Dark Benediction

by Walter M. Miller

  When he was finished, the six hours were nearly gone. Pacing restlessly, he waited for them to come. Then, noticing a sudden flutter on the instruments, he glanced out to see the dark hulk slipping through his radiation screen. It came to a stop a short distance away.

  Roki started the timers he had set, then donned a pressure suit. Carrying a circuit diagram of the changes he had wrought, he went to stand in the outer lock. He held open the outer hatch. The beam of a searchlight stabbed out to hold him while the Sol Ship eased closer. He could see another suited figure in its lock, calling guidance to the pilot. Roki glanced up at his own grapples; they were already energized and waiting for something to which they could cling.

  The ships came together with a rocking jerk as both sets of grapples caught and clung. Roki swung himself across a gravityless space, then stood facing the burly figure of the Solarian. The man pushed him into the next lock and stepped after him.

  "Search him for weapons," growled a harsh voice as Roki removed his helmet. "And get the boarding party through the locks."

  "If you do that, you'll blow both ships to hell," the Cophian commented quietly. "The hatches are rigged to throw the reactors past red line."

  The commander, a sharp-eyed oldster with a massive bald skull, gave him a cold stare that slowly became a sneer. "Very well, we can cut through the hull."

  Roki nodded. "You can, but don't let any pressure escape. The throttles are also keyed to the pressure gauge."

  The commander reddened slightly. "Is there anything else?"

  "Several things." Roki handed him the circuit diagram. "Have your engineer study this. Until he gets the idea, anything you do may be dangerous, like trying to pull away from my grapples. I assure you we're either permanently grappled together, or permanently dead."

  The Solarian was apparently his own engineer. He stared at the schematic while another relieved Roki of his weapon. There were four of them in the cabin. Three were armed and watching him carefully. He knew by their expressions that they considered him to be of a lesser species. And he watched them communicate silently among themselves by a soundless language of facial twitches and peculiar nods. Once the commander looked up to ask a question.

  "When will this timer activate this network?"

  Roki glanced at his watch. "In about ten minutes. If the transmitter's periodic signals aren't answered in the correct code, the signals serve to activate C-drive."

  "I see that," he snapped. He glanced at a burly assistant. "Take him out. Skin him—from the feet up. He'll give you the code."

  "I'll give it to you now," Roki offered calmly.

  The commander showed faint surprise. "Do so then." "The Cophian multiplication tables is the code. My transmitter will send a pair of Cophian numbers every two minutes. If you fail to supply the product within one second, a relay starts the C-drive. Since you can't guarantee an exactly simultaneous thrust, there should be quite a crash."

  "Very well, give us your Cophian number symbols."

  "Gladly. But they won't help you."

  "Why not?"

  "Our numbers are to the base eighteen instead of base ten. You couldn't react quickly enough unless you've been using them since childhood."

  The Solarian's lips pulled back from his heavy teeth and his jaw muscles began twitching. Roki looked at his watch.

  "You have seven minutes to get your transmitter set up, with me at the key. We'll talk while I keep us intact."

  The commander hesitated, then nodded to one of the guards who promptly left the room.

  "Very well, manthing, we will set it up temporarily." He paused to smile arrogantly. "You have much to learn about our race. But you have little time in which to learn it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just this. This transmitter—and the whole apparatus—will be shut down after a certain period of time."

  Roki stiffened. "Just how do you propose to do it?"

  "Fool! By waiting until the signals stop. You obviously must have set a time limit on it. I would guess a few hours at the most."

  It was true, but he had hoped to avoid mentioning it. The power to the control circuits would be interrupted after four hours, and the booby trap would be deactivated. For if he hadn't achieved his goal by then, he meant to neglect a signal during the last half-hour and let the C-ward lurch tear them apart. He nodded slowly.

  "You're quiet right. You have four hours in which to surrender your ship into my control. Maybe. I'll send the signals until I decide you don't mean to co-operate. Then—" He shrugged.

  The Solarian gave a command to his aides. They departed in different directions. Roki guessed that they had been sent to check for some way to enter the Idiot that would not energize a booby circuit.

  His host waved him through a doorway, and he found himself in their control room. A glance told him that their science still fell short of the most modern cultures. They had the earmarks of a new race, and yet Sol's civilization was supposedly the oldest in the galaxy.

  "There are the transmitters," the commander barked. "Say what you have to say, and we shall see who is best at waiting."

  Roki sat down, fingered the key, and watched his adversary closely. The commander fell into a seat opposite him and gazed coolly through narrowed lids. He wore a fixed smile of amusement. "Your name is Eli Roki, I believe. I am Space Commander Hulgruv."

  A blare of sound suddenly came from the receiver. Hulgruv frowned and lowered the volume. The sound came forth as a steady musical tone. He questioned the Cophian with his eyes.

  "When the tone ceases, the signals will begin."

  "I see."

  "I warn you, I may get bored rather quickly. I'll keep the signals going only until I think you've had time to assure yourselves that this is not a bluff I am trying to put over on you."

  "I'm sure it's not. It's merely an inconvenience."

  "You know little of my home planet then."

  "I know a little."

  "Then you've heard of the 'Sword of Apology.' "

  "How does that—" Hulgruv paused and lost his smirk for an instant. "I see. If you blunder, your code demands that you die anyway. So you think you wouldn't hesitate to neglect a signal."

  "Try me."

  "It may not be necessary. Tell me, why did you space them two minutes apart? Why not one signal every hour?"

  "You can answer that."

  "Ah yes. You think the short period insures you against any painful method of persuasion, eh?"

  "Uh-huh. And it gives me a chance to decide frequently whether it's worth it."

  "What is it you want, Cophian? Suppose we give you the girl and release you."

  "She is a mere incidental," he growled, fearful of choking on the words. "The price is surrender."

  Hulgruv laughed heartily. It was obvious he had other plans. "Why do you deem us your enemy?"

  "You heard the accusation I beamed back to my Cluster."

  "Certainly. We ignored it, directly. Indirectly we made a fool of you by launching another, uh, mercy ship to your system. The cargo was labeled as to source, and the ship made a point of meeting one of your patrol vessels. It stopped for inspection. You're less popular at home than ever." He grinned. "I suggest you return to Sol with us. Help us develop the warp locks."

  Roki hesitated. "You say the ship stopped for inspection?"

  "Certainly."

  "Wasn't it inconvenient? Changing your diet, leaving your 'livestock' at home—so our people wouldn't know you for what you really are."

  Hulgruv stiffened slightly, then nodded. "Good guess."

  "Cannibal!"

  "Not at all. I am not a man."

  They stared fixedly at one another. The Cophian felt the clammy cloak of hate creeping about him. The tone from the speaker suddenly stopped. A moment of dead silence. Roki leaned back in his chair.

  "I'm not going to answer the first signal."

  The commander glanced through the doorway and jerked his head. A moment later, Talcwa Walk
eka stepped proudly into the room, escorted by a burly guard. She gave him an icy glance and said nothing.

  "Daleth—"

  She made a noise like an angry cat and sat where the guard pushed her. They waited. The first signal suddenly screeched from the receiver: two series of short bleats of three different notes.

  Involuntarily his hand leaped to the key. He bleated back the answering signal.

  Daleth wore a puzzled frown. "Ilgen times ufneg is hork-segan," she muttered in translation.

  A slow grin spread across Hulgruv's heavy face. He turned to look at the girl. "You're trained in the Cophian number system?"

  "Don't answer that!" Roki bellowed.

  "She has answered it, manthing. Are you aware of what your friend is doing, female?"

  She shook her head. Hulgruv told her briefly. She frowned at Roki, shook her head, and stared impassively at the floor. Apparently she was either drugged or had learned nothing about the Solarians to convince her that they were enemies of the galaxy.

  "Tell me, Daleth. Have they been feeding you well?" She hissed at him again. "Are you crazy—"

  Hulgruv chuckled. "He is trying to tell you that we are cannibals. Do you believe it?"

  Fright appeared in her face for an instant, then disbelief. She stared at the commander, saw no guilt in his expression. She looked scorn at Roki.

  "Listen, Daleth! That's why they wouldn't stop. Human livestock aboard. One look in their holds and we would have known, seen through their guise of mercy, recognized them as self-styled supermen, guessed their plans for galactic conquest. They breed their human cattle on their home planet and make a business of selling the parts. Their first weapon is infiltration into our confidence. They knew that if we gained an insight into their bloodthirsty culture, we would crush them."

  "You're insane, Roki!" she snapped.

  "No! Why else would they refuse to stop? Technical secrets? Baloney! Their technology is still inferior to ours. They carried a cargo of hate, our hate, riding with them unrecognized. They couldn't afford to reveal it."

  Hulgruv laughed uproariously. The girl shook her head slowly at Roki, as if pitying him.

  "It's true, I tell you! I guessed, sure. But it was pretty obvious they were taking their surgibank supplies by murder. And they contend they're not men. They guard their ships so closely, live around them while in port. And he admitted it to me."

  The second signal came. Roki answered it, then began ignoring the girl. She didn't believe him. Hulgruv appeared amused. He hummed the signals over to himself —without mistake.

  "You're using polytonal code for challenge, monotonal for reply. That makes it harder to learn."

  The Cophian caught his breath. He glanced at the Solarian's huge, bald braincase. "You hope to learn some three or four hundred sounds—and sound-combinations within the time I allow you?"

  "We'll see."

  Some note of contempt in Hulgruv's voice gave Roki warning.

  "I shorten my ultimatum to one hour! Decide by then. Surrender, or I stop answering. Learn it, if you can."

  "He can, Roki," muttered Daleth. "They can memorize a whole page at a glance."

  Roki keyed another answer. "I'll cut it off if he tries it."

  The commander was enduring the tension of the stalemate superbly. "Ask yourself, Cophian," he grunted with a smile, "what would you gain by destroying the ship—and yourself? We are not important. If we're destroyed, our planet loses another gnat in space, nothing more. Do you imagine we are incapable of self-sacrifice?"

  Roki found no answer. He set his jaw in silence and answered the signals as they came. He hoped the bluff would win, but now he saw that Hulgruv would let him destroy the ship. And—if the situation were reversed, Roki knew that he would do the same. He had mistakenly refused to concede honor to an enemy. The commander seemed to sense his quiet dismay, and he leaned forward to speak softly.

  "We are a new race, Roki—grown out of man. We have abilities of which you know nothing. It's useless to fight us. Ultimately, your people will pass away. Or become stagnant. Already it has happened to man on Earth."

  "Then—there are two races on Earth."

  "Yes, of course. Did apes pass away when man appeared? The new does not replace the old. It adds to it, builds above it. The old species is the root of the new tree."

  "Feeding it," the Cophian grunted bitterly.

  He noticed that Talewa was becoming disturbed. Her eyes fluttered from one to the other of them.

  "That was inevitable, manthing. There are no other animal foodstuffs on Earth. Man exhausted his planet, overpopulated it, drove lesser species into extinction. He spent the world's resources getting your ancestors to the denser star-clusters. He saw his own approaching stagnation on Earth. And, since Sol is near the rim of the galaxy, with no close star-neighbors, he realized he could never achieve a mass-exodus into space. He didn't have the C-drive in its present form. The best he could do was a field-cancellation drive."

  "But that's the heart of the C-drive."

  "True. But he was too stupid to realize what he had. He penetrated the fifth component and failed to realize what he had done. His ships went up to five-hundred C's or so, spent a few hours there by the ship's clock, and came down to find several years had passed on Earth. They never got around that time-lag."

  "But that's hardly more than a problem in five-space navigation!"

  "True again. But they still thought of it in terms of field-cancellation. They didn't realize they'd actually left the four-space continuum. They failed to see the blue-shift as anything more than a field-phenomenon. Even in high-C, you measure light's velocity as the same constant —because your measuring instruments have changed proportionally. It's different, relative to the home continuum, but you can't know it except by pure reasoning. They never found out.

  "Using what they had, they saw that they could send a few of their numbers to the denser star-clusters, if they wanted to wait twenty thousand years for them to arrive. Of course, only a few_ years would pass aboard ship. They knew they could do it, but they procrastinated. Society was egalitarian at the time. Who would go? And why should the planet's industry exhaust itself to launch a handful of ships that no one would ever see again? Who wanted to make a twenty thousand year investment that would impoverish the world? Sol's atomic resources were never plentiful."

  "How did it come about then?"

  "Through a small group of men who didn't care about the cost. They seized power during a 'population rebellion'—when the sterilizers were fighting the euthanasiasts and the do-nothings. The small clique came into power by the fantastic promise of draining off the population-surplus into space. Enough of the stupid believed it to furnish them with a strong backing. They clamped censorship on the news agencies and imprisoned everyone who said it couldn't be done. They put the planet to work building ships. Their fanatic personal philosophy was: 'We are giving the galaxy to Man. What does it matter if he perishes on Earth?' They put about twelve hundred ships into space before their slave-structure collapsed. Man never developed another technology on Sol III. He was sick of it."

  "And your people?"

  Hulgruv smiled. "A natural outgrowth of the situation. If a planet were glutted with rabbits who ate all the grass, a species of rabbits who learned to exploit other rabbits would have the best chance for survival. We are predators, Cophian. Nature raised us up to be a check on your race."

  "You pompous fool!" Roki snapped. "Predators are specialists. What abilities do you have—besides the ability to prey on man?"

  "I'll show you in a few minutes," the commander muttered darkly.

  Daleth had lost color slowly as she listened to the Solarian's roundabout admission of Roki's charge. She suddenly moaned and slumped in a sick heap. Hulgruv spoke to the guard in the soundless facial language. The guard carried her away quickly.

  ""If you were an advanced species, Hulgruv—you would not have let yourself be tricked so easily, by me. And a highly intellige
nt race would discover the warp locks for themselves."

  Hulgruv flushed. "We underestimated you, manthing. It was a natural mistake. Your race has sunk to the level of cattle on earth. As for the warp locks, we know their principles. We have experimental models. But we could short-circuit needless research by using your design. We are a new race, new to space. Naturally we cannot do in a few years what you needed centuries to accomplish."

  "You'll have to look for help elsewhere. In ten minutes, I'm quitting the key—unless you change your mind."

  Hulgruv shrugged. While Roki answered the signals, he listened for sounds of activity throughout the ship. He heard nothing except the occasional clump of boots, the brief mutter of a voice in the corridor, the intermittent rattling of small tools. There seemed to be no excitement or anxiety. The Solarians conducted themselves with quiet self-assurance.

  "Is your crew aware of what is happening?"

  "Certainly."

  As the deadline approached, his fingers grew nervous on the key. He steeled himself, and waited, clutching at each second as it marched past. What good would it do to sacrifice Daleth and himself? He would succeed only in destroying one ship and one crew. But it was a good trade—two pawns for several knights and a rook. And, when the Solarians began their march across space, there would be many such sacrifices.

  For the last time, he answered a signal, then leaned back to stare at Hulgruv. '"Two minutes, Solarian. There's still time to change your mind."

  Hulgruv only smiled. Roki shrugged and stood up. A pistol flashed into the commander's hand, warning him back. Roki laughed contemptuously.

  "Afraid I’ll try to take your last two minutes away?" He strolled away from the table toward the door. "Stop!" Hulgruv barked.

  "Why? I want to see the girl."