The COMPLEAT Collected Short SFF Stories

by Sterling E. Lanier

  Powers smiled. "You deserve a date," he said quietly. "As a matter of fact, you deserve a medal. Not that you'll ever get one, pal. Mind telling me the background of your wizardry back there on Wolf World? You said the clues that gave you the idea were from my own racial history, I know, but we had no time to go into it in any detail."

  "A small matter, Williams, hardly worth discussion. It will be in the report and you can read it later back at H.Q."

  "Ah, ah," said Powers. "Play fair, Lizard face, I know how modest you pretend to be but this time don't bother. I want a story. Let the backroom boys read it at H.Q. You just tell Daddy in simple language."

  The Lyran's gular pouch suddenly swelled out into a great, bluish fan under the long, thin jaws. The sight was a frightening one to someone unaccustomed to his race. The gesture meant absolutely nothing, as a matter of fact, being purely vestigial and used perhaps as a yawn or stretch in a human.

  "Very well," said Mazzechazz, "since you are so insistent. But it hardly bears telling. When the human governor, the priest Tahira, spoke of the Arghor as 'wolves', something clicked in my mind. Somewhere, long ago, I had seen a reference, perhaps far back in time, as a young student. It was to the Terran carnivorous animals called by this name. The reference, too, must have lain in some sphere of my own interest, which, as you know, mainly comprises alien psychology and things related to it.

  "The Lyran mind, organized as it is, must reject useless information and store usable data only. This reference then must lie in the latter category. I therefore put myself in a trance state while you listened to the history and the hysterics of the governor and his council, and isolated the reference, as well as several related to it—and others still more remote but bearing on the general subject. The matter of recall under such conditions requires training, of course. But it was not so hard as the time I—"

  "Never mind past triumphs," growled Powers. "Stick to Wolf World."

  "If you insist, Softskin. Your own education may even be raised an infinitesimal notch. Unlikelier things have happened." He neatly ducked a seat cushion and went on talking. "Long, long ago on Terra, before your first Global Interregnum, the science of behavioral psychology, which even I must admit, you excel in, was still in its infancy. Certain of your early scientists, led by a man named Lorenz, postulated that rules of behavior which rigidly governed the lower animals also might affect human beings. The fact that Lorenz and the others had barely begun even to discover the basic rules which governed the lower animals made their work very difficult.

  "But they persevered. One of them, whose name I never memorized, having no reason to, was working with Canis lupus, the wolf, the ancestor of all the dogs and doglike things you humans carry about with you to this day as pets and guardians. This person discovered that a pack-living carnivore such as the wolf is the most rule-bound, other-structured animal in creation. It has to be. If it were not, the race it represents would perish. The rules are simple but unbreakable and they go as follows:

  1) Females and young of its race may not be attacked unless the young are approaching maturity. Then the adult pack leaders may expel them.

  2) Territories are inviolate and may not be entered without elaborate ceremonial and ritual between packs.

  3) Any members of the same species, that is, a wolf which exposes its vital organs, such as the throat and belly, and refuses to fight may not be harmed.

  "The last rule is perhaps the strongest of all. Note, William, that these rules are common sense for a carnivorous animal. Omnivores and herbivores, such as you and I, can kill our own species with ease. In the case of my planet, a world government came mercifully early, you know the unhappy and bloody history of your own before the Syrian Combine discovered Terra and compelled you to seek membership.

  "But a true carnivore can only kill on a very small scale. Any male Grawm would have to have a civilization a billion Standard revolutions old to overcome the inbred inhibitions against total war upon his own species. Fighting other males for sexual reasons, small-scale raids for prestige, for sport really, all these things, yes. But killing the young, the aged, the females and above all those who will not fight back, never! He can't do it. The pack leader can kill any pack member. This is because he is the strongest and the wisest, the most cunning in battle. Those below him do not fight back when he punishes. It would be interesting to know what happens to old leaders! I think I can guess, however.

  "Once I had recalled all this I examined, mentally and physically, a Grawm male. It then became a simple matter to set up a construct and a field problem. And of course it worked, because my examination proved my theoretical postulate to be more than approximate. It was more exact than I could believe."

  "Irritating though it is to agree with you, I'm afraid you're right," said Powers.

  "You were so right," he went on, "that when that hairy buck standing over me relieved himself I almost wanted to yell, 'Not me, Mazzechazz did it!' You told me that this was a probable gesture of utter contempt among such a species and it certainly was."

  "The extrapolation for such an action was only sixty-five percent, allowing for the differences in intelligence and culture between Grawm as a higher species, and wolves," said the Lyran. "I was lucky."

  "I wasn't." Powers grinned. "But even that kind of bath wasn't much of a price, I agree, not for what we got. Once they realized that the twenty males they had pinned down wouldn't move, wouldn't fight, they sent for the big chiefs. It took quite a while but there was no real problem. I simply made it plain that we were non-fighters. That all the fighters had been killed in the big raid and that we would never send any more. That we were cowering behind the colony walls trying to think of a way to tell them this.

  "They were almost physically ill when I finished. In a generation, maybe, the Propaganda boys can start a little work of an underhand kind and begin to civilize them. Meanwhile, they want no part of any human.

  "Now," he went on, stretching lazily, "we can forget about the Arghor Confederacy—or any Grawm as a problem. Every colonist will be taught as an infant to flop on his or her back, throat exposed, the minute a male Grawm appears. I strongly suspect that all the Arghor villages will change location to miles away from the settlement—and very quickly at that. The sense of disgust, the sheer revulsion, at being located near a colony of non-fighting males must be hideously strong.

  "I am incapable of truly appreciating—or should I say feeling mammalian emotion, as you know," said Mazzechazz. "I would not have risked this operation without your approval despite all my theory."

  "The minute you suggested it I knew it would work," said Powers. "These Arghor aren't so very far from my own ancestors in a lot of ways. The main problem, of course, the real risk, was a rather subtle one. Did the Grawm species, specifically the Arghor, despite their hatred and contempt for us, feel we were their spiritual equals? If they didn't, if they saw us a weird but lower form of animal, then all bets were off. Things could have been different. The wolf inhibition against killing only applies to one's own kind, not to rabbits or deer. That was the only real chance we had to take. Your figures said it was an extremely good chance, so I took it and persuaded the others to take it as well."

  "Actually," the Lyran began, "actually you took no chance at all." He appeared in some impossible way, embarrassed at what he was saying. Finally, after looking at a bulkhead, he stared his partner in the eye, using one of his own periscope orbs, head turned sideways.

  "I had a needle-beam laser on electronic reflex aimed at your particular assailant, William. Had he moved one wrong muscle and I know to a millimeter which they are—the telltales, I mean—he would have died at once. So would the others."

  Powers was horrified. "My god, that would have violated the major Prime Directive! Are you crazy? How would you have explained it later?"

  The Lyran's membranes flickered up and down over the great red eyes.

  "Oh," he said. "I would have thought of something. I am too lazy an
d too conservative to become accustomed to a new partner, you see. It has nothing, of course, to do with sentiment."

  Powers looked hard at the Lyran and then himself glanced away at a sealed port.

  "Yes," he said. "I see."

  The End

  ... No Traveler Returns

  Fantasy & Science Fiction – April 1974

  COLONEL Morehouse held up his handkerchief again. The odor of the rubbing alcohol in which he had soaked it came over the foul reek from the great open pit like a cleaner breath of air. His fleshy, red face was unshaven, and the dark pouches under his eyes betrayed lack of sleep and also strain.

  "The governor is sending more men if we need them. But I have the whole town tightly cordoned off. The population is only three hundred or so; so that should be enough."

  "We moved quick for once." Naylor, the State Police captain, looked equally tired, but his immaculate uniform had not bagged, and though he also was unshaven, it hardly showed. He looked with some degree of sardonic sympathy at the National Guard officer. Morehouse was a civilian, a political appointee, and he was very close to shock.

  "If you won't get some rest, at least get a gas mask. There's no need to put yourself through this."

  "No." The heavy head shook stubbornly. "I have to see, and you can't see through one of those, at least not well. I can stand it."

  Naylor returned to his inspection of the huge hole. Fresh clouds of purulent foulness eddied from it as more bodies were brought out by the masked and goggled police. Naylor simply forced himself to breathe through his mouth, by an exercise of iron will. The dust of the broken road eddied and sifted around them in the hot Midwestern sunlight. The shattered fragments of tar lay about them in heaps, spilling over into the roadside ditches, some of it hurled as far as the near wire fence rows. Somewhere in the tall town, meadowlarks called and piped, notes of heart-rending bittersweet.

  The pit was now over thirty feet across. The men seemed to have come to an end of the excavation and had reached untouched earth on all the perimeters. But they were still digging straight down.

  "Count's now thirty-two." Lieutenant Vardaman towered over his lean superior. His voice was muffled since he wore a gas mask, but the modified Afro haircut was unrestrained by any cap. The long, slender dark-brown fingers interlaced as he spoke, the only sign of tension. "Come and look at the rest of this stuff. I still can't believe it."

  The two older men followed him to a small pile of curious utensils. There were small pickaxes, battered entrenching tools and short-handled shovels; all were rusty, but some were smeared with fresher stains, darker and heavier stains.

  "Looks like the kind of thing you buy at a surplus store," said Morehouse through his handkerchief. "We had shovels like that when I was just a kid in the Korean War. Haven't seen any for years, though."

  "The picks were traditional, but the shovels and entrenching tools are a modern adaption." The dry, uninflected voice came from behind them, and they all jumped a little.

  "You must be Professor Alietti," said Naylor, his mind clicking over with an effort. "You got here fast, all the way from State."

  The small, round academic looked around with keen interest before answering. The incredible, sickening stench seemed to have no effect on him at all.

  "The governor sent a plane after he spoke with me on the phone. This is incredible, of course, but, perhaps not, well—surprising. But still to borrow an archaic thing like this, almost two hundred years old. Fantastic!" There was a note of professional relish in the newcomer's tones which the others found unpleasant.

  Naylor pointed to the distant town, whose clustered buildings reflected the sun back over the flat landscape. Only the acres of corn, silent and high in the noon heat, lay between them and the distant hamlet. A man cursed as his foot slipped on something unspeakable at the edge of the charnel pit.

  "The clues are over there." The captain fell silent for a moment. "We'll have to dig them out. Just like we dug this out. They all are in it. They none of them are going to get off, except maybe the small kids. We'll get the answers."

  Alietti looked curiously at him. "May I ask what gave you your first clues? I gathered from the governor that this is your work, this whole thing, the fact that it was uncovered at all, I mean."

  Naylor said, "It was a lot of little things, like most police work. It started with a ring of professional car thieves fighting over territories. Someone was undercutting them in this area, underselling them. The syndicate had money in it. They sent people to look around. Some didn't come back. The syndicate smelled something badly wrong and got out of the whole thing. They don't much go for new ideas, or mysteries either. But we heard about it. That was one piece." He watched the line of men who were still carrying nameless things up from the great hole and laying them gently on the side, extending the lines of shapeless objects, all covered in plastic, to yet further on down the road. It was obvious, sickeningly so, that they were no longer finding bodies, but rather fragments.

  "Disappearances were still another thing. All kinds of people, not who were known to have been here, but who could have been here or passing through. The F.B.I, has charts and graphs, and so do we. I began to play with them, and a kind of vague blob appeared. This county and two around it on the east and west." Vardaman left them and went back to the hole where he could supervise. The sound of careful digging still came from the bottom. The men were silent, the enormity of what they were uncovering reducing them to a perspiring quiet, broken only by a muffled curse and the shovel noises audible at close range. Over all, the piercing tremolo of the larks rose on the hot air of the prairie, uncaring and rapturous.

  "The next clue came from the churches, a place I'd never have looked. No minister of any denomination ever asked here to perform marriages or to bury anyone. The churches demolished and used as building sites. No church records newer than twenty years of this town at all. Vardaman found that out while he was investigating. Since the churches, even the Protestant ones, don't liaison much with one another, not one of them noticed that it alone was not the only brand that had left town." A man ran up the ladder on the far side of the hole and ripped off his gas mask. He went off to the side of the road, well away from the hole and vomited. The sounds came clearly to the little group who were listening to Naylor. Nobody reprimanded the man, a state patrolman, or tried to bring him back. He sat down after a while with his head in his hands.

  "We'll all have a few nightmares," mused the captain, half to himself. "Let's see, what came next? Well, there was money, lots of it, moving in the wrong ways for this area. This is conservative country. People don't play the stock market here, or have Swiss bank accounts. That was a weak point in their planning, though they tried to be clever. They were awfully damn clever about the cars. With the two legitimate garages to change the bodies and repaint, file off engine-block numbers and so on, those cars just like to vanished. We still have only a very few traced, mostly to Mexico. But the idea of the local banker and the local nail factory owner and the fellows that owned the garages all having Swiss bank accounts, that was bad. Treasury gave us some help there. Then there was the law situation."

  He spat. A bad cop is anathema to a good one. A cop involved in this sort of thing was unthinkable, awful, a terrible affront to the concept of the law. The law officers involved were people whom Naylor really hated.

  He went on. "Never any crime here, beyond reports, second-hand from the town police and the justice, a chicken stealing and kids being wild. That was another mistake, and it helped eliminate the other places we were watching. Every town has major crimes once in a while, usually an occasional murder, or homicide of some kind, never mind the actual cause. Yet this place never had anything but the piddling stuff, and it was always settled here without trial, or at least nothing beyond the J.P. That was a pointer. I'm a little surprised that they thought they could get away with that, surprised no one had any more psychology than that."

  "They got away with it
for twenty years, from the looks of things," mumbled Morehouse through his handkerchief. "Suppose they decided they'd had enough last year and quit? Where would we be then?"

  They all came alert. The sound of a distant series of shots came faint and far off from over the fields. In a moment, a young lieutenant, masked like all the rest, sprinted over from his command jeep parked up the road. He saluted the colonel, who waved irritably in answer, still holding the cloth to his nose, and choked out the word, "Report."

  "Two of them tried through the cornfields north of town, sir. The heat sensors picked them up, and the machine gunners got them. Both adult males." At a nod, he returned to his radio watch.

  Naylor silently revised some ideas. The paunchy colonel seemed to have an adequate capability for his task. He resumed his story.

  "We took the whole story to the governor, in secret. We had enough proof to convince him but the attorney general wanted even more. So we sent in a decoy family. Father, mother, two grown kids and all police, our people. In a trailer van, because they said they were vaguely moving to California, site and time of arrival uncertain. They were volunteers. Oh boy, what a nice friendly town! But the thing was, when you knew what was going on, it was so obvious that it made your skin crawl. The fake smiles, the mockery, the sly grins, the kindly questions. I was the 'father'," he added, "so I know what I'm talking about.

  "They rushed us at dusk. We had dummies sitting around the trailer door, and we were inside. The trailer was armored. We stood them off, and the helicopters came in with the sleep gas in minutes. Your people were ringing the town at the same time. That's all. We woke up a teen-ager and asked a few questions. He sent us to here." He nodded at the mass grave. The things being brought up now were all very small.

  Alietti stared at the ground for a moment. Then he looked at Naylor. "Have you found anything religious in nature, any of what we anthropologists call cult objects? If the parallel is an exact one, these people simply could not stop what they were doing. The profit motive became a minor one, whatever it had been in the beginning. The lust of killing, the service of Death itself, under one guise or another, that becomes the paramount, the overpowering desire. At least that is the pathology of the thing in other cases. Sleeman stamped it out so quickly in India during the 1840's that a lot of documentation is missing."