“No! Why else would they refuse to stop? Technical secrets? Baloney! Their technology is still inferior to ours. They carried a cargo of hate, our hate, riding with them unrecognized. They couldn’t afford to reveal it.”
Hulgruv laughed uproariously. The girl shook her head slowly at Roki, as if pitying him.
“It’s true, I tell you! I guessed, sure. But it was pretty obvious they were taking their surgibank supplies by murder. And they contend they’re not men. They guard their ships so closely, live around them while in port. And he admitted it to me.”
The second signal came. Roki answered it, then began ignoring the girl. She didn’t believe him. Hulgruv appeared amused. He hummed the signals over to himself—without mistake.
“You’re using polytonal code for challenge, monotonal for reply. That makes it harder to learn.”
The Cophian caught his breath. He glanced at the Solarian’s huge, bald braincase. “You hope to learn some three or four hundred sounds—and sound-combinations within the time I allow you?”
“We’ll see.”
Some note of contempt in Hulgruv’s voice gave Roki warning.
“I shorten my ultimatum to one hour! Decide by then. Surrender, or I stop answering. Learn it, if you can.”
“He can, Roki,” muttered Daleth. “They can memorize a whole page at a glance.”
Roki keyed another answer. “I’ll cut it off if he tries it.”
The commander was enduring the tension of the stalemate superbly. “Ask yourself, Cophian,” he grunted with a smile, “what would you gain by destroying the ship—and yourself? We are not important. If we’re destroyed, our planet loses another gnat in space, nothing more. Do you imagine we are incapable of self-sacrifice?”
Roki found no answer. He set his jaw in silence and answered the signals as they came. He hoped the bluff would win, but now he saw that Hulgruv would let him destroy the ship. And—if the situation were reversed, Roki knew that he would do the same. He had mistakenly refused to concede honor to an enemy. The commander seemed to sense his quiet dismay, and he leaned forward to speak softly.
“We are a new race, Roki—grown out of man. We have abilities of which you know nothing. It’s useless to fight us. Ultimately, your people will pass away. Or become stagnant. Already it has happened to man on Earth.”
“Then—there are two races on Earth.”
“Yes, of course. Did apes pass away when man appeared? The new does not replace the old. It adds to it, builds above it. The old species is the root of the new tree.”
“Feeding it,” the Cophian grunted bitterly.
He noticed that Talewa was becoming disturbed. Her eyes fluttered from one to the other of them.
“That was inevitable, manthing. There are no other animal foodstuffs on Earth. Man exhausted his planet, overpopulated it, drove lesser species into extinction. He spent the world’s resources getting your ancestors to the denser star-clusters. He saw his own approaching stagnation on Earth. And, since Sol is near the rim of the galaxy, with no close star-neighbors, he realized he could never achieve a mass-exodus into space. He didn’t have the C-drive in its present form. The best he could do was a field-cancellation drive.”
“But that’s the heart of the C-drive.”
“True. But he was too stupid to realize what he had. He penetrated the fifth component and failed to realize what he had done. His ships went up to five-hundred C’s or so, spent a few hours there by the ship’s clock, and came down to find several years had passed on Earth. They never got around that time-lag.”
“But that’s hardly more than a problem in five-space navigation!”
“True again. But they still thought of it in terms of field-cancellation. They didn’t realize they’d actually left the four-space continuum. They failed to see the blue-shift as anything more than a field-phenomenon. Even in high-C, you measure light’s velocity as the same constant—because your measuring instruments have changed proportionally. It’s different, relative to the home continuum, but you can’t know it except by pure reasoning. They never found out.
“Using what they had, they saw that they could send a few of their numbers to the denser star-clusters, if they wanted to wait twenty thousand years for them to arrive. Of course, only a few years would pass aboard ship. They knew they could do it, but they procrastinated. Society was egalitarian at the time. Who would go? And why should the planet’s industry exhaust itself to launch a handful of ships that no one would ever see again? Who wanted to make a twenty thousand year investment that would impoverish the world? Sol’s atomic resources were never plentiful.”
“How did it come about then?”
“Through a small group of men who didn’t care about the cost. They seized power during a ‘population rebellion’—when the sterilizers were fighting the euthanasiasts and the do-nothings. The small clique came into power by the fantastic promise of draining off the population-surplus into space. Enough of the stupid believed it to furnish them with a strong backing. They clamped censorship on the news agencies and imprisoned everyone who said it couldn’t be done. They put the planet to work building ships. Their fanatic personal philosophy was: ‘We are giving the galaxy to Man. What does it matter if he perishes on Earth?’ They put about twelve hundred ships into space before their slave-structure collapsed. Man never developed another technology on Sol III. He was sick of it.”
“And your people?”
Hulgruv smiled. “A natural outgrowth of the situation. If a planet were glutted with rabbits who ate all the grass, a species of rabbits who learned to exploit other rabbits would have the best chance for survival. We are predators, Cophian. Nature raised us up to be a check on your race.”
“You pompous fool!” Roki snapped. “Predators are specialists. What abilities do you have—besides the ability to prey on man?”
“I’ll show you in a few minutes,” the commander muttered darkly.
Daleth had lost color slowly as she listened to the Solarian’s roundabout admission of Roki’s charge. She suddenly moaned and slumped in a sick heap. Hulgruv spoke to the guard in the soundless facial language. The guard carried her away quickly.
“If you were an advanced species, Hulgruv—you would not have let yourself be tricked so easily, by me. And a highly intelligent race would discover the warp locks for themselves.”
Hulgruv flushed. “We underestimated you, manthing. It was a natural mistake. Your race has sunk to the level of cattle on earth. As for the warp locks, we know their principles. We have experimental models. But we could short-circuit needless research by using your design. We are a new race, new to space. Naturally we cannot do in a few years what you needed centuries to accomplish.”
“You’ll have to look for help elsewhere. In ten minutes, I’m quitting the key—unless you change your mind.”
Hulgruv shrugged. While Roki answered the signals, he listened for sounds of activity throughout the ship. He heard nothing except the occasional clump of boots, the brief mutter of a voice in the corridor, the intermittent rattling of small tools. There seemed to be no excitement or anxiety. The Solarians conducted themselves with quiet self-assurance.
“Is your crew aware of what is happening?”
“Certainly.”
As the deadline approached, his fingers grew nervous on the key. He steeled himself, and waited, clutching at each second as it marched past. What good would it do to sacrifice Daleth and himself? He would succeed only in destroying one ship and one crew. But it was a good trade—two pawns for several knights and a rook. And, when the Solarians began their march across space, there would be many such sacrifices.
For the last time, he answered a signal, then leaned back to stare at Hulgruv. “Two minutes, Solarian. There’s still time to change your mind.”
Hulgruv only smiled. Roki shrugged and stood up. A pistol flashed into the commander’s hand, warning him back. Roki laughed contemptuously.
“Afraid I’ll try to take your las
t two minutes away?” He strolled away from the table toward the door. “Stop!” Hulgruv barked.
“Why? I want to see the girl.”
“Very touching. But she’s busy at the moment.”
“What?” He turned slowly, and glanced at his watch. “You don’t seem to realize that in fifty seconds—”
“We’ll see. Stay where you are.”
The Cophian felt a sudden coldness in his face. Could they have found a flaw in his net of death?—a way to circumvent the sudden application of the Idiot’s C-drive, with its consequent ruinous stresses to both ships? Or had they truly memorized the Cophian symbols to a one second reaction time?
He shrugged agreeably and moved in the general direction of the transmitter tuning units. There was one way to test the possibility. He stopped several feet away and turned to face Hulgruv’s suspicious eyes. “You are braver than I thought,” he growled.
The admission had the desired effect. Hulgruv tossed his head and laughed arrogantly. There was an instant of relaxation. The heavy automatic wavered slightly. Roki backed against the transmitters and cut the power switch. The hum died.
“Ten seconds, Hulgruv! Toss me your weapon. Shoot and you shatter the set. Wait and the tubes get cold. Toss it!”
Hulgruv bellowed, and raised the weapon to fire. Roki grinned. The gun quivered. Then with a choking sound, the Solarian threw it to him. “Get it on!” he howled. “Get it on!”
As Roki tripped the switch again, the signals were already chirping in the loud-speaker. He darted aside, out of view from the corridor. Footsteps were already racing toward the control room.
The signals stopped. Then the bleat of an answer! Another key had been set up in the adjoining room! With Daleth answering the challenges?
The pistol exploded in his hand as the first crewman came racing through the doorway. The others backed out of sight into the corridor as the projectile-weapon knocked their comrade back in a bleeding sprawl. Hulgruv made a dash for the door. Roki cut him down with a shot at the knee.
“The next one takes the transmitter,” he bellowed. “Stay back.”
Hulgruv roared a command. “Take him! If you can’t, let the trap spring!”
Roki stooped over him and brought the pistol butt crashing against his skull, meaning only to silence him. It was a mistake; he had forgotten about the structure of the Solarian skull. He put his foot on Hulgruv’s neck and jerked. The butt came free with a wet cluck. He raced to the doorway and pressed himself against the wall to listen. The crewmen were apparently having a parley at the far end of the corridor. He waited for the next signal.
When it came, he dropped to the floor—to furnish an unexpected sort of target—and snaked into view. He shot twice at three figures a dozen yards away. The answering fire did something to the side of his face, blurring his vision. Another shot sprayed him with flakes from the deck. One crewman was down. The others backed through a door at the end of the corridor. They slammed it and a pressure seal tightened with a rubbery sound.
Roki climbed to his feet and slipped toward a doorway from which he heard the click of the auxiliary key. He felt certain someone was there besides Daleth. But when he risked a quick glance around the corner, he saw only the girl. She sat at a small desk, her hand frozen to the key, her eyes staring dazedly at nothing. He started to speak, then realized what was wrong. Hypnosis! Or a hypnotic drug. She sensed nothing but the key beneath her fingers, waiting for the next challenge.
The door was only half-open. He could see no one, but there had been another man; of that he was certain. Thoughtfully he took aim at the plastic door panel and fired. A gun skidded toward Daleth’s desk. A heavy body sprawled across the floor.
The girl started. The dull daze left her face, to be re-placed with wide-eyed shock. She clasped her hands to her cheeks and whimpered. A challenge bleated from the radio.
“Answer!” he bellowed.
Her hand shot to the key and just in time. But she seemed about to faint.
“Stay on it!” he barked, and dashed back to the control room. The crewmen had locked themselves aft of the bulkhead, and had started the ventilator fans. Roki heard their whine, then caught the faint odor of gas. His eyes were burning and he sneezed spasmodically.
“Surrender immediately, manthing!” blared the intercom.
Roki looked around, then darted toward the controls. He threw a damping voltage on the drive tubes, defocused the ion streams, and threw the reactors to full emission. The random shower of high-speed particles would spray toward the focusing coils, scatter like deflected buckshot, and loose a blast of hard X-radiation as they peppered the walls of the reaction chambers. Within a few seconds, if the walls failed to melt, the crewmen back of the bulkhead should recognize the possibility of being quickly fried by the radiant inferno.
The tear gas was choking him. From the next compartment, he could hear Daleth coughing and moaning. How could she hear the signals for her own weeping? He tried to watch the corridor and the reaction-chamber temperature at the same time. The needle crept toward the danger-point. An explosion could result, if the walls failed to melt.
Suddenly the voice of the intercom again: “Shut it off, you fool! You’ll destroy the ship!”
He said nothing, but waited in tense silence, watching the other end of the corridor. Suddenly the ventilator fans died. Then the bulkhead door opened a crack, and paused.
“Throw out your weapon first!” he barked.
A gun fell through the crack and to the floor. A Solarian slipped through, sneezed, and rubbed his eyes. “Turn around and back down the corridor.”
The crewman obeyed slowly. Roki stood a few feet behind him, using him for a shield while the others emerged. The fight was gone out of them. It was strange, he thought; they were willing to risk the danger of the Idiot’s C-drive, but they couldn’t stand being locked up with a runaway reactor. They could see death coming then. He throttled back the reactors, and prodded the men toward the storage rooms. There was only one door that suggested a lockup. He halted the prisoners in the hallway and tried the bolt.
“Not in there, manthing!” growled one of the Solarians.
“Why not?”
“There are—”
A muffled wail from within the compartment interrupted the explanation. It was the cry of a child. His hand trembled on the bolt.
“They are wild, and we are weaponless,” pleaded the Solarian.
“How many are in there?”
“Four adults, three children.”
Roki paused. “There’s nowhere else to put you. One of you—you there—go inside, and we’ll see what happens.”
The man shook his head stubbornly in refusal. Roki repeated the order. Again the man refused. The predator, unarmed, was afraid of its prey. The Cophian aimed low and calmly shot him through the leg.
“Throw him inside,” he ordered tonelessly.
With ill-concealed fright for their own safety, the other two lifted their screaming comrade. Roki swung open the door and caught a brief glimpse of several human shadows in the gloom. Then the Solarian was thrown through the doorway and the bolt snapped closed.
At first there was silence, then a bull-roar from some angry throat. Stamping feet—then the Solarian’s shriek—and a body was being dashed against the inside walls while several savage voices roared approval. The two remaining crewmen stood in stunned silence.
“Doesn’t work so well, does it?” Roki murmured with ruthless unconcern.
After a brief search, he found a closet to lock them in, and went to relieve Daleth at the key. When the last signal came, at the end of the four hours, she was asleep from exhaustion. And curled up on the floor, she looked less like a tough little frontier urchin than a frightened bedraggled kitten. He grinned at her for a moment, then went back to inspect the damage to the briefly overloaded reactors. It was not as bad as it might have been. He worked for two hours, replacing fused focusing sections. The jets would carry them home.
> The Idiot was left drifting in space to await the coming of a repair ship. And Daleth was not anxious to fly it back alone. Roki set the Solarian vessel on a course with a variable C-level, so that no Sol ship could track them without warp lockers. As far as Roki was concerned the job was done. He had a shipful of evidence and two live Solarians who could be forced to confirm it.
“What will they do about it?” Daleth asked as the captured ship jetted them back toward the Sixty-Star Cluster.
“Crush the Solarian race immediately.”
“I thought we were supposed to keep hands-off non-human races?”
“We are, unless they try to exploit human beings. That is automatically an act of war. But I imagine an Ultimatum will bring a surrender. They can’t fight without warp lockers.”
“What will happen on Earth when they do surrender?” Roki turned to grin. “Go ask the human Earthers. Climb in their cage.”
She shuddered, and murmured, “Some day—they’ll be a civilized race again, won’t they?”
He sobered, and stared thoughtfully at the star-lanced cosmos. “Theirs is the past, Daleth. Theirs is the glory of having founded the race of man. They sent us into space. They gave the galaxy to man—in the beginning. We would do well to let them alone.”
He watched her for a moment. She had lost cockiness, temporarily.
“Stop grinning at me like that!” she snapped.
Roki went to feed the Solarian captives: canned cabbage.
1952
BIG JOE AND THE Nth GENERATION
A thief, he was about to die like a thief.
He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists.
He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hair was close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not yet sired a pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quick knotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, half-fed and hungry with a quick furious hunger that crouched in ambush. His face, though twisted with pain and fright, remained that of a cocky pup.
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