The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  “Go on!” he ordered hoarsely. “Move!”

  There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.

  Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.

  Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.

  He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare’s end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.

  They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.

  Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.

  To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.

  But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.

  Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.

  Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the Bridge’s gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.

  Roddie took the hammer from his waist.

  “Don’t! Oh, don’t!” Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.

  Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida’s tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.

  “Why should you cry?” he asked comfortingly. “You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.”

  “But—but my people are your people, too,” Ida wailed. “It’s so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don’t you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!”

  “It can’t be,” Roddie objected. “The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they’re so much more rational than yours… And it isn’t rational to let you escape.”

  Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.

  “Rational! What’s rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don’t you realize we’re the same sort of being, we two? Don’t—don’t you remember how we’ve been with each other all day?”

  She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.

  “Never mind!” Ida said viciously. “You can’t make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you’re superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!”

  Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie’s turn to stand and stare.

  “Purpose!” Ida flung at him over her shoulder. “Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You’re a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren’t they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it’s so much more logical to destroy, isn’t it?”

  She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. “Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage.”

  It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.

  “It isn’t reasonable to kill you now,” he said. “Too dark. You can’t possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let’s see how I feel in the morning.”

  Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.

  And by morning he knew he was a Man.

  THE SIGN OF HOMO SAP

  Ayn had been scouting. He returned all excited.

  “This Y-shaped valley,” he said, “ends down below, very abruptly. There’s a wall that looks artificial at the most southerly point of the west end. There are two animals poking around, wearing what looks like protective armor. And—listen!—they speak the language of Those-Who-Taught!”

  Zymn was incredulous. “Aah, you’ve been hearing things!” he snorted. “Drunk, no doubt, on the high oxygen concentration of this atmosphere! Natural enough, but no reason for you to side with Orje, here.”

  I’d been claiming that the Y-shaped valley was artificially floored with salt. Zymn wouldn’t believe it—he never believes anything I say. Maybe that’s one difference between a practical pilot like me and a theoretical scientist like Zymn. Anyhow, our divided command accentuated differences: as pilot, I commanded during flight; but as scientist, Zymn was in charge on the ground. And he wanted us to know it.

  So I said nothing, and because I didn’t he ordered me to go with him and inspect these beings. Since there were only two, it seemed safe enough for just the pair of us to go, and anyway Zymn was contemptuous of safety precautions.

  “You and your deserts!” he jeered as we marched west between rocky canyon walls. “Always you have to pick a spot that looks red from Space! The green areas undoubtedly contain more animal life…”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “More life-forms—and more hostile life-forms. We’re seeking a homeland, not a fight.”

  But, along with routine collecting, we fought all the way.

  We fought because Zymn had already determined that this, the third planet from Star XM-523, should be our new home. He had no use for my precautionary objections.

  “Investigate!” he mocked. “What is there to investigate? The temperature’s all right, the atmosphere is okay, the gravitation is something our people can get used to. And our planet is cooling fast. Already we’ve wasted too much time searching out a substitute. This is it. All we have to do is kill off the vegetation, and maybe increase the rate of oxidation of these rocks. That’ll lower the atmosphere’s oxygen content to where even an infant can stand it.”

  “We know nothing about the place,” I pointed out, “excepting the few life-forms we’ve gathered.”

  “And aren’t they commonplace?” he scoffed. “We know from both experience and theory that the Universe is not chaotic. Both living and non-living forms repeat universally with variations that are basically minor. Nothing here will be totally strange to us—and nothing here is worth bothering about.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But if you believed all that, you wouldn’t be on this hike.”


  “This hike has another purpose altogether,” he answered. “We’ve got to take into account the fears of the religious. Naturally we can’t let ourselves be accused of disturbing Those-Who-Taught, so you and I will personally discredit Ayn’s rumor. And when that’s done, Orje, we’re going to irradiate this atmosphere without any more delay!”

  Even when we reached the wall near the valley’s end, Zymn continued his perverseness. “What if it is symmetrical?” he argued when I’d pointed out how it differed in this respect from anything else in sight. “The Universe is symmetrical too—and what life-form created that?”

  But he was talking in the teeth of facts. The wall was a semicircular monolith that filled the narrow canyon from side to side at a uniform height. Behind it was the Y-shaped valley we’d come down, its floor almost level with the top of the wall. But the wall’s other face, cracked, concave, and nearly free of vegetation, dropped sheer to the strewn canyon floor a full ship’s-length below.

  And down there were the beings that spoke.

  Two wore armor. The third wore fur. All had four limbs, but the armored ones used just two for walking, though the furry one ran around on all fours, shouting. His language we couldn’t understand; the others, we couldn’t hear.

  So we levitated down the wall and stood beside them.

  They were busy and didn’t see us at first. The four-legged furry one did, though. He showed his teeth, made his fur stand on end, and backed off with a rumbling sound.

  One of the others said, with a strange accent, but in the language of Those-Who-Taught, “What’s the matter with the dog?” This one had a high voice.

  The low-voiced one looked up, then, and saw us. Its jaw dropped. Its blue eyes, two in number, seemed to reach out on stalks and snap back again, though Zymn has argued about this. It moved backward a step and, having but the two walking-limbs, tripped and fell. The other one looked up and screeched.

  “Why do you use the language of Those-Who-Taught?” Zymn demanded.

  I hoped they would be careful how they answered; Zymn doesn’t like being proved wrong.

  But there was no response at all, though the screeching stopped.

  So I tried. “We won’t hurt you,” I said. “We have the highest respect for Those-Who-Taught. It’s our religion.”

  “I think they’re trying to talk to us,” the deep-voiced one said. It was long and lean, with gray fuzz on top. It got up and went to the other, which shook. They crouched together on a rock, each staring from us to the other as if doubting its senses.

  “That’s—that’s Old English,” the shaking one said. “If they speak more slowly, maybe—”

  The accent was thick, but I got the idea. So did Zymn.

  “See!” he said, fingering his projector. “They don’t talk right. They’re phonies. So let’s wind this up.”

  “Don’t be silly!” I said. “Do you want us to be hanged by the priests? We need proof to silence Ayn. Besides, they may know the Sign.”

  “All right, ask them,” Zymn said. “But make it snappy. And the whole job is yours—I won’t have anything to do with them.”

  That’s how it started. It took a few minutes to get the interview under way; I found out later they were manifesting fear. So was the furry animal—a dog, they called it—and they tied him up to the vegetation with a strap that ran to a collar around his neck.

  They were, they said, a man and wife.

  Professor Henry Daugherty and wife Jane. He looked nothing at all like a man. Their sexes you can see from my pronouns.

  Henry said he was a historian. His wife was supposed to be a specialist in English, the language of Those-Who-Taught. You’d never have believed her, though, if you’d heard that accent. I’m not going to try to reproduce it, but they were barely intelligible to us, and for that matter we were not easy for them to understand.

  They were full of questions, but because they seemed so phony Zymn refused to let me answer.

  “They’re probably subversive,” he said in our own tongue, “else they wouldn’t have tried to learn the language. So ask much and tell nothing. And don’t pander to that childish curiosity of yours. Just satisfy yourself that they’re not brethren of Those-Who-Taught, so we can get on with our work.”

  I turned to them and said, “Do you know of Those-Who-Taught?” They didn’t.

  “What do you call yourselves? What species, I mean?”

  “Men,” said Henry.

  Zymn sneered. “See,” he said to me.

  “Mockery!”

  To Henry, who still crouched with his arm around his wife, I said, “Better not try to kid us; my friend here will destroy you. We know you’re not men, because we are.”

  Jane flashed her teeth, but Henry made her stop. “Dignity, dignity,” he said. He told us, in perfect seriousness, that many groups call themselves, in their various languages, the equivalent of men. As an historian he knew all about it, he said; lots of groups of primitive inhabitants of his planet had called their own members “men” or “the people” and called all strangers—even of the same species—something else.

  “So we’re just stumbling over words,” he said. “To say you are ‘men’ is something like saying ‘we are us’—meaningless, under the circumstances. But tell us this: who are Those-Who-Taught, whose language we are apparently using?”

  “Don’t answer them,” said Zymn. “It’s sacred knowledge, and if they were what Ayn thinks, they’d know.”

  So I gave no details, and merely said that some beings had come to our planet from another, which was too far away for their return, and had stayed among us and taught us technology, including the fundamentals of space-flight.

  “All Space-men of our people use this sacred language,” I said. “It’s important to our training, since the books of Those-Who-Taught are written in the sacred tongue.”

  Jane said, “The language you use was current here maybe a thousand years ago. Could Those-Who-Taught have lived then?”

  That put me on their side, because it fitted the facts.

  But Zymn said, “Don’t tell them—they’re only grasping at straws.”

  Jane didn’t understand him, of course. But she soon realized her question wasn’t being answered.

  “It’s not important, anyhow,” she said, with more impudence than I’d have expected. “The main thing is what did they look like?”

  “We don’t know,” I admitted. “The pictures are sacred, and only the priests see them.”

  “Then how do we prove who we are?” Jane asked.

  “You give the secret Sign,” I said.

  “And suppose we don’t?” Henry asked.

  I explained how we would remove the oxygen-producing vegetation from the planet, oxidize enough of the surface to reduce the atmospheric oxygen content, and then bring our own people and life-forms there. I also explained why.

  And when I finished, the two of them huddled in a silence so chill you’d have thought their planet was afflicted as was our own.

  Zymn distrusted that silence. “Tell them to give the Sign,” he ordered. So I did.

  “What kind of Sign is it?” Henry asked.

  “I’m not permitted to describe it in words,” I said. “And I can’t imitate it. That’s the point—there’s something Those-Who-Taught could do that’s completely distinctive, utterly unlike the activities of any other form of life known to us. And we know a lot of life-forms.”

  Henry made motions as if to get to his walking-limbs.

  “Stay where you are,” I said hastily. “And if you have weapons, don’t use them. There are more of us up the valley and you’d only make things worse.”

  He put a limb around Jane, again.

  “By the way,” I said, seeking to change the subject, “is the valley by any chance artificial?”

  “Quite,�
� said Henry. “Accidental, really. I’ve been doing research on it; in fact, that’s why I’m here in this wilderness. That is Mead Valley, and once it was a lake. This,” he said, indicating the wall behind him, “is a dam, built to hold back water so the desert could grow things. It worked, but the water contained silt and the lake filled, eventually.”

  “But your people made the dam?”

  “Quite. Long ago. Doesn’t that in itself tell you we’re the technologists who taught your people?”

  “No,” Zymn interrupted, speaking directly to them in his irritation. “The Sign is not a thing of reason.”

  “Oh, our forebears weren’t reasonable,” Henry assured him. “That’s why I had to come out here and do research. On old maps this structure was known both as Hoover Dam and as Boulder Dam. So I came expecting to find two dams, naturally; but there’s only one.

  “So here’s a tremendous technological feat, accomplished, no doubt, by co-operation among many people. Yet though they could have erected this monolith only with the most intricate teamwork, they apparently could never agree on its name. Is that logical?”

  “Neither logical nor relevant,” Zymn said brusquely. “It isn’t the Sign. It proves nothing!”

  Jane broke in, then. Remembering Zymn’s hint that the Sign was not an act of logic, she began to demonstrate the non-logical activities of her life-form. She gave us a song, but Zymn opined that the local flying-creatures—birds she called them—sang better. Anyhow, singing was obviously not exclusively an activity of her kind.

  And the same with what Henry called art. He bragged of feats of pleasing design, and pointed to the dam itself as proof, but I myself could describe something better, seen only that day. They called what I’d seen a spider-web.

  And so it went. Because the two had never been off their planet, we confined our comparisons to things at hand. And we covered many fields of knowledge and activity, both non-logical and logical, as if Henry felt our definition of logic might not be his.