by Chad Oliver
Schaefer looked more closely. Diastema? He couldn’t tell.
Bodies: very light, small-boned, with extremely long, graceful arms. The arms were longer than the legs.
“They’re brachiators,” Schaefer breathed.
Moravia nodded. “Yes, they often swing through the trees.”
More pictures: caves, tents, thatched villages, adobe towns. Small fields planted with crops that looked like cereals. Some animals in corrals, ungainly mammals that were obviously milk-producers.
“Where is it?”
“Aldebaran. The fourth planet. One of the survey ships found it six years ago—the ship’s been back five months now.”
“Got a culture map?”
“Right here.” Moravia slipped a sheet out of his case.
Schaefer studied it carefully. There were four large continental land masses and several big islands. The survey had been thorough on cultural distributions, although it was necessarily superficial in a trait-list sort of way. Most of the people clearly lived by hunting and gathering. There were three centers of agriculture; one continent seemed to lack it altogether.
There were no cities, although there were a number of large adobe towns in several areas. He checked the key with a sinking sensation. No writing. And no real working of metals, except for some raw copper.
He put down his pipe. “Damn,” he said.
“Exactly,” agreed Moravia. “We’re stuck.”
Schaefer got up and paced the floor. It was maddening. It was like glimpsing the promised land and then having the gate slammed in your face.
“No mistake, I suppose?”
“None.”
Schaefer sat down again, clamped his pipe in his teeth. It had been rough enough when Pollux had been found, twelve years ago. That had been the first one, the first system with humanoid beings, the first positive evidence that man was not alone in the universe.
The end of a centuries-long search.
The fifth world of Pollux, 29 light-years from Earth, had a civilization, as defined by law: urban centers, writing, advanced technology. They even had spaceships, although they had not yet perfected an interstellar drive.
Schaefer still remembered the excitement, the promise, the thrill of that discovery. He had prayed that he might be selected to go along with the diplomatic mission as part of the scientific project. He had been passed over. He told himself that he couldn’t have gone anyway, couldn’t have left the kids to grow up by themselves while he spent the implacable years it took to reach another star system and return—
He shut off the thought.
The kids were gone now.
It didn’t matter anyway. Pollux V had had a civilization roughly comparable to Earth’s, which made it simple under the law. Earth could contact them again, talk to them, trade with them.
Aldebaran’s fourth planet was a different kettle of fish.
Schaefer knew the law, and approved of it. There had been enough powers in the UN that remembered their own status as one-time colonies so that the law was a foregone conclusion.
Earthman’s Burden?
Hunt the natives down if they look a little different?
Round them up and herd them into reservations?
No, thanks!
The law was explicit. If a planet was found with humanoid beings who were not prepared to defend themselves technologically or legally, there was just one policy: Hands Off.
No trade, no exploitation, no scientific missions.
No blather about progress and underdeveloped areas.
No well-intentioned slaughter.
It was the great triumph of mercy in law: Let ’em alone!
Schaefer understood that law, and believed in it. He knew the whole sordid story, concealed for so long: Tasmanians hunted like animals until they were extinct, Africans rammed into stinking ships and sold as slaves, Polynesians ravaged by disease. American Indians shot for game and tortured by Spanish explorers and then virtually exterminated simply because they were in the way.
It was a good law, the best law.
He handed the photographs back.
“Too bad,” he said. “But there are more important things than science.”
Moravia looked at the floor. “Yes. I knew you’d see that. That’s why I came to you.”
Schaefer waited, his palms beginning to sweat.
Moravia glanced around the office, his quick eyes taking in the good oil painting on the wall, the novels stuck in between the monographs and tapes and journals on the shelves.
“You see the problem,” he said slowly. “At least, you see part of it. We cannot go back to the Aldebaran system. It would be ethically and legally wrong.” He smiled faintly. “And we’d both lose our jobs if anyone ever found out.”
Schaefer stared at the man. “You’re not suggesting—”
Moravia ignored him. “We can’t go back. We dare not risk making an exception that might be the beginning of the end for millions of free people out there. It’s unthinkable.”
Schaefer waited, feeling as though he had one foot waving over a chasm, with the other about to follow.
Moravia slammed his fist down on the table with a suddenness that made them both jump.
“We’ve got to go back! Heaven help me, we’ve got to.”
The chasm yawned below Schaefer, black and waiting.
“Let’s have it,” he said.
Moravia took a deep breath. “Those people out there are in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Moravia met his eyes squarely. They were haunted eyes, tired eyes. “They’re dying,” he said.
Schaefer digested that one, slowly.
“All of them?”
“No. Just one area. Only a few hundred thousand people.” There was just a trace of irony in Moravia’s voice.
Schaefer drew on his pipe. He knew the score now. He wished desperately that Moravia had never walked into his office or his life.
“We could help them, is that it?”
“Looking at it simply as a problem to be solved, yes. We could save many of them, to say nothing of generations to come. There are people out there dying. We know the answer. Legally, we can’t deliver it.”
“And morally?”
“You tell me, Dr. Schaefer.”
The two men sat in the office, staring at each other.
II
It was early evening when Schaefer lifted his copter from the roof of his university office. There was a fat yellow moon in the sky, dimming the brilliance of the stars. He jockeyed into the fast traffic lane, a river of blinking lights that swirled in the soft night air.
Below him there was another river, a winding ribbon of silver in the moon’s rays. The river glided through darkness now; he could not see the green beds of the treetops or the wind-waves of the grassland meadows. But he could smell the freshness of it, the life of clear water and the peace of trees, and he was glad it was there.
Houses floated above him, warm splashes of light like fireflies in the dusk, and he thought, Antigravity did much more than just give us the key to space—it gave us back our Earth.
He remembered when he was a boy, walking in the green wonderland of the forest, building rock dams across chuckling little streams, and he was grateful for those memories. He was glad that people no longer dirtied the land with their cities, and thankful that men had headed off the pollution of the Earth while there was yet time.
It had been close, too close.
It was so easy to turn grasslands to dust, forests to eroding mud-flats, flowers to steel, rivers to sewers.
He looked up at the faint stars, almost hidden by copter-bugs and houses. God, I wouldn’t know Aldebaran if I were looking right at it.
Schaefer had never been in space, not even to the moon.
He knew, though, that Aldebaran was 53 light-years away. That was a far piece, in any league. Even with the interstellar drive, it would take a minimum of ten years, five years to get ther
e, five to return. And it wouldn’t be that simple.
He was no spaceman, his roots were in the Earth. His roots and his friends and his job. Ten or fifteen years was a big chunk out of a man’s life. To be sure, he wouldn’t age that much, not in the icebox, but everything on Earth would. Jim, Norm, Betty—they all would be past 60 before he returned. And in his own field he would be fifteen years behind. Fifteen years of journals …
And there was Lee.
He couldn’t go without her.
What of her life? Would she be willing to go? Could she take it? He didn’t attempt to kid himself about his wife. She was not so strong as she had been before they had lost their children. She had been an alcoholic for two years before they snapped her out of it.
He listened to the buzz of the copter in the night.
People are the problem. They always are.
He thought of Moravia’s haunted eyes, and wondered.
His home loomed up below him, an island of green in a sea of twinkling lights.
Schaefer landed.
They sat on the couch together. The coffee was still hot in the heat-retaining cups on the imitation redwood table, but it was stale and bitter. Even the fresh night breeze could not completely clear away the film of smoke from the room, and the ashtrays were filled with his charred pipe-cubes and her lipstick-stained cigarette butts.
He was not tired. He was in that flat state of being wide awake, but knowing he had to get up in the morning for an early class. It was probably worse thinking about it now than it would be then.
It was three o’clock in the morning.
Lee had dark circles under her eyes, and there was a coffee stain on the blue silk of her robe. Her hair—a soft brown that she referred to as a nothing color—tumbled down around her almost-thin shoulders.
Moravia’s photographs, maps, and charts were scattered on the floor.
“It’s up to you, Ev. You know that.”
He shook his head. “It’s up to both of us. Always has been. I fouled us up once; that’s enough.”
“Maybe.” Two youngsters playing by the stream. Danny with his dark, serious eyes. Sue, all laughter and sunshine. They’d wandered off; he hadn’t seen them. He’d been too busy with that fat old trout he’d snagged once, and missed. He had never even heard the screams when the kids had gone out too far in the swift water. He had never known, until the man had come to him with the two limp shapes in his arms….
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “He says he can fix it up, get me a leave, cover my tracks. But fifteen years is a long time, Lee. There’ll be questions. I won’t ever be able to tell anyone where I was. I’ll get no thanks for what I do. I could very easily lose my job. Maybe these are selfish considerations, but what the hell. I’m no knight in shining armor.”
She laughed, a friendly laugh. “Nobody ever accused us of being heroes,” she admitted.
“There’s more than that. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. It’s easy for some people—they always seem to know what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s never been easy for me. I believe in that law. I want no part of colonies that take a world away from its own people. I want no part of that ignorant arrogance that assumes that our ways are right and all other ways wrong. If we go out there, if we set the precedent for whatever reason, then what happens the next time, and the next?”
“Careful,” she said, touching him. “The knight is showing through the armor.”
He flushed. “Damn it all. How about our friends? What would they think of us?”
Lee didn’t answer. There was a silence, and then she said, “Ev, are you still worried about me?”
The question took him by surprise. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Should I be?”
“I won’t let you down again.”
“You never let me down, Lee.”
She leaned over and picked up a picture from the floor. They had both looked at it many times. It was a photograph of a child. Not a human child, perhaps, but they never thought of that.
A big-eyed, skinny kid—skinny except where his belly was bloated with hunger.
A shy smile, not asking for anything, not even hoping.
Just a hungry kid.
“Moravia knew what that picture would do to us,” he said, not without bitterness.
“We have to go,” Lee said. “There isn’t really any choice, not for us.”
He said nothing, his chin in his hands.
Lee got up with a whisper of warm silk. “Come on, honey. It’ll be a long day tomorrow.”
He got up, his mind blank, and followed his wife into their bedroom.
The lights went out, and their home was dark, with only the warning beacons burning beneath the stars.
The semester was almost over, and Schaefer was busy with his preparations for final exams. Writing them was no trouble by now, but all the secondary side-effects took time. There were students who had missed lectures, and wanted to be filled in on a week’s work in fifteen minutes. There were students who were failing, and wanted to pass. (“I’ll do anything, Dr. Schaefer, anything! If I don’t make a good grade, I’ll be disinherited!”) There were students who absolutely had to be on the moon the day of the final, and couldn’t they please take their exam with some other section?
It was funny, in a way, but life went on. His head was spinning with unanswered questions and problems he could not discuss, but he still had a job to do.
He hadn’t seen Moravia for almost a month.
And then, one afternoon, there he was, waiting in his office. He had another man with him—a small,l wiry man, his dark hair shot with gray.
“Ah, Dr. Schaefer!” the little man said, cutting off Moravia’s attempted introduction. “I am Tino Sandoval, your partner in crime.” He smiled, showing very white, even teeth.
Schaefer shook his hand with genuine pleasure. “I’ve read your book, sir.” He nodded toward a shelf and a title. Spring Lake.
“Excellent! Did you read it before or after you found out that you were going to have to work with me?”
“I read it years ago. It was wonderful.”
Sandoval was flattered and embarrassed, and covered it with a flood of words. “It was a little thing. The critics in your country, they say I am a new Thoreau. He was from New England, I am a Mexican.” He spread his hands in a thoroughly Latin gesture. “How can that be?”
Schaefer laughed, feeling more hopeful than he had felt in a long time. He knew that Sandoval was a top-notch ecologist, and he knew already that they would get along. That helped a lot.
“You two will have plenty of time to talk later,” Moravia suggested, smiling. “Should we get down to business?”
“He has taken on your ways,” Sandoval whispered loudly. “Always in a hurry! He wants to be an American.”
Moravia lit a cigarette. If he resented Sandoval’s remark, he gave no sign. “We’re all set and the ship is ready,” he said. “I can tell you that it wasn’t easy.”
He paused, searching for words.
“We talk a lot about spiritual values, about high purposes. Did you ever try to raise money, a lot of money, for a mercy mission—in secret, when the contributors can’t even get a button for their money? When they know, absolutely, that it will never benefit them in the slightest? When they know they are even breaking the law?”
He looked haggard, Schaefer thought. And his eyes were more haunted, more troubled, than ever.
“A lot of people had to know. The Security Council had to know. The governments of many countries had to know—unofficially, of course, You can’t build a spaceship and launch it in your backyard. Too many people know, and it can’t be helped. If anything goes wrong, if the word ever leaks, governments will fall. It is terrible how a thing like this can snowball.”
“In other words,” Schaefer said, “we’ve got a bull by the horns.”
“Exactly. If you get into trouble, we can’t help you. If you are successful, we can’t even
thank you in public.”
“It does not make for high morale,” Sandoval said. His voice was suddenly shrewd, stabbing. “Who is going with us?”
“You will have twenty UN men under your direction. They’re intelligent and well-trained.”
“Good. And the ship? Who will command the ship?”
Moravia seemed to hesitate, then spoke swiftly. “Admiral Hurley will have thirty officers and men under him.”
Tino Sandoval stuck a cigarette in a holder, lit it, inhaled deeply. “And this Hurley? You have every confidence in him?”
This time Moravia did hesitate. “He’s the best we could do,” he said finally. “He knows his business.”
“By business, you mean running a spaceship?”
“Yes.”
Schaefer watched the two men fence with each other. He had been bothered by the same questions, but he was content to let Sandoval carry the ball.
“You have of course fed the situation and the personality components into a computer?”’
“Certainly.”
“And the prognosis is that it will all work out OK, probably?”
Moravia hesitated again. “Probably,” he said. “Look here, Sandy! I’m in this thing as deep as you are—deeper, in fact.”
“You’re not going,” Sandoval pointed out bluntly. “We are. I mean no offense. If we can’t trust you, who can we trust?”
The question hung in the air. There was no answer to it.
Schaefer felt uncomfortable and tried to change the subject. He looked at Sandoval. “Is your wife going too?”
The little man laughed and jabbed his cigarette holder at the air. “My wife? That is a good one, Evan!”
“I’m sorry. I assumed you were married—”
“Oh, do not be sorry, please! Is a man sorry because he has no chain around his neck?” His eyes twinkled. “There are many fish in the sea, Evan.”
Moravia watched the two men with a curious expression in his eyes. Schaefer caught it, and wondered at it. Pride? Hope? Regret?
Evidently Sandoval also felt that it was time to let Moravia off the hook, for he steered the conversation into a new channel.