The Randall Garrett Megapack

by Randall Garrett

  Government City was something of a paradox. It was the largest capital city, in terms of population, that had ever been built on Earth, and yet, again in terms of population, it was nowhere near as large as Tokyo or London. The solution to the paradox lies in discovering that the term “population” is used in two different senses, thus exposing the logical fallacy of the undistributed middle. If, in referring to London or Tokyo, the term “population” is restricted to those and only those who are actively engaged in the various phases of actual government—as it is when referring to Government City—the apparent paradox resolves itself.

  Built on the slagged-down remains of New York’s Manhattan Island, which had been destroyed by a sun bomb during the Holocaust nearly a century before, Government City occupied all but the upper three miles of the island, and the population consisted almost entirely of men and women engaged, either directly or indirectly, in the business of governing a planet. There were no shopping centers and no entertainment areas. The small personal flyer, almost the same size as the old gasoline-driven automobile, could, because of its inertia drive, move with the three-dimensional ability of a hummingbird, so the rivers that cut the island off from the mainland were no barrier. The shopping and entertainment centers of Brooklyn, Queens, and Jersey were only five minutes away, even through the thickest, slowest-moving traffic. It was the personal flyer, not the clumsy airplane, that had really eliminated distance along with national boundaries.

  The majority of the government officers’ homes were off the island, too, but this commuting did not cause any great fluctuation of the island’s population. A city that governs a planet must operate at full capacity twenty-four hours a day, and there was a “rush hour” every three hours as the staggered six-hour shifts changed.

  Physically the planet still revolved about the sun; politically, Earth revolved around Government City.

  In one of the towering buildings a group of men sat comfortably in a medium-sized room, watching a screen that, because of the three-dimensional quality and the color fidelity of the scene it showed, might have been a window, except that the angle was wrong. They were looking down from an apparent height of forty feet on a clearing in a paper-tree forest in Siberia.

  The clearing was not a natural one. The trees had been splintered, uprooted, and pushed away from the center of the long, elliptical area. The center of the area was apparently empty.

  One of the men, whose fingers were touching a control panel in the arm of his chair, said: “That is where the ship made its crash landing. As you can see from the relatively light damage, it was moving at no great speed when it hit. From the little information we have—mostly from a momentary radar recording made when the incoming vessel was picked up for a few seconds by the instruments of Transpolar Airways, when it crossed the path of one of their freight orbits—it is estimated that the craft was decelerating at between fifteen and seventeen gravities. The rate of change of acceleration in centimeters per second cubed is unknown, but obviously so small as to be negligible.

  “This picture was taken by the fire prevention flyers that came in response to an urgent call by the assistant of the forest ranger who was in charge of this section.”

  “There was no fire?” asked one of the other men, looking closely at the image.

  “None,” said the speaker. “We can’t yet say what actually happened to the ship. We have only a couple of hints. One of our weather observers, orbiting at four hundred miles, picked up a tremendous flash of hard ultraviolet radiation in the area around the three thousand Ångstrom band. There must have been quite a bit of shorter wavelength radiation, but the Earth’s atmosphere would filter most of it out.

  “A recording of the radiophone discussion between the ranger and his assistant is the only other description we have. The ranger described a bluish glow over the site. Part of that may have been due to actual blue light given off by the—well, call it ‘burning’; that word will do for now. But some of the blue glow was almost certainly due to ionization of the air by the hard ultraviolet. Look at this next picture.”

  The scene remained the same, and yet there was a definite change.

  “This was taken three days later. If you’ll notice, the normal rust-red of the foliage has darkened to a purplish brown in the area around the crash site. Now a Martian paper-tree, even in the mutated form, is quite resistant to U-V, since it evolved under the thin atmosphere of Mars, which gives much less protection from ultraviolet radiation than Earth’s does. Nevertheless, those trees have a bad case of sunburn.”

  “And no heat,” said a third man. “Wow.”

  “Oh, there was some heat, but not anywhere near what you’d expect. The nearer trees were rather dry, as though they’d been baked, but only at the surface, and the temperature probably didn’t rise much above one-fifty centigrade.”

  “How about X rays?” asked still another man. “Anything shorter than a hundred Ångstroms detected?”

  “No. If there was any radiation that hard, there was no detector close enough to measure it. We doubt, frankly, whether there was any.”

  “The ‘fire’, if you want to call it that, must have stunk up the place pretty badly,” said one of the men dryly.

  “It did. There were still traces of ozone and various oxides of nitrogen in the air when the fire prevention flyers arrived. The wind carried them away from the ranger, so he didn’t get a whiff of them.”

  “And this—this ‘fire’—it destroyed the ship completely?”

  “Almost completely. There are some lumps of metal around, but we can’t make anything of them yet. Some of them are badly fused, but that damage was probably done before the ship landed. Certainly there was not enough heat generated after the crash to have done that damage.” His hand moved over the control panel in the armrest of his chair, and the scene changed.

  “This was taken from the ground. Those lumps you see are the pieces of metal I was talking about. Notice the fine white powdery ash, which caused the white spot that you could see from the air. That is evidently all that is left of the hull and the rest of the ship. None of it is radioactive.

  “Random samplings from various parts of the area show that the ash consists of magnesium, lithium, and beryllium carbonates.”

  “You don’t mean oxides?” said one of the others.

  “No. I mean carbonates. And some silicate. We estimate that the remaining ash could not have constituted more than ten percent of the total mass of the hull of the ship. The rest of it vaporized, apparently into carbon dioxide and water.”

  “Some kind of plastic?” hazarded one of the men.

  “Undoubtedly, if you want to use a catchall term like ‘plastic’. But what kind of plastic goes to pieces like that?”

  That rhetorical question was answered by a silence.

  “There’s no doubt,” said one of them after a moment, “that circumstantial evidence alone would link the alien with the ship. But have you any more conclusive evidence?”

  The hand moved, and the scene changed again. It was not a pretty scene.

  “That, as you can see, is a closeup of the late Wang Kulichenko, the forest ranger who was the only man ever to see the alien ship before it was destroyed. Notice the peculiar bruises on the cheek and ear—the whole side of the head. The pattern is quite similar on the other side of the head.”

  “It looks—umm—rather like a handprint.”

  “It is. Kulichenko was slapped—hard!—on both sides of his head. It crushed his skull.” There was an intake of breath.

  “This next picture—” The scene changed. “—shows the whole body. If you’ll look closely you’ll see the same sort of prints on the ground around it. All very much like handprints. And that ties in very well with the photographs of the alien itself.”

  “There’s no doubt about it,” said one of the others. “The connection is definitely there.”

  The lecturer’s hand moved over the control panel again, and suddenly the screen wa
s filled with the image of an eight-limbed horror with four glaring violet eyes. In spite of themselves, a couple of the men gasped. They had seen photographs before, but a full-sized three-dimensional color projection is something else again.

  “Until three weeks ago, we knew of no explanation for the peculiar happenings in northern Asia. After eight months of investigation, we found ourselves up against a blank wall. Nothing could account for that peculiar fire nor for the queer circumstances surrounding the death of the forest ranger. The investigators suspected an intelligent alien life-form, but—well, the notion simply seemed too fantastic. Attempts to trail the being by means of those peculiar ‘footprints’ failed. They ended at a riverbank and apparently never came out again. We know now that it swam downstream for over a hundred miles. Little wonder it got away.

  “Even those investigators who suspected something non-human pictured the being as humanoid, or, rather, anthropoid in form. The prints certainly suggest those of an ape. There appeared to be four of them, judging by the prints—although frequently there were only three and sometimes only two. It all depended on how many of his ‘feet’ he felt like walking on.”

  “And then the whole herd of them dived into a river and never came up again, eh?” remarked one of the listeners.

  “Exactly. You can see why the investigators kept the whole thing quiet. Nothing more was seen, heard, or reported for eight months.

  “Then, three weeks ago, a non-vision phone call was received by the secretary of the Board of Regents of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice, speaking very bad Russian, offered a meeting. It was the alien. He managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, that he did not want to be mistaken for a wild animal, as had happened with the forest ranger.

  “The secretary, Mr. Rogov, felt that the speaker was probably deranged, but, as he said later, there was something about that voice that didn’t sound human. He said he would make arrangements, and asked the caller to contact him again the next day. The alien agreed. Rogov then—”

  “Excuse me,” one of the men interrupted apologetically, “but did he learn Russian all by himself, or has it been established that someone taught him the language?”

  “The evidence is that he learned it all by himself, from scratch, in those eight months.”

  “I see. Excuse my interruption. Go on.”

  “Mr. Rogov was intrigued by the story he had heard. He decided to check on it. He made a few phone calls, asking questions about a mysterious crash in the paper forests, and the death of a forest ranger. Naturally those who did know were curious about how Mr. Rogov had learned so much about the incident. He told them.

  “By the time the alien made his second call, a meeting had been arranged. When he showed up, those of the Board who were still of the opinion that the call had been made by a crank or a psychosis case changed their minds very rapidly.”

  “I can see why,” murmured someone.

  “The alien’s ability to use Russian is limited,” the speaker continued. “He picked up vocabulary and grammatical rules very rapidly, but he seemed completely unable to use the language beyond discussion of concrete objects and actions. His mind is evidently too alien to enable him to do more than touch the edges of human communication.

  “For instance, he called himself ‘Nipe’ or ‘Neep’, but we don’t know whether that refers to him as an individual or as a member of his race. Since Russian lacks both definite and indefinite articles, it is possible that he was calling himself ‘a Nipe’ or ‘the Nipe’. Certainly that’s the impression he gave.

  “In the discussions that followed, several peculiarities were noticed, as you can read in detail in the reports that the Board and the Government staff prepared. For instance, in discussing mathematics the Nipe seemed to be completely at a loss. He apparently thought of mathematics as a spoken language rather than a written one and could not progress beyond simple diagrams. That’s just one small example. I’m just trying to give you a brief outline now; you can read the reports for full information.

  “He refused to allow any physical tests on his body, and, short of threatening him at gunpoint, there was no practicable way to force him to accede to our wishes. Naturally, threats were out of the question.”

  “Couldn’t X rays have been taken surreptitiously?” asked one of the men.

  “It was discussed and rejected. We have no way of knowing what his tolerance to radiation is, and we didn’t want to harm him. The same applies to using any anesthetic gas or drug to render him unconscious. There was no way to study his metabolism without his co-operation unless we were willing to risk killing him.”

  “I see. Naturally we couldn’t harm him.”

  “Exactly. The Nipe had to be treated as an emissary from his home world—wherever that may be. He has killed a man, yes. But that has to be allowed as justifiable homicide in self-defense, since the forester had drawn a gun and was ready to fire. Nobody can blame the late Wang Kulichenko for that, but nobody can blame the Nipe, either.”

  They all looked for a moment in silence at the violet eyes that gazed at them from the screen.

  “For nearly three weeks,” the speaker went on, “humans and Nipe tried to arrive at a meeting of minds, and, just when it would seem that such a meeting was within grasp, it would fade away into mist. It was only three days ago that the Russian psychologists and psychiatrists realized that the reason the Nipe had come to them was because he had thought that the Board of Regents of the hospital was the ruling body of that territory.”

  Someone chuckled, but there was no humor in it.

  “Now we come to yesterday morning,” said the speaker. “This is the important part at this very moment, because it explains why I feel we must immediately take steps to tell the public what has happened, why I feel that it is necessary to put a man like Colonel Walther Mannheim in charge of the Nipe affair and keep him in charge until the matter is cleared up. Because the public is going to be scared witless if we don’t do something to reassure them.”

  “What happened yesterday morning, Mr. President?” one of the men asked.

  “The Nipe got angry, lost his temper, went mad—whatever you want to call it. At the morning meeting he simply became more and more incomprehensible. The psychologists were trying to see if the Nipe had any religious beliefs, and, if so, what they were. One of them, a Dr. Valichek, was explaining the various religious sects and rites here on Earth. Suddenly, with no warning whatever, the Nipe chopped at Valichek’s throat with an open-hand judo cut, killing him. He killed two more men before he leaped out of the window and vanished.

  “No trace of him was found until late last night. He killed another man in Leningrad—we have since discovered that it was for the purpose of stealing his personal flyer. The Nipe could be anywhere on Earth by now.”

  “How was the man killed, Mr. President? With bare hands, as the others were?”

  “We have no way of knowing. Identification of the body was made difficult by the fact that every shred of flesh had been stripped away. It had been gnawed—literally eaten—to the bone!”

  FIRST INTERLUDE

  The big man with the tiny child on his shoulder pushed through the air curtain that kept the warm humid air out of the shop.

  “There,” he said to the little boy softly, turning his head to look up into the round, chubby, smiling face. “There. Isn’t that nicer, huh? Isn’t that better than that hot old air outside?”

  “Gleefle-ah,” said the child with a grin.

  “Oh, come on, boy. I’ve heard you manage bigger words than that. Or is it your brother?” He chuckled and headed toward the drug counter.

  “Hey, Jim!”

  The big man brought himself up short and turned—carefully, so as not to jiggle the baby on his shoulder. When he saw the shorter, thinner man, he grinned hugely. “Jinks! By God! Jinks! Watch it! Don’t shake the hand too hard or I’ll drop this infant. God damn, man, I thought you were i
n Siberia!”

  “I was, Jim, but a man can’t stay in Siberia forever. Is that minuscule lump of humanity your own?”

  “Yup, yup. So I’ve been led to believe. Say hello to your Uncle Jinks, young ’un. C’mon, say hello.”

  The child jammed the three fingers of his left hand into his mouth and refused to say a word. His eyes widened with an unfathomable baby-emotion.

  “Well, he’s got your eyes,” said the thinner man. “Fortunately, he’s going to look like his mother instead of being ugly. He is a he, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right. Mother’s looks, father’s plumbing. I got another just like him, but his mother’s taking the other one to the doctor to get rid of the sniffles. Don’t want this one to catch it.”

  “Twins?”

  “Naw,” said the big man sarcastically, “Octuplets. The Government took seventy-five percent for taxes.”

  “Ask a silly question, get a silly answer,” the smaller man said philosophically.

  “Yup. So how’s the Great Northern Wasteland, Jinks?”

  “Cold,” said Jinks, “but it’s not going to be a wasteland much longer, Jim. Those Martian trees are going to be a big business in fifteen years. There’ll be forests all over the tundra. They’ll make a hell of a fine income crop for those people. We’ve put in over five thousand square miles in seedlings during the past five years. The first ones will be ready to harvest in ten years, and from then on, it will be as regular as clockwork.”

  “That’s great. Great. How long’ll you be in town, Jinks?”

  “About a week. Then I’ve got to head back to Siberia.”

  “Well, look, could you drop around some evening? We could kill off a few bottles of beer after we eat one of Ellen’s dinners. How about it?”

  “I’d love to. Sure Ellen won’t mind?”

  “She’ll be tickled pink to see you. How about Wednesday?”

  “Sure. I’m free Wednesday evening. But you ask Ellen first. I’ll give you a call tomorrow evening to make sure I won’t get a chair thrown at me when I come in the door.”