by Henry Hasse
Wordlessly he aimed a tiny conical rod, first at the larger creature, then at what was evidently its female. They toppled over without a sound, as the charge painlessly neutralized them.
It took the entire crew of seventeen scientists to carry the two heavy creatures, one at a time, to their ship. Once there, they held a conference.
Some of the scientists were for taking them back to their own world. Varona himself was dubious. He felt they were violating their captives' rights.
". . . Besides, what good would it do? We must study them in their own milieu—against the background of the environment which produced them!" Varona observed placidly.
"But did Rima produce them?" Garaban, the psycho-synthesist wanted to know. "In a mere five hundred years? Granted, their intelligence seems to be of a very low order. It has to be, for this creature to engage in mortal combat with anything as fierce and elemental as Perra!"
"Then too," Moldav, the para-psychic, observed thoughtfully, "I noticed right after the battle that the female was having a violent neuro-emotive upheaval. These are low order, highly unstable primitive intelligences—in fact, the original matriarchal race had a vaster, more stable type of coordinates. Witness their highly evolved social complex; their advanced architecture and underground agriculture. And most important, I think," he ended, "they are sufficiently evolved as to be incapable of attack."
"They were," Vestal interposed. "While you conferred I have been exploring in order to establish the incidence of these creatures. There seem to be no others in this sector. But, the startling fact is, that the original matriarchs have been destroyed by some sort of lethal gases, artificially introduced into their subsurface cities!"
The disclosure caused as near a sensation as the nature of the Genserians permitted. They gazed at one another in something akin to horror.
What were these newer creatures? They seemed to have a genius for destruction. These low-order, non-telepathic bipeds seemed to be the embodiment of explosive violence. Varona felt a long forgotten thrill of anticipation. Here was not only a problem as to origin and identity, but something far greater. All this energy, all this incredible emotional power, could not possibly be the complement of a mere brutish, bestial biped. He struggled to recapture some of the ancient, atrophied passions which his race must have felt in eons past. He failed. With a sigh, he turned gently to Garaban. "Do you suppose that by some miracle these creatures possess a share of the insight that might lift them eventually above the level of, let us say, our pet savjers?" He patted the enormous fanged head of Porro, who had lain his muzzle on Varona's knee. Porro lifted his great eyes and gazed mournfully and adoringly at his master, and gave a gusty sigh. He missed Perra, his mate, and the young female they had given him taxed his patience.
One of the younger scientists brought a large platter of food and placed it before him. The shaggy head sniffed the succulent proteinates disdainfully, and turned to gaze at its master. Mara, his young new mate, came rushing in and started to take a bite from the platter. Instantly, Porro turned with a gargantuan snarl, bearing his sharp white fangs, and crouched for the attack. Mara hesitated briefly, drew back, and with a low growl retreated. Porro stood over the platter of food and glared at her.
Varona wearily gestured towards Porro. "They never change, you see! After endless millennia and countless generations, we have failed to raise them an iota on the road to evolution!"
Moldav nodded gently. "Sometimes I think," he said, "that we're trying to find something which does not exist. We're chasing phantoms—it's a deep subconscious wish fulfillment, which in some way is tied up with our fear of racial extinction."
Garaban smiled. "We have lived so long, we have all become rulers—but we have no one to pass the power to. I would be the last one to dash your hopes. But my theory is that these creatures are rebel parasites who have turned against their hosts, the matriarchs, and emerged from the subsurface cities. Obviously, they could not have been evolved in five hundred years. More obviously still, they could not have come from space!"
VARONA rose, and went into the interior of their ship. He stood before two hastily converted staterooms. Originally they had been doorless. Now they were barred with thin strips of alloy. The two strange creatures had been placed one in each stateroom. They were awake now.
Varona had hardly been there a moment before the larger of the two specimens took the vessel containing water, which had been placed inside the stateroom, and hurled it out, missing Verona by inches but nevertheless drenching him.
He stood there utterly astonished. While the creature uttered a rapid succession of discordant sounds, and shook the alloy strips with almost supernatural strength.
In the other stateroom, the yellow-furred female buried her face in her hands and emitted curious muffled cries as her shoulders shook convulsively.
After a while, the neuro-tempest subsided. But the male continued to glare at him with an awful fixity of purpose. It was then Varona noticed the creature had in his hand the noncorrosive alloy math-temporal rule he had lost, five centuries before.
He smiled. He wondered with faint amusement if such an occasion had ever occurred before. It was as if Porro, his pet savjer, were to take up in his paws a slide-rule.
As he stood observing the amazing creatures, Garaban and Moldav joined him.
Little by little, the rage of the male seemed to subside. He was emitting strange sounds now, and to their infinitely subtler minds it seemed as if there were a terrible desperate urgency in the deep voice.
"Do you suppose these creatures have a language of sorts?" Varona wondered aloud.
"Of course. Rudimentary, no doubt, but so has Porro here." He patted the bristling savjer who had followed the scientists silently. "No matter how low the order of intelligence, all life beyond a certain stage has means of communication—it may be vocal, as in this instance, or telepathic, as in the case of the matriarchs. Perhaps both, as in our case." He shook his head with vast disappointment.
"I would give my last remaining two hundred orbitemps," Varona said with conviction, "if I could only find the merest evidence of that spark which is the key to creative evolution in even this creature!"
"What do you imagine he sees of interest in that math-rule?" Garaban inquired half in earnest, half in amusement. "What an adventure to be able to penetrate his mind for even a few seconds!"
They fell silent. The two aliens were quiet now, as if from the depth of their vast despair they gazed at their captors, beyond fear and beyond words.
And out of the silence Moldav, the para-psychic, spoke. His voice rose, tinged with the faintest excitement. He had always been the most original.
"I think," he said uncertainly, "that perhaps we are defeating our purposes by trying to solve this problem from our own exalted point of view. We have become so far removed from the basic values of life that we no longer seem able to understand, not only the problems, but even to recognize the signposts! Observe. See how the family is desperate to be reunited with her mate. Does it not mean something to you, this powerful attachment, even under the stress of an artificial environment?"
They turned to gaze at him in astonishment. If they understood correctly what Moldav was trying to hint, these were low-intelligence beings—precursors of what might he one day, a culture comparable to theirs. This they had gathered from his mind.
Garaban, the psycho-synthesist, permitted himself a slightly sardonic smile. "Even Porro has an attachment of sorts for his females," he observed mildly. "The most bestial lower form will fight to the death to protect its young. These, my dear Moldav, are mere instinctive reactions. I am surprised that one of your brilliance and originality should entertain such mistaken deductions from primitive behavior!"
Varona raised his hand. As the eldest, he permitted himself certain prerogatives, and his whimsical mind had suddenly conceived a simple test which would once and for all settle all theories and speculations.
"
My dear Moldav, we have lost so much, so very much, that even the thrill of scientific and intellectual speculations has vanished. It was the last remaining type of adventure we had—we no longer have that. Since we seem to have become so emotionally rarified, that in comparison with these," he gestured toward Bolivar and Stella, "we are but a shadow of life; I wonder you would endow these creatures with the only remaining reason for existence that we possess. Surely, only after having tasted the bitterness of defeat, endless humiliations, unimaginable despair, were we able to rise to our present stature and understand the length and breadth and depth and height of the noblest, the only supreme emotion left to us. And that you should hint these creatures can even begin to be capable of it . . ."
Varona had the unprecedented and pleasurable feeling of being speechless for the first time in his life.
But Moldav held his ground. It was a challenge. If only for this, the Genserians' flight into space had been a success. "I can prove it," he said quietly.
"It will be cruel," Varona thought aloud, having read Moldav's mind.
"It will not harm them, however," Garaban interposed quickly, catching their trend of thought.
"How long shall we time the experiment?" Moldav inquired, as he eyed the alien creatures.
Varona gazed at them speculatively. "I should say that sixty divisions of time would be about right. If there is any danger during the experiment, we can always stop. Given their anthropological make-up, they should be susceptible to our rejuvenation process in case of physical damage."
And suddenly, despite the obvious absurdity, all three of them hoped with all their beings that the experiment would be a success.
TO BOLIVAR and Stella, the whole thing had been a tremendous shock. Bolivar had tried the three or four languages he knew on their captors, without success.
The very uncertainty, their complete ignorance of the fate in store for them, added to their fear and horror of the unknown.
He tried to reassure the hysterical Stella, repeating over and over, "Nothing's going to happen, my dear. They're just curious!" But he himself didn't believe it in his heart.
"But who are they? What are they trying to do to us?" Stella sobbed. She felt her senses reeling. The sight of the tall, attennuated beings whose large eyes regarded her so intently, paralyzed her reason.
Bolivar tried to explain, "They're from out in space somewhere, darling—probably millions of years ahead of us in development. And they're testing us. They don't quite know what we are, just as we wonder about them. But there's no danger!" He reassured her trying to put conviction in his voice. Stella sobbed.
That night Moldav who was on watch, came and stood silently before the two barred staterooms. He seemed to be concentrating as he regarded Bolivar and then Stella by turns.
Bolivar took the math-rule and moved it back and forth; he could not hope to understand its strange mathematical symbolism, but he tried desperately to show Moldav that he understood its purpose. The Genserian remained impassive and aloof.
In desperation, Bolivar concentrated on their new home on Rima, on Gus and his family living a few miles away; on Earth and its surging throngs, and mammoth cities—he concentrated until his head ached and his eyes burned.
For an instant Moldav's eyes glowed, then he smiled and left as silently as he had come.
The next day, the food ration stopped.
Stella and Bolivar didn't know what to think. They had never brought courage to life or to love—on Terra, it was not necessary. Their rigid, paternalistic culture frowned on greatness. The slightest deviation—even daring or great love, not to speak of abnegation—were considered proper subjects for psychiatric study.
They had no weapons left but themselves; no resources but the vast heritage of their race, now dormant and stifled by the cowardly soporific of an artificial way of life.
But they were the unwanted. They did not quite conform to Terra's sterile ideal. Were they not atavistic? For that they had been relocated—a polite euphemism for exile. And now, in their hour of need, it was their very failure which came to their aid!
The days lengthened into a week, and still no food was forthcoming. Stella and Bolivar had passed through the agony of hunger and into the grey chiaroscuro of semicoma. Daily they grew weaker. They had dreamed of feasts and banquets as they tossed restlessly and cried out in the night. But now, even the mocking specter of hunger had gone, leaving their minds preternaturally clear.
They knew that some fiendish test was under way. And they no longer hoped that their captors possessed any decency. At times they lapsed into delirium, losing their sense of reality as the subconscious overflow gave them relief from tortured nerves and endless fear. Phantoms and nightmares invaded their minds with distorted dreams and memories of Earth and Rima, only to awaken to the reality of starvation—made more stark and terrible by the increasing clarity of their minds.
The Test
IT SEEMED to Bolivar as if here in the glaucous depths of Rima's placid ocean there was silence and peace. He felt cool and relaxed in the luxury of an all-pervading lassitude. Only a faint memory of a "she" with yellow hair gnawed subtly at his mind; it was a vague remembrance that had to do with waving fields of grain like a golden sea. And the "she" was part of him—but he didn't quite know how. And then he was stooping over the freshly furrowed earth, to pick up a strange metallic instrument with odd symbols, which he could not understand out of its frame of reference. It looked like a super-slide-rule.
He floated in that placid sea, shielded by the warm darkness, weightless—in an ecstasy of non-feeling, scarcely breathing. Suddenly, he was flooded with light, and he felt himself rising, rising upwards until he broke surface and awoke to a universe of pain. His eyes were blurred, and delirium returned to dance a macabre saraband without meaning in his brain.
As if from a long distance he saw the fading outlines of his captors; their figures seemed to waver, recede and grow dim. He could hear strange voices pitched low, but the sounds had no significance. He felt a vague irritation at the figures and the lights and the sounds; he longed for the warm security of his placid sea. And without knowing it, he whimpered.
"We have gone too far!" Varona protested. During the weeks of the experiment, he had begun to feel the stirrings of emotions he had not known he was capable of. It made him uncomfortable. "We have no right to violate the concepts of our ethics."
"But you concurred in the experiment," Garaban softly reminded him. He, too, seemed haggard.
But it was Moldav who was not quite himself. He made a gesture with his hand . . . it trembled.
"I would have stopped it long ago," he said pensively, and purposely left his mind open for contact. "But I seemed to contact mental vibrations from the male. Strange! Something in the form of images he was trying to project. I decided then to go on with the experiment."
The other Genserian scientists gazed at him in mild astonishment, probing at Moldav's mind.
"But that would presuppose a high order of intelligence!" Garaban exclaimed with a measure of intensity such as he had rarely shown. "It would mean our search is at an end!"
Moldav nodded. "I am not quite sure," he said slowly. "If I am right, the final test will reveal it."
"I still think it's unfair," Varona shook his head incredulously. "Oh, they're biped, and therefore startlingly Genseroid, all right. Some of the indices conform to our highest expectations, such as cranial development and especially . . ." He broke off uncertainly and frowned at Molday. "The tailless, hairy, stoop-walking caricatures of Rigel-VI had similar characteristics, remember? There we drew a blank."
Moldav remembered. It had been one of their greatest disappointments. The strain he was under was beginning to give his fragile features an elfin look.
At that moment, one of the younger scientists came bearing aloft a steaming platter of food. Silently he placed it before the two staterooms, far enough back as to be clearly visible by both captives.
Slowly the passageway became filled with the rest of the crew. There was no sound except their shallow breathing, as the succulent odor of the food permeated the air.
And then Varona did a strange thing, he placed a hand on Moldav's shoulder, and his thoughts had a tinge of compassion.
"Don't be affected by the failure of this experiment," he said softly. "After all, remember that the instinct of self-preservation is supreme among all the creatures we have ever known. In all recorded history, we've never encountered abnegation—except among ourselves!" He touched an activating key to the lock on each barred door, and silently they slid back in their grooves.
The overpowering odor of food awoke her. Stella stirred and opened her eyes; so weak she could scarcely move, she stared at the white metal ceiling of her cell. Wave upon wave of maddening odor assaulted her. She trembled with the intensity of her desire as her mind cleared.
She turned her head slowly towards the source of the heady fragrance, and saw the platter of food. For an instant, her mind clouded, and she knew only a ravening urge to devour it. She glanced up and saw the tall figures of the aliens as they watched her, and her lips drew back tight over her teeth. Then sanity returned. Her mind had never been so clear. It was as if her famished and wasted body had released its hold upon her mental faculties, and there were no barriers to her understanding.
Intuitively she knew. This was the test! She gazed at the Genserians with a world of scorn mirrored in her eyes. And then she remembered Bolivar. He mustn't touch it, she thought inwardly. He mustn't! Slowly, she began to crawl to the open door to warn him; twice her strength failed her and she had to rest under the scrutiny of those alien eyes. She again began the slow, painful crawl toward the platter. Over and over she repeated in a scarcely audible voice the anguished refrain, as she called his name.