“I’ll show you,” said Caxton, without intonation. “It was silly to hide it, anyhow.”
He led the way. He pointed to where they had dug deep under the Copernicus’ plating to bury the precious metal for which their shipmates had died.
“Fine!” said Slade. “You men buried it. Now dig it out!”
Silently, the four men took shovels and began to dig. Slade stood over them with a blaster held negligently in his hand. Those with him explored the ship cautiously. They found no one else in hiding. They began to loot. One man carried a load of personal possessions back to the pirate ship, moving along the lane of charred, destroyed plants. Two men came back with him. More loads of loot. A shattered box of Bynarth lace had spilled half its contents in a broken-open hold. More men came from the pirate ship. The last three came without spacesuits, having been informed that since the four survivors of the wreck had had no trouble, there was no need of spacesuits here.
Caxton and his fellows unearthed the iridium. Twelve million stellars’ worth. They dragged it out to the clear space of the furrow.
“Maybe I oughta make you carry it to my ship,” said Slade, genially, “but a little exercise’ll do my gang good. So—”
He lifted his hand weapon, grinning. It bore upon Caxton. His finger tensed on the trigger.
And that was all. He ceased to move. His eyes closed. He stood rocking on his feet, breathing heavily.
There was silence. Inside and outside the wreck there was stillness. Caxton turned his head and saw two men from the pirate ship, on their way back to it with loot taken from the Copernicus. They stood still swaying a little on their feet. There was no movement anywhere.
“All right,” said Caxton coldly, “we’ll load up the iridium. That’ll be salvage, anyhow. Maybe we’ll come back for the rest. Maybe not.”
The four men began the transfer. When the last of the iridium was loaded, Caxton went back and took away the weapons from the seemingly paralyzed pirates.
Burton said furiously, “Ain’t you goin’ to blast ’em off?”
“I promised not to,” said Caxton grimly. “Besides, we couldn’t. Slade had his finger tensed to kill me and he was stopped. We’d be, too.”
Burton grumbled. Then he said defiantly, “Whadda we do now, then?”
“Take off,” said Caxton.
He went into the ship. Its entire company was outside. There were only the four survivors of the Copernicus.
The strange ship rose vertically from the ground. Caxton, in the control room, looked at the bottom visiplate. The wrecked spaceship below already grew small upon the screen, but the two blasted areas—in which thousands upon thousands of the plants of Aiolo had died—were still visible. And he saw moving dots. The men who had come to Aiolo in this ship, but now were left behind, marched somnambulistically toward the larger burned-out space in which the pirate ship had landed. But that space dwindled still more as the ship rose, until nothing could be seen at all except the illimitable expanse covered by the flowers—the plants of Aiolo.
* * * *
“They’re the dominant race of Aiolo,” said Caxton doggedly. “It’s as I told you. Like men, they specialized on intelligence. Men specialized on intelligence to tell them what to do. Men had hands to do things with. But those things were plants. They could only specialize on intelligence to tell other things what to do. To tell animals to keep away from them, for instance. They are tiny enough, and maybe the will power of a single one isn’t enough to—well—hypnotize anything or anybody. But when a whole field of them concentrates on telling something or somebody what they must do—why there’s not much chance of disobeying them. Animals, in the past, were useful to them. They made the animals devour other plants—made animals clear ground for them to spread to. But when they’d spread everywhere, they had no use for the animals. So—”
“Huh!” said Burton, “They didn’t bother us!”
“We didn’t bother them,” said Caxton dryly. “And the intelligence that can force itself on other minds hasn’t much trouble extracting information from them. They knew everything we thought.”
“But—”
“Surely they could have killed us,” said Caxton irritably. “It annoys me to think how completely we were at their mercy! But they knew—from our brains—that our arrival was an accident. They knew we were the victims of others of our own kind. And somewhere on the other side of Aiolo, Slade and his gang had made trouble for the plants. He said something about the plants giving off a smell or something that put men to sleep. That was his interpretation. Actually, he and his gang had burned off a ten-acre space simply to have room to move around in. He killed millions of the plants. They fought back the only way they could. But apparently a four-inch steel hull is a barrier to—whatever force a mind or minds can exert on others. They couldn’t affect anybody inside the ship, and the more they worked on men outside the ship, the bigger the swathe of plants was burned down by the men inside the ship, to ‘clear the air.’ Naturally, the plants wanted to get rid of those men and of their ship, too.”
“How d’you know all this?” demanded Hannet skeptically.
“The plants told me,” said Caxton evenly. “Our minds are made to decide things. Their minds are made to communicate and command things. They could read our minds, but they couldn’t communicate ideas—only commands—unless we were asleep, and even then only with difficulty. So I had to go out and sleep among them for them to be able to tell me. We made what you might call a bargain—while I was asleep.”
“Meanin’,” said Burton, “you dreamed it! Huh!”
“Who’s dreaming now,” asked Caxton, “that we’re on this ship headed for the Briariades, fifty light-years off, instead of waiting to die on Aiolo?”
There was no answer to that.
There was a blackened, empty space where a ship-mounted blaster had played, and there was a deep furrow where the Copernicus had ploughed horribly through soft earth as it stopped. But the blackened space was smaller than it had been. There were new small plants growing up, and tall, full-grown plants leaned strainingly far out beyond them to touch the ground at appropriate spots for yet other new plants to start. It would not be long before the naked furrow and the charred spaces would again be filled with growing plants. There was, to be sure, a curious mound at one place in that clearing—it had been men—and the wreck of the Copernicus would stand up above the flowers for long centuries to come. But the situation was well in hand. On the other side of the globe, too, a process of repair was in progress.
So that, with a return to normal quite definitely on the way, the flowers could spend most of their daylight hours gazing at their tiny, blue-white sun. But now and again they did turn from it to regard each other, and, of course, they would always turn to regard any singular occurrence that might take place. But there would not be many happenings, because there was again—nothing on Aiolo but the plants.
*
FRIENDS
(Originally Published in 1947)
They came to Joe Carnahan in his laboratory up in the Blue Ridge Mountains—two generals in a staff car, with other staff cars before and behind. One of the generals hrrrrrmphed and ahemmed and observed that the President wished to confer with Joe and—hrrrrmph—could it be arranged that news of his departure from his laboratory wouldn’t be known for a few days? And Joe Carnahan suddenly looked very tired.
“It’s happened, eh?” he said.
But the generals wouldn’t answer, that. They were very polite to him, but their conversation was mostly hrrrrmphs, and they looked at him rather fiercely.
Joe Carnahan was the most important single unit in the armed forces of the United States, and he knew it, and they knew it too, and it embarrassed them. Because they wore smart uniforms and had staff cars and aides, and he was simply a rather pleasant-faced civilian. He was a very lonely man, too.
They rode toward Washington in the staff cars, paying no attention whatever to the speed limit. If Joe
Carnahan drove too fast, a state policeman would give him a ticket, but the generals could drive as fast as they pleased. And they did.
“What’s happened?” Joe said again, after the cars started off. “Who is it? Europia?”
Europia was that country of Middle Europe whose citizens called themselves Europians, as citizens of the United States took to themselves the title of Americans, and with an equal lack of approval from other nations on the same continent.
One of the generals hrrrrmphed and said that there was a certain amount of tension, and just as a matter of precaution it was desirable for Joe Carnahan to be on hand in Washington. But that nothing had happened yet, of course. Hrrrrmph.
“Meaning that it’s bound to happen,” said Joe Carnahan. “So it’s been decided for us to strike first. You haven’t been able to train anybody else to use the ky—”
The generals shushed him in a panicky haste. Even in their own staff cars they didn’t want Joe Carnahan’s most important military achievement to be named.
It was top priority, top drawer, number one extra confidential secret. It was a device that was simply the one unbeatable weapon in the world. Long-range rockets could be handled, now, with other rockets equipped with radar, proximity fuses, and other devices which ranged them alongside the enemy and kamikazied him. Bombers, too, were sitting ducks for guided missiles moving at supersonic speeds.
Radar-planes cruising in the stratosphere made sneak attacks of any sort quite impossible, and even the planting of atomic bombs by spies was pretty well impossible since Joe Carnahan had worked out a beautifully simple trick for detecting fissionable material.
But the ky—the top priority, top drawer, number one, super-secret military gadget was something else. There couldn’t be any defense against the bombs it controlled. The only trouble was that you had to understand it to make it work properly. The military men objected to a civilian handling it, and they tried hard to find a bright, brisk young officer with the necessary technical background and personal qualifications to handle it. But so far they’d failed. So Joe Carnahan had to be called in and hastily given assimilated rank when international crises arose.
“It’s Europia?” he asked again. “When’s zero hour?”
The two generals grew even more panicky. They had a good idea, but you can’t tell a civilian the plans of the General Staff. They hrrrrmphed and ahemmed and said that it was probably best to discuss the purpose of his call to Washington with the President. So Joe Carnahan leaned back in the staff car and closed his eyes.
“I wish you’d found somebody else to handle the thing,” he said tonelessly after a pause. “I was Twinned with a Europian boy once. I rather liked him. His name was Igor Vladek. Ever hear of him?”
The general had, and they felt consternation. Everybody on Earth had heard of Igor Vladek and of Joe Carnahan, too. They were the two outstanding figures in the world of science, and their discoveries uncannily seemed to have immediate and pressing importance to the world of men. But Joe had just told the generals that he and Igor Vladek had been closer to each other than any brothers ever were, when he told them they’d once been Twinned.
The staff cars rolled swiftly along the fine broad concrete highway toward Washington. Joe Carnahan felt rather sick. Igor Vladek would quite certainly be killed in the war that Joe was to fight, and he and Igor had been quite literally one mind and one thought, long ago.
They’d been among the first pairs of youths to be Twinned in Bixby’s idealistic attempt to end international disagreements and distrust. Bixby, you remember, found a basic consciousness-frequency, to which any human brain could be tuned, and he made the Twinners.
People don’t talk much about Twinners any more. They feel that it isn’t a pleasant subject. Twinners, though, were little electronic devices in pairs. If you wore one of them and somebody else wore the other, the two of you became telepathic in regard to each other. Not only telepathic, though. You shared each other’s consciousness completely. You knew everything the other person thought, and he knew everything you thought, and his memory was as open to you as your own.
It was Bixby’s idea that if children or youths of different nations were Twinned with these devices, then every pair of twins would become a powerful force for international peace and understanding.
Joe Carnahan had been Twinned with Igor Vladek when they were both just fourteen years old. The time-difference between their home was just enough so that when one of the boys was most active the other might be inclined to loaf. They explored each other’s brains with an absorbed interest, and each other’s surroundings with fascinated attention. Within a week each knew all that the other had ever known and was as completely at home in the other’s environment as in his own.
They liked each other. They knew each other more thoroughly and more completely than any two persons had ever been able to know each other before Twinning was devised. And Joe Carnahan would never be able to hate Europians, because a part of his boyhood memories were those of Igor Vladek, and Igor would never be able to hate Americans, because so many of his memories were those of Joe Carnahan.
Bixby’s idea seemed like a good one, at first. Almost half a world apart, two fourteen-year-olds—who’d never seen each other in the flesh—lived in an intimacy that was unparalleled. Joe Carnahan knew what chamois-hunting was like, because Igor’s father took Igor on a hunt. Igor Vladek knew exactly how to play center field.
Presently—when they were fifteen—Joe Carnahan shared a shy romance with a dark-eyed girl with Igor, and Igor knew exactly the sensations of taking a freckled high-school girl to a high-school dance. It was pretty wholesome for the two of them to be Twinned around that time. They didn’t idealize each other, but they did like each other and neither wanted the other befouled. So it was probably the most satisfactory friendship that two people ever had. Joe Carnahan had been a very lonesome person after it ended.
* * * *
Riding into Washington in a staff car, with two uneasy generals beside him and other cars around to make the whole cavalcade conspicuous, Joe Carnahan remembered Igor Vladek with a wistful affection.
They’d always been friends. Other Twinned pairs revolted as they grew up. Twinning wasn’t good for most people. Secret little weaknesses couldn’t be kept secret, so Twinned people were defiantly open about them. Meannesses couldn’t be hidden, or denied, so they were indulged.
Any little spot of rottenness in anybody who was Twinned was necessarily known to the person who was Twinned with him, and a great deal of rottenness is suppressed because it can be concealed. Twinning brought to light too many undesirable traits.
Twinned people turned up too frequently in the criminal courts, guilty of crimes they wouldn’t have committed if their thoughts hadn’t been shared by someone else.
So Twinning was forbidden by law, and Bixby died apparently of a broken heart, and his device was never used any more. It wasn’t even used by psychiatrists, because a patient couldn’t be examined without being able to examine the psychiatrist’s mind too, and there are certain privacies—such as family life—that nobody will willingly expose.
But that came later. Joe Carnahan and Igor Vladek were friend as long as they were Twinned. They matched. Not that their minds were identical. They were complementary, and each acquired the other’s knowledge and capacity.
At seventeen, Igor made a jet-motor that ultimately displaced the last of the old-style internal-combustion engines in Europia. Joe Carnahan had helped, of course. At eighteen, Joe produced a tricky, freakish wing-surface that lifted eight times as much per square foot as any plane-wing had ever lifted before. And Igor helped with that. They were air-minded, then.
And when they went to college—but Igor’s was a university, and they were ten thousand miles apart—each had all the knowledge the other acquired, and Igor became unpopular with his professors because Joe was avidly reading American scientific magazines and Igor knew their contents long before they reached Europia
. Of course Igor had a hand—or a mind—in it when in his junior year Joe turned up the heat-converter that made dynamos old-fashioned, and then Joe helped when Igor had problems to solve.
* * * *
A long way away, over the pine-clad hills, the wireless masts of Arlington rose futilely. They were no longer used, but the Navy never gives up a shore-post. The thin white spire of the Washington Monument appeared. One of the generals in the staff car with Joe suddenly hrrrmphed loudly, and when Joe looked at him, he said something obscure but important sounding and uneasy about security. If Joe had once been Twinned with a Europian, matters didn’t look so good.
“Twinning was ordered stopped all of fifteen years ago,” said Joe patiently. “The Army knew that I’d been Twinned when they asked me to work on counter-bomb devices, and that was even earlier. But of course I don’t mind if you raise the question of security.”
To query his fitness for the handling of the nation’s very top-drawer number one super-secret weapon was ironic. He’d invented it. It was put to him as a matter of obligation when the teeth were drawn from the United Nations’ peace-enforcement arrangements. Igor had been asked to work for his government too, at about the same time. And they’d hated to stop being Twinned, but they had to.
They turned in their Bixby Devices three years before Twinning was outlawed, but they were still friends. Joe and Igor were practically one self, but on matters that had to be military secrets they couldn’t continue to have one mind. Their obligations were different. Igor owed loyalty to Europia, and Joe to the United States. So they’d reluctantly separated their thoughts.
The staff car swerved in toward Washington past the Fort Meyer reservation, and presently the Arlington Bridge lay before them, and the staff cars closed in and swept across the Potomac and past the Lincoln Memorial. Joe Carnahan felt sick at what lay ahead of him.
He and Igor had written once or twice after they turned in their Twinners, but they’d had to stop that, too. Their minds were too closely attuned. Joe knew intuitively what Igor had in the back of his mind, no matter how cryptically he phrased it. And Igor could read more than was wise in the baldest of sentences that Joe might write. They were employed in the task of making their respective nations safe against attack. They simply couldn’t risk communication of any sort.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 31
