The World-Thinker and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  Up, up—and the planet became a ball, and Eridanus two thousand nine hundred and thirty-two peered around the edge and suddenly, without any noticeable sense of boundary passed, they were out in space.

  Welstead sighed. “Lord, what a relief! I never knew how good empty space could look.”

  “It looks beautiful to me also,” said Alexander Clay. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  Welstead whirled, jumped to his feet.

  Clay came forward from the reaction chamber, watching with a peculiar expression Welstead took to be deadly fury. Betty stood by the bulkhead, looking from one to the other, her face blank as a mirror.

  Welstead came slowly down from the controls. “Well—you’ve caught us in the act. I suppose you think we’re treating you pretty rough. Maybe we are. But my conscience is clear. And we’re not going back. Looks like you asked for a ride, and you’re going to get one. If necessary—” He paused meaningfully.

  Then, “How’d you get aboard?” and after an instant of narrow-eyed speculation, “And why? Why tonight?”

  Clay shook his head slowly. “Ralph—you don’t give us any credit for ordinary intelligence, let alone ordinary courage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I understand your motives—and I admire you for them. Although I think you’ve been bull-headed putting them into action without discussing it with the people most directly concerned.”

  Welstead lowered his head, stared with hard eyes. “It’s basically my responsibility. I don’t like it but I’m not afraid of it.”

  “It does you credit,” said Clay mildly. “On Haven we’re used to sharing responsibility. Not diluting it, you understand, but putting a dozen—a hundred—a thousand minds on a problem that might be too much for one. You don’t appreciate us, Ralph. You think we’re soft, spiritless.”

  “No,” said Welstead. “Not exactly—”

  “Our civilization is built on adaptability, on growth, on flexibility,” continued Clay. “We—”

  “You don’t understand just what you’d have to adapt to,” said Welstead harshly. “It’s nothing nice. It’s graft, scheming sharp-shooters, tourists by the million, who’ll leave your planet the way a platoon of invading soldiers leaves the first pretty girl they find.”

  “There’ll be problems,” said Clay. His voice took on power. “But that’s what we want, Ralph—problems. We’re hungry for them, for the problems of ordinary human existence. We want to get back into the stream of life. And if it means grunting and sweating we want it. We’re flesh and blood, just like you are.

  “We don’t want Nirvana—we want to test our strength. We want to fight along with the rest of decent humanity. Don’t you fight what you think is unjust?”

  Welstead slowly shook his head. “Not any more. It’s too big for me. I tried when I was young, then I gave up. Maybe that’s why Betty and I roam around the outer edges.”

  “No,” said Betty. “That’s not it at all, Ralph, and you know it. You explore because you like exploring. You like the rough and tumble of human contact just as much as anyone else.”

  “Rough and tumble,” said Clay, savoring the words. “That’s what we need on Haven. They had it in the old days. They gave themselves to it, beating the new world into submission. It’s ours now. Another hundred years of nowhere to go and we’d be drugged, lethargic, decadent.”

  Welstead was silent.

  “The thing to remember, Ralph,” said Clay, “is that we’re part of humanity. If there’s good going, fine. But if there are problems we want to help lick them. You said you’d given up because it was too big for you. Do you think it would be too big for a whole planet? Three hundred million hard honest brains?”

  Welstead stared, his imagination kindled. “I don’t see how—”

  Clay smiled. “I don’t either. It’s a problem for three hundred million minds. Thinking about it that way it doesn’t seem so big. If it takes three hundred brains three days to figure out a dodecahedron of quartz—”

  Welstead jerked, looked accusingly at his wife. “Betty!”

  She shook her head. “I told Clay about our conversation, our argument. We discussed it all around. I told him everything—and I told him I’d give a signal whenever we started to leave. But I never mentioned space-drive. If they discovered it they did it by themselves.”

  Welstead turned slowly back to Clay. “Discovered it? But—that’s impossible.”

  Clay said, “Nothing’s impossible. You yourself gave me the hint when you told me human reason was useless because the space-drive worked out of a different environment. So we concentrated not on the drive itself but on the environment. The first results came at us in terms of twelve directions—hence the dodecahedron. Just a hunch, an experiment and it worked.”

  Welstead sighed. “I’m licked. I give in. Clay, the headache is yours. You’ve made it yours. What do you want to do? Go back to Haven?”

  Clay smiled, almost with affection. “We’re this far. I’d like to see Earth. For a month, incognito. Then we’ll come back to Haven and make a report to the world. And then there’s three hundred million of us, waiting for the bell in round one.”

  DP!

  An old woodcutter woman, hunting mushrooms up the north fork of the Kreuzberg, raised her eyes and saw the strangers. They came step by step through the ferns, arms extended, milk-blue eyes blank as clam shells. When they chanced into patches of sunlight, they cried out in hurt voices and clutched at their naked scalps, which were white as ivory, and netted with pale blue veins.

  The old woman stood like a stump, the breath scraping in her throat. She stumbled back, almost falling at each step, her legs moving back to support her at the last critical instant. The strange people came to a wavering halt, peering through sunlight and dark-green shadow. The woman took an hysterical breath, turned, and put her gnarled old legs to flight.

  A hundred yards downhill she broke out on a trail; here she found her voice. She ran, uttering cracked screams and hoarse cries, lurching from side to side. She ran till she came to a wayside shrine, where she flung herself into a heap to gasp out prayer and frantic supplication.

  Two woodsmen, in leather breeches and rusty black coats, coming up the path from Tedratz, stared at her in curiosity and amusement. She struggled to her knees, pointed up the trail. “Fiends from the pit! Walking in all their evil; with my two eyes I’ve seen them!”

  “Come now,” the older woodsman said indulgently. “You’ve had a drop or two, and it’s not reverent to talk so at a holy place.”

  “I saw them,” bellowed the old woman. “Naked as eggs and white as lard; they came running at me waving their arms, crying out for my very soul!”

  “They had horns and tails?” the younger man asked jocularly. “They prodded you with their forks, switched you with their whips?”

  “Ach, you blackguards! You laugh, you mock; go up the slope, and see for yourself…Only five hundred meters, and then perhaps you’ll mock!”

  “Come along,” said the first. “Perhaps someone’s been plaguing the old woman; if so, we’ll put him right.”

  They sauntered on, disappeared through the firs. The old woman rose to her feet, hobbled as rapidly as she could toward the village.

  Five quiet minutes passed. She heard a clatter; the two woodsmen came running at breakneck speed down the path. “What now?” she quavered, but they pushed past her and ran shouting into Tedratz.

  Half an hour later fifty men armed with rifles and shotguns stalked cautiously back up the trail, their dogs on leash. They passed the shrine; the dogs began to strain and growl.

  “Up through here,” whispered the older of the two woodsmen. They climbed the bank, threaded the firs, crossed sun-flooded meadows and balsam-scented shade.

  From a rocky ravine, tinkling and chiming with a stream of glacier water, came the strange, sad voices.

  The dogs snarled and moaned; the men edged forward, peered into the meadow. The strangers were c
lustered under an overhanging ledge, clawing feebly into the dirt.

  “Horrible things!” hissed the foremost man, “Like great potato-bugs!” He aimed his gun, but another struck up the barrel. “Not yet! Don’t waste good powder; let the dogs hunt them down. If fiends they be, their spite will find none of us!”

  The idea had merit; the dogs were loosed. They bounded forward, full of hate. The shadows boiled with fur and fangs and jerking white flesh.

  One of the men jumped forward, his voice thick with rage. “Look, they’ve killed Tupp, my good old Tupp!” He raised his gun and fired, an act which became the signal for further shooting. And presently, all the strangers had been done to death, by one means or another.

  Breathing hard, the men pulled off the dogs and stood looking down at the bodies. “A good job, whatever they are, man, beast, or fiend,” said Johann Kirchner, the innkeeper. “But there’s the point! What are they? When have such creatures been seen before?”

  “Strange happenings for this earth; strange events for Austria!”

  The men stared at the white tangle of bodies, none pushing too close, and now with the waning of urgency their mood became uneasy. Old Alois, the baker, crossed himself and, furtively examining the sky, muttered about the Apocalypse. Franz, the village atheist, had his reputation to maintain. “Demons,” he asserted, “presumably would not succumb so easily to dog-bite and bullet; these must be refugees from the Russian zone, victims of torture and experimentation.” Heinrich, the village Communist, angrily pointed out how much closer lay the big American lager near Innsbruck; this was the effect of Coca-Cola and comic books upon decent Austrians.

  “Nonsense,” snapped another. “Never an Austrian born of woman had such heads, such eyes, such skin. These things are something else. Salamanders!”

  “Zombies,” muttered another. “Corpses, raised from the dead.”

  Alois held up his hand. “Hist!”

  Into the ravine came the pad and rustle of aimless steps, the forlorn cries of the troglodytes.

  The men crouched back into the shadows; along the ridge appeared silhouettes, crooked, lumpy shapes feeling their way forward, recoiling from the shafts of sunlight.

  Guns cracked and spat; once more the dogs were loosed. They bounded up the side of the ravine and disappeared.

  Panting up the slope, the men came to the base of a great overhanging cliff, and here they stopped short. The base of the cliff was broken open. Vague pale-eyed shapes wadded the gap, swaying, shuddering, resisting, moving forward inch by inch, step by step.

  “Dynamite!” cried the men. “Dynamite, gasoline, fire!”

  These measures were never put into effect. The commandant of the French occupation garrison arrived with three platoons. He contemplated the fissure, the oyster-pale faces, the oyster-shell eyes and threw up his hands. He dictated a rapid message for the Innsbruck headquarters, then required the villagers to put away their guns and depart the scene.

  The villagers sullenly retired; the French soldiers, brave in their sky-blue shorts, gingerly took up positions; and with a hasty enclosure of barbed wire and rails restrained the troglodytes to an area immediately in front of the fissure.

  ******

  The April 18 edition of the Innsbruck Kurier included a skeptical paragraph: “A strange tribe of mountainside hermits, living in a Kreuzberg cave near Tedratz, was reported today. Local inhabitants profess the deepest mystification. The Tedratz constabulary, assisted by units of the French garrison, is investigating.”

  A rather less cautious account found its way into the channels of the wire services: “Innsbruck, April 19. A strange tribe has appeared from the recesses of the Kreuzberg near Innsbruck in the Tyrol. They are said to be hairless, blind, and to speak an incomprehensible language.

  “According to unconfirmed reports, the troglodytes were attacked by terrified inhabitants of nearby Tedratz, and after bitter resistance were driven back into their caves.

  “French occupation troops have sealed off the entire Kreuzertal. A spokesman for Colonel Courtin refuses either to confirm or deny that the troglodytes have appeared.”

  Bureau chiefs at the wire services looked long and carefully at the story. Why should French occupation troops interfere in what appeared on the face a purely civil disturbance? A secret colony of war criminals? Unlikely. What then? Mysterious race of troglodytes? Clearly hokum. What then? The story might develop, or it might go limp. In any case, on the late afternoon of April 19, a convoy of four cars started up the Kreuzertal, carrying reporters, photographers, and a member of the U.N. Minorities Commission, who by chance happened to be in Innsbruck.

  The road to Tedratz wound among grassy meadows, story-book forests, in and out of little Alpine villages, with the massive snow-capped knob of the Kreuzberg gradually pushing higher into the sky.

  At Tedratz, the party alighted and started up the now notorious trail, to be brought short almost at once at a barricade manned by French soldiers. Upon display of credentials the reporters and photographers were allowed to pass; the U.N. commissioner had nothing to show, and the NCO in charge of the barricade politely turned him back.

  “But I am an official of the United Nations!” cried the outraged commissioner.

  “That may well be,” assented the NCO. “However, you are not a journalist, and my orders are uncompromising.” And the angry commissioner was asked to wait in Tedratz until word would be taken to Colonel Courtin at the camp.

  The commissioner seized on the word. “‘Camp’? How is this? I thought there was only a cave, a hole in the mountainside?”

  The NCO shrugged. “Monsieur le Commissionnaire is free to conjecture as he sees best.”

  A private was told off as a guide; the reporters and photographers started up the trail, with the long, yellow afternoon light slanting down through the firs.

  It was a jocular group; repartee and wise cracks were freely exchanged. Presently the party became winded, as the trail was steep and they were all out of condition. They stopped by the wayside shrine to rest. “How much farther?” asked a photographer.

  The soldier pointed through the firs toward a tall buttress of granite. “Only a little bit; then you shall see.”

  Once more they set out and almost immediately passed a platoon of soldiers stringing barbed wire from tree to tree.

  “This will be the third extension,” remarked their guide over his shoulder. “Every day they come pushing up out of the rock. It is—” he selected a word “—formidable.”

  The jocularity and wise cracks died; the journalists peered through the firs, aware of the sudden coolness of the evening.

  They came to the camp, and were taken to Colonel Courtin, a small man full of excitable motion. He swung his arm. “There, my friends, is what you came to see; look your fill, since it is through your eyes that the world must see.”

  For three minutes they stared, muttering to one another, while Courtin teetered on his toes.

  “How many are there?” came an awed question.

  “Twenty thousand by latest estimate, and they issue ever faster. All from that little hole.” He jumped up on tiptoe, and pointed. “It is incredible; where do they fit? And still they come, like the objects a magician removes from his hat.”

  “But—do they eat?”

  Courtin held out his hands. “Is it for me to ask? I furnish no food; I have none; my budget will not allow it. I am a man of compassion. If you will observe, I have hung the tarpaulins to prevent the sunlight.”

  “With that skin, they’d be pretty sensitive, eh?”

  “Sensitive!” Courtin rolled up his eyes. “The sunlight burns them like fire.”

  “Funny that they’re not more interested in what goes on.”

  “They are dazed, my friend. Dazed and blinded and completely confused.”

  “But—what are they?”

  “That, my friend, is a question I am without resource to answer.”

  The journalists regained a measure of com
posure, and swept the enclosure with studiously impassive glances calculated to suggest, we have seen so many strange sights that now nothing can surprise us. “I suppose they’re men,” said one.

  “But of course. What else?”

  “What else indeed? But where do they come from? Lost Atlantis? The land of Oz?”

  “Now then,” said Colonel Courtin, “you make jokes. It is a serious business, my friends; where will it end?”

  “That’s the big question, Colonel. Whose baby is it?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Who takes responsibility for them? France?”

  “No, no,” cried Colonel Courtin. “You must not credit me with such a statement.”

  “Austria, then?”

  Colonel Courtin shrugged. “The Austrians are a poor people. Perhaps—of course I speculate—your great country will once again share of its plenitude.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. The one man of the crowd who might have had something to say is down in Tedratz—the chap from the Minorities Commission.”

  ******

  The story pushed everything from the front pages, and grew bigger day by day.

  From the U.P. wire:

  Innsbruck, April 23 (UP): The Kreuzberg miracle continues to confound the world. Today a record number of troglodytes pushed through the gap, bringing the total surface population up to forty-six thousand.…

  ******

  From the syndicated column, Science Today by Ralph Dunstaple, for April 28:

  The scientific world seethes with the troglodyte controversy. According to the theory most frequently voiced, the trogs are descended from cavemen of the glacial eras, driven underground by the advancing wall of ice. Other conjectures, more or less scientific, refer to the lost tribes of Israel, the fourth dimension, Armageddon, and Nazi experiments.

  Linguistic experts meanwhile report progress in their efforts to understand the language of the trogs. Dr. Allen K. Mendelson of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Research, spokesman for the group, classifies the trog speech as “one of the agglutinatives, with the slightest possible kinship to the Basque tongue—so faint as to be highly speculative, and it is only fair to say that there is considerable disagreement among us on this point. The trogs, incidentally, have no words for ‘sun’, ‘moon’, ‘fight’, ‘bird’, ‘animal’, and a host of other concepts we take for granted. ‘Food’ and ‘fungus’, however, are the same word.