H. L. Gold (ed), page 69
Cap Haney’s eyes start to pop out of his head. But then the guy in Palmyra uniform grins and says, “Okay, I’m a Moklin. But us Moklins like humans so much, I thought it would be nice to make a trip to Earth and see more humans. My parents planned it five years ago, made me look like this wonderful human, and hid me for this moment. But we would not want to make any difficulties for humans, so I have confessed and I will leave the ship.”
He takes it as a joke on him. He talks English as good as anybody. I don’t know how anybody could tell which was the human guy and which one the Moklin, but this Moklin grins and steps down, and the other Moklins admire him enormous for passing even a few minutes as human among humans.
We get away from there so fast, he is allowed to keep the human uniform.
Moklin is the first planet that humans ever get off of, moving fast, breathing hard, and sweating copious. It’s one of those things that humans just can’t take. Not that there’s anything wrong with Moklins. They’re swell folks. They like humans. But humans just can’t take the idea of Moklins passing for human and being all the things humans want to be themselves. I think it’s really a false alarm. I’ll find out pretty soon.
Inspector Caldwell and Brooks get married, and they go off to a post on Briarius Four—a swell place for a honeymoon if there ever was one— and I guess they are living happy ever after. Me, I go to the new job the Company assigns me—telling me stern not to talk about Moklin, which I don’t—and the Space Patrol orders no human ship to land on Moklin for any reason.
But I’ve been saving money and worrying. I keep thinking of those three Moklin kids that Inspector Caldwell knows she ain’t the father of. I worry about those kids. I hope nothing’s happened to them. Moklin kids grow up fast, like I told you. They’ll be just about grown now.
I’ll tell you. I’ve bought me a little private spacecruiser, small but good. I’m shoving off for Moklin next week. If one of those three ain’t married, I’m going to marry her, Moklin-style, and bring her out to a human colony planet. We’ll have some kids. I know just what I want my kids to be like. They’ll have plenty of brains—top-level brains—and the girls will be real good-looking!
But besides that, I’ve got to bring some other Moklins out and start them passing for human, too. Because my kids are going to need other Moklins to marry, ain’t they? It’s not that I don’t like humans. I do! If
the fellow I look like—Joe Brinkley—hadn’t got killed accidental on that hunting trip with Deeth, I never would have thought of taking his place and being Joe Brinkley. But you can’t blame me for wanting to live among humans.
Wouldn’t you, if you was a Moklin?
JOHN CHRISTOPHER
Man of Destiny
They clock the spaceships in from the main control tower seventeen miles southeast of Tycho. The magnesium flares blossom out against the stars and the searching telescopes find them and name them. The Elistra back from Procyon, the Alte Wien from Lumen III, the Winston from Sirius. Ships laden with passengers and freight from halfway across the visible universe, controlled corks bobbing up through the maelstrom of time and space to that same narrow arc of the lunar sky. They come in on time— solar time. There’s no danger to life or goods or schedule.
It wasn’t always so. When the slip process was first being developed, there were both danger and uncertainty for those isolated men, strapped in their bubbles of metal and plastic, who voyaged out across an alien dimension to the far reaches of the sky. Their job was to take routine star pictures and then come back on the reverse. But the reverse did not always work. They were stranded then, hundreds or thousands of light-years from the planet they had known as home.
From the moment the reverse failed, Theodore Pike concentrated on the lucky side of his situation. He might have been lost in the remotenesses of interstellar space, condemned to suffocation when his meager oxygen supply gave out—a week of waiting for death unless he had the courage to seek it out first.
As it was, he was slap in the middle of a solar system, a matter of three hundred million miles from a blue giant. The system, as he had planned it for the report that would not now be made, was not of any notable size. There were only three planets. One was very large and impossibly distant from the sun. But there was some hope in the other two. In size they were reasonable enough. He arrowed down toward the first of them three days later; and at once set the coracle climbing up again, through a methane atmosphere, from a barren and unrewarding surface.
That left one planet. Only one.
When he released the hood and the planet’s air came in, it was like the first time he had tasted wine, in the late spring at Heidelberg, under the gaudy cherry blossoms. He lifted his body clear and slid down the still warm metal of the spheroid to the mossy ground. The moss was dark green, and deep and springy. His feet went down two or three inches, but there was resilience even beneath that.
He looked up at the sky. It had a strange and strangely warm green tinge; the sun was hidden behind tufted blue-green clouds. He looked toward where it should be with contemptuous, good-humored acknowledgment. It had done its job; he was all right now. Then he stood easily erect beside the spheroid, watching the natives hesitantly approaching from the village fifty yards away.
They were humanoid bipeds, with a natural green-tinged fur, but wearing artificial decorations and the beginnings of clothing. He stood quite still as they approached. Ten yards away, with a slow and somehow graceful ceremony, they all knelt. They rested their heads on the green moss. When he spoke, they looked up. He beckoned and they came closer. Their leader knelt again at his feet. Quite casually Theo put one foot on the prostrate head.
It was accomplished. The natives had found their god.
The first few months passed very quickly. He had set himself one task— to learn the language. After that, the life of Reilly. Things were already very pleasant. The bed made of something like swansdown, the spiced and delicate foods, the sweet yellow wine which, by a dispensation of Providence, had a far less intoxicating effect on him than on the natives. They got drunk on it; a cheerful, happy drunk every seventh or eighth day. He was able to preside over their revels benignly enough, mellowed and happy enough himself in—as he reflected sardonically—his divine way.
He had been figuring on a week of seven days and only later discovered that the natives had a ten month year. The four months thus far had been rather less than one of them, but at the end of that time he could communicate well enough.
He called the chief, Pernar, into the hut that he had once owned and gave the preliminary directions for the building of his palace. The natives already had fire, but had not applied it to the working of metals. He gave them that, and the spoked wheel. They were enough to be going on with, in addition to the supreme, never-ending boon of his own personal godhead. He had found an outcrop of good granite, tinged with rosy green in the prevailing light of the planet, less than three miles from the village.
The palace went up fast. He took it over with due ceremony. The natives were puzzled but respectful.
That was where the settling down began. At one time, at the beginning, he had held vague hopes of being rescued through the slip. He had even planned great beacon towers spaced across the planet. But more sober reflection proved them futile. Even with every imaginable success, the Mendola process could not be studding the universe with ships enough to make the possibility of this planet’s discovery more than fantastically remote. This was a life sentence.
He had something bigger to do now. He would leave something for the exploring slip-ships to find: a civilization founded on a manifest divinity. At its heart a shrine, and in its shrine the memory of what Theodore Pike had made of his exile.
In the eighth month of the planet’s year, he provided the steam engine.
The natives stood around with their usual impeccable gravity; Pernar surrounded by his men, and even the bolder of the women and children. The tiny model hissed; the small piston began to work the wheel.
“In this, my people, is your future,” Theo told them. “With this your labor will be lightened, your fields made fruitful. Your ships and wagons will cross the wide spaces of the world. All this your lord brings to his people.”
They nodded solemnly and bowed. The sun was at its zenith, where its light concentrated into an astonishing blueness. Every day at this time the green became blue for an hour; by now, an ordinary miracle. He looked over their heads toward the dazzling sapphire of his palace. At its threshold stood the two gigantic replicas of his own image. The small white jet of steam climbed unwaveringly. Eventually there would have to be a larger palace, he reflected. But still here, in this spot, still enshrining the spheroid and the spot where it had landed.
Who would be in it? he wondered to himself. He had thought of it before; it was his most sustaining fantasy. The great slip-ship settling down into this blue-green world, being taken (as the tradition would demand) to the shrine of the great palace-temple, looking with astonishment—and respect? pride?—on the first interstellar coracle, the tomb of Theodore Pike. What would the visitors be like? They would be respectful, anyway. They would be proud of the memory of the first of their line. His name would leap through the vast gulfs that now cut him off from all his youth might have enjoyed. That made up for everything.
But everything was quite a lot.
Following Theo’s demonstration, the natives seemed in no hurry to adopt the steam engine. Every now and then the elders would come to watch the little model puffing away. Theo explained it to them several times, and they nodded their heads in respectful approval. But all their working time now was being devoted to the harvest. The whole tribe— men, women, children—toiled in the fields through the long hot days.
Even in his natural indolence he was aware of a sense of urgency about their labor; they worked on their holiday now, only getting drunk when the green twilight had darkened into night. He had the shrewd sense not to interfere. A natural rhythm of the tribe, he guessed, best modified by the fundamental change in environment which his technology would inevitably create.
He went out into the fields one day to watch them. Pernar, the chief, was sweating with the rest. Theo lay back in the springy moss and watched them. He noticed idly that the wagons carrying produce—mounted now on his wheels, the old crude wooden skids having been discarded— did not go back to the village, but away up the slope, in the opposite direction. He asked Pernar why.
Pernar explained, “Against the Time, Lord.”
“The time?”
Pernar paused for a moment, fumbling. At last he used a word Theo had not heard before. “What’s that?”
Pernar said awkwardly, “The wild air … the water.”
A rainy season! Theo understood. It was reasonable enough that the harvest had to be in before the rains came. But that didn’t explain the wagons trekking away uphill. He asked Pernar again.
“At the Time, we retreat. It is necessary.”
“Necessary” was a common and useful word in the vocabulary of the natives; it stood for anything they were in the habit of doing. Eventually he would do something about it himself. But now it was pleasant enough to lie back in the green moss and watch his people going about their business. Let this coming rainy season pass in the usual way; next year he would really get down to pouring them into his mold—into the necessary mold for the empire that he would build and leave as his record to those ships a thousand years in the future.
The sky thickened into cloud over a period of several days; from thin twists and strands low on the horizon to ropes and bunched masses, and, finally, a universal, paralyzing gray. Two days after this unbroken canopy had settled over them, Pernar came to him in the palace. “Lord, it is the Time.”
Theo said, “How long will your people be gone?’
Pernar was startled. “You are not coming with us, Lord?”
“For you in your huts, the retreat may be necessary; these granite walls are protection enough against the wild air. In other years, you, too, will have refuges like this. Go in peace now.”
Pernar nodded reluctantly. “Your other servants, Lord …”
He was referring to the personal servants who attended the god-king in his palace.
“They will be safe here,” Theo said.
“They will not stay, Lord. They dare not stay.”
The best argument, Theo realized, was acquiescence. When they returned to find the palace still standing beside the storm-blasted huts of the village, that would be the real conviction. He said simply, “Let food and drink be made ready. For how long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks, then.”
He was aware of loneliness when the last of them had gone, up the rising ground to whatever ritual refuge they used against the storms. Now once more he was conscious of his isolation, cut off from his own people by uncountable galactic miles, by the long sweep of time itself. Only the realization of destiny made the future seem worth while. He was pleased, in a way, when the rising wind began to howl about the village. The savageness of the elements gave him something to measure himself against.
But he was not prepared for the fury that developed. The storm rose from climax to climax; rain belted down torrentially from the raging skies. On the third day it rose to hurricane force.
From an embrasure slit, he watched the pitiful native huts torn from their moorings and flung like tattered leaves about the swirling sky. It seemed impossible that there could be more violence, but more came. The air shrieked in protest, a high-pitched wail under the constant lash. Theo watched it in amazement.
He was more amazed still when Pernar came to him, drenched and battered from his voyage through the storm.
“You must come, Lord.”
“Into that?” He pointed out into the storm. “You’d better stay here yourself now.”
“The water … the water that rises.”
“Floods? This place is high enough. We’re all right here.”
“You must come, Lord.”
The argument between them went on as the late afternoon passed into night. And with nightfall, astonishingly, the rain stopped and the gale dropped. Theo said to Pernar triumphantly, “You see?”
For answer Pernar insisted on dragging him outside into the open. The ground was soggy underfoot; the mashed remains of the huts lay before them. Pernar pointed. On the far horizon a glow became increasingly brilliant against the thinning clouds. The cloud strands twisted and broke, and, in the interval of clear sky, he saw it.
A moon. A giant, gibbous moon poised above the skyline like a grinning skull.
But how? He knew this planet had no satellite.
When he considered things, it was obvious enough. One of the other two planets in the system, almost certainly the nearer one, with the methane atmosphere, was eccentrically orbited. It was this the natives measured their year by—the regular approach and the attendant perturbations. All their life, inevitably, must be regulated by it.
Pernar said, “The rising water, Lord …”
He understood that, too. With one last glance at his sand-castle palace, he said, “Let’s go.”
The refuge was under the rocky knob of the hill’s carapace, a natural cave hollowed out and improved by the work of generations. They arrived there with less than an hour to spare. Theo watched, with Pernar and the others, the brilliant globe that put out the light of the usual stars in a sky now clear and unclouded again. And he watched the tidal wave surge like a moving mountain of water to within twenty feet of where they crouched.
Watching it lap the land, almost at their feet, he considered the kind of courage that could have made Pernar go down into that doomed valley to rescue him. Nor was it any easily dismissed compulsion of religion. He had been fooling himself about that. You did not rescue a god from the consequences of his folly.
They were a peaceable and docile people. They had accepted his commands and they had given him service; if he wanted to be a god, they were willing to let him. But they weren’t his subjects of his disciples. More important than those things, they were his friends.
There was still much he could give them, but more, he suspected, that they would give him.
Finding himself not a god was a relief, somehow. It was less of a strain to be human and fallible.
The floods receded, and the tribe moved again into the valley. As the great blue sun burned the water out of the steaming soil, they set to work to plant the seeds again and to rebuild the vanished huts.
Theo worked with them. He found an unexpected satisfaction in these labors, and an increasingly deeper realization of the nobility of these creatures who seemed to be without even the slightest trace of mutual hostility or anger. They accepted his working with them in the fields as casually as they had previously accepted his overlordship; the difference was that now he was one of them and wanted no more than the awareness of that oneness.
Sometimes, especially when he passed the broken and scattered stone of what had been his palace, he remembered the world he had come from, and that great ship that—in a hundred years, a thousand, a hundred thousand— might drop through the green glow of the sky.
But the memory and the thought were tinged with fear. Fear of anything that might come to disrupt the beauty and peace of this undemanding life.
When the planting was over, there was the season of recreation. They danced, supple, graceful, unhurried dances, to the music of flutelike instruments ; and chanted poems whose tenderness he understood more clearly as his mind grew more at home in their liquid but sinewy tongue.
Day after day, week after week. Work and rest and laughter and song.
Where he had once asked for worship, he found himself almost reverent.
He had not guessed there could be such joy in humility.
