The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  “A lifting tool”. God showed us how to make all kinds of tools. There’s one that eats away the rock, and one that plows the ground—you saw that, didn’t you? Skora bakes them. They make god work for us. Come on, dinner’s ready.”

  Derek picked up the little piece and turned it over. It was a twisted lump of clay, baked hard, with a series of marks on the top. It looked as if no design existed, yet there was a certain flow to the lines. He reached out for the kettle, fingering the amulet. If the kettle weighed less because of it, he couldn’t feel the difference. Nor could he find any sign of a switch buried on the surf ace of the gadget.

  If there were some kind of broadcast power here, and these things were receivers tuned to convert it into special functions…

  He pocketed it while Lari’s back was turned. There might be some penalty for the theft of one, but he had to risk it.

  The next day when they reached the ship Kayel took it to pieces bit by bit. Lari had missed it, but had only shrugged and pulled another out of a drawer.

  The piece of clay grew smaller and smaller under the grinder as Kayel worked on it. At last it was just a nub that he had to hold with pliers. Then even that was gone. On the floor was a pile of dust, with no trace of metal or foreign element in it. The two men stared at it sickly and then dropped the matter quickly as they turned back to the labor of rebuilding the damaged space-denial generators.

  They worked on doggedly for three days more. Ferad had flatly refused to help them, claiming that his marriage to Lari made him a citizen of Vanir and had ended his need to work under Derek. It was a point the captain had no desire to test while his knowledge of things was so uncertain. Maybe Ferad was a citizen now, and any force exerted on him would antagonize the whole village.

  It was hopelessly slow going, but they were making more progress than Siryl. She finally admitted that she was getting nowhere. There was one explanation for everything—and that was their god.

  “They’re the most superstition-ridden race I’ve ever heard of,” she concluded in disgust.

  Derek had his doubts. So far, every bit of superstition he had run into had proved sound empirical sense. It didn’t matter whether they called it god or magic or anything else. It worked. And they were no worse than many of the civilized people who used the tools given to them and had no other explanation than the fact that science somehow made them work.

  If men lived on a world where the only cats were leopards, where black leopards were all man-eaters, and where the cats avoided men unless looking for food, it would be extremely bad luck to have a black cat cross one’s path. In such a case, the only superstition would be a denial of the facts and a belief that there had to be some other explanation of why men disappeared.

  Siryl’s faith in hypnosis and primitive ignorance might be the real superstition here. Belief in god and the tools probably wasn’t.

  He went out into the rain that was falling again, looking for the house of Skora. There were a few people around and he recognized one as Wolm, the brother of Lari. The man directed him toward a house that was somewhat bigger than the others, with stonework that seemed to have mellowed with time. Derek had passed it before, when a group of children from six to nine were seated silently on couches across an open porch, and had been told it was the school where they learned god’s knowledge. He should have guessed that the priest would handle the schooling here.

  Skora emerged from an outbuilding that boasted the huge chimney of a kiln and invited Derek in. The walls of the building were lined with amulets of all kinds and sizes, and there was a big workbench along one wall that was covered with tools for shaping clay. It was obviously the source of the amulets.

  Derek went through the formula of greeting and accepted a bottle of surprisingly good beer.

  “I’m getting ready for a new baking,” the priest said. “This village has to supply some of the smaller places with tools. My usual helper married into another village. Why don’t you and Kayel join me, Derek? It beats farming, and I understand your friend knows a good deal of science. Maybe he can show us better methods of making the tools.”

  “He isn’t exactly a ceramicist, but we’ll think about it,” the captain promised. He had been turning over every indirect approach to his question. Now he discarded subterfuge. In spite of SiryPs warnings, the only way to learn anything here was to risk stepping on their taboos. “Skora, I came here to ask about your god.”

  Skora put aside the molds he had been cleaning and perched on the edge of the workbench. “That’s asking a lot,” he said, but there was no offense in his voice. “It takes our children several years to learn all about him, though we’ve speeded things up in the last couple of centuries. And there are some things I can’t tell you properly, for your own good, though I’ll be as honest as I can. Ummm. He’s a man—a very wise and very stupid man. He saved us after the sun was exploded in the great war and taught us how to survive. He still teaches our young people.”

  Thirteen hundred years had passed since the solar explosion. Derek whistled. “He sounds like a pretty remarkable man, Skora. No other man has found the secret of immortality. Or do you mean that he dies, but a new god replaces the old one each time?”

  “Neither one. No man is immortal. And there is only one god. Sometimes I used to wonder about him when I first learned to use the power. I even thought of investigating, of going to see him. But I was always too busy.”

  Derek could see no evidence of deceit on Skora’s face, and there was no way he could twist the words to make them mean anything but an impossible contradiction. “Suppose / wanted to visit your god, Skora—could I talk to him?”

  The priest laughed and dropped off the bench to fetch two fresh bottles of beer. “You’d have a hard time of it, Derek. God died over a hundred years ago.”

  “Then when you say god helps you, I suppose you mean that you still follow his advice, using what he taught you before he died. Is that right?”

  “Not exactly. Partly, I suppose. Tradition kept the use of the tools under the false, emotional label of prayer for hundreds of years before we could root it out. I suppose we still use some of the terms in ways that aren’t literally true.” The priest shrugged. “But we still need his help when some new problem comes up. We couldn’t have found where the fruit grows in time without asking him. And he still teaches the children directly.”

  “But he’s dead?”

  “Quite dead,” Skora assured Derek. “Sometimes I think we’re headed for trouble because of that, and it makes things a little difficult at times. But what’s a little trouble? When I first had to bring rain, it took all my thought to control it. Now I can sit here talking to you and enjoying myself, without losing control of the tool.”

  He pulled his hand out of a pocket and showed a quartz amulet in his palm, where his fingers had been fondling it. “When I was younger, I had trouble enough without any distractions. Once I forgot to remove only pure water and nearly ruined the crops with natural sea water. The planet where the rain comes from has a lot of copper salts, and that doesn’t help the land.”

  Derek stared at the priest with sudden shock, the bottle still tilted to his lips. He forgot to swallow and gagged as beer ran down his throat and into his windpipe.

  It was the complete logic of it that hit him. The rain had to be controlled, since it fell most heavily where it was most needed. Lari had already told them that the planet here had been almost barren of water after the solar explosion. Water didn’t create itself. It had to be brought from somewhere.

  He coughed up the beer, forcing some measure of calmness into his mind. The pieces began to fit, even though there was still no explanation.

  They could draw water across space, without letting it freeze or evaporate—or even grow chilled in its passage. The only answer to that had to be some form of nearly instantaneous teleportation!

  “You!” he said thickly. “Your people! It was you who threw my Waraok all the way to Sirius. And you were
the ones who threw part of the Sepelora somewhere else this time!”

  Skora nodded. “That was a mistake. When I learned about your ship and the others with it, I’d never worked through a field like the one around your ship, and had little time in which to operate. Yours was the first ship I tried to handle alone, and I bungled it. But no harm was done. I put your crew on a livable planet and set the other ships beside them—the battleships, too. Working with a tool which wasn’t made for just that use was quite tiring, or I’d have landed you with the others instead of letting you nearly crack up here. After you saw us, it was too late to move you, of course. I’m sorry, Derek, but we had to do it that way.”

  The bottle dropped to the floor and smashed as Derek stared at the old man. He should have guessed. With his type of luck, it was inevitable. He’d chased out after the enemy and been caught—by this! He staggered to his feet with shock waves of pure fear rippling through his shoulders and chest. One man against. a whole flight of ships! One solitary old man…

  5

  His memory was unclear the next morning. He’d been nearly raving when he’d sworn and pleaded with Skora to send them back. He could remember being denied by the suddenly worried and unhappy old man, but the reasons were no longer clear. All that was left was a picture of the priest putting his rain-making amulet aside and pulling down another, before taking Derek’s arms in firm, strong hands.

  “You’re sick,” Skora had said. “I had no idea. I should have known you weren’t ready to discover the truth. Well, I hope your psychologist is a better doctor than healer of minds!”

  And suddenly Derek had been in his own bed here, with his clothes following him out of nowhere to drape themselves over a chair. The covers had come up over him and the door had opened itself. He had been shouting something. Siryl had come in a few seconds later , and there had been a shot of some drug….

  He gave up trying to remember, knowing it was safer not to think on it now. He had been too close to insanity. After all the years of fighting against the jinx, he had developed more strength than most of his people, but there were limits. Maybe he should have let them drive him insane! What was the use…

  The door opened and Siryl came in, carrying another hypo. She grabbed his arm and he felt the bite of a needle. For a moment his heart pounded and cold sweat popped out all over him. Then some of the misery lifted. Whatever she had used the night before must have been a depressant that had needed counteracting.

  “Pull the covers up!” She had been staring at him with a mixture of shock and concern, but some of the worry was leaving her. “Have you no sense of shame?”

  “No strength. You pull them up.” The drug was nearing the end of its first physical impact, but he could barely talk. “Didn’t you ever see a nude man before?”

  She made a face of disgust. “I—we didn’t take that kind of medical course. And I’m—I’m not defiled, if that’s what you’re thinking!” She bent slowly and forced herself to cover him, carefully avoiding all contact with his body. She winced as he laughed.

  Her reactions had done him more good than the drug. The thing he had learned went back into its proper place in his mind. There was nothing horrible about the teleporting of a ship across a quintillion miles of space; he’d accepted the fact when it had happened to the Waraok. If Skora had shown him a huge machine using megawatts of power, he could have accepted that. The shock had come from discovering that it had been done with nothing but a piece of clay for power. Also, he’d been sent to find an enemy secret and had found the secret where he had least expected it. That was all.

  “I’m all right now,” he told her. “But I wonder if you can take it. Call Kayel in here.” He swung out of the bed and grinned as she began backing out of the room, unable to tear her eyes off him until she blundered into the edge of the door.

  He was dressed when the two came back. Ferad had declared his citizenship here, and he could rot in it! But the other two had to know. He gave it to them as fully as he could.

  “Tommyrot!” Siryl said automatically, though her voice was uncertain, as if she were trying to remember how he’d returned to his room. “You were just delirious. Some disease here…”

  Once, Derek thought, men had developed a science of psychology, according to the old reports. But it had been lost during the Collapse, with only the mechanical tricks for relieving neuroses remaining. No wonder the worlds were filled with sick minds, if Siryl was typical of her profession.

  Kayel emptied his pipe, looking at her as if he were thinking the same, with the woman-adulation gone from his eyes for the moment. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing grotesquely. But his voice was as clear as when he discussed physics. “It fits. Oh, not the stuff about the god. That’s probably mumbo-jumbo to cover some master power source and the men who run it. Maybe it’s a’ mechanical educator, too, with a library saved from before the Collapse. The machine must have prevented the Collapse here, and they’ve gone right ahead while we fell back. We’re just working on theories about immense fields of energy in space that can be tapped for antigravity, identity exchange control—all that. They use it already! Derek, we’ve got to get this back to the Federation.”

  “But the way they live?” Siryl protested.

  “Why not?” Derek asked. “With power like that, they don’t need the usual heavy science and gadgetry. There’s no reason not to live the simple life.”

  Kayel was pacing about, sucking on an empty pipe, and wearing a flush of excitement. Normally, it was easy to overlook his mental powers, but a good physicist had to have mental flexibility; he was supposed to be one of the best. “We can’t conquer them—not when one man can handle a fleet. But we look enough like them to pass among them, once we know what to expect. We’ll drop a few small fliers into the wastelands. With any luck, they’ll find the god machine. Derek, do you think they’ll still let us work on the Sepelora, now that you know?”

  It had been bothering the captain. He shrugged uncertainly.

  “I told you not to break their taboos!” Siryl reminded them. “I also told you this had to be a homogenous culture! Now maybe you’ll listen to me. They have to have some neuroses; any isolated group has. What we’ve got to do is to find their weakness. Kayel, they think you’re smarter than they are. Let’s…”

  Derek had heard enough. She still had a genius for remembering only when she’d been right and assuming she always would be infallible. He turned toward the door. “Coming, Kayel?”

  The little man hesitated, obviously swayed by the chance to work closely with her. Then he smiled apologetically at her and followed Derek.

  She sat in offended dignity through breakfast. Luckily, Wolm was there and Lari kept up a steady stream of talk, trying to get Ferad to join the boy in some project or other. Nothing was noticed by the two natives. And nobody tried to stop the two men as they headed toward the ship.

  Michla was busy seeding something on the harrowed field. He’d already added nitrates and other fertilizer—probably from the same planet as the water, carefully selected and dissolved in it. He called out a greeting as they passed, and they waved back. It was all friendly and normal. Derek breathed a sigh of relief as they swung around a pile of boulders.

  Where the space ship had rested there was nothing but a depression in the ground. And coming toward them from that was the graybearded priest, the serape over his shoulders whipping about him in the breeze that was blowing. His face was serious as he drew near them.

  Derek stepped toward him, trying to force anger to replace the fear that was thick in him. “Where’s our ship, Skora?”

  “Safe. Up there.” The old man pointed toward the sky above them. “In an orbit around Vanir.”

  “So we’re prisoners?”

  Skora sighed, and he seemed embarrassed. “Not exactly. We feel obligated to you for bungling the way we handled the return of your ship to Sirius, Derek, and we’d like to return you. But that must wait for further study. You have full free
dom here, though. And if you are permitted to leave, the ship will be ready.”

  “And I suppose you’ll make up all the time when we should be repairing it?” Derek asked grimly.

  “We have already done that. We repaired it last night, before we sent it up. Not the space-denial generators—that is beyond our understanding. But from god we learned how to use what was there to set up the much better time-negation drive that was used before your Collapse.”

  “But—time-negation…” Kayel swallowed, stumbling. Derek hadn’t known that the little man understood Classic. From the accent, he must have only a reading and weak hearing knowledge of it. But he obviously had understood enough.

  “Yes, time-negation works.” Skora smiled at the man’s amazement. “It’s simpler in application, but much more difficult in theory, I believe, than space-denial. It was discovered by accident when our common ancestors had no right to find it. Fortunately, god knew how it worked. And your ship will be ready for you if we find we can let you return.”

  He was heading back to the village, and they were following without thought. Kayel caught Derek’s arm, pulling him back out of earshot. He spoke in hasty Universal. “We’ve got to forget the ship. Now it’s up to god and his charms. Derek, I’ve got to see how those amulets are made.”

  “But they were nothing but baked clay. We took one apart,” Derek protested.

  The physicist shrugged. “A transistor works because of a few parts per millions of impurities. A detector works because of its crystalline structure. Take his job!”

  Skora had noticed that they weren’t with him and had slowed his steps. Derek caught up, trying to look somewhat cheerful. “I guess we’ll have to get ourselves a house of our own and stop bothering Lari until you decide, then. And since we can’t use the power of your god, we’d make pretty poor farmers around here. Is the job in your kiln still open?”