Fletcher Pratt is fondly remembered for many things, but surely not the least of them was his pepper-and-ginger beard. It may be that science-fiction writers go to beards more than normal humans. It is only necessary to mention Sturgeon’s curly spade, H. L. Gold’s jet-black monster or a score less notable chinpieces. Science-fiction’s newest beard, however, surrounds the imp’s chin of one of our oldest-established writers—the man who wrote Nerves and Helen O’Loy and many, many others—more important, the man who presently entertains and delights us with——
Mankind’s first contact with an intelligent alien race didn’t come on some shuddersome foreign planet around a distant star, long after men had built a galactic empire.
Nor did it take place in the backyard of a flying-saucer initiate. No hordes of alien fighting ships plunged into Earth’s skies for plunder and slaves. No primitive Venusians or Martians were discovered ready to worship us. No telepathic monsters took over our minds. There wasn’t even a hassle of misunderstanding while the aliens tried to get through the blue ribbon and red tape of our governments. They made no such attempts.
The event took place on the least likely place for races to meet in the whole galaxy—the lifeless surface of the Moon.
Sam Osheola had no doubt about its being lifeless, and he wasn’t expecting any surprises. The first manned Moon expedition had proved that the satellite was dead and always had been. Sam’s only doubts concerned his being there at all, rubbing elbows with the hundred or so scientists important enough to be included this time. But mostly, he was too busy to think about that. After some of the places he’d worked, even the Moon didn’t seem-too strange.
He was inside the garage dome, swearing a blue streak in the nineteen languages he knew fluently and improvising in a dozen others. In the eighteen hours since landing, the schedule stated, they should have had the tractor tanks out and rolling. But somehow the labor crew had smuggled in a load of rotgut, and now they were locked up in one of the ships, with his two best mechanics passed out too cold for even pure oxygen to revive. That meant he’d have to correct their half-done work and finish it, with whatever help little Commander Larsen could dig up among the ships’ crews and the scientists.
Larsen came back then, snapping off his bowl helmet as he passed through the lock. He stopped to listen admiringly as his labor boss finally ran down into a muttering of Seminole and English.
“I’ve got a bunch of volunteers waiting in the main dome. You can brief ‘em over coffee,” Larsen announced. Then he grinned. “I always thought you Indians were an unemotional race, Sam. Where’s your heap big stone face?”
“Lay off the plains pidgin!” Sam snapped back. Then he caught a glimpse of his face reflected in one of the tractor bubble-tops and chuckled. Any stone in that face must have been cracked in shipment. His nose was broken from the football he had played to earn his M. E., there was a scar across his forehead from an Arab bullet while he’d been laying oil pipe in Israel, and a network of broken veins from the time his helmet had cracked while working on the first space station.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “We Seminoles don’t have emotions at all, Bill. We’re so unemotional we refused to sign a treaty. And we go around to this day bragging that we’re still technically at war with the United States. Let’s get that coffee!”
* * * *
They were just coming out of the garage when they saw the alien ship.
Sam stared at it unbelievingly through the polarized plastic of his helmet. His mind jumped back ten years to fears that should have been long gone. Russians—coming to blow us off the Moon! His hand was pawing for a gun he hadn’t carried for a decade, before he checked the motion. It was a long time since that mess of politics had been cleared up; for that matter, there were a dozen Russian scientists with this expedition.
But it certainly was no ship that he’d ever seen. It was neither a winged trans-atmosphere rocket, a cylindrical ferry, nor one of the piles of girders and tanks used to reach the Moon. Instead, it seemed to be simply a huge sphere, maybe a hundred feet in diameter, and gleaming a bright blue all over. It was coming down in a great curve, slowing steadily, but there was no sign of atomic or even chemical exhaust
It passed over his head and slowed to a stop over the expedition ships—hovering a hundred feet off the ground! Then, as if making up its mind, it began to settle gently beside the largest of the five ships.
There was a babble of voices in Sam’s headphones; others had seen it. But the words made no sense. It certainly wasn’t one of their scheduled supply ships, and the nonsense about flying saucers had been finally disposed of before the station was built
Sam heard Larsen ordering somebody back. He glanced around toward the main dome, to see a few men in space-suits moving reluctantly back inside. It made good sense to wait until they saw what developed. But the commander was moving forward himself.
Sam fell in step with him, the hair on the back of his neck prickling faintly. “Martians?” he asked. It was a fool question, and he expected to be told so.
But Larsen shook his head. “Don’t ask me, Sam! Mars couldn’t produce any advanced technology with her atmosphere—I think. But that thing never came from Earth. Wrong orbit, for one thing. See anything like weapons?”
“I don’t see a thing,” Sam told him. “What’ll you do if they turn up with ray guns?”
Larsen snarled: “If they turn up with bows and arrows, I’ll surrender. This expedition has a total armament of one .38 automatic with seven bullets—in case someone falls into a crater where we can’t rescue him. Wait a minute!” Larsen came to a stop, pointing.
* * * *
A crack had appeared in-the side of the blue sphere. Now it widened and a section peeled downward, to form a curved ramp to the surface. Under it was a gray substance of some kind, from which something that looked like a flight of folding steps shot out. The final step had barely appeared when the gray stuff seemed to give way.
A figure emerged from it.
Whatever it was looked human.
Sam grunted in surprise. He was ready for anything except that. A winged octopus wouldn’t have bothered him. But a man? If any place on Earth had a ship like that and let the Moon expedition take off with the old atomic style rockets, something rotten was really going on! Better a monster than some types of human beings!
Then he wondered. The figure was in a glaring white space-suit of too slim a build—more like a man in tights than in one of the heavy suits he knew. And there was something wrong about the way it walked. Something almost rubbery, as if the legs bent all over instead of at fixed joints.
Larsen and Sam moved forward again. Another figure came from the strange ship, carrying something. This one gestured toward the two men, but it turned toward the expedition ship, following the first figure. It was running as it neared the ship, holding out whatever gadget it was using.
There was a ten second conference between the two. Then both turned and headed back toward Sam and Larsen.
“Wallah!” Sam’s harsh voice seemed to echo in his helmet, and he felt Larsen tense beside him. But he had eyes only for the face in the other helmet nearest him.
* * * *
ii
The creature’s head looked as if someone had managed to cross a man and a frog; a smooth, hairless skull, almost no nose, a wide mouth now partly open in a straight line, eyes that seemed to have independent motion, and a smooth, hairless skin that was so purple it seemed almost black.
The incredible part of it was that the thing was beautiful. Grotesque as it seemed in its blend of human and non-human, it had a certain innate lightness of good design about it, as a racehorse or a cat has.
Abruptly, fifteen feet away, it spread its arms straight out, with hands seeming to droop. The hands, he saw now, had only three fingers, set at even intervals around the palms, all more or less opposed.
“Peace,” Sam guessed. He’d seen various human races use signs that were all different for the same idea, but all with some of the same idea behind them. “Better do the same, Bill—and pray it means what I think.”
The two men moved forward to the two aliens. Sam stopped three feet away from his opposite, but the creature came on until their helmets touched.
“Ssatah!” it said.
“Hello yourself!” Sam answered. It hadn’t been an unpleasant voice, from what he could tell by sound that had traveled through two helmet shells. It seemed to match the velvety quality of the skin he could see. He tapped his chest, then his head. “Sam!”
The straight slit of the mouth narrowed and opened. “Sam.” The alien motioned toward the commander. At Sam’s introduction, the same mouth gesture was repeated. “Birr. Va. Sam t’ Birr.” One finger tapped its chest. “Ato. Ato t’ Mu’an.” A gesture indicated that the second name applied to the other alien.
Then finally Ato stepped back, and motioned to the ship. A lithe leg moved over the ground, drawing circles into a haze around a central point. Beside it, another picture that could only be a crude schematic of a rocket appeared. Ato waited, as if expecting a reaction, then made a gesture curiously like a shrug. He put his hands together, began lifting them and spreading them out, sketching a slim upright with a big circle at the top.
“VvvvPWOOMB!”
Sam jumped, feeling cold chills run up his back. He had been so busy watching the hands that he hadn’t seen the other alien bend forward to touch helmets with him. Then the meaning of it all suddenly registered, and his pulse quieted down again.
But Larsen was ahead of him. He could have heard the sound only faintly, but he’d decoded the symbols. “He’s figured out the ship rockets are atom powered!” His voice came over Sam’s phones. “That gadget they’re carrying must be some kind of radiation detector.”
Abruptly, his voice sobered. “Sam, maybe I shouldn’t have agreed. Damn it, that was an atom bomb explosion he was signaling. They must have used atomics for weapons.”
“Might as well concede what the other side already knows,” Sam told him. Down inside him, the amazement was just beginning to register. Aliens! Martians, Venusians—starmen— here! Alien friends to lead them across space—or alien enemies to attack from God knew where. Aliens—and Sam Osheola, a quarter million miles from the swamps where he’d been born—a billion cultures, perhaps, farther apart than he’d been from any human race he’d met!
And over his mind, the old defense mechanism was dropping down. This didn’t matter, any more than football had. It was all a game—a play he was acting in—he had to go through the motions, say the right lines, but it couldn’t really affect him, because things like this didn’t really happen to Sam Osheola.
* * * *
Other men in spacesuits were coming out now, clustering around them, and other figures from the blue ship, all in the same white, slim suits. Larsen swung around to direct the men of his command, as Ato seemed to be doing to his.
Nothing escaped the alien. One eye swiveled slightly toward the commander, and Sam was sure what passed over the purple face was surprise. Ato was guilty of picking the wrong horse, and he was just realizing it as he saw Larsen giving commands instead of Sam.
At least that meant the things weren’t telepaths.
This time Ato made no mistake. He headed for Larsen, motioning to his own ship. With one hand beside his mouth, he made opening and closing signs, then used his other hand to repeat the gesture beside the commander’s face. With hands facing each other, he pantomimed a conversation, and again pointed to the ship. Larsen’s gesture toward the main dome brought a complicated set of signs that were probably refusal and explanation of some sort, then another motion toward the blue ship.
Finally, Ato swung on his “heels” and headed toward it alone. His fellows watched him, making no move to follow. When the alien reached whatever served as an airlock, he stopped and stood waiting patiently.
“Maybe he’s got some kind of educating machine there, Bill,” Sam offered. “He’s pretty insistent. We could use one —it took me three months to learn Arabic, and that’s a human language!”
The back of his mind was warning him that he was stepping over the line. Leave the guesses and suggestions to the brass, it told him, just as it had ordered him to stay on the ground when the space station began, or to stay clear of the girl who could teach him to read Arabic—or the little crook in Burma. . . . Some day his curiosity would get him killed.
Larsen took the bait, probably deliberately. “All right, Sam. I’m no linguist. If you’re willing to volunteer, see what he wants.”
Ato still waited as Sam started across the pumice and dust toward the blue ship. If the alien was surprised at the switch, there was no sign of it. But that was only good dickering. “Don’t let ‘em get your signals,” Sam muttered to himself.
Then he wondered what equivalent of that could exist in Ato’s language. A speech was more than semantic noises— it was a whole history of culture, and you couldn’t know a thing about anyone until you knew how he thought in his own tongue.
* * * *
Disappointingly, the steps and what showed of the hull section looked no different from the normal alloys Earth used. The gray stuff was some flexible plastic. Earth had been experimenting on flexible locks that would let a man go through without losing air or taking up much space, but so far none had worked. Still, the principle was familiar enough.
Sam nodded as Ato touched his shoulder and backed through. Sam followed. The gray stuff molded to him without too much resistance, and then he was inside a metal-walled, featureless passageway and the alien was shedding his suit
Underneath, it was plain that Sam’s first impression had been right. The purple man’s bony structure hadn’t fully ossified; the joints seemed to be sections where a flexible cartilege permitted bending. It would make for neater spacesuit design, of course. His nude, purple body was that of a slim, graceful watersprite, but there was an air of strength and endurance to it.
From a cabinet, Ato took out a mess of equipment He studied Sam’s suit for a moment, then located the escape valve for exhaled air and got a sample. Things moved, changed color, and precipitated, until a series of dials began registering. The alien studied them silently, then wiggled his mouth. “Val”
At his gesture, Sam reached for his helmet snaps. He was consciously brave. Look at the way his ancestors had faced danger and torture without a whimper . . . no, damn it, those were the Sioux and the Apache! And besides, he was no dratted savage. . . .
He suddenly realized that he was holding his breath.
He let it out with a whoosh. When he breathed in, there was an odd odor, somewhat pungent, a trifle sweet, that seemed to come from the alien. But his lungs accepted the atmosphere gratefully. It was a bit heavier than that used in the domes and suits, and it felt good.
They went down hallways and up some kind of elevator, to reach a room that obviously had something to do with the control of the ship. There were indicators in panels along the walls, television screens showing the outside in color but with too much emphasis on blue for human eyes, and instruments that only vaguely made sense to Sam. Two other purple-skinned men were working in obvious haste on a complicated maze of wiring, with tiny bumps that might have been transistor, coils and other parts. It was obviously electronic, and they were changing the circuits.
One of them stopped to rattle off a string of high-pitched words to Ato, indicating a device on a table.
Ato nodded. He motioned to a three-legged chair that proved surprisingly comfortable, then took a seat across the table. He moved a button connected to a wire between them, then drew a switchboard from the machine within easy reach. His other hand picked up a slim shaft and made hasty marks on a writing surface with it. Apparently his palm was flexible enough to let any two fingers oppose a third. He held up the shaft.
“Ssompa,” he said carefully. He made marks again. “Pir,” he said. Then he pointed to a cluster of marks at a time, repeating: “Edomi.”
It wasn’t even well-organized speech instruction, much less anything as wonderful as a mechanical educator!
Sam felt the disappointment thicken in him as he drew out his own pen and wrote down a group of words. “Va—yes. Va—yes. Ssompa pir edomi. Pen write word. Va. And you’d better let someone who knows how take over, Ato, or we’ll be here until hell freezes over finding out how to tell each other useless sentences. Now, one!”
* * * *
Ato shrugged and let the control pass to Sam. They went through the numbers and common operating words of arithmetic, the simplest nouns and verbs, and a negative—Ato apparently picked one from several.
Sam had already decided that grammar could go out of the window. He elected pidgin English as the simplest, most consistent language he knew. The vocabulary was limited, the rules were simple, and anything they needed to say could be conveyed by it. Anyhow, it gave him an ace up his sleeve— Ato would have a deuce of a time figuring out Sam’s cultural pattern from it, no matter how clever he was.
Then he began to suspect that Ato was doing something of the same nature.
But when he finished his basic list of words and began going through applications of them to fix them indelibly in their memories, Ato would have none of it. “No!” he said firmly. “Make word.” He was stubborn about it.
Sam frowned, but went on. If the aliens had memories that would let them master a vocabulary from a single hearing, they had him beaten. He hunched forward, sweating a little as he tried to force his mind to memorize every word and phrase. But it couldn’t be done! The harder he tried, the more he lost.
Sometime during the long hours, one of the technicians sweating over the electronic panel went out and came back with a package for Sam and a bowl for Ato. Larsen must have sent the food over. Sam wolfed it down, stalling as long as he could while he went over what he could remember. Then the exchange of words resumed. At least by now they had a few basic expressions they could use to clear up doubtful points, and things moved faster.
Sometime during the session he began smoking.
Ato went into a dither until the smoke had been analyzed with the aid of a quick glittering little machine, then paid no more attention to it. He seemed to understand the coffee that was sent over, though, and began drinking a reddish liquid himself. But even with the coffee, Sam was almost dead with fatigue when Ato carefully and experimentally stretched his wide lips into what must have been meant for a human smile and leaned back. “Good,” he said. He patted the machine in front of him, touched a button, and listened as Sam’s voice came out of it
“Va—yes. Ssompa pir edomi. Pen write word. One, two, three, four. . . .”
Sam watched a technician remove one of the two spools inside the machine and thread the thin plastic into a duplicate machine, showing how it worked with a few simple gestures. He’d been a fool! Of course the aliens had perfect memories —so did men, since the invention of the tape recorder!
* * * *
He was still cursing to himself as he threw the machine they gave him onto a bench and began shucking off his clothes in his little private cubicle. While he was working on his shoes Larsen came in, bringing glasses and a small bottle. The commander looked worried, but he was grinning.
“I know it’s illegal to give whiskey to an Indian, Sam,” he said. “But maybe the law won’t reach this far.”
“It’s illegal to give anything to an Indian, Bill. You’re supposed to take things away from them. Luck!” The liquor seemed to cut through his stomach and into his nerves at once, reminding him he hadn’t picked up supper. He needed this more, though. He took a second glass, then reported briefly what had happened, playing a bit of the “tape” back. “What gives here?”
Larsen shook his head. “I wish I knew. Sam, even with this it’ll take a week to get on real speaking terms, won’t it? Umm. Why are they willing to spend all that time and effort? What do they want from us?”
“Why do they have to want anything?”
“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’re good, 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 up north. 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 Donahue 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.”
“You haven’t reported it yet?” Sam asked, trying to control his voice.
The other nodded. “By radio on tight beam, of course. But it will take forty years for word to reach the settlement there —radio won’t beat light speed. That’s just a formality.”
He let it drop.
Sam pondered it, his brain prickling slowly. “Suppose something happened to ground you here, Ato? What then? You’d have to stay here until the radio signal reached them, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s happened,” the alien admitted. “That’s the real reason for the signal—to locate me. Then, of course, once it reached a settlement, plans for a rescue would take a few days, and the ship would need a month more to get here. Of course, if I had bad luck, and the settlement wasn’t visited for a few years, there’d be a longer wait. Now, about those plans my people have worked out, if you want more details-”
Sam shook his head. He’d gone upstage on his lines as much as the script would let him, but there came a time when it had to be torn up and an adlibbed ending was better than none. When the signals failed, and the game was in the final minutes, and the score was 7-0 against you, you got the ball if you could and put it up to your legs and your guts.
* * * *
He pulled out the revolver. “Know what this is, Ato?”
The other studied it slowly. “I can guess. We had them. Fatal, of course?”
“Quite fatal. Better call your men in, but keep them out of here. And get ready to lift ship, Ato. I’m not making a joke. I’ll shoot—in fact, my government would want me to shoot rather than let you leave tomorrow.”
“You can’t hold the weapon forever—and if I lift ship, you’ll be beyond help,” Ato pointed out. “Why?”
It took some fifteen seconds to tell him what Sam thought of the Spaceman’s Burden business for Earth. He’d already figured out what would happen to himself. If those were the lines, and that was the game, he’d have to prove that a Seminole was as good as an Apache any day.
But he couldn’t tell that to the alien. They hadn’t exchanged enough cultural history for that.
“Ten seconds, Ato,” he said. “If you don’t obey by then, I’ll shoot.”
The purple head nodded slowly, and a finger reached out for a button; Ato began giving orders. The screens showed the Perui drifting back to the ship.
By the time the men began to notice, they were all aboard.
“Lift ship,” Sam ordered. “Take it up at less than light speed, and head for our space station, if you know where that is.”
Sam had expected difficulty at this stage, but the alien only shrugged and moved slowly toward the big control panel, dragging the translating machine microphone with him. Sam followed, moving along the wall where he could keep an eye on the door. In a moment, without any feeling of motion, the big ship was lifting; the screens showed the Moon dropping below. One, set for greater magnification, showed Larsen looking up, but it was too far to read his face.
Maybe he’d understand. If not, maybe his kids might, some day—if this worked.
“There’s a ship heading for the Moon, somewhere between us and the station,” Sam said. “I want you to locate it, Ato. Then I want you to set up a stable circular orbit around Earth that will intersect the path of that ship. Got it?”
“As you say,” Ato said quietly.
There was something strange on the alien’s face, but Sam couldn’t read it. He tightened his grip on the gun, keeping his eyes firmly on the face of Ato. He was counting on luck and Ato’s ignorance of the fact that the supply ship was carrying a hydrogen-fusion bomb. And the fact that nothing could be much worse than it would be anyhow, so it wouldn’t matter if he failed.
* * * *
If Earth thought the aliens were enemies and expected a follow-up attack, she wouldn’t sit still and wait for it. History told him that much about his planet, at least. She was often wrong, but rarely cowardly. She’d do her best to get ready to repel any attack—and that best was pretty phenomenal. Men had compressed twenty years of progress into five often enough before in wartime, and they could do it again, if they had to.
They’d have forty years, until that radio message reached some place or other. Then, maybe with luck, they’d only have a rescue ship to deal with, and a little more time before all the Perui realized it was war. If Earth could recover even a little of the technology of the Perui ship and blend it with her own, she’d be able to hold them off. She’d be operating from the strength of a planet base, and they’d have to carry the war to her.
It would be a period of intolerable hell. But no profitless war goes on forever, and there would be an end.
With luck—and with her own determination—Earth could at least hold her own.
History had proved what happened to the races that bowed to their superiors and accepted the help offered them so often in good faith; the history of Ato’s people and his own agreed on that. And they agreed on something else—that sometimes the best way to make sure another race respected you was to fight it. One side couldn’t fight a hard battle over long years against an enemy without gaining some respect. And when wars were finished, alliances could be worked out. There was England and America—and Japan. Germany and New France. Even, to some extent, Jordan and Israel. There was the respect his own people had won among the whites of their swamplands.
Enemies could become friends. But the distance between inferiors and superiors only widened, until the lesser was swallowed up in the greater.
It was better this way.
And yet. . . .
Ato looked around. “We’re going to cross the little ship’s orbit soon, Sam. I suppose you want me to threaten it—and then wait for the bomb it must carry?”
Sam stared at the purple man, without anything to say. It was exactly his plan. And if the other could guess it so easily. ...
“I have nearly fifty other men aboard, Sam,” Ato said quietly. “Some are my friends, and I’m responsible for all of them. There’s a life raft large enough to get them to the planet you call Mars. No farther, Sam. They can manage to live there. Let them go and I’ll call your ship.”
It could be a trick, Sam knew. And with all the lives already at stake, a few more shouldn’t matter. But he nodded.
“Send them off.”
* * * *
A minute later, almost as soon as Ato finished speaking, there was a lurch, and one of the screens showed a part of the blue ship apparently dropping away and picking up speed away from the sun.
Ato reached for the dials on his board and began fiddling until a barrage of words spilled in through the speaker. They were obviously coming from the supply ship.
“I have the power high enough to reach Earth with this,” Ato said. He pulled the translator over and began speaking harshly into the microphone. “Earth ship, you are my prisoner! Earth ship, you are my prisoner! Surrender at once and prepare to let my men aboard. Or I shall destroy you!”
Then he cut the switch and swung back to face Sam again.
Sam stared at him unbelievingly. If the Perui were as easily cowed as this, or as willing to sell their race short—but they couldn’t be: not if any part of their history was true.
“Why?” he asked savagely.
Ato shrugged. “Shoot me and find out, Sam. Go ahead. Or no, I’ll tell you. It would do you no good to shoot, because there is the peace shield we found between you and me. There has been since you walked in with what my detectors said was a weapon. And there’s one around the ship, too. No weapon you now have could wreck it.”
Sam fired—coldly and deliberately. A moment later, the useless gun hung empty in his hands, and there were seven blobs of melted lead on the floor. Ato stood unharmed.
“All right,” Sam said finally. “I suppose I should have saved the final one for myself. Now what?”
“Who knows what comes after death?” Ato asked softly. “Sam, do you think we want what you call the Spaceman’s Burden? Don’t you realize that our history shows us the results, too? It’s no kinder to the superior than the inferior— it rots him inside. Doesn’t your history show—as mine shows —that no true peace and progress can come until it comes among equals?”
He made a sound curiously like a sigh. “I don’t like your solution either, Sam. I don’t like it at all. But I like ours less. And if you can die for it, can one of the Perui do less?”
He threw down a small red lever.
“You can come here now, Sam. That breaks the screen between us. But now, if there is to be anything of this ship and its library left for your people, I’ll need your help. It takes two to maintain part of a shield while canceling the other part. There—that button—and this lever—so. . . .”
I told you so, something in the back of Sam’s head said. You WOULD go to the Moon. Now you’ll die.
And another part of his mind was playing the game, fumbling for the ball to boot over the posts.
He stood quietly beside Ato, watching the screens and holding down the lever while the missile headed toward them from the supply ship. It was bad to die, he thought. But if death had to be, it was good that it was shared . . . with a friend.