Our Children's Children

9

"I would suppose," said Maynard Gale, "that you would like to know exactly who we are and where we're from."

"That," agreed the President, "might be an excellent place to start."

"We are," said Gale, "most ordinary, uncomplicated people from the year 2498, almost five centuries in your future. The span of time between you and us is about the same as the span of time between the American voyages of Christopher Columbus and your present day.

"We are traveling here through what I understand you are calling, in a speculative way, time tunnels, and that name is good enough. We are transporting ourselves through time and I will not even attempt to try to explain how it is done. Actually I couldn't even if I wanted to. I do not understand the principles, other than in a very general way. If, in fact, I understand them at all. The best that I could do would be to give you a very inadequate layman's explanation."

"You say," said the Secretary of State, "that you are transporting yourselves through time back to the present moment. May I ask how many of you intend to make the trip?"

"Under ideal circumstances, Mr. Williams, I would hope all of us."

"You mean your entire population? Your intention is to leave your world of 2498 empty of any human beings?"

"That, sir, is our heartfelt hope."

"And how many of you are there?"

"Give or take a few thousand, two billion of us. Our population, as you will note, is somewhat less than yours at the present moment and later I will explain why this…"

"But why?" asked the Attorney General. "Why did you do this? You must know that the world's economy cannot support both your population and our own. Here in the United States, perhaps in a few of the more favored countries of the world, the situation can be coped with for a limited period of time. We can, as a matter of utmost urgency, shelter you and feed you, although it will strain even our resources. But there are other areas of the Earth that could not do this, even for a week."

"We are well aware of that," said Maynard Gale. "We are trying to make certain provisions to alleviate the situation. In India, in China, in some African and South American areas we are sending back in time not only people, but wheat and other food supplies, in the hope that whatever we can send through may help. We know how inadequate these provisions will be. And we know as well the stress which we place upon all the people of this time. You must believe me when I say we did not arrive at our decision lightly."

"I would hope not," said the President, somewhat tartly.

"I think," said Gale, "that in your time you may have taken note of published speculations about whether or not there are other intelligences in the universe, with the almost unanimous conclusion that there must surely be. Which raises the subsidiary question of why, if this is so, none of these intelligences has sought us out, why we've not been visited. The answer to this, of course, is that space is vast and the distances between stars are great and that our solar system lies far out in one of the galactic arms, far from the greater star density in the galactic core, where intelligence might have risen first. And then there is the speculation concerning what kind of people, if you want to call them that, might come visiting if they should happen to do so, Here I think the overwhelming, although by no means unanimous, body of opinion is that by the time a race had developed star-roving capability they would have arrived at a point of social and ethical development where they would pose no threat."

"And while this may be true enough, there would always be exceptions and we, it seems, up in our own time, have become the victims of one of these exceptions."

"What you are saying," said Sandburg, "is that you have been visited, with what appear to have been unhappy results.

Is that why you sent ahead the warning about the planting of artillery?"

"You haven't done that yet? From the tone of your voice…"

"There has not been the time."

"Sir, I plead with you. We discussed the possibility that some of them might break through the defenses we set up and invade the tunnels. We have strong defenses, of course, and there are strict orders, which will be carried out by devoted men, to destroy any tunnel where this might happen, but there always is the chance that something could go wrong."

"But your warning was so indefinite. How will we know if something…"

"You would know," said Gale. "There would be no doubt at all. Take a cross between a grizzly bear and a tiger, elephant size. Let it move so fast that it seems no more than a blur. Give it teeth and claws and a long, heavy tail armed with poison spines. Not that they look like bears or tigers, or even elephants…"

"You mean they carry nothing but claws and teeth…"

"You're thinking of weapons, sir. They don't need weapons. They are unbelievably fast and strong. They are filled with thoughtless bloodlust. They take a lot of killing. Tear them apart and they still keep coming on. They can tunnel under fortifications and tear strong walls apart…"

"It is unbelievable," said the Attorney General.

"You are right," said Gale, "but I am telling you the truth. We have held them off for almost twenty years, but we can foresee the end. We foresaw it a few years after they first landed. We knew we only had one chance — to retreat, and the only place we could retreat to was into the past. We can hold them off no longer. Gentlemen, believe me, five hundred years from now the human earth is coming to an end."

"They can't follow you through time, however," said the President.

"If you mean, can they duplicate our time capability, I am fairly sure they can't. They're not that kind of being."

"There is a serious flaw in your story," said the Secretary of State. "You describe these alien invaders as little more than ferocious beasts. Intelligent, perhaps, but still mere animals. For intelligence to be transformed into a technology such as would be necessary to build what I suppose you would call a spaceship, they would require manipulatory members-hands, tentacles, something of the sort."

"They have them:"

"But you said…"

"I'm sorry," said Gale. "It cannot all be told at once. They have members armed with claws. They have other members that end in the equivalent of hands. And they have manipulatory tentacles as well. Theirs is a strange evolutionary case. In their evolutionary development, apparently, and for what reason we do not know, they did not trade one thing for another, as had been the case in the evolution of the creatures of the Earth. They developed new organs and abilities, but they let loose of none of those they already had. They hung onto everything. They loaded the evolutionary deck, in favor of themselves.

"I would suspect that if they wished they could build most efficient weapons. We have often wondered why they didn't. Our psychologists think they know why it is. They postulate that these aliens are a warrior race. They glory in killing. They may have developed their space-traveling capability for no other reason than that they might find other things to kill. Killing is a personal thing for them, an intensely personal experience, like religion once was for the human race. And since it is so personal, it must be done personally, with no mechanical aids. It must be done with claws and fangs and poison tail. They may feel about mechanical killing aids as an accomplished swordsman of some hundreds of years ago must have regarded the first guns, with contempt as a cowardly way to fight. Perhaps each one of them must continually reassert his manhood or his beasthood, his selfhood, perhaps, and the only means by which he can do this is slaughter, personally accomplished. Their individual standing, their regard for themselves, the regard of their fellows for them, may be based upon the quality and the quantity of their killing. Once a fight is done they eat their victims, or as many of them as they can, but whether this is for sustenance or is a ritualistic matter, of course we do not know. In fact, we know little of them. There has been, as you can imagine, no communication with them. We have photographed them and we have studied them dead, but this is only superficial to any understanding of them. They do not fight campaigns. They seem to have no real plan of battle; no strategy. If they had, they would have wiped us out long ago. They make sudden raids and then they retire. They make no attempt to hold territory as such. They don't loot. All they seem to want is killing. At times it has seemed to us that they have deliberately not wiped us out, as if they were conserving us, making us last as long as possible so we'd still be there to satisfy their bloodlust."

Wilson glanced at the girl sitting on the sofa beside Gale and caught on her face a shadow of terror.

"Twenty years, you say," said Sandburg. "You held these things off for twenty years."

"We are doing better now," said Gale. "Or at least we were doing better before we left. We have weapons now. At first we had none. The Earth had been without war and weapons for a hundred years or more when their spaceship came. They would have exterminated us then if they had fought a total war, but as I have explained, it has not been total war. That gave us time to develop some defense. We fabricated weapons, some of them rather sophisticated weapons, but even your weapons of today would not be enough-your nuclear weapons, perhaps, but no sane society…"

He stopped in some embarrassment, waited for a moment and then went on. "We killed a lot of them; of course, but it seemed to make no difference. There always seemed as many of them as ever, if not more. Only the one spaceship came, so far as we could determine. It could not have carried many of them, large as it was. The only answer to their numbers seems to be that they are prolific breeders and that they reach maturity in an incredibly short time, They don't seem to mind dying. They never run or hide. I suppose, again, that it is their warrior's code. Nothing quite so glorious as a death in battle. And they took so damn much killing. Kill a hundred of them and let one get through and it more than evens the score. I imagine that we lived the same kind of fear-ridden life as the old American pioneers who lived in the shadow of Indian raids. If we had stayed, they would eventually have wiped us out. Even trying to conserve us, as they may have been trying, they still would have exterminated us. That is why we're here.

"It is impossible, I think, for the human race to accept the sort of creatures they are. There is nothing that we know that can compare with them. The traditionally blood-crazed weasel in the chicken coop is a pale imitation of them."

"Perhaps," said the President, "in view of what we have been told, we should do something now in regard to that artillery."

"We have, of course," the Attorney General pointed out, "no real evidence…"

"I would rather," said Sandburg sharply, "move without ironclad evidence than find it suddenly sitting in my lap."

The President reached for his phone. He said to the Secretary of Defense, "You can use this phone. Kim will put through the call."

"After Jim has made his call," said State, "perhaps I should use the phone. We'll want to get off an advisory to the other governments."