“You haven’t reported it yet?” Sam asked, trying to control his voice.
The other nodded. “By radio on tight beam, of course. But it will take forty years for word to reach the settlement there —radio won’t beat light speed. That’s just a formality.”
He let it drop.
Sam pondered it, his brain prickling slowly. “Suppose something happened to ground you here, Ato? What then? You’d have to stay here until the radio signal reached them, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s happened,” the alien admitted. “That’s the real reason for the signal—to locate me. Then, of course, once it reached a settlement, plans for a rescue would take a few days, and the ship would need a month more to get here. Of course, if I had bad luck, and the settlement wasn’t visited for a few years, there’d be a longer wait. Now, about those plans my people have worked out, if you want more details-”
Sam shook his head. He’d gone upstage on his lines as much as the script would let him, but there came a time when it had to be torn up and an adlibbed ending was better than none. When the signals failed, and the game was in the final minutes, and the score was 7-0 against you, you got the ball if you could and put it up to your legs and your guts.
* * * *
He pulled out the revolver. “Know what this is, Ato?”
The other studied it slowly. “I can guess. We had them. Fatal, of course?”
“Quite fatal. Better call your men in, but keep them out of here. And get ready to lift ship, Ato. I’m not making a joke. I’ll shoot—in fact, my government would want me to shoot rather than let you leave tomorrow.”
“You can’t hold the weapon forever—and if I lift ship, you’ll be beyond help,” Ato pointed out. “Why?”
It took some fifteen seconds to tell him what Sam thought of the Spaceman’s Burden business for Earth. He’d already figured out what would happen to himself. If those were the lines, and that was the game, he’d have to prove that a Seminole was as good as an Apache any day.
But he couldn’t tell that to the alien. They hadn’t exchanged enough cultural history for that.
“Ten seconds, Ato,” he said. “If you don’t obey by then, I’ll shoot.”
The purple head nodded slowly, and a finger reached out for a button; Ato began giving orders. The screens showed the Perui drifting back to the ship.
By the time the men began to notice, they were all aboard.
“Lift ship,” Sam ordered. “Take it up at less than light speed, and head for our space station, if you know where that is.”
Sam had expected difficulty at this stage, but the alien only shrugged and moved slowly toward the big control panel, dragging the translating machine microphone with him. Sam followed, moving along the wall where he could keep an eye on the door. In a moment, without any feeling of motion, the big ship was lifting; the screens showed the Moon dropping below. One, set for greater magnification, showed Larsen looking up, but it was too far to read his face.
Maybe he’d understand. If not, maybe his kids might, some day—if this worked.
“There’s a ship heading for the Moon, somewhere between us and the station,” Sam said. “I want you to locate it, Ato. Then I want you to set up a stable circular orbit around Earth that will intersect the path of that ship. Got it?”
“As you say,” Ato said quietly.
There was something strange on the alien’s face, but Sam couldn’t read it. He tightened his grip on the gun, keeping his eyes firmly on the face of Ato. He was counting on luck and Ato’s ignorance of the fact that the supply ship was carrying a hydrogen-fusion bomb. And the fact that nothing could be much worse than it would be anyhow, so it wouldn’t matter if he failed.
* * * *
If Earth thought the aliens were enemies and expected a follow-up attack, she wouldn’t sit still and wait for it. History told him that much about his planet, at least. She was often wrong, but rarely cowardly. She’d do her best to get ready to repel any attack—and that best was pretty phenomenal. Men had compressed twenty years of progress into five often enough before in wartime, and they could do it again, if they had to.
They’d have forty years, until that radio message reached some place or other. Then, maybe with luck, they’d only have a rescue ship to deal with, and a little more time before all the Perui realized it was war. If Earth could recover even a little of the technology of the Perui ship and blend it with her own, she’d be able to hold them off. She’d be operating from the strength of a planet base, and they’d have to carry the war to her.
It would be a period of intolerable hell. But no profitless war goes on forever, and there would be an end.
With luck—and with her own determination—Earth could at least hold her own.
History had proved what happened to the races that bowed to their superiors and accepted the help offered them so often in good faith; the history of Ato’s people and his own agreed on that. And they agreed on something else—that sometimes the best way to make sure another race respected you was to fight it. One side couldn’t fight a hard battle over long years against an enemy without gaining some respect. And when wars were finished, alliances could be worked out. There was England and America—and Japan. Germany and New France. Even, to some extent, Jordan and Israel. There was the respect his own people had won among the whites of their swamplands.
Enemies could become friends. But the distance between inferiors and superiors only widened, until the lesser was swallowed up in the greater.
It was better this way.
And yet. . . .
Ato looked around. “We’re going to cross the little ship’s orbit soon, Sam. I suppose you want me to threaten it—and then wait for the bomb it must carry?”
Sam stared at the purple man, without anything to say. It was exactly his plan. And if the other could guess it so easily. ...
“I have nearly fifty other men aboard, Sam,” Ato said quietly. “Some are my friends, and I’m responsible for all of them. There’s a life raft large enough to get them to the planet you call Mars. No farther, Sam. They can manage to live there. Let them go and I’ll call your ship.”
It could be a trick, Sam knew. And with all the lives already at stake, a few more shouldn’t matter. But he nodded.
“Send them off.”
* * * *
A minute later, almost as soon as Ato finished speaking, there was a lurch, and one of the screens showed a part of the blue ship apparently dropping away and picking up speed away from the sun.
Ato reached for the dials on his board and began fiddling until a barrage of words spilled in through the speaker. They were obviously coming from the supply ship.
“I have the power high enough to reach Earth with this,” Ato said. He pulled the translator over and began speaking harshly into the microphone. “Earth ship, you are my prisoner! Earth ship, you are my prisoner! Surrender at once and prepare to let my men aboard. Or I shall destroy you!”
Then he cut the switch and swung back to face Sam again.
Sam stared at him unbelievingly. If the Perui were as easily cowed as this, or as willing to sell their race short—but they couldn’t be: not if any part of their history was true.
“Why?” he asked savagely.
Ato shrugged. “Shoot me and find out, Sam. Go ahead. Or no, I’ll tell you. It would do you no good to shoot, because there is the peace shield we found between you and me. There has been since you walked in with what my detectors said was a weapon. And there’s one around the ship, too. No weapon you now have could wreck it.”
Sam fired—coldly and deliberately. A moment later, the useless gun hung empty in his hands, and there were seven blobs of melted lead on the floor. Ato stood unharmed.
“All right,” Sam said finally. “I suppose I should have saved the final one for myself. Now what?”
“Who knows what comes after death?” Ato asked softly. “Sam, do you think we want what you call the Spaceman’s Burden? Don’t you reali
ze that our history shows us the results, too? It’s no kinder to the superior than the inferior— it rots him inside. Doesn’t your history show—as mine shows —that no true peace and progress can come until it comes among equals?”
He made a sound curiously like a sigh. “I don’t like your solution either, Sam. I don’t like it at all. But I like ours less. And if you can die for it, can one of the Perui do less?”
He threw down a small red lever.
“You can come here now, Sam. That breaks the screen between us. But now, if there is to be anything of this ship and its library left for your people, I’ll need your help. It takes two to maintain part of a shield while canceling the other part. There—that button—and this lever—so. . . .”
I told you so, something in the back of Sam’s head said. You WOULD go to the Moon. Now you’ll die.
And another part of his mind was playing the game, fumbling for the ball to boot over the posts.
He stood quietly beside Ato, watching the screens and holding down the lever while the missile headed toward them from the supply ship. It was bad to die, he thought. But if death had to be, it was good that it was shared . . . with a friend.
<
* * * *
MIRIAM ALLEN DEFORD
Not every writer has the stamina to set words on paper with one foot in a cast and one arm in a sling; but there is at least one who has, and that one is a member of what we are taught to think of as the frailer sex, by name Miriam Allen deFord. And not every writer, too, has the talent to find a delightful explanation, in science-fiction terms, for one of the grislier riddles of the Decade of the Mobster. But, here again, it is this same Miss deFord who has done it; and the story she has done it in is-
THE LONG ECHO
Dutch Schultz—which wasn’t his real name, either, but the one by which he was known in his heyday as a New York gangster—lay dying on a hospital bed one day in 1935.
A group of hoodlums from a rival gang had invaded the room back of a saloon where he was in consultation with some of his henchmen. They had pumped him full of machine gun bullets. And they had escaped. Now, in a high fever, he mumbled ceaselessly and unintelligibly.
No mourning family (though he had one) sat around his deathbed. His last companions were doctors, nurses and a detective from the homicide squad. The doctors and nurses were there to keep him alive as long as possible, so that the detective might perhaps extort from him the name of his murderer.
A doctor murmured: “You’d better try again; he’s going fast.”
The detective leaned forward.
“Come on, Schultz,” he exhorted. “It can’t hurt you now. You knew them—who was it?”
The dying gangster went on mumbling in delirium.
Then suddenly his eyes opened. He stared straight into the detective’s face. He tried to raise his head, fell back on the pillow and said, clearly and distinctly, just ten words: “A boy has never wept, or dashed a thousand krim.”
All this is history. You can read it in the files of any newspaper. What you can’t read is. . . .
* * * *
On the Earth-type Planet II of Alpha Centauri, known to its colonists as Novaterra, in the year 3935 of our Earth, a party of young students on holiday was making camp for the night near the ruins of the city of Ish. They were two youths and a girl. Sha, the girl, was a psychophysicist in the making, Rof was in training as a space navigator, Lerin was a budding archaeologist with a special flair for philology; he also fancied himself as a poet and was something of a show-off.
He could not resist now.
“Have you heard that they’ve got this translated at last?” he asked, gesturing toward the massive city gates. The whole of the great unbroken stone arch was covered with minute incised writing, in a script like bird-tracks.
“Who cares?” yawned Rof.
“I care. It’s the biggest thing in Novaterran prehistory. It means we can interpret all the records of the aborigines— and the last native died a thousand years before the first Terran spaceship landed here.”
“How were their records any different from those of humanlike natives of any other planet?” Sha inquired. She was not very curious, either—specialization went far on Novaterra —but she was polite.
“Not much, I admit. They were still essentially barbarians when the spore plague wiped them out. But this city was destroyed centuries before that. It was mined and burned—they were barbarous, but they had some form of explosive—in revenge by a queen for the killing of her three sons in a local revolution. The city was utterly demolished, and every living being in it perished, whichever side of the rebellion he was on.
“Did you say a queen?” Rof’s tone sounded livelier. “Were they governed by queens?”
“You can call her that. It was a matriarchy. Almost like a beehive back on Earth, except that of course they were thoroughly human, sexually. The women were rulers and administrators, the men were soldiers. The manual labor seems to have been done by both sexes when they grew too old for ruling or fighting.”
“Not a bad set-up,” Sha smiled. “We might try it ourselves.”
“Except that we have no need for soldiers. Or for kings or queens, either. Anyway, this inscription up here is a poem— a sort of elegy. Of course Aboihaz herself didn’t do it. She died with the rest when she blew up the city.”
“Aboihaz—was that her name?”
“Yes. They had outlandish names. Her three sons, for instance, were named Dasht, Krim, and—I guess Athow would come nearest to pronouncing it. And the leader of the rebellion was named Godahuk. People from another city, probably another queen, must have had the inscription made as a sort of warning to future rebels who might get ideas.
“I made a rough translation of the poem myself the other day,” Lerin added with specious modesty.
* * * *
Rof groaned.
“Shut up, Rof,” Sha said. “I’m interested.”
“No, you’re not,” Rof retorted. “Ten to one he’s put it into some remote Terran tongue nobody can understand, instead of into good Interlinguan.”
“Well, I did do it in Early English,” Lerin admitted. “It seemed appropriate—about the same cultural period on Earth as it was on Novaterra when the thing happened. I can give it to you in Interlinguan, of course. But if I recite it to you now in an ancient Terran language, it might reverberate on Earth, back even to its own time. Not that I’d ever know if it did.”
“Now look what you started, Sha! What do you mean, Lerin—reverberate?”
“It’s a theory—Sha can tell you more about it than I can. The underlying principle is that time is cyclic and circular-”
“We all know that; it’s elementary psychophysics.”
“Exactly. Well, then, any utterance made in time-space may enter the time-space spiral, at any point, and go forward or backward forever till it returns to its point of origin. You tell him, Sha.”
“Lerin’s right, Rof, though I’d never thought of it as applying to the recitation of a poem. The words have to reach a receptive mind—which is only an improbable possibility. Then, if it’s a writer, say, he calls it an inspiration; or a visionary might consider it a prediction of the future; or a financier or a gambler might say it was a detailed hunch.”
“Or a criminal might think he had the blueprint for a perfect crime.”
“Yes, the receptive mind doesn’t have to be a superior or noble one. But the receptor—at least that’s the theory—must be in—well, let’s say an open state in order to receive it. Perhaps lost in a trance. Or absorbed in artistic creation, or delirious. Or even insane.
“Of course the reverberation may come from the past instead of the future. Then the poor author is accused of plagiarism when he’s entirely innocent. Or the lunatic repeats passages from books he never read.”
“I know just what you mean,” interrupted the irrepressible Rof. “I received a reverberation myself only this morning. I distinctly heard a
voice saying, ‘I want a drink of quizik.’ So I gave the poor thirsty creature one—by taking it myself.”
“Oh, stop it, Rof! Your mind was never in a receptive state in your life.”
“Can you recite some of your poem, Lerin? I know a little Early English—not much, but enough to get the general idea. Rof can stand it, to punish him for being so frivolous.”
Rof groaned again. Lerin cleared his throat.
“Well, my translation’s not a masterpiece or anything; it’s just an approximation. I had an awful time fitting in all those weird personal names. I’ll just give you the first dozen lines or so, and spare you the rest.”
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