Rule Golden

2

“Stop it!” he said sharply.

I was trembling. I had fallen into a crouch without realizing it, weight on my toes, fists clenched.

I straightened up slowly and put my hands into my pockets. “Sorry.”

The speaker rasped.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” said Parst. “We’re coming out.” He turned as the door opened, and I followed him, feeling all churned up inside.

Halfway down the corridor I stopped. Parst turned and looked at me.

“Ithaca,” I said.

Three months back there had been a Monster-from-Mars scare in and around Ithaca, New York; several hundred people had seen, or claimed to have seen, a white wingless aircraft hovering over various out-of-the-way places; and over thirty, including one very respectable Cornell professor, had caught sight of something that wasn’t a man in the woods around Cayuga Lake. None of these people had got close enough for a good look, but nearly all of them agreed on one point—the thing walked erect, but had too many arms and legs... .

“Yes,” said Parst. “That’s right. But let’s talk about it in my office, Mr. Dahl.”

I followed him back there. As soon as the door was shut I said, “Where did it come from? Are there any more of them? What about the ship?”

He offered me a cigarette. I took it and sat down, hitting the chair by luck.

“Those are just three of the questions we can’t answer,” he said. “He claims that his home world revolves around a sun in our constellation of Aquarius; he says that it isn’t visible from Earth. He also—”

I said, “He talks—? You’ve taught him to speak English?” For some reason that was hard to accept; then I remembered the linguists.

“Yes. Quite well, considering that he doesn’t have vocal cords like ours. He uses a tympanum under each of those vertical openings in his body—those are his mouths. His name is Aza-Kra, by the way. I was going to say that he also claims to have come here alone?As for the ship, he says it’s hidden, but he won’t tell us where. We’ve been searching that area, particularly the hills near Cayuga and the lake itself, but we haven’t turned it up yet. It’s been suggested that he may have launched it under remote control and put it into an orbit somewhere outside the atmosphere. The Lunar Observatory is watching for it, and so are the orbital stations, but I’m inclined to think that’s a dead end. In any case, that’s not my responsibility. He had some gadgets in his possession when he was captured, but even those are being studied elsewhere. Chillicothe is what you saw a few minutes ago, and that’s all it is. God knows it’s enough.”

His intercom buzzed. “Yes.”

“Dr. Meshevski would like to talk to you about the technical vocabularies, sir.”

“Ask him to hold it until the conference if he possibly can.”

“Yes, sir”

“Two more questions we can’t answer,” Parst said, “are what his civilization is like and what he came here to do. I’ll tell you what he says. The planet he comes from belongs to a galactic union of highly advanced, peace-loving races. He came here to help us prepare ourselves for membership in that union.”

I was trying hard to keep up, but it wasn’t easy. After a moment I said, “Suppose it’s true?”

He gave me the cold eye.

“All right, suppose it’s true.” For the first time, his voice was impatient. “Then suppose the opposite. Think about it for a minute.”

I saw where he was leading me, but I tried to circle around to it from another direction; I wanted to reason it out for myself. I couldn’t make the grade; I had to fall back on analogies, which are a kind of thinking I distrust.

You were a cannibal islander, and a missionary came along. He meant well, but you thought he wanted to steal your yam-fields and your wives, so you chopped him up and ate him for dinner.

Or:

You were a West Indian, and Columbus came along. You treated him as a guest, but he made a slave of you, worked you till you dropped, and finally wiped out your whole nation, to the last woman and child.

I said, “A while ago you mentioned three or four years as the possible term of the Project. Did you—?”

“That wasn’t meant to be taken literally,” he said, “It may take a lifetime.” He was staring at his desk-top.

“In other words, if nothing stops you, you’re going to go right on just this way, sitting on this thing. Until What’s-his-name dies, or his friends show up with an army, or something else blows it wide open.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, damn it, don’t you see that’s the one thing you can’t do? Either way you guess it, that won’t work. If he’s friendly—”

Parst lifted a pencil in his hand and slapped it palmdown against the desk-top. His mouth was tight. “It’s necessary,” he said.

After a silent moment he straightened in his chair and spread the fingers of his right hand at me. “One,” he said, touching the thumb: “weapons. Leaving everything else aside, if we can get one strategically superior weapon out of him, or the theory that will enable us to build one, then we’ve got to do it and we’ve got to do it in secret.”

The index finger. “Two: the spaceship.” Middle finger. “Three: the civilization he comes from. If they’re planning to attack us we’ve got to find that out, and when, and how, and what we can do about it.” Ring finger. “Four: Aza-Kra himself. If we don’t hold him in secret we can’t hold him at all, and how do we know what he might do if we let him go? There isn’t a single possibility we can rule out. Not one.”

He put the hand flat on the desk. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, infinity. Biology, psychology, sociology, ecology, chemistry, physics, right down the line. Every science. In any one of them we might find something that would mean the difference between life and death for this country or this whole planet.”

He stared at me for a moment, his face set. “You don’t have to remind me of the other possibilities, Dahl. I know what they are; I’ve been on this project for thirteen weeks. I’ve also heard of the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, and the Constitution of the United States. But this is the survival of the human race we’re talking about.”

I opened my mouth to say “That’s just the point,” or something equally stale, but I shut it again; I saw it was no good. I had one argument—that if this alien ambassador was what he claimed to be, then the whole world had to know about it; any nation that tried to suppress that knowledge, or dictate the whole planet’s future, was committing a crime against humanity. That, on the other hand, if he was an advance agent for an invasion fleet, the same thing was true only a great deal more so.

Beyond that I had nothing but instinctive moral conviction; and Parst had that on his side too; so did Frisbee and the President and all the rest. Being who and what they were, they had to believe as they did. Maybe they were right.

Half an hour later, the last-thought I had before my head hit the pillow was, Suppose there isn’t any Aza-Kra? Suppose that thing was a fake, a mechanical dummy?

But I knew better, and I slept soundly.

That was the second day. On the third day, the front pages of the more excitable newspapers were top-heavy with forty-eight-point headlines. There were two Chicago stories. The first, in the early afternoon editions, announced that every epidemic victim had made a complete recovery, that health department experts had been unable to isolate any disease-causing agent in the stock awaiting slaughter, and that although several cases not involving stockyard employees had been reported, not one had been traced to consumption of infected meat. A Chicago epidemiologist was quoted as saying, “It could have been just a gigantic coincidence.”

The later story was a lulu. Although the slaughterhouses had not been officially reopened or the ban on fresh-meat sales rescinded, health officials allowed seventy of the previous day’s victims to return to work as an experiment. Within half an hour every one of them was back in the hospital, suffering from a second, identical attack.

Oddly enough—at first glance—sales of fresh meat in areas outside the ban dropped slightly in the early part of the day (“They say it’s all right, but you won’t catch me taking a chance”), rose sharply in the evening (“I’d better stock up before there’s a run on the butcher shops”).

Warden Longo, in an unprecedented move, added his resignation to those of the fifty-seven “conscience” employees of Leavenworth. Well-known as an advocate of prison reform, Longo explained that his subordinates’ example had convinced him that only so dramatic a gesture could focus the American public’s attention upon the injustice and inhumanity of the present system.

He was joined by two hundred and three of the Federal institution’s remaining employees, bringing the total to more than eighty per cent of Leavenworth’s permanent staff.

The movement was spreading. In Terre Haute, Indiana, eighty employees of the Federal penitentiary were reported to have resigned. Similar reports came from the State prisons of Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, and from city and county correctional institutions from Kansas City to Cincinnati.

The war in Indo-China was crowded back among the stock-market reports. Even the official announcements that the first Mars rocket was nearing completion in its sublunar orbit—front-page news at any normal time—got an inconspicuous paragraph in some papers and was dropped entirely by others.

But I found an item in a St. Louis paper about the policeman who had collapsed after shooting a criminal. He was dead.

I woke up a little before dawn that morning, having had a solid fifteen hours’ sleep. I found the cafeteria and hung around until it opened. That was where Captain Ritchy-loo tracked me down.

He came in as I was finishing my second order of ham and eggs, a big, blond, swimming-star type, full of confidence and good cheer. “You must be Mr. Dahl. My name is Ritchy-loo.”

I let him pump my hand and watched him sit down. “How do you spell it?” I asked him.

He grinned happily. “It is a tough one, isn’t it? French. R, i, c, h, e, l, i, e, u.”

Richelieu. Ritchy loo.

I said, “What can I do for you, Captain?”

“Ah, it’s what I can do for you, Mr. Dahl. You’re a VIP around here, you know. You’re getting the triple-A guided tour, and I’m your guide.”

I hate people who are cheerful in the morning.

We went out into the pale glitter of early-morning sunshine on the flat; the floodlight poles and the pillboxes trailed long, mournful shadows. There was a jeep waiting, and Ritchy-loo took the wheel himself.

We made a right turn around the comer of the building and then headed down one of the diagonal avenues between the poles. I glanced into the firing slit of one of the pillboxes as we passed it, and saw the gleam of somebody’s spectacles.

“That was B building that we just came out of,” said the captain. “Most of the interesting stuff is there, but you want to see everything, naturally, so we’ll go over to C first and then back to A.”

The huge barracks, far off to the right, looked deserted; I saw a few men in fatigues here and there, spearing stray bits of paper. Beyond the building we were heading for, almost against the wall, tiny figures were leaping rhythmically, opening and closing like so many animated scissors.

It was a well-policed area, at any rate; I watched for a while, out of curiosity, and didn’t see a single cigarette paper or gum wrapper.

To the left of the barracks and behind it was a miniature town—neat one-story cottages, all alike, all the same distance apart. The thing that struck me about it was that there were none of the signs of a permanent camp—no borders of whitewashed stones, no trees, no shrubs, no flowers. No wives, I thought.

“How’s morale here, Captain?” I asked.

“Now, it’s funny you should ask me that. That happens to be my job, I’m the Company B morale officer. Well, I should say that all things considered, we aren’t doing too badly. Of course, we have a few difficulties. These men are here on eighteen-month assignments, and that’s a kind of a long time without passes or furloughs. We’d like to make the hitches shorter, naturally, but of course you understand that there aren’t too many fresh but seasoned troops available just now.”

“No.”

"But, we do our best. Now here’s C building.”

Most of C building turned out to be occupied by chemical laboratories: long rows of benches covered by rank growths of glassware, only about a fifth of it working, and nobody watching more than a quarter of that

“What are they doing here?”

I “Over my head,” said Ritchy-loo cheerfully. “Here’s Dr. Vitale, let’s ask him.”

Vitale was a little sharp-featured man with a nervous blink. “This is the atmosphere section,” he said. “We’re trying to analyze the atmosphere which the alien breathes. Eventually we hope to manufacture it.”

That was a point that hadn’t occurred to me. “He can’t breathe our air?”

“No, no. Altogether different.”

“Well, where does he get the stuff he does breathe, then?”

The little man’s lips worked. “From that cone-shaped mechanism on the top of his head. An atmosphere plant that you could put in your pocket. Completely incredible. We can’t get an adequate sample without taking it off him, and we can’t take it off him without killing him. We have to deduce what he breathes in from what he breathes out. Very difficult.” He went away.

All the same. I couldn’t see much point in it. Presumably if Aza-Kra couldn’t breathe our air, we couldn’t breathe his—so anybody who wanted to examine him would have to wear an oxygen tank and a breathing mask.

But it was obvious enough, and I got it in another minute. If the prisoner didn’t have his own air-supply, it would be that much harder for him to break out past the gun rooms and the guards in the corridors and the. pillboxes and the floodlights and the wall....

We went on, stopping at every door. There were storerooms, sleeping quarters, a few offices. The rest of the rooms were empty.

Ritchy-loo wanted to go on to A building, but I was being perversely thorough, and I said we would go through the barracks and the company towns first. We did; it took us three hours, and thinned down Ritchy-loo’s stream of cheerful conversation to a trickle. We looked everywhere, and of course we did not find anything that shouldn’t have been there.

A building was the recreation hall. Canteen, library, gymnasium, movie theater, PX, swimming pool. It was also the project hospital and dispensary. Both sections were well filled.

So we went back to B. And it was almost noon, so we had lunch in the big air-conditioned cafeteria. I didn’t look forward to it; I expected that rest and food would turn on Ritchy-loo’s conversational spigot again, and if he didn’t get any response to the first three or four general topics he tried, I was perfectly sure he would begin telling me jokes. Nothing of the kind happened. After a few minutes I saw why, or thought I did. Looking around the room, I saw face after face with the same blank look on it; there wasn’t a smile or an animated expression in the place. And now that I was paying attention I noticed that the sounds were odd, too. There were more than a hundred people in the room, enough to set up a beehive roar; but there was so little talking going on that you could pick out individual sentences with ease, and they were all trochaic—Want some sugar? No, thanks. Like that.

It was infectious; I was beginning to feel it now myself— an execution-chamber kind of mood, a feeling that we were all shut up in a place that we couldn’t get out of, and where something horrible was going to happen. Unless you’ve ever been in a group made up of people who had that feeling and were reinforcing it in each other, it’s indescribable; but it was very real and very hard to take.

Ritchy-loo left half a chop on his plate; I finished mine, but it choked me.

In the corridor outside I asked him, “Is it always as bad as that?”

“You noticed it too? That place gives me the creeps. I don’t know why. It’s the same way in the movies, too, lately—wherever you get a lot of these people together. I just don’t understand it.” For a second longer he looked worried and thoughtful, and then he grinned suddenly. “I don’t want to say anything against civilians, Mr. Dahl, but I think that bunch is pretty far gone.”

I could have hugged him. Civilians! If Ritchy-loo was more than six months away, from a summer-camp counsellor’s job, I was a five-star general.

We started at that end of the corridor and worked our way down. We looked into a room with an X-ray machine and a fluoroscope in it, and a darkroom, and a room full of racks and filing cabinets, and a long row of offices.

Then Ritchy-loo opened a door that revealed two men standing on opposite sides of a desk, spouting angry German at each other. The tall one noticed us after a second, said, “ ’St, ’st,” to the other, and then to us, coldly, “You might, at least, knock.”

“Sorry, gentlemen,” said Ritchy-loo brightly. He closed the door and went on to the next on the same side. This opened onto a small, bare room with nobody in it but a stocky man with corporal’s stripes on his sleeve. He was sitting hunched over, elbows on knees, hands over his face. He didn’t move or look up.

I have a good ear, and I had managed to catch one sentence of what the fat man next door had been saying to the tall one. It went like this: “Nein, nein, das ist bestimmt nicht die Klaustrophobie; lch sage dir, es ist das dreifiissige Tier, das sie storrt.”

My college German came back to me when I prodded it, but it creaked a little. While I was still working at it, I asked Ritchy-loo, “What was that?”

“Psychiatric section,” he said

“You get many psycho cases here?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Just the normal percentage, Mr. Dahl. Less, in fact.”

The captain was a poor liar.

“Klaustrophobie” was easy, of course. “Dreifilssige Tier” stopped me until I remembered that the German for *‘zoo” is “Tiergarten.” Dreifilssige Tier: the three-footed beast. The triped.

The fat one had been saying to the tall one, “No, no, it is absolutely not claustrophobia; I tell you, it’s the triped that’s disturbing them.”

Three-quarters of an hour later we had peered into the last room in B building: a long office full of IBM machines. We had now been over every square yard of Chillicothe, and I had seen for myself that no skulduggery was going forward anywhere in it. That was the idea behind the guided tour, as Ritchy-loo was evidently aware.

He said, “Well, that just about wraps it up, Mr. Dahl. By the way, the General’s office asked me to tell you that if it’s all right with you, they’ll set,up that phone call for you for four o’clock this afternoon.”

I looked down at the rough map of the building I’d been drawing as we went along. “There’s one place we haven’t been, Captain,” I said. “Section One.”

“Oh, well that’s right, that’s right. You saw that yesterday, though, didn’t you, Mr. Dahl?”

“For about two minutes. I wasn’t able to take much of it in. I’d like to see it again, if it isn’t too much trouble. Or even if it is.”

Ritchy-loo laughed heartily. “Good enough. Just wait a second, I’ll see if I can get you a clearance on it.” He walked down the corridor to the nearest wall phone.

After a few moments he beckoned me over, palming the receiver. “The General says there are two research groups in there now and it would be a little crowded. He says he’d like you to postpone it if you think you can.”

“Tell him that’s perfectly all right, but in that case I think we’d better put off the phone call, too.”

He repeated the message, and waited. Finally, “Yes. Yes, uh-huh. Yes, I’ve got that. All right.”

He turned to me. “The General says it’s all right for you to go in for half an hour and watch, but he’d appreciate it if you’ll be careful not to distract the people who’re working in there.”

I had been hoping the General would say no. I wanted to see the alien again, all right, but what I wanted the most was time.

This was the second day I had been at Chillicothe. By tomorrow at the latest I would have to talk to Eli Freeman; and I still hadn't figured out any sure, safe way to tell him that Chillicothe was a legitimate research project, not to be sniped at by the Herald-Star—and make him understand that I didn’t mean a word of it.

I could simply refuse to make the call, or I could tell him as much of the truth as I could before I was cut off—two words, probably—but it was a cinch that call would be monitored at the other end, too; that was part of what Ritchy-loo meant by “setting up the call.” Somebody from the FBI would be sitting at Freeman’s elbow... and I wasn’t telling myself fairy tales about Peter Zenger any more.

They would shut the paper down, which was not only the thing I wanted least in the world but a thing that would do nobody any good.

I wanted Eli to spread the story by underground channels—spread it so far, and time the release so well, that no amount of censorship could kill it.

Treason is a word every man has to define for himself.

Ritchy-loo did the honors for me at the gun-room door, and then left me, looking a little envious. I don’t think he had ever been inside Section One.

There was somebody ahead of me in the tiny antechamber, I found: a short, wide-shouldered man with a sheepdog tangle of black hair.

He turned as the door closed behind me. “Hi. Oh—you’re Dahl, aren’t you?” He had a young, pleasant, meaningless face behind dark-rimmed glasses. I said yes.

He put a half-inch of cigarette between his lips and shook hands with me. “Somebody pointed you out. Glad to know you; my name’s Donnelly. Physical psych section—very junior.” He pointed through the spy-window. “What do you think of him?”

Aza-Kra was sitting directly in front of the window; his lunch-counter stool had been moved into the center of the room. Around him were four men: two on the left, sitting on folding chairs, talking to him and occasionally making notes; two on the right, standing beside a waist-high enclosed mechanism from which wires led to the upper lobe of the alien’s body. The ends of the wires were taped against his skin.

“That isn’t an easy question,” I said.

Donnelly nodded without interest. “That’s my boss there,” he said, “the skinny, gray-haired guy on the right. We get on each other’s nerves. If he gets that setup operating this session, I’m supposed to go in and take notes. He won’t, though.”

“What is it?”

“Electroencephalograph. See, his brain isn’t in his head, it’s in his upper thorax there. Too much insulation in the way. We can’t get close enough for a good reading without surgery. I say we ought to drop it till we get permission, but Hendricks thinks he can lick it. Those two on the other side are interviewers. Like to hear what they’re saying?”

He punched one of two buttons set into the door beside the speaker grill, under the spy-window. “If you’re ever in here alone, remember you can’t get out while this is on. You turn on the speaker here, it turns off the one in the gun room. They wouldn’t be able to hear you ask to get out.”

Inside, a monotonous voice was saying, . have that here, but what exactly do you mean by..

“I ought to be in physiology,” Donnelly said, lowering his voice. “They have all the fun. You see his eyes?”

I looked. The center one was staring directly toward us; the other two were tilted, almost out of sight around the curve of that bulb of blue-gray flesh.

“... in other words, just what is the nature of this energy, is it—uh—transmitted by waves, or..

“He can look three ways at once,” I said.

“Three, with binocular,” Donnelly agreed. “Each eye can function independently or couple with the one on either side. So he can have a series of overlapping monocular images, all the way around, or he can have up to three binocular images. They focus independently, too. He could read a newspaper and watch for his wife to come out of the movie across the street.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “He has six eyes, not three?”

“Sure. Has to, to keep the symmetry and still get binocular vision.”

“Then he hasn’t got any front or back,” I said slowly.

“No, that’s right. He’s trilaterally symmetrical. Drive you crazy to watch him walk. His legs work the same way as his eyes—any one can pair up with either of the others. He wants to change direction, he doesn’t have to turn around. I’d hate to try to catch him in an open field.”

“How did they catch him?” I asked.

“Luckiest thing in the world. Found him in the woods with two broken ankles. Now look at his hands. What do you see?”

The voice inside was still droning; evidently it was a long question. “Five fingers,” I said.

“Nope.” Donnelly grinned. “One finger, four thumbs. See how they oppose, those two on either side of the middle finger? He’s got a better hand than ours. One hell of an efficient design. Brain in his thorax where it’s safe, six eyes on a stalk—trachea up there too, no connection with the esophagus, so he doesn’t need an epiglottis. Three of everything else. He can lose a leg and still walk, lose an arm and still type, lose two eyes and still see better than we do. He can lose—”

I didn’t hear him. The interviewer’s voice had stopped, and Aza-Kra’s had begun. It was frightening, because it was a buzzing and it was a voice.

I couldn’t take in a word of it; I had enough to do absorbing the fact that there were words.

Then it stopped, and the interviewer’s ordinary, flat Middle Western voice began again.

“—And just try to sneak up behind him,” said Donnelly. “I dare you.”

Again Aza-Kra spoke briefly, and this time I saw the flesh at the side of his body, where the two lobes flowed together, bulge slightly and then relax.

“He’s talking with one of his mouths,” I said. “I mean, one of those—” I took a deep breath. “If he breathes through the top of his head, and there’s no connection between his lungs and his vocal organs, then where the hell does he get the air?”

“He belches. Not as inconvenient as it sounds. You could learn to do it if you had to.” Donnelly laughed. “Not very fragrant, though. Watch their faces when he talks.”

I watched Aza-Kra’s instead—what there was of it: one round, expressionless, oyster-colored eye staring back at me. With a human opponent, I was thinking, there were a thousand little things that you relied on to help you: facial expressions, mannerisms, signs of emotion. But Parst had been right when he said, There isn’t a single possibility we can rule out. Not one. And so had the fat man: It’s the triped that’s disturbing them. And Ritchy-loo: Ifs the same way ... wherever you get a lot of these people together.

And I still hadn’t figured out any way to tell Freeman what he had to know.

I thought I could arouse Eli’s suspicion easily enough; we knew each other well enough for a word or a gesture to mean a good deal. I could make him look for hidden meanings. But how could I hide a message so that Eli would be more likely to dig it out than a trained FBI cryptologist?

I stared at Aza-Kra’s glassy eye as if the answer were there. It was going to be a video circuit, I told myself. Donnelly was still yattering in my ear, and now the alien was buzzing again, but I ignored them both. Suppose I broke the message up into one-word units, scattered them through my conversation with Eli, and marked them off somehow— by twitching a finger, or blinking my eyelids?

A dark membrane flicked across the alien’s oyster-colored eye.

A moment later, it happened again.

Donnelly was saying, “... intercostal membranes, apparently. But there’s no trace of ...”

“Shut up a minute, will you?” I said. “I want to hear this.”

The inhuman voice, the voice that sounded like the articulate buzzing of a giant insect, was saying, “Comparison not possible, excuse me. If (blink) you try to understand in words you know, you (blink) tell yourself you wish (blink) to understand, but knowledge escape (blink) you. Can only show (blink) you from beginning, one (blink) little, another little. Not possible to carry all knowledge in one hand (blink)."

If you wish escape, show one hand.

I looked at Donnelly. He had moved back from the spy-window; he was lighting a cigarette, frowning at the match-flame. His mouth was sullen.

I put my left hand flat against the window. I thought, I’m dreaming.

The interviewer said querulously, “ ...getting us nowhere. Can’t you—”

“Wait,” said the buzzing voice. “Let me say, please. Ignorant man hold (blink) burning stick, say, this is breath (blink) of the wood. Then you show him flashlight—”

I took a deep breath, and held it.

Around the alien, four men went down together, folding over quietly at waist and knee, sprawling on the floor. I heard a thump behind me.

Donnelly was lying stretched out along the wall, his head tilted against the corner. The cigarette had fallen from his hand.

I looked back at Aza-Kra. His head turned slightly, the dark flush crinkling. Two eyes stared back at me through the window.

“Now you can breathe,” said the monster.