Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  “They must,” said Larsen patiently. “Look, suppose we’d found a strange ship already on the Moon? Would we have dropped down beside them, or would we have cased the layout first? Dropping in like that doesn’t make sense, unless they needed something from us enough to take chances on our being armed—or unless they’re completely invulnerable.” He paused, tasting that thought. “But if so, why this desperate urge to get into communication with us? Did you see anything on the ship—their power plant, say?”

  “I didn’t try.”

  Larsen sighed. “No, naturally. But they’ve seen about everything we have. Their men paired up with some of ours; and I couldn’t risk saying no, so they’ve been everywhere. And they’regood, Sam. Too damned good. They spotted our trouble with the tractors, and they pitched in at once. You know how those things come for assembly—and how much it takes to see they’re put together right? But these creatures —Perui, or whatever you call them—were hep to it all in ten minutes, and doing twice as much as our emergency crewmen could do. What’s more, they didn’t make any mistakes. They know machinery. What do they want?”

  “You tell me,” Sam suggested.

  “I wish I could. But for one idea, maybe they want to know what weapons we have back on Earth.”

  Sam grunted. “You’ve been in touch with the station, Bill,” he guessed. The other nodded. “Of course I have. That’s my duty. And once the station scope spotted their ship, all hell was to pay down on Earth. How do we know this isn’t just a scout for an invasion? They’re certainly not from one of our planets. We’ve picked up a mess of high-frequency radiation they use in communicating from ship to men here, and we’d spot that stuff from any planet in the system that had it developed to that degree. Besides, from what you say of their air, they must come from a planet like Earth, and we know that doesn’t fit any other planet here. How come we get a call from God knows just what star the minute our expedition touches the Moon?”

  “Earth’s seeing bogey men again,” Sam said in disgust “Either we’re getting set to take someone over or someone’s after us. Can’t two equals simply get together?”

  “Two equals, maybe. But we’re not their equals.”

  Larsen got up to leave, scowling at his own thoughts. “What has always happened when a superior culture meets an inferior one? You know the answer. See what you can learn tomorrow.”

  Sam muttered to himself. Well, what had happened when the whites met his people? War, of course. But it hadn’t been all bad. Then he amended that; it hadn’t been all bad, but it would have been if both sides had had atomic weapons. He reached for the tape recorder and turned it on, trying to concentrate on mastering more of the vocabulary. But before half an hour had passed he was sound asleep, dreaming he was playing Hermes in some tragedy.

  And no matter how he read his lines or went up on them, he couldn’t get it to move, and he knew the author had messed up the ending beyond all repair.

  * * * *

  iii

  In the morning Ato was waiting for him outside the dome, with a smile on his purple face that now seemed almost natural to him, rather than a learned trick.

  Sam saw that the other purple men were scattered about the field, mixing with the humans. Some crude measure of sign language seemed to have been worked out already, but it would be no good for abstractions. The labor gang had recovered from their binge and were out, looking somewhat chastened. Most of them were Andean Indians—a hangover from the building of the station, when it was thought they’d have a certain margin of safety in an accident. Most of them were avoiding the Perui, and he saw them making signs to ward off evil whenever a purple creature came near them. They were driving tractors on the Moon, but carrying their primitive superstition with them.

  And maybe the whole Earth was doing the same about the aliens.

  Inside the control room of the blue ship, the big electronic gadget seemed to be finished, and the technicians were gone. Ato dropped onto his seat, pointing to a queer glass of some liquid. “Drink it, Sam. We tested some of your drink, and this won’t hurt you.”

  Sam gasped. It had been in pidgin, of course, but the words had been completely fluent. Yet he could have sworn Ato was saying something in Peruta at the same time. For a second, ideas of telepathy that needed initial word symbols before it could work raced through his mind. He reached for the drink, his nose telling him it was mildly alcoholic; at the moment he didn’t care what else was in it, and it seemed palatable enough, though too sweet.

  Then sober thought replaced the fantasy, and he turned to the electronic panel.

  Ato’s voice came, but there was a lag this time. Then the machine spoke—and now Sam could recognize his own voice behind the words.

  “It’s a putting from language to language machine,” it announced. “The word, please?”

  “Translating,” Sam said automatically. That pause had come when the machine found no word for Ato’s expression, and had to hunt for another way to say it—and found one! Maybe a human technician could have taken one of the huge plotting computers used to plan their orbits and adapted it into a translating machine in a few months; such machines had been used long enough on Earth to speed the exchange of scientific knowledge. But to make one that could overcome its own ignorance was another matter.

  Bill Larsen had been right; these boys were good!

  Then he shrugged. There was still Larsen’s job to do. “All right,” he said, while the machine clucked out words in Peruta. “In that case, Ato, what do you want?”

  The smile came quickly this time. “A chance to talk, Sam —to talk until the machine won’t make mistakes or have to hunt for words. About history, perhaps. Shall I talk, or will you?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The purple head nodded—the first use of the motion Sam had seen.

  His soft voice picked up the story of the beginnings of life from the primal seas—almost the same as the one Sam had learned. The machine spent a lot of time at first in hunting for ways to carry across the meaning, but it grew more fluent as its vocabulary increased. Sometimes it missed in its use of words, but it never made the same mistake twice.

  * * * *

  Sam listened, fascinated in spite of himself. This was no wild story, no monstrously different way of life. It was Earth all over again, with names and events, orders of discoveries, and intervals of time changed. But it was a history he could understand as readily as his own. Fire, weapons, domestic animals, agriculture. Cities and then cruel empires. Writing and metal. Race and culture against race and culture, war, slavery. . . .

  He broke in abruptly, forgetting his resolve to give away as little about Earth as he could. “Our culture probably started on a little part of our mainland, too. We called it Greece. About twenty-five hundred years ago.”

  Ato listened, then drew something of a parallel, though with no Alexander, and with some strange ethical religion that sounded like a cross between Buddhism and Christianity. There had even been something like the crusades, and a discovery, much later, of four small continents occupied by savages.

  Sam took over again. They alternated until they were through the current stage of Earth.

  “We were earlier,” Ato said. “All that came for us about two hundred of your years ago. We reached our planets— barely useful enough to encourage us to go on. We had one major atomic war, but fortunately the peace screen was discovered just in time.”

  The peace screen, thought Sam, filing the words.

  “Then the two great powers had to get together. And we found the star ship secret. How to travel at thousands of times the speed of light—in theory; though we can’t do better than hundreds yet. After that, we’ve been spreading, trading, growing. We’ve found three very primitive forms of intelligence, but too low for speech.

  “And now, for the first time, another race and culture.”

  Sam sat back suddenly, the spell broken. Yeah, Earth would have gone through it all—but they’d missed it by
two hundred years. In America, the Indians would have gone through Europe’s progress in time; they’d found some measure of metal-working, the beginnings of writing, agriculture, and a lot of other things. They were moving ahead—not just the Mayans, but the Five Nations upnorth. The Seminoles hadn’t done too badly, all things considered. But they’d missed by a couple thousand years or so, and the higher-cultured whites from Europe had found them.

  Now those same whites at their planet-leaping stage had been found by a race a couple hundred years ahead.

  And in a technical civilization, a couple of centuries were the same as millennia to barbarians. Earth had missed it by two hundred years-—but she’d missed it. The Perui had the techniques, the star ships, and the empire. They’d crossed the galactic Atlantic, looking for trade routes—and found primitive mankind.

  And the worst part of it, as he listened somberly to Ato, was that it hadn’t even been deliberately planned as a voyage of discovery.

  Ato ran a trading ship. He had been going from a new solar system to an older one when detectors on his ship had registered certain radiation that looked like space flight. He’d spun around and backtracked—to find the trail of the Moon ships and follow them down to their base.

  “You took an awful chance, landing like that,” Sam said quickly, hoping that it would at least worry the other.

  * * * *

  But Ato seemed unconcerned. “Not at all. We saw the Moon was airless, so we knew there was no life. Why should a race able to cross space take weapons—when weight means so much in those little ships?”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” the purple man hesitated, then shrugged. “Wouldn’t you be curious if you’d found another race? We expected to some day. Of course, we hoped it might be at our own level. But I guess we’re lucky you weren’t ahead of our progress . . . though I wonder. Our social scientists worked out the steps to be taken for any contingency, of course.”

  Sam leaned forward. “I suppose you know those steps then?”

  He’d expected a denial, but Ato seemed perfectly willing to talk about it. And it seemed like a reasonable plan, all things considered, as Sam listened to it. A lot better than the Aztecs had got from Spain. Maybe as good as India and Egypt had managed with England. There’d be other ships here, of course—and the Perui would even supply Earth with engines to drive her ships to the planets and the nearer stars —the ones around here had not yet been taken over by the Perui. Some Earth scholars would probably be sent to Perui schools to learn more about the techniques, such as faster-than-light drive, than could be given directly to Earth technicians. There’d be little interfering with Earth rule, and a chance for Earth to lift herself up to complete independence as a part of the Peruvui empire. It would take time, of course, but. . . .

  “All this for nothing?” Sam asked doubtfully.

  Ato shook his head. “Of course not, Sam. We’re a practical people, like you. We’re back in the trading stage—on a larger scale. We’ll get things from you. There are a lot of things you can afford to do cheaper than we can, since your standard of living is so much lower for workers. You can do a lot of our smaller machining, produce certain special plants we need . . . after all, it’s cheaper now to ship across space than across an ocean, though there’s still a little more time involved. Oh, you’ll earn your way.”

  One of the Perui came in then, snapping quick words to Ato.

  To his surprise, Sam found he could understand most of them—the constant hearing of the two languages at once was wearing connections in his brain. Larsen wanted Sam.

  Sam stood up as the machine began, and for the first time he saw surprise register clearly on Ato’s face.

  “All right, I’d better go,” he said quickly. “Be back as soon as I can.”

  * * * *

  One of the men outside pointed to the big flagship.

  Sam hurried to it and up to the control room. It was practically stripped by now, but the radio was still there, and Larsen sat before it. He listened to Sam’s report, frowning heavily.

  “No weapons on the ship?” he asked at last

  “How would I know, Bill? I don’t suppose so, on a trading ship between friendly suns. But they could have. They must have had some dillies in that last war of theirs. What’s up?”

  Larsen grimaced. “All hell. Earth tried to contact the Perui. They found the right frequency, apparently, but they got no answer. Then reports came in from some amateur comet watchers—reports of stars suddenly being displaced along a line—and they’ve figured the Perui came in at a hundred or more times light speed and literally buckled space in doing it. Now they’re scared sick down there that this is the spy for an invasion. They’re dying to find what makes the ship tick. So am I, for that matter. But they want the ship held until Donahue can get here on the supply ship. . . .”

  “Donahue?” Sam repeated. He was the President’s own troubleshooter—-and in his case, there had been plenty of signs that the word meant a man who solved troubles by shooting them. There’d been a near riot in Burma over some of his methods, and diplomatic relations with Poland were still messed up from his last visit there. He’d had excellent reasons for his actions, of course, but. . . .

  “Donahue!” Larsen repeated. “He’ll be here in three days. And I gather from something else that he’s equipped.”

  “Equipped?”

  Larsen nodded. “With a missile containing an H-warhead —to make sure the ship doesn’t pull out after he gets here. But that’s just a guess.”

  It would have to be true. There’d be no point in trying to hold the alien ship without some form of force. “So what do I do?” Sam asked.

  “Hold Ato until Donahue gets here. Then pray to every manitou you know,” Larsen told him. “And don’t give away any secrets of ours, of course.”

  He started to swing back to the radio, then stopped. “Oh, yeah. And find out whether their home world knows about us yet. And how far away it is, and any other little military secret you can think of. That’s all, Sam!”

  Sam went out sickly. And the Aztec governor sent word to the men who’d sighted the big ship of Cortez, saying to hold him and to get his military secrets. And the king sent the governor out, armed with a specially powerful obsidian sword and a mantle of the choicest feathers. All he had to do was threaten Cortez enough to hold him until the king could find a way to steal the ship. It was all simple.

  But it probably wouldn’t matter, he realized. It hadn’t really mattered in Mexico.

  In the long run, up north, where the settlers came in peacefully to trade and steal a little, the results had been the same. The white man had taken on the White Man’s Burden, as he’d done in India and in Africa—except for a few tribes like the Zulus, who’d refused it with some success.

  Now the Perui would take on the Spaceman’s Burden, and Earth could like it or not. She’d get the castoff culture of the Perui, she’d be given a helping hand up to “independence”— and to a second-rate Perui culture. They’d have a chance to forget about being themselves and try to be something they never were. They’d be rich, in a way—just as some of the plains Indians had grown rich on oil and decay.

  Thank God, Sam’s ancestors had refused to suck up to the whites! They’d pulled into their swamps instead, after some bitter fighting. And today, the funny thing was, they’d somehow got into the present civilization without losing their respect for themselves or the white men’s respect for them. Their war had become a good-natured joke he and Larsen could kid about

  They’d made it without being the White Man’s Burden.

  He looked at some of the labor crew, still crossing their fingers to ward off evil spirits. Sure, they had television back home, and cars—and they were here on the Moon now, with him—doing the work the scientists didn’t have time for, and still only halfway to being men.

  It was a great future that lay ahead of them all, because of a two hundred year lag in technology.

  And Do
nahue was coming out with his little bomb to make it merrier. He’d insult the superior race and provoke them to force, maybe even kill this group. Then there’d be a quick retaliation, a few lessons that would end Earth’s final vestige of pride, and a somewhat harsher version of the same program of Spaceman’s Burden.

  Running feet jarred the ground behind him, and sounded through his shoes. He turned to see Larsen, holding out a small object. “Take it and hide it,” the commander said bitterly. “Orders!”

  He was gone, as Sam shoved the only revolver on the Moon into his pocket and headed into the alien ship.

  * * * *

  iv

  Ato looked up, smiling. “Your government wants to talk to me, I hear,” he greeted Sam. “Don’t they know I’m only a trader? I can’t make any arrangements with them, and I don’t have time to waste on politicians. I’ve got to get off here tomorrow, your time, to keep on schedule. Besides, I want to report all this as soon as I can.”