The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  They all looked at the wub.

  “What did it say? What did it say?”

  “It suggested we talk about other things.”

  Franco walked toward the wub. He went all around it, examining it from every side. Then he came back over and stood with the men.

  “I wonder if there’s a native inside it,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should open it up and have a look.”

  “Oh, goodness!” the wub cried. “Is that all you people can think of, killing and cutting?”

  Franco clenched his fists. “Come out of there! Whoever you are, come out!”

  Nothing stirred. The men stood together, their faces blank, staring at the wub. The wub swished its tail. It belched suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon,” the wub said.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone in there,” Jones said in a low voice. They all looked at each other.

  The cook came in.

  “You wanted me, Captain?” he said. “What’s this thing?”

  “This is a wub,” Franco said. “It’s to be eaten. Will you measure it and figure out—”

  “I think we should have a talk,” the wub said. “I’d like to discuss this with you, Captain, if I might. I can see that you and I do not agree on some basic issues.”

  The Captain took a long time to answer. The wub waited good-naturedly, licking the water from its jowls.

  “Come into my office,” the Captain said at last. He turned and walked out of the room. The wub rose and padded after him. The men watched it go out. They heard it climbing the stairs.

  “I wonder what the outcome will be,” the cook said. “Well, I’ll be in the kitchen. Let me know as soon as you hear.”

  “Sure,” Jones said. “Sure.”

  * * * *

  The wub eased itself down in the corner with a sigh. “You must forgive me,” it said. “I’m afraid I’m addicted to various forms of relaxation. When one is as large as I—”

  The Captain nodded impatiently. He sat down at his desk and folded his hands.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s get started. You’re a wub? Is that correct?”

  The wub shrugged. “I suppose so. That’s what they call us, the natives, I mean. We have our own term.”

  “And you speak English? You’ve been in contact with Earthmen before?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you do it?”

  “Speak English? Am I speaking English? I’m not conscious of speaking anything in particular. I examined your mind—”

  “My mind?”

  “I studied the contents, especially the semantic warehouse, as I refer to it—”

  “I see,” the Captain said. “Telepathy. Of course.”

  “We are a very old race,” the wub said. “Very old and very ponderous. It is difficult for us to move around. You can appreciate that anything so slow and heavy would be at the mercy of more agile forms of life. There was no use in our relying on physical defenses. How could we win? Too heavy to run, too soft to fight, too good-natured to hunt for game—”

  “How do you live?”

  “Plants. Vegetables. We can eat almost anything. We’re very catholic. Tolerant, eclectic, catholic. We live and let live. That’s how we’ve gotten along.”

  The wub eyed the Captain.

  “And that’s why I so violently objected to this business about having me boiled. I could see the image in your mind—most of me in the frozen food locker, some of me in the kettle, a bit for your pet cat—”

  “So you read minds?” the Captain said. “How interesting. Anything else? I mean, what else can you do along those lines?”

  “A few odds and ends,” the wub said absently, staring around the room. “A nice apartment you have here, Captain. You keep it quite neat. I respect life-forms that are tidy. Some Martian birds are quite tidy. They throw things out of their nests and sweep them—”

  “Indeed.” The Captain nodded. “But to get back to the problem—”

  “Quite so. You spoke of dining on me. The taste, I am told, is good. A little fatty, but tender. But how can any lasting contact be established between your people and mine if you resort to such barbaric attitudes? Eat me? Rather you should discuss questions with me, philosophy, the arts—”

  The Captain stood up. “Philosophy. It might interest you to know that we will be hard put to find something to eat for the next month. An unfortunate spoilage—”

  “I know.” The wub nodded. “But wouldn’t it be more in accord with your principles of democracy if we all drew straws, or something along that line? After all, democracy is to protect the minority from just such infringements. Now, if each of us casts one vote—”

  The Captain walked to the door.

  “Nuts to you,” he said. He opened the door. He opened his mouth.

  He stood frozen, his mouth wide, his eyes staring, his fingers still on the knob.

  The wub watched him. Presently it padded out of the room, edging past the Captain. It went down the hall, deep in meditation.

  * * * *

  The room was quiet.

  “So you see,” the wub said, “we have a common myth. Your mind contains many familiar myth symbols. Ishtar, Odysseus—”

  Peterson sat silently, staring at the floor. He shifted in his chair.

  “Go on,” he said. “Please go on.”

  “I find in your Odysseus a figure common to the mythology of most self-conscious races. As I interpret it, Odysseus wanders as an individual, aware of himself as such. This is the idea of separation, of separation from family and country. The process of individuation.”

  “But Odysseus returns to his home.” Peterson looked out the port window, at the stars, endless stars, burning intently in the empty universe. “Finally he goes home.”

  “As must all creatures. The moment of separation is a temporary period, a brief journey of the soul. It begins, it ends. The wanderer returns to land and race.…”

  The door opened. The wub stopped, turning its great head.

  Captain Franco came into the room, the men behind him. They hesitated at the door.

  “Are you all right?” French said.

  “Do you mean me?” Peterson said, surprised. “Why me?”

  Franco lowered his gun. “Come over here,” he said to Peterson. “Get up and come here.”

  There was silence.

  “Go ahead,” the wub said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Peterson stood up. “What for?”

  “It’s an order.”

  Peterson walked to the door. French caught his arm.

  “What’s going on?” Peterson wrenched loose. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Captain Franco moved toward the wub. The wub looked up from where it lay in the corner, pressed against the wall.

  “It is interesting,” the wub said, “that you are obsessed with the idea of eating me. I wonder why.”

  “Get up,” Franco said.

  “If you wish.” The wub rose, grunting. “Be patient. It is difficult for me.” It stood, gasping, its tongue lolling foolishly.

  “Shoot it now,” French said.

  “For God’s sake!” Peterson exclaimed. Jones turned to him quickly, his eyes gray with fear.

  “You didn’t see him—like a statue, standing there, his mouth open. If we hadn’t come down, he’d still be there.”

  “Who? The Captain?” Peterson stared around. “But he’s all right now.”

  They looked at the wub, standing in the middle of the room, its great chest rising and falling.

  “Come on,” Franco said. “Out of the way.”

  The men pulled aside toward the door.

  “You are quite afraid, aren’t you?” the wub said. “Have I done anything to you? I am against the idea of hurting. All I have done is try to protect myself. Can you expect me to rush eagerly to my death? I am a sensible being like yourselves. I was curious to see your ship, learn about you. I suggested to the native—”

  T
he gun jerked.

  “See,” Franco said. “I thought so.”

  The wub settled down, panting. It put its paw out, pulling its tail around it.

  “It is very warm,” the wub said. “I understand that we are close to the jets. Atomic power. You have done many wonderful things with it—technically. Apparently, your scientific hierarchy is not equipped to solve moral, ethical—”

  Franco turned to the men, crowding behind him, wide-eyed, silent.

  “I’ll do it. You can watch.”

  French nodded. “Try to hit the brain. It’s no good for eating. Don’t hit the chest. If the rib cage shatters, we’ll have to pick bones out.”

  “Listen,” Peterson said, licking his lips. “Has it done anything? What harm has it done? I’m asking you. And anyhow, it’s still mine. You have no right to shoot it. It doesn’t belong to you.”

  Franco raised his gun.

  “I’m going out,” Jones said, his face white and sick. “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Me, too,” French said. The men straggled out, murmuring. Peterson lingered at the door.

  “It was talking to me about myths,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  He went outside.

  Franco walked toward the wub. The wub looked up slowly. It swallowed.

  “A very foolish thing,” it said. “I am sorry that you want to do it. There was a parable that your Saviour related—”

  It stopped, staring at the gun.

  “Can you look me in the eye and do it?” the wub said. “Can you do that?”

  The Captain gazed down. “I can look you in the eye,” he said. “Back on the farm we had hogs, dirty razor-back hogs. I can do it.”

  Staring down at the wub, into the gleaming, moist eyes, he pressed the trigger.

  * * * *

  The taste was excellent.

  They sat glumly around the table, some of them hardly eating at all. The only one who seemed to be enjoying himself was Captain Franco.

  “More?” he said, looking around. “More? And some wine, perhaps.”

  “Not me,” French said. “I think I’ll go back to the chart room.”

  “Me, too.” Jones stood up, pushing his chair back. “I’ll see you later.”

  The Captain watched them go. Some of the others excused themselves.

  “What do you suppose the matter is?” the Captain said. He turned to Peterson. Peterson sat staring down at his plate, at the potatoes, the green peas, and at the thick slab of tender, warm meat.

  He opened his mouth. No sound came.

  The Captain put his hand on Peterson’s shoulder.

  “It is only organic matter, now,” he said. “The life essence is gone.” He ate, spooning up the gravy with some bread. “I, myself, love to eat. It is one of the greatest things that a living creature can enjoy. Eating, resting, meditation, discussing things.”

  Peterson nodded. Two more men got up and went out. The Captain drank some water and sighed.

  “Well,” he said. “I must say that this was a very enjoyable meal. All the reports I had heard were quite true—the taste of wub. Very fine. But I was prevented from enjoying this pleasure in times past.”

  He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and leaned back in his chair. Peterson stared dejectedly at the table.

  The Captain watched him intently. He leaned over.

  “Come, come,” he said. “Cheer up! Let’s discuss things.”

  He smiled.

  “As I was saying before I was interrupted, the role of Odysseus in the myths—”

  Peterson jerked up, staring.

  “To go on,” the Captain said. “Odysseus, as I understand him—”

  PICTURES DON’T LIE, by Katherine MacLean

  The man from the News asked, “What do you think of the aliens, Mr. Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?”

  “Very human,” said the thin young man.

  Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady, faint drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where They would arrive. On the concrete runways the puddles were pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind.

  Back at a respectful distance from the place where the huge spaceship would land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted, sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was ringed in a great circle, and in the distance across the horizon bombers stood ready at airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first alien ship ever to land from space.

  “Do you know anything about their home planet?” asked the man from the Herald.

  The Times man stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of questions but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young man with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and they did not want to harry him with too many questions at once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he would be one of the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.

  “No, nothing directly.”

  “Any ideas or deductions?” the Herald persisted.

  “Their world must be Earthlike to them,” the weary-looking young man answered uncertainly. “The environment evolves the animal. But only in relative terms, of course.” He looked at them with a quick glance and then looked away evasively, his lank black hair beginning to cling to his forehead with sweat. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “Earthlike,” muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed nothing more in the reply.

  The Times man glanced at the Herald, wondering if he had noticed, and received a quick glance in exchange.

  The Herald asked Nathen, “You think they are dangerous, then?”

  It was the kind of question, assuming much, that usually broke reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They all knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to know.

  The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. “No, I wouldn’t say so.”

  “You think they are friendly, then?” said the Herald, equally positive on the opposite tack.

  A fleeting smile touched Nathen’s lips. “Those I know are.”

  There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic facts of the story before the ship came. The Times asked, “What led up to your contacting them?”

  Nathen answered, after a hesitation, “Static. Radio static. The Army told you my job, didn’t they?”

  The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public.

  Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. “My job is radio decoder for the Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble patterns.”

  The officer cleared his throat but said nothing. The reporters smiled, noting that down.

  Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to admit to it.

  Nathen continued, “In my spare time I started directing the pickup at stars. There’s radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It didn’t seem natural.”

  He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that had come to him while
he listened, an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.

  “I decided it wasn’t natural. I tried decoding it.”

  Hurriedly, he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. “You see, there’s an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I’d heard that kind of screech before.”

  “You mean they broadcast at us in code?” asked the News.

  “It’s not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it down. They’re not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they would send it on a tight beam to save power.” He looked for comprehension. “You know, like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You can’t expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a few seconds at a time. So they’d naturally compress each message into a short half-second- or one-second-length package and send it a few hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up during the instant the beam swings across the target.”

  He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation was for the newspapers. “When a stray beam swings through our section of space, there’s a sharp peak in noise level from that direction. The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing tremendously, so we wouldn’t pick up more than a bip as it passes.”

  “How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?” the Times asked. “Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?” It was a private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement.

  The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face for a moment. “Maybe we’re intercepting everybody’s telephone calls, and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model.”

  “It would take something like that,” the Times agreed. They smiled at each other.

  The News asked, “How did you happen to pick up television instead of voices?”