“To correct the impression in the minds of many of you,” he said, chuckling benignly, “I will paraphrase your great poet, Shakespeare. I am here to bury humanity, not to praise it.”
A startled murmur broke out all around me. “Mars,” I heard the colonel say. “Bet they’re from Mars. H. G. Wells predicted it. Dirty little, red little, Martians. Well, just let them try!”
“Red,” the man in the gray sharkskin suit repeated, staring at him anxiously. “Red?”
“Did you ever—” one of the women started to protest. “Is that a way to begin? No manners! A real foreigner.”
“However,” Forkbeard continued imperturbably from the ceiling, “in order to bury humanity properly, I need your help. Not only yours, but the help of others like you who, at this moment, are listening to this talk in ships similar to this one and in dozens of languages all over the world. We need your help—and, knowing your peculiar talents so well, we are fairly certain of getting it!”
He waited until the next flurry of fist-waving and assorted imprecations had died down; he waited until the anti-Negroes and the anti-Jews, the anti-Catholics and the anti-Protestants, the Anglophobes and the Russophobes, the vegetarians and the fundamentalists in the audience all had identified him colorfully with their peculiar concepts of the opposition.
Then, once relative quiet had been achieved, we got the following blunt tale, rather contemptuously told.
There was an enormous and complex galactic civilization surrounding our meager nine-planet system. This civilization, composed of the various intelligent species throughout the Galaxy, was organized into a peaceful federation for trade and mutual advancement.
A special bureau in the Galactic Federation was in charge of new arrivals on the intellectual scene. Thus, quite a few millennia ago, the bureau had visited Earth to investigate tourist accounts of a remarkably ingenious animal that had lately been noticed wandering about and handling its affairs with a definite amount of self-consciousness. The animal having been certified as intelligent and possessed of a high cultural potential, Earth was closed to tourist traffic, and sociological specialists began the customary close examination.
“And, as a result of this examination”—the forked pink beard smiled gently down from above—”the specialists discovered that what you call the human race was nonviable. That is, while the individuals composing it had strongly developed instincts of self-preservation, the species as a whole was suicidal.”
“Suicidal!” I found myself breathing with the others.
“Quite. This is a matter on which there can be little argument from the more honest among you. High civilization is a product of communal living, and Man, in groups, has always tended to wipe himself out. In fact, a large factor in the growth of what little civilization you do experience has been due to rewards derived from the development of mass-destructive weapons.”
“We have had peaceful, brotherly periods,” a hoarse voice said on the opposite side of the ship.
The large head shook slowly from side to side. The eyes, I saw suddenly and irrelevantly, were all black iris. “You have not. You have occasionally developed an island of culture here, an oasis of cooperation there, but these have inevitably disintegrated upon contact with the true standard-bearers of your species—the warrior races. And when, as happened occasionally, the warrior races were defeated, the conquerors in their turn became warriors, so that the suicidal strain was once more rewarded and became even more dominant. Your past is your complete indictment; and your present—your present is about to become your executed sentence. But enough of this peculiar bloody nonsense—let me return to living history.”
He went on to explain that the Federation felt a suicidal species should be allowed to fulfill its destiny unhampered. In fact, so long as overt acts were avoided, it was quite permissible to help such a creature along to the doom it desired—”Nature abhors self-destruction even more than a vacuum. The logic is simple: both cease almost as soon as they come into existence.”
After the Federation sociologists had extrapolated the probable date on which humanity might be expected to extinguish itself, the planet was assigned to the inhabitants of an Earth-like world for the use of such surplus population as they might then have. These were the red-beards.
“We sent representatives here to serve as caretakers, so to speak, of our future property. But about nine hundred years ago, when your world still had six thousand years to run, we decided to hurry the process a bit, as we were experiencing a rising index of population on our own planet. We therefore received full permission from the Galactic Federation to stimulate your technological development into an earlier suicide. The Federation stipulated, however, that each advance be made the moral responsibility of an adequate representative of your race; that he be told the complete truth of the situation. This we did: We would select an individual to be the discoverer of a revolutionary technique or scientific principle; then we would explain both the value of the technique and the consequences to his species in terms of accelerated mass destruction.”
I found it hard to continue looking into his enormous eyes. “In every case”—the booming rattle of the voice had softened perceptibly—”in every case, sooner or later, the individual announced the discovery as his own, giving it to his fellows and profiting substantially. In a few cases, he later endowed great foundations which awarded prizes to those who advanced the cause of peace or the brotherhood of man. This resulted in little beyond an increase in the amount of currency being circulated. Individuals, we found, always chose to profit at the expense of their race’s life expectancy.”
Gnomes, elves, kobolds! Not mischievous sprites—I glanced at Irngl sitting quietly under his father’s heavy hand—nor the hoarders of gold, but helping Man for their own reasons: teaching him to smelt metals and build machinery, showing him how to derive the binomial theorem in one part of the world and how to plow a field more efficiently in another.
To the end that humanity might perish from the Earth ... a little sooner.
“Unfortunately—ah, something has developed.”
We looked up at that, all of us—housewives and handymen, soldiers and stockbrokers, preachers and professional entertainers—looked up from the tangle of our reflections and prejudices, and hoped.
As S-Day (S for suicide, of course) drew nigh, those among the kobolds who intended to emigrate filled their flying saucers with possessions and families. They scooted across space in larger craft, such as the one we were now in, and took up positions in the stratosphere, waiting to assume title to the planet as soon as its present occupants used their latest discovery—nuclear fission—as they had previously used ballistics and aeronautics.
The more impatient wandered down to survey homesites. They found to their annoyance that an unpleasant maggot of error had crawled into the pure mathematics of extrapolated sociology. Humanity should have wiped itself out shortly after acquiring atomic power. But—possibly as a result of the scientific stimulation we had been receiving recently—our technological momentum had carried us past uranium-plutonium fission and up to the so-called hydrogen bomb.
Whereas a uranium-bomb Armageddon would dispose of us in a most satisfactory and sanitary fashion, the explosion of several hydrogen bombs, it seems, will result in the complete sterilization of our planet, as the result of a subsidiary reaction at present unknown to us. If we go to war with this atomic refinement, Earth will not only be cleansed of all present life forms but will also become uninhabitable for several million years to come.
Naturally, the kobolds view this situation with understandable un-happiness. According to Galactic Law, they may not intervene actively to safeguard their legacy.
Therefore, they would like to offer a proposition—
Any nation which guarantees to stop making hydrogen bombs and to dispose of those it has already made—and the little red-beards have, they claim, satisfactory methods of enforcing these guarantees— such a nation will be
furnished by them with a magnificently murderous weapon. This weapon is extremely simple to operate and is so calibrated that it can be set to kill, instantaneously and painlessly, any number of people at one time, up to a full million.
“The advantage to any terrestrial military establishment of such a weapon over the unstable hydrogen bomb, which is not only very expensive and random in its effects but must be transported physically to its target,” the genial face on the ceiling commented, “should be obvious to all of you! And, as far as we are concerned, anything that will dispose of human beings on a wholesale basis, while not damaging—”
At this point, there was so much noise that I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. For that matter, I was yelling quite loudly myself.
“—besides the injury of useful and compatible life forms—”
“Ah-h,” screamed a deeply tanned stout man in a flowerful red sports shirt and trunks, “whyn’t you go back where you came from?”
“Yeah!” someone else added wrathfully. “Can’t yuh see yuh not wanted? Shut up, huh? Shut up!”
“Murderers,” one of the women in front of me quavered. “That’s all you are—murderers trying to kill inoffensive people who’ve never done you any harm. Killing would just be too good for you.”
The colonel was standing on his toes and oscillating a portentous forefinger at the roof. “We were doing all right,” he began apoplectically, then stopped to allow himself to un-purple. “We were doing well enough, I can tell you, without—without—”
Forkbeard waited until we began to run down.
“Look at it this way,” he urged in a wheedling voice. “You’re going to wipe yourselves out—you know it, we know it, and so does everybody else in the Galaxy. What difference can it possibly make to you whether you do it one way or another? At least by our method you confine the injury to yourselves. You don’t damage the highly valuable real estate—to wit, Earth—which will be ours after you’ve ceased to use it. And you go out with a weapon which is much more worthy of your destructive propensities than any you have used hitherto, including your pride and joy, the atomic bomb.”
He paused and spread knobbed hands down at our impotent hatred. “Think of it—just think of it: a million deaths at one plunge of a lever! What other weapon can make that claim?”
~ * ~
Skimming back northward with Redbeard and Irngl, I pointed to the flying saucers radiating away from us through the delicate summer sky. “These people are all fairly responsible citizens. Isn’t it silly to expect them to advertise a more effective way of having their throats cut?”
There was a shrug of the green-wrapped shoulders. “With any other species, yes. But not you. The Galactic Federation insists that the actual revelation of the weapon to humanity as a whole must be made by a fairly intelligent representative of your own species, in full possession of the facts, and after he or she has had an adequate period to reflect on the consequences of disclosure.”
“And you think we will, eh? In spite of everything?”
“Oh, yes,” the little man told me with tranquil assurance. “Because of everything. All of you have been selected with a view to the personal advantage each would derive from the revelation. Sooner or later, one of you will find the advantage so necessary and tempting that the inhibiting scruple will disappear; eventually, all of you would come to it. As Shulmr pointed out, each member of a suicidal race contributes to the destruction of the whole even while attentively safeguarding his own existence. Disagreeable creatures, but fortunately short-lived!”
“I take it that more than one nation has the hydrogen bomb?”
“Quite correct. You are an ingenious race. Now, if you wouldn’t mind stepping back onto your roof? We’re in a bit of a hurry, Irngl and I, and we have to disinfect after. . . . Thank you.”
I watched them disappear upward into a cloud bank. Then, walking around a television dipole tied in a hangman’s noose that Irngl’s father had overlooked, I trudged downstairs.
For a while, I was very angry. Then I was glum. Then I was angry again. I’ve thought about it a lot since August.
I’ve read some recent stuff on flying saucers, but not a word about the superweapon we’ll get if we dismantle our hydrogen bombs. Only trouble is, if someone else has blabbed, how would I know about it?
That’s just the point. Here I am a writer, a science-fiction writer, no less, with one of the hottest yarns since Noah drove the first nail into the ark. Besides, and by no means incidentally, it is also a highly salable story.
Well, it happens that I need money badly right now; and it further happens that I am plumb out of plots. How long am I supposed to go on being a sucker ?
Somebody’s probably told by now. If not in this country, in one of the others. And I am a writer, and I have a living to make. And this is fiction, and who asked you to believe it anyhow?
Only—only—I did intend to leave out the signal. The signal, that is, by which a government can get in touch with the kobolds, can let them know it’s interested in making the trade, in getting that weapon. I did intend to leave out the signal.
But I don’t have a satisfactory ending to this story. It needs some sort of tag-line. And the signal makes a perfect one. Well—it seems to me that if I’ve told this much—and probably, anyhow—
The signal’s the immemorial one between man and kobold: Leave a bowl of milk outside the White House door.
<
~ * ~
Henry Norton
THE MAN IN THE MOON
This is perhaps the only story in the present volume that can be characterized by the word “weird.” It is definitely science fiction, but at the same time it is so out of the ordinary and so nightmarish that it has much the same effect as a tale of supernatural horror.
Keep your eye on the Moon! Maybe there are going to be some changes around here pretty soon.
~ * ~
THE time to put a stop to things is at the beginning. It’s a lot easier, for instance, to pull up a sapling than to chop down a tree. It would have been easier to spank a certain paperhanger back in 1933 than it was to crush his great war machine in January of 1945.
As Dr. Raven looked back on the whole affair, he realized he should have said “No!” and stuck to it the day Sereda asked for a workbench. But hindsight is notably more accurate than foresight, and the heavens know the little man looked harmless. How well they know!
Raven remembered the first time the little Sereda ever came to Mount Palomar. He had walked all the way up the mountain, and sat down dusty and out of breath on the steps of the observatory. Raven felt sorry for him.
He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and his pleasant, swarthy face was marked on the chin by a black, hairy mole. He was completely bald. Not just bald on top—there was no relieving fringe around his ears or neck. He was literally bald as an egg, and his face was round and smiling.
“The Sun is good,” he said simply to Raven.
“Good and hot,” said Raven. A lean, black whip of a man, he towered over the little stranger. “Better come inside.”
Sereda got up obediently and trotted into the great vault of the observatory. He stopped just inside the door and shook his head at the gloom. Far above, in the shadows, the shining barrel of the giant telescope pointed into the sky like some fantastic weapon of the future. Its two-hundred-inch reflector had extended man’s intimacy with space to include island universes hereto undreamed of. It had brought the faces of the solar family into easy view. Incidentally, although communication had not yet been established, it had given the people of Earth a grave respect for the accomplishments now so plainly visible on Mars.
The little man backed out of the observatory and stood in the sunlight. He spoke with the flat simplicity of a child who has learned something by heart.
“Light is good,” he said. “Darkness is evil.”
“You’ll get sunstroke,” said Dr. Raven.
But sunstroke wa
s not for Sereda. He sat in the Sun all that afternoon, soaking up warmth, smiling his sleepy smile. Only when the Sun was gone and the stars began to show in the lemon-green twilight sky did he yield to the attraction of the lights within the observatory and move inside.
~ * ~
It was mere chance Raven had been there that afternoon. Properly, an astronomer’s day begins at nightfall. Not because of the darkness, of course. That factor, important to the naked eye in stargazing, means little to the two-hundred-inch telescope. But at night there’s less distortion in the atmosphere, less dust and smoke. Often, fewer clouds. All in all, better conditions.
Those conditions suited Sereda fine. His days were spent in the more or less consistent California sunshine. Nights he spent within the observatory, while Raven and his gifted young assistant, Bob Ferris, went through the endless routine of observation, charting, photography, and calculation that modern astronomy has become. He had been there almost a month before he got around to asking Dr. Raven for a workbench. Rather, he amended quickly, room for a workbench.
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