by J F Bone
“Others have said that,” the alien said. “Most of them submitted at once when they understood the alternative. If we must, we will reduce your number to a minimum and replace your present savageries with a better culture. But it is slow work to repopulate an empty world. We would prefer to use what the Ultimate Intelligence has provided.”
“That is generous of you.”
“We are a generous race. Ask any of our servants.”
“You are going to be a very dead race, if my people have anything to say about it.”
“By now they will have nothing to say. We should be well beyond any feeble reprisal your fellows might take, but even if we were not, your race will not find us. We can bend light and radiation around us and remain invisible. In fact we are doing it now. You could come within a few feet of the ship and never sense us unless you have mass-detection devices.” The alien shrugged its upper shoulders. It was a startling effect. “But enough of that,” it said. “I come to take you out of here. Until we finish our study of you, we would prefer you to be healthy. We have moved your living quarters from your building to our ship. Everything is ready for you.”
“And if I resist?”
“Then I will stun you and tow you. You will be no problem.”
“You’re right,” Bruce said, “I won’t. Not now.”
The alien maneuvered him through the sphincter and down a transparent hallway lined with banks of what looked like filter panels. They passed through two interlocks—which were only roughly similar to those on Earth—and down a corridor that gave an odd impression of flexibility and porosity, through a third interlock and into an opaque corridor lined with contracted sphincter-doors. The alien stopped before one of them, opened it and pushed Bruce inside. “Your personal things have already been examined,” it said. “We have removed the weapons, but for the rest you will find them undamaged. And in the meantime this may make you more comfortable.” It took a bright coppery square of metal from inside its tunic and laid it on the floor. “Carry this on your person,” it continued. “You will not float.”
“So how do I get to it?” Bruce asked.
“That is your problem,” the alien said as it stepped through the sphincter and disappeared.
“For every reaction,” Bruce muttered, “there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Newton proposed the law a century and a half ago, but it wasn’t going to do him much good. The aliens had stripped him to the skin. Had they but left him his slippers he would be down to that piece of red metal in a moment. By throwing them in one direction he would travel in the other. But he had nothing. He thought for a moment and then grinned. Maybe he could swim. After all, air had some resistance.
It had. A couple of minutes of sculling with cupped hands brought him down to the piece of metal. He touched it and promptly sprawled on the floor. He picked the thing up, stood up and went across the cubicle to where his dresser was set against the wall. He sighed happily as he opened a drawer and took out a pair of coveralls. There were slippers in another drawer, and in a few minutes he was dressed and infinitely more at ease. There was something about clothes that restored his confidence.
As a routine preliminary, Bruce tested the walls, ceiling, floor and door. They were all solid. The door was closed tightly and would not open. He looked at the walls and ceiling. There was nothing of importance; air intake and exhaust ducts in the wall opposite the door, three lenses and a peculiar luminous glow in the ceiling. The air was faintly sulfurous, but breathable. Over the long run it might be harmful, but Bruce didn’t think he’d be around that long.
Bruce tested the installations. None of the plumbing worked which was to be expected, but the electrical appliances operated perfectly.
“Well,” he said. “That’s something.” He trailed the wires to neat needlelike plugs which penetrated the wall. “Hmm—good way to wire—gets rid of fixed sockets. Walls like these would be something building contractors would sell their souls for, if they could be built economically.”
Bruce ran his fingers over the stubble on his chin. It felt heavy—like a full day’s growth. “It’s a helluva time for shaving, but I’d better do it before I begin to look like one of the Smith Brothers,” he muttered as he opened the medicine closet over the wash bowl and took out his electric razor. “Anyway it’ll give my four-armed friends something to think about.”
Feeling a little better, Bruce continued his search for weapons. It was a perfectly natural reaction. Indeed, it would have been out of character had he not done so. Among the first things he examined was the station’s portable transceiver which he kept in his quarters. The radio was dead except for a faint crackle of static, which argued plausibly that if no radio waves came in, none would get out. Yet on the chance they might, he broadcast an appeal for help and planned to repeat it every hour. He grimaced a little. He had a mental picture or chuckling aliens watching him through the lenses in the ceiling.
He checked the rest of his gear for possibilities. The aliens had taken his gun, but there was a refrigerator, a stove, a vacuum cleaner, a coffee pot, an electric toothbrush, a toaster, a waffle iron and a flashlight. This certainly wasn’t the sort of stuff with which wars were won he thought ruefully. The refrigerator would have been a possibility had it been one of the old fashioned freon or ammonia kind. The gas could perhaps be poisonous to aliens. But this box was a direct heat exchanger and didn’t use refrigerant, a nice ultramodern gadget with zero possibilities as a weapon. Something conceivably could be done to the stove to convert it into an instrument for electrocuting the unwary, but that possibility was remote. He looked at the stove and shook his head. Scratch that thought. It simply couldn’t be done. As for the rest of the stuff, it had no use as far as he could see. Any weapon he could make would have to be elemental, something like a club. Ah yes—a chair leg. Bruce upended his chair and looked at it. The metal legs screwed into the seat. They could be easily removed to give him four tapered pieces of tubing two inches in diameter at the base, three quarters of an inch at the tip and a foot and a half long. They would be very satisfactory, providing something came close enough to be clobbered. He set the chair aside and went to the bed. The sheets could be cut into strips and made into an adequate rope which one could use to tie clobbered bodies and keep them helpless. The electric cord from the blanket controls would make a fine garotte. There was enough material for weapons if he kept them simple.
With surprise and a little luck he should be able to immobilize and disarm an alien. Then, with the alien’s weapon he could do considerably more damage. He just might make it hot enough for them to think twice before trying to subjugate men. He didn’t believe the talk about depopulating Earth. That was the sort of thing authors wrote about in science fiction.
But what could create a diversion? His neck itched. Absently he scratched it. A few stray hairs from his recent shave were irritating his skin. Hmm, that was an idea. Maybe if he dumped shaving dust into the air ducts he could cause a diversion. At any rate it was worth trying. But it was a big ship, and although he could collect quite a bit of hair from shaving, it probably would not be enough to cause significant damage. However, he would give the idea the old college try and use everything he had. There was no sense in doing a half-baked job. By shaving his body as well as his face and head, he would probably double the amount of available hair, and that just might be enough to provide a good diversion if there was no internal filtering system. At best, it could give him a certain advantage by producing allergic reactions in the enemy. At worst it would only be a waste of time.
He set about reducing his hair to powder. It was a harder task than he thought. An electric razor designed for beards is a poor clipper for other kinds of hair, but after a fashion it worked. In some cases he had to compromise on short lengths, clipped with scissors rather than the fine powdery razor residue he would have preferred. But at last the task was done and the few grams of hair, dumped into the room exhaust. All that he could do now was wait—an
d unscrew the legs of the chair.
III
Things happened faster than he A expected. Within thirty minutes, a coughing alien appeared in the halfopen sphincter. He carried a plastic bottle full of liquid, and as he set it inside the room, a hacking paroxysm turned his yellowish face a dark crimson. Bruce looked at him, grinned and picked up a chair leg. He was in business.
Three hours later he controlled the ship. Behind him lay a trail of dead, dying, bound and gagged aliens tucked away in dark corners, and his chair leg was bent, dented and splashed with the alien equivalent of blood. He scowled as he tied an alien into one of the control chairs in the operations center. This was the last he could find. It had been hiding in one of the equipment lockers, but its coughing had given it away.
His hair had worked too well. The shorter pieces got on skin and into lungs causing allergic reactions and severe bronchial irritation. Predictably, none of the aliens realized what was happening until it was too late.
The longer pieces sabotaged the ship’s mechanisms, and this Bruce didn’t really expect. He knew, of course, that dust and debris could affect the performance of delicate instruments and machinery, but what happened to the alien ship seemed entirely out of line compared with the cause. The confusion was incredible. Nothing worked properly. Lights sputtered and faded, circuits shorted, servos labored or ran at insane speeds. Rotors stuck, shafts seized, switches and relays failed to work. Solenoids didn’t operate, thermocouples failed to register, tubes shorted out, armatures smoked, wiring arced, microminiaturized circuits melted. It was shambles.
He had thoroughly disabled the alien spaceship.
He poked the alien with his battered club. He hadn’t tried to use an alien weapon after one of them had incinerated its owner as it was trying to shoot him.
The alien grunted and coughed. To Bruce that alien was interesting only because it wore a translator and could talk. Otherwise, he would not have wasted time on it. He didn’t think much of the aliens anyway. They were thoroughly inefficient combat types without their gadgets. Possibly if he knew them better he could find some more positive qualities. As it was, they were that faceless thing called “the enemy,” something that had to be incapacitated without any emotional involvement.
The alien coughed and shook its hairless head. “Why don’t you kill me?” it asked.
“I have no reason to,” Bruce said, “besides you might be useful.”
“How?”
“You could explain these controls.”
“Do you think I would?”
Bruce shook his head. “No,” he said, “not voluntarily. But there are other ways of getting answers.”
“Torture will do you no good.”
“Do you think I am that uncivilized?”
“You attacked us with a biologic weapon against which we had no defense. You may have killed us all. That is uncivilized.”
“What did you expect me to do? Sit still while you killed me?”
“We would not have killed you,” the alien said, “But I don’t suppose you could be expected to believe that. As a member of a racial complex with high culture, but low civilization, you would expect to be tortured or killed. Civilized races have other and better ways of getting at the truth or developing information. You would not have been hurt.”
“Then what was all that talk about killing us off?”
“Racial only. We would have seeded your world with an organism which would have prevented the great majority of you from reproducing. In a few generations your huge, untidy population would have been reduced to manageable size. But we would not have destroyed a single one of your lives. We merely would have prevented new ones.”
“Which in the end would make little difference,” Bruce said, “it would still be genocide.”
“No—there would be a small proportion of your population that would be immune. Not all of you would be killed, nor would your race be extinguished. Your survivors would be educated to fit into our plans, and in a thousand years you probably would be as numerous as you are now.”
“Oddly enough, I believe you,” Bruce said. “Not that it makes any difference.”
“You are right. It makes no difference. In a few years the absence of our ship will be noticed, and a task force will be sent to cover the same route we have traveled. They will encounter you, and this will not happen a second time. Things will be different.”
“They will indeed,” Bruce said.
“Had we suspected that you were so different from us,” the alien said, “we would have taken greater precautions. We assumed correctly that you were a bloodthirsty barbarian, but we made the error of equating your group reactions with your individual ability. You see, in our society, the group action is a direct reflection of the individuals composing the group. In yours it is not. We assumed that you were lazy, hesitant, cowardly, stupid, dilatory and dirty. But somehow you are not.” The alien struggled, gasped, coughed rackingly and sagged with exhaustion when the spasm passed.
“I do not understand you,” it muttered.
“The feeling is mutual,” Bruce said. He looked at the three boards in the room. They were obviously designed to be operated by three aliens—and quite probably the three worked as a unit, synchronizing their activities. It was also quite probable that the central board had control of the major activities of the ship, while the two other boards each controlled a hemisphere. Of course, that might not be the case at all. Alien logic and positioning probably was not similar to human.
As they were now, the three boards were not designed to give anyone peace of mind. They smoked, sputtered and occasionally made noises and flashed lights. They behaved as no control boards should.
If he were an alien, Bruce reflected, he would be worried by the actions of the boards. As it was, he was terrified.
“For your sake,” Bruce said not unkindly, “I will allow you to tell me how to shut off these boards.”
“I appreciate your offer,” the alien said with equal politeness, “but I will not tell you. Figure it out yourself. It should be instructive. The odds are about twenty-to-one against your success.”
“And—”
“If you fail, we are destroyed. And just in case you wish to leave things as they are, sooner or later we will have a key malfunction which will destroy us.”
“And this makes you happy?”
“No. But it will keep our ship and our technology out of your hands. Primitive as you are, you could still make use of many of our devices. You understand the elements of solid-state physics, and your electronics are adequate.” There was no longer a note of contempt in the alien’s voice. It was as if, having chosen to die, the alien saw no reason for trying to be chauvinistic. It coughed again and thrashed violently in the chair where Bruce had tied it. The paroxysm ceased, and the alien sank back, breathing heavily.
“I really have no desire to die messily,” it said. “Only in battle does a messy death allow me an unmarred place with my ancestors. And the action on this ship may not be a battle in the strict sense of the word.”
“Then tell,” said Bruce, “and live to fight another day.”
“No, I must assume that this is war.”
“Well then,” Bruce said, “I’ll have to go it alone.” He reached a hand toward the switchboard and watched the alien narrowly. The alien gave no sign of tension. There was a light burning over the switch. He turned the switch, and the light went out. Four switches later, the alien tensed. Bruce left this one alone and went on. By the time Bruce had nearly finished the board, the alien discovered what the man was doing. It thereupon closed its eyes, tensed its muscles and waited impassively.
By now, however, Bruce was acquainted with the rationale of the board. It was similar to what a man might construct. The color codes were different, and the groupings were probably entirely different; but there were main switches for each section, and these Bruce could recognize and operate. One after another he turned them off until the alien ship flo
ated dark and dead in an orbit around the Earth.
“And now what do you plan to do?” the alien asked from the darkness.
“Wait until we are rescued,” Bruce said, “Now that everything on this ship is turned off it probably looms up on every tracking radar system on Earth that is within range. In about twenty-four hours we will have visitors, and personally I don’t give a damn whether they speak Russian or English. You and your kind hold a threat for my world that is bigger than nationalism or ideology. We will have to co-operate to keep you out.”
“You are absolutely right, Earthling,” the alien said, “but I am also certain that you will not co-operate. Your world has too many cultures, too many ideologies and not enough civilization. You cannot co-operate even if you wish to.” It began to cough again in harsh racking spasms that did not stop.
“We can try,” Bruce said. He found one of the seats behind a secondary board and sat down. He felt no triumph as he listened to the alien’s agony. His lungs hurt, his skin itched and he wanted to cough. A hair had managed to get into his left eye, and it felt as big as a stick of firewood. He was miserably uncomfortable, and the knowledge that any aliens who were still alive were in worse shape was absolutely no consolation.
Their chances for survival were poor, but his own were not much better. The trap which had enmeshed the aliens had also caught him. There was enough hair in his own respiratory system to cause foreign-body pneumonia if he didn’t get prompt medical attention. But that knowledge didn’t bother him. The odds for survival were considerably better than they were a few hours ago, and his problems were simple. All he had to do was stay alive.
For the alien was wrong. Bruce listened to the coughing in the darkness and felt a twinge of pity for his victim. Men would unite against a common danger, and if their fear was great enough, men would cooperate. Bruce’s lips twisted in a smile that was half a sneer. The people of Earth would co-operate. He would see to that. And he would live to watch them form one world to repel invasion from space, by soulless aliens bent on genocide.