The Greks Bring Gifts

11

Cold, icy stars filled the firmament. They shone upon a faintly visible icescape which was totally un-unlike the planet Earth as Hackett had known it before. Even the sky was strange, because the Big Dipper was almost directly overhead and the Milky Way was strangely placed as well. There were no trees and no grass. The air entering one's nostrils was intolerably frigid. Hackett himself wore white outer garments over clumsy inner ones, white garments so he would be inconspicuous! The dogs were muzzled, muted lest they bark or snarl. The dog whips were lashed to the two sledges lest the Eskimo dog drivers forget the need for absolute silence. Sometimes, not often, a dog whined. But there were crunching sounds where men on snowshoes moved about on utterly brittle snow.

It occurred to Hackett that perhaps the precautions for silence were ridiculous, if only deaf Aldarians manned this hidden refuge. But there might not be only Aldarians; there'd been something which came from the moon. The Grek ship undoubtedly waited there. Greks could have journeyed to Earth in that space vehicle, whatever it happened to be. If Aldarians were their slaves, they would be sharply and suspiciously watched. There'd been reason, in Grek eyes, for the torture and murder and contemptuous burial in ship garbage of a number of them before the ship lifted off. The Greks would watch for other thoughts of insubordination. They'd look for failure of alertness and obedience. It was not impossible that one or more Greks would remain at this establishment.

And if one were, they'd be fighting with human powder-weapons against unguessable instruments of destruction in the hands of the Grek. They had weapons, certainly. The murdered Aldarians had been killed by weapons which exploded tunnels through their flesh. There might be other and more terrible devices ...

The small army went on as quietly and as alertly as they could. They'd seen a light. It was now gone. They looked to their weapons, making sure the cold had not ruined their action by freezing some overlooked trace of lubricant. Only graphite could be used to lubricate metal at temperatures like this. The automatic weapons carried explosive bullets, with one bullet in four a tracer. But here were the firmest of possible orders that there was to be no firing at machinery. The whole purpose of this appallingly desperate raid was to capture—or at least for Hackett to see—one of the broadcast-power generators that supplied half the broadcast power which was three-quarters of all the power used on Earth.

It was the most hair-raising gamble ever made by human beings since history began. Its only justification was the stupidity of humans in allowing our power networks to become useless since the Greks arrival, and our steam generators to become unusable. Even the hydraulic generators were unused and their reservoirs half-emptied for irrigation. And men had seized so avidly upon power to be taken from the air that the loss of the broadcast supply would bring all human communications to a stop. Electrified railroads couldn't begin to move again before starvation swept the world. There were ships at sea which would become derelicts. Even ships which came to harbor and their docks could be unloaded only by hand, and the distribution of their cargoes would be so limping and so halting and inadequate that there was no city in which famine would not immediately appear.

But this had to be risked because if only the Greks could distribute power, the Greks had power of life and death over mankind. Which they would use. Which they had been invited and implored to return and use. Therefore men of former authority had very desperately and secretly set up this raid, because the great public believed in the Greks; because it could not be persuaded that their benevolence was a sham; because most men did not want to be independent of the Greks—they wanted to be their pensioners.

But there was that necessary few who gambled their fives and ours together with all the future of the race, because otherwise the gamble would be lost.

There came a time when, advancing with the greatest possible caution over snow between towering cliffs of stone, there were disturbances of the normal surface. The party of snowshoe-wearing men were groping as nearly as possible in the line along which the momentary light had been seen. A man at the end of the staggering advance felt firmness underfoot. The snow had been packed there, and he passed the word to the man next to him. A lieutenant of infantry made every man stop where he stood. With Hackett, who should have stayed behind until the others were successful or dead, he went ploughing across the snow-field to the spot.

There was semi-solidity under the snow. There were depressions where the snow had been packed. Something had pressed it down.

They fumbled about in the darkness. Only fifty yards away the sheer, overhanging mass of a pinnacled cliff blotted out half the sky. From somewhere near here a light had been visible an hour ago. Hackett and the lieutenant of infantry tramped back and forth. The packed snow was not all footprints. Here it had been compacted by a solid object of considerable size and weight.

Hackett began to feel cold chills running up and down his spine. His skin crawled at the back of his neck. This was almost certainly the landing place of the thing—whatever it was—that had come down from the moon and gone away again. If so, the power generator of the Greks was nearby. The aliens who intended the enslavement of Earth were close, with weapons that could only be guessed at, and who would certainly be as merciless to men as to their enslaved Aldarians.

The thing that made Hackett feel desperate was a feeling that the window from which the light had shone might open and pour pitiless light upon himself and his companions. The Greks would violently resent their presence. At any instant any conceivable weapon might open on them. They would be exterminated and the fact that humans were suspicious would be revealed, as well as the fact that they dared attack Greks . . .

There were lesser concretions under the snow. They were foot tracks. The snow was compacted as if the Greks and Aldarians had passed many times between the thing from the moon and—somewhere else.

The word passed in whispers. And then the very small army moved as skirmishers against the cliff base. They reached it without alarm. Hackett and the lieutenant fumbled for the end of that unseen packed trail.

Here was certainly a secret installation of the Greks—a matter of vast importance. They'd chosen a spot where very probably no human being had ever set foot. The secrecy of their construction of the installation was absolute. Their ability to hoodwink humanity had been demonstrated beyond any question, so they reacted exactly as men would have done under the same circumstances. All rational beings will act as fools when the circumstances favor that activity. The Greks, having reason for confidence, reacted with arrogance.

They left the installation to Aldarians to operate. Aldarians were there to turn off the power generator when or if the Greks wished it. And it did not occur to the Greks to set up intruder alarms in an unvisited wilderness which never had been and never ought to be approached by men.

Hackett found an opening in the rock. It was a door. Guns ready, he and the others entered it in single file. A very dimly lighted passage led upward. Presently there was a vast clear space, indifferently lighted, where the floor had been filled in with broken rock and the top roofed over. There would be snow upon that roof, now, and no examination from the air would show it. Besides, this was now the arctic night.

In the center of the artificial cavern there was a motionless, glittering, faintly droning complex of metal. It did not seem large enough to generate the power it did, and at that much of its apparent substance was jimcrackery. The Greks were habitual liars. They concealed the actual simplicity of their apparatus even when none but Greks and Aldarians should ever see it.

The rest of the cavern was bare rock. Here was nothing of civilization, of comfort, or of luxury men imagined as existing among the Greks. This was merely a rocky cave with a floor of packed stone. There were structures of metal pipe very much like bunk racks for use by people with little care for comfort. There was an undisturbed heap of parcels which looked like supplies. Except for the brazen mass of motionless machine in the center, the effect was much like that of a stable. Which it was—for those domestic animals, the Aldarians.

And there was one Aldarian in sight, seated on something indefinite, his furry head sunk into his hands in a position of absolute despair.

A foot scraped on a stone. He did not hear. Men filed into the cave. He did not notice. But then some motion somewhere in the tail of his eye roused him. He jerked his head about and saw them. Instantly he leaped up and as instantly Hackett knew he was terrified, with a terror past the fear of death. He did not flee. He snatched out a weapon from somewhere and leaped toward the machinery in the center of the cave.

Hackett did not fire. Instead, he flung the service automatic in his hand. The Aldarian was obviously under orders to destroy the machine rather than let men see it. He scrambled for it desperately. One of Hackett's followers snapped his rifle to his shoulder, but he did not pull the trigger. He did not need to.

The spinning automatic pistol hit the Aldarian with the impact of a pile driver. He was literally stopped in his tracks by the blow. And then there were men rushing to fling themselves upon him and make him fast.

Hackett snapped orders. Men spread out to hunt for other passages, other rooms, and other Aldarians. But most of them stayed to protect the mass of motionless machine until the entire installation was in their hands.

But there was no more. This one cavern was all there was. It was bare, it was chilly, it was comfortless. Half the broadcast power used on Earth depended on the machine it contained, but it had been made for Aldarians to occupy. Aldarians were slaves. Worse, they were domestic animals, and there was no thought of comfort for them.

But there was only one furry alien in the secret power-generating station.

That was one mystery, and there were others. But Hackett sent a man out to the dog teams and the Eskimos who had been ordered to stay out of the way if fighting started. There had been no fighting. The Eskimos were peacefully asleep and their dogs lay peacefully in the snow, some dozing but the more ambitious ones trying persistently to get rid of the muzzles which kept them from barking or fighting with their fellow dog team members.

That one messenger unlimbered the packed-away shortwave set. He made a call, waited for a reply and then gave a single code-word message. It meant incredible success. It was not wise, of course, to say anything informative in the clear. Too many humans were rejoicing because the Greks were on the way back to Earth.

But within minutes of the transmission of that one-word message, planes far away rumbled and took to the air, helicopters began to throb their way from the airstrip on Baffin Land, and very many others things began to happen. For one, planes began to carry equipment southward, past the equator and the torrid zone and to the remotest edges of the inhabited antarctic.

Hackett prowled around the huge masses of metal in the cavern. He scowled, examined, and drove his brains to superhuman effort. He wished that Lucy were present. For all of an hour he was subject to baffled bewilderment.

Then something fitted itself to something else, and that fitted . . .

The troopers who'd risked so much for so little excitement stared at him as he began to sputter furiously. He had solved the problem of the power generator. And it was infuriating—it was intolerable! It was enough to fill any man with rage to see how elementary, how utterly simple the whole thing was. He'd spent years with the possibility right under his nose, so to speak, and hadn't realized it.

It was power unlimited under absolute control. It was energy inexhaustible without harmful radiation or even high temperatures to get out of hand. The Greks had found it. They'd made use of it. They'd built a civilization upon it. But that civilization was in their own image, and the Greks were not nice people.

There was a curious parallel, in the discovery of one principle that would shape a culture, to the human discovery of the principle of the dynamo. When Faraday discovered that a current-carrying wire in a magnetic field moved sideways, he began the sequence of events which determined human technology. Monstrous atomic-powered generators—no more were built after the coining of the Greks—to microvolto-meters and incandescent lights, the things of which mankind made most use were invariably dependent upon that principle for their use, or in their manufacture, or in their distribution. The one observation was responsible for human technology as far as it had gone. The Grek discovery was different, that was all. It was different, and therefore the technology and the civilization growing from it were different from that of Earth.

But of course the Greks were different, too.

Presently there were planes circling over a place on previously unknown Morrow Island, parachutes blossomed in the night, and flares destroyed the darkness at the earth's surface. Presently Hackett was again explaining disgustedly to newly-arrived eminent scientists what was so plainly to be seen, and they doubted and objected and grew indignant—and then suddenly understood and were stunned by what they realized.

Lucy arrived. She was prim, but her eyes shone. She explained that she'd been working with the Al-darian nerve current device and had found a way to project it in a beam. She was sure that if a really powerful nerve stimulus field could be beamed at Aldari-ans, that if the sounds produced in their severed hearing nerves could be made intelligible . . .

There were high level scientists feverishly anxious to get back to their laboratories to get to work. There were others arriving to have their skepticism satisfied. There were men demanding facts of Hackett so they could begin to make this and that . . .

And back home somebody had blown up half a ploughed field with an Aldarian device modified to do something unknown. It turned out be the violent breakdown of all endothermal compounds. Somebody near Denver had stumbled on a particular shaping of the pointed end of the fishlike Grek device part, and it pushed down walls with no reverse thrust on the device. It was a so-far-primitive space drive, which only needed to be worked out in detail to make rockets mere souvenirs of a quaint, old-fashioned period.

But there was one man who'd worked zestfully in his own field, quite alone and with no help from anything Hackett or anybody else had accomplished. He'd studied the gesture code of the Greks and Aldarians, in motion pictures taken when they were away from the ship. He'd studied pictures showing gesture conversations taking place before an Aldarian writing down something for humans to read. This signal language student had the text of the writings and had learned to talk in gesture code, though with an extremely limited vocabulary. There was some similarity to the sign language of American Indians, who might not know a word of each others' spoken language, but could discuss all sorts of subjects in detail by signs.

Hackett assigned him to establish communication with the solitary Aldarian captured in the Morrow Island cavern. He and Lucy went back together to arrange the next two stages in a sequence which would be more hair-raising in each incident.

He held conferences. Most of the world celebrated or gloated that the Greks were coming back. They'd said so. But Hackett and a certain number of close-mouthed individuals made plans and preparations that would have gotten them lynched anywhere on the globe.

There was a garage mechanic who'd repaired a sinter-field generator much too well, so that even metals crumbled to powder when it was turned on them. In on this discussion was a general of ordnance, an electrical engineer with some reputation for designing gigantic dynamo-electric machinery, and the head of an electrical workers' union.

There was discussion with linguists and semanticists and communications experts. Their subject matter had to be referred to Lucy with an ultimate referral to the man who'd studied Grek-Aldarian gesture-codes. He and the captured Aldarian were flown back to where communication as achieved could be put on tape, and the tape applied to control an Aldarian hearing aid magnified and made able to transmit its field directionally.

There was a conference. They were innumerable, but Hackett did happen to be the man who as of now thought more lucidly about Grek-style devices and principles than anybody else. He assumed the authority to insist that he was going with the expedition to the antarctic. That expedition had the tightest of possible schedules. It would have to shave minutes to reach Antarctica, do what it must do there and get back to the landing cradle in Ohio before the Grek ship came to ground a second time.

In this seething activity, some curious sidelights turned up. The delegation which had implored the return of the Greks somehow gathered bunting and flags and motortrucks and fuel—the fuel was an achievement—and headed for the landing cradle to prepare a welcoming ceremony for those philanthropists of space, the Greks. The Aldarians instructing male and female students in the sciences of the Greks were unaware of any change in the prospective sequence of events. One Aldarian at the dummy power-station Hackett had entered bitterly gave up hope that human beings might turn out to be wiser or stronger than the Greks, so he and his people might some day hope to be more than slaves. And some thousands of tons of gold bullion accumulated at the Mediterranean station where sea water was de-salted to be pumped into the Sahara basin. There was much pilfering of that gold by workmen at the plant, but nobody else, anywhere, wanted it.

Then, when Hackett found that he had to abandon further efforts of any sort in order to head for the airport for the journey south, a large man with a patient expression came into the office he'd preempted.

"Well?" said Hackett. "I don't mean to be impolite, but I have to get going—"

The large man said mildly, "I came to wish you good luck. I think it's important that you have it."

"Thanks and all that, but—"

"We've a mutual acquaintance," said the large man. "A Miss Constance Thale, who went to school with me. She wrote me a very pleasant note the other day. I understand that you and Doctor Thale are to be married. She thought I might be interested. I telephoned her once about you."

Hackett blinked. Then he said hastily, "I suppose I should apologize for giving orders and such things without authority, but they more or less—"

"You've no idea," said the large man mildly, "how pleased I am when people don't insist that I pass on everything they want to do, when what they're doing is sensible, that is." Then he said; "I'm really hopeful now. The credit will have to be distributed rather widely if things go as we want them to, but—You're ready to go? I'll drive you to the airport."

Hackett and Lucy, waiting below, were driven to the airport in a White House limousine, which would be beautifully calculated to give pleasure to Lucy's Cousin Constance when she was free to talk about it. And they took off for Antarctica.

The look of things at their landing place was singularly unlike the darkness and gloom of Baffin Land and Morrow Island. There was sunlight. Ice was blindingly white. Open water was incredibly blue. An atomic submarine waited with atomic-headed rockets ready to take over the enterprise if unhappily the expeditionary force should fail.

From the moment of their landing to the climax of their journey, this was altogether different from the Morrow Island effort. For one thing, exploration of Antarctica was a continuing process. There were still hundreds of thousands of square miles no human eye had ever seen, but the continent had a relatively permanent population of as much as two hundred persons. They moved on fixed routes as a rule, but they did move about. Snow tractors were routine in some areas, and there were caches of fuel along lines sometimes hundreds of miles in length, though they might run alongside the bases of mountains whose other sides were totally unknown. Planes were not unprecedented here. So if there were a Grek power-generating station on Antarctica it would undoubtedly be more carefully hidden than at the other end of the world, but aliens in it would be less likely to imagine every visible movement directed against them.

Snow tractors carried the expedition inland. In the tractor carrying the nerve-stimulus beam projector, Lucy gave Hackett a rundown of progress in race-to-race communication.

"That poor Aldarian you captured," she observed, "was absolutely pitiable, Jim. Do you know why he was alone?"

Hackett shook his head.

"You hurried back," she said. "But after you left they found there'd been some others. They'd been killed and dumped in snowdrifts. Something had come down from the moon. Greks. Just before their ship took off from Earth they made a discovery they didn't like. So while humans got to miss them, they made a surprise inspection on the Morrow Island station. They found an Aldarian hearing aid. So they killed four of the five Aldarians who'd been there, and promised the last that half of those on the ship who were hostages for him would be killed. Half. You see? He was punished by the lulling of some hostages. But he couldn't think of revenge because there were more. They could kill the rest."

"I see," said Hackett. His tone was detached. "I don't like the Greks. I hope things go our way when they land again."

Lucy shivered a little. "He was so completely desperate that I think he'd have killed himself when he got the chance. You see, in being captured or even killed he'd have committed a crime in the eyes of the Greks!"

"Nice people, the Greks," said Hackett ironically. "Nice!"

"So by the time the sign language man came to try to talk to him, he was already due for absolutely every punishment the Greks could inflict. So he talked. He was brought down and showed the things that are being got ready. Did anybody tell you how a stepped-up sinter beam makes metal fall to powder?"

"Yes," said Hackett. "I know about it."

"He began to hope we might kill some Greks, so he told us everything he could. We fixed up a hearing aid so he could hear his own voice and he made a recording. The transmitter in the back can send it so that Aldarians with cut hearing nerves will hear the language they used when they could talk like anybody else."

"You'll broadcast it, and it'll urge the Aldarians to turn against the Greks?"

"Not—not too soon," said Lucy unhappily. "The Aldarian you captured said if we used it too soon some of them would think it was a Grek trick and not dare believe it. And they'd tell the Greks for safety's sake."

"I repeat," said Hackett evenly, "that I don't like the Greks."

She was silent for a little while. The tractor groaned and rumbled upon and through the snow. Then she said, "He said that from now on the Greks won't wait to make Aldarians deaf. They'll cut their hearing nerves while they're babies, so they'll never have any idea of sound or spoken words."

The tractor went on and on. There were many others before it and others behind. The art of traveling over a continent of snow and ice was well developed. The sun moved around the horizon, never dipping below it. There came a time when rest was necessary. They halted. They slept. With insufficient sleep they went on again.

Back in the United States there was a further communication from the Greks to the volunteer Aldarians patiently teaching nonsense to aspiring students.

It announced that the Grek ship would descend at the same earth cradle that had been prepared for their ship before. They'd known of the atomic bombs planted there before their first landing. It was a form of arrogance to use it again, ignoring the possibility that humans could devise any weapon they could not counter.

"They're plenty confident," said Hackett when he heard of it. "If they should be right, by the time they administer punishment to those of us who've been working to defy them—"

"We'll be dead," said Lucy firmly. "We'll make sure of it."

"If they have the least suspicion," said Hackett grimly, "well be wiped out tomorrow. You, by the way, will stay at least three miles back from where any fighting happens."

Lucy did not answer.

The day's journey continued. The sun did not ever set, but its rays were low and slanting. During this day, a plane flew low overhead and dropped an object by parachute. It was a packet of high altitude photographs of the terrain all around the place to which the thing from the moon had descended and from which it had risen again. The pictures were incredibly detailed. From thirty-five thousand feet they showed square miles of cracked and fissured surface, and a range of mountains with every valley revealed to the last jagged boulder which penetrated the snow. There was a mark calling attention to one place on one enlarged photographic print.

It was a depression in the snow, where something heavy had packed the soft stuff down. The low-slanting sunshine cast shadows in the depressed space.

There was discussion. Painstaking examination told more. There was a hundred-foot line of trampled snow from the single large depression. As on Morrow Island, the thing from the moon had landed here, as near as possible to this hidden power-generating station. It had only been necessary to walk thirty yards through the snow. The Greks, evidently, did not imagine a race of such variegated talents that it could find footprints in snow, hundreds of miles from any human settlement, made by aliens marching to arid from an object that humans should be unable to detect.

The expedition sent a tight microwave beam skyward to where the plane that had dropped the pictures now circled out of sight. The plane went away. The expedition went on. There was a schedule to be kept to. It was necessary if efforts now preparing elsewhere were to take effect on the exact instant for the exact effect for the tractors to take advantage of.

The ground party went on in its unending, jolting, crawling progress. At nine hundred hours it moved toward a mountain range from whose farther side it could not be seen. At nine hundred forty hours planes came flying low above the snow surface. They were medium bomber jets, capable of a speed of mach two at sea level, and carrying bombs of very respectable size. They had come down from the United States, refueled and now they plunged over the tractor expedition too fast for the eye to follow. They were a muttering to the rear. They were a bellowing overhead. Then they were a diminishing uproar ahead. The sound of their going trailed them by miles.

They lifted sharply to clear mountain bridges and dipped down; there were ripping, bursting bombs, and a cloud of white phosphorus smoke began to form to windward of the mountains' farther slopes. There was another tumult overhead. Hackett was almost deafened by this, because he'd plunged out of the tractor carrying Lucy and was insisting upon climbing into another.

A second squadron of bombers went racing across the snow sheet and steeply upward. More bombs thudded as they landed. The mountains echoed to sounds they had never heard before in all their millions of years.

And the snow tractors, abruptly dumping all excess loads, flung into the highest speed of which they were capable and raced toward a spot where some unknown object had marked the snow exactly as the snow had been marked on Morrow Island half a world away.

It was not spectacular. From a distance it seemed only that there were small white-painted dots moving over snowfields and the lower slopes of mountains. They left tracks in the snow behind them. Now some of them plunged into dense clouds of white vapor moving slowly toward them from where five-hundred-pound and larger smoke bombs had landed. More of them dived into the white-out the smoke bombs made. Presently there was only one such dot remaining away from the blank whiteness from which detonations and the rasping of automatic weapons came.

The moment arrived when the tractor in which Hackett rode could go no farther. With others, he plunged out and made his way ahead. There were other vehicles still moving. There was dense fog. There were explosions . . .

Shrilling whistles and shouts called to all men. Hackett, panting, ran for the source of the outcry. There was a blown-away door and a cavern from which warm air floated out. Hackett dived into it, with many others. They swarmed down passages. This was no such stable-like cave as the arctic one had been. He saw an Aldarian. The Aldarian had his back against a stony wall and his arms spread wide. This was what the broadcast by Lucy's tractor—inaudible to Greks and men alike—had warned was to be a signal by Aldarians that they wanted to strike a blow at the Greks. This furry man held the pose, but he jerked his head fiercely, mouthing unintelligible sounds, urging the humans into a certain passage on beyond.

Hackett tore into it. There was an Aldarian who fought desperately against the invading humans. He had to be killed. There were others who hesitated. Hackett saw one weeping as he tried to decide instantly between terror for those who were hostages for him, and the ravening, raging, horrible longing to strike at the race of Greks.

There was a flash of flame past Hackett's face. It splashed against stone and glowing powder and pebbles dropped down. Hackett fired. There were other men with him. They were in a room of such spaciousness and lavish luxury as no human despot ever had made for himself. And there was a bulky, gray-skinned Grek moving swiftly toward apparatus at its end. He fired once more and the flash of his hand weapon was like lightning. He had almost reached the device which was plainly a communicator of some sort—

Hackett killed him, from ten yards, with a .45 caliber, primitive, automatic smokeless-powder pistol.

And again, later, there were planes flying overhead and parachutes blooming in the sky. But it was day, here. It would be day for a long while yet. The sun wouldn't set for some six weeks to come, and then it would set only briefly.

This was forty-eight hours before the Grek ship returned to Earth. When it did turn up, it didn't appear as a silver speck beyond the nearer planets, increasing slowly in size as it came nearer. That might have been tactful, but the Greks did not think of it.

The Grek ship came casually out from behind the edge of the moon. It came deliberatly toward Earth. It was huge. It was monstrous. It is probable that the Greks sent calls to their two main installations on Earth. If so, there was no answer. But the enslaved Aldarians in the dummy broadcast transmitters replied promptly, and the Aldarians assigned to teach Grek science to human students were prompt to respond. That was enough. The Grek ship came on. It seems certain that there were no misgivings on board. The Greks knew the state of human civilization. The race of men was primitive in its development. Its technology was absurd. No human being was able to understand how any Grek machine worked. Compared to the Greks, men were savages! At least they had been less than two months before, and it would take millenia for them to overtake the Greks if they were allowed to try. But they wouldn't be.

Moreover, the human race had sent message after message, imploring the Greks to come back and direct them, guide them,—in effect, rule them. They would be docile, and if they ever developed ideas unlike their present tearful gratitude to and for all things Grek—

So the Grek ship came down. Where the enormous viewing-stands had been built for the ceremony of its departure, there were ragged flags and not much bunting and very few humans. But men knew well enough that they were unable to live without the Greks once they'd encountered them. Presently they would discover how promptly they'd die if they displeased them.

But just now there was the matter of landing.

The ship came down and down and down, and it was a monstrous, ungainly object. But it was beautifully controlled. It swung slightly to align itself perfectly with the scooped-out earthen cradle men had prepared for it eight months before. It was the length of five large city blocks, and its thickness was that of the height of a sixty-story building. It was more gigantic than any structure the human race had ever built on solid ground—and it roamed among the stars!

The delegation for welcoming the Greks back to Earth set up a shout of greeting. It was, as it happened, a very small sound in the vastness of the empty stands. But some of the delegates were weeping with joy that now everything would turn out all right with the wise, kind Greks to decide everything for them, and everybody would be rich and nobody would have to do anything in particular . . .

The Grek ship settled neatly and tidily and perfectly in the berth designed for it. Hackett and Lucy watched, Hackett with a surpassing grimness. A door began to open for someone to come out and be greeted by men who essayed to give the Earth and all its people into the benevolent and munificent hands of the Greks.

Then several things happened. They did not seem related, somehow, but they all happened at the same time and place. There were a dozen or so modified sinter-field generators under the grandstand. They had been built after consultation with a garage mechanic who'd tried to mend such a generator of small size when it was smashed in a truck-car collision. These dozen sinter-field generators were changed from the original model. They projected a beam instead of a field, and in this stepped-up beam metal crumbled to powder.

There were some super-laser-beam projectors, of which the idea had come from a burned-out high school science classroom. They would burn a hole through half a mountainside if desired, and repeat the blast with every alternation of the current supplied them.

There were guided missiles carrying relatively miniature artillery shell atomic bombs. They developed the destructive power of no more than five hundred tons of chemical high explosive. And they could not be inactivated. A small device like an Aldarian hearing aid made sure of the fact.

And there was a high power beam of the nerve stimulus field, which could tell every Aldarian in the ship, as if his hearing had been restored, that now was the time to revolt.

It was quite odd that all these things went into operation at once. All of them were strictly focused upon one particular part of the Grek ship. Oddly enough that was the part of the ship reserved for Greks, so certain captured Aldarians affirmed. There was a great space between that infinitely luxurious living space and the stable-like quarters reserved for Aldarians—they being domestic animals only.

They all went into action at once, with no particularly dramatic preface. But the first three hundred feet of the ship shivered and billowed downward and out. It had suddenly become metallic powder, nothing more. As it fell, from the height of a fifty-story human building, intolerably brilliant laser-beams flashed into it like so many lightning bolts, at sixty bolts to the second and with a dozen projectors flinging them.

There was only one guided missile used. It went off, of course. It scattered metal dust far and wide, and proved conclusively that there were no more Greks left alive in the ship. Further bombardment would have been undesirable. Technical reasons aside, there were very nearly two thousand Aldarian slaves in the ship. They were the technicians and the scientists responsible for the ship and all its capabilities. The Greks specialized in ruling, in slave-owning. It turned out to be a weakness. The Aldarians, when they found they were free, only regretted very, very bitterly that no Greks had been left alive so they could kill them.

But even they found some small satisfaction in the fact that the instruments used to destroy the Grek ship had been, in the last analysis, only variations on the devices the Greks had brought to Earth as gifts.

Everybody knows, of course, what happened after that. The destruction of the Grek ship ended immediately all fond notions of pie in the sky and working one day a week and all the rest. But, rather strangely, we seemed to feel that something else was more important after we'd learned and digested the lessons to be drawn from the things the Aldarians told us. We went back to work. Resolutely. We who went through the coming of the Greks were like the humans of today. We could be fools, but also we could be something more.

When we heard the story of the Aldarians, we were enraged. We liked the Aldarians. A fine high sense of mission came to us. We immediately resolved that Earth must be protected against the chance of another Grek ship coming to Earth with plans about our liberty and the futures of our children. We began grimly to build ships of space to protect them. The Aldarians helped with strictly practical information and aid, besides. We acquired a space fleet.

And we continued to learn from the Aldarians. The Greks were liars. There were no thousands of civilized planets in the Nurmi cluster. In fact, the Greks didn't come from there. There was no organized interstellar commerce, with gigantic ships plying from world to world upon their lawful occasions. There were civilized planets, yes. But there were Greks. And the Greks were not a civilization. Centuries or millenia gone by, they'd made some discoveries. They built space ships. They searched for colonizable planets. They found partly civilized ones instead. So they changed their plans. They conquered them and ruled them.

When on a given world there ceased to be slaves by thousands or tens of thousands for each individual Grek, they had their slaves build them a ship and some of them searched for another habitable, partly civilized world to be conquered and ruled. The Aldarians had been victims. There'd been others. Earth, by all the rules of reason, should have been a victim, too. But the Greks would be our deadly enemies if they ever learned we'd destroyed a Grek ship. If Earth could defend itself, it was dangerous!

So, we did what we saw was necessary. We sent a ship to the home planet of the Aldarians. Some of the Aldarians we'd freed were on board. There were Greks ruling that world. We took the necessary action. Then there were no more Greks there—and Earth had an ally and men had staunch and grateful friends.

Then that first ship went exploring. It found a habitable planet not occupied by any but lower animals. We decided to colonize it. But it had to be protected against Greks! So we began to hunt for them. We found worlds with Grek masters ruling millions of slaves. We took action. We found more desirable, colonizable worlds . . .

All of this is tediously well-known. The Earth space fleet is large and competent, and our spacemen are welcome visitors on all the worlds which are now our allies. Interstellar trade has been developing admirably, and as long as our fleet can be said to rule the ether waves, we can look forward to an indefinitely long period of peace and prosperity for ourselves and the other races we have rescued or protect.

But we who remember the coming of the Greks to Earth are sometimes scoffed at by later generations.

We find it hard to explain to them how terrifying the coming of the ship was, and why we behaved as we did. We did act like idiots! But all men can, given the opportunity.

What we sometimes suspect is that maybe, some day, our descendants will be fools, too, only in a different way. Suppose, for instance, that a man-manned ship finds a desirable new planet, far out of the normal range of our ships. And suppose there's a semi-civilized race on it. Suppose this human ship comes casually out from behind that planet's moon, and waits to see what the planet's inhabitants will do. And suppose that presently it pieces together a vocabulary of those barbarian's words, and says that it will be very happy to pass on such technical information as the aborigines can make use of, and therefore it asks permission to land . . .

Heaven help us, it could happen! So we who remember the coining of the Greks hammer at later generations, trying to make them see that they mustn't be the same kind of fools we were. Or the Greks were. Or the Aldarians. Or the—

It seems to be true that all the intelligent races of our galaxy are capable of acting like fools if the conditions are right. That is, we can all be idiots under proper encouragement. So—

Don't do it! Don't do it! Don't!

(For the record, it should be mentioned that James Hackett, Ph.D., and Lucy Thale, M.D., were married within a month after the destruction of the Grek ship. The bride was given away by the President of the United States and the maid of honor was Miss Constance Thale. The most authoritative information is to the effect that they are engaged in living happily ever after.)