The Greks Bring Gifts

1

We who remember the coming of the Greks find it hard to explain to a later generation just how terrifying that coming was, and why we acted as we did. After all, even at the beginning and for a really considerable time, the Greks made no menacing move. Their ship simply came casually around the edge of the moon and moved off some thousands of miles to one side. Then it stopped. It lay there motionless in space, as if looking us over and debating what to do about us, or with us. It could not be said that the ship made any alarming move or gave any evidence of untoward intentions. But we had hysterics.

Mainly, perhaps, that was because the Grek ship was monstrous. It was fully a quarter of a mile long, and thick in proportion. It glittered with a total-reflection surface material which kept it from either radiating heat to the emptiness of between-the-stars, or from absorbing heat when close to a white-hot sun. It was huge beyond imagining. We humans had sent probes to Mars and Venus, but we hadn't yet landed a working party on the moon. The only space drive we could imagine was rockets, and we'd gotten rockets to do about all they could. Which wasn't much. Until we saw the Grek ship, we couldn't conceive of anything as gigantic, as powerful, and as deadly as that seemed to be.

So when the ship did appear, and lay still in space apparently considering what to make of Earth and its quaint aborigines, we gibbered. We felt that if there were another intelligent race in our galaxy, it must be made in the image and likeness of men. And if we'd been able to build a ship like the Grek one, and if we'd found a world like Earth, we'd have taken it over. If it had a primitive race in residence on it, we'd have enslaved or massacred them.

Naturally, then, we expected the Greks to act as we would have done in their place. So we had hysterics. But if we'd known from the beginning what we found out later, hysterics wouldn't have begun to express our feelings!

At that, though, we were lucky. The Greks could have arrived half a century earlier, before the idea of broadcasting had been thought of and applied. We'd have been much worse off if newspapers had been the only way to distribute information. In other ways we were even luckier. One of the strangest ways was the good fortune we had in Jim Hackett. He was old enough to have been nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics, and young enough to have been refused it because of his youth. But apparently nobody thought of him at all. Certainly not as a piece of good luck.

At the moment we couldn't imagine good luck in any form. On all of Earth hysteria succeeded hysterics. There were financial panics in all the civilized countries. Some people seemed to think that if Earth were to be destroyed or conquered by creatures from outer space, it would somehow be useful to have money credits in soundly managed banks. There were political crises, as if who was in office would matter if all human government—or humanity itself—were to be abolished. And, of course, great numbers of people tried to flee the cities in the belief that there would be greater safety where there were fewer numbers. This however, may have been true.

Meanwhile the Grek ship lay perfectly still in space. It made no move. It sent no signals. It showed no signs of life. Ultimately, that quietness had its effect. From crazy and tumultuous rioting, which had many cities in flames and turned loose death and destruction everywhere, things calmed down a little. As nobody knew how the riots had started nobody knew how they happened to stop. But in eighteen hours there was relative order again. We were no less frightened, but we'd become bewildered. We calmed to mere desperation. For the first time in three generations there was practically no tension in international affairs. The heads of government communicated in a common funk that allowed of sincerity. The danger was equal for all nations. So presently there was a shaky, jittering alliance of all the world against the Grek ship. Which remained motionless.

Things couldn't go on in that state, obviously, so we attempted to make contact with the ship from beyond the stars. The attempts ranged from the idiotic to the absurd. An effort was made to open up two-way conversations by sending sequences of microwave pulses which said explicitly that two times two is four, and two times three is six, and so on to more rarefied mathematical conversation, such as a witticism about nine times twelve. There were attempts to communicate by means of television signals to the neighborhood of the moon, to inform the Greks—we didn't know that name yet—that we called ourselves men, that we were civilized, that we conversed by sounds, and that this sound meant this object and that sound that. Not less than twelve different languages were used by different people trying this process, but—somehow there came a breakthrough.

Two days after their first appearance, the Greks replied. Their answer consisted of six completely unrelated words, evidently transmitted from recordings the Greks had made of the confusions transmitted to them. Together the words had no meaning, but they did convey the idea that the Greks recognized them as meaningful and invited more systematic broadcasts on the same order.

To us, at the time, that set of six random words had the impact of a stay of execution in a death house. The Greks ceased to be inexplicable and terrifying, and became merely strangers who could not speak a human language and humbly asked to be helped to learn one. So we immediately began to assist them.

Eventually they stopped our instructions by beaming down a coherent and meaningful message. Nobody knows how they learned which words meant what—not in the case of verbs, anyhow—or how they contrived a lucid if lawless grammer. These are things we haven't found out yet. But the message arrived, and it was intelligible. It was warmly, blandly, deliriously comforting. We humans almost started to riot again out of pure relief.

The message said that the Grek ship greeted the inhabitants of this third planet out from the local sun. The ship was, so they said, a sort of school ship for spacemen of the Nurmi cluster. It trained aspirants for officers' ratings in the space merchantships of that area, where there were thousands of civilized planets. The officers and teaching faculty were members of a race called Greks, and the ship was taking a class of Aldarian student spacemen on a training voyage. It had come upon the Earth by pure accident, while giving its students an exercise in the examination of unfamiliar solar systems. It had occurred to the Grek instructors that their student crewmen would find it very educational to make contact with a new intelligent race, to pass on such technical information as might be useful, and even—if the inhabitants of Earth approved —to prepare them for a sound commercial relationship later with the worlds the Aldarians knew.

For these reasons, therefore, the Grek ship asked permission to land. It had established communication for that purpose. The Greks' intention—so they said— was purely and solely to benefit us, to make us healthy and wealthy and wise.

And we believed them! Heaven help us, we believed them!