by Jerry
“I wouldn’t have known one if I’d seen him. Perhaps they have no concept corresponding to our ‘medicine men.’ But that has no bearing on the question. Medicine men as we think of them are not embryo M. D.’s. They’re priests of superstition. And there’s plenty of that around here. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be in this jam! But it’s a high mysticism like the great religions of Earth—Buddhism, Christianity, the Inca beliefs.”
“Then we can take our answer to their question from the pages of our Earth Bibles?”
Spud shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
The Deacon smiled. He didn’t, either—yet. There had to be one more factor. Three points determine a line; three relevant factors determine an ethical pattern—if you interpret them right.
IN THE NIGHT the guards trebled and the horde of curious, intent Igoroes pressed closer. The stench of their lizard bodies filled the little hut.
Even Spud knew it would be suicide to venture an escape. Through the lowering dusk he had watched them pressing in, and in the blackness he could hear them shifting, sloshing in the water and muck.
The rain increased, torrenting down from the sky. It swept the matting loose on the roof and let warm trickles through onto the men.
Asleep with weariness, they rolled endlessly, trying to keep out of the water, but there was no spot on the dirt floor that was not being drenched.
Dawn came, drear and lifeless. The Earthmen shifted their aching bodies to upright positions and glanced about. They were sitting in an inch of water.
“Today’s the day,” muttered Joe. He surveyed himself and his companions. He looked down at his legs, crossed in the water—
“Gods!” He suddenly burst out laughing. “Funny, isn’t it? Us, gods!” He shook and rocked back and forth.
“Joe! Joe!” Spud reached over and slapped him across the cheek. “Stop it. Do you hear?”
Joe subsided after a moment, looking momentarily ashamed, then burst out crying. “Why don’t they kill us and be done with it? What are they waiting for?”
There was an awkward trampling at the doorway. An Igoroe entered with breakfast.
“Cheer up. Swill’s on,” said the Deacon. He took the bucket-sized gourd from the Igoroe and smelled the sour mess that seemed to be halfdecomposed fruits and berries.
Joe turned paler and grabbed at his stomach. The Deacon busied himself with the gourd and casually turned to the Igoroe, who was nearly out the door.
“Where do Igoroes go when they die?” he asked.
The scaly face remained expressionless, but the Igoroe hesitated as if in puzzlement before he answered: “Igoroes dead when dead. Never go anywhere.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” the Deacon murmured.
“What does it mean?” asked Spud. The Deacon regarded his companion intently. “It can only mean that they have-no belief in an afterlife,” he said at last. “And races who do not have that belief are invariably Epicureans or debauchees. The Igoroes aren’t debauchees; they’re nothing but a bunch of home bodies, living life for all they can get out of it with a holy zeal.”
“Then Joe must surely be right,” exclaimed Spud. “The answer to the question is that the Igoroes would help each other when hurt, apply whatever healing herbs they have—which must be plenty—and be generally good Samaritans.”
The Deacon didn’t want to have to answer that one, and didn’t. He was glancing out the window, and smiled suddenly as a tinny scream shrilled out.
The three went to the window. Beyond the dim, swirling fog three scaled forms were thrashing the mud in a free-for-all. Their needletoothed jaws gnashed into each other’s flesh. Blood spurted into the rain.
It was impossible to see the details of the battle. The fighters rolled far beyond the range of vision before the death cries ended. But the Deacon had seen enough.
IT WAS AFTERNOON when the three Igoroes came again. As if it were part of the ceremony, they carefully laid their hardwood spears on the ground outside. In one palm they held a bowl of clear liquid. Contents of the three bowls were of differing shades of red.
With deference, but yet with firmness and an aura of antagonism, they quickly surrounded Joe.
He went white, and sweat began to stream down his face more rapidly. There was no sound from the hundreds of Igoroes outside.
The shrill piping of the Igoroe burst out. “What must an Igoroe do if he injures or sees an injured Igoroe?”
Joe opened his mouth, but no words came. He looked with agonized pleading at his companions. Spud and the Deacon stood stiffly in opposite corners of the hut.
Then Joe’s faltering voice came weakly. “He must help the Igoroe, give him herbs, heal his wounds—” He almost collapsed. Two of the Igoroes gripped his arms. They held their three bowls in front of him as if he were to take his choice. A whispered scream of despair came from the Igoroes outside.
“Don’t—” Spud began.
The Deacon said nothing.
Joe hesitated, until the Igoroes squeezed his arms. He cried out in pain and grasped one of the bowls and downed its contents.
The Igoroes dropped him to the earth, where he lay gasping.
Then the Igoroe piped again. “The second question: If an Igoroe finds the possession that another Igoroe has lost, what must he do? Answer by darkness.”
They left. Spud stared unbelievingly after them. “The second question! Then Joe must have failed! But what was the answer? Where were we wrong?”
The two stared at Joe, who just sat in the water and muck, not moving, his face expressionless.
For what seemed hours, Spud looked at him, then turned his face away. “Whatever poison they fed him, we’ve got to forget him. It’s our necks now! Where were we wrong? Why wasn’t that the right answer? What would an Igoroe do if he found another’s spear or little tin bowl, or wife, or diamond stickpin? How can a man think in this heat? Tell me, Deac, what’s the answer? You’ve studied these things, races, psychology. Tell me—”
He stopped. The Deacon was staring at him.
“I must be going looney in this heat,” he murmured. Quietly he slumped down in a corner.
The Deacon remained unmoving. His mind was working swiftly over this new problem. He knew he had gauged the last one correctly. Now the question of property—
Spud broke in on him. “Stuff must be scarce around here. They’d grab it off and hide it. Isn’t that what they’d do, Deac?”
“You forget we’re dealing with a race we decided was very moral according to our own—or rather, Earth standards.”
“Sure, and even though they’d really grab it off, they’d expect their god to tell them it wasn’t the proper thing to do and to give it up, wouldn’t they? That one’s easy!” The Deacon wondered. He thought it was easy, too. It was splitting hairs very fine—the difference between his answer and Spud’s. He’d been watching through the window into the grayness ever since the Igoroes’ departure, hoping for a clue, but he found no more than what he already knew.
His thoughts were sheared off by the shrill, insane cry that broke from Joe’s throat. Their companion had suddenly risen, tearing at his clothes and beating upon his body. “It’s burning me up! It’s burning me up! Oh, don’t let it burn me!”
He flung himself full length in the water on the floor, burying his face in the mud. Spud turned away. It took a lot to make his stomach roll over, but it hadn’t been treated very well the last three weeks.
The Deacon continued staring. “He’s drowning!”
Joe writhed in terrible pain. Once he raised his head and screamed again. “Don’t bum—”
“We can’t let him die that way,” said the Deacon. He began tearing at the wall of the hut, and finally jerked away a long pole. Spud had turned back, face white.
“Do you want to, or shall I?” the Deacon asked.
“I will.”
Spud raised the heavy pole and brought it down once.
IT WAS NOT dark enough to prevent their seei
ng each other across the but when the Igoroes came again. The Deacon watched them lay their spears on the ground so ceremoniously before the door again. He wondered why they carried them.
Ho held his breath as they entered. It was not yet his turn.
They surrounded Spud and piped the question.
Spud stood stiffly erect, trying to smile at the Deacon. “If an Igoroe finds something belonging to another Igoroe, he gives it back,” he said.
The three remained motionless. Spud swallowed nervously. “Or does that hurt your conscience—if any—too much?”
“What does an Igoroe do if he finds another Igoroe’s possession?” the lizard repeated.
“Gives it back, I said!” Spud shouted.
The three held out their bowls. Spud bit his lip and stared at them.
Slowly he raised one to his lips and winked at the Deacon. He brought his arm back swiftly and hurled the bowl with all his might into the open jaws of the Igoroe. He leaped backward beyond the reach of the other two, trying to reach the window.
But his foot slipped in the mud and the other two Igoroes were upon him with savage force that was more terrible because of their quietness and determination.
“You will take this one,” one of them hissed.
They pinned Spud to the floor and poured the contents of one bowl into his mouth. In spite of his sputtering and blowing, most of it trickled down his throat because two scaled claws wedged between his jaws.
The Igoroes rose and retreated to the door, visibly trembling. There they stood dramatically erect, and one piped the third question: “Can our god die? Answer at light.” Then they were gone.
Spud got up, shrugging at the effect of the drink. It seemed mildly intoxicating.
“That’s good stuff,” he said to the Deacon. “We could sell it for five dollars a pint back on Earth.”
His eyes became faraway. “Back on Earth—”
Darkness dropped quickly. Still the mob of Igoroes stamped and splashed patiently in the endless falling rain.
With darkness, Spud felt his senses slipping from him. He grew cold and afraid inside. He had seen Joe just sitting in his corner, finally rising with those horrible screams. But Spud just couldn’t keep awake any longer. He slumped in drowsiness.
The Deacon’s mind was working with all the furious intensity and cunning that had successfully carried him through thirty years of living by his wits.
He had been right about the first two questions. Joe and Spud had been stupid not to see that with no belief in an afterlife, with a high morality and an Epicurean outlook on life, suffering would be the height of the intolerable to the Igoroes. It would not be mercy to heal a wounded Igoroe because they had no science with which to heal him. The answer was to kill him as quickly as possible. That was why those two Igoroes had pounced on one of their companions earlier in the day when he had accidentally stumbled into a spear. But, then, Spud and Joe hadn’t seen the accident—
The second question would have been a longer shot if they’d asked him. But Spud had been right about stuff being scarce. It was so scarce that Spud’s answer had undoubtedly sounded silly to the Igoroes. Returning a found possession was merely a minor matter. With their Puritanical extremes of morality, the important part was that an Igoroe should, in addition, pay for the great privilege of being able to return it. The Deacon knew this was logical because one of the sand races on Mars had just such a morality concerning possessions. Theft of any kind was punished with death. Among the Igoroes it would probably be torture, since death was no punishment among them.
The only question in the Deacon’s mind was how much the Igoroes considered a finder should pay a loser. He’d have said that he should pay without stipulating any amount and hoped he could get away with it.
But could their god die? Where were the clues to that one? They didn’t believe in immortality. Did that apply to their god? The obvious answer was that it didn’t. The Deacon was afraid of the obvious.
He racked his brain, frantically searching the dusty catalogue of races he had studied throughout the universe. All he could find was that races who believe in immortality believe in immortal gods. Those who have no belief in after life seldom believe in gods, but the one or two who deny themselves immortality and still have some concept of a nebulous omnipotent presence at least grant it indestructibility.
This slim precedent from known races was the only basis to apply to the unknown. Would it?
Exhausted beyond his endurance, the Deacon sank down against the wall in a daze of half sleep.
FOR a long time, in the middle of the night’s blackness, he thought he heard a scraping, sawing sound, but his consciousness just wouldn’t rise to meet it. The sound continued for seeming hours, then died, and the Deacon rolled on his back in deep, exhausted sleep.
When he awoke, dim grayness filled the hut. The fog seemed thicker than ever and was plainly visible swirling in the hut. As the Deacon shook his head and looked about, a swift spasm clenched his insides.
He saw what the noise in the night had been.
The body of Spud Agill was sitting upright in a corner. In his hands was his pocketknife. Blood colored the water deeply.
Spud had amputated his toes one by one, then both feet. And one leg had been nearly cut off at the knee before the blood had drained out of him.
His face showed that he had felt every searing pain of the knife—that his brain had been powerless to stop his hand from cutting.
The Deacon felt his mind dim. Blank spots sprang up suddenly in his memory. He groped for a moment for his identity and his location. And there was something terribly important to be done this morning.
Oh, yes. The third question. Could a god die? That was it.
But how could he know? He wasn’t a god. None of them were gods. Two of them were dead. He had to be a god or he would die, too.
But if he were a god he couldn’t die. He was safe, then. He chuckled to himself.
Outside, the Igoroes, who never seemed to sleep, pressed close. He felt the tenseness that almost radiated from their bodies. They had reason enough to be excited. This was the big day. The day when their god would be enthroned.
He was that god! He would be the head man from now on, and would he show them!
But first he had to pass their test. Silly—having to pass an examination to be a god. He chuckled again.
Then he caught himself. He gritted his teeth. Get hold of yourself, get hold of yourself. There they come. Three anachronistic saurians. Why don’t you go back to your own time? A million years ago. You don’t belong here.
They came to the door and paused. The Deacon glanced about, panic-stricken for a moment. But there was nothing to worry about. He had the right answer, and after that—
They stood there, solemn, repulsive. Their little bowls were clawed tightly. The hardwood spears lay on the ground.
They, too, were under tremendous nervous strain. This being before them had to be their god. The other two had proven devils and had been destroyed. Now—
“Can our god die?”
“No! No!” The Deacon hurled the words from him. His whole body functions then seemed to pause awaiting the Igoroes’ reactions.
Even before they retreated with the little bowls he knew he had given the right answer. The Igoroes outside had relaxed with an audible hissing sigh.
He turned to the mangled corpse in the corner and shouted, “I’m god, Spud, don’t you hear? I’m god!”
The endless strain was over. Relief and hysteria flooded over him.
But something was wrong. The Igoroes outside were not dispersing in jubilance. Instead, they were pressing even closer, and a new intensity filled the air. A shuffling sound at the door turned the Deacon’s head.
Words collapsed on his lips. The three Igoroes were there. Their little bowls were gone and the hardwood spears were not on the ground.
They were clenched tightly in the claws of the reptiles, the dull wood showing redly lik
e old rusted steel.
The Deacon’s eyes opened wide, and he screamed just once, even before they were halfway across the hut, because he knew he couldn’t pass the final test of the gods.
THE END.
THE BIPED, REEGAN
Alfred Bester
The strongest man, the last woman, at bay against a world that had destroyed their fellows, take a last grim gamble with eternity that the human race might survive.
IF IT please your Imperial Maternity, the day is won. I have here the full report of the last victory, and if your Imperial Maternity would deign to listen . . .?
At the first light our forces were drawn up at the crest of the semicircle of hills surrounding the bipeds’ last citadel. In the ten moons following our first attack on their cities, only this last stronghold prevailed. Within were less than two hundred bipeds. Like a sickle, our armies pressed close.
We were at all times within close observation of the enemy. Spy-alpha had slipped through their traps and barriers during the dark and had taken up a post in the vast room in which the bipeds were accustomed to meet and talk. Spy-alpha telecasted to us shortly after the first light that the bipeds were entering the room, and all of us picked up his thought band.
They came in slowly, those bipeds, for they were desperate. The big one with flushed face and beard, called Otis, banged his hand on the table.
“It’s hopeless,” he said. “What if we do win out?”
The biped with red hair interrupted.
“Not if,” he said. “We shall. Chung and I have something new. It can’t fail. We’ve been working on it for two months.”
Then the biped with slant eyes, the one called Chung, nodded.
“In some ways,” he said, “the attack of the ants has worked miracles. First, it ended a war between the Chinese and Whites. Second, it has provided a necessity that is proving to be the mother of miracles. Between Ivar’s technique and my theory we have created a new thermodynamics . . .”
“You’re too long-winded,” Ivar said.
“You’re both too optimistic,” Otis added. “When do we see this miracle worker of yours? What’s it all about?”
