The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack(r)

  “Hold on!” Voigtland said. The cubes were turning against him suddenly. “What kind of talk is this?”

  Juan said, “And strictly as a pragmatic point, if the people were to find out how far in advance you engineered your way out, and how comfortable you are as you head for exile—”

  “You’re supposed to help me,” Voigtland shouted. “Why are you starting this? What are you trying to do?”

  “You know we all love you,” said Lydia.

  “We hate to see you not thinking clearly, Father,” Lynx said.

  “Weren’t you planning to run out all along?” said Mark.

  “Wait! Stop! Wait!”

  “Strictly as a matter of—”

  Voigtland rushed into the control room and pulled the Juan-cube from the slot.

  “We’re trying to explain to you, dear—”

  He pulled the Lydia-cube, the Mark-cube, the Lynx-cube, the father-cube.

  The ship was silent.

  He crouched, gasping, sweat-soaked, face rigid, eyes clenched tight shut, waiting for the shouting in his skull to die away.

  * * * *

  An hour later, when he was calm again, he began setting up his ultrawave call, tapping out the frequency that the underground would probably be using, if any underground existed. The tachyon beam sprang across the void, an all but instantaneous carrier wave, and he heard cracklings, and then a guarded voice saying, “Four Nine Eight Three, we read your signal, do you read me? This is Four Nine Eight Three, come in, come in, who are you?”

  “Voigtland,” he said. “President Voigtland, calling Juan. Can you get Juan on the line?”

  “Give me your numbers, and—”

  “What numbers? This is Voigtland. I’m I don’t know how many billion miles out in space, and I want to talk to Juan. Get me Juan. Get me Juan.”

  “You wait,” the voice said.

  Voigtland waited, while the ultrawave spewed energy wantonly into the void. He heard clickings, scrapings, clatterings. “You still there?” the voice said, after a while. “We’re patching him in. But be quick. He’s busy.”

  “Well? Who is it?” Juan’s voice, beyond doubt.

  “Tom here. Tom Voigtland, Juan!”

  “It’s really you?” Coldly. From a billion parsecs away, from some other universe. “Enjoying your trip, Tom?”

  “I had to call. To find out—to find out—how it was going, how everybody is. How Mark—Lydia—you—”

  “Mark’s dead. Killed the second week, trying to blow up McAllister in a parade.”

  “Oh. Oh.”

  “Lydia and Lynx are in prison somewhere. Most of the others are dead. Maybe ten of us left, and they’ll get us soon, too. Of course, there’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You bastard,” Juan said quietly. “You rotten bastard. All of us getting rounded up and shot, and you get into your ship and fly away!”

  “They would have killed me too, Juan. They were coming after me. I only just made it.”

  “You should have stayed,” Juan said.

  “No. No. That isn’t what you just said to me! You told me I did the right thing, that I’d serve as a symbol of resistance, inspiring everybody from my place of exile, a living symbol of the overthrown government—”

  “I said this?”

  “You, yes,” Voigtland told him. “Your cube, anyway.”

  “Go to hell,” said Juan. “You lunatic bastard.”

  “Your cube—we discussed it, you explained—”

  “Are you crazy, Tom? Listen, those cubes are programmed to tell you whatever you want to hear. Don’t you know that? You want to feel like a hero for running away, they tell you you’re a hero. It’s that simple. How can you sit there and quote what my cube said to you, and make me believe that I said it?”

  “But I— You—”

  “Have a nice flight, Tom. Give my love to everybody, wherever you’re going.”

  “I couldn’t just stay there to be killed. What good would it have been? Help me, Juan! What shall I do now? Help me!”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do,” Juan said. “Ask your cubes for help. So long, Tom.”

  “Juan—”

  “So long, you bastard.”

  Contact broke.

  * * * *

  Voigtland sat quietly for a while, pressing his knuckles together. Listen, those cubes are programmed to tell you whatever you want to hear. Don’t you know that? You want to feel like a hero for running away, they tell you you’re a hero. And if you want to feel like a vil- lain? They tell you that too. They meet all needs. They aren’t people. They’re cubes.

  He put Goethe in the slot. “Tell me about martyrdom,” he said.

  Goethe said, “It has its tempting side. One may be covered with sins, scaly and rough-skinned with them, and in a single fiery moment of self-immolation one wins redemption and absolution, and one’s name is forever cherished.”

  He put Juan in the slot. “Tell me about the symbolic impact of getting killed in the line of duty.”

  “It can transform a mediocre public official into a magnificent historical figure,” Juan said.

  He put Mark in the slot. “Which is a better father to have: a live coward or a dead hero?”

  “Go down fighting, Dad.”

  He put Hemingway in the slot. “What would you do if someone called you a rotten bastard?”

  “I’d stop to think if he was right or wrong. If he was wrong, I’d give him to the sharks. If he was right, well, maybe the sharks would get fed anyway.”

  He put Lydia in the slot. Lynx. His father. Alexander. Attila. Shakespeare. Plato. Ovid.

  lit In their various ways they were all quite eloquent. They spoke of bravery, self-sacrifice, nobility, redemption.

  He picked up the Mark-cube. “You’re dead,” he said. “Just like your grandfather. There isn’t any Mark anymore. What comes out of this cube isn’t Mark. It’s me, speaking with Mark’s voice, talking through Mark’s mind. You’re just a dummy.”

  He put the Mark-cube in the ship’s converter input, and it tumbled down the slideway to become reaction mass. He put the Lydia-cube in next. Lynx. His father. Alexander. Attila. Shakespeare. Plato. Ovid. Goethe.

  He picked up the Juan-cube. He put it in a slot again. “Tell me the truth,” he yelled. “What’ll happen to me if I go back to Bradley’s World?”

  “You’ll make your way safely to the underground and take charge, Tom. You’ll help us throw McAllister out: We can win with you, Tom.”

  “Crap,” Voigtland said. “I’ll tell you what’ll really happen. I’ll be intercepted before I go into my landing orbit. I’ll be taken down and put on trial. And then I’ll be shot. Right? Right? Tell me the truth, for once. Tell me I’ll be shot!”

  “You misunderstand the dynamics of the situation, Tom. The impact of your return will be so great that—”

  He took the Juan-cube from the slot and put it into the chute that went to the converter.

  “Hello?” Voigtland said. “Anyone here?”

  The ship was silent.

  “I’ll miss all that scintillating conversation,” he said. “I miss you already. Yes. Yes. But I’m glad you’re gone.”

  He countermanded the ship’s navigational instructions and tapped out the program headed RETURN TO POINT OF DEPARTURE. His hands were shaking, just a little, but the message went through. The instruments showed him the change of course as the ship began to turn around. As it began to take him home.

  Alone.

  POINT OF FOCUS

  Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1958.

  Federation emissary Holis Bork was a confident man—and, if he felt a twinge of curious uneasiness at his firs
t glimpse of Mellidan VII, it was not because he doubted his own capabilities, or the value of the Federation’s name as a civilizing force.

  He told himself that it was something subtler and deeper that twinged him, as the warpship spiraled down about the unfederated planet.

  Emissary Bork worried about that subliminal reaction through most of the landing period. He sat broodingly with his eyes fixed; the members of his staff gave him a wide berth. It was, he saw, the deference due to a Federation Emissary so obviously deep in creative thinking. The others were clustered at the far end of the observation deck, staring down at the fog-shrouded yellow-green ball that was soon to be the newest addition to the far-flung Federation. Bork listened to them.

  Vyn Kumagon was saying, “Look at that place! The atmosphere blankets it like so much soup.”

  “I wonder what it’s like to breathe chlorine?” asked Hu Sdreen. “And to give off carbon tetrachloride instead of CO2?”

  “To them it’s all the same,” Kumagon snapped.

  Emissary Bork looked away. He had the answer; he knew what was troubling him.

  Mellidan VII was different. The peoples of the worlds of the Federation, and even the four non-Federated worlds of the Sol system, shared, one seemingly universal characteristic: they breathed oxygen, gave off carbon dioxide. And the Mellidani? A chlorine-carbon tetrachloride cycle which worked well for them—but was strange, different. And that difference troubled Federation Emissary Bork on a deep, shadowy, half-grasped plane of thought.

  He shook his mind clear and nudged the speaker panel at his wrist. “How long till landing?”

  “We enter final orbit in thirty-nine minutes,” Control Center told him. “Contact’s been made with the Mellidani and they’re guiding us in.”

  Bork leaned back in the comforting webfoam network and twined his twelve tapering fingers calmly together. He was not worried. Despite Mellidan VII’s alienness, there would be no problems. In minutes, the landing would be effected—and past experience told him it would be but a matter of time before the Federation had annexed its four hundred eighty-sixth world.

  Later, Bork stood by the rear screens, looking down at the planet as the Federation ship whistled downward through the murky green atmosphere. To civilize is our mission, he thought. To offer the benefits—

  It was four years Galactic since a Federation survey ship had first touched down on Mellidan VII. It had been strictly an accidental planet-fall; the prelim scouts had thoroughly established that there was little point in bothering to search a chlorine world for oxygen-type life. That was easily understood.

  What was not so easily understood was the possibility of a non-oxygen metabolism. Statistics lay against it; the four hundred eighty-five worlds of the Federation all operated on an oxynitrogen atmosphere and a respiration-photosynthesis cycle that endlessly recirculated oxygen and carbon dioxide. The four inhabited worlds of the unfederated system of Sol were similarly constituted. It was a rule to which no exceptions had been found.

  But then the scoutship of Dos Nollibar, cruising out of Vronik XII, came tumbling down into the chlorinated soup of Mellidan VIFs atmosphere, three ultrones in its warp-drive fused beyond repair. It took six weeks for a rescue ship to locate and remove the eleven Federation scouts—and by that time, Chief Scout Dos Nollibar and his men had discovered and made contact with the Mellidani.

  Standing at the screen watching his ship thunder down into the thick green shroud of the planet, Emissary Bork cast an inward eye back over Nollibar’s scout report—a last-minute refresher, as it were.

  “…Inhabitants roughly humanoid in external structure, though probably nearly solid internally. This is subject to later verification when a specimen is available for complete examination.

  “…Main constituents of atmosphere: hydrogen, chlorine, nitrogen, helium. Smaller quantities of other gases. No oxygen. This mixture is, of course, unbreathable by all forms of Federation life.

  “…Mean temperature 260 Absolute. Animal life gives off carbon tetrachloride as respiratory waste; this is broken down by plants to chlorine and complex hydrocarbons. Inhabitants consume plants, smaller animal life, drink hydrochloric acid—

  “…Seat of planetary government apparently located not far from our landing-point, unless aliens have deliberately misled, or we have misunderstood. Naturally most of our data is highly tentative in nature, subject to confirmation after this world is enrolled in the Federation and available for further study.”

  Which is my job, Bork thought.

  For four years, ever since Nollibar had filed his report, Bork had readied himself for the task of bringing Mellidan VII into the Federation. Nollibar had returned with recorded samples of the language, and a few months of phoneme analysis had been sufficient to work out a rough conversion-equation to Federation, good enough for Bork to learn and speak.

  There would undoubtedly be a promotion in this for him: to Subgalactic Overchief, perhaps, or Third Warden. Of the ten emissaries whose task it was to bring newly-discovered planets into the Federation, it was he the First Warden had chosen for this job. That was significant, Bork thought: on no other world would the Emissary be forced to forego direct face-to-face contact with the leaders of the species to be absorbed. Here, on the other hand—Bork sensed a presence behind him. He turned.

  It was Vyn Kumagon, Adjutant in Charge of Communications. Bork had no way of knowing how long Kumagon had been peering over his shoulder; he resented the intrusion on an emissary’s privacy.

  And Kumagon’s green eyes were faintly slitted—the mark of Gyralin blood somewhere in his heritage. As a pure-bred Vengol of the Federation’s First Planet, Bork felt vague contempt for his assistant. “Yes?” he said, mildly but with undertones of scorn.

  Kumagon’s slitted eyes fixed sharply on the Emissary’s. “Sir, the Mellidani have beamed us for some advice.”

  “Eh?”

  “They’d like to know how close to the Terran dome we want to land, sir.”

  Bork barely repressed a gasp. “What Terran dome?”

  “They said the Terrans established a base here several months ago. Sir? Are you well? You—”

  “Tell them,” Bork said heavily, “that we wish to land no closer than five miles from the Terran dome, and no further than ten. Can you translate that into their equivalents?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then transmit it.” Bork choked back a strangled cry of rage. Someone, he thought, had blundered in the home office. That Terrans should be allowed to land on a world being groomed for Federation entry—!

  Why, it was unthinkable!

  The planet was the most forbidding-looking Bork had ever seen, and he had seen a great many. With screens turned to maximal periphery, he could stand in the snout of the ship and look out on Mellidan VII as if he stood outside. It was hardly a pleasant sight.

  The land was utterly flat. Long stretches of barren gray-brown soil extended in every direction, sweeping upward into tiny hillocks far toward the horizon. Soil implied the presence of bacteria—anaerobic bacteria, of course. Life had evolved on Mellidan VII despite the total lack of oxygen.

  There were seas, too, shimmering shallow pools of carbon tetrachloride that had precipitated out of the atmosphere. Plants grew in these ponds: ugly squishy plants, that looked like hordes of gray bladders strung on thick hairy ropes. They lay flat against the bright surface of the carbon tetrachloride pond, drifting. As Bork watched, a Mellidani appeared, wading knee-deep, gathering the bladders, slinging them over his blocky round shoulders. He was a farmer, no doubt.

  At this distance it was difficult to tell much about the alien, except that his body was segmented crustacean-like, humanoid otherwise; his skin looked thick, waxy, leathery. Chief Scout Nollibar had postulated some member of the paraffin series as the chief constituent of Mellidani protoplasm
; he was probably right.

  Clouds of gaseous chlorine hung thickly overhead, draping the sky with a yellow-green blanket. Somewhere directly above burned the sun Mellidan: a yellow star of some intensity, its heat negated by the planet’s distance from it and by the swath of chlorine that was the atmosphere’s main component.

  One other distinct feature made up the view as Bork saw it. Some eight miles directly westward, the violet-hued arc of a plastic-extrusion habitation dome rose from the bare plain. Bork had seen such domes before—more than forty years before, when he had served as a member of the last mission to Terra.

  He had been only a Fifth Attaché then, though soon after he was to begin the rapid climb that would bring him to the rank of Federation Emissary. On that occasion, the emissary had been old Morvil Brek, who had added twelve worlds to the Federation during his distinguished career. Brek had been named to make the fifth attempt to enroll the Sol system.

  The mission had been a failure; the Terran government had emphatically rejected any offer to federate, and Emissary Brek then declared the system non-Federated for good, in a bitter little speech which fell short of making its intended effect of altering the Terran decision. The Galactics had departed—and, on the outward trip, Bork had seen the violet domes on the snowswept plains of Sol IX, where the Terrans had established an encampment.

  He scowled, now. Terrans on Mellidan VII? Why? Why?

  “Contact has been made with the Mellidani leaders, sir,” Kumagon said gently.

  Bork drew his eyes from the Terran dome. It seemed to him he could almost see the Terrans moving about within it, pale-skinned, ten-fingered, almost repellently hairy men with that sly expression always on their faces—Just imagination. He sighed.

  “Transfer the line up here,” Bork said to his adjutant. “I’ll talk to them from my chair.”

  Bork sprawled in a leisure-loving way into the intricate reticulations of the web foam chair; he nudged a stud at its base and the chair began to quiver gently, massaging him, easing the stress-and-fatigue poisons from his muscles. After a moment, the communicator screen lit up, breaking into the wide-periphery view of the landscape.