by Zach Hughes
almost vertically. Near the top, tucked under a glistening crystal overhang, blended into its natural surroundings was a building. In its construction the soft tones of an alabasterlike material blended with the pure tones of crystals. The bright, gay birds seemed to call to them as the three walked toward the hill. A cooling breeze wafted around them and stirred the perfume of the blossoms into a heady draft. They went forward in silence, their eyes
on the building at the crest of the hill. When they stood directly below it, no means of access was apparent until, with an almost imperceptible motion, they were lifted through the heady air. With a slight inward move, they were deposited onto an open balcony. In front of them a door opened. Plank led the way into a room of such beauty that Hara gasped in admiration. Sounds of running water from a trickling artificial brook dividing the room in two were mixed with the softness of music. The lighting seemed muted, but had no hint of dimness. Along the walls artistic constructions sparkled in crystals and colors. The ceiling was painted like a sky with pink and blue tinted clouds. Beside the brook was a sunken seating area. They stood, feeling almost out of place in the splendor, the quiet luxury. On the far wall a crystal panel shimmered, clouded, opened and the woman stepped through, flowed through, moving with a awe-inspiring grace. Her beauty made Plank's throat dry. Beside him, Hara sighed. «I did not intend that effect,» the woman said. «Would this make you more at ease?» Before the change she had been a creature out of a dream, tall, perfectly formed, her body barely covered by a silken sheath that fell to her shapely thighs in clinging glory. After the change the contrast was grotesque. Her face was now a thing from a nightmare, a bleached and shrunken skull from a charnel house, the eyes sunken, the cheeks cracked and dry, the upper teeth exposed in a horrible grin. «I want you to be at ease,» she said. Plank was not usually a man who used profanity, but the word he said was earthy in the extreme. «No matter,» the woman said. Her face resumed its heavenly beauty. She motioned them toward the seating area, leading them, sweeping down the wide steps to the sunken area to pivot and look at them as they glanced at each other. Then she sat. Although he felt a bit intimidated, Plank had been pushed to the limit. «You said you had removed the Eater from Earth.» «Yes.» «You said he was one of you,» Plank said, his voice low and intense. «Are we going to be your afternoon snack?» She smiled at him. «All this in a mere few million years?» «Lady, are you civilized?» Plank asked. «Please, John,» Hara said. «We like to think we are,» she said. «And is this the royal 'we' or are there more of you?» Plank asked. «We are many.» «Good for you,» Plank said. «Maybe there will be one among you who is possessed of a shred of common decency.» «You have reason to be angry, man,» the woman said. «I think so,» Plank agreed. «You see, we had no idea. We left your galaxy when there were giant reptiles on your Earth.» «Why didn't you eat the reptiles?» Plank asked, still fuming. «Even then we were beyond such practices,» she said calmly. «Would any of you like some refreshment?» «What we would like,» said Plank, «is the respect due to a living creature. What we want is our own freedom of choice without the interference of someone who can do mental tricks.» «Ah,» she said, laughing, «if you only knew how presumptuous you are.» She shifted, crossing one leg over the other. The effect was not lost on Plank and Heath. «All right, then. We will stop the preliminary chatter. You are here for a reason. I am tempted…» She smiled again. «Do you prefer the first person singular? You seem to object to our saying 'we.' Although, I assure you, it is much more descriptive.» «I am all in favor of knocking off the chatter,» Plank said. «I have told you that…» and she said a name, but it was a sound that was unintelligible to Plank's ears. The woman smiled again. «He is the one you think of as the Eater, or the monster. I have told you that he has been removed from your planet. Your people are no longer threatened by his childish game.» «Game?» Heath exploded.
«He thinks of it as that, not I,» she said. «Now, I believe it would be wise if you listen and let me talk.» She smiled and waited for comment. Plank shifted in the soft seat and looked at her. In his mind was a conflict. He kept seeing, in her beautiful face, the death's skull she had shown them. «You have reason for pride, for you have come a long way. There is reason, also, for humbleness, because you are, after all, only an accident. When we left your galaxy your ancestry was eating vegetation on a thousand planets.» «Sorry,» Plank said, «I don't buy that.» «You yourself ran tests on the planet you call Plank's World. You noted the amazing—that's the way you expressed it—similarity between your cells and the cells of the slugs.» «May I ask how you know all this?» Plank asked. She laughed. «You made it rather difficult,» she said. «We had to search through the remains of…» Once again there was that ear-twisting name. «…'s planet. Fortunately the data banks were rather well protected and were still intact. You will see just how fortunate that was for you later.» «Yes,» Plank said, «the cellular construction was similar.» «But still you doubt that you evolved from our food creatures.» «There's a body of pretty firm evidence on Earth that life was spontaneous on our planet. You mentioned the giant reptiles. Were they evolved from your creation?» «Life arises in many ways in the universe. However, advancement to intelligence is quite rare. Without a head start your rapid rise would have been impossible.» «Is that crucial to our discussion?» Plank asked. «Not really. Actually, we are very impressed by you. Only one other race we know of has shown such development.» «Yours,» Plank said. «Ours. There are vague similarities. We are very old and no race can trace itself to the beginning, but when your planet was the home of the giant reptiles we had achieved the ultimate state of development and were in the process of changing. We had, then, been in deep space for a million years.» «Why were you so slow?» Plank asked. For the first time an unpleasant expression marred the beauty of the woman's face. «Please do not try to antagonize me. You are, at best, an annoyance. We are being generous to give you our time to explain to you. There is a question to be resolved. First let me confirm one of your
suspicions. The Eater, as you call him, is of us, but he is, how can I say it,
to use your term, retarded. He is a great rarity. Of all the people, he alone was incapable of development. He was not at home with us. It was best for him, and for us, to give him a place of his own. We looked and found your galaxy. It, as you may know, was largely unpopulated. There were a few signs of developing life, but so primitive that he would live out his life span—since he is what you think of as mortal—» «Where you are not?» Hara asked. «Our existence is not limited. His is. He would, we reasoned, die before he could endanger the developing forms of life on the scattered planets. We established him, gave him ways to amuse himself. To give him every opportunity, in case we were wrong and the centuries would effect a change in him, we left him the necessary history of our people to guide his development, if any.» «And you fenced him in with the barrier around the galaxy,» Heath said. «You anticipate,» she said. «But yes, we fenced him in. We provided him with his food creatures, things out of our primitive history. We gave him the basic tools to build. He loved toys.» «A retarded child with a galaxy all his own,» Plank said. «How did you happen to come back just at the time you did?» Hara asked. «He was capable of self-destruction,» she said. «We were notified of the destruction of his planet.» She looked at them with a smile. «You must understand that he is not bad. He is merely afflicted.» «Depopulating a planet in a game not even necessary to his survival is not bad?» Plank asked. «No,» she said, «you judge him too harshly.» «What is the question to be decided?» Plank asked. «We simply must decide whether to leave the galaxy to him or to you,» she said, with a delicate little movement of her shoulders. Plank smoldered for a moment. «All right, what do we have to say about it?» «Whatever you please,» she said. «I am here to evaluate our knowledge of you. We know that you have developed a rather primitive technology. We know that you now understand the principle of the drive aboard the ship you call Pride and, although that drive is still pri
mitive and mechanical, it is a rather sophisticated work. To know that you could so easily understand it is surprising. That, more than anything else, is the reason why you are here to speak for yourselves.» «You know, then, that we developed the blink drive independently,» Heath said. «There was insufficient data on the tapes, but there was evidence that the trips were based on the buildup of power during a turnaround from your ships, which use hydrogen power. Please don't try to impress me. You know and I know that it is quite impossible for you to create a device as sophisticated as the drive.» «No,» Plank said, looking warningly at Heath, «Let's not try to lie to her.» But there was an unanswered question. With all her mental powers, couldn't she read their minds? He sent, with his thoughts, insulting things, rude things. She smiled, looking at Heath. «He is right,» she said. «Your advancements are worthy, without lying about them. Knowledge of our drive will be cleared from your mind before you leave here.» «We are to be allowed to leave, then?» Plank asked. «You would be out of place here,» she said. «More retarded children?» Plank asked. «You bore me, man. But yes, and worse, for you have seen the abilities of what you call the Eater. Can you match even one of them? You are worse than a retarded child; let me assure you that your continued existence depends entirely on what I decide here.» Plank made a low bow. «I ask your forgiveness.» «Now that you are more calm, perhaps you would like to tell me of your race. Your goals, your aspirations.» «We aspire, more than anything else, to perfection,» Hara said. «Rather noble,» the woman said. «Perfection by whose standards?» «Our own, the only standards we've known,» Hara said. «John Plank went into space for money,» the woman said. «But even as he went into space for money,» Hara said, «he was trying
to be the best ship captain, the best trader, the best navigator. He tried to make his ship the best one of its type.» «I see, in your activities, something that reminds me of…» the ear-twisting name…'s games. And his games were for nothing. Is money a way of keeping score in your game?» «We also seek security and comforts,» Hara said. «Money buys us security and comforts.» «And the search for money is a game to be won by the most able,» the woman said. «I suggest that you are a grossly competitive creature, competing with your fellows since you have no one else with whom to compete. I suggest that your entire life is a game and that your one object is to win.» «Why do you have weapons on your ships?» Plank asked. «Ah, that is a good question,» she said laughing, showing her pink tongue. «Perhaps this will not be so boring after all. You show an animal shrewdness. First, the ships were primitive toys of a retarded child. However, the toys, in their time, did come equipped with weapons, for we went through a period of competition. We had our wars among ourselves.» «That sounds very human to me,» Plank said. He lifted a hand to stop her reply. «Yes, we are competitive. We are competitive with our fellow men and with ourselves. We compete with nature, and with the universe. Although we take care of our own retarded children, those less able to compete, we still reward the ablest with the most riches, the most comforts, the most security. In the jungles of the young Earth, the fittest survived to sire more survivors. This continuing process of evolution goes on still. We can document a change in our race in a short period of time. We are taller, stronger, more resistant to disease. Our life span has increased from approximately 70 years to three times 70.» «Let me ask you this,» said the beautiful woman. «If you could, if you had it within your power to provide the ideal existence for your Earth, what would that existence be?» «Freedom of choice,» Hara said. «A meaningful life for each man,» Heath said. «Health, wealth, love and time to enjoy it,» Plank said. «Three answers.» «If there were three million men here you'd get three million answers,» Plank said, «all leading toward the same thing, perhaps, but expressed in different ways. One man would think the ideal existence would be to have a plot of ground on Earth and the time to till it. Another would want a ship like the Pride to rove the stars. Another would want a dozen women at his command.» «You are stating a concept we have been studying,» the woman said. «Each of you is individual.» «And your race operates with one mind?» Plank asked. «Many minds attuned.» «Can you make the water in that brook reverse its flow and run uphill?» Plank asked. «Easily.» She demonstrated. «But you can't read my thoughts,» Plank said. «Another good point, but not conclusive. Neither can I enter the mind of the small birds that you saw outside.» «You mentioned games,» Plank said. «Let me tell you about Earth games. On Sundays, during the colder months, young men don armor and
do battle in an arena. The object is to take a small object, called a football, from one end of the arena to the other. Men devote their lives to this game and those who excel at it are heroes to our people. A man begins to prepare himself for football when he is very young and works to develop
his abilities and his body until he is too old for the game and his reflexes slow. Other men and women spend their lives developing skills. A girl will begin to skate on ice on two thin blades when she is six years old. She may spend many hours every day of her life in an effort to win a gold medal in a series of games that has the attention of our entire world. This is what Hara called the search for perfection. Each individual wants to be the best
at what he or she does and is willing to make great sacrifices. Many strive, but there can be only one winner. We exalt that winner and so we create the desire, in other young people, to emulate the winner. You may call this a useless game, but we on Earth feel that man is at his most magnificent when he is forcing his body to do something it was not designed by nature to do; when he is stretching his abilities to the ultimate to achieve that one moment of triumph which has been attained by no man before him. If you gave a man the garden of Eden…» He paused. «I understand the concept. I've acquainted myself with your culture.» «Give a man everything. Put him into an idyllic situation where he does not have to work for food, where he has eternal shelter and wants for
nothing, and he'll start counting the fruit on the trees or trying to arrange the garden in a way that comes closer to pleasing his own senses. Man is a doer, a striver. Give him the universe, and he'll want to find out where it ends and why it began.» «By your information, how long has man been on Earth?» she asked. «It depends on when you begin to think of our primitive forgoers as man,» Plank said. «We can, although I don't think it worthwhile to do the calculations, tell you exactly when we first fashioned your original primitive ancestor,» the woman said testily. «We return to a basic difference in opinion,» Plank said. «My point is this. You've been on Earth a few million of your years.
While this is not, by our standards, a long period of time, in our history we showed faster development. Our period of warfare was very brief. We began to develop beyond aggressiveness. You have killed your fellows from the beginning.» «Our last war was 75 years ago,» Heath said. The woman laughed. «That is but a moment.» «Without meaning too much more malice than the question implies,» Plank asked, «who gives you the right to judge us?» Another laugh. «Who is there to deny us that right?» «A good point,» Plank said wryly. «But let's get back for a moment to what you think of as man's games. It comes to my mind that there may be a very good reason for man's competition with himself and with his fellow man. You say your life span is unlimited. Even your retarded child has enjoyed what is to us a tremendous and almost immortal life and still has time to live. I assume, then, that you've never been faced with death, guaranteed death, death that comes in a certain span of time regardless of what you do.» «That is true.» «How would your race have developed if, in its youth, each individual had a life span of, say, 30 years? When our people began making technical advances, looking upward to the stars through primitive instruments, we were faced with that problem.» «I see,» she said, nodding. «You show an interest in what we think to be the ideal existence,» Plank said. «Perhaps we could learn by asking you the same question.» «You would not understand,» she said. «Try us,» Hara said. «You lack the capacity.» «It seems to me that you, as we d
o, like comforts and luxuries,» Plank
said. «This place. It is beautiful, but different only in degree from the same sort of home on our planet.» «A moment,» she said. Each of them felt a slight alteration; suddenly they were standing atop a wooded hill. Around them the woodland was dense, heavily brushed, the ground littered with the debris of fallen limbs. «Do you think I needed a building? A home?» The woman was looking at them with a tiny smile. «Did you think the flowers were for me?» «What are you then?» Plank asked. «Even that you would not understand,» she said. «Can you show us?» Plank asked. «No.» «The Eater's basic form was functional,» Plank said. The woman-form began to fade. In its place was something, a
disturbance, not visible so much as felt, a twisting, a distortion of an area of space in front of them. And then they were seated again in the luxurious room, the beautiful woman before them. «I have one question,» Plank said. «It's been demonstrated that you have control over physical things, but how much is real and how much is in our minds?» «I could, if I chose, leave the area, here, as it was. In time the natural growth would creep back, but the other, the flowers from a far planet, the building itself, they would remain.» «What do you do?» Plank said. «What is your purpose?» «I told you that you lacked the ability to understand. Greatly simplified, we blend.» «With what?» Plank persisted. «With ourselves, with the universe.» «Is the universe limited?» Plank asked. «You would not understand.» Plank snorted. «Let me say, then, that it is not my function to educate you beyond your abilities,» the woman said. «And now I think we have reached the conclusion of our discussion.» «No,» Plank said, standing quickly. «You have merely talked with three humans. You can't possibly have an overall view of the race from such limited contact. You should, before making your decision, talk to our philosophers, our men of science and religion, our artists and writers, our physicians.» «That will not be necessary,» she said. «You deserve your chance.» Plank sat down, sighing. «And now you have a choice,» the beautiful woman continued. «I will return you either to your planet or your base on the satellite of your planet.» «As we are?» Plank asked. «I told you that you were most fortunate that your missiles did not destroy the data banks when you fired upon…» She said the name that could not be pronounced, the name of the Eater. «…'s planet. He was well trained in scientific methods, even if he did not have the patience or the
