Our Friends From Frolix 8 (17 page)

‘They can’t destroy your ship. I am wrapped around it entirely, now.’

‘I understand, but they don’t; they may try anyway.’ How will I look when I emerge? he asked himself. Grimy, dirty, given to unclean habits… but wouldn’t they expect that? Wouldn’t the crowd understand that? Maybe that is exactly the way I should appear.

‘Times Square,’ he said aloud.

‘In the middle of the night.’

‘No; even so it would be too crowded.’

‘We’ll fire warning bursts with the retrorockets. When they see that we’re landing they’ll retreat.’

‘And then a hydrogen warhead shell from a T-40 cannon will blow us to bits.’ He felt sardonic and savage.

‘Mr. Provoni, remember that I am semi-matter, that I can absorb anything. I will be there, wrapped around your little ship and you, for as long as is necessary.’

‘Maybe they’ll go mad when they see me.’

‘With enthusiasm?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever makes people go mad. Fear of the unknown; it may be that. They may retreat as far from me as is physically possible. They may retreat to Denver, Colorado, bunch up there like scared cats. You’ve never seen a scared cat, have you? I’ve always had cats, tomcats, unaltered, and always my cat is a loser. He’s the one that comes back in shreds. You know how you can tell your cat’s a loser? When he and another tom are about to fight, you go out to rescue yours, and if he’s a winner, he at once jumps the other cat. And if he’s a loser, he damn well lets you pick him up and take him indoors.’

‘You will soon see cats again,’ Morgo said.

‘So will you,’ Provoni said.

‘Describe a cat for me,’ Morgo said. ‘Let it take shape in your mind. All your recollections and associations with cats.’
Thors Provoni thought about cats. It seemed a harmless thing to do as they waited out the six days until they reached Earth.

‘Opinionated,’ Morgo said at last.

‘Me, you mean? On the subject?’

‘No, I mean cats. And self-centred.’

Angrily, Provoni said, ‘A cat is loyal to its master. But it shows it in a subtle way. That’s the whole point, a cat gives himself to no one, and this has been his way for millions of years, and then you manage to knock a chink in his armor, and he rubs against you and sits on your lap and purrs. So, because of his love for you, he breaks the inherent genetic behavior-pattern of two million years. What a victory that is.’

‘Assuming the cat is sincere,’ Morgo said, ‘rather than trying to cadge extra food.’

‘You think a cat can be a hypocrite?’ Provoni asked. ‘I’ve never heard an insinuation of insincerity directed toward cats. Actually, much of the criticism comes from their brutal honesty; if they don’t like a person then shit, they’re off to someone else.’

‘I think,’ Morgo said, ‘when we get to Terra I would like to have a dog.’

‘A dog! After my meditation on the nature of cats – after all the wealth of material about dearly-loved cats from my past; I still think of one old tom named Asherbanopol, but we called him Ralf. “Asherbanopol” is Egyptian.’

‘Yes,’ the Frolixan said. ‘You still moan deep in your heart for Asherbanopol. But when you die, as in the Mark Twain story—’

‘Yeah,’ he said morosely. ‘They’ll all be there, a row of them on each side of the road, waiting for me. An animal refuses to pass into Paradise without its master. They wait year after year.’

‘And you fervently believe this.’

‘“Believe it?” I know it’s true; God is alive; that carcass they found in deep space back a few years ago, that wasn’t God. You don’t find God under such circumstances, that’s Medieval thought. Do you know where you find the Holy
Spirit? It’s not out in space – hell, it created space. It’s here.’ He pointed to his chest. ‘I – I mean, we – have a portion of the Holy Spirit within us. Look at your decision to come and give us help – you get nothing from it, perhaps injury, or some kind of destruction that the military has but which we haven’t heard about.’

‘I receive something from coming to your planet,’ Morgo said. ‘I get to pick up and hold little life forms: cats, a dog, a leaf, a snail, a chipmunk. Do you know – do you understand – that on Frolix 8 all life forms except ourselves were sterilized, hence they long ago disappeared… although I’ve seen recordings of them, three dimensional recreations that seem absolutely real. Wired directly to the ruling ganglia of our central nervous systems.’

Fear overcame Thors Provoni.

‘That bothers you,’ Morgo said. ‘That we would do that. We ourselves; we were growing, dividing, growing. We needed to urbanize every inch of our planet; the animals would starve, and we preferred using a sterilizing gas, utterly painless. They could not have lived in our world with us.’

‘Your population has tapered off, now, has it?’ Nick asked. The fear still lay inside him, like a coiled snake. Waiting to unwind, to show its poisonous fangs.

Morgo said, ‘We always could use more room.’

Like Earth, Provoni thought.

‘No, there’s already a dominant sentient species, there. We are forbidden by the civil wing of our ruling circles to—’ Morgo hesitated.

‘Military,’ Provoni said, in wonder.

‘I am a commando. That’s what caused them to pick me to return to Sol 3 with you. I have a reputation for being able to solve disputes by mixing reasoning and force. The threat of the force makes them listen; the knowledge, my knowledge, points out the way by which the best society possible can succeed.’

‘You’ve done this before?’ Obviously it had.

‘I am over a million years old,’ Morgo said. ‘I, backed by the contingency of force, have solved wars so vast, with numbers so great, as to be impossible for you to imagine. I have
unscrambled politico-economic problems, sometimes by introducing new machinery or anyhow theoretical papers by which such devices could be achieved. And then I have passed by, and the rest is up to them.’

‘Do you intervene only if called on?’ Provoni said.

‘Yes.’

‘So, in essence, you help only civilizations which have been able to produce trans-stellar drives. To get their messenger there… where at last you notice him. But some Medieval society, with longbows and pig-helmets—’

‘Our theory,’ Morgo said, ‘as to this, is interesting. At the longbow level, in fact at the cannon level, and airships, water ships, bombs…
it is none of our business.
We don’t want it to be, because our theory tells us that they cannot destroy their race or their planet. But when hydrogen bombs are built, and technocracy has enabled them to build interstellar—’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Provoni said flatly.

‘Why?’ The Frolixan explored his brain, deftly, but with his customary reverence. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘You know that they create hydrogen bombs long before they develop an inter-stellar drive. You are right.’ It paused. ‘All right, then. We allow ourselves to get involved only when approached by a ship capable of inter-stellar flight. Because at that point the civilization is potentially dangerous to us.
They have found us.
A response of some sort on our part is indicated… as, for instance, in your world’s history, when Admiral Perry breached the wall surrounding Japan – and the entire country had to modernize within a matter of a few years. Bear this in mind: we could have chosen merely to kill every inter-stellar spaceman, instead of asking what we could add to help stabilize their culture. You would be incredulous if you knew how many cultures are in the grip of wars and power struggles and tyrannies… some far advanced over yours. But you supplied us with our criterion: you reached us. So, Mr. Provoni, I’m here.’

Provoni said, ‘I don’t like that about the animals being exterminated.’ He was thinking about the six billion Old Man population. Would they be treated like that? he wondered.
Will they treat us all like that, New Man, Unusual, Old Man, Under Man – will they snuff us and inherit our planet with all its works?

Morgo said, ‘Mr. Provoni, let me make two points which should serve to quiet your turmoil. First: we have known about your civilization for centuries. Our ships have entered and skimmed around in your atmosphere back to the time of whaling boats. We could have taken over any time, if we so desired; don’t you think it would have been easier to defeat the “thin red line”, the Redcoats, than to face cobalt and hydrogen tactical missiles as we would have to – are doing – now? I’ve been listening. You have several picket ships loitering in the area near the point at which Sol’s gravitational field begins to affect us.’

‘And second?’

‘We will steal.’

‘“Steal”!’ Provoni was amazed. ‘Steal what?’

‘Countless diversions of yours: vacuum cleaners, typewriters, 3-D video systems, twenty-year batteries, computers – in exchange for ending the tyranny we will hang about a while, obtaining working models, if possible, or descriptions of every conceivable plant, tree, boat, power tool; you name it.’

‘But you’re technologically advanced over us.’

Morgo said in a pleased voice, ‘It doesn’t matter. Each civilization, on each planet, develops unique, idiosyncratic tools, manners, theories, toys, acid-resistant tanks, merry-go-rounds. Let me ask you this: suppose you could be transported back to England in the eighteenth century. And you could take back with you whatever pleased you. Wouldn’t you cart away a good deal? Paintings alone – but I see that you understand.’

‘We’re quaint!’ Provoni said furiously.

‘Yes, that expresses it. And quaintness is one of the great use-constituents in the universe, Mr. Provoni. It is a subdivision of the principle of uniqueness, which your own Mr. Bernhad explained in his “Theory of Acausality Measured by Two Axes.” Uniqueness is unique, but there are what Bernhad called “quasi-uniquenesses”, of which many—’

‘I ghosted Bernhad’s theory for him,’ Provoni said. ‘I was a smart-assed young college kid, one of Bernhad’s teaching assistants. We prepared all the data, the citations, everything – had them published in
Nature
– with only Bernhad’s name on it In 2103 I was eighteen. Now I’m one hundred and five.’ He grimaced. ‘An old man in a different sense. But I’m still alive and active; I can still piss and stink and eat and sleep and screw. Anyhow, you read about people living to be two hundred years old, born back around 1985, when the aging virus was isolated, and anti-geretelic compounds were mainlined by forty percent of the population.’

He thought, then, about the animals, and about Earth’s six billion who were going nowhere, except, perhaps, the absolutely gigantic relocation camps on Luna with their opaque tank sides; the prisoners were not even allowed to see the landscape around them. Must be twelve to twenty million Old Men in those camps, he pondered. An army. Where’ll they go on Earth? Twenty
million?
Ten million
apartments?
Twenty million jobs, and all non-G. Not Civil Service.

Gram may be handing us a hot potato, he said to himself.

If we take over the functions of government even briefly,
we’ll
have to process them. We might – incredibly – find ourselves putting them back in the camps on a ’temporary’ basis. Jesus, he thought, how ironic can you get?

Morgo Rahn Wile said suddenly, ‘A man-of-war portside.’

‘A what at what?’

‘Check your radar screen. You’ll see a blip – a ship, a large one, moving very fast, too fast for a commercial vehicle, coming directly at us.’ A pause. ‘On a collision course; they’re going to sacrifice themselves to stop us.’

‘Can they?’

Patiently, Morgo said, ‘No, Mr. Provoni. Even when they have mounted .88 hydrogen warheads or four hydrogen warhead torpedoes.’

I’ll wait, Provoni thought, as he bent over his radar screen, until I see it. Because this is obviously one of those fast new LR-82s – he rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘No, that was ten
years ago; I’m living in the past. Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s a fast ship.’

‘Not as fast as ours, Mr. Provoni,’ Morgo said. The
Gray Dinosaur
boomed and shuddered, as rocket engines were fired; then the characteristic whine that came from entering hyperspace.

The ship followed. There, on the screen once more, it hung, and it moved closer with each second, all its main engines firing in a brilliant nimbus of dancing, flaming, yellow light.

‘I think it ends right here,’ Provoni said.

Notification reached Willis Gram with no delay. To the members of the Extraordinary Committee for Public Safety, gathered about his bed in his office-bedroom, he said, propping himself bolt upright among the pillows, ‘Listen to this.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Gram said happily. To the Committee members he said, ‘I called you here because of this third transmission we got from Provoni. They’ll be here in six days.’ He stretched, yawned, grinned around at them. ‘I was going to tell you how fast we have to act to open the relocation camps, as well as stopping our crackdown on Under Men still at large, and blowing up their transmitters and printing presses and like that.
But
: if
Badger
pulverizes
Dinosaur
, then that’s it! We can go on as if nothing has happened, as if Provoni never made it back here at all.’

‘But the first two notes were telecast,’ Fred Rayner, the Interior Minister, said bitingly.

‘Well, we’ll not disclose it about the third message. About
them landing here in six days and “taking over the government”, and all that.’

‘Mr. Council Chairman,’ Duke Bostrich, Minister of State, said, ‘the third message is coming in – so help me God – on the forty meter band, so it’s been picked up here and there all over the world. By this time tomorrow, everyone will know.’

‘But if
Badger
gets
Dinosaur
it won’t matter.’ Gram inhaled deeply, reached to take an amphetamine capsule to soar even higher in this sudden, unexpected moment of greatness. ‘You know,’ he said to them all, especially Patty Platt, Minister of Defense, who had never liked or respected him, ‘you know it was my idea to station ships like
Badger
out there five years ago… picket ships, not heavily armed. We know the
Gray Dinosaur
isn’t armed. So even a picket ship can destroy it.’