"But, you see, they're very different from any earthly animal, as you might expect. They do look rather like overgrown jumping rats, but the resemblances are mostly superficial. An active land animal that size has to have his skeleton inside like a mammal, instead of outside like an insect, and he needs eyes to see with, and a mouth to eat with, and so forth. But if you ever dissected a hopper—I have—you'd find that its internal organs were very different from those of a mammal. Even their hair is different; under the microscope you can see that each individual hair branches out like a little whisk broom. There are chemical differences, too; their blood is blue, because it has a blue chemical in it called haemocyanin, like an insect, instead of the red chemical haemoglobin, like a man or a bull-frog. So you couldn't possibly cross hoppers with any kind of earthly animal.
"It's thought among those like me who have studied the hoppers that the world they came from is much like ours in temperature, and that it has rather less oxygen in its atmosphere. It's also larger, and hence has a more powerful gravity, which is why the hoppers can make such enormous leaps so easily on earth. Being larger, it has an atmosphere deeper than ours and denser at the surface. That's why the hoppers' voices are so shrill; their vocal apparatus is designed to work in a denser medium.
"Most people know that they're bisexual and oviparous—they lay eggs about the size of robins' eggs. They grow very rapidly and almost reach their full size within a year of hatching. That's how they conquered the earth. In their ship were hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of eggs, together with knocked-down incubators which they set up as soon as they landed. As they were in a heavily forested area, and as they are vegetarians, they didn't have any food problem.
"Their science at the time was quite a way ahead of ours, though not so far ahead that we probably wouldn't have gotten to that stage in time in the natural course of events. It took an advanced science to transform the wood, water, and soil in their neighborhood into weapons of conquest on a colossal scale. But it was their unexpectedness and their enormous numbers that helped them as much as their science.
"There was also the fact that to the people of the time they looked funny rather than sinister; it took a little while to learn to take them seriously. But people stopped thinking they were funny when they conquered all of South America within a week of the time they were first reported, and nobody's made that mistake since. Africa followed in short order. Their flying machines were faster than ours, their explosives were more destructive, and their guns shot farther and more accurately. They also had a lot of special gadgets, like the convulsion ray, the protonic bomb, and the lightning gun.
"As a matter of fact these gadgets aren't so mysterious as you might think. The convulsion-ray projector shoots a stream of heavy positrons, or Y-particles, which you'll read about in the books. They affect the human nervous system so as to greatly magnify every nervous motor-impulse. For instance, suppose you were thinking of picking up a cup of coffee to drink. The thought would cause a slight motor-impulse in the nerves of your arm and hand. If you really wanted to pick the cup up, your brain would have to send out a much stronger motor-impulse. Now suppose a convulsion ray were turned on you, and you merely thought about picking up the cup. Your muscles would react so violently that you'd dash the cup, coffee and all, into your face. So you can see why human beings' bodies became totally unmanageable when the ray was turned on them.
"Or take the protonic bomb. One of those bombs weighing a ton has a chunk of packed hydrogen ions in it the size of a marble, which really does the damage. The rest of the weight is caused by the coils and other apparatus necessary to keep the electrostatic field reversed, so the ions don't fly apart under the influence of their mutual repulsion. The minute you break down the field control, those ions go away from there in a hurry. They have a defense against these bombs, too, just in case men might steal one some day; we call it the X beam. It's really just a huge Roentgen-ray projector, thousands of times more powerful than a medical X- ray apparatus. It dereverses the field around the protons prematurely.
"But to get back to the story: Eurasia and North America, the most densely populated continents, held out for a while, and people began to think they might win. That was their mistake. The hoppers had merely paused in the attack while their second generation was reaching maturity. They can be fantastically prolific when they want to be, and as soon as the first crop had reached sexual maturity they'd laid another crop of millions of eggs. Remember, out of a given population of human beings only a fifth at most will be men of fighting age. But among the hopper everyone, practically, except the casualties, was available for the attack.
"They had another advantage. They seem to be immune to all the known earthly bacteria, though they have a few minor diseases of their own. But the converse unfortunately isn't true. It's probable that they deliberately turned loose a lot of their own exotic bacteria, and one of these found the human body a congenial environment. It caused a plague known as the blue madness. It was quite horrible. At least half the human race died of it. So—anyway, the hoppers won."
Sir Howard asked, "Have there been any more blue plagues since?"
"No; apparently part of the human race is naturally immune, and everyone who wasn't, died. So all of us today are immune, being descended from the survivors.
"The hoppers didn't exterminate us while they had the chance, for which we might give them some credit. Apparently when they saw the fairly high state of human civilization, and its enormous productive capacity, they decided that it would be nicer to set themselves up as a ruling species and use the rest of us to plow the farms and run the machines, while they enjoyed their own hopperish amusements, one of which seems to be ordering us around. They may even have felt sorry for us, though that's difficult to imagine. Anyway, that's the system they've followed ever since." He looked at his watch and got up. "Early hours here, you know. You can sit up to read if you want to, but I'm turning in. Good night."
Up the trail from the camp was a grassy clearing, in the middle of which was a stump. On this stump sat Sally Mitten, smoking a cigarette and looking very much amused. Around the stump in a circle marched Sir Howard. He was looking not, as one might expect, at the girl, but at Lyman Haas. The Westerner was walking around the stump in the same direction in a still larger circle, with the expression of one who is putting up with a great deal for friendship's sake.
"Little slower, Lyman," said the knight.
Elsmith appeared. "What . . . what on earth, or off of it, is this? Some new kind of dance?"
"No." Sir Howard stopped. "I was just checking up on that Cop . . . Copernican hypothesis. You know, about that motion of the planets—why they seem to go backward in the sky at times."
"Retrograde motion?"
"That's it. Sally's the sun, I'm the earth, and Haas is Mars. I was looking at him to see whether he seems to go backward against the farther trees. You . . . uh . . . don't mind my checking up, do you?"
"On the contrary, my boy. I want you to check up everything you get from me, or from the books, every chance you get. Does he show retrograde motion?"
"Yep; he backs up like a scared crawfish every time I pass him."
"What do you mean, backs up?" said Haas. "I been walking forward all the time."
"Certainly, but you're still going backward relative to me. I can't explain it very well; I'll have to show you the place in the book."
Elsmith said: "Do you read books much, Haas?"
"Sure, I like to read sometimes. Only I busted my reading glasses in New York, and I ain't been in one place long enough to get a new pair since. I was in a bar, and I had those glasses in my shirt pocket. And I got into an argument with a guy. He was saying it was a known fact that all Westerners are born with tails. Now, I'm a peaceable man, but—"
"That's all right, Lyman," said Sally Mitten soothingly. "We know you haven't a tail. Don't we, Howard?"
The upper, untanned part of Haas' face reddened a shade. "Uh
. . . ahem . . . Now, what's that again about those there planets? I want to get this straight—"
8
Sir Howard said: "Are you going to tell me some more about the hoppers this evening?"
Elsmith blew out his match. "I never lecture until I have a cigar going, and then it burns down to nothing while I'm talking and I don't get a chance to smoke it. Silly, isn't it?
"But to take up where we left off: The hoppers saw they'd have to remodel human society if they were going to keep human beings in check, especially as the human beings still greatly out-numbered them, and they apparently considered that ratio satisfactory from an economic point of view. They couldn't afford to let us become powerful again. Well, what sources of power did we have?
"We had powered vehicles; some ran on roads, some on railroad tracks, some in the air, and some on the water. So they abolished them, for us, that is. We had explosives, so they took them away. We had united governments over large populations; therefore, they broke us up into small units. Societies in which able people could rise to the top regardless of birth were a menace. They studied our history and decided that a feudal caste system would be the best check on that. Scientific research was, of course, outlawed, and all scientific practice except such engineering as was necessary to keep the productive machine going.
"They abolished every invention they thought might conceivably menace them. Did you know, for instance, that at one time you could talk over wires to people in all parts of the country? And that the telegraph companies owned vast networks of wires for sending messages almost instantaneously? Now they're just messenger-boy agencies, and deliver letters by horse or bicycle.
"That wasn't all. An empirical, materialistic outlook might enable us to see through the preposterous mythology that they were planning to impose on our minds through the schools. So the books expressing such a philosophy were put away, and the people who held it were destroyed. In its place they gave us mysticism, other-worldliness, and romantic tripe. They used the radio, the movies, and the newspapers and books to do this, as these institutions continued to operate under their strict control. They'd have been foolish to destroy such excellent ready-made means of swaying the mass mind. Ever since then they've been filling us with 'Upright ignorance and stalwart irrationality,' as Bell, one of the pre-hopper writers, put it. And I must say"—here he leaned back, closed his eyes, and took a big puff on his cigar—"that my species has come through it remarkably well. It's had a terrible effect on them, of course But when I get most discouraged I can get some comfort out of the thought that they aren't nearly as crazy as they might be, considering what they've been through."
"But," said Sir Howard, "but I was taught that God—" He stopped, confused.
"Yes? Assuming for the sake of argument that there is a God, did He ever confide in you personally? Who taught you? Your schoolteachers, of course. And where did they get their information? Out of textbooks. And who wrote the books? The hoppers. Just assume I'm telling you the truth; what would you expect the hoppers to put in the books? The truth about how they conquered the earth and enslaved its inhabitants, to act as a constant irritant and incitation to revolt?"
Sir Howard was frowning at his toes. "A couple of months ago," he mused, "I'd have probably wanted to make you eat my sword for some of the things you've said, Mr. Elsmith. No offense intended."
"I know that," said Elsmith. "And, if you'd been the man you were a couple of months ago, I wouldn't have said them."
"But now—I don't know. Everything seems upside down. Why didn't the people revolt anyway?"
"They did; almost constantly during the first century of hopper rule. But the revolts were put down and the rebels were killed. The hoppers are microscopically thorough. As you probably know, they have a drug called veramin that makes you answer questions truthfully. Men had such a drug once, but this is much better, except that alcohol in the system counteracts it. They'd give an injection to every inhabitant of a suspected city, for instance, for the sake of catching one rebel. And there was just one penalty for rebellion—death, usually slow. So after a while there weren't any more rebellions. There have been practically none in the last century, so the hoppers have eased up their control of human beings somewhat."
"Well," growled the knight, "what can be done about it?"
Homer Elsmith had seen that look in young men's eyes before. "What would you do?" he asked gently.
"Fight!" Sir Howard had unthinkingly clenched his fist, and was making cut-and-thrust motions in the air.
"I see. You see yourself at the head of a charge of armored cavalry, spearing the hoppers like razorbacks and sweeping them from the face of the earth. No, I'm not making fun of you; that's a common reaction. But do you know what would happen? You've seen wheat stalks fall when a scythe passes through them? That's what you and your brave horsemen would do if the hoppers trained a rapid-fire gun on you. Or they might use the convulsion ray, and have the men and the horses rolling on the ground and writhing while they tied you up. The effect lasts for some minutes after the ray's been turned off, you know. Or they might use a cone transformer, setting up eddy currents in your plate and roasting you in your own lobster shells."
"Well, what then?" Sir Howard's big fist struck his knee.
"I don't know. Nobody knows, yet. I don't know, though I've spent a good part of my life working on the problem. But that doesn't mean we shall never know. Man has solved knottier ones than that.
"We have some advantages: our numbers, for one. Then, the fact that the hoppers are spread out thinly over the earth makes them vulnerable to concerted uprisings. They're not an army, now, but a civilian administration and a police force. Take those hoppers at Albany; there are only a couple of hundred there. They're relieved frequently, because they don't like being stuck out in the sticks. If we were hiding out from human beings, this would be one of the worst places. But for the hoppers it's fine, because there are only two patrolling around the whole Adirondack area, and they seldom leave the main roads. Then there's the fact that they are not, really, very intelligent."
"Not intelligent! Why, they—"
"I know. They know a lot more than we do, and have the sciences at their command, and so forth. But that's not intelligence. A bright hopper is about as intelligent as a stupid man."
"But . . . but—"
"I know, I know. But they have three big advantages. First: they learn quickly, even if not intelligently. That's how the original conquering armies were trained to be competent soldiers so quickly. Second: they live long. I don't know what their average life span is, but I think it's around four hundred years. And third: the helmets."
"The helmets?"
"Those leather things they wear. In their history, the helmet was invented by their god, whose name I can't give you because I can't imitate a canary. We'll call him X. As nearly as I can make out, this X was actually a great genius, a kind of Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton rolled into one. They were some of the most brilliant men of ancient times. X may have been a sterile mutant. You can look that up later. I think it's likely, because the same strain of genius never again appeared among the hoppers, who were living hardly better than a wild-animal existence at the time.
"Early in life X hit upon the technique of scientific investigation: observing and experimenting to find what made things go. He invented their alphabet, which is a cross between a phonetic system and a musical score. He invented an incredible lot of other things, if we can believe the story. Instead of killing him, as human savages might have done, the hoppers made X their god, so he didn't have to work for a living any more. That was probably X's idea, too.
"Four hundred years is a long time, as I said. Toward the end of his life he invented the helmet. It's really an electrical apparatus, the effect of which is to give the hopper who wears it an enormous power of concentration. A man, for instance, can't keep his mind on one subject for more than a few seconds at a time. Try it sometime. First thing yo
u know you'll be thinking about keeping your mind on whatever you're supposed to be keeping your mind on, instead of keeping your mind on the thing itself. I hope I make myself clear. But a hopper with a helmet can think about one thing for hours at a time. And even a chimpanzee could learn calculus if he could do that, I imagine.
"It may be that they're even stupider than stupid men, and that the helmets actually increase their reasoning powers. It's certain that without the helmets they're even more scatterbrained than chimpanzees, so that they're incapable of carrying out any complicated train of action. One reason I think they're so stupid is that their science seems to have remained just about static in the three centuries since the conquest. But it may be that having half a billion slaves of an inferior species to do their dirty work deprived them of ambition."
"Then," said Sir Howard, "I'd think the thing to do was to rush them all at once and snatch their helmets off."
"Yes? You forget the guns and things. If we could time an uprising as exactly as that, we could kill them with our bare hands. I tell you, wide conspiracies have been tried before. They haven't worked. For one thing, we have no sufficiently deadly, simple, and inconspicuous weapon. We're much worse off in that respect than we were at the time of conquest. We've got to have something better than gunfire, at least. Take those Albany hoppers again. They have a supply of small arms in the Office Building. The nearest heavy artillery is stored in the Watervliet arsenal. The really deadly things, like the protonic bombs, are down at Fort Knox, in old vaults where they used to store gold. If we could overwhelm even a large fraction of the hoppers, we could capture enough of their own weapons to redress the balance. But we'd need something to help us overwhelm that fraction first, and bows and bills wouldn't do it."
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