Slowly the hatch clanged shut behind them.
For a moment Ben stopped, trying to adjust his eyes to the dim light inside the ship. They were standing in a huge hallway lighted with luminous poles, with shops and drydocks extending as far as they could see on either side of them. On all sides there were small blue-gray creatures hard at work, hundreds upon hundreds of them. In the drydocks Ben could see a dozen smaller ships swarming with elfin workmen, and across the room showers of sparks flew up from a dozen welding torches. The air was filled with the din of metal on metal; there was hammering and banging, and the whine of winches and the rumbling of overhead cranes carrying crews up and down the hulls of the ships.
The workmen paused as they moved down the center corridor, regarding them curiously with their strange empty blue eyes. Ahead, their guide hurried along as the corridor became a catwalk overlooking huge banks of computers and communications equipment. They passed another area where workmen were posting signals on a vast space map, moving swiftly as powerful radar transmitters swept information into their hands.
For all the hugeness of the ship, Ben Trefon had the curious sensation that he was in a dream world, a giant among elves, towering head and shoulders above the creatures that crowded around them as they passed. Yet from the way these creatures stood and from the expressions on their wizened faces, Ben wondered who the giants were, after all. There was nothing he could pinpoint, but could feel the enormous power of these people, a power that could obliterate him instantly if it were ever to be activated, yet a power which was dormant rather than active. There was no sign of hostility here; indeed, these creatures were regarding him with eagerness and expectation. All about him, whispering wordlessly in his ear, Ben could feel the wave of excitement growing as though a mighty bowstring were being pulled back until it was ready to snap.
It was an uncanny feeling, and a glance at Tom and Joyce’s puzzled faces told Ben that they could feel it too. But there was no time to stop and try to catch distinct impressions. Their escort turned suddenly down a side corridor and ushered them into a small room that looked surprisingly like the library of a Spacer home on Mars. One wall of the room was covered with a bank of instruments; another side held a huge store of microfilm spools and magnetic tapes. As they entered the room their eyes were drawn to the diminutive gray figure at a desk at the far side.
He was a creature like the others, but somehow he looked older, and his shoulders were bent as though he were carrying an enormous weight. He rose as the door closed behind them, and the creature who had escorted them hurried forward to greet him.
And once again Ben heard the musical voice in his ear saying, “Greetings, brother. They have come to us at last, even as you predicted.”
• • •
Across the room the creature stirred slightly, turning smoky blue eyes upon them for so long that Ben felt himself getting dizzy staring at them. Then the creature made another move, and a deeper voice echoed in Ben’s ears. “You have come a long way, both in time and in space,” the Elder was saying. “You must be tired and hungry, perhaps confused.”
“We’re confused, all right,” Ben said sharply. “Who are you people? Where do you come from, and what are you doing here?”
“We are dwellers of the Rings, just as you are,” the voice came back gently. “And we have known your people well, in times past. The belt of power has been our avenue of contact. Now you must let me examine the one you wear.” The voice hesitated. “This chamber is pressurized and supplied with your oxygen needs. You may safely remove your suits.”
Stepping out of the heavy pressure suit, Ben loosened the black web belt from his waist. The capsule was still vibrating like a thing alive. When the creature reached out for it, their fingers touched for an instant, and Ben felt a tingle much like a slight electric shock. But the creature was slipping the capsule from the webbing, staring at it minutely.
He examined it for a long time in silence. Then he looked up at Ben. “So Ivan Trefon is really dead in this senseless war of yours,” the voice said sadly. “I had hoped to the last that our information might be wrong, that such a man had not really been wasted so tragically. But you are now wearing the belt that he wore.”
“I’m his son,” Ben said. “But my father never spoke of you.”
“I know. Your father was a man of honor and integrity. He kept the pledge of silence he made, for he knew that the time had not come to speak of us. In all the centuries that we have counseled with men of Earth it has never been time. But now perhaps it must become time, whether the time is right or not.” The creature looked straight at Ben Trefon. “Your war with the Earth-dwelling men must end before it is too late. Already it has gone too far for simple means, but this time we cannot intervene openly. We intervened once before, against our judgment, and the results were tragic. This time only you can intervene for yourselves.”
Ben saw the puzzled frowns on the Barrons’ faces. “We don’t understand,” he told the creature. “You seem to know so much about us, and we know nothing about you.”
“How we know is not important now,” the creature replied. “What we know is urgently important. We know that you dwellers in space still do not realize the determination of your Earth brothers to destroy you. We know that many Spacers have withdrawn to their last battlement, their Central asteroid, and that the remaining forces have gathered to prepare a disastrous counterattack on Earth itself. Should Asteroid Central fall, the trigger would be pulled and a planetary holocaust would result.” The creature hesitated. “We cannot read the future. We can only predict on the basis of long and bitter experience. Should your war be pursued to its end, the odds are four to one that all human life in the solar system will be obliterated, that the spark will be extinguished once and for all. And that cannot be permitted to happen.”
“But that’s not possible!” Tom Barron cried. “You talk as if we were children.”
“This is a war of children,” the creature returned sharply. “Only children would slaughter each other out of ignorance and fear. Only children would fail again and again to learn the lessons of their foolishness, and stubbornly, blindly persist in their childishness. Don’t speak to me about children, I know what children you are. But I also know the greatness you could achieve if you would only put away childish things.”
They stood silent under the rebuke. Behind the creature’s words Ben could sense a powerful wave of exasperation and anger mixed with concern, the exasperation and concern of an adult for a willful and recalcitrant child, mixed with apprehension and sorrow. For the first time Ben began to see some connection between these strange creatures and the events that had been happening. Pieces of the puzzle suddenly began to fit. He looked up at the little gray figure across the room. “You people are not from Earth,” he said. “You don’t come from any place in the solar system, do you?”
“Of course not,” the creature replied.
“Then who are you? Why do you care what happens to us in our wars?”
“Because that is our purpose here: to care. We have watched your planet for millennia, since the first spark of intelligence flared up in your people, and we have watched that spark grow into the raging fire it is today. Our job is to keep that fire alive until you cease being children and learn how to control it yourselves, until you learn how to use it. Then our work here will be done, if you have not destroyed yourselves in your childishness before you can mature. But one of your own people can tell you about us better than I can. I believe that your father left you something else as well as the belt of power, did he not?”
“The tape,” Tom Barron said.
“Yes, there was a tape,” Ben said. “A mauki chant, but we couldn’t understand it.”
“Let me see the tape” the creature said.
Ben drew the spool from an inner pocket and handed it over. The creature went to a player at the side of the room, placed the tape in the slot and adjusted the controls.
“It
won’t be any good,” Ben said. “It’s in a language none of us understands.”
The tiny gray creature smiled. “Who knows?” he said. “Perhaps you will understand it now. Perhaps that in itself will help you understand why we are here.”
For a moment there was no sound in the room but the swish-swish of the tape in the player, Then, suddenly, the room was flooded with music. It was the same music that Ben and Tom had heard from the player in the vault below the House of Trefon, the same measured rhythms, the same woman’s haunting voice, the same refrain they had heard before. Even the words were the same, words which had seemed familiar but not quite understandable before, as if they were words of a subtly different tongue.
But now, incredibly, the meaning of the words became clear. Ben stared at the frayed tape going through the player, heard the same scratchy defects from repeated replaying as he had heard before, but now the mauki’s chant was understandable, unmistakable in its meaning.
Like so many of the mauki chants Ben had heard, this was a story set to music. Like those other chants, it dealt with times and places and great events, but this story was utterly strange to Ben Trefon. He listened, and the Barrons listened too, their faces reflecting the increasing wonder in their minds as the story unfolded.
It was the story of a people, but not of human people. They were similar to men in many ways, with the loves and hates and fears of men, but a people far older and greater and more powerful than men had ever dreamed of being. These people had been living for untold ages at the time when Earth and her sun were no more than motes of dust in the emptiness of space between the galaxies. Already then these people had been engaged for eons in an endless, patient search through the vast reaches of the universe. Where they had come from and why and how they had first begun to roam the galaxies even they themselves did not know … but they did know that they had a purpose to fulfill, a purpose that spanned all space and extended through all time. And that purpose was to search out, wherever it might be, with infinite patience and perseverance, a certain tiny flame that they knew flickered up from time to time in new galaxies and old across the firmament.
They were called the Searchers, and their dedication to their goal exceeded understanding. There was no time too long to wait, no distance too far to travel, if there was hope that their search might finally lead once again to another source of precious flame they sought. They did not know what that flame was, nor how it came about, nor why it occurred when it did, but they knew full well the incredible, unthinkable power for good or for evil that it signified. And they knew that there was nothing more rare and wonderful in all the universe than this tiny flame whenever it appeared anew: the flame of intelligence flaring up in a race of creatures evolving here or there across the galaxies, with the reason and compassion and strength that always accompanied it.
Time and again the Searchers discovered the flame of intelligence burning brightly on remote planets of remote stars; each new discovery was a time for rejoicing, for then once again the real work of the Searchers could begin. Most intelligent races were planet-born and star-bound. Without aid they would arise, and flourish, and die within the boundaries of their own solar systems, perhaps sensing that other intelligences existed elsewhere in the universe, but unable to reach across the immensities of interstellar space to contact them. Some, more advanced than others, even sensed that their intelligence, in itself, was incomplete, that its real potentials could never possibly be realized without joining with other intelligences across the starways. And for them the tragedy was even greater if they could not find a way to reach from galaxy to galaxy.
But the Searchers were not planet-born, and their lives were not bounded by the time limits of racial history. Geological ages for them were the same as minutes on their time scale; they alone could take the time to search out intelligence wherever it might arise, and nurse it to maturity, and draw it into contact with the great community of intelligent races that grew and flourished in the universe of life. For the Searchers it was a sacred trust that they could not and would not relinquish.
There had been a time when a group of Searchers, traveling with incredible power through the depths of space, had sensed the tiny flame of intelligence flaring up in a race of creatures living on the third planet of a medium-sized main-sequence star situated far out on one of the arms of an immense spiral galaxy. How the Searchers had sensed its presence no one could say; it was enough that they knew it was there, and with excitement and joy plans were made for contact. But contact was approached with caution as the Searchers landed upon the planet where the flame was burning. Long experience had taught them to observe and assess a new intelligence first in secrecy and silence, for raw intelligence without the temper of maturity could do immeasureable harm if contacted too soon. Almost at once the Searchers knew that a flaw was present here, a flaw they had encountered countless times before.
There was intelligence among these creatures who called themselves men. There was reason among them, there was an enormous vigor and curiosity, but their intelligence was raw and uncontrolled. The Searchers had seen the flaw in other races before; these men themselves had words to describe the flaw that crippled them. Like children who had never grown up, their intelligence lacked maturity and compassion. They were only beginning to grasp the difference between themselves and the unintelligent creatures that lived and died around them. Their potential was enormous; the things that they might one day accomplish in a community of intelligent races were staggering, but they were not yet ready for even a suspicion that they might have such potential, for they still thought and acted and behaved as children.
It was a sinister flaw, a grave impediment. The Searchers knew that some intelligent races had never learned to overcome it. Some had lived out their racial history in ignorance of what they might become simply because they had never grown up enough to be told. And it was a flaw which had to be overcome before contact with other races could be permitted.
For a childish intelligence could never cope with the powers that contact would provide them. A race of intelligent children would never contribute. It would only exploit. Without maturity, this intelligent race of men was incredibly dangerous, far too dangerous to entrust with knowledge it would be unable to control.
It was tragic, but simple. A child could not be handed a loaded gun.
So the Searchers waited. They had first come to Earth in a time of empire, and they watched in silent horror as great cities arose from the labor of peasants, tyrants bludgeoned their way to power, soldiers marched and slavery flourished. They waited patiently as men struggled and fought among themselves, as children do, watching hopefully for the first signs of maturity to appear. Over the centuries, bit by bit, they began to hope that their patience might ultimately be rewarded.
• • •
In the dimly lighted room the song of the mauki paused, and the music changed subtly. Ben shook his head, only half comprehending what he was hearing. The Barrons seemed equally wonder-struck. It was as if something was drawing out their minds and painting a picture for them through other eyes, a picture of their own people that they had never seen before. A thousand questions burst into Ben’s mind, but there was no chance to ask them, for the mauki’s song continued, an incredible song, yet a song so compelling that it defied disbelief.
True to their purpose, the Searchers had waited, watching the painful progress of this race of intelligent creatures called men. They listened to the clank of metal armor and smelled the sweaty leather of the Roman armies as they marched north into Gaul. They heard the thundering hoofbeats of the invading hordes from the East, and watched the crumbling of the mighty empire that had been Rome. Throughout the dark centuries that followed they watched and waited, occasionally reaching out for momentary contact with one man or another. Bit by bit their presence became known in the physical form they had chosen to use on Earth, and legends grew up among men, folk stories of elves and trolls and other creatures
of the middle world, living on Earth with men but hidden from men’s senses unless they chose to be revealed. With quickening excitement the Searchers witnessed the blossoming of intelligence as the Middle Ages drew to a close and men discovered science and began systematically to explore their own minds and the physical world that lay about them. The signs of maturity began to gather; the capability was there. Soon, the Searchers were saying to each other, soon the time for contact would arrive.
Then, before their eyes, the variable appeared that the Searchers had been dreading. Just as a child grows rapidly in one way and remains a child in others, these men began moving swiftly with their new-found knowledge of science, and lagging in other areas. In rapid succession two terrible wars broke out, driving Earth technology before them even as humanity was forgotten. The day came when the Searchers saw an enormous bomb explode over an Earth city and form the dreadful mushroom cloud of atomic holocaust, and they knew that the turning point had been reached. They knew men now held the key to utter self-destruction. These children had fashioned their own gun and turned it upon themselves as the struggle between the perpetual childhood of slavery and the mature ideal of free individuals in a free society went on.
No one could choose for them as men continued striving to resolve that struggle. Leaping forward, they learned to leave their planet and explore their solar system, landing outposts of men on Earth’s moon, on Mars, on Venus. Slowly the struggle between slavery and freedom intensified, building up to a frightful war of nuclear weapons fought on Earth and in space alike, and slowly that war became probable, and then inevitable, and the Searchers at last were faced with a terrible choice: either to intervene or to allow these creatures to destroy themselves before their childhood ended.
Right or wrong, the Searchers chose to intervene.
It was an unthinkable choice for these observers from the stars, for bitter experience had told them that intervention in itself could precipitate disaster. But the alternative was equally unthinkable. Nuclear wars in other places and in other times had wiped life from the faces of planets. Intelligent races, flaring with such promise as these men, had been utterly destroyed. Intervention was considered the lesser of the evils, and cautious contacts were made with certain key humans, certain mature men, among the brave crews manning the opposing garrisons in space. By using the belts of power to contact certain men, the Searchers had revealed themselves, and on the very eve of the Great War, had drawn from these men their agreement to protect their race from itself by withholding fire when the war began.
Raiders From the Rings Page 15