The Human Edge

THE CATCH

Time to send the audience out on a light note. Or maybe not so light, after all. Just maybe, there are times when humans might wish that the aliens are the ones with the edge.

“Sure, Mike. Gee!” said the young Tolfian excitedly, and went dashing off from the spaceship in the direction of the temporary camp his local people had set up at a distance of some three hundred yards across the grassy turf of the little valley. Watching him go, Mike Wellsbauer had to admit that in motion he made a pretty sight, scooting along on his hind legs, his sleek black-haired otterlike body leaning into the wind of his passage, and his wide, rather paddle-shaped tail extended behind him to balance the weight of his erected body. All the same…

“I don’t like it,” Mike murmured. “I don’t like it one bit.”

“First signs of insanity,” said a female and very human voice behind him. He turned about.

“All right, Penny,” he said. “You can laugh. But this could turn out to be the most unfunny thing that ever happened to the human race. Where is the rest of the crew?”

Peony Matsu sobered, the small gamin grin fading from her pert face, as she gazed up at him.

“Red and Tommy are still trying to make communication contact with home base,” she said. “Alvin’s out checking the flora—he can’t be far.” She stared at him curiously. “What’s up now?”

“I want to know what they’re building.”

“Something for us, I’ll bet,”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ve just sent for the local squire.” Mike peered at the alien camp. Workers were still zipping around it in that typical Tolfian fashion that seemed to dictate that nobody went anywhere except at a run. “This time he’s going to give me a straight answer.”

“I thought,” said Penny, “he had.”

“Answers,” said Mike, shortly. “Not necessarily straight ones.” He heaved a sudden sigh, half of exhaustion, half of exasperation. “That young squirt was talking to me right now in English. In English! What can you do?”

Penny bubbled with laughter in spite of herself.

“All right, now hold it!” snapped Mike, glaring at her. “I tell you that whatever this situation is, it’s serious. And letting ourselves be conned into making a picnic out of it may be just what they want.”

“All right,” said Penny, patting him on the arm. “I’m serious. But I don’t see that their learning English is any worse than the other parts of it—”

“It’s the whole picture,” growled Mike, not waiting for her to finish. He stumped about to stand half-turned away from her, facing the Tolfian camp, and she gazed at his short, blocky, red-haired figure with tolerance and a scarce-hidden affection. “The first intelligent race we ever met. They’ve got science we can’t hope to touch for nobody knows how long, they belong to some Interstellar Confederation or other with races as advanced as themselves—and they fall all over themselves learning English and doing every little thing we ask for. ‘Sure, Mike!’—that’s what he said to me just now… ‘Sure, Mike!’ I tell you, Penny—”

“Here they come now,” she said.

A small procession was emerging from the camp. It approached the spaceship at a run, single file, the tallest Tolfian figure in the lead, and the others grading down in size behind until the last was a half-grown alien that was pretty sure to be the one Mike had sent on the errand.

“If we could just get through to home base back on Altair A—” muttered Mike; and then he could mutter no more, because the approaching file was already dashing into hearing distance. The lead Tolfian raced to the very feet of Mike and sat down on his tail. His muzzle was gray with age and authority and the years its color represented had made him almost as tall as Mike.

“Mike!” he said, happily.

The other Tolfians had dispersed themselves in a semicircle and were also sitting on their tails and looking rather like a group of racetrack fans on shooting sticks.

“Hello, Moral,” said Mike, in a pleasantly casual tone. “What’re you building over there now?”

“A terminal—a transport terminal, I suppose you’d call it in English, Mike,” said Moral. “It’ll be finished in a few hours. Then you can all go to Barzalac.”

“Oh, we can, can we?” said Mike. “And where is Barzalac?”

“I don’t know if you know the sun, Mike,” said Moral, seriously. “We call it Aimna. It’s about a hundred and thirty light-years from ours. Barzalac is the Confederation center—on its sixth planet.”

“A hundred and thirty light-years?” said Mike, staring at the Tolfian.

“Isn’t that right?” said Moral, confusedly. “Maybe I’ve got your terms wrong. I haven’t been speaking your language since yesterday—”

“You speak it just fine. Just fine,” said Mike. “Nice of you all to go to the trouble to learn it.”

“Oh, it wasn’t any trouble,” said Moral. “And for you humans—well,” he smiled, “nothing’s too good, you know.”

He said the last words rather shyly, and ducked his head for a second as if to avoid Mike’s eyes.

“That’s very nice,” said Mike. “Now, would you mind if I asked you again why nothing’s too good?”

“Oh, didn’t I make myself clear before?” said Moral, in distressed tones. “I’m sorry—the thing is, we’ve met others of your people before.”

“I got that, all right,” said Mike. “Another race of humans, some thousands or dozens of thousands of years ago. And they aren’t around any more?”

“I am very sorry,” said Moral, with tears in his eyes. “Very, very sorry—”

“They died off?”

“Our loss—the loss of all the Confederation—was deeply felt. It was like losing our own, and more than our own.”

“Yes,” said Mike. He locked his hands behind his back and took a step up and down on the springy turf before turning back to the Tolfian squire. “Well, now, Moral, we wouldn’t want that to happen to us.”

“Oh, no!” cried Moral. “It mustn’t happen. Somehow—we must insure its not happening.”

“My attitude, exactly,” said Mike, a little grimly. “Now, to get back to the matter at hand—why did you people decide to build your transportation center right here by our ship?”

“Oh, it’s no trouble, no trouble at all to run one up,” said Moral. “We thought you’d want one convenient here.”

“Then you have others?”

“Of course,” said Moral. “We go back and forth among the Confederation a lot.” He hesitated. “I’ve arranged for them to expect you tomorrow—if it’s all right with you.”

“Tomorrow? On Barzalac?” cried Mike.

“If it’s all right with you.”

“Look, how fast is this… transportation, or whatever you call it?”

Moral stared at him.

“Why, I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “I’m just a sort of a rural person, you know. A few millionths of a second, I believe you’d say, in your terms?”

Mike stared. There was a moment’s rather uncomfortable silence. Mike drew a deep breath.

“I see,” he said.

“I have the honor of being invited to escort you,” said Moral, eagerly. “If you want me, that is. I… I rather look forward to showing you around the museum in Barzalac. And after all, it was my property you landed on.”

“Here we go again,” said Mike under his breath. Only Penny heard him. “What museum?”

“What museum?” echoed Moral, and looked blank. “Oh, the museum erected in honor of those other humans. It has everything,” he went on eagerly, “artifacts, pictures—the whole history of these other people, together with the Confederation. Of course”—he hesitated with shyness again—“there’ll be experts around to give you the real details. As I say, I’m only a sort of rural person—”

“All right,” said Mike, harshly. “I’ll quit beating around the bush. Just why do you want us to go to Barzalac?”

“But the heads of the Confederation,” protested Moral. “They’ll be expecting you.”

“Expecting us?” demanded Mike. “For what?”

“Why to take over the Confederation, of course,” said Moral, staring at him as if he thought the human had taken leave of his senses. “You are going to, aren’t you?”

Half an hour later, Mike had a council of war going in the lounge of Exploration Ship 29XJ. He paced up and down while Penny, Red Sommers, Tommy Anotu, and Alvin Longhand sat about in their gimballed armchairs, listening.

“…The point’s this,” Mike was saying, “we can’t get through to base at all because of the distance. Right, Red?”

“The equipment just wasn’t designed to carry more than a couple of light-years, Mike,” answered Red. “You know that. To get a signal from here to Altair we’d need a power plant nearly big enough to put this ship in its pocket.”

“All right,” said Mike. “Point one—we’re on our own. That leaves it up to me. And my duty as captain of this vessel is to discover anything possible about an intelligent life form like this—particularly since the human race’s never bumped into anything much brighter than a horse up until now.”

“You’re going to go?” asked Penny.

“That’s the question. It all depends on what’s behind the way these Tolfians are acting. That transporter of theirs could just happen to be a fine little incinerating unit, for all we know. Not that I’m not expendable—we all are. But the deal boils down to whether I’d be playing into alien hands by going along with them, or not.”

“You don’t think they’re telling the truth?” asked Alvin, his lean face pale against the metal bulkhead behind him.

“I don’t know!” said Mike, pounding one fist into the palm of his other hand and continuing to pace. “I just don’t know. Of all the fantastic stories—that there are, or have been, other ethnic groups of humans abroad in the galaxy! And that these humans were so good, so wonderful that their memory is revered and this Confederation can’t wait to put our own group up on the pedestal the other bunch vacated!”

“What happened to the other humans, Mike?” asked Tommy.

“Moral doesn’t know, exactly. He knows they died off, but he’s hazy on the why and how. He thinks a small group of them may have just pulled up stakes and moved on—but he thinks maybe that’s just a legend. And that’s it.” He pounded his fist into his palm again.

“What’s it?” asked Penny.

“The way he talked about it—the way these Tolfians are,” said Mike. “They’re as bright as we are. Their science—and they know it as well as we do—is miles ahead of us. Look at that transporter, if it’s true, that can whisk you light-years in millisecond intervals. Does it make any sense at all that a race that advanced—let alone a bunch of races that advanced—would want to bow down and say ‘Master’ to us?”

Nobody said anything.

“All right,” said Mike, more calmly, “you know as well as I do it doesn’t. That leaves us right on the spike. Are they telling the truth, or aren’t they? If they aren’t, then they are obviously setting us up for something. If they are—then there’s a catch in it somewhere, because the whole story is just too good to be true. They need us like an idiot uncle, but they claim that now that we’ve stumbled on to them, they can’t think of existing without us. They want us to take over. Us!”

Mike threw himself into his own chair and threw his arms wide.

“All right, everybody,” he said. “Let’s have some opinions.”

There was a silence in which everybody looked at everybody else.

“We could pack up and head for home real sudden-like,” offered Tommy.

“No,” Mike gnawed at his thumb. “If they’re this good, they could tell which way we went and maybe track us. Also, we’d be popping off for insufficient reason. So far we’ve encountered nothing obviously inimical.”

“This planet’s Earth-like as they come,” offered Alvin—and corrected himself, hastily. “I don’t mean that perhaps the way it sounded. I mean it’s as close to Earth conditions as any of the worlds we’ve colonized extensively up until now.”

“I know,” muttered Mike. “Moral says the Confederation worlds are all that close—and that I can believe. Now that we know that nearly all suns have planets, and if these people can really hop dozens of light-years in a wink, there’ll be no great trouble in finding a good number of Earth-like worlds in this part of the galaxy.”

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s just a natural thing for life forms on worlds so similar to hang together,” offered Red.

“Sure,” said Mike. “Suppose that was true, and suppose we were their old human-style buddies come back. Then there’d be a reason for a real welcome. But we aren’t.”

“Maybe they think we’re just pretending not to be their old friends,” said Red.

“No,” Mike shook his head. “They can take one look at our ship here and see what we’ve got. Their old buddies wouldn’t come back in anything as old-fashioned as a spaceship; and they’d hardly be wanted if they did. Besides, welcoming an old friend and inviting him to take over your home and business are two different things.”

“Maybe—” said Red, hesitantly, “it’s all true, but they’ve got it in for their old buddies for some reason, and all this is just setting us up for the ax.”

Mike slowly lifted his head and exchanged a long glance with his Communications officer.

“That does it,” he said. “Now you say it. That, my friends, was the exact conclusion I’d come to myself. Well, that ties it.”

“What do you mean, Mike?” cried Penny.

“I mean that’s it,” said Mike. “If that’s the case, I’ve got to see it through and find out about it. In other words, tomorrow I go to Barzalac. The rest of you stay here; and if I’m not back in two days, blast off for home.”

“Mike,” said Penny, as the others stared at him, “I’m going with you.”

“No,” said Mike.

“Yes, I am,” said Penny, “I’m not needed here, and—”

“Sorry,” said Mike. “But I’m captain. And you stay, Penny.”

“Sorry, captain,” retorted Penny. “But I’m the biologist. And if we’re going to be running into a number of other alien life forms—” She let the sentence hang.

Mike threw up his hands in helplessness.

The trip through the transporter was, so far as Mike and Penny had any way of telling, instantaneous and painless. They stepped through a door-shaped opaqueness and found themselves in a city.

The city was even almost familiar. They had come out on a sort of plaza or court laid out on a little rise, and they were able to look down and around them at a number of low buildings. These glowed in all manners of colors and were remarkable mainly for the fact that they had no roofs as such, but were merely obscured from overhead view by an opaqueness similar to that in the transporter. The streets on which they were set stretched in all directions, and streets and buildings were clear to the horizon.

“The museum,” said Moral, diffidently, and the two humans turned about to find themselves facing a low building fronting on the court that stretched wide to the left and right and far before them. Its interior seemed split up into corridors.

They followed Moral in through the arch of an entrance that stood without respect to any walls on either side and down a corridor. They emerged into a central interior area dominated by a single large statue in the area’s center. Penny caught her breath, and Mike stared. The statue was, indubitably, that of a human—a man.

The stone figure was dressed only in a sort of kilt. He stood with one hand resting on a low pedestal beside him; gazing downward in such a way that his eyes seemed to meet those of whoever looked up at him from below. The eyes were gentle, and the lean, middle-aged face was a little tired and careworn, with its high brow and the sharp lines drawn around the corners of the thin mouth. Altogether, it most nearly resembled the face of a man who is impatient with the time it is taking to pose for his sculptor.

“Moral! Moral!” cried a voice; and they all turned to see a being with white and woolly fur that gave him a rather polar-bear look, trotting across the polished floor toward them. He approached in upright fashion and was as four-limbed as Moral—and the humans themselves, for that matter.

“You are Moral, aren’t you?” demanded the newcomer, as he came up to them. His English was impeccable. He bowed to the humans—or at least he inclined the top half of his body toward them. Mike, a little uncertainly, nodded back. “I’m Arrjhanik.”

“Oh, yes… yes,” said Moral. “The Greeter. These are the humans, Mike Wellsbauer and Peony Matsu. May I… how do you put it… present Arrjhanik a Bin. He is a Siniloid, one of the Confederation’s older races.”

“So honored,” said Arrjhanik.

“We’re both very pleased to meet you,” said Mike, feeling on firmer ground. There were rules for this kind of alien contact.

“Would you… could you come right now?” Arrjhanik appealed to the humans. “I’m sorry to prevent you from seeing the rest of the museum at this time”—Mike frowned; and his eyes narrowed a little—“but a rather unhappy situation has come up. One of our Confederate heads—the leader of one of the races that make up our Confederation—is dying. And he would like to see you before… you understand.”

“Of course,” said Mike.

“If we had known in advance—But it comes rather suddenly on the Adrii—” Arrjhanik led them off toward the entrance of the building and they stepped out into sunlight again. He led them back to the transporter from which they had just emerged.

“Wait a minute,” said Mike, stopping. “We aren’t going back to Tolfi, are we?”

“Oh, no. No,” put in Moral from close behind him. “We’re going to the Chamber of Deputies.” He gave Mike a gentle push; and a moment later they had stepped through into a small and pleasant room half-filled with a dozen or so beings each so different one from the other that Mike had no chance to sort them out and recognize individual characteristics.

Arrjhanik led them directly to the one piece of furniture in the room which appeared to be a sort of small table incredibly supported by a single wire-thin leg at one of the four corners. On the surface of this lay a creature or being not much bigger than a seven-year-old human child and vaguely catlike in form. It lay on its side, its head supported a little above the table’s surface by a cube of something transparent but apparently not particularly soft, and large colorless eyes in its head focused on Mike and Penny as they approached.

Mike looked down at the small body. It showed no signs of age, unless the yellowish-white of the thin hair covering its body was a revealing shade. Certainly the hair itself seemed brittle and sparse.

The Adri—or whatever the proper singular was—stirred its head upon its transparent pillow and its pale eyes focused on Mike and Penny. A faint, drawn out rattle of noise came from it.

“He says,” said Arrjhanik, at Mike’s elbow, “’You cannot refuse. It is not in you.’”

“Refuse what?” demanded Mike, sharply. But the head of the Adri lolled back suddenly on its pillow and the eyes filmed and glazed. There was a little murmur that could have been something reverential from all the beings standing about; and without further explanation the body of the being that had just died thinned suddenly to a ghostly image of itself, and was gone.

“It was the Confederation,” said Arrjhanik, “that he knew you could not refuse.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Mike. He swung about so that he faced them all, his stocky legs truculently apart. “Now, listen—you people are acting under a misapprehension. I can’t accept or refuse anything. I haven’t the authority. I’m just an explorer, nothing more.”

“No, no,” said Arrjhanik, “there’s no need for you to say that you accept or not, and speak for your whole race. That is a formality. Besides, we know you will not refuse, you humans. How could you?”

“You might be surprised,” said Mike. Penny hastily jogged his elbow.

“Temper!” she whispered. Mike swallowed, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded more reasonable.

“You’ll have to bear with me,” he said. “As I say, I’m an explorer, not a diplomat. Now, what did you all want to see me about?”

“We wanted to see you only for our own pleasure,” said Arrjhanik. “Was that wrong of us? Oh, and yes—to tell you that if there is anything you want, anything the Confederation can supply you, of course you need only give the necessary orders—”

“It is so good to have you here,” said one of the other beings.

A chorus of voices broke out in English all at once, and the aliens crowded around. One large, rather walruslike alien offered to shake hands with Mike, and actually did so in a clumsy manner.

“Now, wait. Wait!” roared Mike. The room fell silent. The assembled aliens waited, looking at him in an inquiring manner.

“Now, listen to me!” snapped Mike. “And answer one simple question. What is all this you’re trying to give to us humans?”

“Why, everything,” said Arrjhanik. “Our worlds, our people, are yours. Merely ask for what you want. In fact—please ask. It would make us feel so good to serve you, few though you are at the moment here.”

“Yes,” said the voice of Moral, from the background. “If you’ll forgive me speaking up in this assemblage—they asked for nothing back on Tolfi, and I was forced to exercise my wits for things to supply them with. I’m afraid I may have botched the job.”

“I sincerely hope not,” said Arrjhanik, turning to look at the Tolfian. Moral ducked his head, embarrassedly.

“Mike,” said Arrjhanik, turning back to the human, “something about all this seems to bother you. If you would just tell us what it is—”

“All right,” said Mike. “I will.” He looked around at all of them. “You people are all being very generous. In fact, you’re being so generous it’s hard to believe. Now, I accept the fact that you may have had contact with other groups of humans before us. There’s been speculation back on our home world that our race might have originated elsewhere in the galaxy, and that would mean there might well be other human groups in existence we don’t even know of. But even assuming that you may have reached all possible limits of love and admiration for the humans you once knew, it still doesn’t make sense that you would be willing to just make us a gift of all you possess, to bow down to a people who—we’re not blind, you know—possess only a science that is childlike compared with your own.”

To Mike’s surprise, the reaction to this little speech was a murmur of admiration from the group.

“So analytical. So very human!” said the walruslike alien warmly in tones clearly pitched to carry to Mike’s ear.

“Indeed,” said Arrjhanik, “we understand your doubts. You are concerned about what, in our offer, is… you have a term for it—”

“The catch,” said Mike grimly and bluntly. “What’s the catch?”

“The catch. Yes,” said Arrjhanik. “You have to excuse me. I’ve only been speaking this language of yours for—”

“Just the last day or so, I know,” said Mike, sourly.

“Well, no. Just for the last few hours, actually. But—” went on Arrjhanik, “while there’s no actual way of putting your doubts to rest, it really doesn’t matter. More of your people are bound to come. They will find our Confederation open and free to all of them. In time they will come to believe. It would be presumptuous of us to try to convince you by argument.”

“Well, just suppose you try it anyway,” said Mike, unaware that his jaw was jutting out in a manner which could not be otherwise than belligerent

“But we’d be only too happy to!” cried Arrjhanik, enthusiastically. “You see”—he placed a hand or paw, depending on how you looked at it, gently on Mike’s arm—“all that we have nowadays, we owe to our former humans. This science you make such a point of—they developed it in a few short thousand years. The Confederation was organized by them. Since they’ve been gone—”

“Oh, yes,” interrupted Mike. “Just how did they go? Mind telling me that?”

“The strain—the effort of invention and all, was too much for them,” said Arrjhanik, sadly. He shook his head. “Ah,” he said, “they were a great people—you are a great people, you humans. Always striving, always pushing, never giving up. We others are but pale shadows of your kind. I am afraid, Mike, that your cousins worked themselves to death, and for our sake. So you see, when you think we are giving you something that is ours, we are really just returning what belongs to you, after all.”

“Very pretty,” said Mike. “I don’t believe it. No race could survive who just gave everything away for nothing. And somewhere behind all this is the catch I spoke of. That’s what you’re not telling me—what all of you will be getting out of it, by turning your Confederation over to us.”

“But… now I understand!” cried Arrjhanik. “You didn’t understand. We are the ones who will be getting. You humans will be doing all the giving. Surely you should know that! It’s your very nature that ensures that, as our friend who just died, said. You humans can’t help yourselves, you can’t keep from it!”

“Keep from what?” yelled Mike, throwing up his hands in exasperation.”

“Why,” said Arrjhanik, “I was sure you understood. Why from assuming all authority and responsibility, from taking over the hard and dirty job of running our Confederation and making it a happy, healthy place for us all to live, safe and protected from any enemies. That is what all the rest of us have been saddled with these thousands of years since that other group of your people died; and I can’t tell you”—Arrjhanik, his eyes shining, repeated his last words strongly and emphatically—“I can’t tell you how badly things have gone to pot, and how very, very glad we are to turn it all over to you humans, once again!”