Aliens from Analog

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  “What?” Aingao almost shouted.

  “I’m afraid you heard me, sir. I can hardly accept it myself, but the aborigines were making threats shortly before the plague struck, to the effect that something unpleasant would happen if the Reska didn’t get off the planet forthwith.”

  Aingao frowned. “Aborigines talking about getting off planets? Forgive me, Dzukarl, but that hardly sounds consistent.”

  Dzukarl shook his head miserably. “I know it’s confusing, sir. I’m confused myself.

  But let’s figure it out later. Right now, I believe it’s urgent that Sirla Tsardong be taken off that planet—and kept off. I tried to persuade Tsardong-li, but he refused. Said there was no developed race there so I had no basis for authority. Technically, he’s right. But I think the case is special. I request a warrant giving me special authority to order removal.”

  Aingao chewed on his upper lip, pondering the request. Dzukarl elaborated on it: “Moreover, sir, I believe the probable urgency is extreme. Tunnel ships are too slow because of acceleration and deceleration time. And there will likely be considerable danger upon arrival. I would like to return by warp ship, and take a sizable armed division with me.”

  Aingao groaned. “I’m afraid I find your requests basically reasonable. But the expense of using a warp ship just for transport! And the morality of letting diseased men from the Tsulan travel with healthy soldiers…of sending healthy men to a plague world—”

  He was interrupted by a sharp buzz in his own office. “Excuse me,” he said. “Something urgent coming in.” He leaned out of the field of view for several minutes, his voice becoming too low for Dzukarl to understand what he said. When he returned to Dzukarl’s screen he was very pale. “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he said weakly. “Your plague seems to be spreading like wildfire from your ‘sealed’ ship. Deaths have already been reported as much as forty miles from the spaceport. And you’ve been in port less than two hours!”

  “Sir,” Dzukarl said tightly, “I hate to mention it, but—”

  Aingao nodded. “I know. In that time one ship has cleared here on an interplanetary run and another on an interstellar trade route. The interplanetary we can probably intercept, but the interstellar…” He stared blankly into space, shaking his head slowly.

  There came a day when Ngasik found a signal on his radio, weak but intelligible. He listened intently, both relieved and concerned, as Kirlatsu explained, “I’ve built some new equipment so we could talk to you. I would have done it sooner, but I’ve been sick. Most of us have been sick. We had hoped to find where you were and plot a safe way to rescue you, but I’m afraid that’s impossible now. There aren’t enough of us left alive and well.”

  Ngasik felt spiritual sickness as he visualized his sirla decimated by plague, but physically he was still in good shape. Bdwdlsplg had even provided him with a diurnal watchdog so he could get some exercise in sunlight. He told Kirlatsu, “The plague is artificial. The tsapeli took a fluid sample from me and used it to invent a plague to exterminate the Reska. Probably some of us are immune—I haven’t got it yet.” (He realized abruptly that that was odd—the disease was based on his body fluids, and yet he seemed immune. Had they done something else to prevent his getting it?) “It might be a good idea for the survivors there to seal themselves in the ship. They may be after you shortly with a new strain designed to catch those who resisted the first batch. They’re very anxious to eradicate us.”

  “They may not have to bother,” Kirlatsu said bitterly. “This one’s still spreading, finally attacking individuals we thought were immune.”

  So maybe my time will come, Ngasik thought.

  Kirlatsu had paused, but Ngasik said nothing. After a while Kirlatsu said pensively, “So the tsapeli caused this! They must know how to cure it, too—but they’d rather just watch us suffer and die. Ngasik…why are they doing this to us?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Ngasik said slowly. “To really understand it—to be sure whether it makes sense even from their standpoint—I’d have to know more about ecology than the little I remember from my dlazol.

  “It turns out that our ‘obvious savages,’ ironically, have almost a pure technocracy organized on a continent-wide basis. Their technology is entirely biological, but very advanced. The new life forms they create—and they can make them to order overnight—make it necessary to control the ecology very closely. Their entire culture depends on keeping that running smoothly. It has to be handled by people who understand it, so the modem descendants of the ‘sorcerer’ class who learned the tricks of manipulating life control the main branch of their government. The government has to be continent-wide because ecological interactions interlock strongly over an entire land mass.

  “They claim that our coming here upsets things enough so the whole system could collapse—so they want to get rid of us, by foul means if not fair.” He added wryly, “And they have the gall to hint they’d like to know our secrets of interstellar flight!” Kirlatsu, his radio voice crackly even with the new long-distance equipment, asked, “How about the folks back home? Did the Tsulan take the plague there?”

  Ngasik shut his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure how easy or hard that would be. But the tsapeli have hinted that they wouldn’t mind exterminating the Reska altogether—to be very sure we give them no more trouble.”

  Kirlatsu said nothing, but Ngasik heard his slow, heavy breathing and knew nothing more to say to him. He broke contact.

  As he tried to get back to sleep, an idea began to form in his mind—and then a decision.

  Thirteen of the original hundred Reska were still alive in the sirla camp when the warp ship landed. Kirlatsu looked at it, puzzled, as it settled down, nearly filling the clearing, and became silent. He had figured the Tsulan might return eventually—though by the time it could get back there might be nobody alive to meet it—but certainly not this soon. And a warp ship was a surprise in any case.

  He watched to see who would come out of it. In a few minutes Dzukarl emerged and walked slowly toward the camp, carrying a key to let him inside the dome. As he came close, Kirlatsu saw with a sinking sensation that he was thin and covered with the white spots that came in a late stage of the plague.

  Dzukarl stopped near Kirlatsu and said, “I want to talk to Tsardong-li.” His voice was weak, but had the old air of authority.

  Kirlatsu said, “Tsardong-li is dead.”

  “I’m sorry.” Brief pause. “I bring orders to remove Sirla Tsardong from Slepo IV. If possible, I am to attempt also to rescue the man who was taken prisoner. We are prepared to fight the tsapeli—”

  “Don’t you know when you’re licked?” Kirlatsu interrupted bitterly. “Oh, we’ll be glad to go back with you. All thirteen—” Then he was interrupted by the longdistance radio.

  “What’s going on?” Ngasik demanded anxiously. His voice was distorted by the noise filters, but Kirlatsu had little trouble understanding it. “I thought I heard a ship going over a little while ago. Is somebody—”

  “This is Dzukarl,” the Arbiter broke in. “I came back with a warp ship to take you all off the planet. Can you tell me where to bring a rescue party?”

  “No,” Ngasik answered promptly. “And you can’t afford to try to find me. You went back to Reslaka. Did the plague—”

  “Yes.” Dzukarl nodded glumly. “It’s spreading wildly over Reslaka—and the colonies, carried by ships which left port before we knew the Tsulan was contagious. I would never have believed a disease could spread so fast—and work so fast. I’m half afraid it could wipe us out before we find a cure.”

  “It could,” Ngasik said bluntly. “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

  Kirlatsu saw Dzukarl turn pale. The Arbiter said weakly, “What?”

  “The tsapeli developed the plague to exterminate the Reska. Naturally they would want to make it fast-working. Otherwise we might be able to discover a cure before it had finished its job.”

 
; Dzukarl said fiercely, “O.K., they may wipe us out, but at least we can take them with us! I brought along weapons and troops. A lot of them are sick, but not too sick to go down fighting!”

  “Where’s the point in that?” Ngasik asked very quietly. It suddenly seemed to Kirlatsu, somehow, that the quiet in his friend’s voice now was more suggestive of new-found strength than of defeat. “Suppose you bomb the whole planet—which you probably aren’t equipped to do anyway. You destroy all the tsapeli. But that doesn’t save the Reska—because only the tsapeli know how to cure the plague!

  “Face it, Dzukarl—the chance of our medics finding a cure in time to stop something that works that fast is infinitesimal. If you exterminate the tsapeli, you may soothe your sense of honor—but you practically guarantee our extinction.”

  “Does it really matter?” Dzukarl asked. “Aren’t we doomed either way?”

  “No!” Ngasik practically shouted. “I’ve been living among the tsapeli, starting to learn about them. I know what their reason for doing this is. All they really want is to keep Reska off this planet—for reasons which make sense to them. Their purpose will be served if the Reska just leave and never come back. It doesn’t really matter if you go away cured, just so you go away. If you come back, you can be hit with a fresh plague.”

  “You mean,” Dzukarl asked, confused, “they’re willing to just give us the cure?”

  “Of course not. We’ve made them angry and distrustful. But there is something we have and they want. They want it badly enough to risk giving you the cure in return for it. I’ve made a deal with them.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “They want to know how to build starships—and they claim they can work one alien into their ecology, under close supervision. I’ve agreed to stay and teach them.” There was a numb silence at Kirlatsu’s end of the line. Ngasik added, “I warned them there’s a lot to learn, and it will take a long time. After all, they’re starting from nothing.”

  “But,” Dzukarl spluttered, “but…but, that’s treason!”

  “No!” Kirlatsu shouted, suddenly understanding. “No, it isn’t, really. And under the circumstances, I can’t see that we have any choice—except nonsurvival.”

  “Neither can I,” Ngasik said. “The cure will work much as the disease. Your camp and ships will be ‘infected,’ and the effects should start showing up very shortly. Then you leave, fast, to show good faith. When you go home, the cure will spread just as the disease did. If they don’t keep their word—if any trickery shows up—I’ve made it clear to the tsapeli that you can get word to me without even entering the atmosphere here. In which case I’ve promised to kill myself, which they emphatically don’t want. Otherwise, surviving Reska can be cured and stay far away fromSlepo.” Kirlatsu was full of an odd mixture of hope, relief, and gratitude—and concern. “But, Ngasik,” he said, “have you thought of what you’re letting yourself in for? The danger, the loneliness—”

  “I’ll manage,” Ngasik assured him, sounding almost cheerful. “I’ll keep alive; I may even find small pleasures in learning what makes these characters tick. In any case, if I can save a few billion lives it’s worth it. Good-bye, Kirlatsu.”

  “Good-bye, Ngasik.” Kirlatsu broke contact and went straight to his hut. Dzukarl was still confused, but he could wait a while for an explanation. Right now Kirlatsu wanted to start remembering what it felt like to have a future.

  “They kept their part of the bargain Kirlatsu finished, “and we checked the plague before it wiped us out—but not before it killed forty-one percent of the race. With damage so great and widespread, the Overgovernment of Reslaka decided—virtually without opposition—that extreme precautions were necessary in the future.”

  “To prevent more trouble with the plague?” Carla asked. “Or the tsapeli?” She shuddered, remembering some of the gorier details of Kirlatsu’s story.

  Kirlatsu shook his head. “No. That was the least of our worries. Slepo IV was put strictly off limits, of course. The radical precautions were just those laws you were wondering about—to guard against trouble with races not yet imagined. You see, the really deadly thing about the tsapeli wasn’t that they could start plagues.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No. If we’d known they had a highly technical culture, we wouldn’t have tangled with them. If we had, Dzukarl could have forced us off even under the puny laws we had then. What we learned from the tsapeli—and it came as a terrible shock to all of us—was that a highly developed and dangerous culture might be very far from obvious…until it’s too late. We were most anxious to see that we never fell into that trap again.”

  Carla suddenly seemed to understand. She murmured an apology to Kirlatsu for what she had said earlier. And I thought of something Kirlatsu had not cleared up.

  “But were you really out of this trap?” I asked. “Weren’t you—aren’t you—afraid of what the tsapeli will do when Ngasik teaches them, and they come into space after you?”

  Kirlatsu smiled slyly. “Not terribly,” he said. “You see, Ngasik was just a cook—with a gift of gab.”

  His leg irons clanked and his wrist chains jingled as they led him into the room. The bonds on his ankles compelled him to move at an awkward shuffle and the guards delighted in urging him onward faster than he could go. Somebody pointed to a chair facing the long table. Somebody else shoved him into it with such force that he lost balance and sat down hard.

  The black brush of his hair jerked as his scalp twitched and that was his only visible reaction. Then he gazed across the desk with light gray eyes so pale that the pupils seemed set in ice. The look in them was neither friendly nor hostile, submissive nor angry; it was just impassively and impartially cold, cold.

  On the other side of the desk seven Gombarians surveyed him with various expressions: triumph, disdain, satisfaction, boredom, curiosity, glee and arrogance. They were a humanoid bunch in the same sense that gorillas are humanoid. At that point the resemblance ended.

  “Now,” began the one in the middle, making every third syllable a grunt, “your name is Wayne Taylor?”

  No answer.

  “You have come from a planet called Terra?”

  No response.

  “Let us not waste any more time, Palamin,” suggested the one on the left. “If he will not talk by invitation, let him talk by compulsion.”

  “You are right, Eckster.” Putting a hand under the desk Palamin came up with a hammer. It had a pear-shaped head with flattened base. “How would you like every bone in your hands cracked finger by finger, joint by joint?”

  “I wouldn’t,” admitted Wayne Taylor.

  “A very sensible reply,” approved Palamin. He placed the hammer in the middle of the desk, positioning it significantly. “Already many days have been spent teaching you our language. By this time a child could have learned it sufficiently well to understand and answer questions.” He favored the prisoner with a hard stare. “You have pretended to be abnormally slow to learn. But you can deceive us no longer. You will now provide all the information for which we ask.”

  “Willingly or unwillingly,” put in Eckster, licking thin lips, “but you’ll provide it anyway.”

  “Correct,” agreed Palamin. “Let us start all over again and see if we can avoid painful scenes. Your name is Wayne Taylor and you come from a planet called Terra?’ ’ “I admitted that much when I was captured.”

  “I know. But you were not fluent at that time and we want no misunderstandings. Why did you land on Gombar?”

  “I’ve told my tutor at least twenty times that I did it involuntarily. It was an emergency landing. My ship was disabled.”

  “Then why did you blow it up? Why did you not make open contact with us and invite us to repair it for you?”

  “No Terran vessel must be allowed to fall intact into hostile hands,” said Taylor flatly.

  “Hostile?” Palamin tried to assume a look of pained surprise but his face wasn’t made for it. �
�Since you Terrans know nothing whatever about us what right have you to consider us hostile?”

  “I wasn’t kissed on arrival,” Taylor retorted. “I was shot at coming down. I was shot at getting away. I was hunted across twenty miles of land, grabbed, and beaten up.”

  “Our soldiers do their duty,” observed Palamin virtuously.

  “I’d be dead by now if they were not the lousiest marksmen this side of Cygni.”

  “And what is Cygni?”

  “A star.”

  “Who are you to criticize our soldiers?” interjected Eckster, glowering.

  “A Terran,” informed Taylor as if that were more than enough.

  “That means nothing to me,” Eckster gave back with open contempt.

  “It will.”

  Palamin took over again. “If friendly contact were wanted the Terran authorities would send a large ship with an official deputation on board, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t risk big boats and important people without knowing what sort of a reception they’re likely to get.”

  “And who digs up that information?”

  “Space scouts.”

  “Ah!” Palamin gazed around with the pride of a pygmy who has trapped an elephant. “So at last you admit that you are a spy?”

  “I am a spy only in the estimation of the hostile.”

  “On the contrary,” broke in a heavily jowled specimen seated on the right, “you are whatever we say you are—because we say it.”

  “Have it your own way,” conceded Taylor.

  “We intend to.”

  “You can be sure of that, my dear Borkor,” soothed Palamin. He returned attention to the prisoner. “How many Terrans are there in existence?”