The Best Of Lester Del Rey Part 6

64.

to exploit all other races. Not that it would do Fats much good if he did.

Slim knew the value of idealism- none better.

He'd come out of college with a bad dose of it and an inherited fortune big enough for three men, filled with the old crusading spirit. He'd written and published books, made speeches, interviewed administrators, lobbied, joined and organized societies, and been called things that weren't complimentary.

Now he was pushing freight from Mars to Earth for a living, quarter owner of a s.p.a.ce-worn freighter. And Fats, who'd come up from a tube cleaner without the help of ideals, owned the other three quarters.

Fats watched him climb out of the hold. "Well?"

"Nothing. I can't fix it-don't know enough about electronics. There's something wrong with the relays that control the time interval, but the indicators don't show where, and I'd hate to experiment out here."

"Make it to Earth-maybe?"

Slim shook his head. "I doubt it, Fats. Better set us down on Luna somewhere, if you can handle her that far. Then maybe we can find out what's wrong before we run out of air."

Fats had figured as much and was already braking (he ship down, working against the spasmodic flutter of die blasts, and swearing at the effects of even the moon's weak gravity. But the screens showed that he was making progress toward the spot he'd chosen-a *mall flat plain with an area in the center that seemed unusually clear of debris and pockmarks.

"Wish they'd at least put up an emergency station out here," he muttered.

"They had one once," Slim said. "But n.o.body ever goes to Luna, and there's no reason for pa.s.senger ships to land there; takes less fuel for them to coastdown on their fins through Earth's atmosphere than to jet down fcere.

Freighters like us don't count, anyway. Funny fcow regular and flat that place is; we can't be over a mile up, and I don't see even a meteor scar."

"Luck's with us, then. I'd hate to hit a baby crater and rip off a tube or poke a hole in the sh.e.l.l." Fats glanced at the radio altimeter and fall indicator. "We're gonna hit plenty hard. If- Hey, what the deuce!"

Slim's eyes flicked to the screen just in time to see the flat plain split into two halves and slide smoothly out from under them as they seemed about to touch it; then they were dropping slowly into a crater of some sort, seemingly bottomless and widening out rapidly; the roar of the tubes picked up suddenly.

Above them, the over-screens showed a pair of translucent slides closing together again. His eyes stared at the height indicator, neither believing nor doubting.

"Hundred and sixty miles down and trapped in! Tube sounds show air in some amount, at least, even up here. This crazy trap can't be here. There's no reason for it."

"Right now, who cares? We can't go through that slide up there again, so we go down and find out, T guess. d.a.m.n, no telling what kind of landing field we'll find when we reach bottom." Fats' lack of excess imagination came in handy in cases like this. He went about the business of jockeying down the enormous crater as if he were docking at York port, too busy with the uncertain blast to worry about what he might find at the bottom. Slim gazed at him in wonder, then fell back to staring at the screen for some indication of the reason behind this obviously artificial trap.

Lhin scratched idly through the pile of dirt and rotten shale, pried a thin sc.r.a.p of reddened stone out from where his eyes had missed it the first time, and rose slowly to his feet. The Great Ones had been good to him, sending a rockslide just when the old beds were wearing thin and poor from repeated digging. His sensitive nostrils told him there was magnesium, ferrous matter, and sulphur in abundance, all more than welcome. Of course, he'd hoped there might be copper, even as little as the end of his finger, but of that there seemed to be no sign. And without copper- He shrugged the thought aside as he had done a thousand times before, and picked up his crude basket, now filled half with broken rock and half with the li-chenlike growth that filled this end of the crater. One of his hands ground a bit of rottenstone together with shreds of lichen and he popped the mixture into his mouth. Grace to the Great Ones who had sent the slide; the pleasant flavor of magnesium tickled his tongue, and the lichens were full-flavored from the new richness of the soil around them. Now, with a trace of copper,' there would have been nothing left to wish for.

With a rueful twitch of his supple tail, Lhin grunted and turned back toward his cave, casting a cursory glance up at the roof of the cavern. Up there, long miles away, a bright glare lanced down, diffusing out as it pierced through the layers of air, showing that the long lunar day was nearing noon, when the sun would lance down directly through the small guarding gate. It was too high to see, but he knew of the covered opening where the sloping walls of the huge valley ended and the roof began. Through all the millennia of his race's slow defeat, that great roof had stood, unsupported except for the walls that stretched out around in a circle of perhaps fifty miles in diameter, strong and more lasting than even the crater itself; the one abiding monument to the greatness that had been his people's.

He knew without having to think of it that the roof was artificial, built when the last thin air was deserting the moon, and the race had sought a final refuge here in the deepest crater, where oxygen could be trapped and kept from leaking away. In a vague way, he could sense the ages that had pa.s.sed sincethen and wonder at the permanence of the domed roof, proof against all time.

Once, as the whole s.p.a.ce about him testified, his had been a mighty race. But time had worked on them, aging the race as it had individuals, removing the vigor of their youth and sending in the slow creepers of hopelessness. What good was existence here, cooped up in one small colony, away from their world?

Their numbers had diminished and some of their skill had gone from them. Their machines had crumbled and vanished, unreplaced, and they had fallen back to the primitive, digging out the rocks of the crater walls and the lichens they had cultured to draw energy from the heat and radioactive phosph.o.r.escence of the valley instead of sunlight. Fewer young were planted each year, and of the few, a smaller percentage proved fertile, so that their original million fell to thousands, then to hundreds, and finally to a few grubbing individuals.

Only then had they awakened to the danger of extinction, to find it too late.

There had been three elders when Lhin was grown, his seed being the only fertile one. Now the elders were gone long years since, and Lhin had the- entire length and breadth of the crater to . himself. And life was a long series of sleeps and food forages, relieved only by the same thoughts that had been , in his mind while his dead world turned to the light and away more than a thousand times. Monotony had slowly killed off his race, but now that its work was nearly done, it" had ended. Lhin was content with his type of life; he was habituated, and immune to boredom.

His feet had been moving slowly along with the turning of his thoughts, and he was out of the valley proper, near the door of the shelter carved into the rocky walls which he had chosen from the many as his home. He munched another mouthful of rock and lichen and let the diffused sunlight shine on him for a few minutes more, then turned into the cave. He needed no light, since the rock walls about had all been rendered radioactive in the dim youth of his race, and his eyes were adapted to wide ranges of light conditions. He pa.s.sed quickly through the outer room, containing his woven lichen bed and few simple furnishings, and back into the combination nursery and workshop, an illogical but ever-present hope drawing him back to the far corner.

But as always, it was reasonless. The box of rich earth, pulped to a fine loam and watered carefully, was barren of life. There was not even the beginning of a small red shoot to awaken him to hope for the future. His seed was infertile, and the time when all life would be extinct was growing near.

Bitterly he turned his back on the nursery bed.

So little lacking, yet so much! A few hundred molecules of copper salt to eat, and the seeds he grew would be fertile; or those same copper molecules added to the water would render the present seeds capable of growing into vigorous manhood-or womanhood; Lhin's people carried both male and female elements within each member, and could grow the seeds that became their children either alone or with another. So long as one member of the race lived, as many as a hundred young a year could be reared in the carefully tended incubating soil-if the vital hormone containing copper could be made.

But that, it seemed, was not to be. Lhin went over his laboriously constructed apparatus of hand-cut rock bowls and slender rods bound together into tubes, and his hearts were heavy within him. The slow fire of dried lichen and gummy tar burned still, and slowly, drop by drop, liquid oozed from the last tube into a bowl. But even in that there was no slightest odor of copper salts.

Well, he had tried that and failed. The acc.u.mulation of years of refining had gone into the water that kept the nursery soil damp, and in it there had been too little of the needed mineral for life. Almost dispa.s.sionately he threw the permanent metal rolls of his race's science back into their cylinders and began disa.s.sembling the chemical part of his workshop.

That meant the other solution, harder, and filled with risks, but necessarynow. Somewhere up near the roof, the records indicated, there was copper in small amounts, but well past the breathable concentration of air. That meant a helmet and tanks for compressed air, along with hooks and grapples to bridge the eroded sections of the old trail and steps leading up, instruments to detect the copper, and a pump to fill the tanks. Then he must carry tanks forward, cache them, and go up to make another cache, step by step, until his supply line would reach the top and-perhaps-he could find copper for a new beginning.

He deliberately avoided thinking of the tune required and the chances of failure. His foot came down on the little bellows and blue flames licked up from his crude forge as he drew out the hunks of refined metal and began heating them to malleability. Even the shaping of it by hand to the patterns of the ancient records was almost impossible, and yet, somehow, he must accomplish it correctly. His race must not die!

He was still working doggedly hours later when a high-pitched note shot through the cave. A meteor, coming into the fields around the sealing slides of the roof, and a large one! In all Lhin's life there had been none big enough to activate the warning screens, and he had doubted that the mechanism, though meant to be ageless and draw sun power until the sun died, was still functioning. As he stood staring at the door senselessly, the whistling note came again.

Now, unless he pressed his hand over the inductance grid, the automatic forces would come into play, twisting the meteor aside and beyond the roof. But he gave no thought to that as he dashed forward and slapped his fingers against the grille panel. It was for that he had chosen his rock house, once the quarters of the Watchers who let the few scouting rockets of the dim past ages in and out. A small glow from the grid indicated the meteor was through, and he dropped his hand, letting the slides close again.

Then he waited impatiently for it to strike, moving out to the entrance.

Perhaps the Great Ones were kind and were answering his prayers at last. Since he could find no copper here, they were sending a token from outer s.p.a.ce to him, and who knew what fabulous amounts it might contain-perhaps even as much as he could hold in one hand! But why hadn't it struck? He scanned the roof anxiously, numb with a fear that he had been too late and the forces had thrown it aside.

No, there was a flare above-but surely not such as a meteor that size should make as it sliced down through the resisting air! A sharp stinging whine hit his ears finally, flickering off and on; and that was not the sound a meteor would logically make. He stared harder, wondering, and saw that it was settling downward slowly, not in a sudden rush, and that the flare struck down instead of fading out behind. That meant-could only mean-intelligent control.

A rocket!

Lhin's mind spun under the shock, and crazy ideas of his ancestors' return, of another unknown refuge, of the Great Ones' personal visit slid into his thoughts. Basically, though, he was severely logical, and one by one he rejected them. This machine could not come from the barren moon, and that left only the fabled planet lying under the bottom of his world, or those that wandered around the sun in other orbits. Intelligence there?

His mind slid over the records he had read, made when his ancestors had crossed s.p.a.ce to those worlds, long before the refuge was built. They had been unable to colonize, due to the oppressive pull of gravity, but they had observed in detail. On the second planet were only squamous things that slid through the water and curious fronds on the little dry land; on his own primary, gigantic beasts covered the globe, along with growth rooted to the ground. No intelligence on those worlds. The fourth, though, was peopled by more familiar life, and like his own evolutionary forerunners, there was no division into animal and vegetable, but both were present in all. Ball-shapedblobs of life had already formed into packs, guided by instinct, with no means of communication. Yet, of the other worlds known, that seemed the most probable as a source of intelligence. If, by some miracle, they came from the third, he abandoned hope; the blood l.u.s.t of that world was too plainly written in the records, where living mountainh'ke beasts tore at others through all the rolls of etched pictures. Half filled with dread, half with antic.i.p.ation, he heard the ship land somewhere near, and started toward it, his tail curved tightly behind him.

He knew, as he caught sight of the two creatures outside the opened lock of the vessel that his guess had been wrong. The creatures were bifurcate, like himself, though ma.s.sive and much larger, and that meant the third world. He hesitated, watching carefully as they stared about, apparently keenly enjoying the air around them. Then one spoke to the other, and his mind shook under a new shock.

The articulation and intonation were intelligent, but the sounds were a meaningless babble. Speech-that! It must be, though the words held no meaning. Wait-in the old records-Slha the Freethinker had touched on some such thought; he had written of remote days when the Lunarites had .had no speech and postulated that they had invented the sounds and given them arbitrary meaning, and that only by slow ages of use had they become instinctive in the new-grown infants-had even dared to question that the Great Ones had ordered speech and sound meanings as the inevitable complement of intelligence. And now, it seemed, he was right. Lhin groped up through the fog of his discovery and tightened his thoughts into a beam.

Again, shock struck at him. Their minds were hard to reach, and once he did find the key and grope forward into their thoughts, it was apparent that they could not read his! Yet they were intelligent. But the one on whom his thoughts centered noticed him finally, and grabbed at the other. The words were still harsh and senseless, but the general meaning reached the moon man.

"Fats, what's that?"

The other turned and stared at Lhin's approach. "Search me. Looks like a scrawny three-foot monkey. Reckon it's harmless?"

"Probably, maybe even intelligent. It's a cinch no band of political refugees built this place-nonhuman construction. Hi there!" The one who thought of himself as Slim-ma.s.sive though he appeared-turned to the approaching Lunarite.

"What and who are you?"

"Lhin," he answered, noting surprised pleasure in Slim's mind. "Lhin-me are Lhin."

Fats grunted. "Guess you're right, Slim. Seems to savvy you. Wonder who came here and taught him English."

Lhin fumbled clumsily, trying to pin down the individual sounds to then'

meanings and remember them. "No sahffy Enlhis. No who came here. You-" He ran out of words and drew nearer, making motions toward Slim's head, then his own.

Surprisingly, Slim got it.

"He means he knows what we're thinking, I guess. Telepathy."

"Yeah? Marshies claim they can do it among themselves, but I never saw one read a human mind. They claim we don't open up right. Maybe this Ream monkey's lying to you."

"I doubt it. Take another look at the radioactivity meter in the viability tester-men wouldn't come here and go home without spreading the good word.

Anyway, his name isn't Ream. Lean comes closer to the sound he made, though we'll never get it right." He half sent a thought to Lhin, who dutifully p.r.o.nounced his name again. "See? His liquid isn't . . . it's a glottal stop.

And he makqb the final consonant a l.a.b.i.al, though it sounds something like our dental. We can't make sounds like that. Wonder how intelligent he is."

He turned back into the ship before Lhin could puzzle out some kind of answer, and was out a moment later with a small bundle under his arm. "s.p.a.ce Englishcode book," he explained to Fats. "Same as they used to teach the Martians English a century ago."

Then to Lhin: "Here are the six hundred most useful words of our language, organized, so it'll beat waiting for you to pick them up bit by bit. You look at the diagrammed pictures while I say and think the word. Now. One-w-uh-nn; two-tuh-ooo. Getting it?"

Fats watched them for a while, half-amused, then grew tired of it. "Okay, Slim, you mollycoddle the native a while and see what you learn. I'm going over to the walls and investigate that radioactive stuff until you're ready to start repairs. Wish radios weren't so darned limited in these freighters and we could get a call through."

He wandered off, but Lhin and Slim were hardly aware of it. They were going through the difficult task of organizing a means of communication, with almost no common background, which should have been worse than impossible in terms of hours. Yet, strange as the word a.s.sociations and sounds were, and odd as their organization into meaningful groups, they were still only speech, after all.

And Lhin had grown into life with a highly complex speech as natural to nun as breathing.

I.

He twisted his lips over the sounds and nailed the meanings down in his mind, one by one, indelibly.

Fats finally found them in Lhin's cave, tracing them by the sound of their voices, and sat down to watch, as an adult might watch a child playing with a dog. He bore Lhin no ill will, but neither could he regard the Moon man as anything but some clever animal, like the Martians or the primitives of Venus; if Slim enjoyed treating them as equals, let him have his way for the time.

Lhin was vaguely conscious of those thoughts and others more disturbing, but he was too wrapped up in the new experience of having some living mind to communicate with, after nearly a century of being alone with himself. And there were more important things. He wriggled his tail, spread his arms, and fought over the Earth sounds, while Slim followed as best he could.

Finally the Earth man nodded. "I think I get it. All of them died off except you, and you don't like the idea of coming to a dead end. Umm. I wouldn't either. So now you hope these Great Ones of yours-we call 'em G.o.d-have sent us down here to fix things up. How?"

Lhin beamed, his face contorting into a furrowed grimace of pleasure before he realized Slim misinterpreted the gesture. Slim meant well. Once he knew what was needed, perhaps he Would even give the copper gladly, since the old records showed that the third world was richest of all in minerals.

"Nra is needed. Life comes from making many simple things one not-simple thing-air, drink stuff, eat stuff, all that I have, so I live. But to begin the new life, Nra is needed. It makes things begin. The seed has no life-with Nra it lives. But I have no word."

He waited impatiently while Slim digested that. "Sort of a vitamin or hormone, something like Vitamin E6, eh? Maybe we could make it, but-"

Lhin nodded. Surely the Great Ones were kind. His hearty were warm as he thought of the many seeds carefully wrapped and stored that could be made to grow with the needed copper. And now the Earth man was willing to help. A little longer and all would be well.

"No need to make/' he piped happily. "Simple stuff. The seed or I can make it, in us. But we, need Nra to make it. See." He pulped a handful of rock from the basket lying near, chewed it carefully, and indicated that it was being changed inside him.

Fats awoke to greater attention. "Do that again, monkey!"

Lhin obliged, curious to note that they apparently ate nothing other life had not prepared for them. "Darn. Rocks-just plain rocks-and he eats them. Has hegot a craw like a bird, Slim?"

"He digests them. If you've read of those half-plant, half-animal things the Martians came from, you'll know what his metabolism's like. Look, Lhin, I take it you mean an element. Sodium, calcium, chlorine? No, I guess you'd have all those. Iodine, maybe? Hmmm." He went over a couple of dozen he could imagine having anything to do with life, but copper was not among them, by accident, and a slow fear crept up into the Lunarite's thoughts. This strange barrier to communication-would it ruin all?

He groped for the answer-and relaxed. Of course, though no common word existed, the element itself was common in structure. Hurriedly, he flipped the pages of the code book to a blank one and reached for the Earth man's pencil.

Then, as Slim and Fats stared curiously, he began sketching in the atomic structure of copper, particle by particle, from the center out, as the master physicists of his race had discovered it to be.

It meant nothing to them. Slim handed the paper back, shaking his head.

"Fella, if I'm right in thinking that's a picture of some atom, we've got a lot to learn back on earth. Wheeoof Fats twistecf his lips. "If that's an atom, I'm a fried egg. Come on, Slim, it's sleepy time and you've fooled away half a day. Anyhow, I want to talk that radioactive business over with you. It's so strong it'd cook us in half an hour if we weren't wearing these portable nulli- fiers-yet the monkey seems to thrive on it.-I got an idea."

Slim came back from his brown study and stared at his watch. "Darn it! Look, Lhin, don't give up yet, we'll talk all this over tomorrow again. But Fats is right; it's time for us to sleep. So long, fella."

Lhin nodded a temporary farewell in his own tongue and slumped back on his rough bed. Outside, he heard Fats extolling a scheme of some kind for getting out the radioactives with Lhin's help, somehow, and Slim's protesting voice.

But he paid no attention. The atomic structure had been right, he knew, but they were only groping toward it in their science, and their minds knew too little of the subject to enable them to grasp his pictures.

Chemical formulae? Reactions that would eliminate others, one by one? If they were chemists, perhaps, but even Slim knew too little for that. Yet, obviously,, unless there was no copper on Earth, there was an answer somewhere. Surely the Great Ones whom they called G.o.d would never answer generations of faithful prayer with a mockery! There was an answer, and while they slept, he would find it, though he had to search through every record roll for clues.

Hours later he was trudging across the plain toward the ship, hope high again.

The answer, once found, was simple. All elements formed themselves into families and cla.s.ses. Slim had mentioned sodium, and copper was related in the more primitive tables, such as Earth might use. More important, its atomic number was twenty-nine by theory elementary enough for any race that could build rockets.

The locks were open, and he slipped through both, the wavering half-formed thoughts of the men leading him to them unerringly. Once hi their presence, he stopped, wondering about their habits. Already he had learned that what held true for his people was not necessarily the rule with them, and they might not approve of his arousing a sleeper. Finally, torn between politeness and impatience, he squatted on the metal floor, clutching the record roll, his nostrils sampling the metals around him. Copper was not there; but he hadn't expected so rare an element, though there were others here that he failed completely to recognize and guessed were among the heavy ones almost lacking on the moon.

Fats gurgled and scrimmaged around with his arms, yawned, sat up, still half asleep. His thoughts were full of some Earth person of the female element which Lhin had noted was missing in these two, and what he'd do "when he gotrich." Lhin was highly interested in the thought pictures until he realized that it would be best not to intrude on these obviously secret things. He withdrew his mind just as the man noted him.

Fats was never at his best while waking up. He came to his feet with a bellow and grabbed for something. "Why, you sneaking little monkey! Trying to slip up and cut our-"

Lhin squealed and avoided the blow that would have left him a shapeless blob, uncertain of how he had offended, but warned by caution to leave. Physical fear was impossible to him-too many generations had grown and died with no need of it. But it came as a numbing shock that these beings would actually kill another intelligent person. Was life so cheap on Earth?

"Hey! Hey, Fats, stop it!" Slim had awakened at the sound of the commotion, and a hasty glance showed Lhin that he was holding the other's arms. "Lay off, will you? What's going on?"

But now Fats was fully awake and calming down. He dropped the metal bar and grinned wryly. "I dunno. I gsess he meant all right, but he was sitting there with that metal thing in his hands, staring at me, and I figured he meant to cut my throat or something. I'm all right now. Come on back, monkey; it's all right."

Slim let his partner go and nodded at Lhin. "Sure, come back, fella. Fats has some funny ideas about non-humans, but he's a good-hearted egg, on the whole.

Be a good doggie and he won't kick you-he might even scratch your ears."

"Nuts." Fats was grinning, good nature restored. He knew Slim meant it as a crack, but it didn't bother him; what was wrong with treating Marshies and monkeys like what they were? "Whatcha got there, monkey?

More pictures that mean nothing?"

Lhirt nodded in imitation of their a.s.sent gesture and held out the roll to Slim; Fats' att.i.tude was no longer unfriendly, but he was an unknown quant.i.ty, and Slim seemed the more interested. "Pictures that mean much, I hope. Here is Nra, twenty-nine, under sodium."