The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (25 page)

“I couldn’t just stay there to be killed. What good would it have been? Help me, Juan! What shall I do now? Help me!”

“I don’t give a damn what you do,” Juan said. “Ask your cubes for help. So long, Tom.”

“Juan—”

“So long, you bastard.”

Contact broke.

* * * *

Voigtland sat quietly for a while, pressing his knuckles together.
Listen, those cubes are programmed to tell you whatever you want to  hear. Don’t you know that? You want to feel like a hero for running  away, they tell you you’re a hero.
And if you want to feel like a vil- lain? They tell you that too. They meet all needs. They aren’t people. They’re cubes.

He put Goethe in the slot. “Tell me about martyrdom,” he said.

Goethe said, “It has its tempting side. One may be covered with sins, scaly and rough-skinned with them, and in a single fiery moment of self-immolation one wins redemption and absolution, and one’s name is forever cherished.”

He put Juan in the slot. “Tell me about the symbolic impact of getting killed in the line of duty.”

“It can transform a mediocre public official into a magnificent historical figure,” Juan said.

He put Mark in the slot. “Which is a better father to have: a live coward or a dead hero?”

“Go down fighting, Dad.”

He put Hemingway in the slot. “What would you do if someone called you a rotten bastard?”

“I’d stop to think if he was right or wrong. If he was wrong, I’d  give him to the sharks. If he was right, well, maybe the sharks would get fed anyway.”

He put Lydia in the slot. Lynx. His father. Alexander. Attila. Shakespeare. Plato. Ovid.

lit In their various ways they were all quite eloquent. They spoke of bravery, self-sacrifice, nobility, redemption.

He picked up the Mark-cube. “You’re dead,” he said. “Just like your grandfather. There isn’t any Mark anymore. What comes out of this cube isn’t Mark. It’s me, speaking with Mark’s voice, talking through Mark’s mind. You’re just a dummy.”

He put the Mark-cube in the ship’s converter input, and it  tumbled down the slideway to become reaction mass. He put the Lydia-cube in next. Lynx. His father. Alexander. Attila. Shakespeare. Plato.  Ovid. Goethe.

He picked up the Juan-cube. He put it in a slot again. “Tell me the truth,” he yelled. “What’ll happen to me if I go back to Bradley’s World?”

“You’ll make your way safely to the underground and take charge, Tom. You’ll help us throw McAllister out: We can win with you, Tom.”

“Crap,” Voigtland said. “I’ll tell you what’ll really happen. I’ll be intercepted before I go into my landing orbit. I’ll be taken down and put on trial. And then I’ll be shot. Right? Right? Tell me the truth, for once. Tell me I’ll be shot!”

“You misunderstand the dynamics of the situation, Tom. The impact of your return will be so great that—”

He took the Juan-cube from the slot and put it into the chute that went to the converter.

“Hello?” Voigtland said. “Anyone here?”

The ship was silent.

“I’ll miss all that scintillating conversation,” he said. “I miss you already. Yes. Yes. But I’m glad you’re gone.”

He countermanded the ship’s navigational instructions and tapped out the program headed RETURN TO POINT OF DEPARTURE. His hands were shaking, just a little, but the message went through. The instruments showed him the change of course as the ship began to turn around. As it began to take him home.

Alone.

POINT OF FOCUS

Originally published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, August 1958.

Federation emissary Holis Bork was a confident man—and, if he felt a twinge of curious uneasiness at his first glimpse of Mellidan VII, it was not because he doubted his own capabilities, or the value of the Federation’s name as a civilizing force.

He told himself that it was something subtler and deeper that twinged him, as the warpship spiraled down about the unfederated planet.

Emissary Bork worried about that subliminal reaction through most of the landing period. He sat broodingly with his eyes fixed; the members of his staff gave him a wide berth. It was, he saw, the deference due to a Federation Emissary so obviously deep in creative thinking. The others were clustered at the far end of the observation deck, staring down at the fog-shrouded yellow-green ball that was soon to be the newest addition to the far-flung Federation. Bork listened to them.

Vyn Kumagon was saying, “Look at that place! The atmosphere blankets it like so much soup.”

“I wonder what it’s like to breathe chlorine?” asked Hu Sdreen. “And to give off carbon tetrachloride instead of CO2?”

“To them it’s all the same,” Kumagon snapped.

Emissary Bork looked away. He had the answer; he knew what was troubling him.

Mellidan VII was
different.
The peoples of the worlds of the Federation, and even the four non-Federated worlds of the Sol system, shared, one seemingly universal characteristic: they breathed oxygen, gave off carbon dioxide. And the Mellidani? A chlorine-carbon tetrachloride cycle which worked well for them—but was strange,
different.
And that difference troubled Federation Emissary Bork on a deep, shadowy, half-grasped plane of thought.

He shook his mind clear and nudged the speaker panel at his wrist. “How long till landing?”

“We enter final orbit in thirty-nine minutes,” Control Center told him. “Contact’s been made with the Mellidani and they’re guiding us in.”

Bork leaned back in the comforting webfoam network and twined his twelve tapering fingers calmly together. He was not worried. Despite Mellidan VII’s alienness, there would be no problems. In minutes, the landing would be effected—and past experience told him it would be but a matter of time before the Federation had annexed its four hundred eighty-sixth world.

Later, Bork stood by the rear screens, looking down at the planet as the Federation ship whistled downward through the murky green atmosphere.
To civilize is our mission,
he thought.
To offer the benefits
—

It was four years Galactic since a Federation survey ship had first touched down on Mellidan VII. It had been strictly an accidental planet-fall; the prelim scouts had thoroughly established that there was little point in bothering to search a chlorine world for oxygen-type life. That was easily understood.

What was not so easily understood was the possibility of a non-oxygen metabolism. Statistics lay against it; the four hundred eighty-five worlds of the Federation all operated on an oxynitrogen atmosphere and a respiration-photosynthesis cycle that endlessly recirculated oxygen and carbon dioxide. The four inhabited worlds of the unfederated system of Sol were similarly constituted. It was a rule to which no exceptions had been found.

But then the scoutship of Dos Nollibar, cruising out of Vronik XII, came tumbling down into the chlorinated soup of Mellidan VIFs atmosphere, three ultrones in its warp-drive fused beyond repair. It took six weeks for a rescue ship to locate and remove the eleven Federation scouts—and by that time, Chief Scout Dos Nollibar and his men had discovered and made contact with the Mellidani.

Standing at the screen watching his ship thunder down into the thick green shroud of the planet, Emissary Bork cast an inward eye back over Nollibar’s scout report—a last-minute refresher, as it were.

“
…Inhabitants roughly humanoid in external structure, though probably nearly solid internally. This is subject to later verification when a specimen is available for complete examination.

“
…Main constituents of atmosphere: hydrogen, chlorine, nitrogen, helium. Smaller quantities of other gases. No oxygen. This mixture is, of course, unbreathable by all forms of Federation life.

“
…Mean temperature 260 Absolute. Animal life gives off carbon tetrachloride as respiratory waste; this is broken down by plants to chlorine and complex hydrocarbons. Inhabitants consume plants, smaller animal life, drink hydrochloric acid—

“…Seat of planetary government apparently located not far from our landing-point, unless aliens have deliberately misled, or we have misunderstood. Naturally most of our data is highly tentative in nature, subject to confirmation after this world is enrolled in the Federation and available for further study.
”

Which is my job, Bork thought.

For four years, ever since Nollibar had filed his report, Bork had readied himself for the task of bringing Mellidan VII into the Federation. Nollibar had returned with recorded samples of the language, and a few months of phoneme analysis had been sufficient to work out a rough conversion-equation to Federation, good enough for Bork to learn and speak.

There would undoubtedly be a promotion in this for him: to Subgalactic Overchief, perhaps, or Third Warden. Of the ten emissaries whose task it was to bring newly-discovered planets into the Federation, it was he the First Warden had chosen for this job. That was significant, Bork thought: on no other world would the Emissary be forced to forego direct face-to-face contact with the leaders of the species to be absorbed. Here, on the other hand—Bork sensed a presence behind him. He turned.

It was Vyn Kumagon, Adjutant in Charge of Communications. Bork had no way of knowing how long Kumagon had been peering over his shoulder; he resented the intrusion on an emissary’s privacy.

And Kumagon’s green eyes were faintly slitted—the mark of Gyralin blood somewhere in his heritage. As a pure-bred Vengol of the Federation’s First Planet, Bork felt vague contempt for his assistant. “Yes?” he said, mildly but with undertones of scorn.

Kumagon’s slitted eyes fixed sharply on the Emissary’s. “Sir, the Mellidani have beamed us for some advice.”

“Eh?”

“They’d like to know how close to the Terran dome we want to land, sir.”

Bork barely repressed a gasp.
“What
Terran dome?”

“They said the Terrans established a base here several months ago. Sir? Are you well? You—”

“Tell them,” Bork said heavily, “that we wish to land no closer than five miles from the Terran dome, and no further than ten. Can you translate that into their equivalents?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then transmit it.” Bork choked back a strangled cry of rage. Someone, he thought, had blundered in the home office. That Terrans should be allowed to land on a world being groomed for Federation entry—!

Why, it was unthinkable!

The planet was the most forbidding-looking Bork had ever seen, and he had seen a great many. With screens turned to maximal periphery, he could stand in the snout of the ship and look out on Mellidan VII as if he stood outside. It was hardly a pleasant sight.

The land was utterly flat. Long stretches of barren gray-brown soil extended in every direction, sweeping upward into tiny hillocks far toward the horizon. Soil implied the presence of bacteria—anaerobic bacteria, of course. Life had evolved on Mellidan VII despite the total lack of oxygen.

There were seas, too, shimmering shallow pools of carbon tetrachloride that had precipitated out of the atmosphere. Plants grew in these ponds: ugly squishy plants, that looked like hordes of gray bladders strung on thick hairy ropes. They lay flat against the bright surface of the carbon tetrachloride pond, drifting. As Bork watched, a Mellidani appeared, wading knee-deep, gathering the bladders, slinging them over his blocky round shoulders. He was a farmer, no doubt.

At this distance it was difficult to tell much about the alien, except that his body was segmented crustacean-like, humanoid otherwise; his skin looked thick, waxy, leathery. Chief Scout Nollibar had postulated some member of the paraffin series as the chief constituent of Mellidani protoplasm; he was probably right.

Clouds of gaseous chlorine hung thickly overhead, draping the sky with a yellow-green blanket. Somewhere directly above burned the sun Mellidan: a yellow star of some intensity, its heat negated by the planet’s distance from it and by the swath of chlorine that was the atmosphere’s main component.

One other distinct feature made up the view as Bork saw it. Some eight miles directly westward, the violet-hued arc of a plastic-extrusion habitation dome rose from the bare plain. Bork had seen such domes before—more than forty years before, when he had served as a member of the last mission to Terra.

He had been only a Fifth Attaché then, though soon after he was to begin the rapid climb that would bring him to the rank of Federation Emissary. On that occasion, the emissary had been old Morvil Brek, who had added twelve worlds to the Federation during his distinguished career. Brek had been named to make the fifth attempt to enroll the Sol system.

The mission had been a failure; the Terran government had emphatically rejected any offer to federate, and Emissary Brek then declared the system non-Federated for good, in a bitter little speech which fell short of making its intended effect of altering the Terran decision. The Galactics had departed—and, on the outward trip, Bork had seen the violet domes on the snowswept plains of Sol IX, where the Terrans had established an encampment.

He scowled, now. Terrans on Mellidan VII?
Why? Why?

“Contact has been made with the Mellidani leaders, sir,” Kumagon said gently.

Bork drew his eyes from the Terran dome. It seemed to him he could almost see the Terrans moving about within it, pale-skinned, ten-fingered, almost repellently hairy men with that sly expression always on their faces—Just imagination. He sighed.

“Transfer the line up here,” Bork said to his adjutant. “I’ll talk to them from my chair.”

Bork sprawled in a leisure-loving way into the intricate reticulations of the web foam chair; he nudged a stud at its base and the chair began to quiver gently, massaging him, easing the stress-and-fatigue poisons from his muscles. After a moment, the communicator screen lit up, breaking into the wide-periphery view of the landscape.

Three Mellidani faced him squarely. They were chalk-white and without hair: their eyes were set deep in their round skulls, ringed with massive orbital ridges, veiled from time to time by fast-flickering nictitating membranes, while their mouths—if mouths they were—were but thin lidless slits. Three nostrils formed a squat triangle midway between eyes and mouth, while cupped processes jutting from the sides of the head seemed to equate with ears. Bork was not surprised at this superficial resemblance to the standard humanoid type; there is a certain most efficient pattern of construction for an erect humanoid biped, and virtually all such life adheres to it.

The emissary said, “I greet you in the name of the Federation of Worlds. My name is Holis Bork; my title, Emissary.”

The centermost of the aliens moved his lipless mouth; words came forth. The linguistic pattern, too, adhered to norms. “I am Leader this month. My name is unimportant. What does your Federation want with us?

It was the expected quasi-belligerent response. Twenty years of emissary duties had reduced the operation to a series of conditioned reflexes, so far as Bork was concerned. Stimulus A produced Response B, which was dealt with by means of Technique C.

He said, “The Federation is composed of four hundred eighty-five worlds scattered throughout some thirty thousand light-years. Its capital and First Planet is Vengo in the Darkir system; its member peoples live in unmatched unity. Current Federation population is twenty-seven billion people. Membership in the Federation will guarantee you free and equal rights, full representation, and the complete benefits of a Galactic civilization that has been in existence for eleven thousand years.”

He paused triumphantly with soundless fanfare. The array of statistics was calculated to arouse a feeling of awe and lead naturally to the next group of response-leads. The Federation’s psychometrists had perfected this technique over millennia.

But the Mellidani leader’s reaction jarred Bork. The alien said, “Why is it that the Terrans do not belong to the Federation?”

Bork had been ready with the next concept-group; he had already begun to bring forth the second phase of his argument when the impact of the Mellidani’s sudden irrelevant question slammed into his nervous system and set the neat circuitry of his mind oscillating wildly.

It was a dizzy moment. But Bork had his nerves under control almost instantly, and a moment later had formulated a new pat reply he hoped would cover the new situation.

“The Terrans,” he said, “did not choose to enter the Federation—thereby demonstrating that they lack the wisdom and maturity of a truly Galactic-minded race.”

* * * *

It was impossible to tell what emotions were in play behind the alien’s almost inflexible features. Bork found himself trembling; he docketed a mental note to have a neural overhaul when he returned to Vengo.

The alien said, “You imply by this that the Federation worlds are superior to the Terran worlds. In what way?

Again Bork’s nerves were jolted. The interview was taking a very unpredictable pattern indeed.
Damn
those Terrans, he thought. And double-damn Security for allowing them to get a foothold here with an emissary on his way!

Sweat dribbled down the emissary’s olive-green skin. His military collar was probably drooping by now. He rooted in his mind for some sequence of arguments that would answer the stubborn alien’s question, and at length came up with:

“The Federation worlds are superior in that they have complete homogeneity of thought, feeling, and purpose. We have a common ground for intellectual endeavor and for commercial traffic. We share laws, works of art, ways of thinking. The Earth-men have deliberately placed themselves beyond the pale of this communion—cut themselves off from every other civilized world of the galaxy.”

“They have not cut themselves off from us. They came here quite willingly and have lived here during three Leaderships.”

“They mean to corrupt you,” Bork said desperately. “To lead you away from the right path. They are malicious: unable to enter Galactic society themselves through their own antisocial tendencies, they try now to drag an innocent world into the same quagmire, the same—”

Bork stopped suddenly. His hands were shaking; his body was bathed in perspiration. He realized gloomily that for the first time in his career he had no notion whatever of the next line of thought to pursue.

Promotion, glory, past achievements—all down the sink because of failure now, here? He swallowed hard.

“We’ll continue our discussions tomorrow,” he said hoarsely. “I would not think of keeping you from your daily work.”

“Very well. Tomorrow the man at my left will be Leader. Address your words then to him.”

In the state he was in, Bork had little further interest in protocol. He broke the contact hastily and sank back in the cradle of webfoam, tense, sweat-drenched.

The pouch of his tunic yielded three green-gold pellets: metabolic compensators. Bork gobbled them hurriedly, and, as his body returned to normal equilibrium, sank back to brood over the ignominious course of the interview.