The High Ones and Other Stories

by Poul Anderson

  "Do you bid, sir?" asked Taruz.

  "I … do. Yes. Twenty-five billion Swiss francs," said Dmitrovich.

  That made over six billion dollars. The Soviets would have to make their own currency convertible … no, wait! With Taruz' help, they could overrun the world and pay him from its loot.

  Samuels realized as much, I could see. His hands trembled. "Seven billion dollars!"

  Eight, nine, ten—how long would it go on?

  France joined us. So did the other Western nations, one by one. Yeah, I thought, the Swiss and the Swedes and everybody else who stayed away were playing it real smart.

  I was watching Dmitrovich closely now. After fifteen billion, he seemed to reach some kind of decision. More likely, his government's instructions had decided something for him. He raised us nearly five billion right away. He kept on raising that much, each time around.

  Samuels turned white. I didn't get it at first, but Langford explained it to me: "They've given up hope of outbidding us. Now they're just staying in to raise the price we must pay."

  At fifty billion dollars, that price looked ruinous.

  And if we dropped out, the Soviets still had their aim of world conquest to pay for them. I wondered if we might not be driven to such a course ourselves. Or was there this much money in the world?

  "One hundred billion dollars!"

  That ended it. Dmitrovich gathered his portfolio, nodded curtly, and stalked out with his satellites.

  I don't remember very well just what happened next. I have a confused impression of people milling about, and talking, and being afraid.

  Taruz was conferring with Samuels, and I caught a fragment of what he said: "—I hope you will be satisfied, sir. This conference has been an admirable example of diplomacy, not so? Open covenants openly arrived at—"

  I thought his sense of humor rather fiendish, but maybe we deserved it.

  What I do remember is Langford drawing me aside. He was very pale, and spoke fast. "We'd better get going," he said. "We'd better start for home right away. This means war."

  He was right. We were still in mid-Atlantic, escorted by one of the Thashtivarian ships, when our radio brought the news that suicide air detachments had H-bombed America.

  III

  We passed over what had been Washington. There wasn't much to see through the dust and smoke which still roiled miles high. The suburban rim was a tangle of shards, and beyond it there was fire.

  Samuels bowed his head and wept.

  We landed in Richmond, and a platoon of Marines surrounded us at once. The radio code had told us that what remained of our government was holed up here. I recalled that this city had been the capital of the Confederacy—if Taruz knew, how he must be grinning!

  His ships were already there, posted in the sky above us, and I gathered that a force-field would be switched on over the town at the first alarm.

  As we drove to meet the President, I saw that the streets were almost empty, except for a few wrecked cars and sprawled corpses which no one had yet had time to clean up. The spectacle, and the smashed windows and scarred walls, told me what a murderous stampede had run through the town the day before.

  People had fled, blind and wild with fear, and those who remained were now huddled behind locked doors. There was likely to be starvation before long, because it would be impossible to restore essential services to a whole country gone lunatic.

  A guard at the door of our new capitol tried to keep me out. I flashed my badge at him in the best movie manner, and shoved him aside. Nobody had told me to quit watching Samuels and Langford. He let me by, which shouldn't have happened; but something in his eyes showed me how stunned he was. I felt an inward emptiness myself, and I hadn't lived through the last several hours here.

  There was a long, time-mellowed conference room, and in it sat the leaders of the nation. The President had had the foresight to leave Washington with the Cabinet and chief staff officers as soon as he got word Taruz was on our side. Most of Congress must have gone up—in hot air, said a ghastly imp within me—and such as had also left didn't know where we were. The rabble-rousers were good riddance, I thought, and the rest might seem superfluous with the whole country necessarily under martial law. But there had been fine and honest men among them who would be sorely missed.

  It was to Taruz that my eyes went first. He sat imperturbably beside the President, and in all the desolation around us his wild alien form looked only natural. There was a world map spread out in front of him.

  The President nodded at us. "Good day, gentlemen," he said tonelessly. "I hope you're not too tired to get right down to work. We need every brain we have."

  "What's the situation?" asked Langford.

  Samuels had collapsed into a heap on one of the chairs, staring at nothing, but the scientist was inhumanly composed.

  "Well, the Soviets have struck," said the President. "Obviously they hope to overcome us, throw us into complete confusion, before we can get organized enough to make much of General Taruz' help. Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Detroit—they're gone."

  As he moved his head, I saw how deep the lines in his face had become, almost overnight. "Clearly, they hope to bottle us up by wrecking our main seaports and industrial centers," he went on. "They're rolling in Europe and Korea. We've sent raids against Vladivostok and certain bases in the Urals, but don't yet know if they've succeeded."

  "Why not Moscow?" snapped someone, a Cabinet secretary. "Blow those devils to hell, like they— Oh, God." He buried his face in his hands; later I found out that his family was gone with Washington.

  "Surely you don't think their headquarters are still in Moscow," said the Chief of Staff. "I don't know where the Politburo is now."

  "I think that information might be obtained," said Taruz quietly. His English was as good as his French.

  "Eh?" We all wheeled about to look at him.

  "Of course," he nodded. "Small one-man scoutboats, flying low with invisibility screens and telepathic receptors. I need only know approximately where they are to find them within … two weeks at the most. After that, one bomb—" He shrugged.

  "That," said the President slowly, "kind of changes the picture."

  "For what?" The Secretary of Labor leaned over the table and shook his fists at Taruz. "Why did you come here? Why did you want your, your blood money—from anyone who had it? You murdering devil, none of this would have happened if—"

  "That's enough!" snapped the President. "We're faced with a fact. It's too late for recriminations." But he didn't apologize to Taruz.

  The soldier took it in good part. "This war will be won," Taruz said. "It may take a little time, since my company is not large, but it can be won. However, there is the question of terms. You will note in the contract that the Free Companions do not have to act until the first payment has been made."

  "Payment!" screamed the Secretary of Labor. "At a time like this you talk of payment—!"

  The President nodded at two MP's, who led the weeping man out. Then he sighed.

  "I understand your position, General," he said. "You owe us nothing, except in terms of a morality which seems to be unknown to you. But there are practical difficulties. The offices of the Treasury Department are gone—"

  "You will write me a check for thirty-three point three billion dollars," said Taruz coldly. "I shall have to ask that my quartermaster general be given powers in your Treasury Department to assure that the check is made good and that inflation does not rob us of full value."

  "But—" The President shut up. It was appalling, to give the right to levy taxes away to a creature from space, with all the police powers implied, but Taruz had us and he knew it. There could be no argument now.

  "Yes," said the President. "Please send your … man … to confer with our Secretary."

  "Internal reorganization will also be necessary," declared Taruz. "There is no point in taxing and controlling prices if the taxpayers, merchant
s, and consumers cannot be located. I will appoint a couple of men to work with your officials."

  The President lifted his head. "These concessions are only for the duration of the emergency," he stated.

  "Of course," said Taruz smoothly. "And now shall we turn to the military problem?"

  The next few weeks were a fever-dream. Like most people, I guarded my sanity by not reading many of the confused dispatches which came from all over our smoking globe, but simply concentrated on my work. That was with Langford at half a dozen cities, getting tracker shells into production.

  We had given up on long-range missiles—the Thashtivarian ships handled such jobs better—but our armies in the field needed artillery missiles which could home on the target.

  Officially I was still Langford's bodyguard; in practice, as soon as he found I had a degree in physics (which had given me a certain specialized usefulness in the Secret Service), he drafted me to be his assistant. Our job was troubleshooting in both the organizational and technical lines.

  Still, I did follow the broad development of the struggle—more so than most, because Samuels had arranged for Langford to be kept abreast of even confidential information, which he passed on to me. During that frightful summer, I knew that Army units stationed within the country had managed to restore a degree of order. There were more raids on us, but the bombs exploded harmlessly against Thashtivarian force screens, and only unimportant, unprotected Atlanta went to hell—by mistake, I imagine.

  With Thashtivarian help, the Communists were soon bounced out of Korea and Japan. The Nationalist Chinese assault from Formosa to the mainland was also successful because a spaceship accompanied their army. Energy beams methodically melted the tracks of the trans-Siberian railway, thus cutting the Soviets off from their own eastern territory.

  A few raids on the gigantic prison camps, weapons dropped to the convicts, and we had the Siberian Commune set up and fighting with us. We let the Vietminh overrun Indo-China, and then isolated them for future reference.

  In Europe, our forces were driven back to the Pyrenees and the English Channel, but there they stayed. It was bitter fighting. A few spaceships roved about, annihilating Russian forces wherever they could be found. But even such immense power was spread so thin that our men bore the brunt of the war.

  Within one month, the head of the Soviet monster had been cut off. Taruz' scouts hunted down and killed the leaders, and located all the factories and military bases for his ships to destroy. But there were still millions of armed men, living off the country and fighting with a desperation that would have been called heroic if they had been ours. Even with Thashtivarian help, it would be a long haul.

  "There was quite a conference in Richmond about strategy," remarked Langford one night. We were in a dingy hotel room overlooking Pittsburgh. The city was dimmed out, merely to conserve power, and it made the red glow of the great mills seem malignant in the sky. "The President was for negotiating terms with the scattered Red armies, but Taruz was for forcing them all to surrender unconditionally. He finally won his point."

  "How?" I asked. I sprawled on the bed, too bone-weary to look at his drawn face. It seemed like forever since I had had a good night's sleep.

  "By pointing out that his company wasn't going to be on Earth indefinitely, and that we had better make damn sure of a final peace while we still have this much strength." Langford pulled off a shoe, and it dropped to the floor with a hollow sound. "I suppose he's right. He always seems to be right. But I don't like it, somehow."

  "Just why do you rate all this top-secret information?" I inquired.

  "Samuels pulled for me. He said he wanted a … an impartial observer. What's happening is too big to be grasped by any human mind, and most of our leaders are too busy with immediate problems to think beyond them. He thought maybe I could spot the significant trends and warn him of them."

  "Have you?"

  "I don't know. If I just had to sit and think. But I've got my own immediate job to do. There's something, call it a hunch, I don't know, but I have an idea that somehow we're sacrificing our long-range interests for expediency."

  "What else can we do?"

  "Search me." He shrugged skinny shoulders and climbed into bed. "History tells us that no good comes of hiring mercenaries, but you know what Shaw said: 'The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.' "

  After a while I got to sleep.

  IV

  World War Three did not end; it fizzled out, bit by bit, through the next two years. In the first winter, it was plain that Soviet Russia had been smashed; but ridding the world of Communism was a long and bloody business. It was men with flamethrowers crawling through Indo-Chinese jungles, it was a bayonet charge up Yugoslavian hills, it was an artillery spotter dying to let his unit know where one tank was.

  Taruz' forces were only of limited value in this small-scale war which spotted the world like pox. He could destroy or immobilize a regiment, but against guerrillas he could offer little except protection for the American base.

  Martial law was lifted here at home on the first New Year's Day, and a specially chosen Congress met the day after. They were not a pretty sight; you couldn't expect them to be, after what the nation had gone through. Public contempt for their wrangling while millions of Americans starved did much to undermine our tradition of constitutional government.

  Nobody said a word against the Thashtivarians, in spite of what they cost us. They were the heroes of the day. Wherever one of their haughty golden-skinned men appeared, a crowd would gather to cheer. A rage for their type of dress swept through the land, and women took to tinting their complexions amber and dying their hair blue. The aliens were always correct and reserved among Americans, even when they visited our night clubs where they were pretty lavish spenders.

  I saw a less pleasant side of them in Russia, when Langford and I took a trip there in the late winter to study conditions. It was in Podolsk, near Moscow. There was muddy snow in the streets, and a raw wet wind melted it off the roofs, drip, drip, drip, like tears. A spaceship had landed and the Thashtivarians were out after loot. I smelled smoke in the air, and saw dead men in the gutters.

  A soldier went by with an armful of tapestries and icons from some church; another was wrenching a gold ring from the finger of an old woman who cried and huddled into her long black dress. Maybe it had been her wedding ring. A third alien was leading a nice-looking girl off, she had a bruise on her cheek and followed him mechanically. Our races were enough alike for such attraction, though there could not be issue from it. I felt sick.

  Still, such incidents were rare, and in accordance with the Thashtivarians' customs. Underneath all their technology, they were barbarians, like German tribesmen armed with Roman weapons. And they did not operate slave camps, nor exterminate whole populations, nor kill more helpless civilians than they had to. Our nation, the first to use atomic bombs and jellied gasoline, should not cast the first stone.

  By the end of that year, things had settled down in the Americas. Europe and Asia were still chaos, but mile by mile peace and order were being restored. American boys were drafted and sent out, and many did not come back. But at home the work of reconstruction went on steadily and a hectic, rather unhealthy gaiety flourished where it could.

  There wasn't much spending, though; Taruz' rigidly enforced economic program saw to that. People went about in sleazy clothes and waited in long queues for cigarettes and meat. They grumbled about the ferocious taxes, but at least there was no further inflation.

  The Big Strike that fall raised a hullaballoo. It started with the coal miners, who saw all their painfully made gains swallowed in taxes, demanding higher pay, but it spread like a grass fire. For a week the country was almost paralyzed. Then the President declared martial law again and called out the Army. Soldiers whose comrades were dying for lack of supplies were not sympathetic to the strikers.

  Langford told me that Taruz had gotten the Presiden
t to do it, and mumbled something ominous about precedents.

  For a while it looked like civil war. There was, indeed, open rioting here and there. But the President made a series of television appeals, and the Thashtivarians used their catalepsy beams, and the whole business caved in. Workers were sullen, but they went back to their jobs. Martial law was not lifted, but Congress continued to sit.

  Shortly thereafter, Taruz himself, who had always remained in the background, appeared on a well-known news commentator's show. I watched it closely. He was a fine actor. He had dropped his usual arrogance, and said he was only serving his own people, whose interests were the same as ours. A plain and truthful statement of what his army meant to us in terms of safety, a few "human interest" remarks about his kiddies at home, a hint or two about the wonders to be expected when his influence got us in on Galactic civilization and commerce—and he had America in his hand.