The Human Edge

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Kator stopped talking. There was a remarkable silence from the fifty-one faces staring at him for a long moment—and then a rising mutter of question and incredulity. The strong voice of the eldest family head cut across this.

  "Are you telling us you planned the suicides of your Captain and men?"

  Kator's face twisted in a sudden, apparently uncontrollable fashion. Almost as if he had been ready to laugh.

  "Yes, sir," he said. "I planned it."

  There was another dead silence.

  "In the name of . . . why?" burst out the eldest. At one side of the half-circle of faces, the face of The Brutogas looked stricken with paralysis.

  Kator's face twisted again.

  "Our ancestor, The Morahnpa," he said, "once ensured the conquest of a world and a race by his own individual actions. Because of this, and to encourage others who might do likewise, the principle was laid down that whoever might match The Morahnpa's action, might have, as The Morahnpa did, complete sovereignty over the natives of such a conquered world, after the conquest was accomplished. That is—other men might be entitled to take their advantages of the world and race itself. But its true conqueror, during his lifetime, would be the final authority on the planet."

  "What's history got to do with this?" It was noticeable that the use of Kator's title of Keysman had begun to be forgotten by the eldest of the family heads. "The Morahnpa not only earned his right to a world, he was in such a position that the world could not be taken without his assistance."

  "Or the Muffled People's world without mine," said Kator. "I had intended to return with a situation that was quite clear-cut. I left our base on the moon unhidden when I returned. It would be bound to be discovered within a limited time. During that limited time, I would offer my knowledge of where the place of strength of the Muffled People was—in turn for the planet of the Muffled People being granted to me as my kingdom—as his world was to The Morahnpa."

  "In that case," said the eldest, "you made a mistake in showing us your recording."

  "No," said Kator. "I've renounced my ambition."

  "Renounced?" The fifty-one faces watched Kator without moving as the eldest spoke. "Why?"

  Kator's face twitched again.

  "Let me show you the rest of the recording."

  "The rest—" began the eldest. But Kator was already turning to the resolving machine. He turned it on.

  For a second there was nothing to be seen—only the bright flicker of a destroyed recording. Then, this cleared magically and the fifty-one found themselves looking at a native of the Muffled People—the same who had spoken to Kator earlier on the recording.

  He took the container of burning vegetation out of his mouth, knocked the vegetation out of it on a rock beside him, overhanging the creek, and put the pipe away. Then he addressed them in perfect Ruml.

  "Greetings," he said. "To all, and particularly to those heads of leading families who are viewing this. As you possibly already know, I am a member of that race you Ruml refer to as Muffled People, but which are correctly called humans"—he pronounced the native word carefully for them—"Heh-eu-manz. With a little practice you'll find it not hard at all to say."

  There was the beginning of a babble from the semicircle of seats.

  "Quiet!" barked the eldest head of family.

  " . . . We humans," the native was saying, smiling at them, "have quite a warlike history, but we really don't like wars. We prefer to be independent, but on good terms with our neighbors. Accordingly, let me show you some of the means we've developed to obtain our preference."

  The scene changed suddenly. The assembled Ruml saw before them one of the small, long-tailed, scavenging animals Kator had used as collectors. This was smaller than Kator's and white-furred. It was nosing its way up and down the corridors of a topless box—here being baffled by a dead end corridor, there finding an entrance through to an adjoining corridor.

  "This," said the voice of the native, "is a device called a 'maze' used to test the intelligence of the experimental animal you see. This device is one of the investigative tools used in our study of a division of knowledge known as 'psychology'—which corresponds to a certain extent with the division of knowledge you Ruml refer to as Family-study."

  The scene changed back to the native on the creekbank.

  "Psychology teaches us humans many useful things about how other organisms must react—this is because it is founded upon basic and universal desires, such as the urge of the individual or the race to survive."

  He lifted the pole he held.

  "This," he said, "though it was used by humans long before we began to study psychology consciously, operates upon psychological principle—"

  The view slid out along the rod, down the line attached to its tip, and through the surface of the water. It continued underwater down the line to a dirt worm like the one in Kator's cube. Then it moved off to the side a few inches and picked up the image of a native underwater creature possessing no limbs, but a fan-shaped tail and minor fans farther up the body. The creature swam to the worm and swallowed it. Immediately it began to struggle and a close-up revealed a barbed metal hook in the worm. The creature, however, for all its struggling was drawn up out of the water by the native, who hit it on the head and put it in a woven box.

  "You see," said the native, cheerfully, "that this device makes use of the subject's—a 'fish' we call it—desire to survive, on a very primitive level. To survive the fish must eat. We offer it something to eat, but in taking it, the fish delivers itself into our hands, by fastening itself to the hook attached to our line.

  "All intelligent, space-going races we have encountered so far seem to exhibit the universal desire to survive. To survive, most seem to believe that they must dominate any other race they encounter, or risk domination themselves. Our study of psychology shows that this is a false assumption. To maintain its domination over another intelligent race, a race must eventually bankrupt its resources, both physical and non-physical. However—it is entirely practical for one race to maintain its domination long enough to teach another race that domination is impractical.

  "The worm on my hook," he said, "is known as 'bait.' The worm you found in the wreckage of the human spaceship was symbolic of the fact that the wreckage itself was bait. We have many such pieces of bait drifting outwards from our area of space here. And as I told Kator Secondcousin Brutogas, you never can tell what you'll catch. The object in catching, of course, is to be able to study what takes the bait. Now, when Kator Secondcousin took the spaceship wreckage in tow, there was a monitor only half a light-year away that notified us of that fact. Kator's path home was charted and we immediately went to work, here.

  "When your expeditionary ship came, it was allowed to land on our moon and an extensive study was made not only of it, but of the psychology of the Rumls you sent aboard it. After as much could be learned by that method as possible, we allowed one of your collectors to find our underground launching site and for one of your people to come down and actually enter it.

  "We ran a number of maze-level tests on Kator Secondcousin while he was making his entrance to and escaping from the underground launching site. You'll be glad to hear that your Ruml intelligence tests quite highly, although you aren't what we'd call maze-sophisticated. We had little difficulty influencing Kator to leave the conveyor belt and follow a route that would lead him onto a surface too slippery to cross. As he fell we rendered him unconscious—"

  There was a collective sound, half-grunt, half-gasp, from the listening Ruml audience.

  "And, during the hour that followed, we were able to make complete physical tests and studies of an adult male Ruml. Then Kator was put back where he had fallen and allowed to return to consciousness. Then he was let escape."

  The human got up, picked up his rod, picked up his woven basket with the underwater creature inside, and nodded to them.

  "We now," he said, "know all about you. And you, with the exception of Kator,
know nothing about us. Because of what we have learned about your psychology, we are confident that Kator's knowledge will not be allowed to do you any good." He lifted a finger. "I have one more scene to show you."

  He vanished, and they looked instead into the immensity of open space. The constellations were vaguely familiar and those who had had experience recognized the spatial area as not far removed from their own planetary system. Through this star-dimness stretched inconceivable great shape followed by great shape, like dark giant demons waiting.

  "Kator," said the voice of the native, "should have asked himself why there was so much empty space in the underground launching area. Come see us on Earth whenever you're ready to talk."

  * * *

  The scene winked out. In the new glare of the lights, the fifty-one proud heads of families stared at Kator Secondcousin, who stared back. Then, as if at some unconscious signal, they rose as one man and swarmed upon him.

  "You fools!" cackled Kator with a Ruml's mad laugh-ter, as he saw them coming at him. "Didn't he say you wouldn't have any use of what I know?" He went down under their claws. "Force won't work against these people—that's what he was trying to tell you! Why do you have to take the bait just the way I did—"

  But it was no use. He felt himself dying.

  "All right!" he choked at them, as a red haze began to blot out the world about him. "Learn the hard way for yourselves. Killing me won't do any good . . ."

  * * *

  And of course he was quite right. It didn't.

  JACKAL'S MEAL

  You may have noticed by now that you can be reading a Dickson story, thinking you know what's going on, and then suddenly—whoops, you should have watched that last step because it was a lulu! In this one, you're really going to have trouble figuring out just what a human is up to. Fortunately, the aliens have the same problem.

  I

  If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away—

  Belike the price of a jackal's meal were more than a thief could pay . . .

  "The Ballad of East and West,"

  by Rudyard Kipling

  In the third hour after the docking of the great, personal spaceship of the Morah Jhan—on the planetoid outpost of the 469th Corps which was then stationed just outside the Jhan's spatial frontier—a naked figure in a ragged gray cloak burst from a crate of supplies being unloaded off the huge alien ship. The figure ran around uttering strange cries for a little while, eluding the Morah who had been doing the unloading, until it was captured at last by the human Military Police guarding the smaller, courier vessel, alongside, which had brought Ambassador Alan Dormu here from Earth to talk with the Jhan.

  The Jhan himself, and Dormu—along with Marshal Sayers Whin and most of the other ranking officers, Morah and human alike—had already gone inside, to the Headquarters area of the outpost, where an athletic show was being put on for the Jhan's entertainment. But the young captain in charge of the Military Police, on his own initiative, refused the strong demands of the Morah that the fugitive be returned to them. For it, or he, showed signs of being—or of once having been—a man, under his rags and dirt and some surgicallike changes that had been made in him.

  One thing was certain. He was deathly afraid of his Morah pursuers; and it was not until he was shut in a room out of sight of them that he quieted down. However, nothing could bring him to say anything humanly understandable. He merely stared at the faces of all those who came close to him, and felt their clothing as someone might fondle the most precious fabric made—and whimpered a little when the questions became too insistent, trying to hide his face in his arms but not succeeding because of the surgery that had been done to him.

  The Morah went back to their own ship to contact their chain of command, leading ultimately up to the Jhan; and the young Military Police captain lost no time in getting the fugitive to his Headquarters' Section and the problem, into the hands of his own commanders. From whom, by way of natural military process, it rose through the ranks until it came to the attention of Marshal Sayers Whin.

  "Hell's Bells—" exploded Whin, on hearing it. But then he checked himself and lowered his voice. He had been drawn aside by Harold Belman, the one-star general of the Corps who was his aide; and only a thin door separated him from the box where Dormu and the Jhan sat, still watching the athletic show. "Where is the . . . Where is he?"

  "Down in my office, sir."

  "This has got to be quite a mess!" said Whin. He thought rapidly. He was a tall, lean man from the Alaskan back country and his temper was usually short-lived. "Look, the show in there'll be over in a minute. Go in. My apologies to the Jhan. I've gone ahead to see everything's properly fixed for the meeting at lunch. Got that?"

  "Yes, Marshal."

  "Stick with the Jhan. Fill in for me."

  "What if Dormu—"

  "Tell him nothing. Even if he asks, play dumb. I've got to have time to sort this thing out, Harry! You understand?"

  "Yes, sir," said his aide.

  Whin went out a side door of the small anteroom, catching himself just in time from slamming it behind him. But once out in the corridor, he strode along at a pace that was almost a run.

  He had to take a lift tube down eighteen levels to his aide's office. When he stepped in there, he found the fugitive surrounded by the officer of the day and some officers of the Military Police, including General Mack Stigh, Military Police Unit Commandant. Stigh was the ranking officer in the room; and it was to him Whin turned.

  "What about it, Mack?"

  "Sir, apparently he escaped from the Jhan's ship—"

  "Not that. I know that. Did you find out who he is? What he is?" Whin glanced at the fugitive who was chewing hungrily on something grayish-brown that Whin recognized as a Morah product. One of the eatables supplied for the lunch meeting with the Jhan that would be starting any moment now. Whin grimaced.

  "We tried him on our own food," said Stigh. "He wouldn't eat it. They may have played games with his digestive system, too. No, sir, we haven't found out anything. There've been a few undercover people sent into Morah territory in the past twenty years. He could be one of them. We've got a records search going on. Of course, chances are his record wouldn't be in our files, anyway."

  "Stinking Morah," muttered a voice from among the officers standing around. Whin looked up quickly, and a new silence fell.

  "Records search. All right," Whin said, turning back to Stigh, "that's good. What did the Morah say when what's-his-name—that officer on duty down at the docks—wouldn't give him up?"

  "Captain—?" Stigh turned and picked out a young officer with his eyes. The young officer stepped forward.

  "Captain Gene McKussic, Marshal," he introduced himself.

  "You were the one on the docks?" Whin asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  "What did the Morah say?"

  "Just—that he wasn't human, sir," said McKussic. "That he was one of their own experimental pets, made out of one of their own people—just to look human."

  "What else?"

  "That's all, Marshal."

  "And you didn't believe them?"

  "Look at him, sir—" McKussic pointed at the fugitive, who by this time had finished his food and was watching them with bright but timid eyes. "He hasn't got a hair on him, except where a man'd have it. Look at his face. And the shape of his head's human. Look at his fingernails, even—"

  "Yes—" said Whin slowly, gazing at the fugitive. Then he raised his eyes and looked around at the other officers. "But none of you thought to get a doctor in here to check?"

  "Sir," said Stigh, "we thought we should contact you, first—"

  "All right. But get a doctor now! Get two of them!" said Whin. One of the other officers turned to a desk nearby and spoke into an intercom. "You know what we're up against, don't you—all of you?" Whin's eyes stabbed around the room. "This is just the thing to blow Ambassador Dormu's talk with the Morah Jhan sky high. Now, all of you, except Gener
al Stigh, get out of here. Go back to your quarters and stay on tap until you're given other orders. And keep your mouths shut."

  "Marshal," it was the young Military Police captain, McKussic, "we aren't going to give him back to the Morah, no matter what, are we, sir . . ."

  He trailed off. Whin merely looked at him.

  "Get to your quarters, Captain!" said Stigh, roughly.

  * * *

  The room cleared. When they were left alone with the fugitive, Stigh's gaze went slowly to Whin.

  "So," said Whin, "you're wondering that too, are you, Mack?"

  "No, sir," said Stigh. "But word of this is probably spreading through the men like wildfire, by this time. There'll be no stopping it. And if it comes to the point of our turning back to the Morah a man who's been treated the way this man has—"

  "They're soldiers!" said Whin, harshly. "They'll obey orders." He pointed at the fugitive. "That's a soldier."

  "Not necessarily, Marshal," said Stigh. "He could have been one of the civilian agents—"

  "For my purposes, he's a soldier!" snarled Whin. He took a couple of angry paces up and down the room in each direction, but always wheeling back to confront the fugitive. "Where are those doctors? I've got to get back to the Jhan and Dormu!"

  "About Ambassador Dormu," Stigh said. "If he hears something about this and asks us—"

  "Tell him nothing!" said Whin. "It's my responsibility! I'm not sure he's got the guts—never mind. The longer it is before the little squirt knows—"