ELEVEN

‘That puts a new light on things,’ Willis Gram said gloomily. ‘Read the intercepted message again.’

Director Barnes read from the copy before him. ‘“Have found… who will… their help will… and I am…” That’s all that came through well enough to be transcribed. Static got the rest.’

‘But all the answers are there,’ Gram said. ‘He’s alive; he’s coming back; he has found someone – not something, but someone, because he used the word “their”. He says, “Their help will…” and what’s missing probably is the rest of a sentence reading, “Their help will be enough.” Or words to that effect.’

‘I think you’re being too pessimistic,’ Barnes said.

‘I have to be. Anyhow, hell, I’ve got the evidence to be pessimistic about. They’ve been waiting for word from Provoni all this time and now it’s come. Their printing plants will have the news all over the planet in the next six hours, and there’s no way we can stop them.’

‘We can bomb their main printing plant on 16th Avenue,’ Director Barnes said; he was all for that. He had waited months for permission to destroy the huge Under Men plant.

‘They’ll patch this into the TV circuit,’ Gram said. ‘Two minutes – then we’ll find their transmitter and that’ll be the end of that, but they’ll have gotten their damn message across.’

‘Then give up,’ Barnes said.

‘I’m not going to give up. I’m never going to. I’ll have Provoni killed within an hour of the time he lands on Earth, and whoever it is he’s brought to help them – we’ll snuff them, too. Damn nonhuman organisms, they probably have six legs and a tail that stings. Like a scorpion.’

‘And they’ll sting us to death,’ Barnes said.

‘Something like that.’ In his bathrobe and slippers, Gram paced moodily about his bedroom office, his arms locked behind him, stomach protruding. ‘Doesn’t it seem to you to be a betrayal of the human race, Old Men, Under Men, New Men, Unusuals – everyone? To bring in a nonhumanoid life form which’ll probably want to colonize here once it’s destroyed us?’

‘Except,’ Barnes pointed out, ‘it’s not going to destroy us; we’re going to destroy it.’

‘You just never know for sure about these things,’ Gram said. ‘They might gain a foothold. That’s what we have to prevent.’

Barnes said, ‘From a calculation of the distance from which the message came, it’s computed that he – and they – won’t be here for two more months.’

‘They may have a faster-than-light drive,’ Gram said shrewdly. ‘Provoni may not be aboard the Gray Dinosaur; he may be on one of their ships. And hell, the Gray Dinosaur is fast enough; remember, it was the prototype of a whole new line of interstellar transportation type ships; he got the first one and away he went.’

‘I’ll admit this,’ Barnes said. ‘Provoni may have modified the ship’s drive; he may have beefed it up. He always was a tinkerer. I wouldn’t rule it out entirely.’

‘Cordon will be executed immediately,’ Gram said. ‘Get it done now. Notify the media, so they can be present. Round up sympathizers.’

‘Ours? Or theirs?’

Gram spat out, ‘Ours.’

‘In addition,’ Barnes asked, scratching out notes on a pad of paper, ‘may I have permission to bomb the 16th Avenue printing plant?’

‘It’s bomb proof,’ Gram said.

‘Not exactly. It’s divided, like a beehive, into—’

‘I know all about it – I’ve read your damn plodding, tiresome memos about it for months. You have a thing about that 16th Avenue printing plant, don’t you?’

‘Shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t it have been destroyed long ago?’

‘Something keeps me from doing it.’

‘Why?’ Barnes said.

Presently Gram said, ‘I worked there, once. Before I rose in the Civil Service. I was a spy. I know almost everyone there; they were onetime friends. They never found out about me… I didn’t look like I do now. I had an artificial head.’

‘Christ,’ Barnes said.

‘What’s the matter with that?’

‘It’s just so – absurd. We don’t do that any more; we haven’t done that since I took office.’

‘Well, this was before you took office.’

‘So they still don’t know.’

‘I’ll give you the authority to break down the wall of the place and arrest all of them,’ Gram said. ‘But I won’t give you permission to bomb them. But you’ll see I’m right; it won’t make any difference; they’ll have the news of Provoni on the air. In two minutes, they’ll blanket the Earth – two minutes!’

‘The second their transmitter goes on the air—’

‘Two minutes. Anyhow.’

Presently Barnes nodded.

‘So you know I’m right. Anyhow, go ahead with the execution of Cordon; I want it done by six o’clock tonight, our time.’

‘And the business about the sharpshooter and Irma—’

‘Forget that. Just get Cordon. We’ll snuff her later. May-be one of the nonhumanoid life forms could smother her with its sack-like, protoplasmic body.’

Barnes laughed.

‘I’m serious,’ Gram said.

‘You have a lurid idea of what the nonhumanoids are going to turn out to look like.’

‘Blimps,’ Gram said. ‘They’ll look like blimps. Only with tails. It’s the tails you have to watch for, that’s where the poison is.’

Barnes rose. ‘May I leave now and start the procedure re Cordon’s execution? And the attack on the 16th Avenue Under Men printing plant?’

‘Yes,’ Gram said.

Lingering at the door, Barnes asked, ‘Would you like to attend the execution?’

‘No.’

‘I could have a special box made up for you from which you could see but into which no one—’

‘I’ll watch it on closed-circuit TV.’

Barnes blinked. ‘Then you don’t want it telecast over the regular planet-web system? For everybody to see?’

‘Oh, yeah, Gram said, glumly nodding. ‘Of course; that’s half of it, isn’t it? All right, I’ll simply watch it like everyone else does. That’s good enough for me.’

‘As to the 16th Avenue printing plant… I’ll have a list made up of everyone we catch there, and you can go over the list—’

‘And see how many old friends are on it,’ Gram finished.

‘You might want to visit them in prison.’

‘Prison! Does everything have to end there or end as an execution? Is that right?’

‘If you mean, Is that what happens? then the answer is yes. But if you mean—’

‘You know what I mean.’

Barnes, reflecting, said, ‘This is a civil war we’re fighting. During his time, Abraham Lincoln imprisoned hundreds upon hundreds of men, without due process, and still he’s remembered as the greatest of the U.S. presidents.’

‘But he was always pardoning people.’

‘You can do that.’

‘Okay,’ Gram said cannily. ‘I’ll free everyone from the 16th Avenue printing plant that I knew. And they’ll never find out why.’

‘You’re a good man, Council Chairman,’ Barnes said. ‘To extend your loyalties even to those who are now actively working against you.’

‘I’m a slimy bastard,’ Gram grated. ‘You know it; I know it. It’s just that – well, hell. We had a lot of good times together; we used to get a million laughs out of what we printed. Laughs, because we put funny stuff into it. Now it’s all solemn and stodgy. But when I was there, we – aw, the hell with it.’ He lapsed into silence. What am I doing here? he asked himself. How did I get into a position like this, with all this authority? I never was meant for it.

On the other hand, he thought, maybe I was.

Thors Provoni awoke. And saw nothing, only depth of blackness surrounding him. I’m inside it, he realized.

‘That is true,’ the Frolixan said. ‘It upset me when you went to sleep – as you call it.’

‘Morgo Rahn Wilc,’ Provoni said, into the darkness. ‘You’re a worrier. We sleep every twenty-four hours; we sleep from eight to—’

‘I know that,’ Morgo said. ‘But consider how it appears: you gradually lose your personality, your heart beat drops, your pulse slows… it looks very much like death.’

‘But you know it isn’t,’ Provoni pointed out.

‘It’s the mental functioning that changes so much, that makes us uneasy. You’re not aware of it, but unusual and violent mental activity takes place while you sleep. First, you enter a world that to some extent is familiar to you… in your mind you are where genuine personal friends, enemies, and socially-contacted figures speak and act.’

‘In other words,’ Provoni said, ‘dreams.’

‘This sort of dreaming forms a kind of recapitulation of the day, of what you’ve done, whom you’ve thought about, talked with. That does not alarm us. It is the next phase. You fall into a deeper interior level; you encounter personages you never knew, situations you’ve never been in. A disintegration of your self, of you as such, begins; you merge with primordial entities of a god-like type, possessing enormous power; while you are there you are in danger of—’

‘The collective unconsciousness,’ Provoni said. ‘That the greatest of the human thinkers Carl Jung discovered. Abreaction past the moment of birth, back into other lives, other places… and populated by archetypes, as Jung—’

‘Did Jung stress the point that one of these archetypes could, at any time, absorb you? And a reformation of your self would never reoccur? You would be only a talking, walking extension of the archetype?’

‘Of course he stressed it. But it’s not at night in sleep that the archetype takes over, it’s during the day. When they appear during the day – that’s when you’re destroyed.’

‘In other words when you sleep while awake.’

Grudgingly, he said, ‘True.’

‘So, when you are asleep we must protect you. Why do you object to my enfolding of you during this period? I am concerned for your life; you are so made that you would throw it away in a single gamble. Your trip to our world – a terrible gamble, one you should not have made, statistically speaking.’

‘But I made it,’ Provoni said.

The darkness had begun to withdraw as the Frolixan left him. He made out the metal wall of the ship, the large hamper used as a hammock, the half-closed hatch to the control room. His ship, the Gray Dinosaur: his world for so long. His cocoon, within which he slept a good part of the time.

They would wonder at the fanatic now, he thought, if they could see him stretched out in his hammock, a week of beard on his face, his hair down to his shoulders, his body grimy, his clothing rancid and grimier still. Here he is, the savior of man. Or rather of some part of mankind. The part which had not been suppressed until – he wondered what it was like, now. Had the Under Men gotten any support? Or were most Old Men resigned to their meager status? And Cordon, he thought. What if the great speaker and writer is dead? Then probably it all died with him.

But now they know – my friends anyhow, know – that I found the help we need and that I am returning. Assuming they got my message. And assuming they could decode it.

I, the traitor, he thought. The caller upon the unhuman for support. Opening up Earth to an invasion by creatures which otherwise would never have noticed it. Will I go down in history as the most evil of men – or savior? Or perhaps something less extreme, down there in the middle. The subject of a quarter page entry in the Britannica.

‘How can you call yourself a traitor, Mr. Provoni?’ Morgo asked.

‘How indeed.’

‘You have been called a traitor. You have been called a savior. I have examined every particle of your conscious self, and there is no lusting after the vainglory of greatness; you have made a difficult voyage, with virtually no hope of success, and you have done it for one motive only: to help your friends. Isn’t it said in one of your books of wisdom, “If a man give up his life for his friend—”’

‘You can’t complete that quotation,’ Provoni, said, amused.

‘No, because you don’t know it, and all we have ever had to go on is your mind – on its contents, down to the collective level, which worries us so at night’

‘Pavor nocturnus,’ Provoni said. ‘Fear at night; you have a phobia.’ He got shakily from his hammock, stood dizzily swaying, then shuffled to the food-supply compartment. He pressed a button, but nothing emerged. He pressed a second button. Still nothing emerged. He felt, then, panic; he pressed buttons at random… and at last a cube of R-ration slid into the receptacle.

‘There is enough to get you back to Earth, Mr. Provoni,’ the Frolixman assured him.

‘But,’ he said savagely, grinding his teeth, ‘just barely enough. I know the calculations; I may have to go through the last few days with no food at all. And you’re worried about my sleep; Christ, if you’re going to worry, worry about my gut.’

‘But we know you’ll be all right.’

‘Okay,’ Provoni said. He opened the cube of food, ate it, drank a cup of redistilled water, shuddered, wondered about brushing his teeth. I stink, he thought. All of me. They’ll be appalled. I’ll look like someone trapped in a submarine for four weeks.

‘They’ll understand why,’ Morgo said.

‘I want,’ Provoni said, ‘to take a shower.’

‘There is not enough water.’

‘Can’t you – get me some? Somehow?’ On a number of times in the past, the Frolixan had provided him with chemical constituents, building blocks he needed for more complicated entities. Surely, if it could do this it could synthesize water… there, around the Gray Dinosaur, where it had placed itself.

‘My own somatic system is short on water, too,’ Morgo said. ‘I was thinking of asking you for some.’

He laughed.

‘What is funny?’ the Frolixan asked.

‘Here we are, out here between Proxima and Sol, on our way to save Earth from the tyranny of its oligarchy of elite rulers, and we’re busy trying to cadge a few quarts of water from each other. How are we going to save Earth if we can’t even synthesize water?’

‘Let me tell you a legend about God,’ Morgo said. ‘In the beginning he created an egg, a huge egg, with a creature inside it. God tried to break the eggshell open to let the creature – the original living creature – out. He couldn’t. But the creature which He had made had a sharp beak, constructed for just such a task, and it chipped its way out of the egg. And hence – all living creatures have free will, now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we broke the egg, not He.’

‘Why does that give us free will?’

‘Because, dammit, we can do what He can’t.’

‘Oh.’ Provoni nodded, grinned, then, in amusement at the Frolixan’s idiomatic English, learned, of course, from himself. It knew Terran language, only to the extent that he knew them: a reasonably adequate span of English – but not what Cordon possessed – plus a little Latin, German, Italian. It could say ‘goodbye’ in Italian, and seemed to enjoy doing so; it always signed off with a solemn ciao. He himself preferred ‘Biz you later,’ but evidently the Frolixans considered that substandard… and by his own standards. It was an idiom from the Service which he couldn’t get rid of. It was, like much else in his mind, a clutter of fleas: hopping fragments of thoughts and ideas, memories and fears, that had taken up residence evidently for good. It was up to the Frolixans to sort it all out, and they had so done, it would seem.

‘You know,’ Provoni said, ‘when we get to Earth, I’m going to find, somewhere, a bottle of brandy. And sit down on the steps—’

‘What steps?’

‘I just see a big gray public building, with no windows, like the Internal Revenue Service, something really dreadful, and I see myself sitting on the steps, wearing an old dark-blue coat, drinking brandy. Right out in the open. And people will come by and they will mutter, “Look, that man’s drinking in public.” And I’ll say, “I’m Thors Provoni.” And then they’ll say, “He deserves it. We won’t turn him in.” And they won’t.’

‘There will be no arrest made of you, Mr. Provoni,’ Morgo said. ‘Then or any other time. We’ll be with you from the moment you land. Not merely me, as we have here now, but my brothers. The brotherhood. And they—’

‘They’ll take over Earth. And then spit me out to die.’

‘No, no. We have shaken hands on it. Don’t you remember?’

‘Maybe you lied.’

‘We can’t lie, Mr. Provoni. I explained that to you, and so did my supervisor, Gran Ce Wanh. If you don’t believe me, and you don’t believe him, an entity over six million years old—’ The Frolixan sounded exasperated.

‘When I see it,’ Provoni said, ‘I’ll believe it.’ He grimly drank a second cup of reconstituted water, even though the red light above the water-source was on… and had been on for a week.