“I do,” Joe asserted. “I think they were prepared to discard us at once, on our arrival. Probably the only reason we ever got Gyul Kodran to pay any attention to us was because we threatened to make a nuisance of, ourselves.”
“Disagree,” snapped Lawrence. “It fits only some of the facts. I’ve been watching the pattern of this society with as open a mind, as I could, and this is the conclusion I come to.”
Joe breathed deeply and lowered himself to a squatting position; there was no room to sit properly in this confined dark space. A hint of terror and despair crossed their minds as they became newly aware of their predicament; striving to ignore it, Lawrence set out his hypothesis.
It came in the rigorous form of a deliberated argument. Bearing in mind, it ran, first, what Gyul Kodran said about the Federation being of two minds about us does imply that there are differences of opinion between the constituent members of the Federation?
The team granted that.
Add what has revealed itself here: the drilled monotony of the behavior patterns of the inhabitants. Include the apparent function of the golden bobbins. Submit that the most probable explanation was along the following lines.
The races comprising the present Federation would be all very uniform, differing little from individual to individual and individually possessing scarcely any initiative. Habit and custom would weld them together into rather rigid, essentially predictable modes of behavior. Their achievements in technology would come about as the result of slow accretions rather than swift advances. There were other corollaries.
“Analogy,” proposed Mrs. King at this point. “The social structures of ancient China and ancient Japan.”
Accepted. Extension: the extreme formality of their art—if it could be classed as art—and architecture, bound by strict mathematical rules.
“Query,” from Joe. “Wouldn’t such stiff-necked cultures
find it impossible to adapt to one another? How could they get along at all?”
Like this—the smooth surface of their own society would in each case provide them with guiding paths to follow in the event of contact with other cultures. Differences would puzzle them, not provoke them to violence because violence was not a standard element in their thought patterns.
“Reservations,” put in Rohini Das. “But go on. This is interesting!”
The process would extend only so far. Contacting another culture in which similar rigid predictable behavior patterns predominated was one thing. Contacting the tumultuous, multifaceted culture of a race like mankind was altogether different.
“As I see it,” Lawrence went on, dropping his air of deliberation for a conversational hesitancy, “Gyul Kodran’s race would be the nearest to us in the Federation, the race possessed of most individuality and initiative. And the golden bobbins are members of the race which most strongly opposed our admission.”
“In fact, you think Gyul Kodran is on our side?” proposed Joe.
“I think he was. But I think something went wrong. And the thing that most likely went wrong was that we were found out in our attempt to cheat.”
There was a pause of mental blankness.
“During the trip?” Rohini ventured. They agreed.
“To put it another way,” Joe suggested, “Gyul Kodran’s people supported our admission and wished to provide this test which an individual member of any other Federation race would fail, as a means of slipping our admission through against the opposition. Why would they oppose us so strongly that they would deliberately frame us into the social disaster of failing to help a sick being?
“Most likely because our presence would be a continual jarring in their ordered universe,” Lawrence answered. “Do you see that?” Associations of ideas sprang up illuminating his proposal: out of sight, out of mind, was their common denominator.
And the wall of the pouch-like compartment where they
had been imprisoned ripped jaggedly to admit light and sound.
“I am Gyul Kodran,” said a familiar voice. “Come forth.”
They went to a place where thousands assembled. It was hard to see what the place was, because its lines dissolved here and there as though they ceased for a short distance to extend through normal space. But it was certainly some sort of council chamber, because in every direction there were beings—the slate and brown race to which Gyul Kodran belonged, the things like bloated blue snakes, the grayish-white creatures, and many other sorts and forms that they had not seen before. Ranked together with the others, like a field of maize stripped of its husks, were thousands and thousands of the golden bobbins, swaying a very little on their downy pedestals.
“Why are we here?” Stepan asked, and the whole team found the answer together.
“We are here for a judgment!”
Joe stood on a low raised dais in the center of all the assembly, defiant, despairing, his mind and the minds of the whole team churning with dismay. His hands clenched and unfolded reflexively; his mouth was dry and his stomach was full of the sourness of defeat. Yes, it was unfair; yes, it was inevitable. But knowing that did not make it easier to endure.
There was the bass humming sound here also. It made the surface of the dais shudder resonantly underfoot.
Gyul Kodran began to speak. His calm, neutral voice was like hammer blows nailing down a coffin.
“Joseph Hardy Morea, representative of the planet Earth, the time of your testing has been cut short because it is said against you that you witnessed the sickness and dying of a fellow being and did no more than watch.”
The golden bobbins heard and understood; that was plain from the movement like a wave of expectancy which passed over their ranks.
“Answer!” came a demand formed of a high jarring note which discorded on the bass humming.
A terrible mounting hopelessness rose up in Joe’s mind, and in the minds of the team all together. It was like a thunder storm within his skull, huge and dark and powerful.
Seconds passed like years; within their eternal length ideas
poured out, were dismissed, faded, left vacancy. Joe was lost; Stepan was lost; Rohini was lost; Mrs. King was lost; Lawrence was lost.
Then in the total darkness of his empty mind, lightning broke out of the thunderstorm of despair. Blasting, fusing bolts lit the mental night, melted the walls that separated the retreating personalities of the team.
No longer were there individuals sharing a body who stood on the dais facing judgment. There was one person only: the representative of Earth.
Man spoke.
He said, “You are afraid of me.”
There was a shudder that passed through the great assembly like a whirlwind, shaking the watchers like leaves. The bass humming of the golden bobbins hesitated, broke, resumed with a vibrant overtone of alarm.
Man said, “You claimed that you were superior to me, in that you exist together in your Federation without hate and intolerance. But this is not because you are benign and well-disposed one to another. It is simply because you are blanks. You are flat, featureless beings, as incapable of positive friendship as you are of hate. Now answer me!”
Gyul Kodran was shaking like the rest. For the first time, when he made reply, his voice betrayed the stigma of dismay.
He said, “Go back to your planet, Joseph Hardy Morea. We will not try to stop you from coming out among us. We could not if we wanted to.
“You must know this. When we brought you away from Earth, we studied you and discovered at once the technique which had been employed to create you. We have known of it for longer than you have used metals. And we said: they have ended their own chances. They are so intolerant one of another that they cannot retain sanity under these conditions. So we expected that you would break down and fail the test which we set you.
“You have not broken down.
“For myself and my own kind, I welcome that. I would not have it said that my race is afraid to recognize greatness. There are some among us who have tried lately to make us
believe evil of you, but all that can be said to them is that they must learn to live with you, not you with them.”
A dizziness overcame the representative from Earth. In the midst of a spinning whirlpool of triumph and amazement, he saw the assembly disperse.
T
HE CELEBRATIONS
were still going on. They would probably last another week before the excitement and tension ran down. Noise of shouting and music from the streets far below was so loud that it could be heard in the privacy of Briaros’s apartment, and the television services were given over almost completely at the moment to world wide reviews of the great rejoicing.
Briaros sat alone in a deep armchair before a screen that currently showed a carnival parade in Lagos in which all the states of Africa were taking part. The sound was turned low, and the commentator’s words were hardly distinguishable from the carrier hum.
He held a fine cut glass in his left hand and was stroking it absently with his right.
The doorbot sounded a quiet announcement. Without looking up, Briaros said, “Come in, Dr. Reynolds.”
He did not raise his eyes until Maggie had come into the room and was standing beside his chair. When he did, he saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were swollen and her face was very pale. She wore a black coat and a black dress; her hands were clasped tightly and nervously on a little black handbag.
“Please sit down,” he said, and indicated a chair. He touched the remote control of the television and the screen died to darkness.
“It’s very good of you to spare time for me …” Maggie began, but he cut her short.
“Please! Could I be so rude that I would not take time for your sorrow when our whole planet is rejoicing?”
Maggie flinched. Then she said, “Are there others as miserable?”
Briaros cupped his glass between his hands and looked at it fixedly. “Of course. The father and mother of Lawrence Tshekele and a girl he left. An intimate friend of Miss Rohini Das. A brother of Mrs. King. Fritz Schneider’s wife. And …”
“Don’t go on,” said Maggie, almost inaudibly. “I’m stupid. I should have realized—but isn’t it forgivable?” She raised beseeching, haunted eyes to Briaros’s face “They have lost people altogether! While there’s Joe, his face, his voice, his name, everything. Only it isn’t Joe any longer. It’s a different person.”
Briaros said nothing.
“What happened, Señor Briaros? Do you understand? I was allowed to see him, and I believed for a moment it was going to be all right. Then he talked to me, and it was as though he was shut off, divided, completely self-sufficient and unable to want anyone else. It was terrifying—oh, God!” She gasped and choked back a sob.
“He’s like a god, isn’t he?” said Briaros, still not looking at her. “That’s the way I feel about him. He’s six people, and yet he’s only one. He has the skills of all of them and the compassion of a hundred.”
“That’s it! It’s the pitying which is worst!” Maggie leaned forward eagerly. “If one could feel that he despised us, that might help, but he doesn’t; he just pities us, and we’re ashamed to react with hatred!”
“I hope we shall always be ashamed to react with hatred,” said Briaros calmly.
Maggie didn’t answer for a moment. Slowly she began to relax, and eventually spoke again in a changed voice. “You are right, of course,” she said dully. “But—if what he says now is true—it was all unnecessary. It was all for nothing.”
“For nothing?” Briaros cocked his head to one side. “For nothing?” he repeated. “Can’t you hear the noise of the crowds, even up here? Don’t you know that the same thing is happening everywhere on Earth because of the good news?”
“That’s not what I mean!” flared Maggie.
“I know it’s not. What you mean is that we went out armored against giants, in the person of Joe and the team, and we found the giants were stuffed dummies.”
“Is that true? I’d like to think it’s not.”
“Are we to disbelieve what he tells us? He has been to see. And it won’t be long now before others go also. They’re assembling the engines now, up at
Old Stormalong
; they’re going to test them shortly, and before this year is up we’ll have made the first flight to another star.”
“I know. And what are we going to find? Not the great wise superior peoples we hoped for—more like a petty collection of selfish children!”
“Joe didn’t say that,” Briaros corrected her gently. “He told us only that they were afraid of us because we weren’t as they are, rigid and predictable. But we shall find friends, you know. Gyul Kodran and his people wanted to welcome us; that was why he came here, why he proposed this test, why he fought against attempts to discredit us and trick us into failure.”
“And I still feel it was for nothing that we lost them,” Maggie countered, “That I lost Joe, that Mrs. Schneider lost Fritz, that Lawrence Tshekele’s family lost him!”
Briaros gave her a thoughtful stare. After a pause, he said, “You know, my position is a very peculiar one. To fill it properly, one has to forget all kinds of loyalties which are as natural to most people as breathing, and sometimes it’s very hard to forget them. Admittedly, to forget ties to a large group is often easier than to fight down something that binds you to an individual person. I know that. I’m just asking you to think about this, too.
“You don’t gain anything, really, without paying for it. The best that can be hoped for is to gain a great deal for a very small payment. I’m saying that we’ve gained a tremendous amount. We haven’t just gained admission to the Federation of Worlds; we’ve gained something far more important. A certain person who is no longer just Joe Morea.”
Maggie sat with her hands folded together in her lap, listening, not moving.
“I said he had the compassion of a hundred,” Briaros went on steadily. “You reacted to that. You’ve seen it too. Is it only because of our checkered past that we value it? Is it only because we’re aware how close we came to wrecking our planet through our own blockheadedness? Or is it because, being so different one from another by comparison with the
other intelligent races we’ve now heard about, we find it more necessary?
“Gyul Kodran came to us saying, in effect, that they in the Federation didn’t trust us—we were too potentially explosive. That was perfectly true. But the point they almost overlooked—the thing that might conceivably have led us to interstellar war, God forbid!, if things had gone otherwise—was that being nearer to the verge of self-destruction than they, we had developed a greater skill in walking the tightrope between success and disaster.
“I think that’s one of the two reasons why Joe and the team made out on the capitol world. We don’t know yet all that happened there, but I think we know the essentials. And the second reason was that the team was acutely aware that we had tried to employ deceit to escape the limiting rules of the challenge.
“It seems funny, doesn’t it, to think of deceiving someone honorably? But that’s the way the team apparently saw it. Or more likely, like this: that it was up to man to do his best, and if his best could not be done under the rules set by people who did not understand man, we had to use our superior knowledge of ourselves to correct that deficiency.
“And what happens? Under the intolerable strain of the belief that they had failed, the defences which still separated the individual personalities of the team—the last vestiges of the repressions, reservations and secrets which we all have one fron another—broke down. Instead of a group of personalities sharing a body, there was suddenly a body housing a six-fold personality, as rich as all six and then richer still.
“Why? Why the sum of the parts less than the eventual whole? I can only guess; we’re still trying to find out, but at present this experience of Joe’s is so far beyond our comprehension that we simply can’t fathom it. What we guess is that in every individual there is a fraction of selfish jealousy, which drives us to try and get just that little bit more than we give because we are lonely and unsatisfied even in our greatest loves.
“But here, now, is someone who need never be lonely or jealous, because he still is all that he was. Here is an over-fulfilled personality, who needs nothing from anyone and has everything to offer in return.”
“This makes one feel very small, doesn’t it?” said Maggie. “To take without being able to offer to give in return!”
“There’s a difference, isn’t there, between accepting charity given with a bad grace and that given out of a real desire to share good fortune?” Briaros half-smiled. “How often have I and my predecessors struggled to make rich countries part with things they don’t need, to give them to poor countries, only to have the poor countries see how unwillingly and with how many qualifications the gifts are bestowed, and take them with hate instead of gratitude!”
“Only—I’m ashamed to want to hate him,” said Maggie in a muffled voice.
Briaros got to his feet. He went to the liquor console and drew a glass of good brandy for Maggie, which he set silently at her elbow. He drew a little for himself, and returned to his chair.
“What I believe is now the case,” he said, “is that the greatest single living creature in the galaxy—that we can know of—is, if not human, at any rate a product of human experience and human skills. Can’t we be proud of that?”
“One day—maybe,” said Maggie. She picked up her glass in a trembling hand, but she was less overwrought than when she entered, and she brought it steadily towards her lips.
“One moment!” said Briaros. “Should it not be a toast? Listen!”
Outside, a tremendous blasting joyful noise of marching bands was growing in the street, twice as loud as any that had gone before.
“Absent friends?” said Maggie with a trace of bitterness.
“No. Future friends, I think. The friends we’re going to make, literally make. By teaching them friendship.”
They drank. Outside, the music faded and passed by.