Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  An order from the Department of War:

  urgent. first attention. this order supersedes all others whatsoever and claims the obedience of every citizen before any other activity whatever.

  The Planetary Council has decided that information obtained from the Buck will determine our attitude toward the invaders. The fullest data must be secured concerning the relative loyalty of superior and inferior. Subject races can be psychologically conditioned to loyalty to tyrannical superiors. To what extent was this done to the Buck, and how? To what extent are rights conceded to the inferior race? What punishments are inflicted for mistakes of the race of inferior intelligence ? What social stigma attaches to them? To what degree does the Buck expect loyalty to his kind from the superior race? What is the nature of the compact between the two—explicit or implied—and to what extent is it observed by the superior? What . . .

  The order continued in exhausting detail. It was based upon the realization that Buck—as a domestic animal—contained within his skull an absolutely objective picture of the human race. Buck would not be unbiased in his contemplation of his memories, but his memories would be right. A dog’s-eye view of humanity would be, within its limits, an extraordinarily revealing view.

  The Planetary Council accepted the conclusion that no technical or military information could be had from Buck. But what information it could obtain would be priceless. No man could be truthful about his own race, talking to an alien entity. But a dog—

  The Planetary Council pushed its preparations for war. It had very little hope of anything but never-ending battle through all the centuries of the future. But what hopes it had were centered in Buck.

  ~ * ~

  Buck himself found life confusing. The place where the lifeboat had landed was fenced in now, and he was inside the fence. The things which were not men treated him with respect, and he treated them with the self-respecting courtesy of a well-mannered dog. They pointed things at him, and he was bored. But presently they had a loud-speaker which made noises. Once it barked at him in exact similitude of another dog—in fact, Buck remembered a dog at the Rigel base whose bark had sounded exactly like that. He barked back angrily. But the loud-speaker did not bark again. Another time, Holden’s voice came out of it. And Buck leaped in frenzied joy, his tail wagging until it was almost a blur, and gave tongue in such howlings of heartbroken joy as a dog does give when his master returns after many days. When he realized that it was the loud-speaker, he could not accept the disappointment. He went whimpering about the enclosure, searching for Holden.

  There were other stimuli applied to Buck, too. One of the Masans brought him food. At first Buck sniffed at it gingerly. If he must eat of unfamiliar things, he preferred food of his own killing. But ultimately he tolerated the Masan and ate. The Masan had a loud-speaker attached to his body, and it said “Buck” on various occasions, and at first Buck’s tail wagged joyously at the familiar syllable. But even when the Masan himself mastered the articulation of the name, Buck did not accept him fully. He wanted men. Especially, he wanted Holden. He dozed, and dreamed of Holden. He slept, and sometimes his dreams were such as to make his paws make tiny, jerking, frustrated movements, and sometimes he barked or whimpered or whined in his sleep. But the whinings were of the desperate joy he felt when in his dreams he saw Holden.

  He had no idea that the things pointed at him by the Masans made records of his memories as they were evoked by the increasing stock of stimuli the Masans were able to apply. Buck had understood the meaning of well over a hundred words, when combined with certain tones of voice. These words invariably provoked similar responses as the loud-speaker uttered them from the record of Buck’s memories.

  While the preparations for the destruction of the Kennessee went on, the Masans studied Buck intensively. With their increasing comprehension of his brain, they tried to win his friendship. The one Masan assigned to the task tried painstakingly to fill the part of Holden. He used the memory-recordings of Holden’s voice. He tried to reproduce the strokings that Buck’s memories said caused quiverings of ecstasy. Once he tried to tussle with Buck, as Holden did. And that took courage, because Buck was a big and powerful dog and the Masan was slight and relatively frail.

  But Buck would not play. He was polite and he was amiable within the limits a dog sets for himself toward other animals also useful to man—horses, for example, and cows and sheep and very occasionally a cat. But a dog will not play with a gamboling lamb nor run with a freed colt. Buck was reserved. His loyalty to man, and especially to Holden, could not be broken. And though he did eat, and condescendingly tolerated the Masan scientist—considered to have one of the two or three best brains in the system—who tried to replace Holden in his affections, he began to pine away as days and days passed by and began to stretch into weeks. He grew thin, though he was abstractedly aware that the people who were not men had begun very definitely to like him.

  After all, a man’s dog doesn’t thrive when he’s separated from the man.

  ~ * ~

  The Kennessee rode on in the orbit it had chosen. Maynard had made an unhappy, abject apology to Holden for the desertion of Buck, and Holden accepted it, and neither of them felt at all better afterward. A man would have been left behind under exactly the same circumstances, but a dog is somehow different. He can’t take care of himself. His abandonment couldn’t be helped, but it rankled.

  The material brought back from Masa Four was duly examined. The space-radio records piled up, and electron-telescope examination of the planets continued, and evidences of a highly developed civilization accumulated—while scanner-beam observation of the Kennessee from Masa Four went on unendingly.

  It was a dubious situation extended almost to the breaking point. The lifeboat voyage had produced a reaction of ground vehicles and atmosphere fliers. It gave an impression of limited offensive power. But, on the other hand, there was interplanetary travel here. And the scanner beam on the Kennessee and the instant detection of the lifeboat was proof that the people of this system knew exactly what the Kennessee was.

  A civilization without defense weapons but with interplanetary ships and space radio should have tried to make contact with the Kennessee. If only to placate invaders, some attempt to open communication should have been made. Absence of such efforts was ominous. The appearance was that of a race which played possum until it could strike an overwhelming blow. So the Kennessee stayed in a state of nerve-racking alertness, with detectors out all around, and relays set to throw on overdrive should a high-velocity guided missile seem to draw near.

  “It looks bad,” admitted the skipper to Holden. “We’d have tried to make contact, in their shoes. But whoever raided the Capella colony simply rode in and started killing. Maybe these people are that sort. Anyhow, if they do get us, our fleet will know who did it and come take them apart with planet-smasher bombs.”

  Holden said dourly:

  “I wish I’d been in that lifeboat. When do we send back another message torp?”

  “We make no more landings,” said the skipper. He added, “You’d never be able to find where the other boat landed, and anyhow Buck—”

  “Was probably blasted the instant they saw him,” said Holden.

  He couldn’t blame anybody, but he was angry. He missed Buck.

  On the twelfth day after Buck’s landing, an interplanetary ship took off from Masa Four. The Kennessee had now ridden in beyond that planet and was headed for a perihelion point on the other side of Masa Gamma. If she survived to get there, it was the skipper’s intention to put on overdrive and go back to base with all his records. But this interplanetary ship changed all plans. It appeared to be a rocket, in that it left behind a trailing cloud of vapor which looked like ejected gases. The spectroscopes, though, showed it to be merely hydrocarbon— smoke particles. And it altogether lacked the backward velocity which would have proved it a means of propulsion. It was simply a trail of vapor, as if for advertisement.

  I
n two days it had climbed well away from the planet and changed direction in a long smooth curve. The Navigation Officer came to the control room shortly after, to report that it was on an interception course, with interception speed, and would draw gradually closer to the Kennessee until contact was made. Then its trail of vapor broke, and swelled, and broke, and swelled, as if unmistakably to draw attention from the cruiser.

  The control-room loud-speaker boomed shortly. Holden’s voice:

  “Sir!” he said harshly. “That phony rocket is beaming signals at us, running up and down the spectrum and trying frequency and amplitude modulation and everything else. Listen!”

  The speaker said resonantly: “Woof!” It was Buck’s joyous bark. An instant later came the word “Buck” in a distorted but definitely recognizable version of Holden’s own voice. And then, quite insanely, “Lie down, sir!” “Come get it, boy!” “Fetch it, Buck,” and all the other phrases to which the dog Buck had been trained to respond. As a means of opening communication between alien and mutually suspicious races, the vocabulary known to a big brown dog named Buck lacked dignity, but nothing could have been much more informative.

  “You see what it means, sir!” said Holden in a strained voice. “They got the stuff out of Buck’s brain, somehow! They read his memories! They must have, somehow! They want to make contact!” Then he said thickly, “But if they killed him to rummage in his brain—”

  “Mr. Holden,” said the skipper, “answer them, please. Speak as if to Buck himself, and see what happens.”

  In the speaker in the control room he heard Holden’s voice as he spoke into another microphone.

  “Buck!” said Holden hoarsely. “If you hear me, speak up, boy! Buck! Do you hear me?”

  And then the loud-speaker bellowed with the joyous uproar with which Buck replied to his master. He barked and bayed and yelped and whined all at once, and then barked crazily like a creature gone quite mad with joy.

  “He ... he heard me, sir,” said Holden unsteadily. “They didn’t hurt him! I ... I think, sir—”

  “Quite so, Mr. Holden,” said the skipper sedately. “I was about to order you to take a lifeboat and take another chance to learn something of these people. Suppose you go over and make contact with them? A race which knows a good dog when it sees one, and is honest enough to return him to his master, can’t be the race that massacred half a million people on Capella Three!”

  ~ * ~

  The Masan scientist who’d tried to replace Holden in Buck’s affections nevertheless grew rather friendly with Holden after the Kennessee landed on Masa Four. A message torp, sent back to base, had explained the situation and the reason for friendly contact with the Masan civilization. Of course, if the Kennessee vanished, the Masans would be known to be definitely responsible, but that did not seem to bother them. And it did not bother the humans, either.

  The Masan scientist explained to Holden:

  “It has worked out very well. With your atomic power, you can put any amount of energy into the power beam we’ve showed you, for battle with our common enemy. It is odd that we made power beams to fuel our interplanetary ships because we didn’t have atomic energy, and you made atomic energy because you didn’t have power beams!”

  “There’ll be a lot of stuff that will fit together like that,” said Holden. “Our civilization will mesh nicely, as long as we trust each other.”

  “Yes,” said the Masan, somehow ruefully. “We intended to blast you to atoms, because we were afraid, and you intended to destroy our planets, because you were, also. I think both our races owe much to Buck.”

  “I still,” said Holden uncomfortably, “can’t see how you were able to trust us so completely. I don’t think we’d have trusted strangers as you do us. Just because of Buck—”

  “But it is because of Buck,” said the Masan wisely. “We could extract all of his memories. All of them. His kind adores men. He would accept any cruelty from you. But you are not cruel. He would give his life gladly, but no man would ask it. He is yours, unreservedly, but you do not accept from him without giving in return. Do you know when the policy of the Planetary Council, to trust men without limit, was finally decided?”

  “Why . . . no,” said Holden.

  “When you entered the airlock of our ship,” said the Masan, smiling, “and Buck met you. He had told us every secret he could impart. He had been almost a traitor, without knowing it. He had told us everything he knew of men. But when you entered our ship he leaped joyfully at you and you rolled on the floor together—you hugged him! You did not think of possible harm he had done. You were as glad to see him as he was to see you. That was when our policy was decided. Then we knew that men will always repay trust with loyalty.” Then the Masan added, “That is, most men.”

  Holden said uncomfortably:

  “Well—that’s something that has worried the skipper. You people act as if all of us were as decent as our dogs think us. We aren’t. You’ll have to be . . . well ... a little cagey, sometimes . . .”

  “So,” said the Masan, “we learned from Buck. But also we learned that there will always be men to trust.”

  Buck came dashing madly up the dark-green lawn. Holden and the Masan scientist sat on a sort of terrace of the Masan’s home. Buck came racing up, panting happily, and thrust his muzzle into Holden’s hand. He gave the Masan a brief tail-wag and went dashing off again.

  “That,” said the Masan, “is something that he would never do to me, though I . . . yes ... I think I like him as much as you do.”

  “That’s because he’s my dog,” said Holden. “But he treats you like a man. Didn’t you notice?”

  “True! I had not realized! But it is true! Listen! We must have dogs, we Masans! Dogs to like us as they like men! And then no man who likes dogs can ever distrust a Masan who likes them also, and no Masan—” The Masan laughed. “We could not despise a man an honest dog had for a master! Our two races will be brothers!”

  ~ * ~

  That is all of the story about this one part of the hunt for the Space Assassins. Everybody knows that their home system was found, and everybody knows that when we tried to open negotiations with them their ships attacked us in a raging ferocity, and that there was no possible end to it but the extermination of men—and Masans—or of the Assassins. The battle was the first that was ever fought with power beams in Earth ships with Masan gunners. That’s history that everybody knows.

  But not everybody knows that there is a statue of Buck before the Planetary Council building on Masa Four. The Masans think it quite natural. They like dogs enormously, and dogs like them, too. The Masans already have a proverb that a dog is a Masan’s best friend. There’s no statue of Buck on Earth, though. But he doesn’t mind. Buck is a very happy dog.

  He’s with Holden. He follows him everywhere.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  H. B. Fyfe

  IN VALUE DECEIVED

  What is valuable? That will depend on the nature of the planetary civilization of which one is a part. In this story we see through the eyes of a strange but highly intelligent life form a picture of how two utterly dissimilar civilizations are forced by their own needs to establish completely different sets of values for various commodities, techniques, and inventions. One man’s meat is another man’s sawdust; in the world of the Galaxy you never can be sure what will be valueless and what will turn out to be worth more than fine jewels...

  ~ * ~

  Rylat was quite disappointed at the barrenness of the planet. At that, it was the only one circling the small white star in Sector Twelve that had offered any hope at all.

  "Things are as bleak as at home on Olittra," he thought to Akyro. "Nothing growing but a few creepers and moss. No wonder, with the dim light."

  He shifted his four eyestalks so as to examine the shallow hills shown on the telescreen. From above the surface, no life had been discernible. They had made the landing only on the strength of Akyro's detection of
radiation. That might have meant habitation, which seldom appeared without some form of agriculture.

  "It could have been artificial," Akyro had thought in mild hope, raising his tapering, dull-blue body to the flat tips of his eight walking legs.

  Seeing the surface at close range, however, he now lost his enthusiasm.

  "You look it over," he thought to Rylat. "I'm hungry."

  He opened a locker and removed a chunk of synthetic food and a plastic tube of liquid. He manipulated the grayish chunk between two of his tiny eating legs, using the other pair to squirt a drink into his mouth at intervals.

  "How can you enjoy that awful stuff?" demanded Rylat in some annoyance. "And how will you like it if we go outside and you get sick in your vacuum suit?"