(1/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  "You have heard our government defined," the Ruler said. "Now, you will define yours for us."

  Korvin shook his head. "If you insist," he said, "I'll try it. But you won't understand it."

  The Ruler frowned. "We shall understand," he said. "Begin. Who governs you?"

  "None," Korvin said.

  "But you are governed?"

  Korvin nodded. "Yes."

  "Then there is a governor," the Ruler insisted.

  "True," Korvin said. "But everyone is the governor."

  "Then there is no government," the Ruler said. "There is no single decision."

  "No," Korvin said equably, "there are many decisions binding on all."

  "Who makes them binding?" the Ruler asked. "Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?"

  "Many of them are unfavorable," Korvin said. "But we are not forced to accept them."

  "Do you act against your own interests?"

  Korvin shrugged. "Not knowingly," he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. "I told you you wouldn't understand it," he said.

  "It is a defect in your explanation," the Ruler almost snarled.

  "My explanation is as exact as it can be," he said.

  The Ruler breathed gustily. "Let us try something else," he said. "Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples--"

  "Neither have we," Korvin said. "We are all individuals, like yourselves."

  "But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions--"

  "We have no need of one," Korvin said calmly.

  "Ah," the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. "And why not?"

  "We call our form of government democracy," Korvin said. "It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler."

  One of the experts piped up suddenly. "The beings themselves rule each other?" he said. "This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule."

  "That is our form of government," Korvin said.

  "You are lying," the expert said.

  One of the technicians chimed in: "The machine tells us--"

  "Then the machine is faulty," the expert said. "It will be corrected."

  Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.

  It took three days--but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.

  Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.

  On the third day Korvin escaped.

  It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.

  Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.

  Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.

  But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.

  The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby--all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.

  He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.

  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought--nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course--but try to make a Tr'en see it!

  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own--and that means no translation.

  But--damn it--I wish I were home already.

  I'm bored absolutely stiff!

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  McILVAINE'S STAR

  By August Derleth

  Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny--or did he?

  "Call them what you like," said Tex Harrigan. "Lost people or strayed, crackpots or warped geniuses--I know enough of them to fill an entire department of queer people. I've been a reporter long enough to have run into quite a few of them."

  "For example?" I said, recognizing Harrigan's mellowness.

  "Take Thaddeus McIlvaine," said Harrigan.

  "I never heard of him."

  "I suppose not," said Harrigan. "But I knew him. He was an eccentric old fellow who had a modest income--enough to keep up his hobbies, which were three: he played cards and chess at a tavern called Bixby's on North Clark Street; he was an amateur astronomer; and he had the fixed idea that there was life somewhere outside this planet and that it was possible to communicate with other beings--but unlike most others, he tried it constantly with the queer machinery he had rigged up.

  "Well, now, this old fellow had a trio of cronies with whom he played on occasion down at Bixby's. He had no one else to confide in. He kept them up with his progress among the stars and his communication with other life in the cosmos beyond our own, and they made a great joke out of it, from all I could gather. I suppose, because he had no one else to talk to, McIlvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city editor--it was old Bill Henderson then--called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus McIlvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a story.' So I set out to track him down...."

  * * * * *

  It was a great moment for Thaddeus McIlvaine. He sat down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered over them in his usual manner, half way between a querulous oldster and a reproachful schoolmaster.

  "I've done it," he said quietly.

  "Aye, and what?" asked Alexander testily.

  "I discovered a new star."

  "Oh," said Leopold flatly. "A cinder in your eye."

  "It lies just off Arcturus," McIlvaine went on, "and it would appear to be coming closer."

  "Give it my love," said Richardson with a wry smile. "Have you named it yet? Or don't the discoverers of new stars name them any more? McIlvaine's Star--that's a good name for it. Hard a port of Arcturus, with special displays on wind
y nights."

  McIlvaine only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try and communicate with it."

  "That's the ticket," said Alexander.

  "Cut for deal," said Leopold.

  That was how the news about McIlvaine's Star was received by his cronies. Afterward, after McIlvaine had dutifully played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning the Globe to announce McIlvaine's discovery.

  * * * * *

  "The old fellow took himself seriously," Harrigan went on. "And yet he was so damned mousy about it. I mean, you got the impression that he had been trying for so long that now he hardly believed in his star himself any longer. But there it was. He had a long, detailed story of its discovery, which was an accident, as those things usually are. They happen all the time, and his story sounded convincing enough. Just the same, you didn't feel that he really had anything. I took down notes, of course; that was routine. I got a picture of the old man, with never an idea we'd be using it.

  "To tell the truth, I carried my notes around with me for a day or so before it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to put a call in to Yerkes Observatory up in Wisconsin. So I did, and they confirmed McIlvaine's Star. The Globe had the story, did it up in fine style.

  "It was two weeks before we heard from McIlvaine again...."

  * * * * *

  That night McIlvaine was more than usually diffident. He was not like a man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself. He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation.

  "It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly.

  Richardson grunted.

  Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours? The one the papers wrote up."

  "I think," said McIlvaine cautiously, "I'm quite sure--I have got in touch with them. Only," his brow wrinkled and furrowed, "I can't understand their language."

  "Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for you to do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand them. Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or something."

  "King Thaddeus the First," said Alexander loftily. "All you star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."

  "That would be unsanitary, I think," said McIlvaine, frowning.

  Poor McIlvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that amber star now.

  McIlvaine's star was certainly much closer to the Earth than it had been.

  He tried once again to contact it with his home-made radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other--a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of McIlvaine's own kind. It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing--McIlvaine sensed all this and strove mightily to understand.

  He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distant impression that someone was talking to him in his own language. But there was no longer any sound on the radio. He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him.

  What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.

  McIlvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien.

  They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese--but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent.

  "And what about you?" cried McIlvaine with unaccustomed heat.

  Silence was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its vividness. But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before--of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them--all appeared to be the same age.

  "We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner.

  Did they have names? McIlvaine wondered.

  "I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are McIlvaine."

  And the civilization of their star?

  Instantly he saw in his mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed dwellers. Within the buildings was evidence of a great and old civilization....

  * * * * *

  "You see, McIlvaine really believed all this. What an imagination the man had! Of course, the boys at Bixby's gave him a bad time; I don't know how he stood it, but he did. And he always came back. Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight in deviling McIlvaine, and I was sent out to see the old fellow again.

  "You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."

  "But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.

  "Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan. "Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his were considerably larger, though."

  "Go on."

  "Well, I talked with McIlvaine for quite a while. He told me all about their civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought he was talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step outside to meet.

  "Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys there. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a connection to McIlvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant to give McIlvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believing everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and let him make a fool of himself.

  "It didn't work out quite that way, however...."

  * * * * *

  "McIlvaine, can you hear me?"

  McIlvaine started with astonishment. His mental impression of Guru became confused; the voice speaking English came clear as a bell, as if from no distance at all.

  "Yes," he said hesitantly.

  "Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough information from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against Earth...."

  "But, why?" cried McIlvaine, astounded.

  The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of Guru betrayed anger.

  "There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the machine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."

  Before he left the machine, McIlvaine had the impression of a greater machine being attached to the means of communication which the inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.

  * * * * *

  "McIlvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blinding flash just outside his window," cont
inued Harrigan. "There was also a run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was nothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound--as if, as he put it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag'. He went back in and examined the space from the window to the machine; there were two thin lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had been attached to the machine and led outside.

  "Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out there, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machine represented the wires he had attached to his microphone while McIlvaine was at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not fiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared from that night on."

  "You investigated, of course?" I asked.

  Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about him. McIlvaine as much as the rest of them.

  "Oh, they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through his house with a fine-toothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, and generally put him through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murder rap on. But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn't manufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that McIlvaine ever knew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.