First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Then Surgeon General Mors said very wearily: “I hope you will surrender your army, General Vladek. Your men, as our prisoners, will become our patients and we will cure them. Otherwise they will die. Permit us, and we will check the epidemic you created in your own country by invading us. We did not defend ourselves without knowing our weapon thoroughly. But you will have to give us the power to rescue you. You and your nation must surrender without conditions…”

  General Vladek stood up. He rang a bell. An officer and soldiers entered.

  “Take him out,” panted General Vladek hoarsely. Then his voice rose to a scream. “Take him out and kill him!”

  The officer moved. Then there was a clatter. A rifle had dropped to the floor. One of the soldiers staggered. He reeled against one of the steel filing cases and clung there desperately. Sweat poured out on his face; he was ashen white. He knew, of course, what was the matter. He sobbed. He was already a dead man, though he still moved and breathed. Great tears welled out of his eyes.

  The other soldiers wavered—and fled.

  Surgeon General Mors stood beside a pigsty and argued patiently with a peasant who so far had stubbornly refused to permit the reinoculation of either his family or his cows. The dumpy little man in the badly fitting uniform said earnestly:

  “It is a matter of living together—what learned men call symbiosis. We defended our country with the other inoculations. Now we must defend all mankind with these! We do not want our people to be feared or hated. We want visitors from other nations to come and live among us in peace and safety, to have no fears about doing business with us. If other nations are afraid of us, we will suffer for it!”

  The peasant made fitful objections. Victory over the invaders, and the terms imposed upon them, had made him proud. But Surgeon General Mors’ patient arguments were gradually wearing him down.

  “Ah, but they made war on us. That was different! We do not want any more wars. When you and your family and your cows have been inoculated, we will be that much further along toward the understanding that nations which are at peace can live together,” said Surgeon General Mors earnestly. “Nations which are at war only die together.”

  CURE FOR A YLITH

  “…Always, throughout history, mankind has alternated between periods of vigor and of decadence. On Earth the ancient histories tell us of a Classic Age of brilliance, which was followed by a Dark Age of despair. Similarly, after the Age of Galactic Conquest, when men swarmed to every habitable planet of the First Galaxy, there followed the Age of Tyranny when men sank into slavery. Yet even then the hope of freedom survived and had its victories. For example, on Loren III…” Basic History of Humanity, Rigel IV, 21105.

  Garr came out of the silvery, flickering film which was the arrival-field of the matter-transmitter on Loren. He was a small man with a lined face and he blinked—everyone always blinks—as he stepped out of the film. He was the only passenger in a mass of bales and parcels because Aldus XXII, King of Loren, followed the usual policy of allowing only very rare travelers to enter or leave his dominions.

  Such travelers were ordinarily only ambassadors to the planets with which commerce was carried on, favored criminals other governments wished to exile but not yet to kill, and the strictly necessary government officials upon business of interplanetary trade.

  Such officials, of course, were secured against temptation by hostages kept on Loren. But Garr fitted into none of those categories. He looked very weary as he turned to watch a special group of shipping-cases follow him through the film. Then he turned and plodded on.

  There was a movement, high above and far away. His eyes flicked up and he saw his friend Sortel. He had appeared on a balcony six hundred feet up and a hundred yards on and now he waved at Garr. In his hand as he waved was a picturescope machine with which he had recorded Garr’s arrival.

  It was a gesture of pure friendship. Garr knew that he had taken the scene to show it to Garr’s wife and so give her the first glimpse of her husband she’d had in two years. There had been official communications, of course. She was well. The two children were well. They sent greetings to him.

  But Garr had doubted bitterly the truth of those official form-messages. Since Sortel had made this picture, though, his wife must be alive and well and still faithful to him. The gesture of waving had told him so much. It had been meant to. On Loren very trivial gestures sometimes meant a great deal.

  Garr went dutifully to the guard-station, where a sergeant of the King’s Guard watched him.

  “My name is Garr—” he began.

  “Who else would you be?” asked the sergeant sardonically. “Strip.”

  Garr went into the examination-room. He took off his clothing. He stood before the fluorescent screen which would reveal any foreign substance he might have swallowed or otherwise hidden. He waited patiently while the screen ran through the spectrum to show up cellulose or writing-material as well as metal.

  “In there,” said the sergeant, jerking his thumb.

  Garr went into the next room, where other clothing waited. The garments he had left would be examined for written matter or suspicious material and afterward destroyed. No propaganda, no plans, no scrap of material for the making of weapons could possibly be smuggled onto Loren after such precautions. King Aldus XXII was particularly concerned about poison. Garr dressed himself in the supplied garments.

  “The apparatus I have brought,” he observed, “is rather delicate. Please see that it is examined by qualified experts. Bunglers could wreck it. It was sealed at the University on Yorath.”

  “Are you giving me orders?” snapped the sergeant. “Prints!”

  Garr put his fingerprints on the Identity-machine. The sergeant looked at his fingers afterward, lest false prints had been prepared. The machine clicked. It began to hum softly to itself. It had been connected with the Command Integrator at Guard headquarters, and a very complicated process had begun. The sergeant relaxed.

  “Had a good time on Yorath, eh?” he demanded enviously.

  Garr said, “No. I had a transmitter sealed on me. Every word I said or heard—even in the University laboratories—was picked up by our Embassy. It’s a reciprocal courtesy between the two governments. Doubtless the Yorathian police listened in also.

  “Even if I had wished, I could not have said or listened to anything improper without being found out at once. And I have a wife and two children here. Naturally—”

  He shrugged. The Identity-machine rattled and thrust out a card. The sergeant glanced at it.

  “Right so far,” he said sourly. “Make your report.”

  He attached the electrodes. Garr submitted docilely. When they were adjusted so that every uncontrollable reflex produced by a conscious lie would show up instantly, Garr spoke clearly.

  “My name is Garr of Vlatin. I have been two years absent from Loren at the University of Yorath, where I have devoted myself solely to the study of psychosomatic medicine in its higher branches.

  “On Yorath I have made no criticism of the King or his government. I have listened to no treasonable conversation. I am glad to return to Loren. I wish only to serve His Majesty Alcius the Twenty-second. I am his dutiful and loyal subject.”

  The sergeant watched the dials. They wavered very, very slightly. No person can make a complicated series of statements to a Truth Machine without some reflex action due to pure fear of making a false statement. The slight waverings of the needles, to the sergeant, proved that Garr told the actual truth.

  “Pretty good!” said the sergeant sardonically. “Those new tricks for fooling the Truth Machine—”

  But Garr’s reaction was again perfectly normal. The sergeant spat.

  “Hah! They never send a man abroad unless he’s a rabbit! You’re to report to the Palace.”

  There was a bell-tone. Garr obediently followed it. The Command Integrator had acted from his prints and issued all the orders that had been prepared for him. He could do absolutely nothing
but obey orders without being detected instantly.

  He got into the ground-car the Integrator had sent for him. He could not speak to the driver. It swung away from the Guard station and moved out into the streets of Loren’s capital.

  Garr, of course, could not see out. He heard the traffic noises and he could picture what the city looked like. Streets on four levels, towering structures reaching to the sky, a marvelous and perfectly integrated civilization which was beginning to run down a little. People with set, impassive faces.

  The answer was, of course, that government had become the most important industry on Loren. There was nothing more important than the service of the King. The people existed to serve the King. The cities were conveniences for the people in the service of the King. The guards were precautions lest the people acquire quaint ideas that anything could be more important than the wishes of the King.

  The vision-casts, the arts, the news, the games with which the people were permitted to refresh themselves—for the better service of the King—were all parts of a complex, overwhelming pressure upon every individual to subjugate him to the idea that he existed only for the King.

  To Garr all this was normal. But as a student of medicine—specializing in psychosomatics—he reflected with interest upon the fact that the mind combats its environment as well as the body.

  When the body is chilled it burns more food to combat the cold. When it is heated it secretes sweat to combat the warmth. Weaklings do not combat their environment. They yield to it and die. Weaklings also do not combat mental pressures. They yield—and become living robots.

  But the healthy members of the race create mental antibodies against propaganda. The people of Loren, saturated with propaganda to make them slaves, seethed with hatred of the King not one in ten thousand had ever seen.

  Garr reflected that it was very interesting. It was even more interesting that people who were forced to lie about their loyalty ceased to think of such statements as lies. They were conventions, as normal as the “So sorry you must go” at parting.

  The Truth Machines could detect lies that men knew were lies, but they had created adjustments in the population so that men no longer considered protestations of loyalty as having any meaning at all. Candidates for the Guard, of course, underwent an examination so rigorous that no instinctive rebel could hope to escape detection.

  Only human robots joined the Guard. They were infinitely loyal, to be sure, but they could not be intelligent. It was an inevitable paradox that the precautions for the King’s safety had created a population in which nine men out of ten could not possibly resist the temptation to murder the King if opportunity offered.

  The ground-car swerved and the door opened. A guard at the Palace gate checked the meter on the ground-car. He, Garr, had got into the car at the matter-transmitter. It had come by the most direct route to the Palace. It had not stopped anywhere. Garr had not seen or spoken to anyone. The guard waved the ground-car on.

  Garr, of course, was not a criminal or under suspicion. To the contrary, he was trusted as few men had ever been trusted before. In the past four centuries only five persons had been sent to other planets for study.

  Garr was trusted to an amazing extent. But these were routine measures for persons with the confidence of the King. An ordinary citizen, before entering the Palace, would have been subjected to an examination requiring months, which might very well have wrecked his mind and nervous system.

  The car stopped finally. Garr got out. His prints were taken in an Identity-Machine. He spoke into an analyzer which checked his voice-pattern, vowel-formation and certain key consonants against his voice. He was admitted to the Quarter of the Domestics of the Palace.

  But before he could reach his own quarters—and his wife and children—his call was ringing in all the corridors. He sighed slightly and reported to the nearest Command-Integrator station. He had not seen his wife for two years but he obeyed orders.

  Ten minutes later he shivered atop a platform on one of the monster landing-shafts of the Palace. He was two thousand feet in the air and the Palace and the city and the fields beyond were spread out below him. The horizon was an indefinite number of miles away. An icy wind blew.

  Lift-doors popped and other men came out to shiver with him. There was Kett, the King’s Physician. There was Nord, the pathologist. In five minutes twenty men stood waiting on the landing-platform. They were the top physicians of Loren, the most capable surgeons, the very cream of the medical skill of the kingdom.

  Something swooped down from overhead, grew huge, grew monstrous, alighted. The twenty men filed up into its underslung cabin. It was one of the great atmosphere-cruisers which hovered always above the Palace, ready with ravening beams to destroy any menace to the tranquility of the King’s realm. It lifted and went hurtling off to the southward. An officer stalked into the cabin with a document in his hand.

  “Sirs,” he said in an official voice, “you have been summoned at the desire of the King”—here he saluted smartly—“because of the indisposition of His Majesty’s favorite ylith. His Majesty is in residence an hour’s journey away. You are informed of this fact that you may reflect upon your knowledge of the indispositions that may afflict his Majesty’s ylith and be prepared to diagnose and treat the ailment.”

  He swung about, stepped through a door and vanished. There was silence in the cabin. Garr glanced out a window. The ground flowed swiftly past, below. The cruiser—its complement was two hundred men—flung southward at twice the speed of sound.

  Garr reflected without emotion that he had been kept from seeing his wife and children, after two years, that he and these others might consider the illness of a hairless small monstrosity which had been inbred to artificial standards until it was as purely parasitic as the Ki—He stopped the thought calmly and turned to listen to his neighbors.

  Nord was saying anxiously, “I hope my assistant carries on the experiment adequately. It was the climax of three months’ work. I have great hopes—if he carries on properly.” Then he said dutifully, “But of course in an emergency like the illness of the King’s ylith—”

  A dark man whom Garr remembered as the best brain-surgeon on Loren said evenly, “I was in the middle of an operation.”

  The others knew what that meant. One does not interrupt a brain-operation of the caliber this man alone could do. Some unknown human being had died because of the illness of the King’s pet.

  Kett, the King’s Physician, said inquiringly, “Garr, I believe you have just returned. You have news for us?”

  Garr smiled very faintly. “Not news. A discovery to be verified. On Yorath they are much excited but the decision must be made with care.”

  Kett grunted. His hands were trembling a little. He was, past question, the greatest medical man on the planet. But if he failed in the service of the King matters would go hard with him. When the King died he would die also in any case.

  A devoted servant could not survive the disgrace of not being able to cure his King. And if the King chose to make it a command that his loathsome pet be cured, then the King’s Physician must commit suicide if unable to obey. Garr felt no envy for Kett.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Nord hopefully, “they’ve developed something intelligible to explain psychosomatic tissue changes?”

  “It’s nothing so simple,” said Garr. He hesitated and said uncomfortably, “It’s a new electronic circuit. You know that our devices have had minimum pick-up of nerve-currents from brains and muscles.

  “When the signal is faint enough it is no stronger than the random shot-effect currents in the apparatus itself. When we amplify a sufficiently faint signal we get only meaningless static.”

  Nord said impatiently, “Of course! I’ve cursed it often enough!”

  “This new circuit,” said Garr, “filters out the random impulses. It seems to work. Apparently there is now no lower limit to the signals that can be picked up and amplified without distortion.”
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br />   The dark man, the brain-surgeon, leaned forward.

  “I’ve brought back one device they’ve made with the new circuit,” said Garr, hesitating to speak. “I’d rather not say what they think it does.”

  “What,” asked Nord, “did you see it do?”

  Garr looked out of the window again. There were clouds below. There was blue sea ahead—a sea it was forbidden for commoners to navigate, because the King had a palace on one of its islands. He turned his head resolutely back.

  “It brings messages from somewhere,” said Garr. “Coherent and specific messages. It brings sights, sounds, smells and other physical sensations from a level of energy lower than anything we have ever tapped before. I used it, and I saw—well—sights and places and—persons—that do not exist in our cosmos.”

  “Artificial delirium?” asked Kett, feigning interest to hide the shaking of his hands. “Induced illusions?”

  “I would rather not say,” said Garr. “I thought of the possibility while using the device. I raised the question with—the person I was talking to.”

  He added wryly, “It is two-way communication, by the way. Messages come up from a level below previous detection. They also go down to a level below previous control. I was—talking to someone about what I saw and heard and that someone gave me proof that it was not delirium. Illusion—perhaps. Delirium—no!”

  The blue sea flowed underneath the cruiser, three miles down. Garr realized that men for whom he had great respect were listening very attentively.

  “I would rather not talk about it,” he said awkwardly. “It is quite unreasonable. Not the circuit, of course—that is simple enough. There is no doubt that it does amplify, quite clearly, signals previously too faint to be detected. But the evidence is not conclusive on where the signals come from.”

  Someone said with skeptical mildness, “A microscopic culture?”

  “I would rule that out absolutely,” said Garr. “I have used the device. But the received signals are of the order of micro-micro-micro-milliwatt-seconds energy.”