American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (60 page)

“Lithia is not even the beginning of an arsenal,” Michelis said. “Every piece of evidence you offered to prove that it might be is either a half-truth or the purest trash. Take cheap labor, for instance. With what will you pay the Lithians? They have no money, and they can’t be rewarded with goods. They have almost everything that they need, and they like the way they’re living right now—God knows they’re not even slightly jealous of the achievements we think make Earth great. They’d like to have space flight but, given a little time, they’ll get it by themselves; they have the Coupling ion-jet right now, and they won’t be needing the Haertel overdrive for another century.”

He looked around the gently rounded room, which was shining softly in the gaslight.

“And I don’t seem to see any place in here,” he said, “where a vacuum cleaner with forty-five patented attachments would find any work to do. How will you pay the Lithians to work in your thermonuclear plants?”

“With knowledge,” Cleaver said gruffly. “There’s a lot they’d like to know.”

“But what knowledge, Paul? The things they’d like to know are specifically the things you can’t tell them, if they’re to be valuable to you as a labor force. Are you going to teach them quantum mechanics? You can’t; that would be dangerous. Are you going to teach them nucleonics, or Hilbert space, or the Haertel scholium? Again, any one of those would enable them to learn other things you think dangerous. Are you going to teach them how to extract titanium from rutile, or how to accumulate enough iron to develop a science of electrodynamics, or how to pass from this Stone Age they’re living in now— this Pottery Age, I should say—into an Age of Plastics? Of course you aren’t. As a matter of fact, we don’t have a thing to offer them in that sense. It’d all be classified under the arrangement you propose—and they just wouldn’t work for us under those terms.”

“Offer them other terms,” Cleaver said shortly. “If necessary, tell them what they’re going to do, like it or lump it. It’d be easy enough to introduce a money system on this planet. You give a Snake a piece of paper that says it’s worth a dollar, and if he asks you just what makes it worth a dollar—well, the answer is, an honest day’s work.”

“And we put a machine pistol to his belly to emphasize the point,” Ruiz-Sanchez interjected.

“Do we make machine pistols for nothing? I never figured out what else they were good for. Either you point them at someone or you throw them away.”

“Item: slavery,” Michelis said. “That disposes, I think, of the argument of cheap labor. I won’t vote for slavery. Ramon won’t. Agronski?”

“No,” Agronski said uneasily. “But isn’t it a minor point?”

“The hell it is! It’s the reason why we’re here. We’re supposed to think of the welfare of the Lithians as well as of ourselves—otherwise this commission procedure would be a waste of time, of thought, of energy. If we want cheap labor, we can enslave any planet.”

“How do we do that?” Agronski said. “There aren’t any other planets. I mean, none with intelligent life on them that we’ve hit so far. You can’t enslave a Martian sand crab.”

“Which brings up the point of our own welfare,” RuizSanchez said. “We’re supposed to be considering that, too. Do you know what it does to a people to be slave-owners? It kills them.”

“Lots of people have worked for money without calling it slavery,” Agronski said. “I don’t mind getting a pay check for what I do.”

“There is no money on Lithia,” Michelis said stonily. “If we introduce it here, we do so only by force. Forced labor is slavery. Q. E. D.”

Agronski was silent.

“Speak up,” Michelis said. “Is that true, or isn’t it?”

Agronski said, “I guess it is. Take it easy, Mike. There’s nothing to get mad about.”

“Cleaver?”

“Slavery’s just a swearword,” Cleaver said sullenly. “You’re deliberately clouding the issue.”

“Say that again.”

“Oh, hell. All right, Mike, I know you wouldn’t. But we could work out a fair pay scale somehow.”

“I’ll admit that the instant that you can demonstrate it to me,” Michelis said. He got up abruptly from his hassock, walked over to the sloping window sill, and sat down again, looking out into the rain-stippled darkness. He seemed to be more deeply troubled than Ruiz-Sanchez had ever before thought possible for him. The priest was astonished, as much at himself as at Michelis; the argument from money had never occurred to him, and Michelis had unknowingly put his finger on a doctrinal sore spot which Ruiz-Sanchez had never been able to reconcile with his own beliefs. He remembered the lines of poetry that had summed it up for him—lines written way back in the 1950’s:

The groggy old Church has gone toothless, 
No longer holds against
neshek;
the fat has covered their croziers. . .

Neshek
was the lending of money at interest, once a sin called usury, for which Dante had put men into Hell. And now here was Mike, not a Christian at all, arguing that money itself was a form of slavery. It was, Ruiz-Sanchez discovered upon fingering it mentally once more, a
very
sore spot.

“In the meantime,” Michelis had resumed, “I’ll prosecute my own demonstration. What’s to be said, now, about this theory of automatic security that you’ve propounded, Paul? You think that the Lithians can’t learn the techniques they would need to be able to understand secret information and pass it on, and so they won’t have to be screened. There again, you’re wrong, as you’d have known if you’d bothered to study the Lithians even perfunctorily. The Lithians are highly intelligent, and they already have many of the clues they need. I’ve given them a hand toward pinning down magnetism, and they absorbed the material like magic and put it to work with enormous ingenuity.”

“So did I,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “And I’ve suggested to them a technique for accumulating iron that should prove to be pretty powerful. I had only to suggest it, and they were already halfway down to the bottom of it and traveling fast. They can make the most of the smallest of clues.”

“If I were the UN I’d regard both actions as the plainest kind of treason,” Cleaver said harshly. “You’d better think again about using that key, Mike, on your own behalf—if it isn’t already too late. Isn’t it possible that the Snakes found out both items by themselves, and were only being polite to you?”

“Set me no traps,” Michelis said. “The tape is on and it stays on, by your own request. If you have any second thoughts, file them in your individual report, but don’t try to stampede me into hiding anything under the rug now, Paul. It won’t work.”

“That,” Cleaver said, “is what I get for trying to help.” “If that’s what you were trying to do, thanks. I’m not through, however. So far as the practical objective that you want to achieve is concerned, Paul, I think it’s just as useless as it is impossible. The fact that we have here a planet that’s especially rich in lithium doesn’t mean that we’re sitting on a bonanza, no matter what price per ton the metal commands back home.

“The fact of the matter is that you can’t ship lithium home. Its density is so low that you couldn’t send away more than a ton of it per shipload; by the time you got it to Earth, the shipping charges on it would more than outweigh the price you’d get for it on arrival. I should have thought that you’d know there’s lots of lithium on Earth’s own moon, too—and it isn’t economical to fly it back to Earth even over that short a distance, less than a quarter of a million miles. Lithia is three hundred and fourteen trillion miles from Earth; that’s what fifty light-years comes to. Not even radium is worth carrying over a gap that great!

“No more would it be economical to ship from Earth to Lithia all the heavy equipment that would be needed to make use of lithium here. There’s no iron here for massive magnets. By the time you got your particle-accelerators and mass chromatographs and the rest of your needs to Lithia, you’d have cost the UN so much that no amount of locally available pegmatite could compensate for it. Isn’t that so, Agronski?”

“I’m no physicist,” Agronski said, frowning slightly. “But just getting the metal out of the ore and storing it would cost a fair sum, that’s a cinch. Raw lithium would burn like phosphorus in this atmosphere; you’d have to store it and work it under oil. That’s costly no matter how you look at it.”

Michelis looked from Cleaver to Agronski and back again.

“Exactly so,” he said. “And that’s only the beginning. In fact, the whole scheme is just a chimera.”

“Have you got a better one, Mike?” Cleaver said, very quietly.

“I hope so. It seems to me that we have a lot to learn from the Lithians, as well as they from us. Their social system works like the most perfect of our physical mechanisms, and it does so without any apparent repression of the individual. It’s a thoroughly liberal society in terms of guarantees, yet all the same it never even begins to tip over toward the side of total disorganization, toward the kind of Gandhiism that keeps a people tied to the momma-and-poppa farm and the rovingbrigand distribution system. It’s in balance, and not in precarious balance either—it’s in perfect chemical equilibrium.

“The notion of using Lithia as a fusion-bomb plant is easily the strangest anachronism I’ve ever encountered—it’s as crude as proposing to equip an interstellar ship with galley slaves, oars and all. Right here on Lithia is the
real
secret, the secret that’s going to make bombs of all kinds, and all the rest of the antisocial armament, as useless, unnecessary, obsolete as the iron boot!

“And on top of all of that—no, please, I’m not quite finished, Paul—on top of all that, the Lithians are decades ahead of us in some purely technical matters, just as we’re ahead of them in others. You should see what they can do with mixed disciplines —scholia like histochemistry, immunodynamics, biophysics, terataxonomy, osmotic genetics, electrolimnology, and half a hundred more. If you’d been looking, you
would
have seen.

“We have much more to do, it seems to me, than just to vote to open the planet. That’s only a passive move. We have to realize that being able to use Lithia is only the beginning. The fact of the matter is that we actively
need
Lithia. We should say so in our recommendation.”

Michelis unfolded himself from the window sill and stood up, looking down on all of them, but most especially at RuizSanchez. The priest smiled at him, but as much in anguish as in admiration, and then had to look back down at his shoes.

“Well, Agronski?” Cleaver said, spitting the words out like bullets on which he had been clenching his teeth, like a Civil War casualty during an operation without anesthetics. “What d’you say now? Do you like the pretty picture?”

“Sure, I like it,” Agronski said, slowly but forthrightly. It was a virtue in him, as well as a frequent source of exasperation, that he always said exactly what he was thinking, the moment he was asked to do so. “Mike makes sense. I wouldn’t expect him not to, if you see what I mean. Also he’s got another advantage: he told us what he thought,
without
trying to trick us first into his way of thinking.”

“Oh, don’t be a thumphead,” Cleaver exclaimed. “Are we scientists or Boy Rangers? Any rational man up against a majority of do-gooders would have taken the same precautions I did.”

“Maybe,” Agronski said. “I’m none too sure. Why is it silly to be a do-gooder? Is it wrong to do good? Do you want to be a do-badder—whatever the hell that is? Your precautions still smell to me like a confession of weakness somewhere in the argument. As for me, I don’t like to be finessed. And I don’t much like being called a thumphead, either.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake—”

“Now-you-listen-to-me,” Agronski said, all in one breath. “Before you call me any more names, I’m going to say that I think you’re more right than Mike is. I don’t like your methods, but your aim seems sensible to me. Mike’s shot some of your major arguments full of holes, that I’ll admit. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re still leading—by a nose.”

He paused, breathing heavily and glaring at the physicist. Then he said:

“By a nose, Paul. That’s all. Just bear that in mind.”

Michelis remained standing for a moment longer. Then he shrugged, walked back to his hassock, and sat down, locking his hands awkwardly between his knees.

“I did my best, Ramon,” he said. “But so far it looks like a draw. See what you can do.”

Ruiz-Sanchez took a deep breath. What he was about to do would hurt him, without doubt, for the rest of his life, regardless of the way time had of turning any blade. The decision had already cost him many hours of concentrated, agonized doubt. But he believed that it had to be done.

“I disagree with all of you,” he said, “except Cleaver. I believe, as he does, that Lithia should be reported triple-E Unfavorable. But I think also that it should be given a special classification: X-One.”

Michelis’ eyes were glazed with shock. Even Cleaver seemed unable to credit what he had heard.

“X-One—but that’s a quarantine label,” Michelis said huskily. “As a matter of fact—”

“Yes, Mike, that’s right,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “I vote to seal Lithia off from
all
contact with the human race. Not only now, or for the next century—but forever.”

Forever.

The word did not produce the consternation that he had been dreading—or, perhaps, hoping for, somewhere in the back of his mind. Evidently they were all too tired for that. They took his announcement with a kind of stunned emptiness, as though it were so far out of the expected order of events as to be quite meaningless.

It was hard to say whether Cleaver or Michelis was the more overwhelmed. All that could be seen for certain was that Agronski recovered first, and was now ostentatiously reaming out his ears, as if in signal that he would be ready to listen again when Ruiz-Sanchez changed his mind.

“Well,” Cleaver began. And then again, shaking his head amazedly, like an old man: “Well. . . .”

“Tell us why, Ramon,” Michelis said, clenching and unclenching his fists. His voice was quite flat, but Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could feel the pain under it.