Rule Golden

3

I let out the breath that was choking me and took another. My knees were shaking.

“What did you do to them?”

“Put them to sleep only. In a few minutes I will put the others to sleep. After you are outside the doors. First we will talk.”

I glanced at Donnelly again. His mouth was ajar; I could see his lips fluttering as he breathed.

“All right,” I said, “talk.”

“When you leave,” buzzed the voice, “you must take me with you.”

Now it was clear. He could put people to sleep, but he couldn’t open locked doors. He had to have help.

“No deal,” I said, “You might as well knock me out, too.”

“Yes,” he answered, “you will do it. When you understand.”

“I’m listening.”

“You do not have to agree now. I ask only this much. When we are finished talking, you leave. When you are past the second door, hold your breath again. Then go to the office of General Parst. You will find there papers about me. Read them. You will find also keys to open gun room. Also, handcuffs. Special handcuffs, made to fit me. Then you will think, if Aza-Kra is not what he says, would he agree to this? Then you will come back to gun room, use controls there to open middle door. You will lay handcuffs down, where you stand now, then go back to gun room, open inside door. I will put on the handcuffs. You will see that I do it. And then you will take me with you.”

... I said, “Let me think.”

The obvious thing to do was to push the little button that turned on the audio circuit to the gun room, and yell for help; the alien could then put everybody to sleep from here to the wall, maybe, but it wouldn’t do any good. Sooner or later he would have to let up, or starve to death along with the rest of us. On the other hand if I did what he asked —anything he asked—and it turned out to be the wrong thing, I would be guilty of the worst crime since Pilate’s.

But I thought about it, I went over it again and again, and I couldn’t see any loophole in it for Aza-Kra. He was leaving it up to me—if I felt like letting him out after I’d seen the papers in Parst’s office, I could do so. If I didn’t, I could still yell for help. In fact, I could get on the phone and yell to Washington, which would be a hell of a lot more to the point.

So where was the payoff for Aza-Kra? What was in those papers?

I pushed the button. I said, “This is Dahl. Let me out, will you please?”

The outer door began to slide back. Just in time, I saw Donnelly’s head bobbing against it; I grabbed him by the shirt-front and hoisted his limp body out of the way.

I walked across the echoing outer chamber; the outermost door opened for me. I stepped through it and held my breath. Down the corridor, three guards leaned over their rifles and toppled all in a row, like precision divers. Beyond them a hurrying civilian in the cross-corridor fell heavily and skidded out of sight.

The clacking of typewriters from a near-by office had stopped abruptly. I let out my breath when I couldn’t hold it any longer, and listened to the silence.

The General was slumped over his desk, head on his crossed forearms, looking pretty old and tired with his polished bald skull shining under the light. There was a faint silvery scar running across the top of his head, and I wondered whether he had got it in combat as a young man, or whether he had tripped over a rug at an embassy reception.

Across the desk from him a thin man in a gray pin-check suit was jackknifed on the carpet, half-supported by a chairleg, rump higher than his head.

There were two six-foot filing cabinets in the right-hand corner behind the desk. Both were locked; the drawers of the first one were labeled alphabetically, the other was unmarked.

I unhooked Parst’s key-chain from his belt. He had as many keys as a janitor or a high-school principal, but not many of them were small enough to fit the filing cabinets. I got the second one unlocked and began going through the drawers. I found what I wanted in the top one—seven fat manila folders labeled “Aza-Kra—Armor,” “Aza-Kra— General information,” “Aza-Kra—Power sources,” Aza-Kra—Spaceflight” and so on; and one more labeled “Directives and related correspondence.”

I hauled them all out, piled them on Parst’s desk and pulled up a chair.

I took “Armor” first because it was on top and because the title puzzled me. The folder was full of transcripts of interviews whose subject I had to work out as I went along. It appeared that when captured, Aza-Kra had been wearing a light-weight bullet-proof body armor, made of something that was longitudinally flexible and perpendicularly rigid— in other words, you could pull it on like a suit of winter underwear, but you couldn’t dent it with a sledge hammer.

They had been trying to find out what the stuff was and how it was made for almost two months and as far as I could see they had not made a nickel’s worth of progress.

I looked through “Power sources” and “Spaceflight” to see if they were the same, and they were. The odd part was that Aza-Kra’s answers didn’t sound reluctant or evasive; but he kept running into ideas for which there weren’t any words in English and then they would have to start all over again, like Twenty Questions.... Is it animal? vegetable? mineral? It was a mess.

I put them all aside except “General information” and “Directives.” The first, as I had guessed, was a catch-all for nontechnical' subjects—where Aza-Kra had come from, what his people were like, his reasons for coming to this planet: all the unimportant questions; or the only questions that had any importance, depending on how you looked at it.

Parst had already given me an accurate summary of it, but it was surprisingly effective in Aza-Kra’s words. You say we want your planet. There are many planets, so many you would not believe. But if we wanted your planet, and if we could kill as you do, please understand, we are very many. We would fall on your planet like snowflakes. We would not send one man alone.

And later: Most young peoples kill. It is a law of nature, yes, but try to understand, it is not the only law. You have been a young people, but now you are growing older. Now you must learn the other law, not to kill. That is what I have come to teach. Until you learn this, we cannot have you among us.

There was nothing in the folder dated later than a month and a half ago. They had dropped that line of questioning early.

The first thing I saw in the other folder began like this:

You are hereby directed to hold yourself in readiness to destroy the subject under any of the following circumstances, without further specific notification:

1, a: If the subject attempts to escape.

1, b: If the subject kills or injures a human being.

1, c: If the landing, anywhere in the world, of other members of the subject’s race is reported and their similarity to the subject established beyond a reasonable doubt....

Seeing it written down like that, in the cold dead-alive-ness of black words on white paper, it was easy to forget that the alien was a stomach-turning monstrosity, and to see only that what he had to say was lucid and noble.

But I still hadn’t found anything that would persuade me to help him escape. The problem was still there, as insoluble as ever. There was no way of evaluating a word the alien said about himself. He had come alone—perhaps— instead of bringing an invading army with him; but how did we know that one member of his race wasn’t as dangerous to us as Perry’s battleship to the Japanese? He might be; there was some evidence that he was.

My quarrel with the Defense Department was not that they were mistreating an innocent three-legged missionary, but simply that the problem of Aza-Kra belonged to the world, not to a fragment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States—and certainly not to me.

... There was one other way out, I realized. Instead of calling Frisbee in Washington, I could call an arm-long list of senators and representatives. I could call the UN secretariat in New York; I could call the editor of every major newspaper in this hemisphere and the head of every wire service and broadcasting chain. I could stir up a hornet’s nest, even, as the saying goes, if I swung for it.

Wrong again: I couldn’t. I opened the “Directives” folder again, looking for what I thought I had seen there in the list of hypothetical circumstances. There it was:

1, f: If any concerted attempt on the part of any person or group to remove the subject from Defense Department custody, or to aid him in any way, is made; or if the subject’s existence and presence in Defense Department custody becomes public knowledge.

That sewed it up tight, and it also answered my question about Aza-Kra. Knocking out the personnel of B building would be construed as an attempt to escape or as a concerted attempt by a person or group to remove the subject from Defense Department custody, it didn’t matter which. If I broke the story, it would have the same result. They would kill him.

In effect, he had put his life in my hands: and that was why he was so sure that I’d help him.

It might have been that, or what I found just before I left the office, that decided me. I don’t know; I wish I did.

Coming around the desk the other way, I glanced at the thin man on the floor and noticed that there was something under him, half-hidden by his body. It turned out to be two things: a grey fedora and a pint-sized gray-leather briefcase, chained to his wrist.

So I looked under Parst’s folded arms, saw the edge of a thick white sheet of paper, and pulled it out.

Under Frisbee’s letterhead, it said:

By courier.

Dear General Parst:

Some possibility appears to exist that A. K. is responsible for recent disturbances in your area; please give me your thought on this as soon as possible—the decision can’t be long postponed.

In the meantime you will of course consider your command under emergency status, and we count on you to use your initiative to safeguard security at all costs. In a crisis, you will consider Lieut. D. as expendable.

Sincerely yours,

CARLTON FRISBEE

cf/cf/enc.

“Enc.” meant “enclosure”; I pried up Parst’s arms again and found another sheet of stiff paper, folded three times, with a paperclip on it.

It was a First Lieutenant’s commission, made out to Robert James Dahl, dated three days before, and with a perfect forgery of my signature at the bottom of it.

If commissions can be forged so can court-martial records.

I put the commission and the letter in my pocket. I didn’t seem to feel any particular emotion, but I noticed that my hands were shaking as I sorted through the “General information” file, picked out a few sheets and stuffed them into my pocket with the other papers. I wasn’t confused or in doubt about what to do next. I looked around the room, spotted a metal locker diagonally across from the filing cabinets, and opened it with one of the General’s keys.

Inside were two .45 automatics, boxes of ammunition, several loaded clips, and three odd-looking sets of handcuffs, very wide and heavy, each with its key.

I took the handcuffs, the keys, both automatics and all the clips.

In a storeroom at the end of the corridor I found a two-wheeled dolly. I wheeled it all the way around to Section One and left it outside the center door. Then it struck me that I was still wearing the pinks they had given me when I arrived, and where the hell were my own clothes? I took a chance and went up to my room on the second floor, remembering that I hadn’t been back there since morning.

There they were, neatly laid out on the bed. My keys, lighter, change, wallet and so on were on the bedside table. I changed and went back down to Section One.

In the gun room were two sprawled shapes, one beside the machine-gun that poked its snout through the hemispherical blister, the other under a panel set with three switches and a microphone.

The switches were clearly marked. I opened the first two, walked out and around and laid the three sets of handcuffs on the floor in the middle room. Then I went back to the gun room, closed the first two doors and opened the third.

Soft thumping sounds came from the loudspeaker over the switch panel; then the rattling of metal, more thumps, and finally a series of rattling clicks.

I opened the first door and went back inside. Through the panel in the middle door I could see Aza-Kra; he had retreated into the inner room so that all of him was plainly visible. He was squatting on the floor, his legs drawn up. His arms were at full stretch, each wrist manacled to an ankle. He strained his arms outward to show me that the cuffs were tight.

I made one more trip to open the middle door. Then I got the dolly and wheeled it in.

“Thank you,” said Aza-Kra. I got a whiff of his “breath”; as Donnelly had intimated, it wasn’t pleasant.

Halfway to the airport, at Aza-Kra’s request, I held my breath again. Aside from that we didn’t speak except when I asked him, as I was loading him from the jeep into a limousine, “How long will they stay unconscious?”

“Not more than twenty hours, I think. I could have given them more, but I did not dare, I do not know your chemistry well enough.”

We could go a long way in twenty hours. We would certainly have to.

I hated to go home, it was too obvious and there was a good chance that the hunt would start before any twenty hours were up, but there wasn’t any help for it. I had a passport and a visa for England, where I had been planning to go for a publishers’ conference in January, but it hadn’t occurred to me to take it along on a quick trip to Washington. And now I had to have the passport.

My first idea had been to head for New York and hand Aza-Kra over to the UN there, but I saw it was no good. Extraterritoriality was just a word, like a lot of other words; we wouldn’t be safe until we were out of the country, and on second thought, maybe not then.

It was a little after eight-thirty when I pulled in to the curb down the street from my house. I hadn’t eaten since noon, but I wasn’t hungry; and it didn’t occur to me until later to think about Aza-Kra.

I got the passport and some money without waking my housekeeper. A few blocks away I parked again on a side street. I called the airport, got a reservation on the next eastbound flight, and spent half an hour buying a trunk big enough for Aza-Kra and wrestling him into it.

It struck me at the last minute that perhaps I had been counting too much on that atmosphere-plant of his. His air supply was taken care of, but what about his respiratory waste produced—would he poison himself in that tiny closed space? I asked him, and he said, “No, it is all right. I will be warm, but I can bear it.”

I put the lid down, then opened it again. “I forgot about food,” I said. “What do you eat, anyway?”

“At Chillicothe I ate soya bean extract. With added minerals. But I am able to go without food for long periods. Please, do not worry.”

All right. I put the lid down again and locked the trunk, but I didn’t stop worrying.

He was being too accommodating.

I had expected him to ask me to turn him loose, or take him to wherever his spaceship was. He hadn’t brought the subject up; he hadn’t even asked me where we were going, or what my plans were.

I thought I knew the answer to that, but it didn’t make me any happier. He didn’t ask because he already knew— just as he’d known the contents of Parst’s office, down to the last document; just as he’d known what I was thinking when I was in the anteroom with Donnelly.

He read minds. And he gassed people through solid metal walls.

What else did he do?

There wasn’t time to dispose of the limousine; I simply left it at the airport. If the alarm went out before we got to the coast, we were sunk anyhow; if not, it wouldn’t matter.

Nobody stopped us. I caught the stratojet in New York at 12:20, and five hours later we were in London.

Customs was messy, but there wasn’t any other way to handle it. When we were fifth in line, I thought: Knock them out for about an hour—and held my breath. Nothing happened. I rapped on the side of the trunk to attract his attention, and did it again. This time it worked: everybody in sight went down like a rag doll.

I stamped my own passport, filled out a declaration form and buried it in a stack of others, put a tag on the trunk, loaded it aboard a handtruck, wheeled it outside and took a cab.

I had learned something in the process, although it certainly wasn’t much: either Aza-Kra couldn’t, or didn’t, eavesdrop on my mind all the time—or else he was simply one step ahead of me.

Later, on the way to the harbor, I saw a newsstand and realized that it was going on three days since I had seen a paper. I had tried to get the New .York dailies at the airport, but they’d been sold out—nothing on the stands but a lone copy of the Staten Island Advance. That hadn’t struck me as odd at the time—an index of my state of mind—but it did now.

I got out and bought a copy of everything on the stand except the tipsheets—four newspapers, all of them together about equaling the bulk of one Herald-Star. I felt frustrated enough to ask the newsvendor if he had any papers left over from yesterday or the day before. He gave me a glassy look, made me repeat it, then pulled his face into an indescribable expression, laid a finger beside his nose, and said, “ ‘Arf a mo.’ ” He scuttled into a bar a few yards down the street, was gone five minutes, and came back clutching a mare’s-nest of soiled and bedraggled papers.

“ ’Ere you are, guvnor. Three bob for the lot.”

I paid him. “Thanks,” I said, “very much.”

He waved his hand expansively. “Okay, bud,” he said. “T’ink nuttin’ of it!”

A comedian.

The only Channel boat leaving before late afternoon turned out to be an excursion steamer—round trip, two guineas. The boat wasn’t crowded; it was the tag-end of the season, and a rough, windy day. I found a seat without any trouble and finished sorting out my stack of papers by date and folio.

British newspapers don’t customarily report any more of our news than we do of theirs, but this week our supply of catastrophes had been ample enough to make good reading across the Atlantic. I found all three of the Chicago stories —trimmed to less than two inches apiece, but there. I read the first with professional interest, the second skeptically, and the third with alarm.

I remembered the run of odd items I’d read in that Washington hotel room, a long time ago. I remembered Frisbee’s letter to Parst: “Some possibility appears to exist that A.K. is responsible for recent disturbances in your area...

I found two of the penitentiary stories, half smothered by stop press, and I added them to the total. I drew an imaginary map of the United States in my head and stuck imaginary pins in it. Red ones, a little cluster: Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur, St. Louis. Blue ones, a scattering around them: Chicago, Leavenworth, Terre Haute.

Down toward the end of the cabin someone’s portable radio was muttering.

A fat youth in a checkered jacket had it. He moved over reluctantly and made room for me to sit down. The crisp, controlled BBC voice was saying, “... in Commons today, declared that Britain’s trade balance is more favorable than at any time during the past fifteen years. In London, ceremonies marking the sixth anniversary of the death ...” I let the words slide past me until I heard:

“In the United States, the mysterious epidemic affecting stockyard workers in the central states has spread to New York and New Jersey on the eastern seaboard. The President has requested Congress to provide immediate emergency meat-rationing legislation.”

A blurred little woman on the bench opposite leaned forward and said, “Serve ’em right, too! Them with their beefsteak a day.”

There were murmurs of approval.

I got up and went back to my own seat.... It all fell into one pattern, everything: the man who kicked his wife, the prizefighters, the policeman, the wardens, the slaughterhouse “epidemic.”

It was the lex talionis—or the Golden Rule in reverse: Be done by as you- do to others.

When you injured another living thing, both of you felt the same pain. When you killed, you felt the shock of your victim’s death. You might be only stunned by it, like the slaughterhouse workers, or you might die, like the policeman and the schoolboy murderer.

So-called mental anguish counted too, apparently. That explained the wave of humanitarianism in prisons, at least partially; the rest was religious hysteria and the kind of herd instinct that makes any startling new movement mushroom.

And, of course, it also explained Chillicothe: the horrible blanketing depression that settled anywhere the civilian staff congregated—the feeling of being penned up in a place where something frightful was going to happen—and the thing the two psychiatrists had been arguing about, the pseudo-claustrophobia... all that was nothing but the reflection of Aza-Kra’s feelings, locked in that cell on an alien planet.

Be done by as you do.

And I was carrying that with me. Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur, St. Louis, Chicago, Leavenworth, Terre Haute—New York. After that, England. We’d been in London less than an hour—but England is only four hundred-odd miles long, from Spittai to Lands End.

I remembered what Aza-Kra had said: Now you must learn the other law, not to kill.

Not to kill tripeds.

My body was shaking uncontrollably; my head felt like a balloon stuffed with cotton. I stood up and looked around at the blank faces, the inward-looking eyes, every man, woman and child living in a little world of his own. I had an hysterical impulse to shout at them, Look at you, you idiots! You’ve been invaded and half conquered without a shot fired, and you don’t know it!

In the next instant I realized that I was about to burst into laughter. I put my hand over my mouth and half-ran out on deck, giggles leaking through my fingers; I got to the rail and bent myself over it, roaring, apoplectic. I was utterly ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t stop it; it was like a fit of vomiting.

The cold spray on my face sobered me. I ieaned over the rail, looking down at the white water boiling along the hull. It occurred to me that there was one practical test still to be made: a matter of confirmation.

A middle-aged man with rheumy eyes was standing in the cabin doorway, partly blocking it. As I shouldered past him, I deliberately put my foot down on his.

An absolutely blinding pain shot through the toes of my right foot. When my eyes cleared I saw that the two of us were standing in identical attitudes—weight on one foot, the other knee bent, hand reaching instinctively for the injury.

I had taken him for a “typical Englishman,” but he cursed me in a rattling stream of gutter French. I apologized, awkwardly but sincerely—very sincerely.

When we docked at Dunkirk I still hadn’t decided what to do.

What I had had in mind up till now was simply to get across France into Switzerland and hold a press conference there, inviting everybody from Tass to the UP. It had to be Switzerland for fairly obvious reasons; the English or the French would clamp a security lid on me before you could say NATO, but the Swiss wouldn’t dare—they paid for their neutrality by having to look both ways before they cleared their throats.

I could still do that, and let the UN set up a committee to worry about Aza-Kra—but at a conservative estimate it would be ten months before the committee got its foot out of its mouth, and that would be pretty nearly ten months too late.

Or I could simply go to the American consulate in Dunkirk and turn myself in. Within ten hours we would be back in Chillicothe, probably, and I’d be free of the responsibility. I would also be dead.

We got through customs the same way we’d done in London.

And then I had to decide.

The cab driver put his engine in gear and looked at me over his shoulder. "Un hotel?”

“... Yes,” I said. “A cheap hotel. Un hotel a bon marche.”

"Entendu.” He jammed down the accelerator an instant before he let out the clutch; we were doing thirty before he shifted into second.

The place he took me to was a villainous third-rate commercial-travelers’ hotel, smelling of urine and dirty linen. When the porters were gone I unlocked the trunk and opened it.

We stared at each other.

Moisture was beaded on his blue-gray skin, and there was a smell in the room stronger and ranker than anything that belonged there. His eyes looked duller than they had before; I could barely see the pupils.

“Well?” I said.

“You are half right,” he buzzed. “I am doing it, but not for the reason you think.”

“All right; you’re doing it. Stop it. That comes first. We’ll stay here, and I’ll watch the papers to make sure you do.”

“At the customs, those people will sleep only an hour.”

“I don’t give a damn. If the gendarmes come up here, you can put them to sleep. If I have to I’ll move you out to the country and we’ll live under a haystack. But no matter what happens we’re not going a mile farther into Europe until I know you’ve quit. If you don’t like that, you’ve got two choices. Either you knock me out, and see how much good it does you, or I’ll take that air-machine off your head.”

He buzzed inarticulately for a moment. Then, “I have to say no. It is impossible. I could stop for a time, or pretend to you that I stop, but that would solve nothing. It will be—it will do the greatest harm if I stop; you don’t understand. It is necessary to continue.”

I said, “That’s your answer?”

“Yes. If you will let me explain—”

I stepped toward him. I didn’t hold my breath, but I think half-consciously I expected him to gas me. He didn’t. He didn’t move; he just waited.

Seen at close range, the flesh of his head seemed to be continuous with the black substance of the cone; instead of any sharp dividing line, there was a thin area that was neither one nor the other.

I put one hand over the fleshy bulb, and felt his eyes retract and close against my palm. The sensation was indescribably unpleasant, but I kept my hand there, put the other one against the far side of the cone—pulled and pushed simultaneously, as hard as I could.

The top of my head came off.

I was leaning against the top of the open trunk, dizzy and nauseated. The pain was like a white-hot wire drawn tight around my skull just above the eyes. I couldn’t see; I couldn’t think.

And it didn’t stop; it went on and on.... I pushed myself away from the trunk and let my legs fold under me. I sat on the floor with my head in my hands, pushing my fingers against the pain.

Gradually it ebbed. I heard Aza-Kra’s voice buzzing very quietly, not in English but in a rhythm of tone and phrasing that seemed almost directly comprehensible; if there were a language designed to be spoken by bass viols, it might sound like that.

I got up and looked at him. Shining beads of blue liquid stood out all along the base of the cone, but the seam had not broken.

I hadn’t realized that it would be so difficult, that it would be so painful. I felt the weight of the two automatics in my pockets, and I pulled one out, the metal cold and heavy in my palm.... but I knew suddenly that I couldn’t do that either.

I didn’t know where his brain was, or his heart. I didn’t know whether I could kill him with one shot.

I sat down on the bed, staring at him. “You knew that would happen, didn’t you,” I said. “You must think I’m a prize sucker.”

He said nothing. His eyes were half-closed, and a thin whey-colored fluid was drooling out of the two mouths I could see. Aza-Kra was being sick.

I felt an answering surge of nausea. Then the flow stopped, and a second later, the nausea stopped too. I felt angry, and frustrated, and frightened.

After a moment I got up off the bed and started for the door.

“Please,” said Aza-Kra. “Will you be gone long?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

“If you will be gone long,” he said, “I would ask that you loosen the handcuffs for a short period before you go.”

I stared at him, suddenly hating him with a violence that shook me.

“No,” I said, and reached for the door-handle.

My body knotted itself together like a fist. My legs gave way under me, and I missed the door-handle going down; I hit the floor hard.

There was no sensation in my hands or feet. The muscles of my shoulders, arms, thighs, and calves were one huge, heavy pain. And I couldn’t move.

I looked at Aza-Kra’s wrists, shackled to his drawn-up ankles. He had been like that for something like fourteen hours. He had cramps.

“I am sorry,” said Aza-Kra. “I did not want to do that to you, but there was no other way.”

I thought dazedly, No other way to do what?

“To make you wait. To listen. To let me explain.”

I said, “I don’t get it.” Anger flared again, then faded under something more intense and painful. The closest English word for it is “humility”; some other language may come nearer, but I doubt it; it isn’t an emotion that we like to talk about. I felt bewildered, and ashamed, and very small, all at once, and there was another component, harder to name. A ... threshold feeling.

I tried again. “I felt the other pain, before, but not this. Is that because—”

“Yes. There must be the intention to injure or cause pain. I will tell you why. I have to go back very far. When an animal becomes more developed—many cells, instead of one—always the same things happen. I am the first man of my kind who ever saw a man of your kind. But we both have eyes. We both have ears.” The feathery spines on his neck stiffened and relaxed. “Also there is another sense that always comes. But always it goes only a little way and then stops.

“When you are a young animal, fighting with the others to live, it is useful to have a sense which feels the thoughts of the enemy. Just as it is useful to have a sense which sees the shape of his body. But this sense cannot come all at once, it must grow by a little and a little, as when a surface that can tell the light from the dark becomes a true eye.

“But the easiest thoughts to feel are pain thoughts, they are much stronger than any others. And when the sense is still weak—it is a part of the brain, not an organ by itself— when it is weak, only the strongest stimulus can make it work. This stimulus is hatred, or anger, or the wish to kill.

“So that just when the sense is enough developed that it could begin to be useful, it always disappears. It is not gone, it is pushed under. A very long time ago, one race discovered this sense and learned how it could be brought back. It is done by a class of organic chemicals. You have not the word. For each race a different member of the class, but always it can be done. The chemical is a catalyst, it is not used up. The change it makes is in the cells of all the body— it is permanent, it passes also to the children.

“You understand, when a race is older, to kill is not useful. With the change, true civilization begins. The first race to find this knowledge gave it to others, and those to others, and now all have it. All who are able to leave their planets. We give it to you, now, because you are ready. When you are older there will be others who are ready. You will give it to them.”

While I had been listening, the pain in my arms and legs had slowly been getting harder and harder to take. I reminded myself that Aza-Kra had home it, probably, at least ten hours longer than I had; but that didn’t make it much easier. I tried to keep my mind off it but that wasn’t possible; the band of pain around my head was still there, too, a faint throbbing. And both were consequences of things I had done to Aza-Kra. I was suffering with him, measure for measure.

Justice. Surely that was a good thing? Automatic instant retribution, mathematically accurate: an eye for an eye.

I said, “That was what you were doing when they caught you, then—finding out which chemical we reacted to?”

“Yes. I did not finish until after they had brought me to Chillicothe. Then it was much more difficult. If not for my accident, all would have gone much more quickly.”

“The walls?”

“Yes. As you have guessed, my air machine will also make other substances and expel them with great force. Also, when necessary, it will place these substances in a— state of matter, you have not the word—so that they pass through solid objects. But this takes much power. While in Chillicothe my range was very small. Later, when I can be in the open, it will be much greater.”

He caught what I was thinking before I had time to speak. He said, “Yes. You will agree. When you understand.”

It was the same thing he had told me at Chillicothe, almost to the word.

I said, “You keep talking about this thing as a gift but I notice you didn’t ask us if we wanted it. What kind of a gift is that?”

“You are not serious. You know what happened when I was captured.”

After a moment he added, “I think if it had been possible, if we could have asked each man and woman on the planet to say yes or no, explaining everything, showing that there was no trick, that most" would have said yes. For people the change is good. But for governments it is not good.”

I said, “I’d like to believe you. It would be very pleasant to believe you. But nothing you can say changes the fact that this thing, this gift of yours could be a weapon. To soften us up before you move in. If you were an advance agent for an invasion fleet, this is what you’d be doing.”

“You are thinking with habits,” he said. “Try to think with logic. Imagine that your race is very old, with much knowledge. You have ships that cross between the stars. Now you discover this young race, these Earthmen, who only begin to learn to leave their own planet. You decide to conquer them. Why? What is your reason?”

“How do I know? It could be anything. It might be something I couldn’t even imagine. For all I know you want to eat us.”

His throat-spines quivered. He said slowly, “You are partly serious. You really think... I am sorry that you did not read the studies of the physiologists. If you had, you would know. My digestion is only for vegetable food. You cannot understand, but—with us, to eat meat is like with you, to eat excretions.”

I said, “All right, maybe we have something else you want. Natural resources that you’ve used up. Some substance, maybe some rare element.”

“This is still habit thinking. Have you forgotten my air machine?”

“—Or maybe you just want the planet itself. With us cleared off it, to make room for you.”

“Have you never looked at the sky at night?”

I said, “All right. But this quiz was your idea, not mine. I admit that I don’t know enough even to make a sensible guess at your motives. And that’s the reason why I can’t trust you.”

He was silent a moment. Then: “Remember that the substance which makes the change is a catalyst. Also it is a very fine powder. The particles are of only a few molecules each. The winds carry it. It is swallowed and breathed in and absorbed by the skin. It is breathed out and excreted. The wind takes it again. Water carries it. It is carried by insects and by birds and animals, and by men, in their bodies and in their clothing.

“This you can understand and know that it is true. If I die another could come and finish what I have begun, but even this is not necessary. The amount of the catalyst I have already released is more than enough. It will travel slowly, but nothing can stop it. If I die now, this instant, still in a year the catalyst will reach every part of the planet.”

After a long time I said, “Then what did you mean by saying that a great harm would be done, if you stopped now?”

“I meant this. Until now, only your Western nations have the catalyst. In a few days their time of crisis will come, beginning with the United States. And the nations of the East will attack.”