Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “I’d feel a lot better myself if Headquarters hadn’t picked us for this particular operation,” Grandma admitted. “Us and Noorhut…”

  Because, by what was a rather singular coincidence, considering how things stood there tonight, the valley was also Grandma’s home. She had been born, quite some while before, a hundred and eighty miles farther inland, at the foot of the dam of the great river Wend, which had given its name to the land, and nowadays supplied it with almost all its required power.

  Erisa Wannattel had done a great deal of traveling since she first became aware of the fact that her varied abilities and adventuresome nature needed a different sort of task to absorb them than could be found on Noorhut, which was progressing placidly up into the final stages of a rounded and balanced planetary civilization. But she still liked to consider the Valley of the Wend as her home and headquarters, to which she returned as often as her work would permit. Her exact understanding of the way people there thought about things and did things also made them easy for her to manipulate; and on occasion that could be very useful.

  In most other places, the means she had employed to turn the Guardian and his troop back from the hollow probably would have started a panic or brought armed ships and radiation guns zooming up for the kill within minutes. But the valley people had considered it just another local emergency. The bronze alarm bell in the village had pronounced a state of siege, and cow horns passed the word up to the outlying farms. “Within minutes, the.farmers were pelting down the roads to the village with their families and guns; and, very soon afterward, everything quieted down again. Guard lines had been set up by then, with the women and children quartered in the central buildings, while the armed men had settled down to watching Grandma’s illusion projections—directional video narrow beams—from the discreet distance marked by the village boundaries.

  If nothing else happened, the people would just stay there till morning and then start a cautious investigation. After seeing mysterious blue lights dancing harmlessly over Grimp’s farm for four summers, this section of Wend was pretty well conditioned to fiery apparitions. But even if they got too adventurous, they couldn’t hurt themselves on the projections, which were designed to be nothing but very effective visual displays.

  What it all came to was that Grandma had everybody in the neighborhood rounded up and immobilized where she wanted them.

  ~ * ~

  IN EVERY other respect, the valley presented an exceptionally peaceful twilight scene to the eye. There was nothing to show that it was the only present point of contact between forces engaged in what was probably a war of intergalactic proportions—a war made wraithlike but doubly deadly by the circumstance that, in over a thousand years, neither side had found out much more about the other than the merciless and devastating finality of its forms of attack. There never had been any actual battles between Mankind and the Halpa, only alternate and very thorough massacres—all of them, from Mankind’s point of view, on the wrong side of the fence.

  The Halpa alone had the knowledge that enabled them to reach their human adversary. That was the trouble. But, apparently, they could launch their attacks only by a supreme effort, under conditions that existed for periods of less than a score of years, and about three hundred years apart as Mankind measured time.

  It was hard to find any good in them, other than the virtue of persistence. Every three hundred years, they punctually utilized that brief period to execute one more thrust, carefully prepared and placed, and carried out with a dreadfully complete abruptness, against some new point of human civilization—and this time the attack was going to come through on Noorhut.

  “Something’s starting to move around in that hollow!” the pony announced suddenly. “It’s not one of their globe-detectors.”

  “I know,” murmured Grandma. “That’s the first of the Halpa themselves. They’re going to be right on schedule, it seems. But don’t get nervous. They can’t hurt anything until their transmitter comes through and revives them. We’ve got to be particularly careful now not to frighten them off. They seem to be even more sensitive to emotional tensions in their immediate surroundings than the globes.”

  The pony made no reply. It knew what was at stake and why eight big ships were circling Noorhut somewhere beyond space-detection tonight. It knew, too, that the ships would act only if it was discovered that Grandma had failed. But—

  The pony shook its head uneasily. The people on Treebel had never become civilized to the point of considering the possibility of taking calculated risks on a planetary scale—not to mention the fact that the lives of the pony and of Grandma were included in the present calculation. In the eight years it had been accompanying her on her travels, it had developed a tremendous respect for Erisa Wannattel’s judgment and prowess. But, just the same, frightening the Halpa off, if it still could be done, seemed like a very sound idea right now to the pony.

  As a matter of fact, as Grandma well knew, it probably could have been done at this stage by tossing a small firecracker into the hollow. Until they had established their planetary foothold, the Halpa took extreme precautions. They could spot things in the class of radiation weapons a hundred miles away, and either that or any suggestion of local aggressiveness or of long-range observation would check the invasion attempt on Noorhut then and there.

  But one of the principle reasons she was here tonight was to see that nothing did happen to stop it. For this assault would only be diverted against some other world then, and quite probably against one where the significance of the spying detector-globes wouldn’t be understood before it was too late. The best information system in the Galaxy couldn’t keep more than an insignificant fraction of its populations on the alert for dangers like that—

  She bounced suddenly to her feet and, at the same instant, the pony swung away from the hollow toward which it had been staring. They both stood for a moment then, turning their heads about, like baffled hounds trying to fix a scent on the wind.

  “It’s Grimp!” Grandma exclaimed.

  The rhinocerine pony snorted faintly. “Those are his thought images, all right,” it agreed. “He seems to feel you need protection. Can you locate him?”

  “Not yet,” said Grandma anxiously. “Yes, I can. He’s coming up through the woods on the other side of the hollow, off to the left. The little devil!” She was hustling back to the trailer. “Come on, I’ll have to ride you there. I can’t even dare use the go-buggy this late in the day.”

  The pony crouched beside the trailer while she quickly snapped on its saddle from the top of the back steps. Six metal rings had been welded into the horny plates of its back for this purpose, so it was a simple job. Grandma clambered aloft, hanging onto the saddle’s hand-rails.

  “Swing wide of the hollow,” she warned. “Grimp came just as I suggested him mentally to. You needn’t worry about making noise. The Halpa don’t notice noise as such—it has to have emotional content for them to hear it—and the quicker Grimp spots us, the easier it will be to find him.”

  The pony already was rushing down into the meadow at an amazing rate of speed—it took a lot of muscle to drive a body like that through the gluey swamps of Treebel, and there were none here to impede it. It swung wide of the hollow and of what it contained, crossed a shallow bog farther down the meadow with a sound like a charging torpedo-boat, and reached the woods.

  It had to slow down then to avoid brushing off Grandma.

  “Grimp’s down that slope somewhere,” Grandma said. “He’s heard us…”

  “They’re making a lot of noise,” Grimp’s thought reached them suddenly and clearly. He seemed to be talking to someone. “But we’re not scared of them, are we?”

  “Bang-bang!” another voice-thought came excitedly.

  “That was the lortel,” Grandma said. “They’re very good for giving children courage. Much better than Teddy Bears.”

  “That’s the stuff,” Grimp resumed approvingly. “We’ll slingshot th
em all if they don’t watch out. But we’d better find Grandma soon.”

  “Grimp!” shouted Grandma. The pony backed her up with a roaring call.

  “Hello?” came the lortel’s thought.

  “Wasn’t that the pony?” Grimp asked it, getting only another “hello” in reply. “All right, we’ll go that way,” he added, as though they had reached a joint decision.

  “Here we come, Grimp!” Grandma shouted, and the pony descended the steep side of a ravine with the straightforward technique of a rock slide.

  “That’s Grandma!” thought Grimp. “Grandma!” he yelled. “Look out, there’s monsters all around!”

  ~ * ~

  “WHAT you missed!” yelled Grimp, dancing around the pony as Grandma Wannattel scrambled down from the saddle. “The monsters have the village surrounded, and the Guardian killed one and I slingshot another till he fizzled out, and I was coming to find you—”

  “Your mother will be worried,” said Grandma as they rushed into each other’s arms.

  “No,” grinned Grimp. “All the kids are supposed to be sleeping in the school house, and she won’t look there till morning, and the teacher said the monsters were all holynations—ho-lucy-nations. But he wouldn’t go look when the Guardian said they’d show him one. He stayed right in bed! But the Guardian’s all right—he killed one, and I slingshot another one and the lortel learned a new word. Say ‘bang-bang,’ lortel!”

  “Hello!” squeaked the lortel.

  “Aw, he’s scared,” said Grimp disappointedly. “He can say it, though. And I’ve come to take you to the village so the monsters don’t chase after you. Hello, pony!”

  “Bang-bang,” said the lortel distinctly.

  “See?” cried Grimp. “He wasn’t scared, after all—he’s a real brave lortel! If we see some monsters, don’t you get scared, either, because I’ve got my slingshot,” he said, waving it bloodthirstily, “and two back pockets all full of real big stones. I just hope my pants stay up. But that doesn’t matter—the way to do it is to kill them all.”

  “It sounds like a pretty good idea, Grimp,” Grandma agreed. “But you’re awfully tired now.”

  “No, I’m not!” Grimp said, surprised. His right eye sagged shut and then his left. He opened them both with an effort and looked at Grandma. “I can stay awake all night, I bet,” he argued drowsily. “I am—”

  “In fact,” said Grandma, “you’re asleep.”

  “No, I’m n—” objected Grimp. Then he sagged toward the ground, and Grandma caught him firmly.

  “In a way, I hate to do it,” she panted, wrestling him aboard the pony, which had hunkered down and flattened itself as much as it could to make the job easier. “He’d probably enjoy it. But we can’t take a chance. He’s a husky little devil, too,” she groaned, giving a final boost, “and those ammunition pockets don’t make him any lighter.” She clambered up again behind him and noticed that the lortel had transferred itself to her coat collar.

  The pony stood up cautiously.

  “Now what?” it asked.

  “Might as well go straight to the hollow,” said Grandma, breathing hard. “We’ll probably have to wait around there a few hours, but if we’re careful it won’t do any harm.”

  ~ * ~

  “DID you find a good deep pond?” Grandma asked the pony a little later, as it came squishing up softly through the meadow behind her to rejoin her at the edge of the hollow.

  “Yes,” said the pony. “About a hundred yards back. That should be close enough. How much more waiting do you think we’ll have to do?”

  Grandma shrugged carefully. She was sitting in the grass with what, by daylight, would have been a good view of the hollow below. Grimp was asleep with his head on her knees. The lortel, after catching a few bugs in the grass and eating them, had settled down on her shoulder and dozed off, too.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s still three hours till Big Moonrise, and it’s bound to be some time before then. Now that you’ve found a waterhole, we’ll just stay here together and wait. The one thing to remember is not to let yourself start getting excited about them.”

  The pony stood, huge and chunky beside her, staring down, its forefeet on the edge of the hollow. Muddy water trickled from its knobby flanks. It had brought the warm mud-smells of a summer pond back with it to hang in a cloud about them.

  There was vague, dark, continuous motion at the bottom of the hollow. A barely noticeable stirring in the single big pool of darkness that filled it.

  “If I were alone,” the pony said, “I’d get out of here! I know when I ought to be scared. But you’ve taken psychological control of my reactions, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Grandma. “It’ll be easier for me, though, if you help along as much as you can. There’s really no danger until their transmitter has come through.”

  “Unless,” objected the pony, “they’ve worked out some brand-new tricks in the past few hundred years.”

  “There’s that chance,” Grandma admitted. “But they’ve never tried changing their tricks on us yet. If it were us doing the attacking, we’d vary our methods each time, as much as we could. But the Halpa don’t seem to think the way we do about anything. They wouldn’t still be so careful if they didn’t realize they were very vulnerable at this point.”

  “I hope they’re right about that!” the pony said anxiously.

  Its head moved then, following the motion of something that sailed flutteringly out of the depths of the hollow, circled along its far rim, and descended again. The beings of Treebel had a much deeper range of night vision than Grandma Wannattel, but she was also aware of that shape.

  “They’re not much to look at,” the pony remarked. “Like a big, dark rag of leather, almost.”

  “Their physical structure is believed to be quite simple,” Grandma agreed slowly.

  The pony was tensing up again, and she realized that it was best to go on talking to it, about almost anything at all. That always helped, even though the pony knew her much too well by now to be really fooled by such tricks.

  “Many very efficient life-forms aren’t physically complicated, you know,” she went on, letting the sound of her voice ripple steadily into its mind. “Parasitical types, particularly. It’s pretty certain, too, that the Halpa have the hive-mind class of intelligence, so what goes for the nerve systems of most of the ones they send through to us might be nothing much more than secondary reflex-transmitters…”

  Grimp stirred in his sleep at that point and grumbled. Grandma looked down at him. “You’re sound asleep!” she told him severely, and he was again.

  “You’ve got plans for that boy, haven’t you?” said the pony, without shifting its gaze from the hollow.

  “I’ve had my eye on him,” Grandma admitted, “and I’ve already recommended him to the organization for observation. That’s if we beat off the Halpa this time—and Grimp will be pretty important in deciding that. If we do, we’ll let him develop with only a little help here and there. We’ll see what he picks up naturally from the lortel, for instance, in the way of telepathic communication and sensory extensions. I think Grimp’s the kind we can use.”

  “He’s all right,” the pony agreed absently. “A bit murderous, though, like most of you…”

  “He’ll grow out of it!” Grandma said, a little annoyedly, for the subject of human aggressiveness was one she and the pony argued about frequently. “You can’t hurry developments like that along too much. All of Noorhut should grow out of that stage, as a people, in another few hundred years. They’re about at the turning-point right now—”

  Their heads came up together then, as something very much like a big, dark rag of leather came fluttering up from the hollow and hung in the dark air above them. The representatives of the opposing powers that were facing each other on Noorhut that night took quiet stock of one another for a few moments.

  ~ * ~

  THE Halpa was about six feet long and two feet wide
, and considerably less than an inch thick. It held its position in the air with a steady, rippling motion, like a bat the size of a man, and then suddenly it extended itself with a snap, growing taut as a curved sail.

  The pony snorted involuntarily. The apparently featureless shape in the air turned toward it and drifted a few inches closer. When nothing more happened, it turned again and fluttered quietly back down into the hollow.

  “Could it tell I was scared?” the pony asked uneasily.

  “You reacted just right,” Grandma soothed. “Startled suspicion at first, and then just curiosity, and then another start when it made that jump. It’s about what they’d expect from creatures that would be hanging around the hollow now. We’re like cows to them. They can’t tell what things are by their looks, as we do.”

  But her tone was thoughtful, and she was more shaken than she would have cared to let the pony notice. There had been something indescribably menacing and self-assured in the Halpa’s attitude. Almost certainly, it had only been trying to draw a reaction of hostile intelligence from them, probing, perhaps, for the presence of weapons that might be dangerous to its kind.