The Greks Bring Gifts

2

Everybody was comforted. Everybody was happy. Nobody would have thought, of course, that visitors from beyond the stars were do-gooders of purest ray serene. But we were desperately anxious to believe it, once the idea was suggested. More details came from the monstrous ship. Yes, they were utterly altruistic and wholly philanthropic. They traveled from star to star, innocently engaged in making people happy while they trained astrogators and engineroom officers as benevolent as themselves. What more would we want? How could we improve on that as bait? We couldn't.

But the Greks could. They did.

They landed their ship in Ohio in an enormous earthen cradle Army engineers scooped out for them. In preparing the earth cradle, the military men thoughtfully buried four atomic fission bombs where they would be handy if we needed them. They were arranged to be detonated from a distance. There were also ballistic missiles with atomic warheads, prudently placed in concealment a good way from the landing site. They could blast even the Grek ship to incandescent, radioactive gas if the need arose. But apparently we were much ashamed of this afterward. From the moment of their landing until after their departure, it seems that nobody thought a single naughty thought about the Greks. They were wonderful! They were making everybody rich! For six months the Greks were deliriously revered.

It is still hard for us who went through all this to make another generation understand why we acted and felt as we did. But now we know what the Greks are like. Then we didn't. Now we know what they came for. Then we were intoxicated by the gifts they brought us. We hadn't discovered that unearned riches are as bad for a race as for a person. And the Greks had made us rich.

In the six months the Greks were aground we acquired broadcast power. Not yet an adequate supply for all the waste a planet's population could achieve. Not yet. But anybody who had a receiving unit could draw from the air all the power he needed to light or heat his house and run his ground car or his small-sized business, if he had one. We had de-salting plants turning salt water into fresh for the irrigation of the Sahara Basin, and we anticipated having all the fresh water we could use in all the arid regions of the world.

We had fish-herding electronic devices that drove unbelievable quantities of ocean fish into estuaries to be netted. We had a sinter field which made the minerals in topsoil more available to plants, and our crops promised to be unmanageably huge. We had plastics we hadn't dreamed of, materials we could hardly believe, and new manufacturing processes. . . .

After six months the Greks announced that they were going away. They'd leave us to the enjoyment of our new wealth. We owed them nothing. What they had done had been done out of the goodness of their hearts. True, they made most of their benefactions through their furry Aldarian student spacemen. We liked the Aldarians, though it was odd that they had external ears but were totally deaf. We felt uncomfortable in the presence of Greks. The feeling Greks produced in human beings was usually described as "creepy." But we were grateful to them. We idolized them. Being the kind of idiots we were, we practically worshipped the Greks for their benefactions!

If all this seems improbable, it's true just the same. The rest of the tale may make it believable.

The rest may as well begin with Jim Hackett on the day before the leaving of the Greks. The date of their departure had been proclaimed a planetary holiday, the first in human history. All of Earth would take the day off to do honor to those gray-skinned, bald and uninterested creatures who had remade our world much nearer to our hearts' desire.

At the lift-off spot itself, in Ohio, it was estimated that not less than a million and a half human beings would congregate to tell the Greks goodbye. In the rest of America there were to be other gigantic farewell parties. They'd be linked to the actual lift-off spot by closed-circuit television. In Europe, in Asia, in Australia, in South America, in Africa—everywhere—the world prepared to do honor to the Greks on their departure.

In the United States, naturally, the celebration began with the worst traffic foul-up in the history of self-propelled vehicles. And Hackett was caught in it. He was going to the lift-off ceremony for a reason of his own. He'd made a suggestion to an archaeologist he knew, and he wanted to see what it turned up, if anything. He'd picked up Lucy Thale—she'd been Doctor Lucy Thale this past full month—at the hospital where she'd been interning. She wanted to see the Greks go away. After four hours of stop-and-go crawling, Hackett swerved off the official main highway to the liftoff site and turned onto a secondary road.

There was an enormous difference. The two-lane main road had been a solid, packed, crawling mass of vehicles. Now and again they halted by necessity. Sooner or later they started up again, to crawl at five to ten miles an hour until perforce they halted once more. When he got on the narrower road, though, Hackett could make fifty miles an hour or better.

It was a singularly perfect day, with remarkably green grass and an unusually blue sky, and little white clouds sailing overhead. This road wound and twisted, and the main highway gradually moved farther and farther away toward the horizon, until one couldn't even smell the gas fumes from its fuel-driven cars. Seven-eighths of the cars on the road were still that kind. The cars that ran on broadcast power were coming out of the factories, but there weren't anywhere near enough of them to meet the public demand. There were other difficulties about them, too. But everybody knew that everything would be ironed out shortly.

Hackett drove, thinking absorbedly to himself. Lucy Thale took a deep breath of the purer air.

"It'll be a good thing," she said, "when all cars run on broadcast power. It was stifling on the highway!"

Hackett grunted.

"It's the heaviest traffic in history. I can imagine only one way it could be heavier."

Lucy turned her head to look at him inquiringly.

"Everybody on the road," he told her, "is on the way to cheer and praise the Greks. But if they'd turned out not to be as benevolent as they seem, there'd be heavier traffic trying to get away from them."

Lucy smiled a little.

"You're not enthusiastic about the Greks, Jim."

"I'm less enthusiastic about the human race," he said grimly. "We're about in the position of the American Indians when the whites came to America. The Greks are farther ahead of us than our ancestors were ahead of the Indians. But the Indians didn't quarrel among themselves for the privilege of letting the whites destroy them!"

"But the Greks aren't—"

"Aren't they?" asked Hackett sourly.

Lucy said, "They've given us things we didn't hope to have for generations to come!"

"We gave the Indians metal tomahawks and whiskey and guns," growled Hackett. "They killed each other with the tomahawks, drank themselves to death on the whiskey, and fairly often they used the guns on us. But they didn't try to keep each other from having the guns or the tomahawks or the whiskey. We're not so tolerant."

Lucy did not comment. There were some governments which protested that it was unfair for other nations with more developed industry and more trained technical workers to be able to make more use of the Greks' gifts than they could. They argued that they should be given extra aid to lift themselves level. But so far it was only squabbling. It would be smoothed out. Everybody was sure it would work out all right.

"Also," said Hackett, "Indians didn't go hungry because flint arrowheads became obsolete. Have you seen the unemployment figures? The Indians didn't pauperize their hunters because they weren't needed while everybody was busy getting drunk! The thing hasn't hit you, Lucy. You're a doctor, and the Greks haven't made medicine a useless skill. But most of the world isn't so lucky. Me, for example."

Again Lucy did not answer. Hackett had been among the first to feel the impact of the Greks upon his career. He had been the youngest man ever to be nominated for a Nobel Prize and, though he hadn't received it, he'd had some reputation and the prospect of considerable achievements in the years to come. So he'd been included in the group of Earth physicists to whom the Greks offered instruction in their more advanced science. But he hadn't made the grade. The painstakingly translated Grek texts on physics made sense to him so far and no further. At a certain point the statements seemed to him to become meaningless gobbledy-gook. He couldn't follow the reasoning or grasp the ideas. They seemed simply nonsensical, leading nowhere and accounting for nothing. So the Greks, with painstaking sighs of regret, observed that he seemed incapable of the kind of thinking their sciences required, and politely showed him the door.

He hadn't taken it well. There were other physicists who went on zestfully through the most abstruse areas of Grek theory. They'd produced nothing new as yet, of course. They couldn't hope for independent achievement before they were thoroughly grounded in the new way of looking at things. But they were admired, while Hackett had lost his reputation with his dismissal. He no longer had a career. His training and his work up to now had become useless.

At this time we who were madly absorbed in the gifts the Greks had brought us couldn't see Jim's value. There were a lot of things we didn't see. We don't feel proud of ourselves. We were idiots. Some of us were worse than idiots. Very luckily, Hackett wasn't.

But he had enough reason to feel bitter as he drove along a curving secondary road on the day before the Greks' departure. Beside him, Lucy Thale frowned a little. She wasn't too happy, either. She'd just finished her year's interning at Hoyt Memorial Hospital, and she'd been debating what it would mean if she married Hackett. There'd been a time when it had seemed a complete and beautifully satisfying career. But Hackett wasn't thinking romantically now.

The traffic grew more dense even on this road. From fifty miles an hour, the practical road speed dropped to forty, then to thirty. Others beside Hackett had abandoned the toll highways for lesser thoroughfares. Hackett drove automatically, scowling to himself.

The traffic stopped. Hackett braked, and wound up with his front bumper only inches from the car ahead. Presently movement began again, inch by inch and foot by foot. A long time later they came to a place where a car had swerved out of the right-hand lane to try to leapfrog on ahead. There'd been a truck coming in the opposite direction and the leap-frogging car couldn't get back into its proper lane. It should have darted across the road into a ditch. It hadn't. A wrecked truck and four more or less wrecked cars had blocked traffic for a time. The cars had now been pushed off the highway. Traffic speeded up again.

"That's six wrecks we've seen so far today," observed Lucy. "If anybody was hurt, though—"

If so, they'd been taken away. The national highway safety board had estimated that there would be between nine hundred and a thousand highway fatalities today, due to the traffic toward the lift-off tribute to the Greks. That compared with estimates of six to seven hundred for a long Fourth of July weekend. The farewell to the Greks would be costly in human lives, but there was no way to prevent it. And Hackett had spent a good deal of his financial reserves getting tickets for himself and Lucy to watch the departure.

There were gigantic grandstands built all around the monstrous space ship. There were many square miles of parking space set aside. There were acres of cubbyholes containing bunks, to be rented for the night before the take-off. There was an enormous bunting-draped auditorium in which an incredible departure party would be held in honor of the Greks. Humanity would do itself proud. There were already organizations collecting funds with which to build a towering permanent monument where the Greks had first landed. It seemed proper. Hadn't the Greks come to turn Earth into a terrestrial paradise in which nobody would work more than a day a week, all men would retire at forty, and everybody would have every possession he'd ever envied anybody else?

It is too bad those plans for a monument weren't carried through. It might be useful to remind later generations what fools we humans can be.

The traffic spread out to where individual vehicles were one car length apart and the speed was up to fifty miles an hour once more. Small towns and villages appeared near the roadside from time to time. Little service highways led to them. Hackett noticed a car lumbering off to the right at one such turnoff. Two miles later he saw two more cars turn off. Not long after, another car went careening out of the traffic-loaded secondary road, though there was then no settlement of any sort in sight. Each of these cars seemed to turn off in consequence of something ahead of Hackett. The first one he'd noticed was perhaps the eighth car ahead. The seventh had swerved off on a lesser road. The sixth was followed off by the fifth. The road passed a small town with twin steeples on its church, and the fourth car ahead left at the next possible exit. The third and second went off together. It was peculiar.

Then the car just ahead of Hackett turned off. It would not be easy to get back into such traffic as this, but it left. And then Hackett saw what eight other cars had refused to follow. But Lucy saw it first.

"Jim!" she said quickly. "Look! It's an Aldarian!"

Hackett nodded with some, grimness. The car just ahead was a convertible with its top down. It slowed violently, as if a foot had been taken off its accelerator. Hackett had to brake to avoid crashing into it. But then it shot ahead with such acceleration as almost to crash into the car ahead. It braked again and swerved wildly, came back on the highway, and proceeded normally for a minute or more. Then it darted to the right, overcorrected so it headed into the left-hand lane, and got back just before a monstrous truck roared by from the opposite direction.

The convertible stopped short and Hackett burned rubber to keep from smashing into it. Instinctively he cringed in anticipation of being crashed into from behind. But the white convertible shot ahead again and Jim sent his own car leaping after it.

"Yes," he said between his teeth, "it's an Aldarian. And he's a lousy driver. Somebody'll get killed if he keeps on!"

The furry poll and ears of an Aldarian showed above the back of the driver's seat. The world loved Aldarians—one of the few excusable reactions we managed in connection with the stay of the Grek ship. The Aldarians were likable. We owed gratitude to the Greks, but it had to be admitted that they made human beings feel creepy. Aldarians were something else again. They were, we understood, the students and trainees of the Greks. They knew vastly more than men, but one didn't feel uncomfortably inferior to them. They didn't make anybody feel creepy. And they took delight in doing primitive things—like driving human-design cars—which their Grek officers and instructors in the training ship never bothered with.

This Aldarian doubtless enjoyed driving a human car in the middle of human traffic. He'd probably been presented with it. Greks and Aldarians alike were overwhelmed with gifts everywhere they went. But he shouldn't have tried to drive in traffic like this, not until he'd had a lot of practice. His car required the constant attention of its driver, which was not true of Grek-designed cars. He couldn't remember that requirement. He was charmed with the adventure he was having. . . .

Lucy watched, fascinated by the sight of an Aldarian in the flesh. Hackett swore at his erratic driving. He not only swerved unpredictably, but from time to time he had to slow down and put his whole mind on aiming his car again. Which is not a good practice in nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic at fifty miles an hour.

Lucy said suddenly, "Jim, Aldarians are deaf, aren't they?"

"Yes, all of them." Hackett added sourly, "They're also crazy as drivers."

"But—they've got ears! Why?"

Hackett did not answer immediately. The Aldarian driver found himself about to run off the highway to the right and agitatedly swung to the left, just as a truckload of lumber raced past in the opposite direction. The truck tapped the alien's car, at exactly the right angle and with just the right force to flip it sharply into its proper lane and line of travel. The furry-headed driver was flung to one side. He straightened up frantically, and found everything perfectly normal. He was bemused. He was astonished!

"This one," said Hackett, "seems to have a rabbit's foot in wonderful working order! But I think he's dangerous."

"But why," insisted Lucy, "would Aldarians have ears if they can't hear? How could a bodily structure develop if it didn't work? How could a creature develop ears if it made no use of sounds?"

"I don't know," said Hackett. "The question's been raised before, privately, but not in public that I know of."

There was a little group of people beside the road. Others came running to join them from the town the highway now skirted. When the white convertible with the Aldarian driver went past, the people waved wildly. They cheered. Those who ran to join them waved and shouted too. It was easy to guess that the Aldarian was driving to rejoin his ship before it lifted off. And Aldarians were infinitely popular.

Through them—the Greks stayed in their ship, mostly—everybody in the world would presently be a millionaire. Food would be so plentiful that even the lavish living standard of America would be raised. Everybody would have everything he'd ever envied the rich for having. The Greks were providing this good fortune, but the Aldarians were its distributors. People liked them! Women said gushingly that they were cute, and men felt comfortably superior because they were deaf and had to communicate by writing. And they were friendly, and helpful, and they liked humans, whereas the Greks were merely distantly polite. And they made people feel creepy.

Half a mile on, another group of people waited. They waved and cheered as the Aldarian drove unskillfully past them. They laughed tolerantly at his incompetence. They liked him for trying to drive a human car. They applauded. Evidently one of the turned-off cars had telephoned ahead that an Aldarian was driving by, and people had come out to wave or shout warm and friendly greetings which the Aldarian could not hear.

But driving behind him was dangerous.

"It's practically a miracle," Hackett said coldly, as the divergations of the car ahead seemed to grow wilder, "that he hasn't crashed into something yet. But miracles don't go on forever, Lucy. He's going to be in the middle of a pile-up of cars presently, and I don't want you in it. So I'm turning off at the next side road."

"We may not be able to get back on the highway," she said, "but if you think we'd better—"

That was the instant it happened. An oil truck (lashed past on the other lane. It made the loudest of possible roarings. The Aldarian's car flinched away from it. It straightened out. Then three enormous trucks-and-trailers went bellowing by, tailgate to bumper. At each flashing appearance, the Aldarian flinched again. After the last, his right-hand wheels were off the concrete. He jerked the car crazily back on the road and went partly into the other lane. Something monstrous and howling plunged toward him. All his partly acquired responses went into action together. He swerved frantically to the right, jammed down the accelerator—

His car leaped crosswise off the road. It went into a ditch, careened and came out of it, and then, in the act of overturning, crashed violently into a tree.

Hackett had already reacted when the crash came. For a long while he'd been expecting some accident. Now he followed the white car instantly off the highway, steering with inspired accuracy. He hit the same ditch at the exactly right angle and bounced out of it with a monstrous crashing of springs. He had all four wheels in the air for part of a second, but then his car came to a grinding, locked-wheel stop not more than five feet from where the Aldarian had been thrown partly clear.

He was out in an instant. There was the smell of gasoline. A flame licked up. He scooped up the Aldarian in his arms. Lucy opened the rear-seat door. Hackett put the Aldarian on the cushions, snapped orders to Lucy—later he didn't remember what they'd been—and she jumped in beside the curiously crumpled figure. Hackett shot his car fiercely ahead just as the white car started really to burn.

Lucy said evenly, as the car lurched and swayed on the uneven ground, "He's not bleeding that I can see, but that's all I can see."

"You're a doctor, and it's not likely any other human doctor can do more. We'll have to get him to a hospital, fast! They may have equipment that'll do some good."

He drove on, on the shoulder of the road. He could see a fence ahead which might mark a feeder road joining the highway. He made for it as swiftly as he could.

Behind him there arose a wild, sky-shattering wail. The car that had followed him blew its horn violently to warn other cars behind it that something drastic had happened. Those other cars sounded their horns, and others behind them, to the horizon, set up a dismal din. But the traffic didn't stop. Moving cars near the now fiercely burning wreck only tried to speed up to get past it. Others speeded up as space opened before them. Perhaps fewer than a dozen cars actually knew what had happened. The rest only knew that a toppled white convertible blazed on its side by the highway.

Hackett braked and stopped at a house a quarter mile from the road. He banged on a door until it opened. He snapped explanations before it was fully ajar, demanding a telephone and the nearest hospital in one breath. He got the hospital on the phone, while all the occupants of the house ran to see an actual Aldarian at close quarters. While Hackett telephoned, Lucy made careful, tentative efforts to make the injured alien more comfortable.

Hackett came out. "There'll be motor cops coming to meet us," he said. "They're getting X-rays ready at the hospital, and they're getting in touch with the Grek ship, asking what to do first. There'll probably be a helicopter coming to take him to the ship for proper care."

He was in the car seat before he'd finished speaking. He eased the car into motion again, parting the small and sympathetic crowd, and headed away on the course he'd been given.

Once in motion he said, "How's he doing?"

"He's conscious," said Lucy, "and he has a heartbeat. But I don't know whether it's right or not. I can't know what it ought to be!"

"One good thing," said Hackett. "He's getting quick action! It'll be only minutes between the crash and the hospital."

He speeded up, easing the accelerator on curves and making the best possible time without shaking his passenger. It occurred to him that he and Lucy might have done some injury in moving the alien. But he'd had to be moved away. His car had begun to burn. There'd really been no choice.

Behind them, black smoke rose skyward. The traffic went on. Hackett's car raced on its way.

Motorcycle cops did meet them. And an ambulance. But Lucy pulled her professional status and insisted that the patient not be moved until he got to the hospital. He seemed as comfortable now as his situation permitted.

So Hackett followed a motorcycle cop, with other cops and the empty ambulance trailing him. He heard Lucy talking, in the back seat. The rear-view mirror showed her leaning over the Aldarian, speaking soothingly and reassuringly, even though he could not hear her. Once she gasped.

"What's up?" demanded Hackett, not slackening speed.

"He—spoke!" said Lucy. "He said—words! Words, Jim! I don't know what they meant, but—he said words!"

They came to a town. The motorbike sirens howled.

The small fleet of cars rushed through streets. They turned into a hospital's grounds. Hackett slowed smoothly and came to a jarless stop, and then there were agitated doctors and, it seemed, crowds of nurses.

Lucy said crisply, "I'm a doctor. I think we can move him with least risk this way."

She directed the delicate job of lifting the Aldarian from the back seat onto a stretcher. She accompanied him into the hospital. Hackett pulled his car to one side and sat smoking.

A cop came over, memo pad in hand. Hackett described the accident. The cop looked Hackett's car over. No bumps. No dents.

"You didn't bump into him," he said. "What sort of guys are those Aldarians?"

Hackett said he didn't know. Reporters arrived, and vanished into the hospital. Presently two of them came out, looked around, and made for Hackett.

"Are you the man who brought that Aldarian in?" demanded one feverishly. He backed off and prepared to use a camera.

"No," said Hackett. "That man left. I brought a brother-in-law here. His wife's having triplets."

The reporters went disappointedly away. Hackett reflected sourly that they'd get his name from the police report of the accident anyway. People who knew he'd been dismissed as incompetent to learn Grek physics would be amused.

A long, long time later, there was the heavy, beating rumble of a helicopter. It settled down on a corner of the hospital grounds. Men alighted. Then two Aldarians. Then one Grek. Everybody kowtowed to the gray-skinned Grek. He was a little larger than a man, he was balder than a man, and he was no longer grotesque to anybody who could see newspapers or magazine pictures or Took at television. He made polite and infinitely bored gestures. He and the two Aldarians were escorted into the hospital. A little later they came out again. The two Aldarians carried a stretcher. They put it into the helicopter. The sagging rotors of the copter began to turn. They roared, and the copter rose into the air. It went away across the small town, swinging as it flew, and ultimately it vanished in the direction of that faraway place from which the Grek ship would rise on the morrow.

Again a long time later, Lucy came out of the hospital. Two male internes came with her, talking volubly. Some of their animation disappeared when she smiled brightly at Hackett. He rolled the car over to her. She climbed in and finished her conversation as she closed the door behind her.

"I'd love to see a print of those X-rays," she said sweetly. "If you think I can get them, I'll write and ask."

She waved cheerfully and Hackett drove away. They were two miles from the hospital when Lucy spoke. Then she said in a queer voice, "I did—something peculiar back there, Jim. Maybe I did wrong. I'm worried. But it happened so fast—"

"What was it?"

She hesitated. Then she said, "You were driving for the hospital after we got the Aldarian in the car. I tried to make him comfortable by straightening out his arms and legs the way I've seen them on TV. I think there are some broken bones, but of course I don't know Aldarian anatomy. He—kept moving. Stirring. I though he was in pain, and tried to help him move to the position he wanted. He watched my face. I guess they've come to recognize what our facial expressions mean. He tried desperately to make me understand something. Finally he used words. Words! How could someone whose whole race is deaf know how to form words? I kept trying to soothe him, but he kept trying to move and struggle. . . ."

Hackett's car arrived at a place where the highway he'd come on—itself a secondary road—was silhouetted against the sky. It was a solid mass of cars. They looked like an endless procession of rushing insects, black against the horizon. But then Hackett's present road turned and ran downhill and the highway traffic disappeared behind a hillside.

"I realize now," said Lucy distressedly, "he was trying to make gestures. I thought he was only hurt. Then he—tried to use words. His eyes looked desperate, but I kept on trying to soothe him. And when he was carried into the hospital I could see that he was in a panic. He was terrified!"

"He ought to have known that no human would harm him," said Hackett sardonically. "At least nobody'd harm him yet. Not so long as they pass out gifts!"

Lucy swallowed.

"I'm not at all sure I did the right thing," she said uneasily. "When he saw the X-ray apparatus, he must have known what it was. His eyes looked simply crazy with despair. I bent over him, still trying to soothe him, thinking he must know I meant well for him because we'd pulled him out of the wreck. And—somehow he touched my hand. I looked, and he was trying to put something in it. I let him. He closed my fingers on it, and looked at me, and his eyes—they talked, Jim! He begged me desperately to do something about the thing in my hand. So I—I hid it and put my finger on my lips to say I'd keep it a secret. I don't know how I knew he wanted me to hide it, but I did."

Hackett slowed for a traffic sign. It felt strange to be driving on a minor road with next to no cars left, after the bumper-to-bumper traffic he'd been in for so long.

"You hid it," said Hackett. "On a hunch. Being a woman, you'll call it intuition. Then what?"

"He was perfectly still while the X-rays were being taken. He didn't look at me again. He didn't look desperate. Then the helicopter arrived and the Grek came in. He was very polite and somehow very lordly. But—Greks do make you feel creepy, Jim! They do! It's—unpleasant! Then the other two Aldarians took the stretcher and carried the injured one out. And he looked at me once more, just for an instant, as they carried him away. It was—significant. He was anxious. He was terribly anxious! But he wasn't panicky any more. It was as if he meant that everything was all right so far, but please don't do anything to spoil it!"

"So," said Hackett, "you kept the thing he handed you. And you kept your mouth shut, except to me. And now you suspect you should have done something else. Right?"

"Of course!" said Lucy. "I thought I'd ask you."

It is extremely likely that almost all of us, at that time, would have been shocked at the idea of anybody, for any reason, doing anything as irregular as Lucy had done. It was fortunate for the rest of us that Lucy was a woman. Only a woman would have done it.