by William Tenn
All night, all day, the loading went on. It was indiscriminate. No human boundaries were recognized. A load of Portuguese fishermen was deposited in the midst of a previous load of Chinese farmers from a collective in Kwantung. The Roman Catholic fishermen sank to their knees and followed an apoplectic Methodist minister from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in prayer; the ingratiating young chairman of the collective farm bustled about organizing a Marxist study group for a squeaking crowd of stylish matrons from Johannesburg, South Africa, whose Ladies' Aid Society meeting had been picked up en masse.
When a hold contained enough people to occupy all the cots in it, the ceiling opened no more, and activity moved to another hold or another ship. Thus, half the Congress of the United States of America was dropped wholesale into the student body and faculty of the largest elementary school in Bucharest, while the other half vainly tried gaining information and establishing authority among the surrounding Madras dirt farmers and the rather puzzled inmates of a Damascus prison.
The loading went on for five days and five nights. Nothing stopped the loading; nothing delayed it. Guided missiles with nuclear warheads not only disappeared just as they arrived at target, but their sources became the very next object of attention. Every last launching site in the Arizona desert and the Siberian tundra was visited and cleared a few minutes after it fired its rockets. Here and there, military detachments fought on valiantly to the end, their commanding officers watching in stupefaction as bullets and shells bounced harmlessly off the alien robots who plodded patiently through murderous enfilading fire on their way to pick up the occupants of regimental or divisional headquarters.
A thorough job was done. Submarines were brought to the surface and emptied of their crews; men at the bottom of the world's deepest mine shafts, with their arms locked desperately about the supporting timbers, were gently but insistently pried loose by the robot tentacles and carried to a last open hold.
Every living human on Earth was taken up to the alien spaceships. But no animals. The animals all remained behind, they and the empty fields and the tall forests and the seas that swirled unendingly along the white beaches of the world.
When the loading was complete, the space fleet moved away as a unit. The acceleration was so smooth that few of the humans even suspected that they were under way. The space fleet moved away from Earth, away from our Sun, and plunged into the black gulfs of the universe.
Except for the shock of being torn from familiar environments so abruptly, the humans aboard the ships had to admit they were not too badly off. There were several water fountains in each hold; there were adequate plumbing facilities; the cots were quite comfortable and so were the temperatures maintained.
Twice each day, exactly twelve hours apart, chimes were sounded and a dozen large soup tureens materialized in the middle of the floor. These tureens were filled with thick white dumpling-like objects bobbing in a greenish liquid. The dumplings and the soup were apparently nourishing, and acceptable to the palates of a thousand different cuisines—though dismally boring as a steady diet. After everyone had eaten, the chimes sounded again and the tureens vanished; they vanished like great, moistureless bubbles. And then there was nothing to do but wander about, try to learn your neighbor's language, sleep a little, worry about the future a little—and wait for the next feeding.
If trouble started, as for example between a factory of Australian steel workers and a tribe of Zulu warriors over the favors of some nurses from a Leningrad hospital—if large trouble, incipient riot, mass fighting, ever got started—it was stopped immediately. A series of robots would materialize through the floor, one after another, each one exactly like the other. Each robot would grab as many individual belligerents as its tentacles could hold and keep them apart until the passage of time and the ridiculous position in which they found themselves brought the angry people back to a state of relative calm. Then, without making a comment or even a single illuminating gesture, the robots disappeared, exactly like the soup tureens.
They were certainly well taken care of. On that point, eventually, all agreed. But why? For what purpose?
Certainly, there seemed to be a sinister overtone to the hospitality they were enjoying. The care and concern lavished upon them, not a few noted darkly, were all too reminiscent of a farmer in a barnyard or a shepherd with a flock of fat, highly marketable sheep.
Or was it possible, the optimists argued, that these highly advanced aliens were mixing humanity in the melting pots of the holds deliberately? Having impatiently observed our squabbling and wars and homicidal prejudices, had they decided with a kind of godlike irritation to make of us one cohesive race once and for all?
It was hard to tell. No alien ever manifested himself. No robot ever said another word, once the holds were closed. Despite the best efforts of all the inhabitants of a given hold, despite the untiring ingenuity of the human race in all of the ships, there was no communication between the people of Earth and their alien hosts for the entire lengthy voyage.
All they could do was wonder—eat, sleep, talk, and wonder—as the fleet of enormous spaceships traveled on and on. They went past star system after star system, they went past worlds in gaseous birth and worlds cracked and dead.
And as the days passed—marked only by sleep periods and carefully rewound wristwatches—most people decided that the complete lack of communication, as well as the casual way they had been handled, suggested a contempt that was very disquieting.
Many great and minor changes took place among the inhabitants of the holds. The young Danish housewife who had been separated from her husband and children grew tired of fighting off the advances of the Trobriand Islanders about her and made her choice simply, in terms of the huskiest and most importunate of her suitors; the member-delegates of the United Nations Security Council gave up trying to effect a rapprochement with the gabardined followers of Chaim ben Judah-David, the wonder-working rabbi from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and sat in bitter isolation in their corner of the hold, announcing from time to time that they constituted the only world government legally capable of dealing with the aliens in the name of humanity as a whole. As soon, of course, as the aliens asked for such representatives...
That was the rub, and all felt it to some degree, and felt it more and more as the days were marked off into weeks and the weeks into months. In the bowels of every one of them—diplomat and devout Hasidic Jew, pale woman from the shores of the North Sea and brown man from the wide Pacific Ocean—nervousness about the future rattled and clattered. What was going to happen to them? What could the aliens want with the whole human race?
Most of them did not know exactly when the ships came to their destination and stopped. The realization that the voyage was over came only when the holds opened above their heads and welcome sunlight roared in. Except that—once the first wildly happy cheers had died away—they noticed this was red sunlight, not yellow.
And then there was the debarkation.
Done with much less struggling, of course, much less screaming and fear-wet excitement. The robots were almost welcomed as they reversed the process of a few months ago. Men and women, with a few neurotic or superstitious exceptions, fought to be the first picked up by the hard, shining, segmented tentacles and transferred to the smaller ships that were attached to the sides of the large transports like so many baby spiders.
When the small ships landed, the human cargo enthusiastically continued to help the robots as much as it could in its own unloading. Ship after ship, now empty, sped back to the great fleet above for more humans, while those who once again found themselves standing on soil and vegetation looked about them.
It was not Earth. That alone was certain.
They were on a hard grey planet whose surface was broken by few of the hills and none of the mountains that most of them associated with topography. A rather dry-smelling grey planet, poor in oceans and barely stippled here and there with tiny, lake-like seas. A gusty grey
planet without trees to shush the steady complaint of its winds. There were only broad-leaved, gritty-stemmed plants that grew ankle-high.
All the colors were wrong. The plants looked like sick blue spinach. The sun above them was a liverish bronze, old and stained. The sky was made of bile—cloudless, featureless essence of thick green bile.
And on the night side, no moon floated through the absolutely unfamiliar constellations. It was deeply dark on the night side, and with the darkness a sharp stink belched from the ground-huddled plants. The stink was spread efficiently by the ever-wandering, ever-wailing winds.
No, it was not Earth. It was not at all like Earth... Earth, so exceptionally far away.
A Finnish farmer watched a small boy from Dakar tear off a limp blue leaf and munch on it experimentally. The boy spat out the leaf with an explosion of saliva and wiped his tongue furiously upon his arm. The farmer prodded a shoe into the ground and worried: Grey dust, that's all it is. What could I grow in it that I could eat? I don't have any seeds, but even if I did, could they grow in this damn dust? A New Zealand sheep rancher bit deep into a fingernail as he wondered: We didn't bring any herds with us, but say we had—what in hell would they be grazing on? No sheep in its right mind would go near those blue weeds. A Bolivian mining engineer arose from an examination of the soil and said to his still-nightgowned wife: "My first impression, and a pretty strong one, is that this planet is rich in copper—and not much else. Not that there's anything wrong with copper, you understand, only there's just so much you can do with it. You can't make typewriters out of copper... You can't make automobiles or airplanes out of copper."
Men looked around in vain for wood that could be used to build houses, for stone with which to raise temples and altars and idols; they saw nothing but the green sky, the blue plants, and the grey, grey soil. Fishermen peered anxiously into the tiny seas and saw nothing swimming, nothing crawling, nothing wriggling; they saw only seaweed, purplish-blue seaweed floating in thin, ragged patches.
A little boy from Chattanooga, Tennessee, toddled up to his mother where she stood talking in a low voice to a group of worried neighbors. He tugged at her skirt until he attracted her attention. "It's an ugly world, Mommy," he told her decisively. "It's an ugly, no-good world, and I don't like it. I want to go home."
She picked him up and hugged him to her, but before she could say anything—while she was still searching for words and thoughts—the robots started to build.
They came down, the robots, from the great ships hanging motionless above, each carrying a section of a prefabricated dwelling. These they fitted together rapidly into immensely long barracks, filled with the familiar cots. Each long barracks held one shipload of people; each was furnished with toilets and water-fountains which bubbled good potable water; each had multitudes of tiny loudspeakers mounted along the walls and ceilings.
When they had assembled the barracks, the robots herded the people into them. They spread their tentacles wide, and they insistently, patiently pushed people ahead of them through the entrances. So many to a barracks, irrespective of age, sex, nationality, or family connection. When a barracks had been filled, the robots shunted the very next individual—husband, commanding officer, twin sister—into another and empty barracks. They were as efficient as ever, and, by this time, most human beings had learned it was useless to oppose them. The robots did their job well, gently and courteously for non-sentient creatures, but as ever, with the single-minded purposefulness of drones.
The humans sat on the cots and waited until all of them were housed. Then the robots disappeared. In their place came the familiar soup tureens and the familiar dumplings. People everywhere ate. They ate their fill, glancing at each other sideways and shrugging their shoulders. They finished, and the tureens disappeared.
Now, for the first time, the people of Earth heard the voice of the aliens, the owners and masters of the robots, the navigators of the grape-cluster ships.
It was an explanation (at last, at last, an explanation!) and it came from the many little loudspeakers in the barracks. It was given simultaneously in every language of mankind—you moved about the barracks until you found a speaker emitting words you understood—and it was listened to with great, almost frantic attention.
To begin with, the aliens explained, it was necessary for us to understand how highly civilized they were. That was very important. It was the foundation, it was the basic reason for everything they had done. They were a civilized race, enormously civilized, anciently civilized, civilized beyond our most poetic dreams of civilization.
We, as a race, were on the first stumbling steps of that civilization. We were primitive, insignificant, and—if we might pardon them for saying so—slightly ridiculous. Our technology was elementary, our ethical and spiritual awareness almost nonexistent.
But we were a race of living creatures and we did have a speck, a promise, of civilization. Therefore, they had no alternative: they had to save us. They had to go to all the trouble and expense we had witnessed and would witness in the future. As civilized creatures there was absolutely nothing else they could do.
We should know that not all creatures in the universe were as civilized as they. Wars were fought, weapons were used. They themselves had recently developed, purely for purposes of self-protection, a new weapon...
It was a frightful weapon, a shattering weapon, a weapon that smashed the constituents of time and space in a given area. They sincerely hoped never to have to use that weapon in actual warfare. Still, one never knew to what lengths an uncivilized enemy might go.
The weapon had to be tested.
It was impossible, given the terrible nature of the weapon, given its totally unpredictable aftereffects, to test it in any densely populated section of the galaxy. Furthermore, in order to get a clear and scientific picture of the weapon's potential military value, it was necessary to destroy an entire planet in the course of the test.
The aliens had selected the site very carefully. They had selected a sparsely populated solar system, a very unimportant planet inhabited by an extremely backward race—a race so backward, in fact, that it was just now beginning to develop space travel. They had selected, in other words, a world of no conceivable value to anybody consulted, a world that no other race in the galaxy deemed at all desirable, an absolutely useless, second-rate nonentity of a world—our Earth.
Here they would test their weapon. They would test it on a world whose total obliteration would not be noticed anywhere.
But Earth was inhabited by a race which had intelligence within, at least, the widest definition of the term. And the aliens were civilized, highly civilized, ultimately civilized. They could not just destroy another race out of hand, no matter how primitive it might be. They had a responsibility to life itself, to the future, to history.
So they had done this enormous, this expensive, this altruistic and unheard-of thing. At a cost so overwhelming that it could not be expressed at all in the limited figures of human economics, they had evacuated our entire planet.
They had carried us all the way across the galaxy (hang the expense! never mind the expense! when they did a thing, they believed in doing it right!) to another planet which, while uninhabited, was as much like Earth as anything they could find in the universe.
Its size and mass were almost exactly the same as Earth's—so we didn't have to worry about any difference in gravity. Its distance from the sun, its periods of revolution and rotation were quite similar—our day-night systems and calendars would be little altered.
All in all, a wonderful new home.
Of course, there were some changes: no two planets were exactly alike. The atmospheric elements existed here in slightly different proportions; the water, while not poisonous, was effectively undrinkable; it would not be possible for a good long time to grow any edible plants in this soil. And, no doubt we had noticed, there weren't any animals on this world, nor were the mineral resources susceptible to exploitat
ion by any techniques we had developed to date. However, taking the good with the bad, the bitter with the sweet, one way or another, sooner or later, they knew we would manage. We had a brand new planet, a completely untouched planet, a virgin planet, all for our very own.
All we had to do was to learn how to use it properly.
Meanwhile, they would not desert us. Hadn't they told us how civilized they were? No, however long it took us to get on our feet and become self-supporting, their robots would be there to take care of us. We could use the barracks (they were made of almost indestructible material) until we figured out a way to make some other kind of home on this world. And the soup kitchens would be running, day in and day out, serving the good white dumplings designed especially for us until we developed some other, more indigenous source of nourishment.
But all this was for the future. We had had a long, tiring trip and probably did not want to worry about practical matters right now. How about a little entertainment? Something special, something none of us had ever imagined we would see.
Television screens appeared on the ceilings of the barracks, and humans turned baffled, confused faces upwards. Outside the walls, everywhere, the wind howled stubbornly, unendingly.
This was a rare treat, the aliens explained through the loudspeakers, a once-in-a-thousand-years sort of thing. We would be able to tell our children and our children's children that we had seen it, at exactly the same time as other, much more advanced races throughout the galaxy. "Now, for the first time, and at the exact moment it occurs, you will witness the total destruction of a world—the planet Earth—in the course of an essential and epic scientific experiment."
AFTERWORD
For those readers who don't know about it:
In 1946, the United States needed a place to test the atomic bomb that had been developed and used only one year before. The Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean was chosen. It consisted of thirty-six islets on a reef twenty-five miles long.
