To give him credit, Pastor Gorman intended to be as fair as he possibly could. He was going to return to the Uglie village and tell them what he intended to do. Theirs would be the choice then: They could cease their killing of the Pinks, or accept the consequences. I went with him again, but this time I doubted my own sanity. We were asking to be killed. But I had developed too deep an affection for the old man to let him go alone.
That evening Gorman took up his usual stance in the village square. However, he had traversed the huts during all the afternoon, telling the natives that his talk that evening would be of special importance, and asking them to attend.
Most of the villagers were there. Gorman talked again of his God, building up to the explanation that killing was the worst offense that could be committed against Him. He explained how, as His servant, he must do all he could to prevent murder. Once again he asked them to cease their wanton slaughter. Finally he warned that if they would not, he would give the Pinks weapons with which to fight back.
I think the Uglies understood the importance of what he told them; I think, also, that they believed he might have the power to do what he threatened. There was a long period of subdued but serious conversation. The Uglies wandered about, forming and reforming groups for discussion. But the end was discouraging for Gorman. They returned to their huts without a word to him.
The next day, when a hunting party brought in the bodies of a female and a child Pink, we left them. “They have made their choice,” Pastor Gorman said fatalistically.
* * * *
It took him more than another month to teach the Pinks the use of the bow and arrow. Yet they were surprisingly eager to learn, and as surprisingly adept. I had doubted that they had the intelligence or the perseverance to acquire the necessary skill, but they listened quite attentively, and followed Pastor Gorman’s instructions fairly well. They did not, I am certain, understand at all the reason it was being taught them, but accepted it more as a game. I may have been prejudiced, but my view was that to them it presented only another means to practice their continual mischief. I had very little affection for them.
Gorman readily found a type of tree whose springy limbs could be made into splendid bows, and to them he attached the thin vine-ropes he had learned to use in the Uglie village. He had the most difficulty finding adequate arrows. The Pinks would not do the work of carving them. However, he found a weed that maintained its toughness of stem some time after drying. It could be easily pulled from the ground, and the pointed root—being still moist—made a stout head. The Pinks had only to break off the top, trim a few root sprouts, and they had a serviceable arrow. They weren’t too accurate, and they could seldom be used more than once for they splintered easily, but they were very abundant, and the Pinks always had a natural supply near at hand. Some of the more intelligent of them learned to put slivers of stone in the arrow heads, and made them into deadly weapons.
Then we sat back to wait. “One day soon a Pink will use his bow and arrow to defend himself against an attacking Uglie,” Gorman said, “and their emancipation will begin.”
* * * *
Less than a week later I found the bodies of two Uglies in the woods. A dozen arrows sprouted from their stomachs and legs. As the days went on I found more bodies. I hunted almost every day now. I still found no animals, and I suppose I had given hope of ever finding any, but I wanted to observe the results of Pastor Gorman’s stratagem.
Another month went by while I saw few signs of the Uglies, and never a live one. And the Pinks were becoming more numerous. As a second month stretched to an end the Pinks seemed to literally pack into our clearing. Most of them appeared gaunt and hungry. Several times we returned to the woods to hunt for yams to feed them, but found only holes from which the vegetables had been taken. We saw also that the bark had been stripped from most of the trees. Often we observed Pinks pulling up small shrubs and gnawing at the roots. They were always hungry now.
One trip into the woods I went as far as the Uglie village, and what I saw sickened me. It was deserted. I found the bodies of children, and a few adults, lying in the huts. It was evident that they had starved to death.
When I returned to the ship I had lost much of my sympathy for Pastor Gorman and his religion. I told him what I had seen, and my conclusions. “Your scheme had resulted in mass homicide,” I told him. “The Uglies have been wiped out.”
He looked up, startled. “That can’t be true,” he protested.
“Have you seen an Uglie lately?” I asked.
“No, but…” He turned and went into the ship. I followed him and found him packing supplies.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To see if what you say is true.”
I packed supplies of my own and followed him.
* * * *
For eight days we traveled along the big, muddy river. We found five villages of the Uglies. All were deserted, with the same signs of death I had observed before. Our last doubt was resolved.
The Uglie race had been obliterated!
On the way back to the ship we found more signs of starvation—starvation of the Pinks. Several times we found emaciated bodies.
In all our wandering we had still seen no animal, I reflected idly. Suddenly I had the answer. “This world has no animals—other than the Pinks and Uglies,” I said, hearing the tone of awakened wonder in my own words.
“I know,” Pastor Gorman answered dully. His shoulders were bowed, as though he carried a great weight. But I wondered if he really understood the situation here.
“The Pinks were the only source of food the Uglies had,” I said. “They had to kill to survive.”
“I know that too—now,” he answered.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” I asked, really angry with him for the first time. “You’ve killed off a noble race, to help a race of sneak thieves. And have you helped even them? Look around you. You’ve upset this world’s ecological balance. Even the race you tried to help is due for starvation and wide-spread death.”
“What you say is true,” he agreed-. His face was twisted in lines of dumb agony. “But where was I wrong? I had to do what I could to end that murder of the Pinks. The method I chose may have been unwise, but I know I was right to try to stop that wicked practice.”
“Is the lion wicked because it must kill the antelope—if it is to survive, itself?” I asked. “Here we had the same situation, with the only difference being that the Uglies and the Pinks were more intelligent than the lions and the antelopes. Can you really feel that you are justified in what you did?”
He walked with his head back and his eyes closed tightly, and his face made a flinching grimace at my words. I had no need to goad him further. He had something within that was already serving him his punishment. And would probably continue to do so the rest of his life. He had only done what he knew was God’s will. Yet…
I would not have wanted to face his conscience.
TRADER’S RISK, by Roger Dee
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1958.
The Ciriimian ship was passing in hyperdrive through a classic three-body system, comprising in this case a fiercely white sun circled by a fainter companion and a single planet that swung in precise balance, when the Canthorian Zid broke out of its cage in the specimen hold.
Of the ship’s social quartet, Chafis One and Two were asleep at the moment, dreaming wistful dreams of conical Ciriimian cities spearing up to a soft and plum-colored sky. The Zid raged into their communal rest cell, smashed them down from their gimbaled sleeping perches and, with the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could wake enough to teleport to safety.
Chafis Three and Four, on psi shift in the forward control cubicle, might have fallen as easily if the mental screamings of their fellows had not warned them in time. As it was, th
ey had barely time to teleport themselves to the after hold, as far as possible from immediate danger, and to consider the issue while the Zid lunged about the ship in search of them with malignant cries and a great shrieking of claws on metal.
Their case was the more desperate because the Chafis were professional freighters with little experience of emergency. Hauling a Zid from Canthorian jungles to a Ciriimian zoo was a prosaic enough assignment so long as the cage held, but with the raging brute swiftly smelling them out, they were helpless to catch and restrain it.
When the Zid found them, they had no other course but to teleport back to the control cubicle and wait until the beast should snuff them down again. The Zid learned quickly, so quickly that it was soon clear that its physical strength would far outlast their considerable but limited telekinetic ability.
Still they possessed their share of owlish Ciriimian logic and hit soon enough upon the one practical course—to jettison the Zid on the nearest world demonstrably free of intelligent life.
They worked hurriedly, between jumps fore and aft. Chafi Three, while they were still in the control cubicle, threw the ship out of hyperdrive within scant miles of the neighboring sun’s single planet. Chafi Four, on the next jump, scanned the ship’s charts and identified the system through which they traveled.
Luck was with them. The system had been catalogued some four Ciriimian generations before and tagged: Planet undeveloped. Tranquil marine intelligences only.
The discovery relieved them greatly for the reason that no Ciriimian, even to save his own feathered skin, would have set down such a monster as the Zid among rational but vulnerable entities.
The planet was a water world, bare of continents and only sparsely sprinkled with minor archipelagoes. The islands suited the Chafis’ purpose admirably.
“The Zid does not swim,” Chafi Four radiated. “Marooned, it can do no harm to marine intelligences.”
“Also,” Chafi Three pointed out as they dodged to the control cubicle again just ahead of the slavering Zid, “we may return later with a Canthorian hunting party and recover our investment.”
Closing their perception against the Zid’s distracting ragings, they set to work with perfect coordination.
Chafi Three set down the ship on an island that was only one of a freckling chain of similar islands. Chafi Four projected himself first to the opened port; then, when the Zid charged after him, to the herbivore-cropped sward of tropical setting outside.
The Zid lunged out. Chafi Four teleported inside again. Chafi Three closed the port. Together they relaxed their perception shields in relief—
Unaware in their consternation that they committed the barbarous lapse of vocalizing, they twittered aloud when they realized the extent of their error.
Above the far, murmurous whisper of expected marine cerebration there rose an uncoordinated mishmash of thought from at least two strong and relatively complex intelligences.
“Gas-breathing!” Chafi Four said unbelievingly. “Warm-blooded, land-dwelling, mammalian!”
“A Class Five culture,” Chafi agreed shakenly. His aura quivered with the shock of betrayal. “The catalogue was wrong.”
Ironically, their problem was more pressing now than before. Unless checked, the Zid would rapidly depopulate the island—and, to check it, they must break a prime rule of Galactic protocol in asking the help of a new and untested species.
But they had no choice. They teleported at once into the presence of the two nearby natives—and met with frustration beyond Ciriimian experience.
* * * *
Jeff Aubray glimpsed the Ciriimian ship’s landing because the morning was a Oneday, and on Onedays his mission to the island demanded that he be up and about at sunrise.
For two reasons: On Onedays, through some unfailing miracle of Calaxian seamanship, old Charlie Mack sailed down in his ancient Island Queen from the township that represented colonial Terran civilization in Procynian Archipelago 147, bringing supplies and gossip to last Jeff through the following Tenday. The Queen would dock at Jeff’s little pier at dawn; she was never late.
Also on Onedays, necessarily before Charlie Mack’s visit, Jeff must assemble his smuggled communicator—kept dismantled and hidden from suspicious local eyes—and report to Earth Interests Consulate his progress during the cycle just ended. The ungodly hour of transmission, naturally, was set to coincide with the closing of the Consul’s field office halfway around the planet.
So the nacreous glory of Procyon’s rising was just tinting the windows of Jeff’s cottage when he aligned and activated his little communicator on his breakfast table. Its three-inch screen lighted to signal and a dour and disappointed Consul Satterfield looked at him. Behind Satterfield, foreshortened to gnomishness by the pickup, lurked Dr. Hermann, Earth Interests’ resident zoologist.
“No progress,” Jeff reported, “except that the few islanders I’ve met seem to be accepting me at last. A little more time and they might let me into the Township, where I can learn something. If Homeside—”
“You’ve had seven Tendays,” Satterfield said. “Homeside won’t wait longer, Aubray. They need those calm-crystals too badly.”
“They’ll use force?” Jeff had considered the possibility, but its immediacy appalled him. “Sir, these colonists had been autonomous for over two hundred years, ever since the Fourth War cut them off from us. Will Homeside deny their independence?”
His sense of loss at Satterfield’s grim nod stemmed from something deeper than sympathy for the islanders. It found roots in his daily rambles over the little island granted him by the Township for the painting he had begun as a blind to his assignment, and in the gossip of old Charlie Mack and the few others he had met. He had learned to appreciate the easy life of the islands well enough to be dismayed now by what must happen under EI pressure to old Charlie and his handful of sun-browned fisherfolk.
Unexpectedly, because Jeff had not considered that it might matter, he was disturbed by the realization that he wouldn’t be seeing Jennifer, old Charlie Mack’s red-haired niece, once occupation began. Jennifer, who sailed with her uncle and did a crewman’s work as a matter of course, would despise the sight of him.
The Consul’s pessimism jolted Jeff back to the moment at hand.
“Homeside will deny their autonomy, Aubray. I’ve had a warp-beam message today ordering me to move in.”
The situation was desperate enough at home, Jeff had to admit. Calaxian calm-crystals did what no refinement of Terran therapeutics had been able to manage. They erased the fears of the neurotic and calmed the quiverings of the hypertensive—both in alarming majority in the shattering aftermath of the Fourth War—with no adverse effects at all. Permanent benefit was slow but cumulative, offering for the first time a real step toward ultimate stability. The medical, psychiatric and political fields cried out for crystals and more crystals.
“If the islanders would tell us their source and let us help develop it,” Satterfield said peevishly, “instead of doling out a handful of crystals every Tenday, there wouldn’t be any need of action. Homeside feels they’re just letting us have some of the surplus.”
“Not likely,” Jeff said. “They don’t use the crystals themselves.”
Old Dr. Hermann put his chin almost on the Consul’s shoulder to present his wizened face to the scanner.
“Of course they don’t,” he said. “On an uncomplicated, even simple-minded world like this, who would need crystals? But maybe they fear glutting the market or the domination of outside capital coming in to develop the source. When people backslide, there’s no telling what’s on their minds and we have no time to waste negotiating or convincing them. In any case, how could they stop us from moving in?” Abruptly he switched to his own interest. “Aubray, have you learned anything new about the Scoops?”
“Nothing beyond the fact that the islanders don’t talk
about them,” Jeff said. “I’ve seen perhaps a dozen offshore during the seven cycles I’ve been here. One usually surfaces outside my harbor at about the time old Charlie Mack’s supply boat comes in.”
Thinking of Charlie Mack brought a forced end to his report. “Charlie’s due now. I’ll call back later.”
He cut the circuit, hurrying to have his communicator stowed away before old Charlie’s arrival—not, he thought bitterly, that being found out now would make any great difference.
* * * *
Stepping out into the brief Calaxian dawn, he caught his glimpse of the Ciriimian ship’s landing before the island forest of palm-ferns cut it off from sight. Homeside hadn’t been bluffing, he thought, assuming as a matter of course that this was the task force Satterfield had been ordered to send.
“They didn’t waste any time,” Jeff growled. “Damn them.”
He ignored the inevitable glory of morning rainbow that just preceded Procyon’s rising and strode irritably down to his miniature dock. He was still scowling over what he should tell Charlie Mack when the Island Queen hove into view.
She was a pretty sight. There was an artist’s perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth War scars and heritage of anxieties made calm-crystals so desperately necessary, oppressed him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred, her people without need of the calm-crystals they traded.
Something odd in the set of the Queen’s sails puzzled him until he identified the abnormality. In spite of distance and the swift approach of the old fishing boat, he could have sworn that her sails bellied not with the wind, but against.
They fell slack, however, when the Queen reached his channel and flapped lazily, reversing to catch the wind and nose her cautiously into the shallows. Jeff dismissed it impatiently—a change of wind or some crafty maneuver of old Charlie Mack’s to take advantage of the current.
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