by Zach Hughes
just a trace of frost. It melts off completely in the summer. The air is full of sulphur and ammonia and other goodies with just the barest trace of oxygen. The surface is about eight-tenths water, but usable water is as scarce as on any desert planet you can name. The rivers are running chemical sewers and the seas are just about as thick as a good juaro soup—only they contain everything that is soluble in water. They'd float a piece of steel, almost, they're so saturated. Fortunately these people don't need water; they subsist on an all-purpose liquid food that comes from a slimy, green sea plant. There's not enough soil on the planet to grow a patch of beans. Most of the land is bare rock, except in valleys where soil has been trapped. Those low places are something out of a nightmare. They're filled with plants that look something like toadstools, but they're unlike anything we've seen because they're as toxic as a Telos red-snake. The soil holds about all the
radioactivity that is left on the planet. It limits the stay in a Type-A suit to about ten minutes. That's damned hot. The radioactivity is artificially produced and is all old stuff. Lots of the carbon series. There are enough original radioactives down deep to tell us what happened. There are indications of mining at very deep levels. Yep. That's the story. I didn't put that in my official report and I leave it to you whether or not to break it right now. I was afraid if I reported it I might give the isolationists more fodder for their fear-mongering. The planet has been systematically looted of every resource. On the surface there's not enough metal to put together a child's toy and indications point to quite a few millennia since anyone has dug for it. We've turned up samples of most of the common stuff, Lead 208 and 206 and a bit of U-235 at the deep levels. On the surface, especially next to the vegetation in the low spots, there's some Strontium 90 and Cesium 137, and it gets into the atmosphere at times. But these beings are not the planet-killers of the central galaxy. I'd stake my career on that, Jack. This planet was killed, all right, but it's older than the center worlds. Not in geological formation, but in settlement. And this very oldness leads one to speculate. The ruins of the central worlds are about 75,000 N.Y. old. The planet-killers were in their big, final battles just about the time we came from wherever it was we came from and landed on Terra II. We couldn't have come from the central galaxy or beyond, or we'd have encountered the killers. Suppose we'd missed Terra II—and it would have been easy as it's the only life-zone planet in its sector. We'd have gone on and run head-on into that big war and that would have been the end of us. But we hit on the one planet in a thousand that could give us the proper conditions and then we settled down and started pulling ourselves into space again. It makes me think, sometimes, that Jordan is right in his history about a one-ship landing. That would explain a lot. If one ship had carried our little zoo out from the mother planet, wherever the hell it is, and if it had been severely damaged on landing so that somehow the history tapes or whatever records there were were lost, the survivors would have nothing but their intelligence. And they'd have been so damned busy during the first few generations rebuilding toward a technological civilization that they wouldn't have bothered with recording history and where they came from. Word of mouth is a chancy way of preserving fact. All right, I'm rambling, but it's all connected, It's all about the Goddamnedest bunch of people I've ever imagined. This world is peopled by four distinct racial types. No type is dominant. One type is a moron-intellectual sort of being, female, and the most humanoid in appearance. They're hairless, with skin much like ours, only a bit thicker and tougher. They have breasts and most of the other female accouterments. They grow to adult-size, a bit smaller than the average U.P. female, but their brains remain at the level of about a six-month-old baby. I've seen one or two of them. They lie in bed, naked, kicking and mewling like infants. But behind the part of the brain that controls their bodily functions is an area that, according to the creeps from Belos II, is like a flesh-and-blood computer. These idiot-computer beings can't control that part of the brain, but it's used by another racial type. This is a male who lives and works with the idiot female and he's a real monster right out of the flicks. He's got scales like a lizard and a chest about the size of a barrel and his head rises from his shoulders in a solid, fleshy cone into a rounded peak. He has no eyes, but has a small mouth and a hairy, inverted nose through which he breathes. All four types have one thing in common. They have red gills on their necks. The gills have something to do with breathing, because the computer morons, whose gills look like they haven't been completely formed, can't go into the outside, except under ideal conditions. The male types living with the computer morons have the gills on the thick, fleshy portion of their tall, domed heads. They see and hear and apparently smell and do a lot of other things with senses much like old-fashioned radar. They can hurt with the power of their minds, but they're gentle. We've observed no attempt to dominate. They can send their senses bouncing off the near planets and—try this one on for size—they can sense the stars. Of course, they're not sending signals all the way there and back, because the nearest star to their sun is four plus light-years distant, but they can feel something, maybe the light from the stars, which is quite a trick since the thickness of the atmosphere makes a summer's day as dark as the inside of a cat's ass. They've got an abstract sense of time that tells them the season, the month, and the day, although they have no names for them. They use pictures to compare the time in relationship to the entire year. Of the two other racial types one is male and one female. The female is the flyer. She uses electromagnetic force in some way that has our boys stumped to lift herself and a considerable load for fantastic distances. More on that later. The other male type is the worker. He's developed some amazing body functions, including the ability to rebuild damaged cells on the DNA level. This healing ability allows him to go out into that hell of a planet and gather food. He likes to travel and bugs around all over the land areas and under the seas when he's not working. He can exist in an atmosphere in which an ant couldn't get a good breath of air by storing oxygen and nutrition in his cells and using these reserves at will. These two types are the breeders. They copulate just once in a lifetime. Once in a lifetime, Jack. How would you like that? All four of the types are ugly by our standards. The male breeder has huge, thick scales that repel both the local radiation and that from the sun. This property in itself is worthy of a lifetime of study for a dozen of our scientists. He has a chest capacity of about four cubic liters. He has eyes, as do the three types other than the radar fellow. The male breeder also has the strongest aesthetic sensibilities. But you've got all this if you've read the rather unusual transcript we sent as exhibit one in this affair. I hope you have read it, thoroughly, because this whole thing means a lot to me, and I sincerely feel that it means a helluva lot to all of us. So here's this society working together. They never, never, except in rare cases of severe law-breaking, do any harm to any living thing. They're the dominant form on the planet, and there's not much else. There's a large, spiderlike thing and another insect type about the size of a phralley dog which looks like an ant and makes a fantastic amount of sting fluid. Then there are the half-plant, half-animal creatures, the size of the period dot on a blinkstat typer, which can eat the atmosphere and synthesize oxygen. These little bugs are keeping the race more or less alive. The people know they're living on a dying planet, but they don't know why it's dying. They have a semi-religion and worship nature as a force for good. Their god is life itself. They think the role of nature is to people worlds with life of an intelligent nature, and to them that means individuals like themselves. But their faith is being tested, because their best minds predict death for the race in about one generation. We think they have plus or minus nine years, New Years, that is, before the air is gone. We may be slightly underestimating their survival capacity, but it is my considered opinion—and the opinion of my staff —that the situation is urgent. They're going to die. The little oxygen-makers they call Breathers are being killed in their natural habitat by a worse
ning of the sea and air conditions. Colonies of the Breathers are kept inside, but the Breathers are relatively short-lived and cannot be bred satisfactorily in captivity. New Breathers have to constantly be brought in from the sea with much labor and difficulty. And in about nine years there ain't gonna be no supply of new Breathers, as one of my mech-mates says. For the first time in history we're face to face with an intelligent alien society and it almost makes me believe in their nature worship, because we've come on this at a crucial time and we have the power to help them. Basically, that's the case, Jack. We help or they die. I hope you haven't made a decision yet, because now I'm going to hit you right in the balls with a few facts we've dug up. One, our archaeologists have made test borings and excavations. We have to do this in out-of-the-way places, in order to avoid making contact, but we've been able to do some interesting things. It's difficult to state anything with much authority, because by our measurements this world has been in bad shape for the last 75,000 N.Y. You can imagine what 75,000 New Years of corrosive rains and uncontrolled erosion can do to a planet— especially one that has been burned good with atomics. Yep. That's what I said. She was burned bald. Just like the worlds of the planet-killers. Only these people did it the hard way, with old-fashioned atomics. The signs are unmistakable—all the old, decaying isotopes. They must have been very funny bombs they used, because they produced a lot of carbon isotopes with long half-lives. I know that I'm going to be asked how, with the amount of radiation that must have been present 75,000 N.Y. ago to leave this much hot stuff now, anyone at all survived to found this new race. Well, I haven't got the answer, only proof that they did survive, because they are here. I've monitored as many interviews as I could. The ones with the pointed heads who have no eyes or ears call themselves Far Seers. That's because they can send their radarlike senses out to vast distances. The Far Seers are the priests of the nature religion, logically explaining that nature abhors a vacuum as far as life is concerned. The Far Seers believe that all the far suns they can sense have planets and that those planets swarm with life like themselves. Incidentally, Jack, the Far Seers screw the computer beings, called Keepers, with astounding frequency. They're very virile cats, but completely sterile, like that creature out of our mythology, the mule. That is their only pleasure, but they're not just dirty old men, because the Keepers are also sterile but well developed sexually, and enjoy it too. That's just an aside, but I think it shows as much as anything that these fellows have basic human traits. I've looked into the records of the Far Seers, kept in the back part of the minds of the Keepers. I know about as much about the history of this race as they know themselves. I do it, of course, with the help of the little bastard from Belos II, who can't concentrate, but has to keep looking into my mind to see if I'm having too many wet dreams or something. It's interesting to note that these people are about as foggy about their beginnings as we are about ours. They have some incomplete legends, just as we do. They think they're mutations of a race they call the Old Ones. They believe that nature adapts life to meet the conditions of a world. They believe that in times of crisis nature comes up with a New One to pull life through. This is like saying that environment shapes life, isn't it? Here on this world it seems to. These people have adapted to conditions that would kill one of us in nothing flat. Their legends tell of nature forming the First Healer. He could live with what they picture as small, hard projectiles: radiation. He apparently did, for the Healer calls on that strange ability of his to repair radiation-damaged cells and his scales bounce off all kinds of radiation in quantities that would kill a horse. His organs don't collect the bad stuff either. They throw it out and vent it, along with the waste gases and unused toxic content of the air, through the gills. Then this First Healer, breeding with what they call the Old Ones, produced the Keepers and the Far Seers. I'd guess that it was the Old Ones who did in the planet with atomics. There's a beautiful series of pictures in one of their records that is called, roughly, The Book of Rose the Healer. They don't know what a rose is, but the picture of a rose is still in their minds after the conditions that would have produced a rose have been gone for 75,000 N.Y. Rose the Healer said that the Old Ones fornicated even in death, producing the Healers. That sounds rather human, doesn't it? The Healers, of course, were mutants—instant adaptation, believe it or not. I suspect the legends condense the process somewhat. But we have to believe what we see and what we find. We have here a world that, at one time, was highly technological, to the point of atomics. We've found a few decomposing chunks of metal to indicate that they were working with some advanced alloys of an atomic culture type. We've found a sizable city under the sea. We can't get to it because it's under a few hundred feet of sludge, but we detect decomposed metals, stone, everything to indicate that it was a real city. It was submerged, I'd guess, either by the melting of the icecaps or by the distortion of the planetary crust which is indicated by wide rifts, the deepest of which splits the crust almost to the molten core in the south of the western hemisphere. Both these events occurred 75,000 N.Y. ago. We've found a few traces of plastics, but a lot of it must have been burned with the surface stuff. I'm sure that, given time, well find some underground deposits that will tell us more. So this world was much like some of ours, with atomics, metals, and plastics. It killed itself. The present race mutated from the original race, which was also humanoid, because the forms of the things we can identify by instrument in the sunken city point definitely to a humanoid origin. The question is, who were the Old Ones? I think I have an answer to that. I know we don't have enough proof for what I'm coming to, not yet, but I say we have to take the risk and supply the justification later. We followed the prescribed approach to a life-zone planet. We came in slowly and carefully and did a lot of instrument work at long range. When we detected no probes from the planet we looked for a base close in and decided on a large, airless satellite that kept just one face to the planet, as do the satellites of some of our worlds. We came down on the back side and peeked around the horizon with instruments. Although we found nothing, we went through normal routine. We sent crews around to the side facing the planet to probe her and measure her. I had come down with a cold and was sacked out, groggy with drugs, when one of my junior officers came in with his ass in an uproar. What he told me made the drug-wooziness leave me like a hangover after a dose of Zarts. I got into a suit and took a jumper around to where one of my crews were milling around a veritable junkpile. Yep. We were not the first ones to land on that satellite. Someone had been there ahead of us. Two of those someones were still there. This, too, is not in the report, Jack. I suppose it should have been sent immediately Code 1, but you and I both know there's nothing that whets the curiosity of an X&A stat clerk like a Code 1 rating. It would have been all over the U.P. But a Personal-Personal communication like this is fairly sacred. Inside a five-foot-high half-dome of semi-opaque material were two beings with huge chests. They were lying on a little bed with their arms around each other. They looked as if they were asleep, but we knew they had to be dead, because we were on the night side of the satellite and it was colder than hell. There was no air outside and our instruments showed no oxygen inside. We thought they might be breathing the inert gases, but we could detect no movement. It was a male and a female of the breeder species. The female had cute little silvery and gold scales. The male was as horny as any Phebus lizard in any zoo. The thing that stoned our people was the lack of any propellant device. I mean, you could see through the whole fucking thing and the plastic-like material was soft to the touch. There was nothing in it to account for its having got here. The two beings were obviously dead. It took a few hours to get ready, and then I opened the lock. It was a funny thing, that lock. It opened easily, but when it was closed the material overlapped itself and formed an airtight seal. Well, after we'd taken all the pictures and measurements our scientists wanted, I went in. As per regulations, the telepath from Belos II accompanied me, even though I knew in my mind that there was no c
hance of contact, since they had to be dead. The air in the dome was completely dead—no oxygen at all. Along the walls, in little tanks, were dead Breathers, looking like tiny flower buds. I was casing the joint when Dr. Janti, creepy little fink that he was, came on with his communicator full blast and almost ruptured my eardrums. He was yelling, «It's alive. It's alive.» All the dead air had evacuated through the open lock. I ordered the lock closed and then I told Janti to vent his spare oxygen into the air. We emptied our tanks and suits of all but a reserve. There must have been just enough air in that cold dome to give a mouse a full breath, but it was enough for that big fellow with the scales. I'll be damned if he didn't move. I was paralyzed. I won't say I forgot my duty, but I ignored regulations. This was the first intelligent life we'd ever encountered and I wasn't about to bug out of there and let it die. I watched, my hackles rising, as his big, thick, scaled chest heaved. Then I got some more oxygen into the dome. Soon we had it filled with good, sweet air. And that scaled monster sat up. «Contact, please, Dr. Janti,» I ordered. The alien was sitting on the little bed looking at us with a set of blue eyes unlike anything I'd ever seen—huge, soft, alive. Think of the eyes of one of those Satina sea nymphs and multiply them four times. He looked at us and the little creep from Belos II went probing into his mind. Meantime, this scaled cat was breathing us down to nothing. His lungs and cells could hold almost all the oxygen we pumped in. I was watching him. He looked at us. His face wasn't built for expression, being pretty well hidden by scales. He made no hostile move; he just looked. When he shifted his eyes to Janti, I felt a force in the air that I couldn't put my finger on. It was just something that came out of him. Then Janti lost control and started screaming that the alien had to be killed. The alien looked down at his female. She wasn't moving. She was dead. I felt an overwhelming sense of despair, as if the planet-killers had done in all our worlds with all my friends, family, crew, all the girls I'd ever loved, all the sweet grass I'd walked on and sat on, all the good, blue water, all the sweet air, everything. Gone. I don't have the words to describe the total sadness I felt. I wanted to reach out to him, but Janti was screaming that the alien had to be killed and that we had to blast the planet before it was too late. I had never realized that Janti was a psychopath. Whose mind can heal the mindhealer's mind? But all the time he'd been one of those damned doom-sayers and he was sure we'd run into a form of life that would do us all in unless we acted quick. In all this turmoil the scaled fellow turned and made an animal sound. It was a sound of pure pain. He put his arms around the female and held her dead body close. He rocked and rocked. It was quiet in the dome, because the good doctor had finally made his escape, taking all the air out with him. I pumped it up again. Then I went out and threatened to smash Janti's faceplate and let in space to boil his blood. Janti recovered his sanity and came back into the dome but he couldn't get any communication. I ordered him to contact, breaking every rule in the book. The scaled fellow was closed off tightly and Janti couldn't find a chink. He said the alien's mind was like a solid ball of steel. So I had to watch as this first intelligent being we've met in all our history died. He held the female close and rocked back and forth. I had tears running down inside my helmet. There was plenty of air in the dome, but the alien wouldn't breathe. He seemed to will himself to death. It took a long, long time and there was nothing we could do to reach him. We tried contact on all levels. But he was closed. Janti said his mind was the most powerful he had ever encountered. In the end we tried to pump oxygen into his mouth, but he merely voided it from his gills. He was from the planet, of course And the way he got to the satellite is one of the most incredible stories I've ever run into, fiction or otherwise. I've told you that the female breeders fly. Well, when we went down to the planet we landed on this fellow's home continent. As I've described, it's a piece of desolate real estate if I've ever seen one. It wasn't much better than the planet's moon. Janti and his help made hypno-contact. Luckily our encounter with the live one on the moon had warned us of the strength of their minds. If we'd made direct contact those Far Seer types would have sensed us. It turned out that the fellow we met on the moon was a hero, and their last hope. Everyone knew all about him. He'd been sent to the satellite because of their wild belief in nature. They just knew that there was a happy, sweet-aired world up there, so they sent these damned kids, and I say lads because the life span of a male breeder is about twenty-two N.Y. and that of the female breeder even less. The female breeder literally consumes her life substance in flight. But how did they manage to get there? Well, they had come up with something new. It wasn't a machine or anything like that. It was a mutation, those two beings were propelled to the moon of that planet on power of mind, Jack. Somehow, this Healer—he was called the New One—was able to «blend his flesh» with others. It was somewhat like a blood transfusion, only infinitely more complete, for he could go into the body of the others and heal them, as he healed himself, on the cell level. His fantastic capacity to store oxygen, combined with what food and air they could carry in that dome, gave him enough energy to send that whole crazy space ship, and that's what it was, all the way to the moon. Don't ask me why they didn't freeze. There was no artificial heat in the thing. Our boys think he might have been able to diffuse the heat from direct sunlight around the dome with his scales. At any rate, he had to have been exposed to direct sunlight and to the freezing cold. He must have had a fantastic tolerance for extremes in temperature, for when we found him he came out of his coma unharmed, except for a small ashlike deposit on his scales. The female had apparently died of a variety of things, cold, heat, radiation, and lack of oxygen. They went there expecting to find life and they found airless space and heat and cold and death. Back on the planet everyone knew all about the trip all over the western continent, and even in the eastern areas, too. We were interested in our first alien, naturally, so we traced him through the records in the minds of the Keepers and compiled the stat that we've submitted as exhibit one. Now maybe you're thinking it's a sad story but no justification for us to step in. I know that there are isolationists high up in the council of President Borne and they'll agree with Janti that these people could threaten us with their fantastic mental powers. How would we control people who can teleport, send fatal force from their mind, and live in conditions that would kill us in three minutes? I know that a lot of powerful people are going to insist on following regulations—no contact until a thorough study has been made. But if the study were carried out according to regulations, it would take twenty N.Y. Jack, we can't let these people die. We've spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to find exactly what we've found here, a civilization of intelligent beings. They're different, but not that different. They're gentle. When we pieced together the account of Rack the Healer from the minds of the Keepers and the others it was so human that there wasn't a one of us who wasn't touched. I like to think that Rack would be pleased with his book. It was taken from a lot of sources and the end of it is not yet written. We found a part of Rack's book in the mind of his infant child, a Keeper living in the east. We found more of it in the minds of his friends and their Keepers. I wanted you to read it even before you scanned the official reports, because I think it shows that these are nice people, Jack. They must be saved. Hell, I'm selfish. I want one of those Far Seers in my crew some day. What an exploration tool he'd be! And a Power Giver to do short range scouting. And a Healer to look around on hell-hole planets where even the best suit is only good for limited periods. I won't guarantee that if we took them into the United Planets they wouldn't be running things in a few hundred years, but we could do worse for leaders. They have gentleness, true regard for individual freedom, and a reverence for life of any sort. If they're smarter than we are, then we'll just have to buckle down and learn more. We just can't let them die. As I see it, we have three choices. We can let them die—and that's what will happen if the regulations are followed. In order to hide our contact we can move some or all of them under
hypnosis and risk having them go into some kind of shock when they awaken on a totally different planet. Or, we can contact them, explain the whole situation, and move them to a nice, fresh planet. It wouldn't even have to be a prime planet. Worlds we look on as being waste worlds would be paradise to them. They'd live like kings on Terra II, for example. I am unalterably opposed to the first course of action, and I don't favor the second, because we'd be unable to move all of them in time. I therefore suggest we undertake the third alternative and in support of this course I have one more item. I said, earlier, that when I went out to see what my junior officer had reported I found my crew beside a regular junkpile. Up to now I haven't mentioned anything but the dome in which the two aliens made the trip from their world to the satellite. But there was something else. The spot where we found Rack the Healer and his nicely named female was not, obviously, their first landing on the moon. They had made some prior stops. We found Rack's footprints in the lunar dust. That fantastic scaled character could walk around in a complete vacuum, using his stored oxygen. He'd done a lot of exploration and all along he must have known that it was hopeless. He didn't have enough reserves to make it back home. His Breathers had been used up and were dying. His girl must have been dying. But he didn't give up and during his explorations he found this junkpile I mentioned. He knew, before he died, that he was not the first to make the trip from his planet to his moon, because his landing, his last one, was made alongside a meteorite-pitted, antique contraption that could have been nothing but the jettisoned state of a primitive combustion rocket. Yep, there it was. We found others later. And here was the real kick in the ass for us and for Rack. This thing has been there a helluva long long time. And I wondered, as I looked at it, what he thought. As you know from reading his book, he valued and speculated about the small chunks of metal he found on his planet. Even while he and his lover were dying he must have been amazed to discover such a store of metal. But he wouldn't have known what it was. And I thought of you, old buddy, and the talks we used to have about where we came from and about all our speculations about which direction our ancestors would have taken after they launched us into space. We dreamed about finding them and being welcomed. We would be the long-lost children home from the far stars. We'd be given the benefit of all their advanced wisdom. We'd gain immortality, and other fantastic gifts, because a society that, 75,000 N.Y. past, could launch a starship, would have made unbelievable advances. I'm sorry I have to kill that dream for you, because, knowing you, I'm sure there's a spot somewhere in your aging carcass where that young dream survives. But it's dead, that dream. We killed it when we landed on a barren satellite without a name, just a generic label, moon. It died when we found Rack and Beautiful Wings beside a junkpile of antique equipment. I knew it was dead when I stood in front of a crazy, boasting, thoroughly human object I'm going to show you in a moment. But it's not all bad, Jack. It's not all bad. We've been looking for our parents for 30,000 N.Y. and now we've found them. Our old year figures to the minute or so with their sun circle. When I looked at Rack, the scaled fellow, I was looking at my cousin a million times removed. Rack and his people are mutations of the Old Ones and some of the Old Ones were sent to the moon about 100,000 old years ago. After this experiment they must have discovered better ways to travel, and sent another party—our immediate ancestors— out into space with what might have been an unguided version of the blink drive, since we landed so far away from this