The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  CHAPTER XVIII

  One of the technicians was running and screaming. The magter knocked him down and beat him into silence. Seeing this the other two men returned to work with shaking hands. Even if all life on the surface of the planet were dead, this would have no effect on the magter. They would go ahead as planned, without emotion or imagination enough to alter their set course. As they worked the technicians’ attitude changed from shocked numbness to anger. Right and wrong were forgotten. They had been killed—the invisible death of radiation must already be penetrating into the caves—but they also had the chance for vengeance. Swiftly they brought their work to completion, with a speed and precision they had concealed before.

  “What are those offworlders doing?” Ulv asked.

  Brion stirred from his lethargy of defeat and looked across the cavern floor. The men had a wheeled hand-truck and were rolling one of the atomic warheads onto it. They pushed it over to the latticework of the jump-field.

  “They are going to bomb Nyjord now, just as Nyjord bombed Dis. That machine will hurl the bombs in a special way to the other planet.”

  “Will you stop them?” Ulv asked. He had his deadly blowgun in his hand and his face was an expressionless mask.

  Brion almost smiled at the irony of the situation. In spite of everything he had done to prevent it, Nyjord had dropped the bombs. And this act alone may have destroyed their own planet. Brion had it within his power now to stop the launching in the cavern. Should he? Should he save the lives of his killers? Or should he practice the ancient blood-oath that had echoed and destroyed down through the ages—An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It would be so simple. He literally had to do nothing. The score would be evened and his and the Disans’ deaths avenged.

  Did Ulv have his blowgun ready to kill Brion if he should try to stop the launchings? Or had he misread the Disan entirely?

  “Will you stop them, Ulv?” he asked.

  How large was mankind’s sense of obligation? The cave man first had this feeling for his mate, then for his family. It grew until men fought and died for the abstract ideas of cities and nations, then for whole planets. Would the time ever come when men might realize that the obligation should be to the largest and most encompassing reality of all? Mankind. And beyond that to life of all kinds.

  Brion saw this idea not in words, but as a reality. When he posed the question to himself in this way he found that it stated clearly its inherent answer. He pulled his gun out, and as he did he wondered what Ulv’s answer might be.

  “Nyjord is medvirk,” Ulv said, raising his blowgun and sending a dart across the cavern. It struck one of the technicians who gasped and fell to the floor.

  Brion’s shots crashed into the control board, shorting and destroying it, removing the menace to Nyjord for all time.

  Medvirk, Ulv had said. A life form that co-operates and aids other life forms. It may kill in self-defense, but is essentially not a killer or destroyer. Ulv had a lifetime of knowledge about the interdependency of life. He grasped the essence of the idea and ignored all the verbal complications and confusions. He had killed the magter, who were his own people, because they were umedvirk—against life. And saved his enemies because they were medvirk.

  With this realization came the painful knowledge that the planet and the people that had produced this understanding were dead.

  * * * *

  In the cavern the magter saw the destruction of their plans, and the cave mouth from which the bullets had come. Silently they rushed to kill their enemy. A concerted wave of emotionless fury.

  Brion and Ulv fought back. Even the knowledge that he was doomed no matter what happened could not resign Brion to death at the hands of the magter. To Ulv, the decision was much easier. He was simply killing umedvirk. A believer in life, he destroyed the anti-life.

  They retreated into the darkness, still firing. The magter had lights and ion-rifles, and were right behind them. Knowing the caverns better than the men they chased, pursuers circled. Brion saw lights ahead and dragged Ulv to a stop.

  “They know their way through these caves, and we don’t,” he said. “If we try to run, they’ll just shoot us down. Let’s find a spot we can defend and settle into it.”

  “Back here,” Ulv gave a tug in the right direction, “there is a cave with only one very narrow entrance.”

  “Let’s go!”

  Running as silently as they could in the darkness, they reached the deadend cavern without being seen. What noise they made was lost in other footsteps that echoed and sounded through the connecting caves. Once inside they found cover behind a ridge and waited. The end was certain.

  The magter ran swiftly into their cave, flashing his light into all the places of concealment. The beam passed over the two hidden men and at the same instant Brion fired. The shot boomed loudly as the magter fell. Even if his loss was not known, the shot would surely have been heard.

  Before anyone else came into the cave, Brion ran over and grabbed the still functioning light. Propping it on the rocks so it shone on the entrance, he hurried back to shelter beside Ulv. They waited for the attack.

  It was not long in coming. Two magter rushed in and died. There were more outside, and Brion wondered how long it would be before they remembered the grenades and rolled one into their shelter.

  An indistinct murmur sounded outside and some sharp explosions. In their shelter, Brion and Ulv crouched low and wondered why the attack didn’t come. Then one of the magter came in and Brion hesitated before shooting.

  The man had backed in, firing behind him as he came.

  Ulv had no compunctions about killing, only his darts couldn’t penetrate the magter’s thick clothing. As the magter turned Ulv’s breath pulsed once and death stung the back of the other man’s hand. He collapsed into a crumpled heap.

  “Don’t shoot,” a voice said from outside the cave, and a man stepped through the swirling dust and smoke to stand in the beam from the light.

  Brion clutched wildly at Ulv’s arm, dragging the blowgun from the Disan’s mouth.

  The man in the light wore a protective helmet, thick boots and a pouch-hung uniform.

  He was a Nyjorder.

  This shock of reality was almost impossible to accept. Brion had heard the bombs fall. Yet the Nyjord soldier was here. The two facts couldn’t be accepted together.

  “Would you keep a hold on his arm, sir, just in case,” the soldier said, glancing warily at Ulv’s blowpipe. “I know what those darts can do.” He pulled a microphone from one of his pockets and spoke into it.

  More soldiers crowded into the cave and Professor-Commander Krafft came in behind them. He looked strangely out of place in the dusty combat uniform. The gun was even more grotesque in his blue-veined hand. After relievedly giving the pistol to the nearest soldier, he stumbled quickly over to Brion and took his hand.

  “It is a profound and sincere pleasure to meet you in person,” he said. “And your friend Ulv as well.”

  “Would you kindly explain what is going on,” Brion said thickly. He was obsessed by the strange feeling that none of this could possibly be happening.

  “We will always remember you as the man who saved us from ourselves,” Krafft said, once again the professor instead of the commander.

  “What he wants are facts, Grandpa, not speeches,” Hys said. The bent form of the leader of the rebel Nyjord army pushed through the crowd of taller men until he stood next to Krafft. “Simply stated, Brion, your plan succeeded. Krafft relayed your message to me—and as soon as I heard it I turned back and met him on his ship. I’m sorry that Telt’s dead—but he found what we were looking for. I couldn’t ignore his report of radioactive traces. Your girl friend arrived with the hacked up corpse at the same time I did, and we all took a long look at the green leech in its skull. Her explanation of what it is made significant sense. We were already carrying out landings when we had your call about something having been stored in the magter tower. After that it w
as just a matter of following tracks—and the transmitter you planted.”

  “But the explosions at midnight,” Brion broke in, “I heard them!”

  “You were supposed to,” Hys laughed. “Not only you, but the magter in this cave. We figured they would be armed and the cave strongly defended. So at midnight we dropped a few large chemical explosive bombs at the entrance. Enough to kill the guards without bringing the roof down. We also hoped that the magter deeper in would leave their posts or retreat from the imagined radiation. They did. Worked like a charm. We came in quietly and took them by surprise. Made a clean sweep. Killed the ones we couldn’t capture.”

  “One of the renegade jump-space technicians was still alive,” Krafft said. “He told us about your stopping the bombs aimed at Nyjord, the two of you.”

  * * * *

  None of the Nyjorders there could add anything to his words, not even the cynical Hys. Yet Brion could empathize their feelings, the warmth of their intense relief and happiness. It was a sensation he would never forget.

  “There is no more war,” Brion translated for Ulv, realizing that the Disan had understood nothing of the explanation. As he said it, he realized that there was one glaring error in the story.

  “You couldn’t have done it,” Brion said, astonished. “You landed on this planet before you had my message about the tower. That means you still expected the magter to be sending their bombs to Nyjord—and you made the landings in spite of this knowledge.”

  “Of course,” Professor Krafft said, astonished at Brion’s lack of understanding. “What else could we do? The magter are sick!”

  Hys laughed aloud at Brion’s baffled expression. “You have to understand Nyjord psychology,” he said. “When it was a matter of war and killing my planet could never agree on an intelligent course. War is so alien to our philosophy that it couldn’t even be considered correctly. That’s the trouble with being a vegetable eater in a galaxy of carnivores. You’re easy prey for the first one that lands on your back. Any other planet would have jumped on the magter with both feet and shaken the bombs out of them. We fumbled it so long it almost got both worlds killed. Your mind-parasite drew us back from the brink.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Brion said. “Why—”

  “Simple matter of definition. Before you came we had no way to deal with the magter here on Dis. They really were alien to us. Nothing they did made sense—and nothing we did seemed to have the slightest effect on them. But you discovered that they were sick, and that’s something we know how to handle. We’re united again, my rebel army was instantly absorbed into the rest of the Nyjord forces by mutual agreement. Doctors and nurses are on the way here now. Plans were put under way to evacuate what part of the population we could until the bombs were found. The planet is united again and working hard.”

  “Because the magter are sick, infected by a destructive life form?” Brion asked.

  “Exactly so,” Professor Krafft said. “We are civilized, after all. You can’t expect us to fight a war—and you surely can’t expect us to ignore the plight of sick neighbors?”

  “No…you surely can’t,” Brion said, sitting down heavily. He looked at Ulv, who knew nothing of the incomprehensible speech. Beyond him Hys wore his most cynical expression as he considered the frailties of his people.

  “Hys,” Brion called out. “You translate all that into Disan and explain to Ulv. I wouldn’t dare.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  Dis was a floating golden ball, looking like a schoolroom globe in space. No clouds obscured its surface, and from this distance it seemed warm and attractive set against the cold darkness. Brion almost wished he were back there now, as he sat shivering inside the heavy coat. He wondered how long it would be before his confused body-temperature controls decided to turn off the summer adjustment.

  Delicate as a dream, Lea’s reflection swam in space next to the planet. She had come up quietly behind him in the spaceship’s corridor, only her gentle breath and mirrored face telling him she was there. He turned quickly and took her hands in his.

  “You’re looking better,” he said.

  “Well I should,” she said, pushing her hair in an unconscious gesture with the back of her hand. “I’ve been doing nothing but lie in the ship’s hospital, while you were having such a fine time this last week. Rushing around down there shooting all the magter.”

  “Just gassing them,” he told her. “The Nyjorders can’t bring themselves to kill any more, even if it does raise their own casualty rate. In fact they are having difficulty restraining the Disans led by Ulv, who are happily killing any magter they see as being pure umedvirk.”

  “What will they do when they have all those frothing magter madmen?”

  “They don’t know yet,” he said. “They won’t really know until they see what an adult magter is like with his brain-parasite dead and gone. They’re having better luck with the children. If they catch them early enough, the parasite can be destroyed before it has done too much damage.”

  Lea shuddered delicately.

  “I hate to think of a magter deprived of his symbiote,” she said. “If his system can stand the shock, I imagine there will be nothing left except a brainless hulk. This is one series of experiments I don’t care to witness. I rest secure in the knowledge that the Nyjorders will find the most humane solution.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Brion said.

  “Now what about us,” she said disconcertingly.

  This jarred Brion. He didn’t have her ability to put past horrors out of the mind by substituting present pleasures. “Well, what about us?” he said with masterful inappropriateness.

  She smiled and leaned against him. “You weren’t as vague as that, the night in the hospital room. I seem to remember a few other things you said. You can’t claim you’re completely indifferent to me, Brion Brandd. So I’m only asking you what any outspoken Anvharian girl would. Where do we go from here? Get married?”

  There was a definite pleasure in holding her slight body in his arms and feeling her hair against his cheek. They both sensed it, and this awareness made his words sound that much more ugly.

  “Lea…darling! You know how important you are to me—but you certainly realize that we could never get married.”

  Her body stiffened and she tore herself away from him.

  “Why you great, fat, egotistical slab of meat,” she screamed. “What do you mean by that? I like you Lea, we have plenty of fun and games together, but surely you realize that you aren’t the kind of girl one takes home to mother!”

  “Lea, hold on,” he said. “You know better than to say a thing like that. What I said has nothing to do with how I feel towards you. But marriage means children, and you are biologist enough to know about Earth’s genes—”

  “Intolerant yokel!” she cried, slapping his face. He didn’t move or attempt to stop her. “I expected better from you, with all your pretensions of understanding. But all you can think of are the horror stories about the worn out genes of Earth. You’re the same as every other big, strapping bigot from the frontier planets. I know how you look down on our small size, our allergies and hemophilia and all the other weaknesses that have been bred back and preserved by the race. You hate—”

  “But that’s not what I meant at all,” he interrupted, shocked, his voice drowning hers out. “Yours are the strong genes, the viable strains—mine are the deadly ones. A child of mine would kill itself and you in a natural birth, if it managed to live to term. You’re forgetting that you are the original Homo sapiens. I’m a recent mutation.”

  Lea was frozen by his words. They revealed a truth she had known, but would never permit herself to consider.

  “Earth is home, the planet where mankind developed,” he said. “The last few thousand years you may have been breeding weaknesses back into the genetic pool. But that’s nothing compared to the hundred millions of years that it took to develop man. How many newborn babies live to be a year o
f age on Earth?”

  “Why…almost all of them.”

  “Earth is home,” he said gently. “When men leave home they can adapt to different planets, but a price must be paid. A terrible price in dead infants. The successful mutations live, the failures die. Natural selection is a brutally simple affair. When you look at me you see a success. I have a sister—a success too. Yet my mother had six other children who died when they were still babies. And at least fifteen others that never came to term. You know these things, don’t you Lea?”

  “I know, I know.…” she said sobbing into her hands. He held her now and she didn’t pull away. “I know it all as a biologist—but I am so awfully tired of being a biologist, and top of my class and a mental match for any man. But when I think about you, I do it as a woman, and can’t admit any of this. I need someone Brion, and I needed you so much because I loved you.” She sniffed and pushed at her eyes. “You’re going home, aren’t you? Back to Anvhar. When?”

  “I can’t wait too long,” he said, unhappily. “Aside from my personal wants I find myself remembering that I’m a part of Anvhar. When you think of the number of people who suffered and died—or adapted—so that I could be sitting here now. Well, it’s a little frightening. I suppose it doesn’t make sense logically that I should feel indebted to them. But I do. Whatever I do now, or in the next few years, won’t be as important as getting back to Anvhar.”

  “And I won’t be going back with you.” It was a flat statement the way she said it, not a question.

  “No, you won’t be,” he said.

  Lea was looking out of the port at Dis and her eyes were dry now. “Way back in my deeply buried unconscious I think I knew it would end this way,” she said. “If you think your little lecture on the Origins of Man was a novelty, it wasn’t. Just reminded me of a number of things my glands had convinced me to forget. In a way I envy you your weightlifter wife-to-be, and your happy kiddies. But not very much. Very early in life I resigned myself to the fact that there was no one on Earth I would care to marry. I always had these teen-age dreams of a hero from space who would carry me off, and I guess I slipped you into the pattern without realizing it.”