The Randall Garrett Megapack

by Randall Garrett

  But, externally, a Kerothi would need only a touch of plastic surgery and some makeup to pass as an Earthman in a stage play. Close up, of course, the job would be much more difficult—as difficult as a Negro trying to disguise himself as a Swede or vice versa.

  But Tallis was—

  * * * *

  “I would have a word,” Tallis said, shattering MacMaine’s carefully neutral train of thought. It was a standard opening for breaking the pause of adjustment, but it presaged good news rather than bad.

  “I await your word,” MacMaine said. Even after all this time, he still felt vaguely proud of his ability to handle the subtle idioms of Kerothic.

  “I think,” Tallis said carefully, “that you may be offered a commission in the Kerothi Space Forces.”

  Sebastian MacMaine let out his breath slowly, and only then realized that he had been holding it. “I am grateful, my sibling-by-choice,” he said.

  General Tallis tapped his cigarette ash into a large blue ceramic ashtray. MacMaine could smell the acrid smoke from the alien plant matter that burned in the Kerothi cigarette—a chopped-up inner bark from a Kerothi tree. MacMaine could no more smoke a Kerothi cigarette than Tallis could smoke tobacco, but the two were remarkably similar in their effects.

  The “surprise” had been delivered. Now, as was proper, Tallis would move adroitly all around the subject until he was ready to return to it again.

  “You have been with us…how long, Sepastian?” he asked.

  “Two and a third Kronet.”

  Tallis nodded. “Nearly a year of your time.”

  MacMaine smiled. Tallis was as proud of his knowledge of Earth terminology as MacMaine was proud of his mastery of Kerothic.

  “Lacking three weeks,” MacMaine said.

  “What? Three…oh, yes. Well. A long time,” said Tallis.

  Damn it! MacMaine thought, in a sudden surge of impatience, get to the point! His face showed only calm.

  “The Board of Strategy asked me to tell you,” Tallis continued. “After all, my recommendation was partially responsible for the decision.” He paused for a moment, but it was merely a conversational hesitation, not a formal hiatus.

  “It was a hard decision, Sepastian—you must realize that. We have been at war with your race for ten years now. We have taken thousands of Earthmen as prisoners, and many of them have agreed to co-operate with us. But, with one single exception, these prisoners have been the moral dregs of your civilization. They have been men who had no pride of race, no pride of society, no pride of self. They have been weak, self-centered, small-minded, cowards who had no thought for Earth and Earthmen, but only for themselves.

  “Not,” he said hurriedly, “that all of them are that way—or even the majority. Most of them have the minds of warriors, although, I must say, not strong warriors.”

  That last, MacMaine knew, was a polite concession. The Kerothi had no respect for Earthmen. And MacMaine could hardly blame them. For three long centuries, the people of Earth had had nothing to do but indulge themselves in the pleasures of material wealth. It was a wonder that any of them had any moral fiber left.

  “But none of those who had any strength agreed to work with us,” Tallis went on. “With one exception. You.”

  “Am I weak, then?” MacMaine asked.

  General Tallis shook his head in a peculiarly humanlike gesture. “No. No, you are not. And that is what has made us pause for three years.” His grass-green eyes looked candidly into MacMaine’s own. “You aren’t the type of person who betrays his own kind. It looks like a trap. After a whole year, the Board of Strategy still isn’t sure that there is no trap.”

  Tallis stopped, leaned forward, and ground out the stub of his cigarette in the blue ashtray. Then his eyes again sought MacMaine’s.

  “If it were not for what I, personally, know about you, the Board of Strategy would not even consider your proposition.”

  “I take it, then, that they have considered it?” MacMaine asked with a grin.

  “As I said, Sepastian,” Tallis said, “you have won your case. After almost a year of your time, your decision has been justified.”

  MacMaine lost his grin. “I am grateful, Tallis,” he said gravely. “I think you must realize that it was a difficult decision to make.”

  His thoughts went back, across long months of time and longer light-years of space, to the day when that decision had been made.

  THE DECISION

  Colonel Sebastian MacMaine didn’t feel, that morning, as though this day were different from any other. The sun, faintly veiled by a few wisps of cloud, shone as it always had; the guards at the doors of the Space Force Administration Building saluted him as usual; his brother officers nodded politely, as they always did; his aide greeted him with the usual “Good morning, sir.”

  The duty list lay on his desk, as it had every morning for years. Sebastian MacMaine felt tense and a little irritated with himself, but he felt nothing that could be called a premonition.

  When he read the first item on the duty list, his irritation became a little stronger.

  “Interrogate Kerothi general.”

  The interrogation duty had swung round to him again. He didn’t want to talk to General Tallis. There was something about the alien that bothered him, and he couldn’t place exactly what it was.

  Earth had been lucky to capture the alien officer. In a space war, there’s usually very little left to capture after a battle—especially if your side lost the battle.

  On the other hand, the Kerothi general wasn’t so lucky. The food that had been captured with him would run out in less than six months, and it was doubtful that he would survive on Earth food. It was equally doubtful that any more Kerothi food would be captured.

  For two years, Earth had been fighting the Kerothi, and for two years Earth had been winning a few minor skirmishes and losing the major battles. The Kerothi hadn’t hit any of the major colonies yet, but they had swallowed up outpost after outpost, and Earth’s space fleet was losing ships faster than her factories could turn them out. The hell of it was that nobody on Earth seemed to be very much concerned about it at all.

  MacMaine wondered why he let it concern him. If no one else was worried, why did he let it bother him? He pushed the thought from his mind and picked up the questionnaire form that had been made out for that morning’s session with the Kerothi general. Might as well get it over with.

  He glanced down the list of further duties for the day. It looked as though the routine interrogation of the Kerothi general was likely to provide most of the interest in the day’s work at that.

  He took the dropchute down to the basement of the building, to the small prison section where the alien officer was being held. The guards saluted nonchalantly as he went in. The routine questioning sessions were nothing new to them.

  MacMaine turned the lock on the prisoner’s cell door and went in. Then he came to attention and saluted the Kerothi general. He was probably the only officer in the place who did that, he knew; the others treated the alien general as though he were a criminal. Worse, they treated him as though he were a petty thief or a common pickpocket—criminal, yes, but of a definitely inferior type.

  General Tallis, as always, stood and returned the salute. “Cut mawnik, Cunnel MacMaine,” he said. The Kerothi language lacked many of the voiced consonants of English and Russian, and, as a result, Tallis’ use of B, D, G, J, V, and Z made them come out as P, T, K, CH, F, and S. The English R, as it is pronounced in run or rat, eluded him entirely, and he pronounced it only when he could give it the guttural pronunciation of the German R. The terminal NG always came out as NK. The nasal M and N were a little more drawn out than in English, but they were easily understandable.

  * * * *

  “Good morning, General Tallis,” MacMaine said. “Sit down. How do you feel this morning?”

  The general sat again on the hard bunk that, aside from the single chair, was the only furniture in the small cell. “As
s well ass coot pe expectet. I ket ferry little exercisse. I…how iss it set?…I pecome soft? Soft? Iss correct?”

  “Correct. You’ve learned our language very well for so short a time.”

  The general shrugged off the compliment. “Wen it iss a matteh of learrn in orrter to surfife, one learrnss.”

  “You think, then, that your survival has depended on your learning our language?”

  The general’s orange face contrived a wry smile. “Opfiously. Your people fill not learn Kerothic. If I cannot answerr questionss, I am uff no use. Ass lonk ass I am uff use, I will liff. Not?”

  MacMaine decided he might as well spring his bomb on the Kerothi officer now as later. “I am not so certain but that you might have stretched out your time longer if you had forced us to learn Kerothic, general,” he said in Kerothic. He knew his Kerothic was bad, since it had been learned from the Kerothi spaceman who had been captured with the general, and the man had been badly wounded and had survived only two weeks. But that little bit of basic instruction, plus the work he had done on the books and tapes from the ruined Kerothi ship, had helped him.

  “Ah?” The general blinked in surprise. Then he smiled. “Your accent,” he said in Kerothic, “is atrocious, but certainly no worse than mine when I speak your Inklitch. I suppose you intend to question me in Kerothic now, eh? In the hope that I may reveal more in my own tongue?”

  “Possibly you may,” MacMaine said with a grin, “but I learned it for my own information.”

  “For your own what? Oh. I see. Interesting. I know no others of your race who would do such a thing. Anything which is difficult is beneath them.”

  “Not so, general. I’m not unique. There are many of us who don’t think that way.”

  The general shrugged. “I do not deny it. I merely say that I have met none. Certainly they do not tend to go into military service. Possibly that is because you are not a race of fighters. It takes a fighter to tackle the difficult just because it is difficult.”

  MacMaine gave him a short, hard laugh. “Don’t you think getting information out of you is difficult? And yet, we tackle that.”

  “Not the same thing at all. Routine. You have used no pressure. No threats, no promises, no torture, no stress.”

  MacMaine wasn’t quite sure of his translation of the last two negative phrases. “You mean the application of physical pain? That’s barbaric.”

  “I won’t pursue the subject,” the general said with sudden irony.

  “I can understand that. But you can rest assured that we would never do such a thing. It isn’t civilized. Our civil police do use certain drugs to obtain information, but we have so little knowledge of Kerothi body chemistry that we hesitate to use drugs on you.”

  “The application of stress, you say, is not civilized. Not, perhaps, according to your definition of”—he used the English word—“cifiliced. No. Not cifiliced—but it works.” Again he smiled. “I said that I have become soft since I have been here, but I fear that your civilization is even softer.”

  “A man can lie, even if his arms are pulled off or his feet crushed,” MacMaine said stiffly.

  The Kerothi looked startled. When he spoke again, it was in English. “I will say no morr. If you haff questionss to ask, ko ahet. I will not take up time with furtherr talkink.”

  A little angry with himself and with the general, MacMaine spent the rest of the hour asking routine questions and getting nowhere, filling up the tape in his minicorder with the same old answers that others had gotten.

  He left, giving the general a brisk salute and turning before the general had time to return it.

  Back in his office, he filed the tape dutifully and started on Item Two of the duty list: Strategy Analysis of Battle Reports.

  Strategy analysis always irritated and upset him. He knew that if he’d just go about it in the approved way, there would be no irritation—only boredom. But he was constitutionally incapable of working that way. In spite of himself, he always played a little game with himself and with the General Strategy Computer.

  The only battle of significance in the past week had been the defense of an Earth outpost called Bennington IV. Theoretically, MacMaine was supposed to check over the entire report, find out where the losing side had erred, and feed correctional information into the Computer. But he couldn’t resist stopping after he had read the first section: Information Known to Earth Commander at Moment of Initial Contact.

  Then he would stop and consider how he, personally, would have handled the situation if he had been the Earth commander. So many ships in such-and-such places. Enemy fleet approaching at such-and-such velocities. Battle array of enemy thus-and-so.

  Now what?

  MacMaine thought over the information on the defense of Bennington IV and devised a battle plan. There was a weak point in the enemy’s attack, but it was rather obvious. MacMaine searched until he found another weak point, much less obvious than the first. He knew it would be there. It was.

  Then he proceeded to ignore both weak points and concentrate on what he would do if he were the enemy commander. The weak points were traps; the computer could see them and avoid them. Which was just exactly what was wrong with the computer’s logic. In avoiding the traps, it also avoided the best way to hit the enemy. A weak point is weak, no matter how well it may be booby-trapped. In baiting a rat trap, you have to use real cheese because an imitation won’t work.

  Of course, MacMaine thought to himself, you can always poison the cheese, but let’s not carry the analogy too far.

  All right, then. How to hit the traps?

  * * * *

  It took him half an hour to devise a completely wacky and unorthodox way of hitting the holes in the enemy advance. He checked the time carefully, because there’s no point in devising a strategy if the battle is too far gone to use it by the time you’ve figured it out.

  Then he went ahead and read the rest of the report. Earth had lost the outpost. And, worse, MacMaine’s strategy would have won the battle if it had been used. He fed it through his small office computer to make sure. The odds were good.

  And that was the thing that made MacMaine hate Strategy Analysis. Too often, he won; too often, Earth lost. A computer was fine for working out the logical outcome of a battle if it was given the proper strategy, but it couldn’t devise anything new.

  Colonel MacMaine had tried to get himself transferred to space duty, but without success. The Commanding Staff didn’t want him out there.

  The trouble was that they didn’t believe MacMaine actually devised his strategy before he read the complete report. How could anyone out-think a computer?

  He’d offered to prove it. “Give me a problem,” he’d told his immediate superior, General Matsukuo. “Give me the Initial Contact information of a battle I haven’t seen before, and I’ll show you.”

  And Matsukuo had said, testily: “Colonel, I will not permit a member of my staff to make a fool of himself in front of the Commanding Staff. Setting yourself up as someone superior to the Strategy Board is the most antisocial type of egocentrism imaginable. You were given the same education at the Academy as every other officer; what makes you think you are better than they? As time goes on, your automatic promotions will put you in a position to vote on such matters—provided you don’t prejudice the Promotion Board against you by antisocial behavior. I hold you in the highest regard, colonel, and I will say nothing to the Promotion Board about this, but if you persist I will have to do my duty. Now, I don’t want to hear any more about it. Is that clear?”

  It was.

  All MacMaine had to do was wait, and he’d automatically be promoted to the Commanding Staff, where he would have an equal vote with the others of his rank. One unit vote to begin with and an additional unit for every year thereafter.

  It’s a great system for running a peacetime social club, maybe, MacMaine thought, but it’s no way to run a fighting force.

  Maybe the Kerothi general was right. Maybe ho
mo sapiens just wasn’t a race of fighters.

  They had been once. Mankind had fought its way to domination of Earth by battling every other form of life on the planet, from the smallest virus to the biggest carnivore. The fight against disease was still going on, as a matter of fact, and Man was still fighting the elemental fury of Earth’s climate.

  But Man no longer fought with Man. Was that a bad thing? The discovery of atomic energy, two centuries before, had literally made war impossible, if the race was to survive. Small struggles bred bigger struggles—or so the reasoning went. Therefore, the society had unconsciously sought to eliminate the reasons for struggle.

  What bred the hatreds and jealousies among men? What caused one group to fight another?

  Society had decided that intolerance and hatred were caused by inequality. The jealousy of the inferior toward his superior; the scorn of the superior toward his inferior. The Have-not envies the Have, and the Have looks down upon the Have-not.

  Then let us eliminate the Have-not. Let us make sure that everyone is a Have.

  Raise the standard of living. Make sure that every human being has the necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, proper medical care, and proper education. More, give them the luxuries, too—let no man be without anything that is poorer in quality or less in quantity than the possessions of any other. There was no longer any middle class simply because there were no other classes for it to be in the middle of.

  “The poor you will have always with you,” Jesus of Nazareth had said. But, in a material sense, that was no longer true. The poor were gone—and so were the rich.

  But the poor in mind and the poor in spirit were still there—in ever-increasing numbers.