“There is some danger, then?” asked the secretary of defense.
Wilson shook his head. “I don’t know. He apparently was not specific. Only if anything happened at any tunnel we should fire an explosive charge directly into it. Even if there were people in it. To disregard the people and fire. He said the explosive would collapse the tunnel.”
“What could happen?” asked Sandburg.
“Tom Manning passed on the word from Molly. He quoted the spokesman as saying we would know. I got the impression the measure is precautionary only. He’ll be here in a few minutes. He can tell us.”
“What do you think?” the President asked the others. “Should we see this man?”
“I think we have to,” said Williams. “It’s not a matter of protocol, because in the situation a it stands we have no idea what protocol might be. Even if he isn’t what he says he is he can give us information—and so far we have none at all. It isn’t as if we were accepting him as an ambassador or official representative of those people out there. We can use our judgment as to how much of his story we’ll accept.”
Sandburg nodded gravely. “I think we should have him in.”
“I don’t like the idea of a press association’s bringing him in,” said the attorney general. “The news media are not particularly disinterested parties. There would be a tendency to palm their own man off on us.”
“I know Tom Manning,” said Wilson. “Molly, too, for that matter. They won’t trade on it. Maybe they would have if this spokesman had given an interview to Molly, but he hasn’t talked to anyone. The President, he said, is the only man he’ll speak with.”
“The act of a public-spirited citizen,” said the attorney general.
The secretary of state said, “We won’t, of course, be seeing him in any official capacity unless we make it so. We won’t be bound by anything he says or anything we say.”
“But,” said the secretary of defense, “I want to hear more about blowing up those tunnels. I don’t mind telling you they have bothered me. I suppose it’s all right as long as only people are coming out of them. But what would we do if something else started coming through?”
“Like what?” asked Douglas.
“I don’t know,” said Sandburg.
“How deeply, Reilly, does your objection go?” the President asked the attorney general.
“Not deeply,” said Douglas. “Just a lawyer’s reaction against irregularity.”
“Then I think,” said the President, “that we should see him.” He looked at Wilson. “Do you know, has he got a name?”
“Maynard Gale,” said Wilson. “He has his daughter with him. Her name is Alice.”
The President nodded. “You men have the time to sit in on this?”
They nodded.
“Steve,” said the President. “You as well. He’s your baby.”
8. The village had known hunger, but now the hunger ended: For some time in the night a miracle had happened. High up in the sky, just beyond the village, a hole had opened up and out of the hole had poured a steady stream of wheat. The foolish boy with the crippled leg who belonged to no one, who had simply wandered into the village, who was crippled in his mind as well as in his body, had been the first to see it. Skulking through the night as well as he could with one leg that dragged, unable to sleep, looking for the slightest husk that he could steal and chew on, he had seen the grain plunging from the sky in the bright moonlight. He had been frightened and had turned to run, but his twisting hunger had not let him. He had not known what the cascade was at first, but then it was something new and it might be something he could eat and he had not run away. So, frightened still, he had crept upon it and finally, seeing what it was, had rushed upon it and thrown himself upon the pile that had accumulated. He had stuffed his mouth, chewing and gasping, gulping to swallow the half-chewed grain, strangling and coughing, but stuffing his mouth again as soon as he managed to clear his throat. The overloaded stomach, unaccustomed to such quantities of food, had revolted, and he had rolled down off the pile and lain upon the ground, weakly vomiting.
It was there that others found him later. They kicked him out of the way, for with this wondrous thing that had happened and that had been spotted by a man of the village who had happened to go out to relieve himself, they had no time for a foolish, crippled boy who had merely attached himself to the village and did not belong there.
The village was aroused immediately and everyone came with baskets and with jars to carry off the wheat, but there was far more than enough to fill all receptacles, so the headmen got together and made plans. Holes were dug in which the grain was dumped, which was no way to treat good wheat. But it had to be hidden, if possible, from the sight of other villages and it was the only thing the people could think of to do immediately. With the dryness and the drought upon the land there was no moisture in the ground to spoil the wheat and it could be safely buried until that time when something else could be devised to store it.
But the grain kept pouring from the sky and the ground was baked and hard to dig and they could not dispose of the pile.
In the morning soldiers came and, thrusting the villagers to one side, began hauling the wheat away in trucks.
The miracle kept on happening. The wheat continued to pour from the sky, but now it was a less precious miracle, not for the village alone, but for a lot of other people.
9. “I would suppose,” said Maynard Gale, “that you would like to know exactly who we are and where we’re from.”
“That,” agreed the President, “might be an excellent place to start.”
“We are,” said Gale, “most ordinary, uncomplicated people from the year twenty-four hundred ninety-eight, almost five centuries in your future. The span of time between you and us is about the same as the span of time between the American voyages of Christopher Columbus and your present day.
“We are traveling here through what I understand you are calling, in a speculative way, time tunnels, and that name is good enough. We are transporting ourselves through time and I will not even attempt to try to explain how it is done. Actually I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I do not understand the principles except in a very general way. If, in fact, I understand them at all. The best I could do would be to give you a very inadequate layman’s explanation.”
“You say,” said the secretary of state, “that you are transporting yourselves through time back to the present moment. May I ask how many of you intend to make the trip?”
“Under ideal circumstances, Mr. Williams, I would hope all of us.”
“You mean your entire population? Your intention is to leave your world empty of any human beings?”
“That, sir, is our heartfelt hope.”
“And how many of you are there?”
“Give or take a few thousand, two billion. Our population, as you will note, is somewhat less than yours at the present moment and later I will explain why this—”
“But why?” asked the attorney general. “Why did you do this? You must know that our world’s economy cannot support both your population and our own. Here in the United States, perhaps in a few of the more favored countries of the world, the situation can be coped with for a limited period of time. We can, as a matter of utmost urgency, shelter you and feed you, although it will strain even our resources. But there are other areas of Earth that could not manage to sustain you even for a week.”
“We are well aware of that,” said Maynard Gale. “We are trying to make certain provisions to alleviate the situation. In India, in China, in some African and South American areas we are sending back in time not only people, but wheat and other food supplies, in the hope that whatever we can send may help. We know how inadequate these provisions will be. And we know as well the stress we place upon all the people of this time. You must believe me when I say we did not arrive at our decision lightly.”
“I would hope not,” said the President, somewhat tartly.
�
�I think,” said Gale, “that in your time you may have taken note of published speculations about whether or not there are other intelligences in the universe, and the almost unanimous conclusion that there must surely be. Which raises the subsidiary question of why, if this is so, none of these intelligences has sought us out—why we have not been visited. The answer to this, of course, is that space is vast and the distances between stars are great and that our solar system lies far out in one of the galactic arms, far from the greater star density in the galactic core, where intelligence might have risen first. And then there is the speculation concerning what kind of people, if you want to call them that, might come visiting if they should happen to do so. Here I think the overwhelming, although by no means unanimous body of opinion is that by the time a race had developed star-roving capability it would have arrived at a point of social and ethical development where it would pose no threat.
“And while this may be true enough, there would always be exceptions and we, it seems, in our own time, have become the victims of one of these exceptions.”
“What you are saying,” said Sandburg, “is that you have been visited, with what appears to have been unhappy results. Is that why you sent ahead the warning about the planting of artillery?”
““You haven’t yet set up the guns? From the tone of your voice—”
“We have not had time.”
“Sir, I plead with you. We discussed the possibility that some of them might break through the defenses we set up and invade the tunnels. We have strong defenses, of course, and there are strict orders—to be carried out by devoted men—to destroy any tunnel where a breakthrough might occur but there is always the chance that something could go wrong.”
“But your warning was so indefinite. How will we know if something—”
“You would know,” said Gale. “There would be no doubt at all. Take a cross between your largest, most powerful mammal and your most agile one. Let it move so fast that it seems no more than a blur. Give it teeth and claws and an armament of poison spines. Not that they look like your bears or tigers or even elephants—”
“You mean they carry nothing but claws and teeth and poison darts?”
“You’re thinking of weapons, sir. They don’t need weapons.
They are unbelievably fast and strong. They are filled with thoughtless bloodlust. They take a lot of killing. Tear them apart and they will keep coming at you. They can tunnel under fortifications and tear strong walls apart.”
“It is unbelievable,” said the attorney general.
“You’re right,” said Gale. “But I am telling you the truth. We have held them off for almost twenty years, but we can foresee the end. We foresaw it a few years after they first landed. We knew we had only one chance—to retreat. And the only place we could retreat to was the past. We can hold them off no longer. Gentlemen, believe me, five hundred years from now the human world is coming to an end.”
“They can’t follow you through time, however,” said the President.
“If you mean, can they duplicate our time capability, I am fairly sure they can’t. They’re not that kind of being.”
“There is a serious flaw in your story.” said the secretary of state. “You describe these alien invaders as little more than ferocious beasts. Intelligent, perhaps, but still mere animals. For intelligence to be transformed into a technology such as would be necessary to build what I suppose you would call a spaceship, they would require manipulatory members—hands or perhaps even tentacles, something of the sort.”
“They have them.”
“But you said—”
“I’m sorry,” said Gale. “It cannot all be told at once. They have members armed with claws. They have other members that end in the equivalent of hands. And they have manipulatory tentacles as well. Theirs is a strange evolutionary case. In their evolutionary development, apparently, and for what reason we do not know, they did not trade one thing for another, as has been the case in the evolution of the creatures of the Earth. They developed new organs and abilities, but they let go of none of those they already had. They hung on to everything. They loaded the evolutionary deck in their own favor.
“I would suspect that if they wished they could build most efficient weapons. We have often wondered why they didn’t. Our psychologists postulate that these aliens glory in killings They may have developed their spacetraveling capability for no other reason than to find other life forms to destroy. Killing is an intensely personal experience for them—as religion once was for the human race. And since it is so personal it must be done personally, without mechanical aids. It must be done with claws and fangs and poison tail. They may feel about mechanical killing aids what an accomplished swordsman of some hundreds of years ago must have felt about the first guns—contempt. Perhaps each one of them must continually reassert his manhood—selfhood, perhaps—and the only means by which he can do this is slaughter, personally accomplished. Their individual standing, their regard for themselves, the regard of their fellows for them, may be based upon the quality and the quantity Of their killing.
“We know little of them. There has been, as you can imagine, no communication with them. We have; photographed them and we have studied them dead, but this is only superficial to any understanding of them. They do not fight campaigns. They seem to have no real plan of battle, no strategy. If they had, they would have wiped us out long ago. They make sudden raids and then retire. They make no attempt to hold territory as such. They don’t loot. All they seem to want is killing, At times it has seemed to us that they have deliberately not .wiped us out—as if they were conserving us, making us last as long as possible, so we’d still be there to satisfy their bloodlust.”
Wilson glanced at the girl sitting on the sofa beside Gale and caught on her face a shadow of terror.
“Twenty years?” Sandburg said. “You held these beasts off for twenty years?”
“We are doing better now,” said Gale. “Or at least we were doing better before we left. We now have weapons. At first we had none. Earth had been without war and weapons for a hundred years or more when their spaceship came. They would have exterminated us then if they had fought a total war, but as I have explained, it has not been total war. That gave us time to develop some defense. We fabricated weapons, some of them rather sophisticated weapons, but even your weapons of today would not be enough. Your nuclear weapons might work, perhaps, but no sane society—”
He stopped in some embarrassment, waited for a moment and then went on. “We killed a lot of them, of course, but it seemed to make no difference. There always seemed as many of them as ever, if not more. Only the one spaceship came, as far as we could determine. It could not have carried many of them, large as it was. The only answer to their numbers seems to be that they are prolific breeders and that they reach maturity in an incredibly short time. They don’t seem to mind dying. They never run or hide. I suppose, again, that it is their warrior’s code. They seem to know nothing quite as glorious as death in battle. And they take much killing. Kill a hundred of them and let one get through and it more than evens the score. If we had stayed they would eventually have wiped us out. Even trying to conserve us, as they may have been trying, they still would have exterminated us. That is why we’re here.
“It is impossible, I think, for the human race to accept the sort of creatures they are. There is nothing that we know that can compare with them.”
“Perhaps,” said the President, “in view of what we have been told, we should do something now in regard to that artillery.”
“We have, of course,” the attorney general pointed out, “no real evidence.”
“I would rather,” said Sandburg sharply, “move without ironclad evidence than find it suddenly sitting in my lap.”
The President reached for his phone. He said to the secretary of defense, “Use this phone. Kim will put through the call.”
“After Jim has made his call,” said State, “perhaps I s
hould use the phone. We’ll want to get off an advisory to the other governments.”
10. Miss Emma Garside turned off the radio and sat bolt upright in her chair in something approaching silent awe of herself for the brilliance of the idea that had just occurred to her. It was not often (well, actually never before) that she had felt that way, for—although a proud woman—she was inclined to be mousy in both her actions and her thoughts. The pride she had was a secret one, divulged only occasionally and guardedly to Miss Clarabelle Smythe, her closest friend. It was something she held close within herself for comfort, although there were times she flinched a little when she remembered the undoubted horse thief and the man who had been hanged for a rather heinous offense. She had never mentioned either the horse thief or the hanged man to her good friend Clarabelle.
The Sunday afternoon sunlight slanted through the west window, falling on the worn carpeting where the aged cat slept, tightly rolled into a ball. In the garden at the rear of the dowdy house on the dowdy street a catbird was calling sassily—perhaps preparing for a new inroad on the raspberry patch—but she paid it no attention.
It had cost a deal of money, she thought. The pride she had was her writing and some traveling, but what she knew had been worth the money and time. For there was no one else in this little town who could trace back his or her blood as far as she—to the Revolution and beyond, back to English days and little English villages that lay sunken deep in time. And while there had been a horse thief and a hanged man and others of somewhat dubious character and undistinguished lineage, they had been offset by country squires and sturdy yeomen, with even the hint of an ancient castle somewhere in the background, although she never had quite been able to authenticate the castle.
And now, she thought, and now! She had carried her family research back as far as human ingenuity and records went. Now could she—would she dare—proceed in the opposite direction, forward into the future? She knew all the old ancestors and here, she told herself, was the opportunity to acquaint herself with all the new descendants. If these people were really what the radio hinted they might be—it surely could be done. But if it were to be done she would have to do it, for there would be no records. She would have to go among them—those who came from the area of New England—and she would have to ask her questions and she might ask many different people before she got a clue. Are there, my dear, any Garsides or Lamberts or Lawrences in your family tree? Well, then, if you think so, but don’t really know—is there anyone who would? Oh, yes, my dear, of course it is most important—I cannot begin to tell you how important . . .
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