The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Obedience

On a tiny planet of a far, faint star, invisible from Earth, and at the farther edge of the galaxy, five times as far as man has yet penetrated into space, there is a statue of an Earthman. It is made of precious metal and it is a tremendous thing, fully ten inches high, exquisite in workmanship.

Bugs crawl on it…

They were on a routine patrol in Sector 1534, out past the Dog Star, many parsecs from Sol. The ship was the usual two-man scout used for all patrols outside the system. Captain May and Lieutenant Ross were playing chess when the alarm rang.

Captain May said, “Reset it, Don, while I think this out.” He didn’t look up from the board; he knew it couldn’t be anything but a passing meteor. There weren’t any ships in this sector. Man had penetrated space for a thousand parsecs and had not as yet encountered an alien life form intelligent enough to communicate, let alone to build spaceships.

Ross didn’t get up either, but he turned around in his chair to face the instrument board and the telescreen. He glanced up casually and gasped; there was a ship on the screen. He got his breath back enough to say “Cap!” and then the chessboard was on the floor and May was looking over his shoulder.

He could hear the sound of May’s breathing, and then May’s voice said, “Fire, Don!”

“But that’s a Rochester Class cruiser! One of ours. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but we can’t—”

“Look again.”

Don Ross couldn’t look again because he’d been looking all along, but he suddenly saw what May had meant. It was almost a Rochester, but not quite. There was something alien about it. Something? It was alien; it was an alien imitation of a Rochester. And his hands were racing for the firing button almost before the full impact of that hit him.

Finger at the button, he looked at the dials on the Picar ranger and the Monoid. They stood at zero.

He swore. “He’s jamming us, Cap. We can’t figure out how far he is, or his size and mass!”

Captain May nodded slowly, his face pale.

Inside Don Ross’s head, a thought said, “Compose yourselves, men. We are not enemies.”

Ross turned and stared at May. May said, “Yes, I got it. Telepathy.”

Ross swore again. If they were telepathic—

“Fire, Don. Visual.”

Ross pressed the button. The screen was filled with a flare of energy, but when the energy subsided, there was no wreckage of a spaceship…

Admiral Sutherland turned his back to the star chart on the wall and regarded them sourly from under his thick eyebrows. He said, “I am not interested in rehashing your formal report, May. You’ve both been under the psychograph; we’ve extracted from your minds every minute of the encounter. Our logicians have analyzed it. You are here for discipline. Captain May, you know the penalty for disobedience.”

May said stiffly, “Yes, sir.”

“It is?”

“Death, sir.”

“And what order did you disobey?”

“General Order Thirteen-Ninety, Section Twelve, Quad-A priority. Any terrestrial ship, military or otherwise, is ordered to destroy immediately, on sight, any alien ship encountered. If it fails to do so, it must blast off toward outer space, in a direction not exactly opposite that of Earth, and continue until fuel is exhausted.”

“And the reason for that, Captain? I ask merely to see if you know. It is not, of course, important or even relevant whether or not you understand the reason for any ruling.”

“Yes, sir. So there is no possibility of the alien ship following the sighting ship back to Sol and so learning the location of Earth.”

“Yet you disobeyed that ruling, Captain. You were not certain that you had destroyed the alien. What have you to say for yourself?”

“We did not think it necessary, sir. The alien ship did not seem hostile. Besides, sir, they must already know our base; they addressed us as ‘men.’”

“Nonsense! The telepathic message was broadcast from an alien mind, but was received by yours. Your minds automatically translated the message into your own terminology. He did not necessarily know your point of origin or that you were humans.”

Lieutenant Ross had no business speaking, but he asked, “Then, sir, it is not believed that they were friendly?”

The admiral snorted. “Where did you take your training, Lieutenant? You seem to have missed the most basic premise of our defense plans, the reason we’ve been patrolling space for four hundred years, on the lookout for alien life. Any alien is an enemy. Even though he were friendly today, how could we know that he would be friendly next year or a century from now? And a potential enemy is an enemy. The more quickly he is destroyed the more secure Earth will be.”

“Look at the military history of the world! It proves that, if it proves nothing else. Look at Rome! To be safe she couldn’t afford powerful neighbors. Alexander the Great! Napoleon!”

“Sir,” said Captain May. “Am I under the penalty of death?”

“Yes.”

“Then I may as well speak. Where is Rome now? Alexander’s empire or Napoleon’s? Nazi Germany? Tyrannosaurus rex?”

“Who?”

“Man’s predecessor, the toughest of the dinosaurs. His name means ‘king of the tyrant lizards.’ He thought every other creature was his enemy, too. And where is he now?”

“Is that all you have to say, Captain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I shall overlook it. Fallacious, sentimental reasoning. You are not under sentence of death, Captain. I merely said so to see what you would say, how far you would go. You are not being shown mercy because of any humanitarian nonsense. A truly ameliorating circumstance has been found.”

“May I ask what, sir?”

“The alien was destroyed. Our technicians and logicians have worked that out. Your Picar and Monoid were working properly. The only reason that they did not register was that the alien ship was too small. They will detect a meteor weighing as little as five pounds. The alien ship was smaller than that.”

“Smaller than—?”

“Certainly. You were thinking of alien life in terms of your own size. There is no reason why it should be. It could be even submicroscopic, too small to be visible. The alien ship must have contacted you deliberately, at a distance of only a few feet. And your fire, at that distance, destroyed it utterly. That is why you saw no charred hulk as evidence that it was destroyed.”

He smiled. “My congratulations, Lieutenant Ross, on your gunnery. In the future, of course, visual firing will be unnecessary. The detectors and estimators on ships of all classes are being modified immediately to detect and indicate objects of even minute sizes.”

Ross said, “Thank you, sir. But don’t you think that the fact that the ship we saw, regardless of size, was an imitation of one of our Rochester Class ships is proof that the aliens already know much more of us than we do of them, including, probably, the location of our home planet? And that—even if they are hostile—the tiny size of their craft is what prevents them from blasting us from the system?”

“Possibly. Either both of those things are true, or neither. Obviously, aside from their telepathic ability, they are quite inferior to us technically—or they would not imitate our design in spaceships. And they must have read the minds of some of our engineers in order to duplicate that design. However, granting that is true, they may still not know the location of Sol. Space coordinates would be extremely difficult to translate, and the name Sol would mean nothing to them. Even its approximate description would fit thousands of other stars. At any rate, it is up to us to find and exterminate them before they find us. Every ship in space is now alerted to watch for them, and is being equipped with special instruments to detect small objects. A state of war exists. Or perhaps it is redundant to say that; a state of war always exists with aliens.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That is all, gentlemen. You may go.”

Outside in the corridor two armed guards waited. One of them stepped to each side of Captain May.

May said quickly, “Don’t say anything, Don. I expected this. Don’t forget that I disobeyed an important order, and don’t forget that the admiral said only that I wasn’t under sentence of death. Keep yourself out of it.”

Hands clenched, teeth clamped tightly together, Don Ross watched the guards take away his friend. He knew May was right; there was nothing he could do except get himself into worse trouble than May was in, and make things worse for May.

But he walked almost blindly out of the Admiralty Building. He went out and got promptly drunk, but that didn’t help.

He had the customary two weeks’ leave before reporting back for space duty, and he knew he’d better straighten himself out mentally in that time. He reported to a psychiatrist and let himself be talked out of most of his bitterness and feeling of rebellion.

He went back to his schoolbooks and soaked himself in the necessity for strict and unquestioning obedience to military authority and the necessity of unceasing vigilance for alien races and the necessity of their extermination whenever found.

He won out; he convinced himself how unthinkable it had been for him to believe that Captain May could have been completely pardoned for having disobeyed an order, for whatever reason. He even felt horrified for having himself acquiesced in that disobedience. Technically, of course, he was blameless; May had been in charge of the ship and the decision to return to Earth instead of blasting out into space—and death—had come from May. As a subordinate, Ross had not shared the blame. But now, as a person, he felt conscience-stricken that he had not tried to argue May out of his disobedience.

What would Space Corps be without obedience?

How could he make up for what he now felt to be his dereliction, his delinquency? He watched the telenewscasts avidly during that period and learned that, in various other sectors of space, four more alien ships had been destroyed. With the improved detection instruments all of them had been destroyed on sight; there had been no communication after first contact.

On the tenth day of his leave, he terminated it of his own free will. He returned to the Admiralty Building and asked for an audience with Admiral Sutherland. He was laughed at, of course, but he had expected that. He managed to get a brief verbal message carried through to the admiral. Simply: “I know a plan that may possibly enable us to find the planet of the aliens, at no risk to ourselves.”

That got him in, all right.

He stood at rigid attention before the admiral’s desk. He said, “Sir, the aliens have been trying to contact us. They have been unable because we destroy them on contact before a complete telepathic thought has been put across. If we permit them to communicate, there is a chance that they will give away, accidentally or otherwise, the location of their home planet.”

Admiral Sutherland said drily, “And whether they did or not, they might find out ours by following the ship back.”

“Sir, my plan covers that. I suggest that I be sent out into the same sector where initial contact was made—this time in a one-man ship, unarmed. That the fact that I am doing so be publicized as widely as possible, so that every man in space knows it, and knows that I am in an unarmed ship for the purpose of making contact with the aliens. It is my opinion that they will learn of this. They must manage to get thoughts at long distances, but to send thoughts—to Earth minds anyway—only at very short distances.”

“How do you deduce that, Lieutenant? Never mind; it coincides with what our logicians have figured out. They say that the fact that they have stolen our science—as in their copying our ships on a smaller scale—before we were aware of their existence proves their ability to read our thoughts at—well, a moderate distance.”

“Yes, sir. I am hoping that if news of my mission is known to the entire fleet it will reach the aliens. And knowing that my ship is unarmed, they will make contact. I will see what they have to say to me, to us, and possibly that message will include a clue to the location of their home planet.”

Admiral Sutherland said, “And in that case that planet would last all of twenty-four hours. But what about the converse, Lieutenant? What about the possibility of their following you back?”

“That, sir, is where we have nothing to lose. I shall return to Earth only if I find out that they already know its location.”

“With their telepathic abilities I believe they already do—and that they have not attacked us only because they are not hostile or are too weak. But whatever the case, if they know the location of Earth they will not deny it in talking to me. Why should they? It will seem to them a bargaining point in their favor, and they’ll think we’re bargaining. They might claim to know, even if they do not—but I shall refuse to take their word for it unless they give me proof.”

Admiral Sutherland stared at him. He said, “Son, you have got something. It’ll probably cost you your life, but—if it doesn’t, and if you come back with news of where the aliens come from, you’re going to be the hero of the race. You’ll probably end up with my job. In fact, I’m tempted to steal your idea and make that trip myself.”

“Sir, you’re too valuable. I’m expendable. Besides, sir, I’ve got to. It isn’t that I want any honors. I’ve got something on my conscience that I want to make up for. I should have tried to stop Captain May from disobeying orders. I shouldn’t be here now, alive. We should have blasted out into space, since we weren’t sure we’d destroyed the alien.”

The admiral cleared his throat. “You’re not responsible for that, son. Only the captain of a ship is responsible, in a case like that. But I see what you mean. You feel you disobeyed orders, in spirit, because you agreed at the time with what Captain May did. All right, that’s past, and your suggestion makes up for it, even if you yourself did not man the contact ship.”

“But may I, sir?”

“You may, Lieutenant. Rather, you may, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“A ship will be ready for you in three days. We could have it ready sooner, but it will take that long for word of our ‘negotiations’ to spread throughout the fleet. But you understand—you are not, under any circumstances, to deviate on your own initiative from the limitations you have outlined.”

“Yes, sir. Unless the aliens already know the location of Earth and prove it completely, I shall not return. I shall blast off into space. I give you my word, sir.”

“Very good, Captain Ross.”

The one-man spacer hovered near the center of Sector 1534, out past the Dog Star. No other ship patrolled that sector.

Captain Don Ross sat quietly and waited. He watched the visiplate and listened for a voice to speak inside his head.

It came when he had waited less than three hours. “Greetings, Donross,” the voice said, and simultaneously there were five tiny spaceships outside his visiplate. His Monoid showed that they weighed less than an ounce apiece.

He said, “Shall I talk aloud or merely think?”

“It does not matter. You may speak if you wish to concentrate on a particular thought, but first be silent a moment.”

After half a minute, Ross thought he heard the echo of a sigh in his mind. Then: “I am sorry. I fear this talk will do neither of us any good. You see, Donross, we do not know the location of your home planet. We could have learned, perhaps, but we were not interested. We were not hostile and from the minds of Earthmen we knew we dared not be friendly. So you will never be able, if you obey orders, to return to report.”

Don Ross closed his eyes a moment. This, then, was the end; there wasn’t any use talking further. He had given his word to Admiral Sutherland that he would obey orders to the letter.

“That is right,” said the voice. “We are both doomed, Donross, and it does not matter what we tell you. We cannot get through the cordon of your ships; we have lost half our race trying.”

“Half! Do you mean—?”

“Yes. There were only a thousand of us. We built ten ships, each to carry a hundred. Five ships have been destroyed by Earthmen; there are only five ships left, the ones you see, the entire race of us. Would it interest you, even though you are going to die, to know about us?”

He nodded, forgetting that they could not see him, but the assent in his mind must have been read.

“We are an old race, much older than you. Our home is—or was—a tiny planet of the dark companion of Sirius; it is only a hundred miles in diameter. Your ships have not found it yet, but it is only a matter of time. We have been intelligent for many, many millennia, but we never developed space travel. There was no need and we had no desire.”

“Twenty of your years ago an Earth ship passed near our planet and we caught the thoughts of the men upon it. And we knew that our only safety, our only chance of survival, lay in immediate flight to the farthest limits of the galaxy. We knew from those thoughts that we would be found sooner or later, even if we stayed on our own planet, and that we would be ruthlessly exterminated upon discovery.”

“You did not think of fighting back?”

“No. We could not have, had we wished—and we did not wish. It is impossible for us to kill. If the death of one single Earthman, even of a lesser creature, would ensure our survival, we could not bring about that death.”

“That you cannot understand. Wait—I see that you can. You are not like other Earthmen, Donross. But back to our story. We took details of space travel from the minds of members of that ship and adapted them to the tiny scale of the ships we built.”

“We built ten ships, enough to carry our entire race. But we find we cannot escape through your patrols. Five of our ships have tried, and all have been destroyed.”

Don Ross said grimly, “And I did a fifth of that: I destroyed one of your ships.”

“You merely obeyed orders. Do not blame yourself. Obedience is almost as deeply rooted in you as hatred of killing is in us. That first contact, with the ship you were on, was deliberate; we had to be sure that you would destroy us on sight.”

“But since then, one at a time, four of our other ships have tried to get through and have all been destroyed. We brought all the remaining ones here when we learned that you were to contact us with an unarmed ship.”

“But even if you disobeyed orders and returned to Earth, wherever it is, to report what we have just told you, no orders would be issued to let us through. There are too few Earthmen like you, as yet. Possibly in future ages, by the time Earthmen reach the far edge of the galaxy, there will be more like you. But now, the chances of our getting even one of our five ships through is remote.”

“Goodby, Donross. What is this strange emotion in your mind and the convulsion of your muscles? I do not understand it. But wait—it is your recognition of perceiving something incongruous. But the thought is too complex, too mixed. What is it?”

Don Ross managed finally to stop laughing. “Listen, my alien friend who cannot kill,” he said, “I’m getting you out of this. I’m going to see that you get through our cordon to the safety you want. But what’s funny is the way I’m going to do it. By obedience to orders and by going to my own death. I’m going to outer space, to die there. You, all of you, can come along and live there. Hitchhike. Your tiny ships won’t show on the patrol’s detectors if they are touching this ship. Not only that, but the gravity of this ship will pull you along and you won’t have to waste fuel until you are well through the cordon and beyond the reach of its detectors. A hundred thousand parsecs, at least, before my fuel runs out.”

There was a long pause before the voice in Don Ross’s mind said, “Thank you.” Faintly. Softly.

He waited until the five ships had vanished from his visiplate and he had heard five tiny sounds of their touching the hull of his own ship. Then he laughed once more. And obeyed orders, blasting off for space and death.

On a tiny planet of a far, faint star, invisible from Earth, and at the farther edge of the galaxy, five times as far as man has yet penetrated into space, there is the statue of an Earthman. It is a tremendous thing, ten inches high, exquisite in workmanship.

Bugs crawl on it, but they have a right to; they made it, and they honor it. The statue is of very hard metal. On an airless world it will last forever—or until Earthmen find it and blast it out of existence. Unless, of course, by that time Earthmen have changed an awful lot.