The Greks Bring Gifts

10

Hackett told it later to Lucy, back at the village of Traylor. He was somehow resentful.

"He saw me!" he said bitterly. "There's no doubt about it. But—he spared me, he pretended not to see me. Why?"

Lucy had listened very carefully, but she'd grown pale during his recital. Now she asked, "What do you think?"

"I don't think—I can't!"said Hackett more bitterly still. "He could have orders from the Greks. If they're contemptuous enough of us, they might think it amusing to let us beat out our brains against their cleverness, let us see their tricky apparatus. We'd never be smart enough to understand them. Not raising an alarm could be an expression of contempt."

Lucy shook her head.

"Maybe," she said in an odd tone, "maybe the Greks are more unpleasant than we think. Maybe the Aldarian didn't dare admit that he and the others had failed to stop you from getting into the place. Maybe the Greks would have punished them for that failure, even if they killed you when you were discovered."

Hackett growled to himself, "That could be . . ."

"And also," said Lucy, "it was a pretty remarkable thing for you to walk through screens and force-fields that even gnats can't get through. Maybe the Aldarians hope that some day the Greks will run into a race that's more intelligent than the Greks. Maybe that's the Aldarians' only hope, and you're the only indication they've ever had that it might be coining true. He wouldn't dare give you any sign of his hope. Maybe Aldarians don't dare even trust each other, much less people like us, so all he dared do was let you escape so he can hope, though he doesn't really believe, that a race that is more intelligent than the Greks has been found." She hesitated and said, "You know, maybe it has."

"Not me," said Hackett savagely. "Do you know what I made out of what I saw of the power-broadcast equipment?"

"What?"

"That it's not power-broadcast equipment. It's only a receiver, tricked up differently from the small ones, but only a receiver. The Greks are such liars that when they set up power broadcasters they lie about it by putting up dummy ones! And we can't have the least idea where the real ones are!"

Lucy hesitated a long time. Then she said, "You said something once . . . You found there was power in the Aldarian hearing aid. Now you know how a receiver works, more or less. The Aldarians know a lot of Grek science. Could they have included a miniature and very much simplified power receiver for the energy that instrument uses?"

"I'll see," said Hackett dourly. "Or try to! But what difference will it make if it's so and we find it out?"

It did not seem that anything would be of any use whatever. A day earlier, a delegation of assorted citizenry had waited on the Aldarians conducting the education of human students in the sciences of the Greks. The students had different reactions to their instruction. Some of them grew more and more unhappy as their human habits of thinking insisted that they studied nonsense. Others adopted a fine, idealistic attitude which said that it was not necessary to understand Grek science in order to believe in it, and that if one believed in it firmly enough, there would come a time when comprehension must develop. The Aldarian instructors did not teach this doctrine. Some of the students thought they detected a peculiar expression on their faces when it was mentioned in a burst of fervor for all things Grek. But they permitted their students to believe it if they chose.

It was to these instructors that a delegation had gone. They spread out the world's situation as they saw it. There was utter paralysis of the human economy and utter loss of faith in human leadership, because it seemed to try to postpone the benefits of the gifts of the Greks. There was such collapse of confidence that even paper currency had ceased to buy things. The delegation begged the Aldarians to try somehow to contact the Greks in their faster-than-light travel to their home, to beg them to return and direct us in the stabilization of our society; to beg them at least to give us advice, to tell us humans what to do . . .

The Aldarian instructors, blinking, read the elaborate confession of the bankruptcy of humanity from mere contact with a more advanced and more intelligent race. The petition represented exactly the view of the larger part of the human race. We who agreed with it then do not feel comfortable now. But remember—we did not know of the garbage pit discoveries. We didn't know the Greks were liars and the Aldarians slaves, or that Grek devices were one part operative and nine parts deception to keep us from understanding them.

The Aldarians asked questions, to bring out why men begged the Aldarians to make us companions in their slavery. The delegation explained. People were on the verge of starvation because they had lost confidence in everything—even in money.

The Aldarians asked politely what money was. The delegation answered, confusedly, that humans needed a medium of exchange that everybody accepted. Paper money no longer served the purpose. After many writ-ten-in questions and answers, it developed that people believed in gold.

The Aldarians seemed relieved and briskly proposed to help. In the process of de-salting sea water for the Sahara depression, to make a vast fresh water lake where only desert had been, they had accumulated vast stores of minerals. Every element on Earth was to be found dissolved in its seas. Naturally every one came out with the salt. The Aldarians brightly offered to supply any imaginable quantity of gold. They had de-salted more than a cubic mile of sea water and could offer some thousands of tons of gold. If more were needed, it could be obtained.

There was, of course, a complete collapse of all values that still remained. Even gold was no longer money if it could be had in any desired quantity. There was a total stop of business. When food couldn't be bought or bartered for there remained only one answer to hunger: Take it.

Some places—Traylor, for example—were far enough from cities to be free of hungry mobs. There were some organizations—Army posts, for example— which were held together by a combination of previous habit and discipline. But our human civilization began to go downhill and fast.

But again, just as the one-man businesses did not collapse with the larger ones, so there were still people who behaved sanely as individuals, as families, and sometimes even larger groups. All over the world there were tumults and lootings and unorganized disorder, but also all over the world there were humans who reacted to this disaster as they would have reacted to an earthquake or a plague, sanely and with courage. And this human fraction would be available if any hope sprang up. It was not, on the whole, very well represented in the first delegation to ask for the return of the Greks.

There was a curious side effect from the complexity of the Grek devices. On the East Coast a Grek fish-herding device ceased to work and there was panic in the population near one estuary, because a large part of the food supply there was fish. It was simple, stark necessity that the herder be gotten back to work. The proprietor of a television repair shop undertook the work. He took the fish-herding unit apart and put it together again. It worked. He'd puttered with it ignorantly and had a number of parts left over, but it worked.

A garage mechanic tried to reconstruct a sinter-field generator, knocked out of operation and partly crushed by a collision of the truck that carried it. He stripped it down, straightened out bent parts and found some parts that were ruined, destroyed. He began to reassemble it, checking the way current went through it as he put back each part. It began to work when by Grek standards it was only partly complete. The garage mechanic found it embarrassingly efficient. It not only loosened the chemical bonds of minerals, so plants could make use of fertilizing elements formerly locked up in topsoil but it reduced metals to powder. He had to put extra, unnecessary parts back to throttle down its activity.

Word got to the FBI and somebody had an inspiration. Every office of that organization was informed that it was at least as important to get information about repairs to Grek devices as to arrest low number public enemies. Trickles of information began to come in. Some of them were disheartening. One was that sinter fields, in making any amount of fertilizing elements available to crops, made the same amount of fertilizer available to weeds. Agriculture was not simplified to a mere making of holes and dropping seeds in them. Bigger and better weeds were consequences of Grek technology in agriculture.

Very curious results turned up as a consequence of enthusiastic but uninformed putterings with Grek machinery. A new laser principle turned up in a high school science laboratory and burned down half a high school before it could be gotten under control. Somebody else bewilderedly displayed something which could only be described as the fractional distillation of isotopes. Such things were admirable, but they didn't apply to the big problem on which the fate of humanity depended.

Even Hackett puttered fretfully in the woodshed of Lucy's Cousin Constance. He resented the unscientific methods he was using, but there was no scientific way to attack the problem. The human race had to have one thing if it was to have any hope of resisting the Greks. It had to have power that the Greks couldn't turn off. Human generating plants were abandoned and power distribution networks were gone down the drain for lack of maintainance. The Greks could cut off three-quarters of the world's power supply at will. We humans didn't even know where it was generated!

So Hackett puttered. He searched harassedly and almost at random for some portion of some Grek device that wouldn't look like itself—itself being a way to get power out of anything at all. We know now that his whole notion was wrong, but the odds were astronomically against us anyhow.

And naturally, at just this time a more than usually depressing development would have to appear. Hackett had been one of those to insist that the skies ought to be watched more carefully. Apparatus had been improvised. Wide-angle Schmidt telescopes were set to work forming temperature images of the sky. Johnson detectors scanned the images for spots whose temperature was above normal for the background.

They picked up a moving higher temperature area almost at the edge of the moon and actually just as it came out from behind it. It did not reflect sunlight. No telescope could pick it up, but it could be tracked. Something warmer than interplanetary space moved toward Earth from the moon. It was radar black.

Johnson detectors trailed it to a halt some thousands of miles out from the arctic regions. It hovered there as if making certain no new strange frequency played upon it.

It descended. No human eye saw it, but the detectors that amplified infra-red as if it were microwaves triangulated its descent. It stayed aground for some days, then rose once more and went around the bulge of the Earth, down the middle of the Pacific. There were jet planes racing it to the antarctic, but they lost. They had Johnson detectors, however, at work when it rose once more and went deliberately back to the moon. There were guesses that since signals from the moon had been picked up by men, physical communication was desirable for the time being.

Then Hackett discovered that a curiously formed small metal part in the Aldarian hearing aid looked very much like a larger part in a broadcast-power receiver. It was a fishlike shape, extraordinarily resembling one of the figures in the Tao, the Chinese symbol of the eternal way. In the power-receiver it performed a function, carrying current from one place to another. Its peculiar shape allowed it to do so without shorting anything. In the Aldarian device the piece of metal was smaller—much smaller—but was identical in shape except at the pointed end. There the two elements of the two devices differed markedly. That pointed end was the spot where the broadcast receiver appeared to deliver usable current. And the force-field of the Aldarian device, the energy-field, the whatever-it-was that affected severed nerves, appeared to come into existence at the corresponding differently shaped pointed end.

Lucy watched as he sweated over the cryptic, comparable parts. She acted oddly, these days. She seemed relieved when he straightened up, shaking his head helplessly.

"It takes power from nowhere," he said, "but we almost understand that. Then the same power—it must be the same power—comes out of the apparatus in the one case as something that affects only cut nerves, and in the other it's perfectly normal high-frequency current we can rectify and use!"

Lucy watched his face. She said tentatively, "Nerves are pretty much alike in some ways, as electric conductors are. Stimulate an optic nerve by any means and you see a flash of fight. Give the same stimulus to a taste bud and you have taste. Pain nerves will report pain from the same stimulus that reported as fight, taste, and so on. It's not the stimulus given to a nerve or a wire that determines what happens. It's what the nerve or wire leads to."

He looked up at her blankly. Then his eyes grew shrewd.

"Go on!"

"Go on with what?" asked Lucy.

"You've got the answer I haven't found," said Hackett. "I think you've had it for some time. I can't find it—tell me."

Lucy hesitated.

"Come on!" he insisted. "Come on! You try to keep me from realizing how many brains you have, but you aren't smart enough. You can't fool me on a thing like this. I can read you like a book."

"You can? I don't think so!"

"You were hinting at the answer then. You were trying to make me think of something that's all clear in your own mind." He grinned suddenly. "Do that, Lucy, and I'll prove I can read you like a book!"

She looked at him for a long time, studying his expression.

"It isn't all clear," she said defensively, and untruthfully. "But that piece of metal could be, for most of its length, like a nerve. Broadcast power—whatever that is!—goes into the thick rounded end of it. But the thin ends are shaped differently in the two instruments, and they don't need to be if they're only current carriers. I said that one nerve makes a sensation of light and another of pain and so on, depending on what it goes to."

"So?" said Hackett.

"I wonder," said Lucy reluctantly, "if you made a new small piece to fit in the hearing aid, and shaped it like the piece from the power receiver—I wonder if it would turn the hearing aid into a power receiver?"

Hackett's grin went awry. He shook his head and stood up.

"You mean," he told her, "that the shape in general transforms the broadcast power—whatever it is—but the shape of the thin end determines what it's transformed into." Then he said vexedly, "I'm the damnedest idiot, Lucy—"

He reached out his hands and drew her to him. He kissed her thoroughly. For an instant she resisted, then she didn't.

"I'm a damned idiot for not doing that before," he said a moment later.

"N-no," said Lucy, rather breathless. "But when you did that, you—did read me like a book!"

"We'll prove that you're right about the gadget," said Hackett, "after one more short paragraph."

Presently they were smiling at each other quite absurdly. Hackett said, "It seemed there wasn't any use in anything, Lucy. I didn't want to be sure about you because I thought this business of the Greks was hopeless. And if it was, I meant to get killed because—"

"We'll win now," said Lucy confidently.

"Now," he told her, "we've got to! Stay here and watch while I prove how beautifully your idea works. It's going to make all the difference in the world."

It took him all of half an hour to make a minute, curled up, fish-shaped sliver of metal perhaps three-quarters of an inch long. It was exactly like the one in the Aldarian device except for the last sixteenth of an inch. There its shape was that of the corresponding part of the power receiver.

He assembled it into the tiny, watch-shaped object. He moved the stud.

There was the smell of hot metal. The device that had formerly affected severed nerves no longer did anything of the sort. Instead, it took broadcast power from somewhere and turned out electric current enough to melt itself down if Hackett hadn't hastily turned it off.

A second delegation of citizens went to the Aldarians about now. Hackett didn't know of it at the time. He was in Washington, feverishly showing what he'd found out, demanding a sinter-field generator and listening to other feverish men trying to fit something they'd discovered into something somebody else had found out. They were shunted into the red brick Smithsonian lecture hall as a place for them to argue together.

Hackett pulled down a sinter-field generator. He had a substitute part corresponding to a part from a power receiver. He switched the substitute for the original part and the sinter-field generator became a power receiver. He switched another substitute into the Aldarian hearing aid and it became a sinter-field generator.

His demonstration was conclusive and started a tumultuous interchange of enthusiastic views and deductions.

"Doctor Thale," said Hackett pugnaciously, "is responsible for this particular development. She is convinced that the Greks are not our superiors in intelligence. She believes that at some time in the past they had a lucky break. A couple of hundred years ago we discovered the principle of the dynamo and the motor. Modern human civilization depends absolutely upon that principle. The Greks found something else. And their civilization depends on this! They found a way to put power into the air and they found a way to get it out again. And in getting it out, they found it could take innumerable forms. One was standard electric current. One herds fish. One is a sinter field." He stopped and said deliberately, "One may be—must be—unidirectional thrust. A space drive."

A unidirectional thrust would push a ship through emptiness. Babblings came from everywhere. Now research had a purpose and a program. It was to make as many metal instrument parts as possible with different shapes at their pointed ends, and see what they produced. Nobody could guess, but everybody wanted to find out.

Hackett was leaving the room, almost fighting his way through men who wanted to buttonhole him, when the FBI man of the lift-off site came to his rescue. He got Hackett outside.

"I've got a job for you," he said cordially. "Want to hear the details?"

"I've got plenty to do," Hackett told him. "What's the job?"

"Civilian adviser," said the FBI man blandly, "to an exercise of ski troops. We know where something from the moon landed and stayed a couple of days and then lifted off again. Since what we thought were power-broadcasting stations aren't—as you discovered— maybe the real ones are up in the arctic, where this thing landed for awhile."

Hackett said, "I'm getting a little bit fed up with being ordered around."

"Ordered?" said the FBI man. "This is no order— this is an opportunity! Don't you want to take a look at a real power-broadcasting unit?"

Hackett said hungrily, "I was planning to try—I'll have to—Naturally!"

He might have to argue with Lucy. She attempted sometimes, now, to act in a proprietary fashion. She wouldn't want him to go into danger, but everybody was in danger. If the Greks came back, very many people would zestfully submit to them in the expectation of working only one day a week and retiring at forty, and so on. When they didn't get into that blissful state, they'd want to revolt. Considering the nature of human beings, a very great many of them would need to be killed before the balance were as subjugated as the Aldarians. And they weren't too much subdued to dream of disaster to their masters.

So Hackett undertook to go with a fast-moving small expedition into the arctic on the same day a second delegation went to the Aldarians to plead for their intercession with the Greks. The people of Earth begged them to return, on any terms they chose. They'd left gifts on Earth, and the rulers of Earth withheld them and oppressed the poor, and there was no one that humanity could turn to but the Greks—the benign, the generous, the infinitely admirable and altruistic Greks! Let the Greks come back. Let them establish that paradisiacal state of things they meant humanity to enjoy. Unless they returned, their benefactions would be useless.

The Aldarians to whom this second petition was presented read it carefully. They replied in writing that they had not yet been able to reach the Greks on their homeward way. Communication with a ship traveling faster than light was a tricky business, but they would continue to try. When they made contact with the Greks, they would tell humanity what the reply was.

Hackett knew nothing of this. He was busy.

In three hours he was in a jet plane lifting off for Fairbanks, Alaska. There he'd take a plane—a slower plane—to a bush pilots' airstrip in Baffin Land. There were heavy-duty helicopters already heading to meet the expedition there. The expedition would be volunteers with some arctic training, and the copters would fly them as low as they dared toward the northwest and as near the shores of Morrow Island as a flying craft would dare. The thing from the moon had landed there. Its landing place could be spotted certainly within a ten-mile area, and probably within one. What would happen when the small party got there might well determine the fate of the human race. If it was successful, the chances were good. If it failed, we humans would be no worse off. We couldn't be much worse off! It was up to Hackett, to the twenty troopers with arctic training, and to two Eskimos and their dog teams carrying supplies.

Hackett landed at Fairbanks, took off again with some very competent young soldiers in troop carrier planes, flew north through dusky twilight and into night that became complete as the sun slid sidewise down below the horizon, and landed at a completely inadequate airstrip on Baffin Land. There were huge helicopters waiting for them.

They flew through blackness at the time the Aldari-ans politely reported that they had made good contact with the swiftly traveling Grek ship, incredible billions of miles away and going farther. The Greks would give the human plea for their return the most indulgent consideration. They would let humanity know what they'd decided shortly. Meanwhile they went on away from Earth.

A clamour arose, demanding that the Greks be persuaded to come back at any cost, under any considerations. While the Greks were here, marvelous things happened. Everybody inherited a million dollars, everybody was going to be rich. When they left everything went wrong, there was no work, there was no food.

Paraders displayed banners inscribed GREKS COME HOME! and requested the Aldarians to notify the Greks of this public and unanimous demand for their return.

We who did not protest this attitude, and especially those of us who took part in those futile demonstrations, are not pleased with ourselves now. But considering the information we had, it was reasonable. Considering how we'd have reacted if we'd known what Hackett and some hundreds of other secretive persons knew, it was reasonable for us to be kept in ignorance. The fact that men are rational animals doesn't mean they can't be stupid on occasion. We were. We tell about it to keep other generations from being stupid in the same fashion.

Unfortunately it's only too likely that they'll simply behave like idiots about something else.

Anyhow, while most of the world paraded and demonstrated and expressed the most passionate possible desire for the return of the Greks, Hackett and his entirely inadequate army moved through the arctic night. The Northern Lights flickered overhead, and sometimes they were overbright for people who did not want to be seen though the throbbing of the copters could be heard for many miles.

Eventually they landed and took up their journey on foot. Then when the copters were gone, they were in a world of frozen silence. Sometimes pack ice somewhere growled for no reason except to break the stillness. Sometimes when the lights were brightest it seemed that the faintest of hissing, whispering noises came down from where the aurora played. But they went on at the best speed possible.

At best their traveling was laborious past imagining, and there were unseen perils, as when one of their number vanished without sound or outcry, and they backtracked and found where he'd gone through snow that had held the rest of them, down into a crevasse on an unsuspected semi-glacier.

It was daunting to move through a night that never lifted, in cold so bitter that no word for it was known, in a world which was mostly noiseless, yet which sometimes made abrupt harsh sounds for which no reason could be assigned. They traveled doggedly, in the dark and over rough and broken ice. They rested in the bitter chill of night. They waked in darkness and went on in darkness.

It was a nightmare. Their mission itself had the feeling of total unreality. They knew nothing of events except where they struggled desperately to cover distance swiftly in a blackness that never lifted. There was a shortwave set on one of the dogsleds, but it would not be wise to use it, not even for reception of broadcast news. Resonant receivers can be detected. So they did not know when, after days of seeming hesitation, the Greks appeared to agree to return to Earth.

On the fifth day's—night's—journeying they saw a light far away. It glowed for perhaps two minutes, the only light or sign of life in any form that they'd seen in two hundred miles. Then it went out.

Hackett and his small party moved onward with redoubled caution. There was life here—the light proved it.

It would be an installation armed and guarded, designed to help in the subjugation of the Earth and the enslavement of its population, with that population's wildly enthusiastic approval.