And that, after all, Mardin reflected, was just the kind of man needed in the kind of world Earth had become in eighteen years of Jovian siege. He, himself, owed this man a very special debt...
“You probably don’t remember me, sir,” he began hesitantly as they paused beside a metal armchair that was suspended from an overhead wire. “But we met once before, about sixteen years ago. It was aboard your space-ship, the Euphrates, that I—”
“The Euphrates wasn’t a space-ship. It was an interceptor, third class. Learn your damned terminology if you’re going to dishonor a major’s uniform, mister! And pull that zipper up tight. Of course, you were one of that mob of mewling civilians I pulled out of Three Watertanks right under the Jovians’ noses. Let’s see: that young archaeologist fellow. Didn’t know then that we were going to get a real, first-class, bang-up, slaughter-em-dead war out of that incident, did we? Hah! You thought you had an easy life ahead of you, eh? Didn’t suspect you’d be spending the rest of it in uniform, standing up straight and jumping when you got an order! This war’s made men out of a lot of wet jellyfish like you, mister, and you can be grateful for the privilege.”
Mardin nodded with difficulty, sardonically conscious of the abrupt stiffness of his own back, of the tightly clenched fingers scraping his palm. He wondered about the incidence of courts-martial, for striking a superior officer, in Billingsley’s personal staff.
“All right, hop into it. Hopin, man!” Mardin realized the significance of the cupped hands being extended to him. A Marshal of Space was offering him a boost! Billingsley believed nobody could do anything better than Billingsley. Very gingerly, he stepped into it, was lifted up so that he could squirm into the chair. Automatically, he fastened the safety belt across his middle, strapped the headset in place.
Below him, Old Rockethead pulled the clamps tight around his ankles and called up: “You’ve been briefed? Arkhnatta contacted you?”
“Yes. I mean yes, Sir. Professor Arkhnatta traveled with me all the way from Melbourne Base. He managed to cover everything, but of course it wasn’t the detail he’d have liked.”
“Hell with the detail. Listen to me, Major Mardin. Right there in front of you is the only Jovian flatworm we’ve managed to take alive. I don’t know how much longer we can keep him alive—engineers are building a methane plant in another part of the cave so he’ll have some stink to breathe when his own supply runs out, and the chemistry johnnies are refrigerating ammonia for him to drink—but I intend to rip every bit of useful military information out of his hide before he caves in. And your mind is the only chisel I’ve got. Hope I don’t break the chisel, but the way I figure it you’re not worth as much as a secondary space fleet. And I sacrificed one of those day before yesterday— complement of two thousand men—just to find out what the enemy was up to. So, mister, you pay attention to me and keep asking him questions. And shout out your replies good and loud for the recording machines. Swing him out, Colonel! Didn’t you hear me? How the hell long does it take to swing him out?”
As the cable pulled the chair away from the platform and over the immense expanse of monster, Mardin felt something in his belly go far away and something in his brain try to hide. In a few moments—at the thought of what he’d be doing in a minute or two he shut his eyes tightly as he had in childhood, trying to wish the bad thing away.
He should have done what all his instincts urged way back in Melbourne Base when he’d gotten the orders and realized what they meant. He should have deserted. Only trouble, where do you desert in a world under arms, on a planet where every child has its own military responsibilities? But he should have done something. Something. No man should have to go through this twice in one lifetime.
Simple enough for Old Rockethead. This was his life, negative as its goals were, moments like these of incipient destruction were the fulfillment for which he’d trained and worked and studied. He remembered something else now about Marshal of Space Billingsley. The beautiful little winged creatures on Venus—Griggoddon, they’d been called —who’d learned human languages and begun pestering the early colonists of that planet with hundreds of questions. Toleration of their high-pitched, ear-splitting voices had turned into annoyance and they’d been locked out of the settlements, whereupon they’d made the nights hideous with their curiosity. Since they’d refused to leave, and since the hard-working colonists found themselves losing more and more sleep, the problem had been turned over to the resident military power on Venus. Mardin recalled the uproar even on Mars when a laconic order of the day—”Venus has been rendered permanently calm: Commodore R. Billingsley.”—announced that the first intelligent extra-terrestrial life to be discovered had been destroyed down to the last crawling segmented infant by means of a new insecticide spray.
Barely six months later the attack on sparsely settled Mars had underlined with human corpses the existence of another intelligent race in the solar system—and a much more powerful one. Who remembered the insignificant Griggoddon when Commodore Rudolfo Billingsley slashed back into the enemy-occupied capital of Southern Mars and evacuated the few survivors of Jupiter’s initial assault? Then the Hero of Three Watertanks had even gone back and rescued one of the men captured alive by the Jovian monsters—a certain Igor Mardin, proud possessor of the first, and, as it eventually turned out, also the only, Ph.D. in Martian archaeology.
No, for Old Rockethead this horrendous planet-smashing was more than fulfillment, much more than a wonderful opportunity to practice various aspects of his trade: it represented reprieve. If mankind had not blundered into and alerted the outposts of Jovian empire in the asteroid belt, Billingsley would have worked out a miserable career as a police officer in various patrol posts, chained for the balance of his professional life to a commodore’s rank by the Griggoddon blunder. Whenever he appeared at a party some fat woman would explain to her escort in a whisper full of highly audible sibilants that this was the famous Beast of Venus—and every uniformed man in the place would look uncomfortable. The Beast of Venus it would have been instead of the Hero of Three Watertanks, Defender of Luna, the Father of the Fortress Satellite System.
As for himself—well, Dr. Mardin would have plodded on the long years tranquilly and usefully, a scholar among scholars, not the brightest and best possibly—here, a stimulating and rather cleverly documented paper, there, a startling minor discovery of interest only to specialists—but a man respected by his colleagues, doing work he was fitted for and liked, earning a secure place for himself in the textbooks of another age as a secondary footnote or additional line in a bibliography. But instead the Popa Site Diggings were disintegrated rubble near the ruins of what had once been the human capital of Southern Mars and Major Igor Mardin’s civilian skills had less relevance and value than those of a dodo breeder or a veterinarian to mammoths and mastodons. He was now a mildly incompetent field grade officer in an unimportant section of Intelligence whose attempts at military bearing and deportment amused his subordinates and caused his superiors a good deal of pain. He didn’t like the tasks he was assigned; frequently he didn’t even understand them. His value lay only in the two years of psychological hell he’d endured as a prisoner of the Jovians and even that could be realized only in peculiarly fortuitous circumstances such as those of the moment. He could never be anything but an object of pathos to the snappy, single-minded generation grown up in a milieu of no-quarter interplanetary war: and should the war end tomorrow with humanity, by some unimaginable miracle, victorious, he would have picked up nothing in the eighteen years of conflict but uncertainty about himself and a few doubtful moments for some drab little memoirs.
He found that, his fears forgotten, he had been glaring down at the enormous hulk of the Jovian rippling gently under the transparent tank-surface. This quiet-appearing sea of turgid scarlet soup in which an occasional bluish-white dumpling bobbed to the surface only to dwindle in size and disappear—this was one of the creatures that had robbed him of the life he should h
ave had and had hurled him into a by-the-numbers purgatory. And why? So that their own peculiar concepts of mastery might be maintained, so that another species might not arise to challenge their dominion of the outer planets. No attempt at arbitration, at treaty-making, at any kind of discussion—instead an overwhelming and relatively sudden onslaught, as methodical and irresistible as the attack of an anteater on an anthill.
A slender silvery tendril rose from the top of the tank to meet him and the chair came to an abrupt halt in its swaying journey across the roof of the gigantic cave. Mardin’s shoulders shot up against his neck convulsively, he found himself trying to pull his head down into his chest— just as he had scores of times in the prison cell that had once been the Three Watertanks Public Library.
At the sight of the familiar questing tendril, a panic eighteen years old engulfed and nauseated him.
It’s going to hurt inside, his mind wept, twisting and turning and dodging in his brain. The thoughts are going to be rubbed against each other so that the skin comes off them and they hurt and hurt and hurt...
The tendril came to a stop before his face and the tip curved interrogatively. Mardin squirmed back against the metal chair back.
I won’t! This time I don’t have to! You can’t make me— this time you’re our prisoner—you can’t make me—you can’t make me—
“Mardin!” Billingsley’s voice bellowed in his head phones. “Put the damn thing on and let’s get going! Move, man, move!”
And almost before he knew he had done it, as automatically as he had learned to go rigid at the sound of atten-shun! Mardin’s hand reached out for the tendril and placed the tip of it against the old scar on his forehead.
There was that anciently familiar sensation of inmost rapport, of new-found completeness, of belonging to a higher order of being. There were the strange double memories: a river of green fire arching off a jet-black trembling cliff hundreds of miles high, somehow blending in with the feel of delighted shock as Dave Weiner’s baseball hit the catcher’s mitt you’d gotten two hours ago for a birthday present; a picture of a very lovely and very intent young female physicist explaining to you just how somebody named Albert Fermi Vannevar derived E=MC2, getting all confused with the time to begin the many-scented dance to the surface because of the myriad of wonderful soft spots you could feel calling to each other on your back.
But, Mardin realized with amazement in some recess of autonomy still left in his mind, this time there was a difference. This time there was no feeling of terror as of thorough personal violation, there was no incredibly ugly sensation of tentacles armed with multitudes of tiny suckers speeding through his nervous system and feeding, feeding, greedily feeding . . . This time none of his thoughts were dissected, kicking and screaming, in the operating theater of his own skull while his ego shuddered fearfully at the bloody spectacle from a distant psychic cranny.
This time he was with—notof.
Of course, a lot of work undoubtedly had been done on the Jovian question-machine in the past decade. The single tendril that contained all of the intricate mechanism for telepathic communion between two races had probably been refined far past the coarse and blundering gadget that had gouged at his mind eighteen years ago.
And, of course, this time he was the interrogator. This time it was a Jovian that lay helpless before the probe, the weapons, the merciless detachment of an alien culture. This time it was a Jovian, not Igor Mardin, who had to find the right answers to the insistent questions—and the right symbols with which to articulate those answers.
All that made a tremendous difference. Mardin relaxed and was amused by the feeling of power that roared through him.
Still—there was something else. This time he was dealing with a totally different personality.
There was a pleasant, undefinable quality to this individual from a world whose gravity could smear Mardin across the landscape in a fine liquid film. A character trait like— no, not simple tact—certainly not timidity—and you couldn’t just call it gentleness and warmth—
Mardin gave up. Certainly, he decided, the difference between this Jovian and his jailor on Mars was like the difference between two entirely different breeds. Why, it was a pleasure to share part of his mental processes temporarily with this kind of person! As from a distance, he heard the Jovian reply that the pleasure was mutual. He felt instinctively they had much in common.
And they’d have to—if Billingsley were to get the information he wanted. Superficially, it might seem that a mechanism for sharing thoughts was the ideal answer to communication between races as dissimilar as the Jovian and Terrestrial. In practice, Mardin knew from long months of squeezing his imagination under orders in Three Watertanks, a telepathy machine merely gave you a communication potential. An individual thinks in pictures and symbols based on his life experiences—if two individuals have no life experiences in common, all they can share is confusion. It had taken extended periods of desperate effort before Mardin and his Jovian captor had established that what passed for the digestive process among humans was a combination of breathing and strenuous physical exercise to a creature born on Jupiter, that the concept of taking a bath could be equated with a Jovian activity so shameful and so overlaid with pain that Mardin’s questioner had been unable to visit him for five weeks after the subject came up and thenceforth treated him with the reserve one might maintain toward an intelligent blob of fecal matter.
But mutually accepted symbols eventually had been established—just before Mardin’s rescue. And ever since then, he’d been kept on ice in Intelligence, for a moment like this . . .
“Mardin!” Old Rockethead’s voice ripped out of his earphones. “Made contact yet?”
“Yes. I think I have, sir.”
“Good! Feels like a reunion of the goddam old regiment, eh? All set to ask questions? The slug’s cooperating? Answer me, Mardin! Don’t sit there gaping at him!”
“Yes, sir,” Mardin said hurriedly. “Everything’s all set.”
“Good! Let’s see now. First off, ask him his name, rank and serial number.”
Mardin shook his head. The terrifying, straight-faced orderliness of the military mind! The protocol was unalterable: you asked a Japanese prisoner-of-war for his name, rank and serial number; obviously, you did the same when the prisoner was a Jovian! The fact that there was no interplanetary Red Cross to notify his family that food packages might now be sent. ..
He addressed himself to the immense blanket of quiescent living matter below him, phrasing the question in as broad a set of symbols as he could contrive. Where would the answer be worked out, he wondered? On the basis of their examination of dead Jovians, some scientists maintained that the creatures were really vertebrates, except that they had nine separate brains and spinal columns; other biologists insisted that the “brains” were merely the kind of ganglia to be found in various kinds of invertebrates and that thinking took place on the delicately convoluted surface of their bodies. And no one had ever found anything vaguely resembling a mouth or eyes, not to mention appendages that could be used in locomotion.
Abruptly, he found himself on the bottom of a noisy sea of liquid ammonia, clustered with dozens of other newborn around the neuter “mother.” Someone flaked off the cluster and darted away; he followed. The two of them met in the appointed place of crystallization and joined into one individual. The pride he felt in the increase of self was worth every bit of the effort.
Then he was humping along a painful surface. He was much larger now—and increased in self many times over. The Council of Unborn asked him for his choice. He chose to become a male. He was directed to a new fraternity.
Later, there was a mating with tiny silent females and enormous, highly active neuters. He was given many presents. Much later, there was a songfest in a dripping cavern that was interrupted by a battle scene with rebellious slaves on one of Saturn’s moons. With a great regret he seemed to go into suspended animation for a number of years
. Wounded? Mardin wondered. Hospitalized?
In conclusion, there was a guided tour of an undersea hatchery which terminated in a colorful earthquake.
Mardin slowly assimilated the information in terms of human symbology.
“Here it is, sir,” he said at last hesitantly into the mouthpiece. “They don’t have any actual equivalents in this area, but you might call him Ho-Par XV, originally of the Titan garrison and sometime adjutant to the commanders of Ganymede.” Mardin paused a moment before going on. “He’d like it on the record that he’s been invited to reproduce five times—and twice in public.”
Billingsley grunted. “Nonsense! Find out why he didn’t fight to the death like the other four raiders. If he still claims to be a deserter, find out why. Personally, I think these Jovians are too damn fine soldiers for that sort of thing. They may be worms, but I can’t see one of them going over to the enemy.”
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