The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (82 page)

They even considered blasting the cliff, to smash the instrument they had presented to Tork. But anything that would smash the device would blow up the ship. The hundred-thousand-year-old Antarean civilization was helpless against the naïve desires of cave men who simply wanted more pieces of worked flint.

“Man,” snapped a voice in Tork’s mind, “how did you creatures keep your thought steadily upon us so that we were called?”

“We made pictures of you,” said Tork happily. “It was not easy to do, but we did it.”

He beamed at them. There was pained silence. Then a mental voice said bitterly, “We will give you the spears and arrows, Man, if you will destroy every one of the pictures.”

“We will do that,” promised Tork brightly, “because now we can draw them again when we need you.”

He seemed to hear groans inside his head. But the Antareans were civilized, after all. He seemed also to hear wry chucklings. And the dry voice said, inside his skull, “It is agreed. Go down and blot out the pictures of us. We will give you what you wish. Then we can go away.

“And—you will never be able to summon us again, Man! We had intended to stay on this earth for a hundred of your years, and if our experiment seemed too deadly to you, we would have stopped it. But now we will not take that risk. Your species is a land species, and we are of the sea, but we think it best that you disappear. We have given you the means to destroy yourselves. We will depart and let you do so. Now go and blot out the pictures.”

Tork went happily down into his cave. He commanded the wiping out of the pictures of Antareans. Within an hour the ship was gone. And this time it rose straight into the sky, as if it weren’t coming back.

At first Tork was made happy by a huge new store of worked flint; but within two months disaster fell. The pictures of animals—so needful when using the Antarean device—blew into a cooking fire and burned. Then there was deep mourning, and Tork and Berry and all the tribe tried earnestly to call back the ship to get a fresh supply.

But nothing happened.

This was catastrophe; they could no longer call animals to be killed. But then Berry suggested redrawing the burned pictures on the cave’s walls, and again art was attempted, by men working from the motive which has produced most of the great art works of earth—to get something to eat.

The Antarean device worked just as well with pictures of the cave-folk’s own drawing as with those the Antareans had provided. But of course the Antareans could not know about it, because they had left the planet altogether.

Tork and Berry lived long lives and had many offspring, all of whom thrived mightily because of the Antarean experiment. Of course, the experiment was not ended. In time, the tribe in the chalk-cliff village had increased so much in numbers that there was lack of room for its members. Colonies were sent out from it, and they thrived, too. And every colony carried with it three distinct results of the Antarean experiment in ecological imbalance.

One was stone weapons, which in time they rather painfully learned to make for themselves. Another was the belief that it was a simple trick to call animals to be killed. The actual Antarean device being tucked away in the back of Tork’s cave—in time was covered over with rubbish and in two generations was forgotten. Since it needed no attention, it got none. In time, when its power grew weaker and its effect less, nobody even thought to uncover and tinker with it. And the third result of the Antarean contact with Tork’s tribe was the practice of drawing and painting pictures of animals on cave walls. The art of those Cro-Magnon artists is still admired.

The experiment still went on. Men learned to make weapons. Presently they discovered metal. The spears and arrowheads became bronze, and then iron, and presently gunpowder replaced bowstrings to hurl metal missiles. Later still, there was the atom bomb. In the art line, there were Praxiteles and Rodin and Michelangelo and Picasso… And the consequences of the experiment continued to develop…

A good thirty thousand years after the time of Tork, the Antareans decided that they needed the oceans of Earth for the excess population of several already colonized planets. They prepared a colonizing fleet. The original survey was not complete, but it was good enough to justify a full-scale expedition for settlement.

More than two million Antareans swam in the vessels which launched themselves into space to occupy Earth. It was purely by accident that members of a society of learned Antareans, going over the original survey reports, came upon the record of the experiment. The learned society requested, without much hope, that an effort be made to trace the ancient meddling with the laws of nature and see if any results could be detected.

The Antarean fleet came out of overdrive beyond Jupiter and drove in toward Earth with placid confidence. There was blank amazement on board when small spacecraft hailed the newcomers with some belligerence. The Antareans were almost bewildered. There was no intelligent race here… But they sent out a paralyzing beam to seize one ship and hold it for examination. Unfortunately, the beam was applied too abruptly and tore the Earthship to pieces.

So the many-times-removed great-great-grandchildren of Tork and Berry and the others of the cave-folk tribe—they blasted the Antarean fleet in seconds, and then very carefully examined the wreckage. They got an interstellar drive out of their examination, which well paid for the one lost Earthship. But the Antarean learned society never did learn the results of that experiment in ecological imbalance, started thirty thousand years before.

In fact, the results aren’t all in yet.

*

CURE FOR A YLITH

(Originally Published in 1949)

“…Always, throughout history, mankind has alternated between periods of vigor and of decadence. On Earth the ancient histories tell us of a Classic Age of brilliance, which was followed by a Dark Age of despair. Similarly, after the Age of Galactic Conquest, when men swarmed to every habitable planet of the First Galaxy, there followed the Age of Tyranny when men sank into slavery. Yet even then the hope of freedom survived and had its victories. For example, on Loren III…”

—Basic History of Humanity,
Rigel IV, 21105.

* * * *

Garr came out of the silvery, flickering film which was the arrival-field of the matter-transmitter on Loren. He was a small man with a lined face and he blinked—everyone always blinks—as he stepped out of the film. He was the only passenger in a mass of bales and parcels because Alcius XXII, King of Loren, followed the usual policy of allowing only very rare travelers to enter or leave his dominions.

Such travelers were ordinarily only ambassadors to the planets with which commerce was carried on, favored criminals other governments wished to exile but not yet to kill and the strictly necessary government officials upon business of interplanetary trade.

Such officials, of course, were secured against temptation by hostages kept on Loren. But Garr fitted into none of those categories. He looked very weary as he turned to watch a special group of shipping-cases follow him through the film. Then he turned and plodded on.

There was a movement, high above and far away. His eyes flicked up and he saw his friend Sortel. He had appeared on a balcony six hundred feet up and a hundred yards on and now he waved at Garr. In his hand as he waved was a picturescope machine with which he had recorded Garr’s arrival.

It was a gesture of pure friendship. Garr knew that he had taken the scene to show it to Garr’s wife and so give her the first glimpse of her husband she’d had in two years. There had been official communications, of course. She was well. The two children were well. They sent greetings to him.

But Garr had doubted bitterly the truth of those official, form-messages. Since Sortel had made this picture, though, his wife must be alive and well and still faithful to him. The gesture of waving had told him so much. It had been meant to. On Loren very trivial gestures sometimes meant a great deal.

Garr went dutifully to the guard-station, where a sergeant of the King’s Guard watched him.

“My name is Garr—” he began.

“Who else would you be?” asked the sergeant sardonically. “Strip.”

Garr went into the examination-room. He took off his clothing. He stood before the fluorescent screen which would reveal any foreign substance he might have swallowed or otherwise hidden. He waited patiently while the screen ran through the spectrum to show up cellulose or writing-material as well as metal.

“In there,” said the sergeant, jerking his thumb.

Garr went into the next room, where other clothing waited. The garments he had left would be examined for written matter or suspicious material and afterward destroyed. No propaganda, no plans, no scrap of material for the making of weapons could possibly be smuggled onto Loren after such precautions. King Alcius XXII was particularly concerned about poison. Garr dressed himself in the supplied garments.

“The apparatus I have brought,” he observed, “is rather delicate. Please see that it is examined by qualified experts. Bunglers could wreck it. It was sealed at the University on Yorath.”

“Are you giving me orders?” snapped the sergeant.

“Prints!”

Garr put his fingerprints on the Identity-machine. The sergeant looked at his fingers afterward, lest false prints had been prepared. The machine clicked. It began to hum softly to itself. It had been connected with the Command Integrator at Guard headquarters, and a very complicated process had begun. The sergeant relaxed.

“Had a good time on Yorath, eh?” he demanded enviously.

Garr said, “No. I had a transmitter sealed on me. Every word I said or heard—even in the University laboratories—was picked up by our Embassy. It’s a reciprocal courtesy between the two governments. Doubtless the Yorathian police listened in also.

“Even if I had wished, I could not have said or listened to anything improper without being found out at once. And I have a wife and two children here. Naturally—”

He shrugged. The Identity-machine rattled and thrust out a card. The sergeant glanced at it.

“Right so far,” he said sourly. “Make your report.”

He attached the electrodes. Garr submitted docilely. When they were adjusted so that every uncontrollable reflex produced by a conscious lie would show up instantly Garr spoke clearly.

“My name is Garr of Vlatin. I have been two years absent from Loren at the University of Yorath, where I have devoted myself solely to the study of psychosomatic medicine in its higher branches.

“On Yorath I have made no criticism of the King or his government. I have listened to no treasonable conversation. I am glad to return to Loren. I wish only to serve His Majesty Alcius the Twenty-second. I am his dutiful and loyal subject.”

The sergeant watched the dials. They wavered very, very slightly. No person can make a complicated series of statements to a Truth Machine without some reflex action due to pure fear of making a false statement. The slight waverings of the needles, to the sergeant, proved that Garr told the actual truth.

“Pretty good!” said the sergeant sardonically. “Those new tricks for fooling the Truth Machine—”

But Garr’s reaction was again perfectly normal. The sergeant spat.

“Hah! They never send a man abroad unless he’s a rabbit! You’re to report to the Palace.”

There was a bell-tone. Garr obediently followed it. The Command Integrator had acted from his prints and issued all the orders that had been prepared for him. He could do absolutely nothing but obey orders without being detected instantly.

He got into the ground-car the Integrator had sent for him. He could not speak to the driver. It swung away from the Guard station and moved out into the streets of Loren’s capital.

Garr, of course, could not see out. He heard the traffic noises and he could picture what the city looked like. Streets on four levels, towering structures reaching to the sky, a marvelous and perfectly integrated civilization which was beginning to run down a little. People with set, impassive faces.

The answer was, of course, that government had become the most important industry on Loren. There was nothing more important than the service of the King. The people existed to serve the King. The cities were conveniences for the people in the service of the King. The guards were precautions lest the people acquire quaint ideas that anything could be more important than the wishes of the King.

The vision-casts, the arts, the news, the games with which the people were permitted to refresh themselves—for the better service of the King—were all parts of a complex, overwhelming pressure upon every individual to subjugate him to the idea that he existed only for the King.

To Garr all this was normal. But as a student of medicine—specializing in psychosomatics—he reflected with interest upon the fact that the mind combats its environment as well as the body.

When the body is chilled it burns more food to combat the cold. When it is heated it secretes sweat to combat the warmth. Weaklings do not combat their environment. They yield to it and die. Weaklings also do not combat mental pressures. They yield—and become living robots.

But the healthy members of the race create mental antibodies against propaganda. The people of Loren, saturated with propaganda to make them slaves, seethed with hatred of the King not one in ten thousand had ever seen.