Collected Short Fiction, page 198
Smith laughed. “Good! But remember—we haven’t controlled you for years—not since we tossed you out. We actually have never really controlled you. Even when you were in School, I let you go ahead on your own. Your discovery of the hormone was, as I said, completely your own.
“No—of all people on Nidor, you alone have been completely free to do and think and act as you liked—to do the things that you thought were right for Nidor. We watched, yes—but we have neither helped nor hindered. We simply kept silent and made our preparations to leave Nidor.
“Nidor today is your product, and its future is up to you. For we are leaving—completely.”
Norvis chuckled softly. “Funny. I’ve dedicated fifteen years of my life to driving you Earthmen away, and now that I’ve done it, I don’t want you to go.” He looked up into the Earthman’s eyes. “I see what you mean. A race needs friends. I like you, Smith. And my children’s children will like yours.”
“I hope so,” Smith said. “Now. we must go—and you and I will never see each other again. It’s all yours, the whole mess. You’ve got a broken culture to put together again. You’ve got at least two heretical religions springing up—the New Lawyer in Lebron, and the group in Sugon. You’ll have political factions; you’ll have a complete breakup of the Clan system soon. You’ll have more riots, more battles, more bloodshed. But keep moving forward. In the end, you’ll have something better than the dead Way of your Ancestors.”
“Aren’t you ever coming back?”
“Not in your lifetime—or mine. Oh, we’ll peek in once in a while to check your progress, but we won’t touch. This new civilization has to be a Nidorian one—not just a copy of our own. Eventually, you’ll build ships like this, and we can meet on even terms—as friends.”
“But Nidorians will hate Earthmen for a long time.”
“Don’t worry about that. We don’t really call ourselves by the Nidorian word ‘Earthmen‘—our own term means the same, but it sounds completely different. And these beards were grown for a purpose. Nidorians will remember the beards long after they’ve forgotten everything else. And we don’t normally wear beards. No, your people won’t know us when they first meet us, and when we finally tell them we’ll both have a big laugh on the joke we pulled on their ancestors. We—” Harrison stood up and glanced at a little machine on his Wrist. “Five minutes to rendezvous with the mother ship, Smith. You about through?”
“I think so. Any more questions, Norvis?”
“I don’t think so,” he said firmly. “I think I understand. I’m ready to go back.”
“Good. The rest is up to you. I’m going to send you back down alone—think you can take it?”
Norvis nodded. “I’ve seen so much now that a little drop of a few miles won’t hurt me.”
“Fine,” Smith said. A humorous twinkle came into his eyes. “By the way, don’t think you’re going to get away with the force-field generator. When you get down, take it off and throw it away. We’re going to destroy it, and you don’t want to be anywhere near it when we do.” Norvis grinned. “I won’t be.”
XXIV
He wasn’t. When his feet touched the ground only a few feet from where he had tethered his deest, he felt the force-field die. Quickly, he unstrapped the generator from his waist and hurled it away into the rocks.
Then he mounted the animal and rode westward, not even looking backward when a silent burst of light illuminated the landscape around him. The Earthmen were gone.
He rode slowly, his mind still dazed. He had gone to the Mountains of the Morning to find out the secret of the Earthmen—and he had found. The magnitude of the Earthmen’s plan dazzled him. He rode on, revolving the concept in his mind.
Nidor was a mess, as Smith had said. But it could soon be straightened out; it—
And then, quite suddenly, as though the Great Light Himself had given full illumination to his mind, Norvis peRahn Brajjyd realized the enormity of the terrible thing he had done.
He had done.
He.
The Earthmen hadn’t ruined Nidor—no, not at all. Everything they had done had healed itself. The hugl plague had done nothing really drastic to Nidor; in a hundred or two hundred years, it would have been forgotten. The discovery of the growth hormone had done nothing in the long run; it, too, would have vanished away in the mists of the monotonous history of Nidor.
Who had started the Merchants’ Party, and thus conceived for the people of Nidor the idea that there could be more than one group contending for supremacy? Who?
Norvis peRahn Brajjyd.
Who had begun, secretly, the little splinter groups of religion that now threatened the whole Nidorian culture?
Who?
Norvis peRahn Brajjyd.
Who had engineered the rebellion against the Earthmen? Who had actually caused the burning of the School? Who had started the agitation of the crazed masses who had burned and destroyed the Great Temple? Who had instituted the idea that Nidorians should be led by a single popular strong man instead of a senile Council of Elders?
Who had ruined, beyond any hope of redemption, the culture, the mores, the ideals of Nidor?
Who?
Norvis peRahn Brajjyd!
There was bitterness in his mouth and in his mind as he realized the full truth of what the Earthman had told him.
The process was irreversible; Nidor could never go back to the Way of the Ancestors. That Way implied a certain innocence—an ignorance of other ways. But Norvis had introduced too many new ideas. A culture which had once been static had become dynamic simply because it had been overburdened with new ideas and concepts.
It wasn’t catastrophes that had ruined Nidor—not even the Great Cataclysm had done that. It had been ideas—devastatingly new ideas—that had done the terrible, irreparable damage to a culture which had sustained itself intact for thousands and thousands of years.
For a decade and a half, Norvis had hated the Earthmen for what they had done. Then, when Smith had explained, he had thought that they were doing it—had done it—for the good of Nidor, and he had felt relief.
But now he knew that the Earthmen had done nothing directly. They had simply bred yes, bred! a Nidorian who would do their work for them. And he had. As they had known he would.
He didn’t know, at that point, whether he hated Smith or worshiped him—or, perhaps, feared him.
He decided it must be hatred, but it wouldn’t do him any good to hate Earthmen. He was helpless, as they had known he would be. He had to rebuild Nidor-rebuild it along the lines they wanted. Why? Because he was built that way; he could do nothing else. He couldn’t stand around and watch his home, his people, dissolve into barbarism.
He was irrevocably dedicated to the course ahead of him.
Damn them, he thought. Damn them! And then, after a moment: Bless their damned souls!
It was the night of the second day when he arrived in Holy Gelusar. The Great City looked oddly unimportant now, no longer the metropolis he had once thought it to be. He trotted across the Bridge of Gon and headed toward the Great Temple.
No sooner did he approach the charred building when a guard rushed up. “Secretary Norvis! Where have you been? We’ve looked all over Nidor for you!”
“What’s happened?” Norvis asked. It was near morning, and he was tired.
“Leader Kris has been shot!”
“Take me to him!” Norvis said. He dismounted and the guard led him up the stairs to the room where Kris lay. His fingers quivered a little as he threw open the door.
Marja was standing at the foot of the bed, and Ganz by the Leader’s side. Two other men that Norvis recognized as physicians stood by helplessly.
Norvis glanced at one of them. “How’s his condition?”
“Serious,” the physician said bleakly. He lowered his voice. “We don’t have much hope.”
Kris, Norvis thought sadly. You were almost a son to me—and here you are, dying of the bullet I should have gotten.
He took Kris’ cool, limp hand. The Leader opened his eyes slowly and focused them on Norvis.
“I heard what that doctor said,” he muttered indistinctly. “Not much hope. You don’t have to hide it from me.”
“Easy, Kris,” Norvis said. “Don’t talk.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m going, maybe it’s best this way—cut off at the top. Wealthy, good wife, everyone cheering. Earthmen gone. Nidor rebuilding. I might have lived to see worse.” His head sank back. “You’ve been good to me, Norvis. Thanks.”
Kris shuddered, and Norvis squeezed his hand and let it drop. “He’s dead,” Norvis said. There was little emotion apparent in his voice.
“He was a great man,” Ganz peDel said. Behind him, Marja sobbed quietly.
Norvis took a deep breath and steeled himself for what had to be done. He rose from the bedside, walked toward Ganz peDel, put his arm around the boy’s broad shoulders.
“Nidor needs a new Leader,” he said quietly.
“But I’m . . . you . . . I—”
Norvis smiled. “Kris thought you could do the job, Ganz peDel. Do you?’
“I . . . I think so,” Ganz said, after a pause.
“Good. We’ve got plenty of work ahead of us, then.” Norvis walked to the window of the death-room and threw open the shutters. The Great Light had just risen, and the light of dawn came streaming in, breaking through the eternal clouds of Nidor.
THE END
Sunrise on Mercury
The question was: why was the sun rising a week ahead of schedule?
NINE MILLION miles to the sunward of Mercury, with the Leverrier swinging into the series of spirals that would bring it down on the solar system’s smallest world, Second Astrogator Lon Curtis decided to end his life.
Curtis had been lounging in a webfoam cradle waiting for the landing to be effected; his job in the operation was over, at least until the Leverrier’s landing jacks touched Mercury’s blistered surface. The ship’s efficient sodium-coolant system negated the efforts of the swollen sun visible through the rear screen. For Curtis and his seven shipmates, no problems presented themselves; they had only to wait while the autopilot brought the ship down for man’s second landing on Mercury.
Flight Commander Harry Ross was sitting near Curtis when he noticed the sudden momentary stiffening of the astrogator’s jaws. Curtis abruptly reached for the control nozzle. From the spinnerets that had spun the webfoam came a quick green burst of dissolving fluorochrene; the cradle vanished. Curtis stood up.
“Going somewhere?” Ross asked.
Curtis’s voice was harsh. “Just—just taking a walk.”
Ross returned his attention to his microbook for a moment as Curtis walked away. There was the ratchety sound of a bulkhead dog being manipulated, and Ross felt a momentary chill as the cooler air of the superrefrigerated reactor compartment drifted in.
He punched a stud, turning the page. Then—
What the hell is he doing in the reactor compartment?
THE AUTOPILOT would be controlling the fuel flow, handling it down to the milligram, in a way no human system could. The reactor was primed for the landing, the fuel was stoked, the compartment was dogged shut. No one—least of all a second astrogator—had any business going back there.
Ross had the foam cradle dissolved in an instant, and was on his feet a moment later. He dashed down the companionway and through the open bulkhead door into the coolness of the reactor compartment.
Curbs was standing by the converter door, toying with the release-tripper. As Ross approached, he saw the astrogator get the door open and put one foot to the chute that led downship to the nuclear pile.
“Curtis, you idiot! Get away from there! You’ll kill us all!”
The astrogator turned, looked blankly at Ross for an instant, and drew up his other foot. Ross leaped.
He caught Curtis’ booted foot in his hands, and despite a barrage of kicks from the astrogator’s free boot, managed to drag Curtis off the chute. The astrogator tugged and pulled, attempting to break free. Ross saw the man’s pale cheeks quivering. Curtis had cracked, but thoroughly.
Grunting, Ross yanked Curtis away from the yawning reactor chute and slammed the door shut. He dragged him out into the main section again and slapped him, hard.
“Why’d you want to do that? Don’t you know what your mass would do to the ship if it got into the converter? You know the fuel intake’s been calibrated already; 180 extra pounds and we’d arc right into the sun. What’s wrong with you, Curtis?”
The astrogator fixed unshaking, unexpressive eyes on Ross. “I want to die,” he said simply. “Why couldn’t you let me die?”
HE WANTED to die. Ross shrugged, feeling a cold tremor run down his back. There was no guarding against this disease.
Just as aqualungers beneath the sea’s surface suffered from l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs—rapture of the deeps—and knew no cure for the strange, depth-induced drunkenness that caused them to remove their breathing tubes fifty fathoms below, so did spacemen run the risk of this nameless malady, this inexplicable urge to self-destruction.
It struck anywhere. A repairman wielding a torch on a recalcitrant strut of an orbiting wheel might abruptly rip open his facemask and drink vacuum; a radioman rigging an antenna on the skin of his ship might suddenly cut his line, fire his directional pistol, and send himself drifting away. Or a second astrogator might decide to climb into the converter.
Psych Officer Spangler appeared, an expression of concern fixed on his smooth pink face. “Trouble?”
Ross nodded. “Curtis. Tried to jump into the fuel chute. He’s got it, Doc.”
SCOWLING, Spangler rubbed his cheek, then said: “They always pick the best times, dammit. It’s swell having a psycho on a Mercury run.”
“That’s the way it is,” Ross said wearily. “Better put him in statis till we get home. I’d hate to have him running loose looking for different ways of doing himself in.
“Why can’t you let me die?” Curtis asked. His face was bleak. “Why’d you have to stop me?”
“Because, you lunatic, you’d have killed all the rest of us by your fool dive into the converter. Go walk out the airlock if you want to die—but don’t take us with you.” Spangler glared warningly at him. “Harry—”
“Okay,” Ross said. “Take him away.”
The psychman led Curtis within. The astrogator would be given a tranquilizing injection, and locked in an insoluble webfoam jacket for the rest of the journey. There was a chance he could be restored to sanity, once they returned to Earth, but Ross knew that the astrogator would make a beeline for the nearest method of suicide the moment he was let loose in space.
BROODING, Ross turned away. A man spends his boyhood dreaming about space, he thought, spends four years at the Academy and two more making dummy runs. Then he finally gets up where it counts, and he cracks up. Curtis was an astrolgation machine, not a normal human being; and he had just disqualified himself permanently from the only job he knew how to do.
Ross shivered, feeling chill despite the bloated bulk of the sun filling the rear screen. It could happen to anyone . . . even him. He thought of Curtis, lying in a foam cradle somewhere in the back of the ship, blackly thinking over and over again I want to die, while Doc Spangler muttered soothing things at him. A human being was really a frail form of life, Ross reflected.
Death seemed to hang over the ship; the gloomy aura of Curtis’ suicide-wish polluted the atmosphere.
Ross shook his head and punched down savagely on the signal to prepare for deceleration. The unspinning globe that was Mercury bobbed up ahead. He spotted it through the front screen.
THEY WERE approaching the tiny planet middle-on. He could see the neat division now: the brightness of Sunside, the unapproachable inferno where zinc ran in rivers, and the icy blackness of Darkside, dull with its unlit plains of frozen CO2.
Down the heart of the planet ran the Twilight Belt, that narrow area of not-cold and not-heat where Sunside and Darkside met to provide a thin band of barely-tolerable territory, a ring nine thousand miles in circumference and ten or twenty miles wide.
The Leverrier plunged downward. “Downward” was actually a misnomer—space has no ups or downs—but it was the simplest way for Ross to visualize the approach. He allowed his jangled nerves to calm. The ship was in the hands of the autopilot; the orbit was precomputed and the analog banks in the drive were happily following the taped program, bringing the ship to rest smack in the middle of—
My God!
Ross went cold from head to toe. The precomputed tape had been fed to the analog banks—had been prepared by—had been the work of—Curtis.
A suicidal madman had worked out the Leverrier’s landing program.
ROSS’ HANDS began to shake. How easy it would have been, he thought, for death-bent Curtis to work out an orbit that would plant the Leverrier in a smoking river of molten lead—or in the mortuary chill of Darkside.
His false security vanished. There was no trusting the automatic pilot; they’d have to risk a manual landing.
Ross jabbed down on the communicator button. “I want Brainerd,” he said hoarsely.
The First Astrogator appeared a few seconds later, peering in curiously. “What goes, Captain?”
“We’ve just carted your assistant Curtis off to the pokey. He tried to jump into the converter.”
“He—?”
Ross nodded. “Attempted suicide; I nabbed him in time. But in view of the circumstances, I think we’d better discard the tape you had him prepare and bring the ship down manually, yes?”
The First Astrogator moistened his lips. “Maybe that’s a good idea,” he said.
“Damn right it is,” Ross said, glowering.
AS THE SHIP touched down, Ross thought, Mercury is two hells in one.
It was the cold, icebound kingdom of Dante’s deepest pit—and it was also the brimstone empire of another conception. The two met, fire and frost, each hemisphere its own kind of hell.
