The High Ones and Other Stories

by Poul Anderson

  "Why do they have the brains they do, if they're in the stone age?" Haraszthy argued.

  "Why did we, in our own stone age?" I countered. "It wasn't necessary for survival. Java man, Peking man and the low-browed rest, they'd been doing all right. But evidently evolution, intraspecies competition, sexual selection … whatever increases intelligence in the first place continues to force it upward, if some new factor like machinery doesn't interfere. A bright Jorillian has more prestige, rises higher in life, gets more mates and children, and so it goes. But this is an easy environment, at least in the present geological epoch. The natives don't even seem to have wars, which would stimulate technology. Thus far they've had little occasion to use those tremendous minds for anything but art, philosophy and social experimentation."

  * * * *

  "What is their average IQ?"

  "Meaningless," Vaughan said dully. "Beyond 180 or so, the scale breaks down. How can you measure an intelligence so much greater than your own?"

  There was a stillness. I heard the forest sough in the night around us.

  "Yes," Baldinger ruminated, "I always realized that our betters must exist. Didn't expect we'd run

  into them in my own lifetime, however. Not in this microscopic sliver of the galaxy that we've explored. And … well, I always imagined the Elders having machines, science, space travel."

  "They will," I said.

  "If we go away—" Lejeune began.

  "Too late," I said. "We've already given them this shiny new toy, science. If we abandon them, they'll come looking for us in a couple of hundred years. At most."

  Haraszthy's fist crashed on the table. "Why leave?" he roared. "What the hell are you scared of? I doubt the population of this whole planet is ten million. There are fifteen billion humans in the Solar System and the colonies! So a Jorillian can outthink me. So what? Plenty of guys can do that already, and it don't bother me as long as we can do business."

  Baldinger shook his head. His face might have been cast in iron. "Matters aren't that simple. The question is what race is going to dominate this arm of the galaxy."

  "Is it so horrible if the Jorillians do?" Lejeune asked softly.

  "Perhaps not. They seem pretty decent. But—" Baldinger straightened in his chair. "I'm not going to be anybody's domestic animal. I want my planet to decide her own destiny."

  That was the unalterable fact. We sat weighing it for a long and wordless time.

  The hypothetical superbeings had always seemed comfortably far off. We hadn't encountered them, or they us. Therefore they couldn't live anywhere near. Therefore they probably never would interfere in the affairs of this remote galactic fringe where we dwell. But a planet only months distant from Earth; a species whose average member was a genius and whose geniuses were not understandable by us: bursting from their world, swarming through space, vigorous, eager, jumping in a decade to accomplishments that would take us a century—if we ever succeeded—how could they help but destroy our painfully built civilization?

  We'd scrap it ourselves. As the primitives of our old days had scrapped their own rich cultures in the overwhelming face of Western society. Our sons would laugh at our shoddy triumphs, go forth to join the high Jorillian adventure and come back spirit-broken by failure, to build some feeble imitation of an alien way of life and fester in their hopelessness. And so would every other thinking species, unless the Jorillians were merciful enough to leave them alone.

  Which the Jorillians probably would be. But who wants mercy?

  * * * *

  I looked upon horror. Only Vaughan had the courage to voice the thing:

  "There are planets under technological blockade, you know. Cultures too dangerous to allow modern weapons, let alone spaceships. Joril can be interdicted."

  "They'll invent the stuff for themselves, now they've gotten the idea," Baldinger said.

  Vaughan's mouth twitched downward. "Not if the only two regions that have seen us are destroyed."

  "Good God!" Haraszthy leaped to his feet.

  "Sit down!" Baldinger rapped.

  Haraszthy spoke an obscenity. His face was ablaze. The rest of us sat in a chill sweat.

  "You've called me unscrupulous," the Trader snarled. "Take that suggestion back to the hell it came from Vaughan, or I'll kick out your brains."

  I thought of nuclear fire vomiting skyward, and wisp of gas that had been Mierna, and said, "No."

  "The alternative," Vaughan said, staring at the bulkhead across from him, "is to do nothing until the sterilization of the entire planet has become necessary."

  Lejeune shook his head in anguish. "Wrong, wrong, wrong. There can be too great a price for survival."

  "But for our children's survival? Their liberty? Their pride and—"

  "What sort of pride can they take in themselves, once they know the truth?" Haraszthy interrupted. He reached down, grabbed Vaughan's shirt front, and hauled the man up by sheer strength. His broken features glared three centimeters from the Federal's. "I'll tell you what we're going to do," he said. "We're going to trade, and teach, and xenologize, and fraternize, the same as with any other people whose salt we've eaten. And take our chances like men!"

  "Let him go," Baldinger commanded. Haraszthy knotted a fist. "If you strike him, I'll brig you and prefer charges at home. Let him go, I said!"

  Haraszthy opened his grasp. Vaughan tumbled to the deck. Haraszthy sat down, buried his head in his hands and struggled not to sob.

  Baldinger refilled our glasses. "Well, gentlemen," he said, "it looks like an impasse. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, and I lay odds no Jorillian talks in such tired cliches."

  "They could give us so much," Lejeune pleaded.

  "Give!" Vaughan climbed erect and stood trembling before us. "That's p-p-precisely the trouble. They'd give it! If they could, even. It wouldn't be ours. We probably couldn't understand their work, or … It wouldn't be ours, I say!"

  Haraszthy stiffened. He sat like stone for an entire minute before he raised his face and whooped aloud. "Why not?"

  IV

  Blessed be whisky. I actually slept a few hours before dawn. But the light, stealing in through the ports, woke me then and I couldn't get back to sleep. At last I rose, took the dropshaft down and went outside.

  The land lay still. Stars were paling, but the east held as yet only a rush of ruddiness. Through the cool air I heard the first bird-flutterings from the dark forest mass around me. I kicked off my shoes and went barefoot in wet grass.

  Somehow it was not surprising that Mierna should come at that moment, leading her oontatherium. She let go the leash and ran to me. "Hi, Mister Cathcart! I hoped a lot somebody would be up. I haven't had any breakfast."

  "We'll have to see about that." I swung her in the air till she squealed. "And then maybe take a little fly-around in this boat. Would you like that?"

  "Oooh!" Her eyes grew round. I set her down. She needed a while longer before she dared ask, "Clear to Earth?"

  "No, not that far, I'm afraid. Earth is quite a ways off."

  "Maybe someday? Please?"

  "Someday, I'm quite sure, my dear. And not so terribly long until then, either."

  "I'm going to Earth, I'm going to Earth, I'm going to Earth." She hugged the oontatherium. "Will you miss me awfully, Big-Feet-Buggy-Eyes-Top-Man-Underneath-And-Over? Don't drool so sad. May be you can come too. Can he, Mister Cathcart? He's a very nice oontatherium, honest he is, and he does so love crackers."

  "Well, perhaps, perhaps not," I said. "But you'll go, if you wish. I promise you. Anybody on this whole planet who wants to will go to Earth."

  As most of them will. I'm certain our idea will be accepted by the Council. The only possible one. If you can't lick 'em … get 'em to jine you.

  * * * *

  I rumpled Mierna's hair. In a way, sweetheart, what a dirty trick to play on you! Take you straight from the wilderness to a huge and complicated civilization. Dazzle you with all the tricks and gadgets and
ideas we have, not because we're better but simply because we've been at it a little longer than you. Scatter your ten million among our fifteen billion. Of course you'll fall for it. You can't help yourselves. When you realize what's happening, you won't be able to stop, you'll be hooked. I don't think you'll even be able to resent it.

  You'll be assimilated, Mierna. You'll become an Earth girl. Naturally, you'll grow up to be one of our leaders. You'll contribute tremendous things to our civilization, and be rewarded accordingly. But the whole point is, it will be our civilization. Mine … and yours.

  I wonder if you'll ever miss the forest, though, and the little houses by the bay, and the boats and songs and old, old stories, yes, and your darling oontatherium. I know the empty planet will miss you, Mierna. So will I.

  "Come on," I said. "Let's go build us that breakfast!"

  * * * *

  THE APPRENTICE WOBBLER

  The moving men were cleaning out an office on the fifteenth story of the building across the street.

  As Holloway and Damon watched, a safe came floating through the window. It bobbed a little in the breeze, clanking lightly against the filing cabinets which were already there. A couple of heavy desks and some assorted furniture drifted out after the safe.

  "That must be about it," said Damon uneasily.

  "Yeah." Holloway shook a cigarette from its pack and stuck it in his mouth.

  A man jumped from the window. He was in ordinary work clothes, with a Wojcek machine like a suitcase in his hand. He soared to one of the swivel chairs hovering in the sky, sat down, and made himself comfortable with the machine on his lap.

  Then the whole convoy got into motion and flew out of sight beyond the skyscrapers.

  Damon looked at the crowds below, most of them going casually about their business—Wojcek was getting to be an old story—and swore in a tired voice. "You'd think the cops would at least rope off the area," he said. "Suppose that damn gadget failed? People would get killed."

  "Wojcek hasn't failed yet," said Holloway. "They claim they can't have accidents."

  "They claim! They claim!" Damon spun on his heel and walked over to his desk and sat down behind it. He was a big man, with soft face and hard eyes, correctly outfitted in the green suit and sincere tie currently prescribed for executives. He regarded the machine before him with a bitter gaze. It was of the same oblong shape as the one he had just seen in use, with a handle, a neat crackle finish, and a bewildering array of meters and dials; but it had come out of his company's own laboratories. Nobody who owned a Wojcek would sell it for any price, and stolen ones disappeared, went back to their owners in some unknown fashion.

  "Sit down, Dan," he said. "We've got to run through this again. Maybe then we can get the picture."

  * * * *

  Daniel Holloway jackknifed his gaunt frame into a chair, remembered that he was supposed to look alert, and used the edge of the seat. His long face did not bend itself easily into an expression of deferential eagerness, but he tried manfully.

  "Okay, chief," he said. "Fire when ready."

  "You got no results whatsoever out of this thing?" Damon gestured at the machine. Its meters gazed blandly back at him.

  "None, chief."

  "Are you sure it's a true copy?"

  "Well, the patent is on file, you know. We built it exactly according to specifications." Holloway scowled and ran a hand through his coarse black hair. "I could have told you from the blueprints, though, that we wouldn't learn anything. It's just a lot of tubes, capacitors, and whatnot, powered by a six-volt dry cell battery. The current goes round and round, and it doesn't produce anything except a little heat."

  "But damn it, boy, the thing works for the Wojcek crews!" said Damon.

  "Uh-huh. And you tell me where a six-volt battery finds the power to lift a safe weighing a couple of tons." Holloway realized that his cigarette was still unlighted, and fumbled after a match. "There were no ropes attached to that furniture, no nothing … I not only can't figure out where the energy comes from, I can't understand how it's applied. I've watched their crews at work, you know, using every instrument I could think of to try and find out. Nothing registered, except the slight local temperature drop reported in all the journals."

  The vice president in charge of research and development nailed the engineer with a stiff eye. "I don't get any nourishment out of this, boy," he said. "Have you read all the technical papers?"

  "Oh, yes," said Holloway bleakly. "Articles by a dozen different men in twenty different journals. Including Wojcek's own reports. He describes how you can move matter, gives measurements of the selectivity and … well, all the data are there. And the physicists are going quietly insane trying to find a theory which accounts for it."

  "Still," mused Damon, "it's funny that the only people who can make those blasted things work are those Wojcek has trained himself."

  "But that includes men from the Bureau of Standards," pointed out Holloway. "It's no fake. After all, chief, theoretically anyone can do a successful appendectomy from a description in a book, but in practice it usually takes a skilled surgeon. The mere fact that special training is required proves nothing. Neither does the fact that nobody knows the why of the Wojcek Effect. It's like, oh, X-rays, which were used for quite a while before anybody really understood what generated them. The point is, Wojcek has proved to the government's satisfaction that his machines are safe in the hands of a skilled operator. In fact, they're safer than any other gadget, because an unskilled man can't make them work at all."

  "I know," said Damon in a moody voice. "Our legal department tried for two years to get injunctions. And now the louse is— Dan, he'll destroy the economy! His people move furniture, cargo, anything, anywhere, for half price and no breakage. He generates his own atomic energy. Auto stocks are nose-diving, because everybody figures in a few years they'll have Wojcek machines too, and fly around without the trouble and expense of a car. He's talking about crashproof airplanes that don't need fuel! Lucky thing, boy, we've got friends in the CAA and he hasn't gotten a permit yet—but it's coming. Gas, oil, autos, uranium, a hundred essential businesses are ready to go bust."

  "I know," said Holloway. The fear of being laid off was haggard in him. He was only an engineer in the corporation's research department, no executive status whatsoever. He had hopes of promotion, but—

  "The only thing that's saved us so far is, it takes time to train his operators," said Damon. "Only a few thousand of 'em to date. But it'll snowball if we don't stop it."

  "I don't see how we can," said Holloway uneasily. He added a hasty: "Chief."

  "Oh, we don't want to stop it." Damon smiled, exuding sincerity. "After all, boy, our great American free enterprise economy … progress … rising standard of living. Sure. But you got to see the big picture, Dan. Readjustment. We can't be hasty. We have a responsibility to our shareholders." Holloway waited for him to describe the widows and orphans, but was spared that much. "Let's put it this way, man to man. We want a piece of this."

  "Well—"

  "If we find out how it works, maybe we can do something about it. This Wojcek character. Radical. Something ought to be done. You know what?" Damon leaned forward confidentially. "We've had him traced back. He's no physicist. He was bounced out of the American Psychological Association ten years ago for making fancy claims he couldn't prove. That's right, he started out as an egghead psych professor."

  Holloway sucked in a surprised breath.

  "So we need you, Dan," said Damon earnestly. "I've had my eye on you for quite a while. Quite a while. You're a bright boy, up and coming. I want you to go enroll in Wojcek's school. Learn all you can. Mostly, learn what this flimflam is and what really makes the gadget work. But if you can pick up anything else—you know. There might be a nice little promotion waiting for you when you get back. We need a new assistant department head."

  Holloway sighed. He had been afraid of this.

  II

  Wojcek Enter
prises maintained its headquarters and school on a hundred acres of Iowa farmland, more to escape the nuisance of city inspections than for fear of accidents. Holloway was met at the Des Moines airport by a stocky, blond young man who introduced himself as Thomas Gerrold. "Got your luggage? I'll drive you out to the place."

  "I thought you, uh, flew," said Holloway.

  Gerrold laughed. "Well, I could kite you there, but most of the recruities would find that a bit disconcerting." He picked up one of the bags and led the way out. "I'm a sort of principal at the school, your official wailing wall, besides doing a lot of the instruction. The old man can't be bothered with it, he's all tied up in research." With a startlingly sharp blue glance: "Do you know why Olson cancelled out?"

  "His wife is sick," lied Holloway. As a matter of fact, it had taken a substantial bribe; there was a waiting list of thousands. Olson had recommended Holloway to take his place and, rather to everyone's surprise, the switch had been made at once—probably because Wojcek needed men with technical training and most of them were too set in their jobs to apply. A generation which worshipped before the altars of Conforming Security was apt to be short on pioneers.