by Hal Clement
Physically, there was little remarkable about it. It was less massive even than his own body, though a short period of observation disclosed that it was in an orbit about the central furnace, just as the farm plots were. Sometimes its outline was clear, at others it blurred oddly. Its brightness flickered in an apparently meaningless pattern. Merely on its physical description, there was nothing remarkable about it, but it seized and held the superintendent's puzzled attention. Off his planned course though it was, he swung toward it, wondering. The student had mentioned no friends or co-workers
Gradually, details grew clearer and the superintendent's feelings grew grimmer. He did not like to believe what he saw, but the evidence was crowding in.
“Help! Please help! Master!”
The bubble of horror burst, and one of anger grew in its place. Not one of his own kind, injured or dying and an object of terror and revulsion thereby; this thing was a slave. A slave, moreover, well within the limits of the farm, where it had no business to be without supervision; a slave who dared call on him for help!
“What are you doing here?” The superintendent sent the question crackling along a tight beam toward the apparently helpless creature. “Did you enter this region without orders?”
“No, Master. I was…ordered.”
“By whom? What happened to you? Speak more clearly!”
“By — I cannot, Master. Help me!” The irregular flickering of the slave's auroral halo brightened fitfully with the effort of radiating speech.
Unsympathetic as the superintendent normally was to such beings, he realized that help must be given if he were to learn anything. Conquering a distinct feeling of repugnance, he moved up beside the slave to investigate its injuries. He expected, naturally, to find the visible results of a thorough ion-lashing, that being the principal occupational hazard faced by the slaves; but what he actually saw almost made him forget his anger.
The unfortunate creature's outer crust was pitted — dotted and cratered with a pattern of circular holes which resembled nothing the superintendent had ever encountered. He knew the long, shallow scars of an ion-lashing and the broad, smoothed areas which showed on the crust of one of his people when close exposure to a sun had boiled away portions of his mass. These marks, however, looked almost as though the slave had been exposed to a pelting by granules of solid matter!
A ridiculous thought, of course. The stupidest slave could detect and avoid the occasional bits of rock and metal which were encountered in the interstellar void. After all, they had the same sensory equipment and physical powers as the masters. An unprejudiced judge might even have said they were of the same species as the masters.
Whatever had caused the creature's injury, there was little that could be done for it. Grudgingly, inspired far more by curiosity than by sympathy, the superintendent did that little, supplying hydrocarbons and other organic matter lately skimmed from the ringed planet.
Food, however, was not enough. Bits of extraneous metal were imbedded in its body, altering the precise pattern of charged metal nodes that spelled life to these beings. Some of its own field nodes had apparently been chipped or blown away, and others were discharged. The creature's body was only a fraction of its normal size — the regular reserve of “food” compounds that ordinarily made up so much of even a slave's bulk had long since been consumed or had evaporated.
There was no doubt that it was dying. But there was some chance that it might gain strength enough to impart information if it were fed. It was — sparingly, of course.
“No sense wasting food on a slave that's about to die,” the superintendent explained without brutality.
“Certainly not, Master,” the slave agreed without resentment.
“What happened to you?” the superintendent repeated. The slave was in no condition to be coherent; but a lifetime of conditioning brought some order to its agony-dazed mind, and it answered.
“I was ordered to the inner plots — to harvest.” The word-symbols came haltingly, but with sufficient clarity to be unmistakable, shocking as their implication was.
So the student had trusted slaves near a food supply! Perhaps that accounted for the two stripped planets.
“You went to harvest when a young fool like this orders it?”
“He was a master, and he gave the order. Many of us went; many of us have been going for years — and seldom returning. We did not wish it, Master, but he ordered it. What could we do?”
“You could have asked the first superintendent who came here whether it was better to disobey a Prime Order or a young master.”
“You are the first to come, Master, as far as I know. And the young master said we were not to speak of this order to anyone. It is only because you command me to speak that I do so now — that and the fact that there is little more that he could do to me, anyway.”
The overseer ignored the pointed closing sentence. “You say many of you have been ordered to do this, but few have returned from the errand? What happened to them? What happened to you?”
“They die. I did not know how; now I suppose it must be — this way.”
There was a pause, and the supervisor was moved to sarcasm. “I suppose they are struck by meteoric particles, as you seem to have been. Do slaves absorb personal characteristics such as stupidity from their masters? Could you not dodge the meteors?”
“No, not all of them. The region near the central furnace has more of such matter than any other place I have ever seen. Some pieces are iron, some are of other matter; but they cannot be avoided. They strike too hard. They cannot be absorbed in normal fashion, but simply boil off one's body material into space. The shock is so tremendous that I, at least, could do nothing toward recovering the material until it had dissipated beyond hope of salvage. That is the reason so much of my mass is gone; it was not merely starvation.
“Some of the other slaves did better than I — as I said, some of them have survived — but others did much worse. They would dive in toward the furnace, and their bodies would come falling back out in just about the shape I am.”
“And still he sends his slaves in to harvest?”
“Yes. We did not do too badly, actually, on the largest plots; but then he got interested in the others farther in. After all, they're hotter. He ventured in himself almost to the orbit of the plot that was destroyed — did you know that? — but came out very quickly and sent us on all such journeys thereafter.
“We — or, rather, those who preceded me — cleaned off the next inner plot, the fourth from the central furnace, fairly well, though the loss of slaves was high. Then he wanted to start on the third. I was one of the first to work on this project.
“I did not expect to live, of course, after what I had heard from the others; but the order came, and I let myself fall toward the sun. My orbit passed close to the greatest of the plots, which the master has been harvesting himself, and I hoped to strengthen myself with a little food from it as I passed.”
That confession showed how certain the slave felt of his own imminent death, as well as the state of demoralization into which the student's activities had permitted his servitors to fall.
“But I did not dare take any food when the time came,” the slave went on feebly. “As I passed through the region where the destroyed plot had been, drifting particles began to grow more numerous. At first there would be an occasional bit of stone or iron, which I could dodge easily. Then they came in twos and threes, and sometimes I would have to change an escape curve in mid-maneuver. Then they came in dozens and clusters, and at last I could avoid them no longer. I was struck several times in rapid succession.
“For a moment I almost turned back — I had never dreamed that anything could feel like that — and then I remembered the order and went on. And I was struck again, and again, and each time the order faded in my mind. I reached the orbit of the fourth planet, crossed it — and turned out again. It didn't seem to help; I was still being pelted. For a time I must have al
most lost orientation; but at last I won out to a place near the orbit of the giant planet. That was where I remembered the order again.
“I had never disobeyed a master before, and I didn't know what to do, or say, or think. I'd start back toward the sun, and remember what had happened, and come back out. Then I'd remember the master, and head in again. I didn't dare go out in the cold where he would be waiting. I didn't dare dive back into that storm of rock and metal from the old fifth planet. But I had to do something. I couldn't float by the orbit of the giant planet forever. He would find me there sooner or later, and that would be worse than if I had come out to him. I had to think.”
That word struck the superintendent like a shock. The very idea of a slave's thinking-making a decision for himself concerning an action he was to perform — was repugnant to a member of the dominant race. They preferred to think of their slaves as mindless creatures relying on their masters for the necessities of existence — a comforting fiction that had been maintained for so many rotations of the Galaxy that its originators had come to believe it themselves. He had suspected that this particular slave must be an unusual specimen in many ways; now he was sure of it.
It was this that kept him silent while the creature paused, visibly collected its waning energies, and resumed the tale.
“I found what I thought was the answer at last. Since the tremendous number of particles must have come from the farm that had been blown up, it seemed likely that their orbits would be more or less controlled by that and would have at least a slight family resemblance. If I were to take up a powered, nearly elliptical path through that region, matching velocities with most of them instead of falling in a practically parabolic orbit across their path, I should be able to avoid the worst of the blows.”
Weakly, the shattered creature shuddered and paused, mustering strength to continue.
“I had about made up my mind to try this when I detected another slave inbound,” it went on, “and it occurred to me that two would be better than one. If one died, at least the other could learn from what had happened. I caught him easily since he was in free fall and explained the idea. He seemed willing to follow any suggestion, not thinking for himself at all, so he went with me.
“For a while it worked. We got inside the orbit of the fourth planet without being hit more than a few times each — that was harder on me than on him, because I'd already been hurt quite a lot on the first trip. Into that level, a great deal of the wreckage is formed of quite large particles, anyway; it's easy to see and avoid. Farther in, though, where most of the heavy stuff either never went or was cleared out by collision with the inner planets in a few million of their revolutions, there was much more extremely fine stuff. It actually seems to increase in concentration near the sun. Maybe radiation pressure has something to do with it.
“Anyway, we began to take a bad beating again. It was a little better than before. My idea must have had something to it, but it still wasn't good. The other slave wasn't used to it, either, and lost control of himself just as I had. We were almost to the third farm plot then, but he must have gone completely blind from pain. He apparently never sensed the food so near by — that plot is incredibly rich.
“He went blundering squarely into another, useless plot that accompanies the third one in its orbit; an object too small to hold culture material in that temperature range, though still several hundred times the diameter of my body or his. He rammed it hard, and the energy involved in matching velocities was more than enough to volatilize his mass completely. The object was pretty well scarred with impact craters, but he made one of the neatest.
“I was close enough then to the third planet to start harvesting — at least, I would have been under normal circumstances. I tried, but couldn't concentrate on one course of action long enough. The bombardment was endless. There are simply no words to describe what it was like. I was not twenty of its own diameters from the most amazingly rich farm plot I have ever seen, and was not able to touch a bit of it!
“It had been so long since it was harvested that substances completely strange to me had developed in its surface layers. There were carbohydrates, of course, and light-element oxides and carbonates which anyone would expect; but there were proteins more fantastically complex than anyone could well imagine. Their emanations nearly drove me wild. They must have been building up and breaking down at incredible speed at that temperature — It had quite an atmosphere out, as a result of boiling off surface matter to use up incoming radiant energy — and they had evolved to an unheard-of degree. And I couldn't get a taste!
“I could sense them, though, and in spite of the pain of the meteor bombardment, I stayed near the planet, vacillating as I had done before, for a couple of hundred of its trips around the Sun. That may seem like a short time, but it was long enough to ruin my body past saving. It was only when my senses began to fail that I was able to turn away from it and fight my way out this far. I just managed to get into a stable orbit that would keep me clear of that hellish halo of planet fragments, and every now and then I succeeded in mustering enough energy to call for help, but I knew it was useless. Even had you come much sooner, it would still have been too late for me.
“I live to warn you, however. Do not go within the orbit of the old fifth planet! Do not even look within it, for if you sense what lies on that unharvested third world, you will be drawn to your doom as surely as I was ordered to mine!”
The slave fell silent, and the superintendent pondered its tale as they drifted on about the Sun. He could not, offhand, think of any adequate punishment for the student whose recklessness had brought about this state of affairs. The mere cruelty of ordering endless crowds of slaves to nearly certain death did not affect him particularly; but the waste of it did, very much. To him the thought of hundreds of lifeless bodies drifting endlessly about the Sun, boiling off a little more of their masses with each perihelion passage until nothing was left but a loose collection of high-melting-point pebbles, was a painful picture of economic loss. The fact that the best farm plot in the system had apparently become unattainable was also to be considered, and the driving of at least one slave to the extreme of thinking for himself was not to be ignored.
Of course, everything should be checked before confronting the student with such charges. Only the last, after all, could be considered as yet a matter of objective knowledge.
The overseer moved abruptly away from the slave — sunward. The dying creature, seeing him depart, called once more for aid, and was silenced instantly and permanently by a slashing beam of ions. For an instant the overseer regretted the impulsive act — not from gratitude for the warning, to which he attached little weight and which was part of a slave's duty, but simply because it was impulsive rather than reasoned. But then he reflected that the creature could probably not have told much more anyway, even if it had survived until his return.
He was in no hurry. He let the gravity of the central furnace draw him in to the orbit of the giant planet, his senses covering the half-billion-mile sphere of space ahead where death was reputed to lurk.
At this range, all seemed innocuous. He watched the inner planets circling rapidly in their paths — even the giant one made most of a revolution during his fall — and noted that the slave had spoken the truth about a companion body to the third planet. But space seemed otherwise empty.
He did not completely abandon caution, however. What had proven fatal to slaves might be inconvenient or even dangerous to a master.
He stopped at the fifth planet's orbit and began a more minute examination of that suspicious volume of space.
The small bodies were there, all right. Thousands of them, even though he was not trying to detect anything less than a twentieth of his own diameter. They did show a rather vague preference for the orbit of the old fifth planet, as the slave had said. The greater number circled between the present fourth and fifth orbits, at any rate. There seemed no reason why he could not match velocities well
enough to keep out of trouble. Why, chance alone could be trusted to protect him from collision with a few thousand asteroids, when they were scattered through something like ten-to-the-twenty — fourth-power cubic miles of space!
Still, there was little wisdom in going into possible danger without a very sound reason. It would be well to judge from his present position if such reason existed. His finer senses could easily operate at the half billion miles that separated him from the farthest point of the third planet's orbit. So, holding his position, he focused his attention on the elusive farm plot in question.
Being so close to the central furnace, it revolved rapidly. He faced somewhat the same problem in examining it that a man would have trying to recognize a friend on a merry-go-round — assuming that the friend were spinning in his seat like a top at the same time.
It took the superintendent only a few revolutions of the body to adjust to this situation, however, and as details registered more and more clearly on his consciousness, he began to admit grudgingly that the slave had not exaggerated.
The plot was fabulous!
Substances for which he had no name abounded, impressing themselves on the analytical sense that was his equivalent of both taste and smell. Strange as they were, he could tell easily that they were foods — packed with available energy and carrying fascinating taste potentialities, organized to a completely unheard-of degree. They were growths of a type and complexity which simply never had a chance to evolve on the regularly harvested worlds of the Galaxy.
The overseer wondered whether it might not be worth while to let other plots run wild for a few years. His principal vice, by the standards of his people, was gluttony; but the most ascetic of his species would have been tempted uncontrollably by that planet.
He almost regretted the few tons of food he had taken on from the ringed planet — though he had, he told himself quickly, sacrificed much of that in helping the slave and would lose still more if he decided actually to penetrate into the high-temperature zones near the Sun.
