The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  “It tells you nothing!” barked Speidel.

  She forced down the anger that threatened to overwhelm her. “If you can read the emotional signs,” she said, “they reveal if a speaker is telling the truth. That’s all, general. They just tell you if you’re getting at the truth. Any good psychologist knows this, general. Freud said it: ‘If you try to conceal your feelings, every pore oozes betrayal.’ You seem to think that the opposite is true.”

  “Emotions! Dancing!” Speidel pushed his chair back. “Smitty, I’ve had as much of this as I can take.”

  “Just a minute,” said Langsmith. “Now, Dr. Millar, I wanted you to have your say because we’ve already considered these points. Long ago. You’re interested in the gestures. You say this is a dance of emotions. Other experts say with equal emphasis that these gestures are ritual combat! Freud, indeed! They ooze betrayal. This chopping gesture they make with the right hand”—he chopped the air in illustration—“is identical to the karate or judo chop for breaking the human neck!”

  Francine shook her head, put a hand to her throat. She was momentarily overcome by a feeling of uncertainty.

  Langsmith said: “That outward thrust they make with one hand: That’s the motion of a sword being shoved into an opponent! They ooze betrayal all right!”

  She looked from Langsmith to Speidel, back to Langsmith. A man to her right cleared his throat.

  Langsmith said: “I’ve just given you two examples. We have hundreds more. Every analysis we’ve made has come up with the same answer: treachery! The pattern’s as old as time: Offer a reward; pretend friendship; get the innocent lamb’s attention on your empty hand while you poise the axe in your other hand!”

  Could I be wrong? she wondered. Have we been duped by these Galactics? Her lips trembled. She fought to control them, whispered: “Why are you telling me these things?”

  “Aren’t you at all interested in revenge against the creatures who murdered your husband?” asked Speidel.

  “I don’t know that they murdered him!” She blinked back tears. “You’re trying to confuse me!” And a favorite saying of her husband’s came into her mind: “A conference is a group of people making a difficult job out of what one person could do easily.” The room suddenly seemed too close and oppressive.

  “Why have I been dragged into this conference?” she demanded. “Why?”

  “We were hoping you’d assist us in capturing that spaceship,” said Langsmith.

  “Me? Assist you in…”

  “Someone has to get a bomb past the force screens at the door—the ones that keep sand and dirt out of the ship. We’ve got to have a bomb inside.”

  “But why me?”

  “They’re used to seeing you wheel in the master recorder on that cart,” said Langsmith. “We thought of putting a bomb in…”

  “No!”

  “This has gone far enough,” said Speidel. He took a deep breath, started to rise.

  “Wait,” said Langsmith.

  “She obviously has no feelings of patriotic responsibility,” said Speidel. “We’re wasting our time.”

  Langsmith said: “The Galactics are used to seeing her with that cart. If we change now, they’re liable to become suspicious.”

  “We’ll set up some other plan, then,” said Speidel. “As far as I’m concerned, we can write off any possibility of further cooperation from her.”

  “You’re little boys playing a game,” said Francine. “This isn’t an exclusive American problem. This is a human problem that involves every nation on Earth.”

  “That ship is on United States soil,” said Speidel.

  “Which happens to be on the only planet controlled by the human species,” she said. “We ought to be sharing everything with the other teams, pooling information and ideas to get at every scrap of knowledge.”

  “We’d all like to be idealists,” said Speidel. “But there’s no room for idealism where our survival is concerned. These frogs have full space travel, apparently between the stars—not just satellites and moon rockets. If we get their ship we can enforce peace on our own terms.”

  “National survival,” she said. “But it’s our survival as a species that’s at stake!”

  Speidel turned to Langsmith. “This is one of our more spectacular failures, Smitty. We’ll have to put her under close surveillance.”

  Langsmith puffed furiously on his pipe. A cloud of pale blue smoke screened his head. “I’m ashamed of you, Dr. Millar,” he said.

  She jumped to her feet, allowing her anger full scope at last. “You must think I’m a rotten psychologist!” she snapped. “You’ve been lying to me since I set foot in here!” She shot a bitter glance at Speidel. “Your gestures gave you away! The noncommunicative emotional gestures, general!”

  “What’s she talking about?” demanded Speidel.

  “You said different things with your mouths than you said with your bodies,” she explained. “That means you were lying to me—concealing something vital you didn’t want me to know about.”

  “She’s insane!” barked Speidel.

  “There wasn’t any survivor of a plane crash in Ceylon,” she said. “There probably wasn’t even the plane crash you described.”

  Speidel froze to sudden stillness, spoke through thin lips: “Has there been a security leak? Good Lord!”

  “Look at Dr. Langsmith there!” she said. “Hiding behind that pipe! And you, general: moving your mouth no more than absolutely necessary to speak—trying to hide your real feelings! Oozing betrayal!”

  “Get her out of here!” barked Speidel.

  “You’re all logic and no intuition!” she shouted. “No understanding of feeling and art! Well, general: Go back to your computers, but remember this—you can’t build a machine that thinks like a man! You can’t feed emotion into an electronic computer and get back anything except numbers! Logic, to you, general!”

  “I said get her out of here!” shouted Speidel. He rose half out of his chair, turned to Langsmith who sat in pale silence. “And I want a thorough investigation! I want to know where the security leak was that put her wise to our plans.”

  “Watch yourself!” snapped Langsmith.

  Speidel took two deep breaths, sank back.

  They’re insane, thought Francine. Insane and pushed into a corner. With that kind of fragmentation they could slip into catatonia or violence. She felt weak and afraid.

  Others around the table had arisen. Two civilians moved up beside Francine. “Shall we lock her up, general?” asked one.

  Speidel hesitated.

  Langsmith spoke first: “No. Just keep her under very close surveillance. If we locked her up, it would arouse questions that we don’t want to answer.”

  Speidel glowered at Francine. “If you give us away, I’ll have you shot!” He motioned to have her taken out of the room.

  When she emerged from the headquarters building, Francine’s mind still whirled. Lies! she thought. All lies!

  She felt the omnipresent sand grate under her feet. Dust hazed the concourse between her position on the steps and the spaceship a hundred yards away. The morning sun already had burned off the night chill of the desert. Heat devils danced over the dun surface of the ship.

  Francine ignored the security agent loitering a few steps behind her, glanced at her wristwatch: nine-twenty. Hiko will be wondering what’s happened to me, she thought. We were supposed to get started by eight. Hopelessness gripped her mind. The spaceship looming over the end of the concourse appeared like a malignant growth—an evil thing crouched ready to envelope and smother her.

  Could that fool general be right? The thought came to her mind unbidden. She shook her head. No! He was lying! But why did he want me to … Delayed realization broke off the thought. They wanted me to take a small bomb inside the ship, but there was no mention of my escaping! I’d have had to stay with the cart and the bomb to allay suspicions. My God! Those beasts expected me to commit suicide for them! They wanted me
to blame the Galactics for Bob’s death! They tried to build a lie in my mind until I’d fall in with their plan. It’s hard enough to die for an ideal, but to give up your life for a lie …

  Anger coursed through her. She stopped on the steps, stood there shivering. A new feeling of futility replaced the anger. Tears blurred her vision. What can one lone woman do against such ruthless schemers?

  Through her tears, she saw movement on the concourse: a man in civilian clothes crossing from right to left. Her mind registered the movement with only partial awareness: Man stops, points. She was suddenly alert, tears gone, following the direction of the civilian’s extended right arm, hearing his voice shout: “Hey! Look at that!”

  A thin needle of an aircraft stitched a hurtling line across the watery desert sky. It banked, arrowed toward the spaceship. Behind it roared an airforce jet—delta wings vibrating, sun flashing off polished metal. Tracers laced out towards the airship.

  Someone’s attacking the spaceship! she thought. It’s a Russian ICBM!

  But the needle braked abruptly, impossibly, over the spaceship. Behind it, the air force jet’s engine died, and there was only the eerie whistling of air burning across its wings.

  Gently, the needle lowered itself into a fold of the spaceship.

  It’s one of theirs—the Galactics’, she realized. Why is it coming here now? Do they suspect attack? Is that some kind of reinforcement?

  Deprived of its power, the jet staggered, skimmed out to a dust-geyser, belly-landing in the alkali flats. Sirens screamed as emergency vehicles raced toward it.

  The confused sounds gave Francine a sudden feeling of nausea. She took a deep breath and stepped down to the concourse, moving without conscious determination, her thoughts in a turmoil. The grating sand beneath her feet was like an emery surface rubbing her nerves. She was acutely conscious of an acrid, burning odor, and she realized with a sudden stab of alarm that her security guard still waited behind her on the steps of the administration building.

  Vaguely, she heard voices babbling in the building doorways on both sides of the concourse—people coming out to stare at the spaceship and off across the flats where red trucks clustered around the jet.

  A pebble had worked its way into her right shoe. Her mind registered it, rejected an urge to stop and remove the irritant. An idea was trying to surface in her mind. Momentarily she was distracted by a bee humming across her path. Quite inanely her mind dwelt on the thought that the insect was too commonplace for this moment. A mental drunkenness made her giddy. She felt both elated and terrified. Danger! Yes: terrible danger, she thought. Obliteration for the entire human race. But something had to be done. She started to run.…

  An explosion rocked the concourse, threw her stumbling to her hands and knees. Sand burned against her palms. Dumb instinct brought her back to her feet. Another explosion—farther away to the right, behind the buildings. Bitter smoke swept across the concourse. Abruptly men lurched from behind the buildings on the right, slogging through the sand toward the spaceship.

  Civilians! Possibly—and yet they moved with the purposeful unity of soldiers.

  It was like a dream scene to Francine. The men carried weapons. She stopped, saw the gleam of sunlight on metal, heard the peculiar crunch-crunch of men running in sand. Through a dreamy haze she recognized one of the runners: Zakheim. He carried a large black box on his shoulders. His red hair flamed out in the group like a target.

  The Russians! she thought. They’ve started their attack! If our people join them now, it’s the end!

  A machine-gun stuttered somewhere to her right. Dust puffs walked across the concourse, swept into the running figures. Men collapsed, but others still slogged toward the spaceship. An explosion lifted the leaders, sent them sprawling. Again, the machine-gun chattered. Dark figures lay on the sand like thrown dominoes. But still a few continued their mad charge.

  MPs in American uniforms ran out from between the buildings on the right. The leaders carried submachine-guns.

  We’re stopping the attack, thought Francine. But she knew the change of tactics did not mean a rejection of violence by Speidel and the others. It was only a move to keep the Russians from taking the lead. She clenched her fists, ignored the fact that she stood exposed—a lone figure in the middle of the concourse. Her senses registered an eerie feeling of unreality.

  Machine-guns renewed their chatter and then—abrupt silence. But now the last of the Russians had fallen. Pursuing MPs staggered. Several stopped, wrenched at their guns.

  Francine’s shock gave way to cold rage. She moved forward, slowly at first and then striding. Off to the left someone shouted: “Hey! Lady! Get down!” She ignored the voice.

  There on the sand ahead was Zakheim’s pitiful crumpled figure. A gritty redness spread around his chest.

  Someone ran from between the buildings on her left, waved at her to go back. Hiko! But she continued her purposeful stride, compelled beyond any conscious willing to stop. She saw the red-headed figure on the sand as though she peered down a tunnel.

  Part of her mind registered the fact that Hiko stumbled, slowing his running charge to intercept her. He looked like a man clawing his way through water.

  Dear Hiko, she thought. I have to get to Zak. Poor foolish Zak. That’s what was wrong with him the other day at the conference. He knew about this attack and was afraid.

  Something congealed around her feet, spread upward over her ankles, quickly surged over her knees. She could see nothing unusual, but it was as though she had ploughed into a pool of molasses. Every step took terrible effort. The molasses pool moved above her hips, her waist.

  So that’s why Hiko and the MPs are moving so slowly, she thought. It’s a defensive weapon from the ship. Must be.

  Zakheim’s sprawled figure was only three steps away from her now. She wrenched her way through the congealed air, panting with the exertion. Her muscles ached from the effort. She knelt beside Zakheim. Ignoring the blood that stained her skirt she took up one of his outstretched hands, felt for a pulse. Nothing. Now, she recognized the marks on his jacket. They were bullet holes. A machine-gun burst had caught him across the chest. He was dead. She thought of the big garrulous redhead, so full of blooming life only minutes before. Poor foolish Zak. She put his hand down gently, shook the tears from her eyes. A terrible rage swelled in her.

  She sensed Ohashi nearby, struggling toward her, heard him gasp: “Is Zak dead?”

  Tears dripped unheeded from her eyes. She nodded. “Yes, he is.” And she thought: I’m not crying for Zak. I’m crying for myself … for all of us … so foolish, so determined, so blind …

  “EARTH PEOPLE!” The voice roared from the spaceship, cutting across all thought, stilling all emotion into a waiting fear, “WE HAD HOPED YOU COULD LEARN TO COMMUNICATE!” roared the voice. “YOU HAVE FAILED!”

  Vibrant silence.

  Thoughts that had been struggling for recognition began surging to the surface of Francine’s mind. She felt herself caught in the throes of a mental earthquake, her soul brought to a crisis as sharp as that of giving birth. The crashing words had broken through a last barrier in her mind. “COMMUNICATE!” At last she understood the meaning of the ultimatum.

  But was it too late?

  “No!” she screamed. She surged to her feet, shook a fist at the ship. “Here’s one who didn’t fail! I know what you meant!” She shook both fists at the ship. “See my hate!”

  Against the almost tangible congealing of air she forced her way toward the now silent ship, thrust out her left hand toward the dead figures on the sand all around her! “You killed these poor fools! What did you expect from them? You did this! You forced them into a corner!”

  The doors of the spaceship opened. Five green-skinned figures emerged. They stopped, stood staring at her, their shoulders slumped. Simultaneously, Francine felt the thickened air relax its hold upon her. She strode forward, tears coursing down her cheeks.

  “You made them afraid!”
she shouted. “What else could they do? The fearful can’t think.”

  Sobs overcame her. She felt violence shivering in her muscles. There was a terrible desire in her—a need to get her hands on those green figures, to shake them, hurt them, “I hope you’re proud of what you’ve done.”

  “QUIET!” boomed the voice from the ship.

  “I will not!” she screamed. She shook her head, feeling the wildness that smothered her inhibitions. “Oh, I know you were right about communicating … but you were wrong, too. You didn’t have to resort to violence.”

  The voice from the ship intruded on a softer tone, all the more compelling for the change: “Please?” There was a delicate sense of pleading to the word.

  Francine broke off. She felt that she had just awakened from a lifelong daze, but that this clarity of thought-cum-action was a delicate thing she could lose in the wink of an eye.

  “We did what we had to do,” said the voice. “You see our five representatives there?”

  Francine focused on the slump-shouldered Galactics. They looked defeated, radiating sadness. The gaping door of the ship a few paces behind was like a mouth ready to swallow them.

  “Those five are among the eight hundred survivors of a race that once numbered six billion,” said the voice.

  Francine felt Ohashi move up beside her, glanced sidelong at him, then back to the Galactics. Behind her, she heard a low mumbling murmur of many voices. The slow beginning of reaction to her emotional outburst made her sway. A sob caught in her throat.

  The voice from the ship rolled on: “This once great race did not realize the importance of unmistakable communication. They entered space in that sick condition—hating, fearing, fighting. There was appalling bloodshed on their side and—ours—before we could subdue them.”