His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He took in the situation at a glance. Baldwin lying spread-eagled and charred against the conversion grids. The units yammering and terrified in their chairs, none of them driving. Into a wall mike he snapped to the bridge: "My driver's dead, commander. He got the charge from the conversion grids—"

  "Stop your gabbing and give me power, you fool!"

  Deathly pale, Lakhrut turned to the disorganized units and tried to talk to them in remembered scraps of Engish. (He should have worked more with his driver on it. He should have worked more.) They only gawked at him, and he swore in A'rkhov—

  But one of the units was doing something that made sense. He was yelling in English, pointing to the chairs. And a dozen of the units resumed their places and began to drive, feebly at first and then better.

  That was taken care of. He turned to the machinery and checked rapidly through the stages of amplification. They were clear; the commander, curse him, was getting his power. The fellow who had yelled at the units was standing by him when the inspection was completed. Startlingly, he said in A'rkhov, though with a fearsome accent: "Can I serve Lakhrut-takh?"

  With considerable effort, Lakhrut scanned him. Obedience, fear, respect, compliance. All was well. He asked him coldly: "Who are you that you should speak the tongue?"

  "Name is Oliver. I studied languages. Baldwin-takh-lyur taught me the tongue." Lakhrut scanned; it all was true.

  "How did he die?"

  "I did not see. Oliver was not looking. I was in darkness."

  Asleep, was he trying clumsily to say? Lakhrut scanned. There was no memory of the death-scene in the scared, compliant mind of this unit.

  But something nagged Lakhrut and teased at his mind. "Did you kill him?" he snapped.

  The flood of horror and weakness he scanned was indubitable. The unit babbled brokenly: "No, Lakhrut-takh! No! I could not kill! I could not kill!" Well, that was true enough. It had been a silly thing to ask.

  "Take me," he said, "to each unit in turn and ask them whether they killed the takh-lyur."

  This Oliver did, and reported twenty-two denials while Lakhrut scanned each. Each was true; none of the twenty-two minds into which he peered was shuddering with the aftermath of murder; none seemed to have the killer's coldness and steel.

  Lakhrut said to the wall mike: "Power is restored. I have established that my driver's death was accidental. I have selected a new driver from among the units." He turned off the mike after a curt acknowledgment and said to Oliver: "Did you understand? I meant you." At the mike again he called two maintenance men to clear the conversion grid and space the body.

  "Establish unit shifts and then come with me," he told Oliver, and waited for the new driver to tell off the gangs. He ceased scanning; his head was aching abominably.

  BARKER felt the fingers leave his brain and breathed deeper. Dr. Oliver of Columbia, the whining incubus on him, was bad company. His own memory of the past few minutes was vague and fragmentary. In jittery terror Dr. Oliver had yelled at the units to man their chairs before they all were killed for disobedience. In abject compliance Dr. Oliver had placed himself at Lakhrut's orders. And he had heard that he would be the new slave-driver with almost tearful gratitude. To be shaved and clean again!

  To dine again! Barker wanted to spit. Instead he divided the units into new shifts and followed Lakhrut from the oblong room.

  He washed and used a depilatory powder that burned horribly as the cyclops monster called Lakhrut silently watched. Somebody brought him shorts that fit. Apparently the concept of a uniform was missing—

  so even was style. He saw passing on the upper decks crew "men" in trousers, gowns, kilts and in combinations of these. The only common note was simplicity and a queer, vulgar absence of dash, as if nobody cared what he looked like as long as the clothes didn't get in his way.

  "That's enough," Lakhrut said, as Barker was trying to comb his wetted hair with his fingers. "Come with me."

  Back between decks they went to a cubicle near the drive room—a combination of kitchen, cramped one-man office and hammock-space.

  Lakhrut briskly showed Barker how to draw and prepare the food for the units—it was the first time he suspected that Baldwin had cooked for them—and how to fill in a daily report on the condition of the units.

  It was hardly writing; he simply had to check a box in the appropriate column next to the unit's number. His "pen" flowed clear plastic which bonded to the paper in a raised ridge. The "printed" form was embossed with raised lines. Barker could make nothing of the numerals that designated the units or the column-headings; the alphabet rang no bells in his memory or the Oliver-memory. But that would come later.

  THE COMMANDER was winding up his critique, and his division officers were perspiring freely.

  "As to the recent gun-drill, I have very little to say. What, gentlemen, is there to say about the state of training, the peak of perfection which enabled Gori-takh's crews to unlimber, train and dry-fire their primary and secondary batteries in a mere two hundred and thirty-six and eleven-twelfths vistch? I am sure the significance of this figure will be clear to us all when point out that the average space engagement lasts one hundred and eighteen vistch. Is the significance clear to you, Gori-takh?"

  "Yes, Commander," said the division officer, very pale.

  "Perfectly clear?"

  "Yes, Commander," Gori said, wishing he were dead.

  "Good. Then we will go on to pleasanter subjects. Propulsion has been excellent and uninterrupted since our last meeting. Steerage way has been satisfactorily maintained, units are in reasonable health, mechanical equipment checks out between Satisfactory and Excellent.

  The surprise-drill calls for driving surges were responded to promptly and with vigor. Lakhrut-takh, you are to be commended."

  He left the compartment on that note, and the division officers sprawled, sighed and gave other signs of release from tension.

  Lakhrut said to Gori, with the proper blend of modesty and sympathetic blandness: "It's just luck, you know. Your bad luck and my good luck. I happen to have stumbled on the most extraordinary driver in the fleet.

  The fellow is amazing. He speaks the tongue, he's pitiless to the units, and he's wild to anticipate my every wish. He's even trying to learn the mechanism."

  A takh vaguely corresponding to the Paymaster of a British naval vessel, with a touch of Chaplain and Purser thrown in, said: "What's that? Isn't there a Y ongsong order about that? Perhaps I'd better—"

  Lakhrut hastily balanced the benefit of a lie at this point against the chance that the takh, a master-scanner because of his office, might scan him for veracity. Since scanning of equals was bad manners and he felt himself the takh's equal at least after the commander's sweet words of praise, he lied. "'Trying' does not mean 'succeeding,' " he said, letting his voice sound a little hurt. "I'm surprised that you should think I'd let an Outworlder into our secrets. No; the man is merely cracking his brains over an obsolete manual or two of advanced theory. He can barely read, as I've repeatedly verified by scanning. His tactile-memory barely exists. What brutes these Outlanders are! I doubt that they can tell fur from marble."

  The takh said: "That is extremely unlikely in view of their fairly-advanced mechanical culture. Take me to him; I shall scan him."

  Gori tried not to look exultant as Lakhrut, crestfallen, led the takh from the room.

  The takh was somehow alarmed when he saw Lakhrut's driver. Even before scanning he could see that the fellow was tough. Vague thoughts of a spotter from Fleet Command or a plant from some enemy—or nominally friendly—fleet drifted through his head before he could clamp down on them. He said to the driver: "Who are you and what was your occupation?" And simultaneously he scanned deep.

  The driver said: "Name is Oliver, takh. Teacher of language and letters."

  The personality-integral included: Inferiority. ? Self-deprecation/Neurosis.? …..

  Weakling's job/Shame? Traumata.

  A light. A bell. A
pendulum. Fear. Fear.

  Being buried, swallowed, engulfed.

  The takh was relieved. There was no danger in such a personality-integral. But the matter of security—he handed the driver a fingering-piece, a charming abstraction by the great Kh'hora. It had cost him his pay for an entire tour of duty and it was quite worth it. Kh'hora had carved it at the height of his power, and his witty juxtapositions of textures were unsurpassed to this day. It could be fingered a dozen ways, each a brilliant variation on a classic theme.

  The driver held it stupidly. "Well?" demanded the takh, his brows drawing together. He scanned.

  The driver said: "Please, takh, I don't know what to do with it."

  The personality-integral included: Fear. Bewilderment. Ignorance.

  Blankness.

  "Finger it, you fool!"

  The driver fumbled at the Piece and the takh scanned. The tactile impressions were unbelievably obtuse and blurry. There was no emotional response to them whatsoever except a faint, dull gratification at a smooth boss on the piece. And the imbecile kept looking at it.

  It was something like sacrilege. The takh snatched the piece back indignantly. "Describe it," he said, controlling himself.

  The fellow began to maunder about its visual appearance while the takh scanned. It was true; he had practically no tactile memory.

  The takh left abruptly with Lakhrut. "You were right," he said. "If it amuses the fellow to pretend that he can read, I see no obstacle. And if it contributes to the efficiency of your department, we all shine that much brighter." (More literally, with fuller etymological values, his words could be rendered: "If it amuses the fellow to pretend that he fingers wisdom, my hands are not grated. And if it smoothes your quarry wall, we all hew more easily.")

  Lakhrut's hands were not grated either; it was a triumphant vindication of his judgment.

  And so, for departmental efficiency, he let his marvelous driver have all the books he wanted.

  CHAPTER VII

  BARKER'S head ached and his eyes felt ready to fall out of their sockets.

  He did not dare take rubbings of the books, which would have made them reasonably legible. He had to hold them slantwise to the light in his cubicle and read the shadows of the characters. Lakhrut had taught him the Forty-Three Syllables, condescendingly, and the rest was up to him. He had made the most of it.

  An imagery derived more from tactile than visual sense-impressions sometimes floored him with subtleties—as, he was sure, an intensely visual English nature poem would have floored Lakhrut. But he progressed.

  Lakhrut had brought him a mish-mash of technical manuals and trashy novelettes—and a lexicon. The takh who had made such a fuss about the chipped pebble had brought him something like a Bible. Pay dirt!

  It seems that in the beginning Spirit had created Man —which is what the A'rkhovYar called the A'arkhovYar—and set him to rule over all lesser creation. Man had had his ups and downs on the Planet, but Spirit had seen to it that he annihilated after sanguinary, millennium-long battles, his principal rivals for the Planet. These appeared to have been twelve-footed brutes who fought with flint knives in their first four feet.

  And then Spirit had sent the Weak People to the Planet in a spaceship.

  Schooled to treachery in the long struggle against the knife-wielding beasts, Man had greeted the Weak People with smiles, food and homage. The Weak People had foolishly taught them the art of writing, had foolishly taught Man their sciences. And then the Weak People had been slain, all twelve of them, in an hour of blood.

  Barker somehow saw the Weak People as very tired, very gentle, very guileless survivors of a planetary catastrophe beyond guessing. But the book didn't say.

  So the A'rkhov-Yar stole things. Science. People. Let George do it, appeared to be their morality, and then steal it from George. Well, they'd had a hard upbringing fighting down the Knifers, which was no concern of his. They'd been man-stealing for God knows how long; they'd made turncoats like the late Mister Baldwin, and Judas goats like neat Miss Winston, disgusting creatures preying on their own kind.

  From the varied reading matter he built up a sketchy picture of the A'rkhov-Yar universe. There were three neighboring stars with planetary systems, and the Cyclopes had swarmed over them once the guileless Weak People had shown them spaceflight. First they had driven their own ships with their own wills. Then they had learned that conquered races could be used equally well, so they had used them.

  Then they learned that conquered races tended to despair and die out.

  "THEN," he said savagely to old man Stoss, "they showed the one flash of creative intelligence in their career—unless they stole it from one of their subjects. They invaded Earth — secretly. Without knowing it, we're their slave-breeding pen. If we knew it, we'd either fight and win, or fight and lose—and die out in despair."

  "The one flash?" Stoss asked dryly, looking about them at the massive machinery.

  "Stolen. All stolen. They have nations, trades and wars —but this is a copy of the Weak People's ship; all their ships are. And their weapons are the meteor screens and sweepers of the Weak People. With stolen science they've been stealing people. I think at a rate of thousands per year. God knows how long it's been going on—probably since the neolithic age. You want proof of their stupidity? The way they treat us. It leads to a high death rate and fast turnover. That's bad engineering, bad economics and bad housekeeping. Look at the lights they use—

  low-wattage incandescents! As inefficient lamps as were ever designed—"

  "I've got a thought about those lights," Stoss said. "The other day when Lakhrut was inspecting and you were passing out the food I took two cakes instead of one—just to keep in practice. I used slight of hand, misdirection—but Lakhrut didn't misdirect worth a damn. He slapped the pain button and I put the extra cake back. What does it mean when the hand is quicker than the eye but the sucker isn't fooled?"

  "I don't get you."

  "What if those aren't very inefficient lamps but very efficient heaters?"

  "They're blind," whispered Barker. "My God, you've got to be right! The lamps, the tactile culture, the embossed writing. And that thing that looks like an eye—it's their mind-reading organ, so it can't be an eye after all. You can't perform two radically different functions with the same structure."

  "It's worth thinking about," old man Stoss said.

  "I could have thought about it for a million years without figuring that out, Stoss. How did you do it?"

  The old man looked modest. "Practice. Long years of it. When you want to take a deacon for a long score on the con game, you study him for his weaknesses. You don't assume he hasn't got any just because he's a deacon, or a doctor, or a corporation treasurer. Maybe it's women, or liquor, or gambling, or greed.

  You just play along, what interests him interests you, everything he says is wise and witty, and sooner or later he lets you know what's his soft spot. Then, lad, you've got him. You make his world revolve around his little weakness. You cater to it and play it up and by and by he gets to thinking that you're the greatest man in the world, next to him, and the only real friend he'll ever have. Then you 'tell the tale,' as we say. And the next sound you hear is the sweetest music this side of Heaven, the squealing of a trimmed sucker."

  "You're a revolting old man," said Barker, "and I'm glad you're here."

  "I'm glad you're here too," the old man said. And he added with a steady look: "Whoever you are."

  "You might as well know. Charles Barker — F. S. I. agent. They fished me out of the Riveredge gutter because I may or may not have telepathic flashes, and they put me on the disappearance thing."

  Stoss shook his head unhappily. "At my age, cooperating with the F. S. I.

  I'll never live it down."

  Barker said: "They've got sound to go on, of course. They hear movements, air currents. They carry in their heads a sound picture—

  but it isn't a 'picture': damn language!—of their environ
ment. They can't have much range or discrimination with that sense; too much noise hashing up the picture. They're probably heat-detectors, too. If bedbugs and mosquitoes can use heat for information, so can these things. Man could do it too if he had to, but we have eyes. The heat-sense must be short range too; black-body radiation falls off proportional to the fourth power of the distance. It's beginning to fit together. They don't go very near those incandescent bulbs ever, do they? They keep about a meter distant?"

  "Yes, I've noticed that. Anything closer must be painful to the heat sense—`blinding,' you might say."

  Then that leaves their telepathy. That specialist came into this room to examine me, which tells us something about the range. Something—

  but not enough."

  Stoss said : "A person might pretend to throw something at one of them from a distance of ten yards. If the creature didn't notice, we'd know they don't have a ten-yard range with sound, heat or telepathy. And the next day he could try it at nine yards. And so on, until it noticed."

  "And blew the person in half with those side-arms they carry," said Barker. "Who volunteers for the assignment, Stoss?"

  "Not I," the old man said hastily. "Let's be practical. But perhaps I could persuade Miss Trimble?"

  "The math teacher? Hell, no. If things work out, we're going to need all the mathematical talent we've got."

  They conferred quietly, deciding which of their fellow-Earthmen would be persuaded to sacrifice himself. The choice fell on a nameless, half-mad youngster in the third seat of the second tier; he spoke to nobody and glared suspiciously over his food and drink.

  "But can you do it?" asked Barker.

  Stoss was offended. "In my time," he said, "I've taken some fifty-five really big scores from suckers. I've persuaded people who love money better than life itself to turn their money over to me, and I've sent them to the bank for more."

  "Do your best," Barker said.

  WHAT APPROACH the old swindler did use, he never learned. But the next day Third Seat, Second Tier, rose during the doling out of the food and pretended to hurl his plate at Lakhrut. The cyclops, ten meters away, stalked serenely on and the young man collapsed in an ecstacy of fright.