9 Tales of Space and Time Read online

  “Wainwright, here, when he took the tests, had to pass or fail on the basis of his personality. You simply took another test on your understanding of theory.

  “Now if Wainwright took a test of physics, he’d answer according to the theories his examiner expected him to use—even if some of his own private research had led him to original discoveries tending to disprove standard theory. You pass tests not on that-which-is-true, but on the degree to which your answers match what-the-examiners-hold-to-be-true.

  “The Duke has certain beliefs he believes to be true; you have others which exclude his. If you took an examination prepared by his people, I suspect you would get an appallingly poor mark. You’d fail the test. Whether your answers are correct-in-fact or not has very little to do with the score one makes on a test, you know.”

  Gay looked at him with a complexly blended mixture of anger, surprise, confusion, embarrassment, and professional defensiveness. “You know nothing about psychological testing procedures!” she finally blurted out.

  Bowman nodded. “I know I don’t, Dr. Firestone. A political career is a peculiar sort of thing—it requires a maximum willingness to admit ignorance of other people’s business, and a maximum willingness to learn. Basically, a politician must rely on the votes of many people; to him, psychological theory is a very uncertain thing indeed, because it doesn’t succeed in getting votes. But most politicians I’ve worked with seem to feel that the ultimate test of psychology is whether people actually act as the theory predicts they will.

  “My own feeling is that I know very little about psychology.

  “As to taking political appointments—yes. Since I left college, that’s all I’ve done. It’s my postgraduate work. Haven’t you been working on fellowships to which you were appointed? I believe Carl and Blackie have, also.

  “Political ‘fellowships’ are somewhat the same, I feel.”

  Blackie looked somewhat startled. “You’ve got a point, fella!”

  Bowman grinned. “We get beat about the ears a good bit—but we’re trying to do a job of work too, you know. We’re sort of sociological craftsmen. We’re still flying by the seat of our pants, using rules of thumb, and making a lot of crash landings. I’m strictly an apprentice at the trade; it’s my very genuine conviction of my own incompetence that makes me feel like hell about those two men who got caught in the gears of progress. I’d like someone older and more experienced to look this deal over before we get any more people hurt.”

  Gay’s face was set in stubborn lines. “I think we should talk this over further tomorrow. We can each think about it tonight.”

  The others nodded agreement slowly. Bowman acquiesced. It was perfectly clear that Gay intended to talk to the others when Bowman was not around to interfere.

  But there was little opportunity for Gay or anyone else to talk it over the next day. Bowman had roused first and had been keeping a speculative eye on the fields toward Stonehill, while organizing things for the new day. Quite as he expected, Duke Stonehill and three of his men started out across the fields with the sunlight streaming long, low rays down the hillside. There was a heavy dew on the grasses, and the early-morning haze softened the usually bitingly harsh light of the distant electric-arc sun. The Duke and his men, in colorful, highly decorated armor, the leading guardsman carrying the Duke’s pennon, with the ancient Castle-town in the background, made a picture-book scene.

  Bowman looked silently, his face for a moment showing strong, deep lines of sadness. He knew with immense precision what was going to happen, and he also knew precisely how to stop it, in any of several thousand ways. But he also knew—which none of the others here could—precisely why he had to refrain from stopping it. A little longer, though—just a little while now—and he could put these jobs off on someone else.

  He was aware simultaneously of the Duke and his men, of the soft sleep sounds of the crew, of the control room, and the papers where Wainwright and Seaman had been working hard on the field-force calculations. A faint smile twitched his lips as he glanced over their results. The “Wake-makers”! It was definitely a good name for them—they’d stirred up quite a few Wakes, trying to rearrange the galaxy to suit themselves.

  He sighed, amused at himself as he did so, and turned toward the companionway. “Up and out! Up and out! Boarders approaching to starboard,” he called.

  The sleep sounds stopped abruptly.

  “Huh?” came from Wainwright’s cabin. “Boarders?”

  “Is he back again?” called Gay’s irritated voice. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “What do you mean, ‘boarders’?” Blackie called. He and Seaman were stirring, and Blackie’s round face, sleepy-eyed and black-beard-stubbled, stuck out the door.

  Wainwright was out, zipping his tunic, his eyes still slightly bleary with sleep, but rapidly becoming alert. “The Duke?” he asked. “What’s he coming back for?”

  Gay bustled out of the Medic department; there was a curious impression of a humming swarm of bees about her. “We already know that man doesn’t learn easily or willingly. I don’t know what he expects to accomplish, but whatever it is, he won’t. Let’s go out and see what he wants.”

  They gathered at the outer lock as the Duke and his men rode closer. Again the men stopped about fifty paces away, and the Duke came on alone. Wainwright and Seaman went down the ramp to meet him, with Bowman somewhat behind them. Gay stationed herself at the head of the ramp.

  The Duke drew himself up some ten paces from Wainwright and Seaman. “I stand challenged,” he said heavily. He drew his sword slowly and held it vertically before his face. “It is not honorable or proper to ignore the protest and the challenge of any man. There shall be combat!”

  “There can be no combat, Duke Stonehill,” Carl protested. “It is contrary to our customs; let us determine then what should be done.”

  “There shall be combat, for there has been combat, though you deny it! Two of my people are slain by your corruption!” The Duke, the day before, had held his sword pointing directly at Carl; this morning he swung it from the vertical position into a horizontal position, held in his left hand and at throat height, pointing across his body toward his right, as he started forward.

  “Tell him to stop!” Gay cried.

  “Stop, Defender!” Carl called, retreating, his face suddenly worried. Wainwright, too, began to retreat. “Stop and let us discuss . . . stop!”

  The Duke, his face completely immobile, walked straight on. “There shall be combat!” he repeated. Suddenly he leaped forward.

  “Oh my God!” Gay cried and triggered her neurodamper.

  Again, the Duke’s powerful body jerked in the initial spasm of the neurodamper. But, as he had known when he advanced, there was a difference. The instantaneous spasm of his muscles jerked the sharp, heavy sword against his throat, nearly severing his head from his body.

  The body dropped limply to the ground, less than two feet from Wainwright’s feet. Unfamiliarly pinkish blood welled out in a pool, and Wainwright stepped back quickly. He looked down at the fallen Duke, his massive, blocky body sprawled on the dew-wet grass. He looked up to where the three men were standing beside the four horselike animals.

  Finally he sighed heavily. “All right, gang, let’s pack up the show.”

  “The fool,” said Gay shakenly, “the damned, stubborn fool!”

  Wainwright looked from the fallen Duke to where she stood in the doorway, the neurodamper hanging from her fingers. “Gay, I can no longer accept that he was an egotistical aristocrat simply trying to keep his nest feathered. You were quite wrong on that, and so were we. You’d better go back aboard. We’ll have to do what we can to clean up this mess.” He gestured toward the three men still standing by their horses.

  “He knew exactly what would happen,” said Carl quietly.

  Blackie came down the ramp and joined them. He looked at the Duke’s face, still stern and determined in death. He touched his forehead and said softly, “M
y respects, sir, and my apologies.” He turned to Wainwright. “What do we do—besides packing out of here?”

  Wainwright shrugged and turned to Bowman apologetically. “I’m afraid that, as is usual when people have somehow gotten fanatical and not figured things too straight, we’ll have to turn to the politicians and statesmen to get us out again. Will you take over, Bull?” he waved toward the Duke’s men.

  Bowman nodded. “I’ll see what sort of peace I can make with—oh, let’s face it—what sort of peace I can make with our own consciences . . . in the guise of the Paradans.

  “I’ll have to see the Temple Priest, from what I can make of their Customs, since it is he who shares the actual rule with the reigning Duke.

  “You’d better go back aboard; since the Duke undoubtedly ordered his men to stay out of this, I’ll have no trouble alone.”

  “As you say, Bull.” Wainwright picked up the others with his eyes and went aboard. At the head of the inner lock Gay was standing very nervously watching Wainwright. The Captain was unconsciously rubbing his hands against his tunic, as though trying to clean them.

  “I—I’m sorry, Hal,” Gay said, “I . . .”

  “So are we all, Gay. Better leave it to Bull. He seems to feel he can handle it.” Wainwright walked on into the control room.

  Outside, Bowman gently picked up the Duke’s body and carried it toward the waiting men. One of them started toward him, leading the Duke’s horse.

  “He died a good and brave man,” said Bowman quietly. “He has forced us to leave this place; take him to the Temple, as is fitting a brave warrior. I go to make our settlement with the Uncle.”

  “Aye. The Last Stonehill was a brave man; he feared no magic.” The guardsmen expertly tied the Duke onto his horse and started slowly across the field. The Duke’s pennon waved in the light morning air; it was carried in his saddle-boot now.

  The Duke was coming home dead, but with his pennon flying.

  Bowman walked with them till they crossed a slight swale of ground. Then he said, “I will go to the Uncle.” The ship was out of sight from this spot—and Bowman vanished.

  By a very simple method—one so simple it had taken the Wake-makers seventy thousand years of immense research to perfect it—Bowman’s mind triggered certain spatial laws into action.

  The old Temple priest looked up with widened eyes, as Bowman suddenly was in front of him.

  “The Star People will leave, Nephew,” said Bowman.

  “I—felt the Duke die. But you—you are not of the Star People, yet you are a Star Man, too!” The old priest rose and looked at Bowman in confusion.

  “They do not know that, Nephew. It is not wise for them to know that, nor will it be wise for your people to know it in a little while longer. I am of another Star People, a people who came among the stars a great while ago; we are truly Star People now and have been for more than two hundred thousand years.”

  “Do these Star People here know your people exist?”

  “Long ago, my people left certain traces in the heavens when they moved worlds from one star to another; these traces are known to the Star People, but they believe my people are gone. They, like your people, believe that a race must be all alike to be able to work together—which is not true. Is not your muscle different from your brain, your lungs different from your bones? Are not all these differences part of you, and are these differences not essential to your living?

  “We came, once, from a single planet called Earth . . . a long time ago. Now some, like myself, are adapted to planets like this, where water is very near to boiling; others prefer planets where water is a kind of stone. We are very different—and we are therefore more essential to each other. Between peoples who are just alike, there can be only competition. Where there is difference, there can be the harmony of complementation, but there can be no competition.

  “Now, my Nephew, we must discuss the errors that have been made; I will see that the Star People understand their errors, also, but I must go with them.

  “The Duke is dead; death is solely and always the result of accumulation of mistakes.”

  “Old age . . .” said the priest doubtfully.

  “The accumulation of the errors of living. This is so; I know this by experience, and your people will learn. I have lived some twenty thousand years, and I will spend a few more centuries on Therlem, the planet of your Star People, before I go home. But there need be no end to life.

  “The Duke died because he made mistakes, and he died a brave and good man because he faced the penalty of his mistakes and thereby balanced them.

  “The Star People are a good people. They are young, and they are not wise—but they are not childish. They are, instead, an adolescent people, idealistic, sure of themselves and their mission (which is as it should be for the adolescent!), and very difficult to live with.” Bowman smiled ruefully. “You have, perhaps, some experience with the nature of the adolescent?”

  “Yes,” said the priest. “I—believe I understand a little.”

  “I have lived with them some thousand years now, I and a few friends, and the Therlem people are nearly approaching adult stage now. This experience has been very good, but very, very painful, to four of their finest people. My friends and I selected some of their most effective individuals for this trip.

  “They are good, they are not vicious, and they are not twisted. You spoke truly with the Duke on that.

  “But the Duke, and you yourself, are paying with unhappiness and loss, because you sought to use the humanity, the understanding and fellow-feeling of these four youngsters as a weapon to drive them away. You have succeeded despite the power of their ship—and this you could not imagine, for you have not the experience, but they could turn half this world into a bubbling lake of boiling rock with the powers that ship carries!—still, the Duke has lashed them and is sending them home with their tails between their legs.

  “But this was because you knew the depth and power of human things and human forces.” Bowman looked steadily at the old man. “Now tell me wherein you were wrong, and why, therefore, the Duke died—and you face years of loneliness.”

  The old man trembled and sat down unsteadily. “I—I see, and the fault is mine. We acknowledged that they were good and understanding people when we sought to hurt them and drive them away, but we did not acknowledge that they were good and understanding people when they came to us. ‘He who would push, must be pushed.’ ”

  “When the Duke refused to allow understanding or to admit that understanding could grow between your two peoples, he established an unbalance.

  “Very wise adults could have re-established the balance without the Duke’s death; but these are the adolescents of an adolescent race. They could not.”

  “You . . .?” the priest half asked.

  “I,” said Bowman, “could make you believe I was a pink dragon with three heads and six legs—or that the sun did not go around Parado, but that Parado went around the sun, spinning like a top. I could make you believe anything I chose to insert in your mind.

  “Many times on Therlem and other planets where I have studied, I have wanted very much to use this power. It would have saved me so much time and trouble.

  “But doing that can only make a mind a pale imitation of a part of me, leaving nothing of itself at all. I can make you believe anything—but only by destroying forever that which is you—the originality that you yourself have built and are building.

  “Certainly I could have stopped all this trouble. I could have stopped it a thousand years ago. But then there would have been no Therlem and no Paradans. There would only have been puppets, living contented, peaceful, ordered lives.

  “We learn by pain; I, too, must accept pain and not protect either you or myself in the easy way of avoiding lessons. Not more than a dozen times have I destroyed a mind, and then only because of the danger of destruction of a world if I did not. There is nothing more appallingly dangerous than an adolescent with G
odlike powers. Our own young are a particularly difficult problem, naturally.

  “I did not stop the thing, because it is your life you must lead, not one I construct for you, however placid and pretty it might be.

  “I can take from you all memory of the Duke; then there will be no sorrow over his loss. Do you wish that?”

  The old man shook his head. “No, Uncle. But—will you or one of you be near us when there is great trouble?”

  Bowman smiled slowly and shook his head. “Tell me why we will not.”

  The priest sighed. “I have trouble making my students work through their own problems; they would rather borrow the answers from someone else, not taking the hard way of learning to work out the answers. And if a child knows his father stands by to catch him if he falls, he will be careless indeed.

  “Very well, my Uncle, I have learned much—and I will seek faithfully to learn more, and to teach what I can. Only so can the sacrifice of the Duke be other than futile.”

  “Good. I will return to the ship; they, too, have lessons to learn; and they know very well that they have been hurt, but cannot yet understand why. Patience is very hard for the adolescent to learn, but until he learns it, he is not adult.”

  Bowman faded from the priest’s view and, aware that none of the ship’s crew was watching out the bubble dome, was instantaneously walking up the lock ramp.

  Wainwright met him at the inner lock door, his face considerably more lined than it had been when Bowman left a bare hour before. “How goes it, Bull? You look beat.”

  Bowman shrugged. “It goes. Nothing much we can do, of course; we have nothing they want—which was the source of the whole trouble—and they are not stupid; they know they can do nothing to us. Except make us damned unhappy. I—well—call it ‘apologized’ and promised we would leave at once.” Bowman paused to look at Wainwright again. “You look sort of beat, too.”