Hour of the Gremlins

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "We had no choice," said Miles.

  "No choice?" The Center Alien stared strangely at him. "You had a clear choice. Your choice was to leave, as you had been ordered to do."

  "No," said Miles.

  Once more he was conscious of standing between two points of view: the point of view of the Center Aliens and that of his crewmates—neither of whom fully saw and understood the situation and what had taken place in their meeting with the Horde. It was up to Miles now to satisfy them both, even if he could make neither understand what he now understood.

  "Maybe it's because, as you say, we're primitive compared to the rest of you in the Battle Line," said Miles slowly. "But our choice wasn't a head choice, it was a heart choice. I don't believe I can explain it to you. I can only tell you that it's that way—with us. You can't take people like myself and those here with me, who care for their own races, and set them out between those races and an enemy who threatens utter destruction—and then expect that we whom you set there will be able to step aside, leaving our people unshielded, simply because logic dictates that we're going to lose if we try to fight the destroyer."

  He paused. From the beginning the huge globeful of watchers had been silent, and there was no more silence now than there had been before. Yet Miles felt a certain extra focusing of attention on him, a metaphorical holding of the breath by the hundreds of thousands or millions who were listening. He went on.

  "Probably," he said, "there's no way for me to make you understand this. But in running away without fighting the Horde, we were leaving our people—probably to die. And we couldn't do that. We aren't built that way—so that we can cold-bloodedly save ourselves if they're likely to be wiped out. To save ourselves under those conditions would have required a self-control greater than any of us has."

  Once more he paused. The globeful of listeners still listened.

  "Our peoples," Miles said, slowly, "are part of us, you see—the way our arms and legs are parts of our body. We couldn't any more abandon them just to save ourselves than we could coolly submit to cutting off all our arms and legs so that the useless trunks of our bodies would be left to survive. If our people had to face death, the least we could do—not the most, but the least—was to face that death with them. It wasn't any thinking decision we made. I repeat, it was an instinctive decision—to kill as many of the Horde as we could before we were killed. It wasn't any different for us than if we'd come back and found our planets turned to desert, our people dead—and then we'd run into the Horde. Then, just as we did here, we'd have tried without thinking to kill as many of the Horde as we could before we were killed ourselves."

  Miles stopped talking. The silence that followed his words this time was a long one. But at last it was broken by the taller of the two aliens standing with the crew of the Fighting Rowboat at midpoint.

  "We were right originally then," said the Center Alien slowly. "It was a part of your primitive nature that caused it—and we could not understand, because it is a part we have long abandoned. You are still on that early road from which we departed a very long time ago. Do not think, though, that we are less grateful to you because of what you have just told us."

  He turned a little so that his gaze was directly on Miles. The Center Alien seemed almost to speak directly and privately to Miles.

  "No matter from what source it sprang," said the Center Alien, "from will or mind or instinct, the fact remains that what you did changed the battle picture and resulted in our saving our galaxy. What can we do for you and these others to show our gratitude?"

  Miles had been prepared for the question. Now he answered quickly before any of the others from the Fighting Rowboat could speak up.

  "We want to stay independent," said Miles, "and much of what you could give us might not be good for that independence. But there are a few things. . . . Now that we've been brought together aboard the Fighting Rowboat, we'd like our races to stay in touch. So give us ships then, or show us how to build our own ships, so that our twenty-three different races can communicate and travel among our separate worlds."

  "The ships and the knowledge you ask for are yours," said the Center Alien. He hesitated. "And if in the future you should want more than this from us, we will arrange a method of communication so that you need only ask."

  "Thanks," said Miles. "But I don't think we'll be asking."

  17

  The summer sun of a later year was sinking toward the hours of late afternoon above the high banks of the Mississippi River by the University of Minnesota campus when the envoy from that race called (by themselves) the Rahsesh alighted from a government car at the edge of a road on the west bank of the river. Before the envoy, humans in plain clothes guarded a small section of green lawn that run outward a short distance to the edge of a bluff. Recognized by the guards, in his personal and diplomatic capacities, the alien envoy was admitted through their lines. He went alone across the grass to where a man stood with his back turned, painting on a large canvas set up on a heavy easel. A brown-haired girl sat quietly in a camp chair near him, reading.

  The painter was in light slacks and white shirt with sleeves rolled up. Smears of gray, blue, and yellow paint were on his bared forearms, on his hands and fingers, and the canvas before him was heavy with wet paint of many colors. The envoy from the Rahsesh went swiftly, smoothly, and quietly up to stand at his elbow.

  "Am I interrupting you, friend Miles?" he asked the painter.

  "No," Miles shook his head without looking around. "I'm all done, Luhon. I'm just putting a little polish on a last few sections. You've met my wife, Marie?"

  She raised her head to smile at Luhon before returning to her book.

  "No. I'm honored to meet her," said Luhon. "Continue with your occupation, friend Miles, I can wait."

  "No, go ahead. Talk." said Miles, still without turning. "Do you know you're the first one in? None of the rest of our old crew from the Fighting Rowboat has got to Earth yet."

  "They'll be along shortly, I'd guess," said Luhon. "Did each of the races pick its former representative to be its envoy? It occurred to me that there might be races which might want to send someone else."

  "Not for this meeting," said Miles. His brush point placed yellow color lightly on the canvas. "Each of our twenty-three races needs all the understanding it can get about the others, and that sort of understanding is possible only through someone who already knows the rest of us. In fact, I said as much in the message I sent around to the other races. You must have noticed my recommendation to that effect in the letter I sent the Rahsesh."

  "I noticed," replied Luhon, gazing at the canvas with some small interest and curiosity. "But it occurred to me that perhaps the recommendation was special in my case."

  "No," said Miles.

  For a few seconds neither one said anything. Miles worked away at his painting.

  "You know, friend Miles," said Luhon thoughtfully, "when the Center Aliens asked you, after the battle with the Silver Horde, what we all wanted in the way of reward, you answered him without talking it over with the rest of us first."

  "That's right," answered Miles, painting.

  "And now," murmured Luhon, "here you've called a meeting of all of us on your world, speaking for all our races—again all on your own. Also, that notice you sent around, friend Miles, didn't say especially what we all were getting together to discuss."

  "It said," said Miles, "that what we were going to discuss would at first be understandable only to those who, like we twenty-three, had had experience with the Center Aliens and the Silver Horde."

  "True," said Luhon, "and that was enough to satisfy my government—and, I suppose, those who govern the other twenty-one races. But is it going to be satisfactory to the twenty-three of us, when we all come face to face again, I ask you, friend Miles?"

  "All right. You've asked me," answered Miles, and paused to squint at the descending sun sending its rays slanting now across university buildings, trees, river blu
ffs, and river—the entire scene of Miles' painting. "And you've made a point of coming early, to be sure that you'd be the first to ask me."

  "I was your second-in-command," Luhon reminded him mildly.

  "True," said Miles, straightening up and stepping back from the canvas, brush in hand, to get a longer perspective at what he was doing. "All right, friend Luhon. I'll give you your answer. I've called us all together again here to begin making plans for the day when it'll be our turn, eventually, to take over control of the galaxy from the Center Aliens."

  His words sounded calmly on the warm summer air. But they were received by Luhon in a silence that stretched out and out.

  Miles went on, unperturbed, examining his canvas. He stepped forward once more and began to make a few more tiny alterations on it with the yellow-tipped number ten brush he still held. Finally, behind him, Luhon spoke again.

  "I have my people to think of," said Luhon slowly. "If you've become mentally unreliable, friend Miles, I'll put off whatever friendship and allegiance I had to you and so inform the rest of the twenty-two—crewmates and races alike."

  "That's up to you," said Miles. "Meanwhile, why don't you think a little about what I've just said? I didn't say anything about taking over from the Center Aliens tomorrow, or next year, or even a thousand years from now. I said that we'd be taking over eventually—and we needed to start talking about that eventuality now."

  "Have you forgotten"—Luhon's voice was almost a whisper—"the number of Center Alien ships in the Battle Line? Have you forgotten the number of Center Aliens that each of those great ships must have held? And what one Center Alien was able to do to our whole ship and crew? Can you imagine how many like him there must be, and the number of worlds they must occupy, in toward the galaxy's center? Can you imagine all that and the thousands of years of technological advantage they must have over us—and still say what you're saying?"

  "That's right. I can," said Miles flatly, putting his brush away finally into a jar of muddy turpentine standing on a small table to the left of his easel. "Because it isn't numbers or technology that're the true measure of a race. We found that out when the Horde attacked."

  "Did we, friend Miles?" Luhon's eyes narrowed to dark lines in his gray face.

  "I'm reminding you," said Miles, "that the Center Aliens failed the rest of the galaxy in the moment of the attack of the Horde. I didn't think you'd forget that."

  "Forget? No," replied Luhon slowly. His eyes widened once more.

  "Think!" said Miles, turning for the first time to face him. "Nothing shrinks faster with time than the memory of a great struggle. Right now, my race has been completely shaken up, awakened, by its escape from the Horde. But the generation remembering this, the one that shared consciousness with me out there on the Battle Line, isn't going to live forever. How much will its grandchildren remember?"

  He paused, staring at Luhon.

  "Not—not much," said Luhon, hesitantly. "If your people are like mine, forgetfulness will take the edge off memory, in time. That's true. . . ."

  "Of course it's true!" said Miles. "In a hundred years they'll start forgetting that we didn't really conquer the Horde—only caused it enough trouble so that it turned aside to easier feeding grounds. In a thousand years they'll talk about the great victory we won. In two thousand, it'll have been an easy and expected victory. Soon—very soon—as the whole galaxy figures time, another million years'll have gone by and the Horde will be back again. And how ready will we be?"

  Luhon hesitated.

  "Very well," he said after a second. "But why us? Why not leave the control and the responsibility of remembering to the Center Aliens—or whoever takes their place down in the middle of the galaxy? They kept the records of the Horde's coming once before."

  "Kept the records, yes," said Miles. He looked down from his slightly greater height at the gray-skinned alien. "But that's all they did. Millions of years ago, remember, the Horde wasn't stopped at all. It swept through this galaxy, almost emptying it of life. The Center Aliens must have been one of the few technological races of which individuals survived. But in spite of that, this time the Horde would have done exactly the same thing it did before—if it hadn't been for us. Us! We twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat!"

  "You have to admit," said Luhon, quietly, "luck had a lot to do with it—with all we did."

  "No," said Miles, "I don't have to admit that. Because it wasn't luck. It was something much more important than luck—and that something's to be the topic of this meeting I've called. Because we've got it—a hope and a power that the Center Aliens haven't, and that's why they failed, facing the Horde."

  "Failed?" Luhon's voice was almost too quiet.

  "They ran. We stayed—and saved the day," said Miles. "Because of our blind instincts, but also because of something I'd found and shared with the rest of you. The ability to go into an overdrive state, to tap hysterical strength of the mind and body. Only 'hysterical strength' is really the wrong term for it. Because what it is, actually, is a breakthrough into a creative ability to draw on all the deepest reservoirs of our minds and bodies at once. Remember how you felt when we attacked the Horde and I reached out to all of you with the strength that was in me?"

  "I remember," said Luhon.

  "Then you remember that the Center Aliens didn't have anything like that in themselves. If they had, we'd have felt it. More than that, they'd never have needed to run from the Horde in the first place, if their naturally greater psychic strength could be multiplied as ours into overdrive."

  "Unmultiplied, their strength was enough—once they did come back and start fighting," said Luhon.

  "Yes, once they came back!" said Miles. "But the point is, they didn't come. Not until after we, with no hope, just instinct, had attacked the Horde and changed the battle odds for them. The odds meant everything to them—nothing else did."

  "Friend Miles," murmured Luhon, "it seems to me you make too much of one small difference."

  "It's not just the difference," replied Miles more quietly. "It's what the difference tells me about the Center Aliens. Don't you remember how they didn't understand—even after I'd explained it—why we aboard the Fighting Rowboat felt we'd no choice but to attack the Silver Horde, even though we were left alone? Remember how that was something that the Center Aliens couldn't get?"

  "They'd changed, over their longer period of civilization," said Luhon. "They explained that."

  "Changed, yes!" said Miles almost fiercely. "They'd changed—so that they couldn't any longer understand our reacting the way we did. But it was still our reaction that triggered off their own fight to save the galaxy, and that fight succeeded in spite of all their earlier calculations! Don't you see? They'd given up their instincts, years ago, for what they thought were other advantages. But those other advantages couldn't save them—and our instincts, filling in where theirs were missing, did!"

  "All this," said Luhon, "I admit, friend Miles. Maybe we do have something the Center Aliens gave up, and maybe their lack of it would have opened the galaxy to the Silver Horde if we hadn't been there. But how can you make this one small, instinctive reaction a basis for some sweeping plan to replace the lords of our island universe?"

  Miles smiled a little grimly. He picked up a clean piece of white cloth from the small table, soaked it in kerosene from a container standing nearby, and began to clean the red, the gray, the yellow paint from his hands and lower arms.

  "Because it isn't small," he said. "You, I—all of us on the Fighting Rowboat—made a wrong guess about the Center Aliens from the start. Seeing how old and powerful they were, we took it for granted that they'd long ago won all their battles with their environment, that they'd evolved beyond the point where they had to prove their right to survive in the universe. But we were wrong."

  Luhon looked strangely at Miles.

  "I don't understand you," the gray-skinned alien said.

  "I'll explain," said Miles. He finished clean
ing his hands and, wadding up the now sodden and stained piece of white cloth, threw it into a large coffee can half-filled with other paint-soaked rags.

  "Somewhere," he said, "sometime, there may be an end to the physical universe. But only then—only when there are no more frontiers over which something unknown and inimical can come to attack—is any race's struggle for survival going to be over. Up until then, each race is going to have to keep on proving itself. The only differences are going to be that the challenges to survival will come from farther and farther away, as it expands the area it's made safe for itself to live in. We humans, Luhon, are end products of an organism that started as a one-celled animal and that, to date, has won every battle for life that's been forced on it. How is it with your people?"

  "The same," murmured Luhon. "But surely the Center Aliens also—"

  "No," said Miles. "Somewhere, back thousands of years probably, they made the decision to scrap their instincts for other abilities. And for all those thousands of years it looked like the right decision. Then the Silver Horde came back and proved it was wrong. Oh, the Center Aliens survived the Horde physically, but that doesn't matter, because it was we, not they, who saved them. They were proved vulnerable—and they can't go back to pick up what they've lost. All at once, their road into the future turns out to have been a dead-end route all along."

  Miles looked for a long second at Luhon.

  "So that's why we'll be taking over the galaxy from them," he went on. "Because from that moment on, they'll have begun to die—somewhere in their race consciousness—just like any prehistoric species that took the wrong evolutionary road and finally came up against something it couldn't handle."

  "But, friend Miles," said Luhon, "even if they do die off and we take their place, if we hold on to our instincts, how can we gain what they gained at the price of giving up their instincts? Where can we go—"