Collected Short Fiction, page 341
“How do I decide which are yours and which are mine?”
Take them all. Wm will decide once they are out of the ship.
A sudden ripple of terror ran through Kiley, turning the little jewel-thief cold. He felt dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of Thaklaru’s world. He wondered where the alien was, what sort of creature he might be.
Your curiosity will soon be ended, Thaklaru said. When you have brought the jewels out, I will appear.
Kiley shrugged and started to climb the catwalk that led into the ship. There was little sense in trying to argue with Thaklaru’s abilities; if he didn’t go willingly, the alien would only force him. He gathered the jewels into a double handful and brought them back outside, dropping them onto a bare patch of reddish-green soil. Returning, he brought the rest of them out.
“Okay,” he said. “They’re all there.”
Good. They are lovely.
“Suppose you show up and let’s divide these things,” Kiley said. “I’m tired of your mental voice—let’s hear the real thing.”
Very well.
A clap of thunder seemed to split the sky—a deafening, booming noise that made the ground quiver. Kiley cowered in fright as the sound was repeated—and this time, he was able to detect words.
“I am Thaklaru!”
“Where are you?”
“Look upward!” the booming voice cried.
Hesitantly, Kiley turned his gaze upward—and gasped. The “cliff” he had thought stood next to him was no cliff at all. It was a vast alien creature, stony and terrifying, whose head vanished in the fuzzy clouds far overhead.
Again came the booming noise: “I am Thaklaru!”
“I see why you needed an accomplice,” Kiley said in a weak voice. “Something—someone of your size—”
“Yes. I could never venture into anything as tiny as one of your cities.”
Kiley licked his lips nervously. “Well—here are the jewels. Let’s—let’s divide them!”
“One bit of business first,” the alien’s thunderous boom came. “You have served well—but you cannot live.”
“What?”
“It is necessary, Kiley. There are ways of extracting information from a man’s subconscious—and I would not have my existence known.”
Suddenly the sky was black. Kiley looked up and saw what could only be a foot—a monstrous, horrible foot—blotting out the sunlight overhead.
“I warned you, Kiley—never trust an accomplice. And I was your accomplice.”
The sky rang with the gigantic alien’s cosmic laughter, Kiley covered his ears to blot out the hideous sound. Tears of rage flooded his eves, “It’s not fair! It’s—”
“Sorry, Kiley.”
Like an ant, the thief thought bitterly. I’m dying like an ant.
And then the great foot came down.
THE END
No Way Out
When the facts are what they are, a man has a choice of three conclusions: I must not. He won’t let me. Or, It can’t be. But no choice at all as to whether it will be or not . . .
FOR Lester McClellan, Secretary General of the United Nations, it promised to be just another busy morning. Routine was a comforting cradle that kept him from feeling the strain of his weighty office.
He riffled his way through the accumulated mail the chute had deposited on his desk, then pushed the stack of papers to one side and reflectively drew a fingertip across the desk’s dark, lustrous wooden surface. He was proud of the desk; not everyone rated real wood instead of formica or some other wood-imitation.
The wall clock showed 0917. The Outworld delegates were due to show up at 0930. A little tensely, McClellan forced his attention back to the morning mail.
Routine, he told himself. It’s just routine.
But it wasn’t just routine. That was what was troubling him. In thirteen minutes three smug Outworlders were due to come through his door, and then all his diplomatic skill, accumulated over years, would have to be brought into play.
He unfolded the pink slip from BuPop. The figure stood at 9,111,234,006. McClellan drew the previous day’s slip from the desk and compared it; the computer was known to err, at least once every ten thousand days or so. But no error had been made this time. Yesterday’s figure was 9,111,102,006. One hundred thirty-two thousand human beings had been added to the world’s total population since the previous morning.
McClellan stared blankly at the BuPop info-slip, then slid it into the drawer. Next year—2180—was a Census year. Demographic techniques always improved considerably in each ten-year span; the census-takers would probably discover a couple of hundred millions who had been overlooked last time around. It was only to be expected.
On his desk also was a memo from Kingston, head of Research. It said simply: “Lester—I think we’re getting close. Can you drop down to my office about 1630 this afternoon for a progress briefing?”
Kingston and his men were working on a faster-than-light drive: another of Earth’s frantic attempts to dispose of its excess population. McClellan dictated an answering memo: “Tell Dr. Kingston that I’ll be at his place at the hour requested, barring troubles.”
Getting close, the memo said. McClellan wondered. By tonight, Kingston’s project, once thought just a pipe dream, might be Earth’s only hope. The stars—
The annunciator chimed.
“Yes?” McClellan said.
“Three gentlemen to see you, sir. Mr. Ludwig, Mr. Castellani, Mr. Rockwood.”
McClellan glanced at the clock. Damned Outworlders were seven minutes early. Impulsively he jammed the rest of the mail in a desk drawer and said, “Send them in, please.”
He straightened his tie, smoothed back his graying hair, fussed with his short clipped mustache. He took one last look at the memo from the Assembly instructing him as to the part he was to play in the negotiations.
(“. . . You are to exert every means within your power to persuade the colonial visitors to reopen their worlds to immigration . . .”)
He scowled fitfully, dumped the memo in the disposal chute, tugged briefly at his collar, and glanced up, calm and outwardly self-possessed, as the three Outworlders trooped into his office.
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
They arrayed themselves in a tense little line on the carpeting before his desk. They looked uneasy; small wonder, McClellan thought. After all, the Outworlders were in the position of children who had refused to come to the aid of their aged parents in a time of need. No one likes to be open to a charge of filial ingratitude, even when he may have excellent reasons for holding his point of view.
“Won’t you be seated?” McClellan said urbanely. He appraised the tone of his own voice: it was smooth, unwavering, even. He was pleased. Diplomacy was his job; he wanted to do it well.
The Outworlders moved gawkily toward the three chairs he indicated, and after finally settling themselves, leaned forward eagerly with hands placed uncomfortably on their knees.
McClellan glanced quizzically from one to the next until the man on the extreme right, a long-legged, pale man with deep-set and disconcerting eyes, said, “Permit me to make the introductions. Immediately to my right is Donato Castellani, Vice Prefect of Mars Central; to his right is Earl Ludwig, Third Chancellor of Callisto Colony.”
“And I take it then that you’re David Rockwood, Arch Secretary of Venus Mid?”
“Correct.”
McClellan studied them. Castellani was short, pudgy, with sandy hair and a nearly-bridgeless nose; Ludwig’s face seemed all cheekbones and planes. All three were dressed in traditional pinstripes, which struck the secretary general as mildly amusing, since no self-respecting Terran diplomat would wear anything so stereotyped. But these three, he reminded himself, were colonials—gauche, nervous, and very, very self-serious.
He assumed an air of complete relaxation to dismay them further. “As secretary general of the United Nations, I’m happy to welcome you back to the planet of your ancestors. Is this a first visit?”
“It is.”
McClellan smiled. “You’ll find Earth perhaps not so attractive as your native worlds, but I hope you won’t be too critical of us. After all, we didn’t have the advantage of the Terraforming process.”
“Of course not,” Rock wood said. He seemed to be the spokesman. His words were clipped, precise, and faintly alien-sounding. Obviously pronunciation had diverged from Earth-norm considerably in the four generations of the colonies’ existence.
The time had come to end the more-or-less courteous preliminaries; McClellan said, “We’re very happy that the Outworlds agreed to send observers. There’s a major problem here and we think you can help us.”
“If it’s within our power to do so,” Rockwood said.
“Naturally. I imagine you’re thoroughly familiar with the text of the Assembly resolution inviting the three Outworlds to send observers to Earth?”
“We are.”
“Good. I’ve arranged for you to have a guided tour of our planet—a brief tour, to be sure, but one that will amply illustrate our major problem. Which is, of course, overpopulation.”
Castellani of Mars Central squinted at him. “At the conclusion of which tour, you’re going to request us to open our planets for further colonization. Well, I think you ought to know—”
Rockwood jabbed the Martian swiftly and efficiently in his plump stomach with an elbow; it was a surreptitious gesture, but McClellan’s quick eyes took it in. He smiled good-naturedly.
“The Assembly resolution,” Rockwood said stiffly, “requests us to reserve our decision until we’ve seen Earth. Very well. We intend to abide by our agreement, and we’ll take a look around.”
Castellan looked abashed and crestfallen. McClellan let his eyelids droop briefly in a flickering concession to weariness. He had told the Assembly and the Council both that this mission was a waste of his time and of the Outworlders’. But the Assembly had passed the resolution and had implicity ordered the secretary general to persuade the Outworlders in some manner to admit Earth’s ravening overflow.
(” . . . exert every means . . .”)
He moistened his lips and rose, digging his knuckles into the authentic wood of the desk. The Outworlders wouldn’t be impressed by a wooden desktop—not when their pleasantly arboreal worlds boasted more trees per square mile than all of North America and—
“If you’d like to begin the tour now—” he said questioningly, and left the sentence unfinished.
“This is essentially a show-cause operation,” McClellan remarked as he led them down the corridor to the liftshaft. “I mean in legal terms. You’re requiring us to show cause why we should not be compelled to remain bottled up on Earth—and once that’s done, you’ll have to show cause why you should not admit us.”
“It’s curious to me,” Ludwig said, “that Terran law should work on so many negative principles. A prosecutor, for example, is supposed to show cause why the defendant should not be found innocent.” The Callistan shrugged. “You make needless verbal complications for yourselves.”
“It amuses us,” McClellan said. “Involutions appeal to our way of thinking.”
They entered the liftshaft and spiraled downward to Sublevel 23. The first stop on McClellan’s list was BuBop.
“We keep check on our population statistics from here,” the secretary general commented, nudging open the door to the BuBop office. Douglass, the computer technician, looked up and regarded McClellan gravely.
“Good morning, Mr. McClellan.”
“Hello, Douglass. These gentlemen are some friends of mine. I’d like them to have a look at the way BuBop functions.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
BuPop was a mere cubicle, not more than fifteen feet square. Its walls were lined with screens bright with data; but the computers, were far below. McClellan gestured to the broad screen mounted in the wall opposite the door. A line of bold red figures marched across it, flickering and changing rapidly.
“There’s the official record of Earth’s population,” he said. “Every birth and every death is automatically fed into the main computer channel as soon as it’s known, and within two hours gets indicated up there.”
He glanced at the figure. It was now 9,111,236,917. According to the 0900 slip, it had been down near 234,000 or so. Two thousand lives had been added to the roster since he had entered the office at 0900 . . . thirty-one minutes ago.
As they watched, the last three digits wavered and blurred; when the blurring ceased, some hundred units had been deleted. Now the screen read 9,111,236,823.
“What happened?” Rockwood asked.
Death entries clogging up in the smaller comps. It happens some times; those computers are busy day and night. Just keep watching.”
They watched. A flurry of births followed; within minutes, the total was climbing toward 9,111,237,000.
“Hardly a day goes by without at least a hundred fifty thousand units being added to the total,” McClellan said. “Yesterday’s was low; only 132,000. But as you can see our population keeps climbing steadily. It’s an average gain of about a million a week, fifty million a year. Only there’s compound interest involved in the increase, of course. Fifty years ago we were only gaining about thirty-nine million a year.”
“You unloaded several billions setting up the colonies,” Ludwig observed. “My own world, Callisto, still is thinly populated, but I know Mars has almost a billion, and Venus—”
“Total Outworld population is just above two billion,” Rockwood informed.
McClellan nodded. “Opening up the colonies helped. But with an increase-rate of fifty million and up per year, we’ll have added another billion to Earth’s population in less than two decades.”
“What you need is an efficient plague,” Castellani said. “Something that’ll clear away three or four billions.”
“Yes,” McClellan said coldly. “Or an interplanetary war. That might do it.”
For a few instants tension crackled in the BuPop cubicle. Then Ludwig broke the silence by gesturing to another screen.
“What’s this?”
“Population distribution. We do our best to keep exploiting every bit of cultivatable land, and to keep population density roughly equal all over the globe. It’s strictly a temporary expedient, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And this screen over here—”
The statistics were somewhat numbing, McClellan decided, as he finally shepherded the three emissaries away. In fifteen minutes more than a thousand units had been added to the total on the BuPop screen. The Outworlders were visibly uneasy, unhappy, out of sorts. Mere numbers had a stultifying effect. The next step was to show the Outworlders actuality.
The copter was waiting on the roof as scheduled. The pilot stood tensely at ease; he was a fidgety-looking man with the bleak, harried look of someone whose family lived in a Class Nine one-room “apartment.” At McClellan’s approach, he climbed into the cockpit and readied for a take-off.
“You’ll be able to observe actual living conditions from here,” McClellan said. The three Outworlders took seats in the copter’s rear.
“This is New York,” McClellan said, as the small craft sprang into the air. “Current population of New York City is about thirteen million. New York City is just a legal fiction, though, as you’ll see. There’s hardly any gradation between the five boroughs and the outlying suburbs.”
The Outworlders peered down, frowned, twitched, whispered to each other. Below, New York unfolded itself, row on row on row of dwellings stretching in a dull gray-brown sheet to the horizon.
“The largest city on Mars has seven hundred thousand people,” Castellani said.
“Callisto has no cities,” commented Ludwig. “We discourage urban accumulation. Of course, with our relatively small area—”
McClellan remained silent, allowing the colonials to get a full view of the continent and receive maximum impact.
“Note the absence of trees,” he remarked later, as they passed over New Jersey. “We have hardly any. Wood is a precious commodity on Earth—a luxury substance, you might say.”
“One would wonder where you plan to put the billions you anticipate in coming years,” Rock wood said.
“One would wonder indeed.” After a lag Ludwig asked, “How is the Terraforming of Titan and Ganymede coming along?”
“So far as I know it’s nearly completed. Both worlds will be ready for colonization within five years,” McClellan said. “But then we’ll have run out of worlds to Terraform. Mercury’s too hot; Pluto’s too far out. The others are too big.”
“There are more moons,” Castellani observed. “Including your own.”
“Yes,” McClellan admitted dryly. “But moons tend to be small and barren, and not worth the billions it costs to Terraform them.” He chuckled. “We could Terraform Deimos in ten years, at a cost of thirty billion dollars—but how much of our overflow will be absorbed by a moon five miles in diameter?”
“You’ve deliberately picked the smallest one!”
“Indeed. But even Luna could hardly hold more than eight or nine hundred million.”
McClellan turned away and looked down. A spot of green appeared—some local sanctuary, no doubt. There still was grass and trees in various parts of America. But when the Parks Act ten years ago halved Yellowstone and Yosemite to provide more housing and more room for industry, Earth’s parks had been doomed. He scowled and shook his head.
The pilot was following a carefully-plotted itinerary that would take him over the most thickly-populated sections of North America. McClellan listened to the steady throb of the jets and let his eyes be caught up by the unending grayness of the land below. The colonials seemed impressed—horrified, in fact.
Perhaps, he thought, the Assembly had been right; if you brought some colonials down here and let them see first-hand what sort of hive their mother world had become, perhaps they’d change their minds about the Exclusion Acts.
Perhaps. But McClellan wondered if it made any difference what the colonials were thinking. Mars and Venus and Callisto were only small worlds too, after all.
