Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J. Francis McComas

  The archeologist nodded.

  “We should have tried that in the first place. Now . . . it’s too damn late! Well, let’s take a look at these.”

  Squat, humanoid beings, with long torsos and short, bowed legs. Obviously they were born for the saddle. Hardin noted the garments first. They were dressed in the furs of animals; they wore thick dirty jackets; long trousers, equally dirty, were stuffed into boots of unfinished leather. The jackets were belted at the waist and pouches of bolts, broad-bladed knives, and other unidentifiable personal belongings were hung around the wide, bone-buckled belts. Then he looked closely at the face of the one he’d killed with the body shot.

  “Long-headed,” murmured Gearhardt, following his glance.

  Hardin matter-of-factly opened the jacket at the throat. The deep tan of the face ended abruptly at the base of the neck. The rest of the body was white.

  The staring eyes were yellow, small and completely round. The face itself was remarkably bony, with high cheekbones, a beak of a nose and a wide, almost lipless mouth. The tanned skin of the face was almost leathery in texture but that, thought Hardin, was due to constant exposure to wind and sun.

  “Odd,” said Hardin, “he . . . it . . . has what we would call a nice, long moustache, but the top of the head is absolutely hairless . . .”

  “Not shaved,” observed Gearhardt. “But there’s plenty of eyebrow. Both a sort of rusty red. Why?”

  Hardin shook his head.

  “Oh,” Gearhardt said cheerfully, “we’ll need a much greater sampling before we can draw any conclusions. But they are very like us.”

  “And very different.”

  Gearhardt straightened with a sigh. “I feel a quite unscientific dislike for them,” he said slowly. “I keep remembering what their ancestors did to the ones who built and lived in this great city. That’s right, isn’t it? This kind were the destroyers?”

  “Yes. The Indians who evaded the Reservation . . . the Mongols who never tasted defeat . . . the Vandals who never went soft.” He touched a bowed leg with the toe of his boot. “See what generations in the saddle have developed?”

  “I’d like to see the results of a full-scale autopsy,” Gearhardt said, “but—”

  “No chance for that, I’m afraid. We can’t take them with us, sir—we’ve got to hurry!”

  “Yes . . . I know.”

  But Hardin didn’t move. He looked at Gearhardt, cleared his throat and said finally, “Will you tell them, sir—the Administrator and the others—about what I think?”

  “I will not,” Gearhardt’s voice was incisive. “You will, Leslie. It’s time we listened to a historian!”

  The second scout ship was somewhat larger than the first, so its messhall was the scene of the night’s council. But the meeting was still a tightly squeezed affair; only the top echelons of each major department of pertinent knowledge were present. It was an unhappy meeting. And, despite the Administrator’s occasional attempts to assert order, a very noisy one.

  Hardin sat quietly beside Gearhardt and let the babble flow over his head. He and the archeologist had returned just as the third assault wave had come within fifteen meters of the gun pit. Not until the plain was heaped high with paralyzed bodies did the enemy retire.

  Now, they were camped sullenly just at the limit of the ship’s lights, waiting. Hardin guessed that all the stunned casualties had recovered by now; even the effects of the paral-gas should have worn off and the complement of the foe should now be at full strength. He reflected worriedly that the same couldn’t be said of his ammunition . . . he’d have to use the gun on them next time.

  Hardin thought of them, in their camp out there, banging their drums, blowing their horns . . . Thanks to Stiegesen, he had a pretty good idea of what that camp looked like. Stiegesen had crawled in from the east, saluted, and stood patiently while Hardin slowly and methodically chewed his neck off for gross dereliction of duty, deserting his post while under fire and divers other heinous military sins of omission and commission. Then Stieg had made his report and he and the captain had developed the film in the lieutenant’s spy camera.

  A sudden silence brought Hardin’s mind to the present. The arguments and counter-arguments had ground to a stop as their proponents got tired of saying the same things over and over again. After a short period of quiet a botanist said, “I suppose we can try one of the other three continents?”

  “My dear Healy,” the Administrator’s voice was patiently weary, “both ships have passed over the other land masses. On them we saw similar ruined cities. We didn’t get low enough for a good look at animal life but I think, in this instance, we can reason from the particular to the general and assume the other continents have—ah, tribes like this one, possessing the same bellicosity and—ah, irrationality.”

  “I agree!” snapped Tresco. “We’ve no choice. We’ve simply got to establish peaceable contact with this group—or give up!”

  The ensuing silence was broken by Gearhardt. The old man cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Administrator?”

  Jeltenko smiled warmly and said, “Ah, Doctor, I was wondering when we were going to hear from you. Surely you have some wise counsel for us?”

  “I haven’t,” Gearhardt replied. “But one of our number has—you haven’t heard from him yet, either.” Hardin was startled by the sharp ring of authority in the old man’s voice. “I refer to Captain Hardin. He’s got something to tell you and I suggest you listen to him!”

  Hardin felt all eyes upon him . . . eyes signaling irritation, curiosity, impatient contempt . . .

  Administrator Jeltenko said very courteously, “Captain Hardin? To be sure. What have you to tell us, Captain?”

  Hardin got up and stood in front of his pushed-back chair, his legs spread wide apart, his hands clasped behind his back. This is it, he thought wryly, they’ll listen to me now, or see some killing in the morning. But when he spoke, he kept all belligerence out of his voice.

  “You won’t like much of what I’ll say,” he said slowly. “And certainly, a great deal of it will be completely foreign to your thinking. But I’d like you to hear me out.”

  “I assure you that you will be heard, Captain,” murmured the Administrator. “Please continue.” He leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through his white mane and smiled his benevolent smile.

  “Thank you, sir. The first thing I’d like to tell you is this: You will never establish any sort of peaceable relationship with the natives of this planet.”

  That jolted them. Tresco was the first to recover. “Ah,” he sneered, “the military mind.”

  Hardin looked at him.

  “Let me explain the military mind to you, Doctor Tresco,” he said quietly. “The military, as it is constituted today, was established in 2117 for the protection of society. To do the job properly, it had to possess two things: One, an absolute selfless, yet intelligent devotion to its duty. Two, to protect society, it had to know society. To know society, it had to know history. Doctor Tresco, there are differences between the military mind and—let us say—your own: possibly a greater sense of duty—inbred, of course—and very definitely a vaster knowledge of history.”

  Tresco flushed and stared down at the table.

  “There will be no more interruptions, gentlemen,” said the Administrator.

  “The essential thing is,” Hardin continued, “I know history. I know the three thousand year period which we call the conflict era in man’s cultural development . . . that period of violence and bloodshed about which you gentlemen know nothing.”

  “Pardon me, Captain,” Jeltenko broke in very smoothly. “I, myself, don’t quite see the connection between a knowledge of the tragic era of Terran man’s development and the situation that confronts us here—Terran man’s first contact with an extra-Solar race.”

  “Parallels, sir.”

  “Parallels?”

  “Certainly. Those people out there,” he gestured toward the bow of the ship, “are
human. The two bodies Doctor Gearhardt and I examined this afternoon prove that. Archeological evidence indicates that the beings who built the abandoned city were also human. But obviously not of the same culture pattern as ours . . . ah, besiegers. Right, Doctor?”

  Gearhardt nodded.

  “I see.” The Administrator drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Let me see if I understand you. Captain. You are saying that our besiegers, as you so aptly put it, are at a stage of development that corresponds with a similar, known level of Terran man’s development. If we can ascertain the proper stage, we’ll be able to understand them?”

  “Oh, I know the stage,” Hardin said casually. Eyebrows went up all around the table. “As soon as I explain it to you, you’ll ail understand them, completely. But they’ll never understand us—they don’t want to.”

  Ignoring the startled gasps, Hardin went on. “This afternoon Lieutenant Stiegesen risked his life to get a good look at the enemy encampment.” At the word enemy Tresco ahemed loudly, but said nothing. “I’ll remark in passing that the lieutenant has been reprimanded for disobeying orders. He will also be commended for exceptional devotion to duty. For he crawled through the grass, right to the edge of their encampment and got a very good look at these people’s way of life.”

  He paused, looked slowly at each face in turn.

  “I’ll show his report and pictures, later,” he said. “Here’s the gist of it and as I give it to you, please remember the phrase I just used. We’re not up against a hostile army so much as a hostile way of life. A complete community is out there, arrayed against us. Men and older boys are mounted and make up the fighting force. Women and smaller children follow that mounted corps in carts, drawn by four-legged beasts the size of our ponies. The females of both the six-and four-legged types give a lactic-seeming fluid which the people drink. Their staple diet is flesh, probably of wild animals and of the two species they’ve domesticated. As they’re all dressed in skins and furs, we may presume they hunt a lot.”

  Hardin took a deep breath, then went on.

  “Stiegesen reports that the tents and carts are arranged in concentric circles around an open area. In the center of that area he saw a pole with Doctor Struthers-Stote’s head on it.”

  A whispering sigh drifted around the table.

  “Barbarians,” said someone.

  “By our standards,” nodded Hardin. “Well, gentlemen, that’s about all . . . Stiegesen says their sole artifacts seem to be their weapons, their carts, their riding and kitchen gear. As clothes and tents are merely skins stitched together, I’d hardly call them items of manufacture. In short, these are a roving people, living off the land—uncultivated land.

  “Gentlemen, they’re nomads.”

  Hardin waited. No one said anything.

  “Good God!” he cried. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Startled, they looked from one to the other. Jeltenko frowned and the quiet of his tone was a reproof. “I’m sure that most of us know what Terran nomads were, Captain. A migratory people, just as you’ve described these Wolfians. If these are nomads of the Terran type, that still doesn’t explain their hostility.”

  There were muttered noises of agreement. Hardin suddenly realized one leg was stiff. He shifted his stance, then took out his cigaret case. The smoke irritated his dry throat but, at the same time, eased his tension.

  “More history, gentlemen. You’ve tried to forget about the wars of man’s past. You’re quite right in thinking that most of those wars were pretty indecent and unnecessary affairs. But our history, recorded and unrecorded, is marked by one ever-recurring, inescapable conflict—the violent, no-holds-barred struggle to the death between the nomad and the town-dweller.”

  “Inescapable?” asked Tresco.

  “Yes, Doctor. The nomad has always demonstrated a deep-seated hatred for the man who has stopped, built himself a permanent shelter and begun to till the soil. Part of this, I think, is purely psychological: the contempt of the free rover for the . . . well, the stick-in-the-mud. Another part—and Doctor Gearhardt shares this opinion—is the nomad’s subconscious awareness that the town dweller will eventually destroy the ecology that gives the nomad life.”

  “That makes sense,” Healy, the botanist, said. “A people dependent on grazing can’t exist in a world of leveled forests and plowed fields.”

  “Well,” said Tresco, “now that we know what we’re up against, we should take steps to remedy the matter.”

  The Administrator nodded.

  “But you can’t!” cried Hardin. “The situation is forever irremediable! This conflict has been going on for thousands of years—apparently not only in our system, but in this one—very likely in others!” He dashed the cigaret into an ashtray. “For God’s sake, gentlemen! What do you suppose happened to the city behind us? Don’t you think they were a peaceful, highly intelligent people? Of course they were—and they were overcome in a day. Their city was taken by the nomads, its builders slaughtered, and the city looted of what they wanted. And what did they want? Not the city itself—as some of you have seen, that’s almost intact. No, they wanted its metal for their weapons; likely they also took jewels or similar personal adornments . . . assuredly they kept some of the urban children alive for the increase of the nomadic tribe. That’s the pattern of this world—victorious nomads!”

  “That is right,” nodded Gearhardt.

  “At times they were victorious in our own world,” Hardin swept on. “The white Vandals and Goths shattered the western Roman empire.

  The sophisticated culture of Roman Italy was almost totally obliterated by the Goths and took centuries to reassert itself. Then later the brown Mongols overran Europe and Asia for over two hundred years. They were not absorbed, they were defeated and scattered finally . . . but not until the urban dwellers of Russia and north China had received an evolutionary setback that took them centuries to overcome.”

  “It is a pattern that cannot be altered,” Gearhardt said. “A pattern that we have been instructed to ignore. But here it is again.”

  “If you want to make contact with those drum-beaters out there,” Hardin said, “give them the metal of our ships for their weapons . . . and our heads for their poles.” Administrator Jeltenko coughed and Dr. Idealy automatically touched his neck.

  Jeltenko said, “You think there’s no doubt in their minds that we’re urban?”

  “What do you think, sir?”

  “We pretty well proved to them we were, of course.” He sighed. “One more question: Why aren’t they afraid of us?”

  “Because we didn’t kill a few in the first attack!”

  “I suppose so . . . They thought the film sequence showing our culture abandoning war was . . . funny.”

  “That was like talking morality to a naughty three-year-old!”

  The Administrator sighed again.

  “I think you’ve made your point, Captain, and I’m grateful. It seems that we scientists don’t know everything, do we?”

  Tresco started to speak, grunted, cleared his throat, then started again. “We’ve made a grave mistake in ignoring history. We’ve made another in failing to integrate our soldiers— our defenders—into our intellectual life.” He chewed violently on his cigar.

  Hardin smiled at him. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said quietly.

  Tresco met his eyes, smiled around his cigar and said, “No fool like a fat fool, is there? So much more of him, eh?”

  “I shall do everything in my power to correct both situations,” said Jeltenko. “Meantime, Captain, what do you suggest we do now?”

  “Mmmn,” said Hardin. He grinned suddenly. “You won’t like this, but . . . anyway: The rumor’s probably got around among them that we do possess killing weapons. But most of them won’t believe it, so they’ll keep up the attacks until we use the gun and knock off a few hundred of them—”

  “No!” Save for the smiling Gearhardt the chorus of dissent was unanimous.


  “I said you wouldn’t like it. Had we used the gun in the first place, killed a few, we might have overawed the rest and established some kind of uneasy truce. Too late for that now. We can only drive them off by killing them.”

  “And what will we accomplish by that?” snapped the Administrator.

  “There’s the rub,” replied Hardin. “You’ll have then only the ground you can hold by force of arms. What will you do with it?” No one answered him. “You can settle that ground and death will be lurking at its borders, ready for the first settler that gets careless. That’s the defensive way . . . and it’s a nerve-wracking way—not my idea of the good life at all!”

  “This is a mission of contact, not settlement!” cried the Administrator.

  “Or,” Hardin ignored the interruption, “your settlement can take the offensive—introduce some factor that would upset these nomad’s ecology. The western American urbanites did that. They defeated the Plains Indians by butchering the buffalo which was the Indians’ commissary.”

  “My dear Captain!” Jeltenko’s voice was an angry rasp. “You know the United Solar Nations need no new lands! This is a friendly mission, a social visit, if you like—it is not a would-be conquest!”

  All heads nodded violently.

  Hardin still smiled. “I understand, sir,” he said easily. Believe me, I didn’t imagine for one second that you’d entertain either of those possibilities. I was just narrowing it down to the only thing this kind of expedition can do.”

  “And that is?”

  “To leave.”

  There was utter silence in the room. Gearhardt doodled aimlessly on a pad in front of him, Tresco forgot to chew his cigar. The Administrator slowly lifted his handsome, white-maned head and forced himself to meet Hardin’s level stare.

  “You mean . . . go back . . . admit defeat?”

  “This is no question of defeat, sir. Is a man defeated when an earthquake hurls him to the ground?”

  “But our hopes . . . our plans . . . the millions spent in building and equipping the ship . . . Generations have lived for this moment! And—”