your Code say that you can’t do what you know is just?”

  “You do not understand.”

  “Does your own sense of justice say I should die without understanding?” Darzek persisted.

  “You are not able to understand. There is darkness within you.”

  “Ah!” Darzek had the feeling that he was on the verge of discovering something important, and he chose his words carefully. “Darkness. Well—there is darkness within everyone.”

  “Yes. Within all of your people.”

  “And within you, and your people.”

  “But the darkness within you—” Ysaye spoke as if the words were wrenched from him “—the darkness within you is the wrong color.”

  “The—wrong—color,” Darzek mused. The conversation had taken an unexpected twist that he did not like. “But darkness has no color.”

  “It has many colors.”

  “Many colors—” Darzek echoed with a smile.

  But he had suddenly grasped the full implications of what Ysaye had said, and he was shaken. It was as though some ultimate, invincible power had used this grotesque alien to pronounce judgment on the human race—had judged it, and found it wanting. And there was no appeal.

  “It is your turn,” Ysaye said.

  Darzek stirred himself, and carefully drew an O. “Because my darkness is the wrong color, does this mean that I cannot have justice?”

  “You do not understand,” Ysaye said. And drew an X.

  * * * *

  Ysaye was the misfit among the aliens. If they were given to classifying things in terms of round holes, he was the square peg. Darzek considered him the youngest of the five, but this did not seem sufficient cause to set him apart from the others so drastically.

  Darzek’s sympathy and liking for him increased in exact measure as his taunts grew bitter and malicious. He sensed that his remarks cut the young alien deeply, and he loathed himself for what he was doing.

  But now he was determined to know—to know everything.

  His “tick…tock” chant was overheard by Zachary, who asked Ysaye for an explanation and then told Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn hurried to relay the information to Alice and Xerxes, and thereafter a single “tick” from Darzek disrupted the game above and brought Alice’s singing to a choking halt.

  In the grim psychological battle he was waging, Darzek could count on only one superior weapon. The aliens feared death. He did not, and to sit quietly waiting for it seemed ludicrous. As the unspoken tension fed on the aliens’ fright and became a bloated, terrifying force that filled the capsule, his own sense of responsibility staggered him. Fear had immobilized the aliens. They were no longer capable of acting to save themselves.

  And Darzek was immobilized by ignorance.

  He tried a new tack. “You went about it the wrong way, you know,” he said to Ysaye.

  “I do not understand,” Ysaye said.

&nbs
p; “I’m talking about the attempt to put Universal Trans out of business. It seems surprising—you people being the right color, and all that—that you did such a miserably inept job.”

  “We must follow our Code,” Ysaye said.

  “I have some misgivings about a Code that allows you to go about smashing property that doesn’t belong to you. But never mind. For the moment I’m just wondering how you happened to botch the job so badly.”

  “What should we have done?”

  “We’ve been over that before. I’ll trade information, but I won’t donate it.”

  “We do not smash property if we can help it,” Ysaye said. “There was no other way.”

  “No other way to do what?”

  Ysaye did not answer.

  “No other way to smash property except by smashing property?”

  Again no answer.

  “Look,” Darzek said. “You claim to be a highly civilized, highly ethical people. Surely such a people would not indulge in wanton destruction merely for the fun of it. You must have some overriding purpose or objective.”

  Ysaye got to his feet slowly. “I feel very tired. I must sleep.”

  He disappeared up the ladder. The other aliens also seemed to be sleeping. Alice had been silent for an unusually long time, and there were no muttered disputations—or perhaps exaltations, since Darzek had failed utterly to interpret them—from the game. Darzek went to his personal bin, and after some deliberation took one of his two remaining cigarettes and lit it. He stretched out on his sleeping pad.

  He was in need of sleep himself. Even after he had come to appreciate it somewhat, Alice’s singing kept him awake, and she slept seldom. He felt intensely sorry for her. As the Group Leader she must be suffering a ravaging remorse for the disaster that had fallen upon them. Her wide face was narrower than Gwendolyn’s, more perfectly proportioned. Her voice was noticeably less harsh than those of the other aliens, or at least he had come to think so. He wondered if she were considered dazzlingly lovely by her own people. He could—almost—envision her as a thing of beauty, in the way that an abstract painting could be, at the same time, a ludicrous distortion and a work of art.