The Greks Bring Gifts

3

The small road on which Hackett drove now turned and twisted. Once it dived down and ran under a roil rood crossing. For an instant the sound of the car seemed very loud, reflected as it was from the walls and coiling of the very brief tunnel.

Then Hackett said, "He wasn't making you a gift. It wasn't an expression of gratitude for our pulling him out of the wreck and getting him to a hospital."

Lucy moistened her lips. "No. . . ."

"He didn't want the thing he gave you to show when he was X-rayed," said Hackett. "And he didn't want it given back when he went off with the Grek in the helicopter. That was pretty clear, wasn't it?"

"Y-yes," said Lucy hesitantly. "That was clear."

"He'd know the Greks would see the X-rays," observed Hackett. "He knew he'd be taken back to the ship. So it looks as if he didn't want the Greks to know about the thing he gave you. He wanted to get rid of it."

Lucy nodded. She'd reasoned the same way, after the event, but she still felt uncomfortable about what she'd done. Hackett added, "Offhand, I'm for the Aldarian. They're likeable characters. The Greks aren't. They're obviously very generous—" his tone held irony, here—"but they act too superior. And they're creepy. So I advise you to do what the Aldarian wanted you to. Keep quiet. Don't do anything. It may not be sensible, but you'll feel better if you do."

Lucy said, relieved, "I was going to anyway, but I'm glad you agree."

"In confidence," said Hackett, "I have a reason."

"What? And don't you want to look at the thing?"

"Not now," said Hackett. "I think I want to keep moving. And I wish I hadn't given our names to that cop!"

He drove on. There was bright sunshine, and little white cumulus clouds seeming like islands floating upon the ocean of the sky. Hackett had felt definitely sour for a good part of the time the Grek ship had been aground. It was a vessel of a civilization so far advanced that we humans were savages .by comparison. Its officers behaved with a sort of aloof politeness that some people took for cordiality, but there was boredom behind it.

The Greks were not interested in man's achievements. They weren't interested in human beings as persons. They gave, indifferently, the information that should turn Earth into a terrestrial paradise when understood and applied. But they showed no enjoyment in their benevolence. They acted like men who didn't care for children, who gave toys or candy to them without feeling pleasure in the action. There was something wrong; something lacking.

And we who were right there saw it and didn't understand what it was!

Hackett made what time he could. He didn't try to get back even to a secondary road. They were too crowded. He stayed on the back roads, the service roads, the third-rate highways between small towns and villages. But they were chosen to lead gradually to the place from which the Grek ship would presently rise and disappear.

Oddly enough, by taking those back roads Hackett made better speed than most drivers. He arrived at the Grek ship's cradle after sundown, but hours earlier than some travelers on the jammed main roads. He arrived, in fact, early enough to be able to reserve a sleeping cubbyhole for Lucy for overnight. He could only get one, so he would have to sleep in his car. But he didn't mind.

When that arrangement was complete, they were hungry. Miles of land had been devoted to preparations for the lift-off ceremony. There were incredibly vast parking areas, already partly filled. The gigantic stands for onlookers covered acres upon acres. The bunting-draped auditorium was large enough even for the intended departure ball.

And naturally, in such a setting and for such a purpose, there were many minor enterprises designed to make a fast dollar. Hackett and Lucy got something to eat. There was no restaurant—because this event would last only twenty-four hours or so—but for hamburgers of inferior quality and uniced soft drinks he paid the price of a six-course dinner at an expensive nightclub. For the cubbyhole reserved for Lucy, he paid the price of a Presidential suite in a metropolitan hotel.

He and Lucy peered into the huge canvas-roofed hall where the predeparture ball would be held. It was abundantly draped with colored bunting which was too cheap to be opaque. The unpainted framing of the walls showed through. The floor had been hastily laid. There was the smell of sawdust. High up around the walls were the projection-TV screens to link all the celebrations, everywhere, into one.

"They say," said Hackett in a dry voice, "that there'll be ten thousand couples dancing here tonight. In honor of the Greks, of course. A highly suitable event. I'm sure they'll be lost in admiration!"

Lucy nodded. They went outside and found themselves passing a gate and entering the now silent, roofless, enormous grandstands. If they'd been built in any but the most penny-pinching manner, they would have been a remarkable spectacle in themselves. They completely surrounded the quarter-mile-long Grek ship.

Hackett and Lucy saw the ship, now.

It was wholly past belief. Partly buried in the cradle dug out for it to rest in, it was still more huge than any manmade object on Earth. It was five city blocks long, and though its cradle had been dug out to a depth of more than a hundred feet, its rounded upper surface, glittering in the moonlight, reached as high as the roof of a fifty-story building. It was overwhelming in its massiveness. It was daunting because of sheer size. There were men working on a platform before its forward end, installing microphones and cameras on a platform for the departure broadcast. They looked smaller than ants. The glaring fights they worked by were pinpoints of brightness in the black shadow cast by the ship in the moonlight.

"I don't think," said Hackett detachedly, "that anything as big as that can be imagined to be benevolent. The most plausible thing one can believe is that it's indifferent."

He moved purposefully along one of the walkways of the grandstand. Lucy followed, shivering a little. Greks were not much larger than men. Aldarians were not as tall as the average human. To think of such relative mites controlling anything so gigantic appalled her. And her imagination refused to picture them as constructing such a ship.

There was another matter. The Greks had let it be inferred that there were no more than six or seven—at most a dozen—Grek officers and instructors aboard. They had definitely said the class of student Aldarians was limited to forty or fifty members. So small a ship's company in so vast a ship seemed unreasonable. But pure frustration followed an effort to conceive what the rest of the ship contained.

Humans had been aboard, to be sure, but not one had gone beyond a single passageway and two or three small compartments at its end. No man knew more of the inside of the ship than that. The Greks ignored hints for a larger view. And they were so lavish with information by which the world should profit, that nobody wanted to offend them by impertinent curiosity.

As he went along the walkway, Hackett glanced again at the monstrosity of shining metal. It had not stirred since its arrival. It had displayed no weapon. It remained a mystery. Neither Greks—on the rare occasions when one or more of them left it—nor Aldarians had given any information about it. The Greks did explain that its space drive could only be understood and used by engineers fully understanding the scientific principles they were now trying to teach to carefully selected human students. But they'd rated Hackett as incapable of that training.

"They've announced," said Hackett detachedly, "that some of their Aldarian crewmen have volunteered to stay on Earth and help us get started toward civilization. Remarkable altruism! The Greks say they don't expect to be back in this part of the galaxy for a good ten of our years, and they say the trip isn't worth while for a single uncivilized world's commerce. But another training ship will be ordered to stop by and pick up the Aldarian volunteers eventually."

Lucy looked at him curiously. "I didn't know that."

"It will be in the newspapers tomorrow," he said sardonically. "There's been some fear that we're too stupid to carry on with only what information they've given us so fur. The theory of the power-broadcast system still hasn't fully been grasped by any of us natives. If we're to develop past the elementary stuff they're leaving with us, we have to have more instruction. Several governments asked for it. So there'll be some Aldarians staying here."

He turned again, this time down steps toward the grandstands' central space, in which the Grek ship lay motionless. Again Lucy followed.

She said suddenly, "Are you going somewhere special, Jim?"

He nodded and went on. He turned to the right, and saw signs. This was section such-and-such, subsection such-and-such, and aisle so-and-so. He came to a gate, held it wide. It opened upon a flight of steps going down under the rows of plank grandstand seats. He offered Lucy his hand for security and they went down and down and down. Streaks of star-studded sky could be seen between the seat planks overhead. There were struts and braces everywhere to support the weight of the crowd the stands would hold on the morrow.

There were small tarpapered temporary structures on the ground. Light showed out of the windows. They reached the bottom of the steps. Here were four or five roughly built one-story shacks.

"Emergency stuff," said Hackett explanatorily. "First-aid stations. Bulldozer shelters. We're going to the one yonder—the smallest one. You've got the thing the Aldarian gave you?"

"Of course," said Lucy uneasily.

"I advise you to turn it over to the people I'll introduce you to," said Hackett. "But that's your decision. If you feel like mentioning it after you know them, do so. Otherwise don't."

They went forward, past the first of the jerrybuilt structures. Inside it, someone was talking over the telephone. The second building was long and high. It had enormous doors so the earth-moving machinery could get in. The next building was a first-aid station. Lighted windows allowed a glimpse of hospital beds inside. In the last shack there was a television set turned on. Hackett opened the door without knocking and ushered Lucy in.

It was brightly lighted, with three unshaded electric bulbs, and there were four men in it. Three of them were barely Hackett's age, and there was one man with gold-rimmed spectacles and startling wisps of sandy-colored hair. Two of the younger ones played cards. The third leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. Those three looked as if they might be graduate students, or maybe college seniors. The man with sandy hair seemed to be listening critically to strange, supposedly musical sounds from the television set. He looked up, nodded, and rose. Hackett introduced them in turn.

"This is the Rogers University strictly unofficial archaeological expedition to the Grek ship's lift-off," he explained to Lucy. "They're here because they're the only people who thought I might be worth listening to, after the Greks rated me as a retarded child."

The man with the wispy hair had been introduced as Clark. He grinned.

"We diggers are classed subnormal, too," he said comfortably. "So we think kindly of Jim. He was on the Rogers faculty, you know. We've got better than an even chance of finding out some interesting stuff here. It wouldn't have been thought of except for Jim."

The younger man who'd been smoking said judicially, "It's a most promising idea. If it works out we may rise in status from archaeologists to garbage analysts. A new profession, and a distinguished one!"

Lucy said helplessly, "I don't quite understand."

"Tell her," suggested Hackett.

"We're going to analyze the Grek garbage," said Clark cheerfully. "It's Jim's idea. When the Army dug out a cradle for the ship to land in, they naturally planted a few atom bombs under it—to have in the house in case of sickness, you might say. They also planted underground microphones to find out if the Greks detected them and dug them out. They didn't. The atomic boys are tearing their hair right now; but their ground microphones did report that, though the Greks didn't bother the bombs, they did dig a hole somewhere else. From time to time they've dumped stuff in it. The obvious conclusion is garbage. So we're going to examine it after they leave."

"And we're experienced," said another of the younger men. "We can tell plenty from a garbage pit a thousand years old. There's no telling what we can do with fresher material."

The third of the younger men added mildly, "One archaeologist found out and proved that the average sandal size of Roman legionaries was almost exactly the same as the modern child's size-ten shoe. You see? We may do wonders!"

The television set broke off its musical broadcast. A "Special Bulletin" line appeared on its screen. A voice said resonantly, "At the request of the commanding officer of the Grek ship, we offer this special bulletin. Early today an Aldarian member of the Grek ship's crew was badly injured in an automobile accident on his way to rejoin his ship. His injuries would have caused his death but for the prompt action of a Mr. James Hackett and a Doctor Lucy Thale, who rushed him to a human hospital, communicated with the Grek ship, and thereby saved his life. The Grek commander wishes to express his gratitude to these two persons. Will they get in touch with him? All human authorities have been asked to bring them to the Grek ship immediately, to receive evidence of the gratitude the Greks wish to express."

The "Special Bulletin" line disappeared. After a moment's pause the musical din resumed.

Hackett looked grimly at Lucy. She was pale. He said, "No! Absolutely not!"

She shook her head.

"I'd—much rather not. I was near that Grek in the hospital. I felt—I felt horribly creepy! I don't want to go near any of them again!"

"And I won't let you," said Hackett flatly.

"If you won't go, I won't," said Lucy shakily. "So that's settled. But do you think they can find us?"

The sandy-haired Clark looked shrewdly from one to the other.

"We don't want to be found," Hackett told him coldly. "Lucy'll tell you why—if she wants to."

Carefully, hesitatingly, Lucy told the story of the Aldarian's wreck, his attempt to tell her something, and his desperately forming words, when all Aldarians were supposed to be congenitally deaf. If they were a race that had never heard sounds, they couldn't possibly have developed a spoken language. But—

She stopped and looked at Hackett. He made no sign to tell her either to end it there or to go on. She had to make the decision. So she hesitated for a moment, and then described the terrified effort of the injured alien to thrust something into her hand, and the impassioned pleading that she hide it.

Clark said briskly, "Hm. The Grek who came for him didn't think of thanking you then, did he? It seems odd that he'd develop an urgent gratitude only after some time and a possible—ah—discovery that there was something going on he didn't approve of. Did you keep what was given you?"

She produced it. It was a small, flat, round object, hardly larger than a woman's wrist watch. There was a stud on one side which could be moved. The flat part of one surface yielded a little to pressure. The object wasn't finely finished. Tool marks remained on it. It wasn't a timepiece. It wasn't anything that could be imagined. It was wholly cryptic.

The sandy-haired man examined it very carefully. He did not shift the stud in any way. He said meditatively, "In our line, we don't go pushing things around at random. They might break. I'd be inclined to X-ray this very carefully to see what's inside. This isn't a Grek artifact, you know! There's a feel to such things. I've seen Grek objects. This is not one. Considering everything, I'd say it was definitely Aldarian."

"I don't know what to do with it," said Lucy.

"I'll find out," said Clark, "with your permission." She nodded, and he put the object in a small safe. He explained, "We don't know what we may find, so we have this safe here to keep souvenir hunters from making off with anything we do find." Then he added, "This is no time or place to play with your gift. We don't know what it may do."

There was a tap on the door. He spun the safe's knob while one of the younger men got up and opened the door. A policeman came in.

"Sorry to bother you," he said amiably, "but you people come from Rogers University, don't you?"

"That's right," said Clark, cordially. "What's up?"

"Nothing bad," the policeman assured him. "There was a guy named Hackett who used to be there. You know him?"

"Yes," said Clark. "Physics Department. What about him?"

"He did the Greks a big favor," explained the uniformed man. "They want to find him and a girl who was in the car with him. Want to give him a present or something. They're anxious about it. So they asked us to hunt up everybody he might get in touch with and have 'em tell him."

"Right," said Clark. "If I see him, I'll tell him. He'll report in at traffic headquarters."

"Fine! If he comes there they'll tell the Greks he's turned up. He and that girl are kind of heroic, to the Greks. They want to do something for 'em. I wouldn't mind being in his shoes, would you?"

"Not a bit," said Clark. "If I see him I'll certainly tell him."

The policeman went out. There was silence. After a moment Hackett said, "Thanks." Then he added, "I gave my name and Lucy's to the cop who wanted to report the accident. I also gave my car license number. And Lucy's registered by name for one of those cubbyholes with a bunk in it. If the Greks have gone as far as having the police look up people who might know me, the cops will have my car and Lucy's bunk staked out. With the best of intentions, of course!"

The man with wispy hair nodded. Then he said to Lucy, "Don't worry. You brought us something we want to look at. If the Greks overwhelmed you with presents and then asked about it. . . . But I can't figure why their gratitude's so great only after so long an interval. Anyhow, we're your confederates in whatever you've done. We won't tell on you!"

Lucy tried to smile, but she was extremely uneasy.

"Mysterious characters, the Greks," said Clark. "They've got the atomic boys tearing their hair. They have some bombs planted under the ship. Naturally, they made arrangements for testing the firing circuits. And they did, even after the Greks began to act benevolent. That's mysterious, when you think of it! Why are they so kind to us? Anyhow, the firing circuits don't work. The bombs couldn't be set off if somebody wanted to. The Greks have done something to them without bothering to dig them up. The atomic people don't like that."

He turned down the music from the television set. It had seemed to Hackett rather worse than the average noises of that kind. But perhaps this was especially in honor of the Greks, too.,

"I'm not too confident," said Clark, worriedly. "They're smart! They might have garbage-disposal units that will spoil their wastes as a source of information. And it'll be too late to picket the ship with signs saying, 'Greks are Unfair to Garbage Analysts.' "

He smiled and said reassuringly to Lucy, "But don't worry. We're going to look for information the Greks don't want us to have. Which is ingratitude, but very much like us humans. Are you two going to the ball?"

Hackett shook his head. He was deeply uneasy. His pride had been hurt by the Greks' disqualification of him for instruction in their science. He didn't believe in Grek science, yet there was something about it which mystified everybody who tried to grasp it. Now he was baffled and made acutely uneasy by the sudden excessive gratitude of the Greks for an action which—as Lucy verified—had not caused a glance or a gesture of appreciation in the hospital.

Time went on. The television music went off. There was a commercial, especially designed as a tribute to the Greks, about to leave Earth enriched behind them. It promised that when better power receivers were made, so-and-so would make them. Meanwhile it urged listeners to wait until the receivers could be put on the market. There was more sponsored entertainment, adulating the Greks.

An hour after the first special bulletin, the line appeared on the screen again. There was a second announcement of the ardent desire of the Greks to reward Hackett and Lucy for their kindness to an injured crewman. Behind the announcer's voice there were resonant sounds. Voices. Footsteps. A musical instrument hooted briefly. The farewell party for the Greks was about to begin.

"I think," said Hackett, "that if I could get Lucy a couple of thousand miles away tonight, I'd do it. Since I can't, I want to keep her and myself out of sight until the Greks are gone. I don't know why."

"Be our guests," said Clark cheerfully. "We aren't advertising our intentions. The Greks might not like them. We're co-conspirators. Be our guests."

Hackett was disturbed. He couldn't fully account to himself for his point of view about this affair. Now, of course, we can see why he should have thought this way. It wasn't reasonable for a highly advanced race like the Greks to take the trouble they'd done for a backward and practically uncivilized world like ours. There could be no possible way for us to return their kindness. It wasn't even sensible of them to be so generous, so it was foolish for us to believe in their overwhelming benevolence.

But we did. We did! We were the prize imbeciles of the galaxy.