The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  “That we were - what?”

  “They can be killed but they don’t know what natural death is. They didn’t anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yesterday.”

  “Two of - Oh!”

  “Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species gone irrevocably. And by the Zan’s way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens.”

  “You mean they didn’t realize what short-lived creatures we are?”

  “That’s right,” Walter said. “One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bisexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core - if they have cores. At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo

  - two by two instead of one by one. They figure we’ll last longer collectively if not individually.”

  “Oh!” Grace Evans stood up and there was a taint flush on her face. “If you think - If they think -” She turned toward the door.

  “It’ll be locked,” Walter Phelan said calmly “But don’t worry. Maybe they think, but I don’t think. You needn’t even tell me you wouldn’t have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances.”

  “But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?”

  “It isn’t so little; we’ll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don’t think I don’t agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo.”

  She said “Thank you,” almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is wasn’t anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought.

  He smiled at her and said, “Otherwise -‘

  She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. “If you were a man, you’d be thinking of some way to - They can be killed, you said?” Her voice was bitter.

  “The Zan? Oh, certainly. I’ve been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them.”

  “But you said -”

  “Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don’t have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn’t have, something that renews cells.”

  She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, “I think that’s right. And I don’t think they feel pain.”

  “I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?”

  “I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg.”

  “Did he bleed red?”

  “Yes but it didn’t seem to annoy him. He didn’t get mad about it; didn’t even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was one. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan.”

  Walter Phelan nodded slowly.

  “He wouldn’t get angry, of course,” he said. “They’re emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn’t do any good. They’d just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They’d just see that he didn’t have a crack at any more keepers.

  “How many of them are there?” she asked.

  “About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,”

  “They did a good-”

  There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, “Come in.”

  A Zan stood in the doorway.

  “Hello George,” said Walter.

  “Hel-lo Wal-ter,” said the Zan.

  It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.

  “What’s on your mind?” Walter asked.

  “An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel.”

  Walter shrugged.

  “It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him.”

  “And worse. A Zan has died. This morning.”

  “Is that worse?” Walter looked at him blandly. “Well, George, you’ll have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay around here.”

  The Zan said nothing. It stood there.

  Finally Walter said, “Well?”

  “A-bout wea-sel. You ad-vise same?”

  Walter shrugged again. “Probably won’t do any good. But sure, why not?”

  The Zan left.

  Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. “It might work, Martha,” he said.

  “Mar - My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?”

  “My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Grace “But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?”

  “We’ll know tomorrow,” Walter said. And she couldn’t get another word out of him.

  That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.

  The next was the last.

  It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren’t words.

  He said, “We go. Our coun-cil met and de-cid-ed,”

  “Another of you died?”

  “Last night This is pla-net of death ”

  Walter nodded. “You did your share. You’re leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don’t hurry back.”

  “Is there an-y-thing we can do?”

  “Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We’ll take care of the others.”

  Something clicked on the door; the Zan left.

  Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.

  She asked, “What -? How -?”

  “Wait,” cautioned Walter. “Let’s hear them blast off. It’s a sound I want to remember.”

  The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he’d been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.

  “There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble,” he said musingly. “But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake.”

  “You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But -”

  Walter nodded, “They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who ‘were asleep and wouldn’t wake up,’ and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an

  idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn’t know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right.”

  “How did you get the snake to -”

  Walter Phelan grinned. He said, “I told them what affection was. They didn’t know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of
the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting - constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it

  - and the rattlesnake.”

  He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.

  “Well, we’ve got a world to plan,” he said. “We’ll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we’ll do better to keep and take charge of; we’ll need them. But the carnovora - Well, we’ll have to decide. But I’m afraid it’s got to be thumbs down.”

  He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.”

  Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.

  “No!” she said.

  He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can -”

  He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.

  He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.”

  The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but is no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.

  He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really.

  The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

  A pair of rabbits once were let loose in Australia—and overran the country in no time fiat. Now start with a whole planet of geniuses… .

  Genius

  By Poul Anderson

  “THE EXPERIMENT has been going on for almost fifteen hundred years,” said Heym, “and it’s just starting to get under way. You can’t discontinue it now.”

  “Can and will,” replied Goram, “if the situation seems to justify it. That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  “But—one planet! One primitive planet! What sort of monsters do you think live here? I tell you, they’re people, as human as I—” Heym paused. He had meant to add—“and you,” but couldn’t quite bring himself to it. Goram seemed less than human, an atavistic remnant of screaming past ages, an ape in uniform. “—as I am,” finished Heym.

  The hesitation seemed lost on Goram. The marshal stood regarding the psychologist out of sullen little black eyes, blocky form faintly stooped, long arms dangling, prognathous jaw thrust ahead of the broad flat-nosed countenance. The fluorotubes gleamed down on his shining shaven bullet skull. The black gold-braided uniform fitted him closely, a military neatness and precision that was in its way the most primitive characteristic of all.

  He said in his hoarse bass: “So are the rebels. So are the barbarians and pirates. So are the serfs and slaves and criminals and insane. But it’s necessary to suppress all of them. If Station Seventeen represents a menace, it must be suppressed.”

  “But what conceivable danger—one barbarian planet—under constant surveillance throughout its history! If that can menace an empire of a hundred thousand star systems, we’re not safe from anything!”

  “We aren’t. For three thousand years of history, the Empire has been in danger. You have to live with it, as we soldiers do, to realize how ultimately unstable the stablest power in history really is. Oh, we can smash the peripheral barbarians. We can hold the Taranians and the Comi and Magellanics in check.” The marshal’s heavy-ridged eyes swept contemptuously up and down the scientist’s long weedy form. “I’m in no danger from you. I could break you with my bare hands. But a dozen viruses of Antaric plague, entering my body and multiplying, would paralyze me in agony and rot the flesh off my bones and probably empty this ship of life.”

  The office quivered, ever so faintly. The muffled throb of the great engines was vibrant in its walls and floor and ceiling, in the huge ribs and plates of the hull, in guns that could incinerate a continent and the nerves and bones of the two thousand men manning that planetoidal mass. Monstrously the ship drove through a night of mind-cracking empty distances, outpacing light in her furious subdimensional quasivelocity, impregnable and invincible and inhuman in her arrogance. And a dozen blind half-living protein molecules could kill her.

  Heym nodded stiffly. “I know what you mean,” he said. “After all”—deliberate snobbery edging his voice—“applied psychological science is the basis of the Empire. Military power is only one tool for— us.”

  “As you will. But I am not a researcher’s tool, I belong to practical men, and they have decided this mission. If I report Station Seventeen potentially dangerous, they will order me to destroy it. If I decide it is already dangerous, I have the authority to order it destroyed myself.”

  Heym kept his gaunt face impassive, but for a moment he felt physically ill. He looked across the sparsely furnished office at the marshal’s squat simian form, he saw the barely suppressed triumph-smile in the heavy coarse visage, and a wave of sick revulsion swept over him.

  He thought wearily: Fifteen hundred years … patience, work, worry, heartbreak, and triumph and a gathering dawn … generation after generation, watching from the skies, learning, pouring their whole lives into the mighty project—As if I didn’t know the danger, the fear which is the foundation and the reason for the Empire … and here we have the first glimmerings of what may be a way out of the rattrap which history has become … and it’s now all dependent on him! On the whim of a two-legged animal which will strike out in blind fear to destroy whatever it doesn’t understand … or even understanding, will destroy just for the satisfaction of venting an inferiority complex, of watching better men squirm in pain.

  Calmness came, a steadiness and an icy calculation. After all, he thought, he was a psychologist and Goram was a soldier. It should be possible for him to handle the creature, talk him over, deftly convince him that he himself wanted what Heym wanted and had in fact thought of it himself and had to argue the scientist into agreement.

  Yet—slow, easy, careful. He, Sars Heym, was a research man, not a practicing psychotechnician. He wasn’t necessarily able to handle the blind brutal irrationality of man, any more than a physicist was ordinarily capable of solving an engineering problem. And so much depended on the outcome that … that—

  Briefly, he sagged beneath the burden of responsibility. The load seemed for a dizzying instant too much to bear—unfair, unfair, to load one man with the weight of all the future. For Station Seventeen was the key to the next phase of history—of that Heym was certain. The history of man, his evolution —the whole universe seemed to open vertiginously before him, and he stood alone with the cosmos blazing on his shoulders.

  He shook himself, as if to get rid of a clinging burden, and with a convulsive effort forced coolness on himself. Detached argument—well, he had used that often enough at Sol without convincing anyone who mattered. He could still use it on Goram, but not for itself, only as a means of flattery by appealing to reason—among other means.

  Intolerable, to have to play sycophant to this—atavist but there was too much at stake for pride to count. “I understand your position, of course,” said Heym, “even if I do not agree. I am sure that a glance at our records will convince you there is no danger.”

  “I’m not interested in records,” said the marshal. “I could have had all that transvised to me at Sol if I wanted to see it. But that’s the psychologists’ department. I want to make a personal inspection.”

  “Very well. Though we could just as well have transvised the scenes revealed on the spy devices from our headquarters to Sol.”

  “I’m not interested in te
lescreen images either. I want to land on the planet, see its people with my own eyes, hear them talk, watch them at work and play. There’s a feel to a race you can only get by direct observation.” Goram’s bulldog face thrust aggressively forward. “Oh, I know your fancy theories don’t include that—you just watch from afar and write it all down in mathematical symbols nobody can read without twenty years of study. But I’m a practical man, I’ve dealt with enough barbarians to have an instinct for them.”

  Superstition! thought Heym bitterly. Typical primitive mind reaction—magnifying his own ignorant guesses and impulses into an “instinct.” No doubt he also believes hair turns gray from fear and drowned Men always float face down. Behold the “practical man”!

  It was surprisingly hard to lie, after a lifetime’s training in the honesty of science and the monastic community of observers at the station. But he said calmly enough: “Well, that’s very interesting, Marshal Goram. We’ve often noticed curious talents—precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest, appearing sporadically among people who have some use for them, but we’ve never been able to pin them down. It’s as if they were phenomena inaccessible to the ordinary scientific method. I see your point.”

  And I flatter myself that’s good flattery—not too obviously in agreement, but still hinting that he’s some kind of superman.

  “Haven’t you ever landed at all?” asked Goram.

  “Oh, yes, fairly often—usually invisible, of course. However, we can generally see quite enough through the strategically planted recording televisors and other spy devices.”

  “You think,” grunted Goram. “But a planet is mighty big, I tell you. How do you know what they’re cooking up in places your gadgets don’t see?”