The Greks Bring Gifts

9

It took two days for ground monitor units to pick up the beamed signals from the moon. They were on a frequency of which no human use was then being made. They were wideband. And obviously they would not be mere audible signals if they were intended for deafened Aldarians to pick up. So the monitor station busily recorded them on television tape and then set to work to decode them into presumed pictures. It was necessary to figure out the number of images to the frame, and then the number of lines per frame, the scanning pattern and a few other things.

A few people heard about the picked up signals and were uneasy. For some reason, security slipped up on this item of fact, and a number of people noted that the Greks had said they were going home, to ten fight-years away. But their signals came from the moon, less than two light-seconds away. If, however, anybody drew any particular conclusions from such facts, they did nothing about them.

In the general public, though, there were no misgivings of any kind at any time. Not about the Greks! They'd gone away after enriching humanity beyond belief. True, there was unemployment, there was hardship, there was depression and there was indignation. Human industries, unable to sell anything but Grek-designed units, and unable to make them, closed down. Other factories, wanting to modify themselves to make such units, were unable to get anybody to work at any rational wage. People who saw the extinction of whole classes of business—fuel, for example—tried to get out of those businesses and the stock market hit bottom, bored holes in it, and went down farther. But this was not the fault of the Greks! They'd done great things for us and they intended greater. So we were angry and impatient with the current state of things. We wanted what the Greks had given us and we wanted it fast.

Already murmurings blamed the delay on Wall Street, or capitalists, or graft, or corruption. People said indignantly that "the interests" would keep us from our Grek-given wealth and it wasn't likely we'd ever get what the Greks had meant us to have unless they came back and forced the arrival of an economic millenium.

The point of which, naturally, was that people began to fink the granting of all our wishes to the return of the Greks.

There was more rioting. In South Africa it took on a racial tinge. In ultra-socialistic nations, the riots implied criticism of Marxism-Leninism. In other countries the rioters seemed pro-communist as well as pro-Grek. There was an increasing, seething political chaos in much of the world, and there was financial depression everywhere. Ugly moods characterized the followers of volunteer agitators, but also nearly everybody who'd set their hearts on working only one day a week with retirement at forty and everybody having everything that anybody else had.

The signals from the moon presently yielded pictures. They were of hands—Grek hands—making gestures in that formalized code with which the Greks communicated with the Aldarians. The pictures proved that the Greks hadn't gone away. But it didn't matter because the signals stopped. Hackett was among those who believed the Aldarians had heard the rumors about them, though they'd actually have to read them, and had reported the matter to the Greks. So the Greks stopped the signals.

At about this same time the various underground activities of the United States Government began to bear fruit. For one, Hackett found a way to find a way to discover how the broadcast-power receivers worked. He labored frantically at it. His basic discovery was that—as he'd guessed—the Greks were truly stupendous liars. Their policy could be summed up in a sequence of five statements. (1) If the Greks wanted to take over Earth, they could take it by violence or they could take it by deception. (2) But violence would reduce the value of Earth after they'd conquered it. Also (3) violence would leave the surviving humans filled with hatred which would make them less desirable as slaves. Therefore (4) it would be much more intelligent to let men conquer and enslave themselves so they would serve their new owners and masters with a loyal and grateful docility. And (5) the Greks' policy of action and of instrumentation would follow from the preceding statements.

They said they gave us all their devices and all their learning. But their science was obfuscation and their devices were wholly deceptive. The Greks had designed—say—their broadcast-power receiver as a stage magician plans his card tricks and illusions, to keep his audience from knowing how he does them.

That was Hackett's basic discovery, after the way to make the discovery had been discovered. He examined a power receiver, not for its working principles, but for the equivalent of magic passes and mumblings that would look as if they did something, but didn't. Then he began to take such things away from the complex apparatus, and somehow to make their absence not count. On the second day he had his first success. After the third day he had a receiver that worked with nine-tenths of its original parts removed.

There were some other discoveries not reported in the public newscasts. There'd been suspicions that the Greks had some sort of flying device coated with a sort of radar black so radars wouldn't be able to detect it. In the garbage pit specimens of arctic vegetation had been found: tundra grass; dwarf willows; kidney ferns. The records of Johnson detectors, noting objects at a different temperature from their backgrounds, showed oddities that fitted in with periods of bad weather at the Ohio landing place of the ship. It became practically certain that the Greks had some sort of flying object and that they'd made explorations including arctic landings.

It was information. It fitted into other information but added nothing to the prospects for the defense of Earth against the Greks—particularly since public opinion was feverishly in favor of anything the Greks were for. Nobody would have taken the fact of secret exploration seriously. If the Greks wanted to go somewhere, why not? Shouldn't we let the benign, benevolent, beautifully generous and illimitably altruistic Greks do as they pleased?

Then Hackett ran into something which filled him with bitter doubt. Human devices, on the whole, work both ways. Radio receivers need to be changed very slightly to become transmitters, and the reverse is true of transmitters. Most pumps can be made to work as engines, and most engines as pumps. A dynamo can function as a motor, and a motor as a dynamo. The starting motor generator in human cars was a familiar example of the last. But a Grek broadcast-power receiver couldn't be made to work as a transmitter. It simply couldn't be done.

Hackett racked his brains. Until he worked that out he didn't have anything but an enormously simplified receiver. It wasn't enough. It wasn't anything. And time was working for the Greks.

No day passed without an intensification of the chaotic state of Earth. If it had happened without the Greks' visit beforehand, there would already have been starvation and worse. It was disaster comparable to war, when all a nation's productive capacity is taken away from normal use and applied to destruction. Now production simply stopped. It was not applied to anything. Prices fell because nobody wanted to buy anything, since presently they could get better things. Human production simply ceased.

Stored surplus foodstuffs began to run low. Many people began to hoard food. All other values dropped to zero. There was practically a complete paralysis of all human activities—and we waited blandly for the miracle we expected.

Hackett took his stripped-down power receiver to Washington and demonstrated it. It was enlightening, but it wasn't enough to start human activities up again. Attempts by other men to use Hackett's principles of research into Grek gadgets yielded no results. There were only so many human brains that could work on the premise that liars making machinery would make mechanical lies.

Lucy was along because she'd contributed to what fragments of information had been gathered, but Hackett alone made his demonstration and found out the inflexibility of most human brains. When he rejoined Lucy, his expression was queer.

"You look almost stunned," said Lucy. "Red tape?"

"No," said Hackett. "Everything's fine. I'm a hero.

You're a heroine. But—I've got a job to do. I'll join you later at Traylor."

Lucy stood still looking at him. He said impatiently, "I explained what you've done—how you've thought straight when nobody else seemed able to. You did what the Aldarians wanted. You kept your mouth shut and gave me the key to what I've figured out. If I'm—delayed coming back, somebody will come and talk to you from time to time about—things. What's been accomplished has to be kept secret for now, but you'll definitely be in on everything that's done."

"No," said Lucy. "I'm a girl—I'm not a Ph.D. in physics. I'm a brand-new M.D. instead. They won't ask me to help them. You didn't, Jim. I volunteered what I did volunteer. But I'm not interested in that!"

"What do you want, then?" asked Hackett crossly.

"I—" Lucy said very carefully, "I can work with you, Jim. I think I'm on the track of what that Aldarian gadget is supposed to do. I'd like to work on it with you."

"What've you found out?"

"Nothing," said Lucy. "But I think I've found a way to find out something." Hackett frowned.

"I'll ask for some extra cooperation with you," he promised. "But you've got to go back to Traylor, where apparently you'll be safe. I've this job to do."

"What is it?"

He hesitated. Then he said, "They want me to look over a Grek power-broadcast transmitter and see if I can break it down to simplicity like I did the receiver."

Lucy said evenly, "There are two transmitters in the United States. They're broadcasting all the power that's picked up by all the receivers. They're run by Aldarians because we humans can't understand them yet. They're guarded like Fort Knox, but that's the story. Are the Aldarians going to be asked to let you putter with one of them?"

"No-o-o," admitted Hackett. "Since that satellite picked up those signals, it looks like the Greks are keeping in touch with Earth. So we daren't do anything that suggests we're using our brains."

"Then you can't see the generators?"

Hackett said uncomfortably, "Oh, I'll see them! That's being arranged . . ."

Lucy stared at him. "You're trying not to tell me, so it must be dangerous."

"I don't think so," protested Hackett. "No—not at all. There shouldn't be any danger to it."

"You're protesting too much," said Lucy.

Hackett spread out his hands. He said impatiently, "My dear Lucy, it's something that's done every day. People make a profession of it. I'll have expert advice. There's no reason to worry. I happen to have worked out a sort of trick way of looking at things—"

"Jim," said Lucy, "what is it you're going to do?"

He looked guilty. Then he grinned unconvincingly.

"If you must have it, I'm to sneak a look at a power broadcaster. Nothing to that!"

Lucy went pale.

"You mean burglary. Unofficially approved, of course. But the Greks have said the broadcasters are dangerous! They can leak a lightning-bolt at anybody who comes near them without knowing how to be safe. They've put elaborate alarm-systems around them—to prevent, they said, curious or meddling persons from being killed."

"But they're Bars," protested Hackett. "So if they say they're dangerous, they aren't."

"Of course they're liars," said Lucy. "So when they say the alarm-system is to protect meddlers, it isn't. Jim, it's deadly! They don't want us to know things. They don't mind killing people. There were three human skeletons in their garbage pit! They tried to get us killed—and of all people in the world, you're the one they'd best like to see dead. I don't want you to do it!"

Hackett said insistently, "There's not a chance in a million that we can stall off the Greks unless we find out what they've got and get something better! The world's falling apart all around us." Then he said doggedly, "I ought to be back in Traylor in a few days, Lucy. See you then. Goodbye."

He moved quickly away. Lucy said, "Jim!" but he didn't turn. And she couldn't run after him. She was very quiet when the FBI man who'd driven them down from Traylor took her to the car to start back.

And Hackett went off to be instructed in the very latest techniques of breaking and entering, housebreaking, felonious entry, burglary, and the manners and customs of Aldarian power-broadcast technicians as far as they were known.

He studied hard. From time to time he took an hour off to attempt unavailingly to make promising young scientists grasp the trick of assuming that devices were not meant to be simple but deceptive; not efficient but incomprehensible; that they were intended to work only after bewildering anybody who tried to find out how they worked. A normal technically educated man instinctively assumed that things were meant to be simple and rational and efficient. It went against his nature to try to persuade him to the contrary.

"Dammit!" he protested hotly to four young men whose scholastic records were outstanding. "You have to become crackpots to try this trick! Listen. If a device looks like it works this way, it doesn't. You take it apart and find out where the design was tricked so that it looked important without being so. You assume that everything you see is all wrong and then find out what it includes that you can't see that is right and does work and is brand-new. That's the job!"

They were very conscientious young men. They tried hard. But as the time drew near for Hackett to try to look at a power-broadcasting unit, he was more and more disheartened. They could think with admirable precision about everything they'd studied, and they could use everything they'd been taught. But they had trouble trying to learn a new way of thinking.

Somehow, Hackett's depression grew deeper when he got a letter from Lucy, forwarded by hand through the FBI. It was a very friendly letter and he chafed at the fact. Its contents, though, showed that Lucy had every qualification he'd been trying to beat into the heads of others. The letter:

Dear Jim,

Something occurred to me. I've been trying things with the gadget like the Aldarian gave me. You agreed that it did something, but we couldn't imagine what, though it seemed it ought to be something we humans wouldn't want. I've been trying to think what they'd want that we don't. It occurred to me that they are deaf. Not naturally deaf, but deafened. The Greks want them that way. They can't eavesdrop and it wouldn't be easy for them to conspire, but they know about hearing. They used to hear. They might want to be able to hear again.

I found a patient of the local doctor who was deafened in one ear by an accident that severed his left auditory nerve. I tried the gadget on him. It is a hearing aid. Its cover is thin enough to vibrate from sound and it produces some sort of field effect that affects the ends of severed nerves only. If you aren't deaf it does nothing, and the same if your deafness is from any cause but a severed nerve. But it affects all severed nerves. I turned it on near a man who lost his hand in a tractor accident. He felt all sorts of sensations as if he had his hand back.

I think that if the Greks found out that such things existed they'd be merciless toward slaves who'd fooled them and who might be thinking of revolt.

I hope you're well and thriving,

Lucy.

Hackett wrote back:

I've passed on your letter. I would rather have you working with me than anybody else in the world, but if you think that by proving again that the two of us make up one smart character, it won't work. Not this time! If I get away with what I'm going to try, you'll see me immediately afterward. And I repeat what I once said about your brains.

Then he angrily lectured everyone about him on the kind of brains Lucy possessed, and the stark, raving lunacy of authorities who put him to work trying to learn from the lies of the Greks and didn't use her.

But he didn't want her with him now. He would have wanted any man whose way of thinking meshed with his own as hers did. But he didn't want her to share the hair-raising experience he anticipated. The eastern broadcast-power unit was in the center of a five-acre enclosure. It was surrounded by an electrified fence, booby-trapped and undoubtedly filled with capacity-detectors and infra-red beams and such matters. It ought to be simple suicide to try to approach the squat power-broadcast structure.

Birds had been seen to fly low over the enclosure and to vanish in what looked like electric-arc flame. In some cases they'd exploded in mid-air, ten feet or more aboveground. And Hackett had worked out a possible defense against what he thought this might be, but it hadn't been tested. It couldn't be and he refused to estimate his chances.

But there had to be some breakthrough if there was ever to be any hope of defense against a Grek ship a quarter-mile long and with nobody-knew-what resources of devastation and destruction in its hull.

There came the time when he was to make his practically hopeless attempt to find information that could mean nothing when it was discovered. It was a night with thick clouds. Far away below the horizon there was a city which sent a faint yellowish-white glow into the sky. An irresolute small wind blew in puffs and lesser motions. There was the smell of growing things.

Hackett approached the electrified fence, trailing a cable behind him. The fence itself was, naturally, electrified. It had been secretly tested earlier with an electronic volt meter, which draws no current. No instrument within the squat concrete structure would report the measurement. Hackett now verified it again. The reading went back along the cable he trailed, to where sweating, uneasy men watched it affect dials and instruments. The equipment would either work or not. If it didn't work . . .

He climbed the fence. Nothing happened. He received no shock. He went down the other side. Nothing happened. The equipment he'd designed functioned as it should. The electrified fence had four thousand volts of ninety-cycle current in it. Hackett's body had been charged with four thousand volts of ninety-cycle current, exactly one hundred eighty degrees out of phase. When the fence was charged to so many volts, Hackett was similarly charged. When it was charged plus, so was he. When it was charged minus, he was similarly charged to the same potential. At all times he was charged identically with the fence. There was no potential difference between the two electrified objects, man and fence. He descended to the ground and moved toward the power-broadcast building.

The operation of his protective device made a sort of anticlimax. It was deep dark night. The air was warm, and soft night breezes blew irregularly. There were sounds of night insects, though not nearby. Far, far away a plane went grumbling across the sky. Frogs in some pond or other shouted senselessly without pause or rhythm. There was no sound which was not a natural one, no movement save Hackett's in all the world.

A faint light glowed. It was very, very faint, but it told him of high-voltage tension about him. He stood still and the distant apparatus and his special costume adjusted to it. He went on.

He heard tiny noises, more or less like leaves tapping upon each other, but not rustlings; snappings. Then Hackett saw tiny twinklings in the air. The wind had changed and now blew toward him. He heard a droning sound and a loud snap. Another. And another.

There were sparkings in the air around him. They moved and surrounded him. And suddenly he realized what they were.

They were midges; gnats, mosquitos, tiny flying beetles and sometimes larger ones, and moths of infinitesimal wingspread. They were the night creatures which flutter and hum in the twenty or thirty feet of air just above the ground level. When an air current moves, they move with it, carried by breezes as the ocean's plankton drift where the sea's currents take them.

But about Hackett the tiny creatures were exploding in minute electrical snappings. A spark and a snap meant a gnat vanished. A hissing and crackling noise meant something large dying in mid-air and scorched to nothingness by an invisible electric field. The very air was deadly. But Hackett's carefully designed costume and the countervailing energies sent him along the cable were an answer to this intended form of murder. He wasn't insulated from the fields of force about him. Instead, he was supplied with counter-potential from the other end of his cable.

He approached the building. Three separate times the infinitely tiny light warned him to move slowly. Each time he was supplied with an electric charge equal to and identical with the outside potential.

He reached the squat building. There was an iron door. He opened it and found the scatter of an infra-red beam, slightly dissipated by dust particles in the air. He neutralized its power to give warning and went on, with infinite care and using techniques which were improvements on those of the most highly gifted criminals of the time.

Perhaps—perhaps—his crackman's work was less than perfect. But this installation had been in operation for months and there had never been an attempt to enter it. Every moment of every day and every night it had been under test by the midges and microscopic creatures of the air. The Aldarians had come to have complete, unthinking confidence in the protection against intrusion. There was no reason for them to look for intrusion now.

There was no movement inside the building. He opened doors—doors are inevitable inventions, like wheels and screws and hammers—and they did not report his passage through them.

Then he came to a semispherical room all of sixty feet across and thirty high. There was a faint droning sound in it coming from a huge and apparently infinitely complex mass of metal, cables, cones and other shapes of dully glistening metal. Hackett pressed a button and tiny TV cameras began to send back fine-grain pictures of everything he saw. Hackett himself looked with more desperate attention and urgency than he'd ever looked at anything before. He saw this— that; he saw familiar irrationalities . . .

His lips formed furious curses. He saw, and it did no good. It was useless. He'd learned nothing.

And then he heard a noise. An Aldarian opened a door and came into the great open space which was almost filled with monstrous motionless machinery emitting a faint droning sound and nothing else.

Hackett froze to stillness. Aldarians were familiar sights. They'd been seen often enough on television. They were furry, with pointed ears, but they carried themselves erect and nobody had ever thought of them as apelike. This Aldarian crossed the floor as if to look at something in the mass of motionless, droning machinery. Hackett remained as still as the machinery itself. He was armed and could kill. But the return through the outside force-fields would have to be slow and cautious, and with many pauses while his protective apparatus adjusted to changing electric fields. Discovery would mean he couldn't possibly get back.

The Aldarian walked toward the huge machine. Then he checked. He almost stumbled upon nothing whatever. And Hackett knew that the Aldarian had seen him. He stood rigid for an instant, then went on and examined the huge device, turned and walked neither slowly nor hastily back to the door through which he'd entered. In turning, his eyes passed over Hackett and showed no faintest sign of having seen him. But they had. He went out of the door and closed it behind him.

Hackett waited, weapon in hand, raging because this adventure was meaningless and his death would mean no more. Because the Greks were liars.

But nothing happened. And nothing happened.

Nothing happened at all.