by Five Odd
If I bad not been there, thought Halden—and thereafter made it a point to be there.
Meredith was excited, but not precisely happy. The work was out of her hands until the translating equipment was retrieved. As the second highest biological type, she, too, was affected, until she pointedly went to her room and locked it from the inside.
Halden kept himself awake with anti-fatigue pills, in part because Meredith could change her mind about Kelburn, and because of that locked door.
Emmer tried to be phlegmatic and seemed to succeed. Taphetta alone was unconcerned; to him, it was an interesting and perhaps profitable discovery, but important only because of that He would not be changed at all by whatever he learned.
Hours crawled by and at last the door opened; the air came rushing out again. The translating equipment was brought back to the ship and Meredith was left alone with it
It was half a day before she admitted the others to the laboratory.
"The machine Is still working." she said. "There seems to have been some attempt to make the message hard to decode. But the methods they used were exactly the clues that the machine needed to decipher it. Mv function as a linguist was to help out with the interpretation of key words and phrases. I haven't got even a little part of the message. You'll know what it is as soon as I do. After the first part the translator didn't seem to have much trouble."
They sat down facing it—Taphetta, Kelburn, Meredith, Halden and Emmer. Meredith was midway between Kelburn and himself. Was there any significance in that wondered Halden. or was he reading more in her behavior than was actually there?
The translation is complete," announced the machine. "Go ahead," Meredith ordered.
The words will be speeded up to human tempo," said the translator. "Insofar as possible, speech mannerisms of the original will be imiftnH Please remember that it is only an imitation, however."
The translator coughed, stuttered and began. "We have purposely made access to our records difficult If you can translate this message, youll find, at the end, instructions for reaching the rest of our culture relics. As an advanced race, you're welcome to them. We've provided a surprise for anyone else.
"For ourselves, there's nothing left but an orderly retreat to a place where we can expect to live in peace. That means leaving this Galaxy, but because of our life span, we're capable of it and we won't be followed."
Taphetta crinkled his ribbons in amusement Kelburn frowned at the interruption, but no one else paid any attention.
The translator went on. "Our metabolic rate is the lowest of any creature we know. We live several thousand revolutions of any recorded planet and our rate of increase is extremely low; under the most favorable circumstances, we can do no more than double our numbers in two hundred generations."
This doesnt sound as if they were masters of biological science," rustled Taphetta.
Halden stirred uneasily. It wasn't turning out at all the way he had expected.
"At the time we left," the message continued, "we found no other intelligent race, though there were some capable of further evolution. Perhaps our scout ships long ago met your ancestors on some remote planet We were never very numerous, and because we move and multiply so slowly, we are in danger of being swept out of existence in the foreseeable future. We prefer to leave while we can. The reason we must go developed on our own planet deep beneath the cities, in the underworks, which we had ceased to inspect because there was no need to. This part was built to last a million generations, which is long even for us."
Emmer sat upright annoyed at himself. "Of course I There are always sewers and I didn't think of looking there!"
"In the last several generations, we sent out four expeditions, leisurely trips because we then thought we had time to
explore thoroughly. With this planet as base of operations, the successive expeditions fanned out in four directions, to cover the most representative territory."
Kelburn stiffened, mingled pride and chagrin on his face. His math had been correct, as far as he had figured it. But had there been any reason to assume that they would confine their exploration to one direction? No, they would want to cover the whole Milky Way.
Taphetta paled. Four times as many humans to contend with! He hadn't met the other three-fourths yet—and for him, it wasn't at all a pleasant thought.
"After long preparation, we sent several ships to settle one of the nearer planets that we'd selected on the first expedition. To our dismay we found that the plague was there— though it hadn't been on our first visit!"
Halden frowned. They were proving themselves less and less expert biologists. And this plague—there had to be a reason to leave, and sickness was as good as any—but unless he was mistaken, plague wasn't used in the strict semantic sense. It might be the fault of the translation.
"The colonists refused to settle; they came back at once and reported. We sent out our fastest ships, heavily armed. We didn't have the time to retrace our path completely, for we'd stopped at innumerable places. What we did was to check a few planets, the outward and return parts of all four voyages. In every place, the plague was there, too, and we knew that we were responsible.
"We did what we could. Exhausting our nuclear armament, we obliterated the nearest planets on each of the four spans of our journeys."
"I •wondered why the route came to an end," crinkled Taphetta, but there was no comment, no answer.
"We reconstructed what had happened. For a long time, the plague had lived in our sewers, subsisting on wastes. At night, because they are tiny and move exceedingly fast, they were able to make their way into our ships and were abroad on every journey. We knew they were there, but because they were so small, it was difficulf to dislodge them from their nesting places. And so we tolerated their existence."
"They weren't so smart," said Taphetta. "We figured out that angle long ago. True, our ship is an exception, but we haven't landed anywhere, and won't until we deverminize ft."
"We didn't guess that next to the hull in outer space and consequently exposed to hard radiation," the message went on, "those tiny creatures would mutate dangerously and escape to populate the planets we landed on. They had always been loathsome little beasts that walked instead of rolling or creeping, but now they became even more vicious, spawning explosively and fighting with the same incessant violence. They had always harbored diseases which spread to us, but now they've become hothouses for still smaller parasites that also are able to infect us. Finally, we are now allergic to them, and when they are within miles of us, it is agony to roll or creep."
Taphetta looked around. "Who would have thought it? You were completely mistaken as to your origin." Kelburn was staring vacantly ahead, but didnt see a thing Meredith was leaning against Halden; her eyes were closed. "The woman has finally chosen, now that she knows she was once vermin," clicked the Ribboneer. "But there are tears in her eyes."
"The intelligence of the beast has advanced slightly, though there isn't much difference between the highest and the lowest—and we've checked both ends of all four journeys. But before, it was relatively calm and orderly. Now it is malignantly insane."
Taphetta rattled his ribbons. "Turn it off. You don't have to listen to this. We all are of some origin or other and it wasnt necessarily pretty. This being was a slug of some kind —and are you now what it describes? Perhaps mentally a little, out of pride, but the pride was false."
"We can't demolish all the planets we unthinkingly let it loose on; there are too many and it lives too fast. The stars drift and we would lose some, and before we could eliminate the last one, it would develop space travel—it has little intelligence, but it could get that far—and it would escape ahead of us. We know an impossible task when we see it. And so we're leaving, first making sure that this animal will never make use of the products of our civilization. It may reach this planet, but it will not be able to untangle our code—it's too stupid. You who will have to face it, please forgive us.
It's the only thing that we're ashamed of."
"Don't listen," said the Ribboneer and, bending his broad, thin body, he sprang to the translator, shook it and banged with his ribbons until the machine was silent "You don't have to tell anyone," crackled Taphetta. "Don't worry about
me—I wont repeat it" He looked around at the faces. "But I can see that you will report to everyone exactly what you found. That pride you've developed—you'll need it"
Taphetta sat on top of the machine, looking like nothing so much as a huge fancy bow on a gift-wrapped package.
They noted the resemblance vaguely. But each of them knew that, as a member of the most numerous race in the Milky way, no longer feared for their mysterious qualities— despised, instead—wherever they went, there would never be any gifts for them—for any man.
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