All the Colors of Darkness

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  He finished his cigarette—finished it down to a minute stub that scorched his fingers—and composed himself for an attempt at sleep. For a time his mind kept him awake with unanswerable questions and irrational speculations, but eventually he dozed off. He was not aware of Zachary’s presence until he opened his eyes and saw the alien seated on the pad beside him.

  Zachary said softly, “I am sorry to have awakened you, Jan Darzek. But Ysaye—” He paused. The aliens were still grappling uncertainly with the results of Darzek’s impromptu christenings, as if they feared that he was somehow insulting them. “—Ysaye is so much with you when both of you are awake that we have little opportunity to speak with you confidentially.”

  “Perfectly all right,” Darzek whispered. He sat up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes.

  “We have been listening,” Zachary said, “and we have discussed the matter. We agree that it is unjust to require your death for principles you do not understand. For—” he crossed his legs, and gazed steadily at a storage compartment behind Darzek “—for it is true that we could have summoned assistance from your people. We could have employed them to save our lives, and yours, but we did not. Our Code sternly forbids it.”

  “That only confirms what I already knew,” Darzek murmured. “Since your Code sternly forbids your telling me anything about—your Code, I don’t see that it alters the situation.”

  “The Code requires that we utilize any or every means of preventing outsiders, such as your people, from becoming aware of our presence or objectives. We have reread the Code, and discussed it, and we are agreed that it refers to outsiders as a group rather than as individuals. In all of our previous experience there is no instance in which this distinction has had relevance. In your case, as you have pointed out, there is no possibility of your giving the information to your group. We have decided that the Code permits us to make an exception.”

  “It sounds as if an attorney would have a delightful time with that Code,” Darzek said. “Just what do you mean by making an exception?”

  “We have decided to tell you what you want to know.”

  “I see. If you don’t mind, I’ll smoke my last cigarette.”

  “Please do. I regret that we are unable to supply you with more, but we did not anticipate the need for them here.” He added, almost apologetically, “We have never been able to use them ourselves.”

  Darzek lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply. “You’ve been reading those old medical reports, I suppose. But I thought the manufacturers had that cancer thing licked.”

  “Oh, we do not avoid them for medical reasons. It is just that they make us ill.”

  “Understandable. They made me sick the first time I tried them—though I was only about ten years old at the time. You’ve thrown me for a loop. I thought that if any of you told me anything it would be Ysaye. He seems—I suppose I’d call him the most idealistic.”

  “He is,” Zachary said promptly.

  “But I couldn’t budge him.”

  “Of course not. It is precisely for that reason that he would never tell you anything. And I must request, please, that you do not ask him any more questions. You have disturbed him exceedingly.”

  “I meant to disturb him, but I certainly didn’t get the results I expected.”

  “The young are always the most inflexible in their application of the Code,” Zachary said, “and Ysaye is not only young, but he is also—is it not the same with your people?”

  “I wouldn’t say so, no.”

  “It does not surprise me to hear it. We have noticed many instances where your people are emotionally inverted. I must also ask that you do not mention our conversation to Ysaye. Perhaps later I shall find a way to make him understand. What would you like to know?”

  Darzek blew a smoke ring, and watched it float through the opening above. “Everything,” he said.

  Zachary shifted his position to lean against the ladder, and recrossed his legs. “No,” he said finally. “I cannot tell you everything. You do not need to know everything, and we have relatively little time. Ysaye will be awakening soon.”

  “Tell me what I need to know, then,” Darzek said with a grin.

  “Perhaps you would prefer to ask questions.”

  “All right. Why the vendetta against Universal Trans?”

  “Our action against Universal Trans—and it will resume as soon as a group is sent to replace us—has two important purposes: to protect the inhabitants of the planet you call Earth, and to protect the inhabitants of other planets of which you could not possibly have any conception.”

  “Interesting,” Darzek said. He was taking long, slow puffs on his cigarette, on the general assumption that this would make it last longer. It was another scientific problem he would like to have discussed with Ted Arnold. “You are protecting us, and them, against what?”

  “Against each other.”

  “Sounds like a noble objective,” Darzek said. “But putting aside for the moment the question as to whether these various inhabitants and planets want or need such protection, what does Universal Trans have to do with it?”

  “Universal Trans has perfected a type of matter transmitter. With this achievement your people are but two steps removed from absolute mastery of space travel.”

  “Ah! Mankind is reaching out for the stars, as the poets put it. But I don’t think Universal Trans or anyone else is aware of this.”

  “They must not become aware of it. For this reason Universal Trans must, and will, fail. Your transmitter must, and will, develop—” He paused.

  “Bugs?” Darzek suggested.

  “Bugs. Defects, that will hold back its effective utilization for many, many years. Your people are not ready for space travel, and will not be for generations.”

  “Because our darkness is the wrong color?”

  “The color,” Zachary said deliberately, “is horribly wrong. Do you have any more questions?”

  “Not more than a few hundred. I’m still grappling with the connection between the transmitter and space travel.”

  “It is difficult to discuss even your crude transmitter in simple terms, but nevertheless the device represents what you would call a breakthrough. A decisive first step. Once its principles are mastered—and Universal Trans has mastered them even though its engineers are far from understanding them—it becomes relatively easy to proceed to step two, which is the transmitter that works without a receiver. The third step is the transmitter that transmits itself, also without a receiver. This is the only practical kind of spaceship. The rockets your people have been developing for so many years are crude toys by comparison.”

  “I see. Very neat. All the glowing advantages of Universal Trans travel applied to batting about the Solar System. Mars and back before breakfast, and that sort of thing.”

  “Not only the Solar System. Your galaxy—and others.”

  “I won’t pretend that I understand, but I’m willing to take your word for it. Limitless distances in one instantaneous twitch, and no wonder our rockets look crude to you. What I don’t see is what our color has to do with it—of darkness or whatever.”

  Zachary spoke with the lofty patience of an adult instructing a child. “Think! Your darkness is so deeply ingrained that your people are generations away from merely mastering your relations with each other. You exploit the weak. You defy the strong with nuclear weapons. You pervert and distort your own justice, even where justice exists. Your honor is for sale in every market place. You persecute those of your own kind who have different hues of skin—and what minute differences they are, compared with the variegated colors of the inhabitants of other worlds! You even wage war among yourselves over trifling contradictions of words in what you choose to call religion—and what feeble contradictions, when compared with those of the major religions of only this galaxy! You have not even mastered the relationship between your sexes, you who are so fortunate as to have only two. We cannot—we must not—permit your peopl
e to leave your Solar System. The galaxy has myriads of worlds with power and technology beyond your comprehension. You are pugnacious, and resourceful, and at the mercy of your own darkness. You would inflict grievous harm upon others, but they would utterly destroy you. Now do you have any other questions?”

  “Only one more—for the present, anyway. Who are you?”

  “You might call me a policeman,” Zachary said. “I fear that my superiors will consider me—consider all five of us—highly inept policemen. We should have recognized that the Earth situation had developed beyond our control, and asked for assistance. Not that it will really make any difference. We are due for resupply in approximately seven of your months, and then our superiors will learn what has happened. A reinforced group of specially trained officers will be brought in, and it will halt the operations of your Universal Transmitting Company permanently.”

  “Thank you,” Darzek said. “You have given me much to think about.”

  “Whenever you have more questions, I invite you to ask them. I shall probably feel free to answer most of them.”

  He withdrew up the ladder, and Darzek held a cold fragment of cigarette between his fingers and gazed blankly after him.

  He felt torn between two conflicting desires. His loyalty to his fellow men demanded that he bend every effort to put a halt to the activities of these super-smug aliens. On the other hand, he felt morally obligated to save the lives of the five aliens entrapped through his blundering.

  But the conflict was at worst an academic one. There was no possible way for him to do either.

  CHAPTER 15

  Circling the ladder slowly, Darzek made one of his periodic checks of the capsule’s air. He took long, steady breaths, drinking deeply of it, dragging it past his tongue with gastronomic deliberation; and short, powerful sniffs that sought to gauge its freshness around a cloying host of alien odors.

  It always tasted and smelled the same to him.

  Ysaye descended the ladder on one of his culinary errands, stepped carefully around Darzek, and expertly mixed up six servings of food. He left Darzek’s portion at the foot of his sleeping pad, and went back up the ladder adroitly cradling five triangular bowls between his arms and body. He neither looked at Darzek nor spoke.

  Darzek nibbled at the food distastefully, and abandoned his air supply speculation to wonder about Ysaye.

  Immediately after the conversation with Zachary, Ysaye began to avoid Darzek. He remained in the upper reaches of the capsule, still the lonely one, estranged now even from his human friend. Darzek could not decide whether the young alien was horrified that Zachary had confided in him, or merely embarrassed because he had not dared to do so himself. Or perhaps some exotic twist of alien mentality was involved.

  Or perhaps—

  Zachary’s mention of humanity’s good fortune at having only two sexes had startled Darzek into mental immobility. Could it be possible that the aliens had three, that there were two male sexes, and Ysaye was the second—useful, even essential, but fiercely resented?

  He hesitated to inquire. As Zachary had said, it was not necessary that he know everything; and at every point that he met alien psychology and physiology head on, they baffled him.

  He turned his thoughts again to the capsule’s air supply.

  The air circulation system was wonderfully efficient. It filtered the air, removed carbon dioxide and impurities, restored the oxygen content to specification, and returned the air to use. Now that the system had been explained to him, Darzek’s hunch was that the air would never grow foul. The capsule would continue to remove the carbon dioxide and restore oxygen as long as the supply of oxygen lasted. Then it would circulate air that contained no oxygen. Darzek did not expect a sudden drop from ample oxygen to none at all, but he felt certain that the end would come with very little warning.

  All of this was by way of attempting to figure out how much time he had in which to concoct a miracle. Between the capsule’s outer and inner shells was an enormous storage capacity for air and water; but how much air had been stored there, and how quickly they were using it, were matters vague beyond conjecture.

  But the essential ingredient in this miracle that Darzek must shape was not time, but distance. He could save the aliens only by moving them to safety. His adversary was the ruthless, uncompromising reality that lurked just beyond the capsule walls: the Moon. Neither man nor alien was a match for it without the sustaining resources of another world.

  Zachary descended, emulating Darzek’s technique of sliding down the ladder. “Have you enjoyed your cigarette today?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Darzek said. “But this would be as good a time as any.”

  It had been Zachary’s suggestion that they attempt to manufacture cigarettes. He produced a crisp, clothlike material, and in this they rolled such substances as the capsule was able to supply. Some of these burned slowly, raising a veritable fog of choking smoke; others burned with the sputtering rapidity of a time fuse. Finally they found a dark, granular substance that proved to be almost smokable—though it gave off a nasty-smelling, purplish smoke and left Darzek’s mouth in a state of acutely puckered sensitivity—and Darzek fashioned himself a reserve of a dozen cigarettes.

  During one of the least successful experiments Alice and Xerxes came to investigate the source of the smoke. Alice informed Darzek, by way of Zachary’s translation, that a burning cigarette needlessly squandered oxygen.

  “So does breathing,” Darzek responded cheerfully, and Alice received the translation and retired without further comment.

  Darzek yearned again for the presence of Ted Arnold. Arnold would have calculated the precise amount of oxygen burned in each puff of a cigarette, and knowledgeably estimated the number of seconds of life lost thereby. Arnold would have been a man after Alice’s own heart.

  Darzek lit a synthetic cigarette, and tried not to wince on the first puff.

  “If you would care now to teach the game to me, I have brought the materials,” Zachary said.

  “Certainly,” Darzek said.

  The game that had so intrigued Ysaye had aroused Zachary’s interest, so they proceeded to fill with ticktacktoe diagrams several large sheets of the same material that had been used for cigarette papers. Zachary proved quite as inept as Ysaye had been, but Darzek suspected that his mind was on other things.

  “You mentioned,” Zachary said finally, “that you would trade information.”

  “Any information you want,” Darzek said, “provided I have your pledge that you won’t record it for your successors.”

  “Certainly. They would not accept it if we did. Because we have failed, any message from us would be suspect.”

  “But surely they will try to find out what happened—where you went wrong, and that sort of thing.”

  “They will know at once that our power plant exploded,” Zachary said. “That they will investigate carefully. Such a disaster as this one has never occurred in all of our history, so of course much will be made of it. From your presence they will conclude that we blundered or violated the Code, but no time will be wasted in speculating as to why we blundered or violated the Code.”

  “My people would speculate,” Darzek said. “They would want to know why, so they could avoid a recurrence.”

  “Indeed. But perhaps your people are more uniform in thought and action. What I would like to know—only from what you would call curiosity—is why Universal Trans continued to accept passengers when some of its passengers were not reaching their destinations.”

  “There’s a simple explanation. There were no such passengers.”

  Zachary laid down Darzek’s pencil. “We know that the company was informed. The subject was discussed by the directors. You were hired to investigate it. We ourselves wrote letters to newspapers so that everyone would know about it. And yet the company proceeded as if nothing had happened.”

  “Nothing had happened,” Darzek said. “If a bona fide passenger had failed
to reach his destination, friends and relatives would have complained, the police would have made inquiries—even one such disappearance might have stopped the company’s operations. As soon as our investigation revealed that the missing passengers had used phony identifications, the disappearances were recognized for the fraud that they were. The company’s attention was directed entirely at figuring out how the fraud was carried out.”

  “But our identifications were flawless!”

  “With nothing to back them up. No matter how perfectly forged a driver’s license is, it won’t stand up to investigation if no one of that name has ever lived at that address, or if there is no such address. Of course the newspapers would ignore your letters unless they had some way of proving the allegations.”

  “I understand. Our plan was doomed from the start. It could not possibly have succeeded.”

  “Not only that, but sooner or later your phony identifications would have gotten you into trouble. You shouldn’t have copied the number of a Universal Trans officer when you forged license plates.”

  “It seemed that all of the numbers were taken, and that one was as good as any,” Zachary said. “Even so, I believe that we should have succeeded had it not been for you. You have more than justified my apprehensions.”

  “That night outside my office!” Darzek exclaimed. “What were you going to do? Salt me away somewhere until you’d finished your job on Universal Trans?”

  “Nothing as drastic as that,” Zachary said. “A few changes in your thinking, a little memory erasing, and you would have declined the Universal Trans position. You would have been home no more than two hours later.”

  “Memory erasing?”

  “It is a common procedure among us, with a number of valuable applications. No doubt the concept is strange to you.”

  “Not at all,” Darzek said. “It didn’t occur to me at the time, because I didn’t know you were aliens. Aliens always erase the memory. We have a substantial literature on that subject.”