A Separate War and Other Stories (23 page)

Bloodshot eyes clot with rheum, cataracts cloud and blind them, the lids close and collapse inward and the body—real only in the minds of two disparate creatures—was mercifully dead.

The brown skin darkened further and released its life grip on the ancient body; the body puffed up again in macabre burlesque of its younger brawn. It lived again for a short time as maggots fed on its putrescence.

Then a dry, withered husk again, still standing upright; the last vestiges of skin and flesh sloughed off to reveal a brown-stained skeleton filled with nameless cobwebs. It collapsed with a splintering clatter.

On top of the pile of grey dust and bones, the yellow skull glared balefully at Jimmy for a long moment, and then, piece by piece, the whole grisly collection started to reassemble itself.

Before the clatter of Jimmy's footstep's had faded, his alter ego was whole and well again. The black-skin molecules had become charcoal-grey-Brooks-Brothers-suit molecules and Braxn, the very model of the young man on his way up.

Braxn scanned the still forms around him and found that they were all still unconscious. One, the little one, was dead. Probing further, Braxn dissolved a blood clot, patched an infarction, and shocked the still heart back into action. Pity to spoil good art—he liked the combination of cause and effect and dumb luck causing only the harmless one to die. Survival of the fittest, eugenics will out, and all that. With a mental shrug, Braxn walked off to find a cab.

“Oh, enter, by all means.” Llarvl slipped into the Survey Chief's cabin with trepidation. He was in for a bad time.

The chief, who looked like a cross between a carrot and a praying mantis, got right to the point. “Llarvl, your reports stopped coming in several cycles ago. From this I infer that either a.) your scout is dead, not likely; b.) he got disgusted with your asinine questions, rather more likely; or c.) he went on one of his blasted binges and is busily turning the autochthones into quatrains and limericks. I find this last alternative the most probable, if the least palatable. He
is
a G'drellian, an adolescent at that. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes, sir, it means that he's in the aesthetic stage of…”

“It
means
he should have been locked up before we got within a parsec of this primitive world.”

“But, sir, after his initial experiments he stopped killing them. Why, I
made
him stop. He might have drawn attention to himself.”

“Your devotion to objectivity is most commendable.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“It shows that you know and appreciate the first rule of contact.” He pressed a stud, and one wall became transparent. He gestured at the busy scene beneath them. “Are they aware of our presence?”

“Of course not, sir. That
is
the first law.”

“Tell me, Llarvl. What sort of radiation would you suppose their eyes are sensitive to?”

The captain's addiction to obliqueness was most exasperating. “Well, sir, since their planet goes around a yellow star, their organs of vision are sensitive to a narrow band of radiation centered around the ‘yellow' wavelengths.”

The captain scraped his thorax with a claw. Llarvl interpreted this as applause. His race had forgotten sarcasm eons before the captain's had invented fire.

“You are a good study, Llarvl.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So we make our ship transparent in these wavelengths, at great expenditure of power.”

“Yes, sir. So the natives' development won't be influenced by premature knowledge of…”

“…and with similar expenditure of power, we extend this transparency down into the longer wavelengths. Why do we do this, Llarvl?”

The little ethnologist was perplexed. Even the lowliest cabin boy could answer these questions.

“Why, of course, sir, it's to make the ship invisible to radar detection. Only it's not really invisible, it's just that the local implicit coefficient of absorption becomes asymptotic with…”

“Llarvl”—the captain sighed—“I learned one of those creatures' words the other day; and I suppose you've run into it now and then: catechism.

“Yes, sir.” Llarvl squirmed.

“Now as far as I can tell, though I'm not a man of learning myself, this is a form of stylized debate; wherein one person asks a series of questions, whose answers are so simple that they brook no disagreement or misinterpretation. These answers, forced, as it were, upon the hapless interrogatee, lead to an inevitable conclusion, which gains a spurious validity through sheer tautological mass. Is that fairly accurate?”

Llarvl paused a second to retrieve the sentence's verbs, as the captain had mischievously, if appropriately, switched from English to Middle High German.

“Yes, sir, very accurate.”

“Well, then”—the captain gave a gleaming metallic smile—“to borrow another of their delightfully savage concepts, the
coup de grâce
: How did we know that they had radar, long before we came into its range?”

“Radio broadcasts, sir, and television.”

“Which means?”

“Mass communications, sir.”

“Which means?”

“Sir, I'm aware of…”

“You're aware of the fact that our arty friend could gain control of this planetwide network, and, in a matter of seconds, destroy almost every intelligent being on the planet. Or worse, reduce them to gibbering animals. Or perhaps worse still, increase their understanding of themselves beyond the threshold…”

“Yes, sir.” Llarvl could fill in the blanks.

“Then get out of here and let more capable minds deal with the situation.”

“Yes, sir.” The ethnologist started to scuttle toward the door.

“And Llarvl…remember that your captain, like most of the members of this expedition, normally communicates mind to mind, and can read your surface thoughts even when they are not verbalized.”

“Yes, sir,” he said meekly.

“Your captain may be a ‘pompous martinet,' yes, but really, Llarvl: a ‘vegetable that walks like a man'? Racism is, I think, singularly inappropriate in an ethnologist. Make an appointment with the psychiatric staff.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And on your way down, check at the galley and see if Troxl has a couple of years' work for you to do.”

The captain watched the disconsolate creature scurry out, and settled down at his desk. He passed a claw over a photosensitive plate.

“Computer,” he thought.

“Here, Captain.”

“Where the hell is that G'drellian poet?”

The machine thought a low hum. “I can't find him. He must be generating a strong block. You know a G'drellian can synthesize ‘dummy' thought waves exactly out of phase with his natural pattern, and by combining the two patterns…”

“How do you know he isn't just on the other side of the planet?” A computer will talk on one subject forever, if you let it.

“Using the planet's satellites as passive reflectors, I can cover 80 percent or more of the planet's surface, and by integrating the fringe effects from…”

“I believe you. Then tell me; where is his old goat of a father?”

“Meditating in the meat locker, in the form of a large stalagtite, as he has been, I might add, ever since you…”

“All right! Have Stores send me up a winter outfit. I'll have to go and try to blackmail him into telling me where his blasted progeny is.”

Give me a thousand humorless ethnologists, thought the captain to himself; give me a thousand garrulous computers, but spare me the company of G'drellians. Even on G'drell, they confine the adolescents to one island, to work out their poetry on worms and insects and each other.

A survey expedition needs a G'drellian, of course; a mature one to solve problems beyond the scope of the computer, but—

Damn that Brohass! He must have known he was gravid when he volunteered for the trip. How do you deal with these creatures, who seem to live only to torment other people with their weird, inscrutable sense of humor? Brohass knew he would undergo fission, knew his offspring would reach adolescence in midvoyage, and probably contrived to send the ship to a planet where…

The captain's reverie was broken by the robot from Stores. “The clothing you requested, sir.”

“Put it on the hook there.” The robot did so and glided out of the room.

I should have had it delivered to the locker, thought the captain; clothing was tantamount to obscenity to many of the crew members, and one must maintain dignity…

“Yes, one must, mustn't one,” thought the computer.

“Will you go do something useful?” The captain threw up a block in time to miss the reply. He jerked the clothes off the hook and strode out of his cabin, letting out occasional thoughts about the ancestry, mating habits, etc., of the machine that was the ship's true captain.

“Fasten your seat belts, please.” The slender stewardess swayed down the aisle, past a young man with a handsome, placid face and a Brooks Brothers suit. “Landing at Kennedy International in three minutes.”

Braxn did as told, shifting the heavy attaché case from his lap to the floor. Two hundred pounds of gold bullion would buy a great deal of prime time.

They landed uneventfully. Braxn took a helicopter to the Pan American Building, went down to the 131st floor, and into an office with gold leaf on the frosted-glass entrance, proclaiming Somebody, Somebody, and Somebody, Advertising Counselors.

He came out two hundred pounds lighter, having traded the gold for one minute of time, nine o'clock Saturday night (an hour away), on all of the major radio and television networks. A triumph of money over red tape, his commercial would be strictly live, with no chance of FCC interference. And his brand of soap would certainly make the world a cleaner place for a person to live in.

Alone.

The captain donned his thermal outerwear and entered the massive locker. Sure enough, there was a huge blue stalagtite suspended from the ceiling. He addressed it.

“Brohass,” he thought obsequiously, “would you serve your captain?”