Daughters of Eternity
JAMES MacCREIGH
What it finally boiled down to was Earth, Mars and Venus—against the Oberonians.
Oh, there were other planets and races represented at the Peace Conference. Every nation in the Solar System was there. But the little nations, the minor powers, didn't count for much. Whatever permanent peace terms came out of the conference, they would be made by Earth, Mars, Venus—and the Oberonians.
And the Oberonians were out for war.
The Great War was just over, leaving every race decimated. I was a press attaché to the Terrestrial delegation—which is really only a nicer way of saying I was a reporter. The fact that I held any kind of newspaper job was, I am proud to say, due to my work alone. But my managing to wangle the career-making assignment of covering the First Interplanetary Peace Conference can probably be traced to the fact that I am the son of Eustis Durand, Earth's World President.
None of my associates on the other papers and news services ever seemed unduly respectful to me because of my father's high position. I didn't mind; I liked it that way. It gave me a chance to know them better. And one or two of them, such as Barbara King, the Radiovox correspondent, I wanted to know real well.
Barbara came into my room just as I was eating breakfast on the morning of the fifth day of the conference. She's tall, red-headed, and has a voice that reminds you of Braunzwich's electro-viol when he plays a Chopin nocturne.
She said, "Move over, Lower-order, and pour me some coffee."
Barbara King was liable to call you most anything, in that husky, smooth voice of hers, and make you like it. But "Lower-order" was something out of the usual line of affectionate insult.
"What do you mean, 'Lower-order'?" I asked. "I like me, even if you don't."
She smiled, showing teeth that were whiter than the rays of Sirius. "Then you haven't heard the news, I take it? Well, read this!" She flipped a news-transparency into my toast.
I fished it out, blotted it, and read: "Strictly confidential. Report to Terrestrial delegates. Do not file. Agents operating on Rhea, former colony of Oberonian Empire, report inflammatory speeches being made, seemingly with government approval, if not actual sponsorship. Oberonian racist theories are re-emphasized. Many references are made to Terrestrials and Martians as 'Lower orders of animate matter . . . unfit for rule, good only for slaves to the Oberonian Master race'. This is propaganda in direct conflict with the anti-nationalism clauses of the Armistice. If meetings are held under government approval, would seem to indicate that dissolution of Oberonian Empire was a fraud and that undercover reorganization work is being carried on."
I tried to keep my voice steady. "Where did you get this?" I asked. "And why are you showing it to me? Your outfit would like an exclusive story on a piece of news like this. Why cut me in on it?"
Barbara sighed. "Act your age, Lee," she said reprovingly. "You won't send that to your paper any more than I would. Do you think I would have showed it to you if I thought there was any chance of its getting out? I got it from a delegate—a guy who trusts me. Even if it didn't mean getting him in trouble, I still wouldn't send that. It's hot."
She was right, of course.
"Well—" I began—and stopped.
I drank the last of my coffee and lit a cigarette before I asked, "What are we doing about it?"
Barbara shrugged. "That I don't know. If the Oberonians are up to their old tricks, it means that this conference is a failure before it gets well started. And we're all wasting our time out here." She glanced at her watch and then rose hastily.
"I've got to get going," she said. "I've got to interview Madame Lafarge—Earth's only woman delegate. Human interest stuff. I just thought you ought to know about this. Keep your eyes open when you're around the Oberonian contingent—and remember this, you owe me a favor for letting you see this."
She waved the message at me, then struck a match and ignited it. When it was burned completely she broke up the ash and went out "So long," she called.
"So long," I echoed thoughtfully.
I leaned back in my pneumatic chair and drew a deep breath from my cigarette. The heavy Venusian tobacco smoke made excellent smoke rings. I blew one and stared at it, trying to see through it to what lay ahead for humanity.
The Oberonian Empire had started the last war. The five planets and moons which formed their empire had been the most potent military reservoir in the history of the Solar System. They'd made only one little miscalculation when they set off the fuse that plunged the nine planets into four years of carnage. They hadn't figured on Earth's immediate and decisive entrance into the war. Venus and Mars, the original targets for their attack, they could have vanquished within months. But Earth, the untapped reserve of man-power and industries; Earth, the most highly mechanized planet of all, had for once acted with courage and immediate decision.
The Oberonian drive had been stopped. Then the war had resolved itself into a contest of duration. The planet that could hold out the longest would win. Holding out meant building new rockets to replace those destroyed by enemy fleets; meant keeping up the morale despite constant attacks by raiders, despite occasional major defeats; meant diverting all of the planets' productive resources into the channels of war.
The Tri-Planet Confederation—Earth, Mars and Venus—had won. But at a terrific cost. Ten percent of the intelligent life of the Solar System was destroyed. Some planets suffered more than others—Mercury's frightful toll is too well known to mention. Others, such as the Oberonians themselves, lost comparatively little. But every planet, belligerent or not, felt the effects of that war economically at least. And the economic toll, in the long run, was perhaps even worse than the loss of life.
The war had ended finally through a palace coup in the Oberonian government. Faced with the inescapable fact that Tri-Planet production was increasing by leaps and bounds, the Oberonians had only one recourse: to stop the war. They stopped it for good and all, it seemed. Popular pressure forced the abdication of the War-minded emperor; no new king succeeded to the throne. The Oberonian Parliament proclaimed the independence of all the colonies, the end of the Empire, and the withdrawal of all the territorial claims that had inspired the war.
That move saved the skins of the Oberonians. For the traditionally sportsmanlike Earthmen, as was to be expected, showed quick willingness to forget old wounds and to give the new regime a place in the Peace Conference. Nor was that a wrong thing to do. For the Oberonian Empire had been potent only because it was so large. Split into five separate groups, it was considerably less formidable.
Only, according to the secret message I had seen, it wasn't split at all, but was united as ever—probably by secret treaties and agreements which might even have been concluded before the formal announcement of the end of the Empire.
I lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old and tried to follow the thing through. Why would the Oberonians be anxious for a resumption of hostilities? They'd lost the last war. A new one, so soon after the first, would be hopeless. Everything was the same—wasn't it?
No! It wasn't the same at all!
For I recalled with a sinking heart the fact that Earth, and to a lesser degree Venus, had already begun the demolition of certain munitions industries. Scores of private space-yachts and freighters, appropriated by the space-navies for the war, were being stripped of their armaments and returned to their owners. The armies and navies were being demobilized, their members returning to civilian life.
The thing that was different about the present situation was the Peace Conference itself. Where before it had been common knowledge that the Oberonian Empire was a rapacious, martial group of predatory nations, now people had dismissed that menace from their minds. A project of the Conference was to have been total disarmament. Earth's government had already begun on that. If the Oberonians should fail to follow suit, it would mean. . . .
It might mean almost anything—including a new war which Earth and its allies would lose.
I flipped my cigarette away and left for the press room. It was nearly time for the day's session to begin.
I had forgotten my pass and the Press Relations Bureau was very strict about things like that. They made me go back for the pass, which was also my identification. I couldn't blame them for taking every conceivable precaution to see that unauthorized persons were kept from the council room, but I still felt vaguely angry with someone as I arrived at my sealed-in booth ten minutes late.
A Martian delegate was speaking on the horrors of war. Purely platitudinous; just one of the things that a politician likes to get on the record. I made sure the recorder-tape was running so that I could send the text to my paper, then proceeded to forget the speaker.
The Council Hall was probably the largest and most magnificent enclosed room ever built anywhere. The Peace Conference couldn't meet on any major planet because of the gravity. For political reasons, it was advisable that it not meet on any planet, lest the government of the favored world feel that it was entitled to special favor. So an entire asteroid—Juno—had been hollowed out, fitted with special sealed chambers for the delegates from each world, equipped with the newest and best equipment of every sort of communication, relaxation, comfort and efficiency.
The representatives of forty-two supposedly sovereign powers were here. Each group had its own gas-tight chamber, as luxuriously furnished as could be, each in the proper style for the beings it contained. The ammonia-men from Jupiter and Saturn sat ponderously in their rotating cells of high-pressure methane gas. The rotation provided them with the gravity to which they were accustomed; by special stroboscopic lighting devices they were able to view the outside scene as well as if they had been motionless.
The great black metal delegates from the Robot Republic stood utterly motionless in a perfect vacuum. They had no special gravity-effects; high gravity or low it made no difference to these "descendants" of the intelligent robots that had been banished from Earth and Mars scores of years back.
The Venusian representatives—there were two groups of them, one from each polar civilization—swam restlessly about in murky, tepid water.
And the Oberonians were there too, as well as the lesser delegates.
The Martian had completed his speech with an appeal for disarmament. I kept the tape running, but opened up the switch which kept me connected in direct, automatically coded radio with my paper's office on Earth. If there were going to be speeches on disarmament, I wanted to be ready to make my commentaries on them. I knew, probably better than any but a half-dozen others, how important that question had suddenly become.
An Oberonian signalled that he wished the floor. The Chairman for the day, a lank, demon-black Callistan, yielded it to him and the mechano-translators clicked and buzzed as the switch from Martian to Rhean dialect of Oberonian was made.
The Rhea-Oberonian began to speak. I couldn't hear his voice, but I had a pretty good idea what it was like—a thin, whining twitter. That was Oberonian language, in whatever dialect. The mechano-translator, of course, made impeccable English of it.
The Oberonian, viewed in the synchronized stroboscopic lighting, was an impressive sight. That race runs to height, and this member of it was no exception. He was close to fourteen feet tall, and the light gravity of his home world had allowed him to spread out. On Earth he would have weighed close to a thousand pounds.
Except for the fact that they are a dozen times bigger, Oberonians greatly resemble lemurs. Their skin is furred—a necessity in their cold home worlds. The pattern of their fur reminds me of a North American animal, mephitis mephitica—skunk.
That's what their politics reminded me of, too.
I was all set to forget about diplomatic secrecy and send through a hot message to my office. The Oberonian, I was sure, would disregard what the previous speaker had said, and try to get the attention of the Conference fixed on some new topic. Disarmament would be something taboo with him—if that secret report had been correct. Perhaps he would talk about it in weasel-words, or he might even denounce it openly, though that wouldn't be at all in keeping with the Oberonian foreign policy. But it ought to prove interesting.
So I leaned forward in my chair, listening to the calm, metallic voice of the mechano-translator. . . .
And twenty minutes later, when the Oberonian had finished speaking, I was still leaning forward, in a tense expectation that had somehow gone sour.
For the Oberonian hadn't evaded the issue of disarmament. Nor had he denounced it. He had, instead, presented what seemed to be a complete, efficient, and workable plan for disarmament—plus a proposal for an interplanetary police force with full authority to investigate every part of every planet and use any measures necessary to insure that the disarmament agreement was kept.
There might have been loopholes in the proposal—loopholes that the Oberonians were planning to wriggle out of. There might have been, and by all the evidence I'd ever heard concerning the treachery of Oberonians, there should have been. But I, who was looking for any such loopholes, who knew things that were supposed to be Oberonian state secrets, couldn't find them.
It was enough to shake my faith in Oberonian nature. I had a strong impulse to go over and brave the sub-arctic cold of their section to shake the speaker's hand and ask his apology.
It was a good thing I didn't.
There were a lot of other speeches made that day, but none of them counted for much. I walked out on them, after sending my notes and commentaries—minus the secret item—to the paper. I went back to my room and sat down to think. But I didn't get a chance. Without the formality of a knock, the door opened and Barbara King walked in. She had a companion with her—and the companion was Mercurian!
Not a live Mercurian, of course. There aren't any of those; they were exterminated to the last one in the War. This was one of the Mercurian semi-robots, the metal creatures in whose skulls were planted living Mercurian brains. Such brains came from the very highest type of Mercurian—and that was a pretty high type of individual, for the Mercurians were a brainy lot. The honor of having your brains transferred to a metal body took away from you some of the pleasant bodily functions, but it carried some boons too. A life-expectancy of a thousand of Mercurian years, an average of about fifteen hundred Earth years, went with it, as well as complete freedom from aches, pains, diseases, and all other physical frailties.
The Mercurian "spoke" first—actually, he communicated by mental telepathy.
"I had not wished to come," he said gravely. "It is against the custom of the Conference for delegates of different powers to fraternize. But your young friend here has a certain claim on me, which she exercised."
Barbara flushed. "Not against your will," she reminded him aloud. "This will be to your interest as much as to ours."
The Mercurian made no visible motion, but I received an impression of judicious agreement, as though he had nodded his great, spined plastic head.
"True," he thought compellingly. "But it is not the habit of our race to violate custom—not even the customs of others."
I was still in the dark about the purpose of the visit.
He began to explain: "Have you noticed the wording of the resolution the Rhean delegate introduced today?" he asked. "No? I thought not. It was not intended to be noticed—one little phrase. The resolution, if enacted, would totally outlaw the construction of all existing types of warships. Those which are already built would be either destroyed or irrevocably converted to peace-use spaceships. And a very efficient policing system would prevent any power from disobeying that law. I have reason to believe that the Oberonians are willing to obey that law implicitly. To the letter of the law. But only that far, no farther!"
Barbara broke in there, her hazel eyes shaded. "What he is saying, Lee, is that there's a rider on that definition of a battleship." She dug in the pocket of her coverall. "I'll read it to you. The construction is outlawed of 'all ships constructed in whole or in major part of steel, iron, a similar ferrous metal, or an allotropic form thereof, excepting'—Well, I won't read the rest. The exceptions are small ships. Do you see the catch?"
"No," I said frankly. "You can make passenger and freight ships without steel, because they have pretty easy going. But a battleship needs ray-gun armor, and that has to contain iron alloys. Nothing else is strong enough; Earth has tried practically everything else."
"Earth has," she flashed back. "But does it occur to you that the Oberonian Empire is not Earth? It's a good deal different—and that difference is important. The Oberonians have developed an allotropic form of mercury. It's harder than any steel yet devised. It works perfectly for ray screens. It's lighter than most steel, and it seems to have every necessary quality for making battleships. There's only one thing wrong with it, from our standpoint. At normal Earthly temperatures it's a liquid."
That was the why of the Oberonlan's actions. "Can you prove what you say?" I asked tensely. "How do you know about it?"
The Mercurian answered that. "We of Mercury have a special power for reading thoughts," he said obliquely. "It is not used ordinarily, for it would not be courteous. But now and again a situation will call for it. You'll see the delicacy of trying to prove any such statement. It would be necessary first for me to admit that I had—infringed on the privacy of the Oberonian delegate."
And that would not be good. It looked as if the situation called for some tall thinking.
I was getting ready to try and fill that order when Barbara said, "There's one thing we haven't told you yet. Besides finding out about the new construction material, he found out that what we had deduced was true. There is a secret Oberonian Empire. It's run by a dictator, not the old emperor or any of his successors. The dictator is an army fanatic, one of the generals who forced the emperor into war. We couldn't get his name, but we found out one thing. He is in a warship of the new design, somewhere in space, not a hundred thousand miles from here."
We three discussed the question for an hour or more without coming to any particular conclusion. The Mercurian, whose intelligence was unquestionable, nevertheless did not seem to be up to the problem of doing anything constructive about our dilemma. He became gloomier and gloomier as the discussion went on. Finally he left, after taking precautions so that he would be unobserved as he went back to his own quarters. He told us not to worry. The intimation was that he would take care of things for us. But I couldn't see what he could do.
I said as much to Barbara. She, surprisingly, seemed to put a lot of confidence in him.
"Don't forget, Lee, it meant a fight against all his training to come here at all. He said he'd help us and he will. I don't know what he can do, but mark my words, he'll do something."
He did something, all right. The next morning the news of what he'd done was all over Juno. Sometime during the night he'd taken a helico-ray pistol and destroyed his metal brain-case and the almost immortal brain within.
Confronted with a problem, his answer had been suicide.
A special funeral ship brought his remains back to his native planet, and an alternate delegate filled his place in the Conference until a fully accredited one could be sent from Mercury.
In the three days that it took for the new delegate to arrive from Mercury, events moved rapidly. The proposal of the Oberonian had been adopted and implemented by codes and rules suggested by delegates from every planet. An interplanetary police force had already been authorized, to be paid for and staffed jointly by all civilized planets. An iron tracer, the military secret of Callisto, had been given to all, particularly to the policing agency mentioned before. With the aid of this device, it was possible to spot an iron-bearing ship within a distance of a half-million miles, and aim your guns at it without even seeing it.
The outlook for peace would have been rosy. . . . If the Oberonians hadn't managed to develop the new metal. For every bill for disarmament presented to the Conference was only an amplification of the first one drawn up by the Oberonians. And the definition of a warship remained the same.
I dropped hints right and left to all the Terrestrial delegates I could manage to buttonhole, but my hands were tied. Barbara had asked for and received a promise of secrecy in regard to everything she'd told me. As yet, it was not quite imperative that I act immediately. Full-scale disarmament, including the dismantling of all war rockets, wouldn't be begun by Earth until the Peace Conference was over and all the agreements signed. Before they were signed, there was no great need for action and I could keep my promise. If the actual signing became imminent without any encouraging sign, I'd have to tell the whole story to any Terrestrial diplomat I could convince.
I didn't see much of Barbara in those three days. I tried hard enough but she made herself scarce. And I was kept rather busy too, so I never had a really good chance to get her alone and find out what she was planning to do.
The new Mercurian delegate came and nothing happened. I was one of the crowd of newsmen of assorted shapes and races who met him at the entrance-porte to the Halls of the Delegates when his ship landed. He was nothing special, I thought, just a typical Mercurian—and probably, I thought bitterly, as worthless as the one before him. He didn't pause for much of a personal interview, just distributed printed statements to the reporters and went off to his chambers.
But that night I suddenly found cause to remember him vividly.
I woke to find someone in my room, rummaging through my things. I rose and was about to challenge the intruder when he whirled and stared at me. It was the new Mercurian delegate!
The mind-power of the Mercurian cannot be overrated. His metal-glass eyes seemed to shine with a weird inner fire as they stared into mine. They enlarged and became more brilliant, and I found myself swirling off to sleep again. . . .
Pure hypnosis, a type impossible for a human being to exercise. But the superior mentality of the Mercurian made it possible for him to dominate my lesser mind so completely that I had to obey his unspoken command to sleep.
But the command could not have any lasting effect. It wore off, probably in a matter of seconds. As I came to again, I heard the door to my room slide gently shut.
I leaped out of bed and examined my belongings. I quickly discovered what the Mercurian had been after: my photo-key to the Press Relations Bureau.
Hastily I climbed into my one-piece coverall and followed.
No one was in sight in the corridors. I made my way quickly to the Press Relations room. I found the door open, and the night attendant asleep within.
The hall was almost totally dark, and, except for the Mercurian and myself, empty. I stared through the blurring transparencies and tried to find him. I saw him moving—yes, it was he—walking rapidly through the Callistan section to the Oberonian one beyond.
I followed. I was totally unequipped for such a venture. The Callistan section, I knew, would be all right. The air pressure would be lower and the atmosphere would have a pungent reek of rare gases, but otherwise it would be much the same as Earth's.
But the Oberonian—this was the Rhean division—section would be considerably different. Cold—frightfully cold.
So I was forced to watch his actions from a distance. He seemed to be doing something—I couldn't tell what—to the mechano-translator, by the light of a small pocket-torch, to judge by the feeble glow. Then the light went out and I could see his gleaming form coming back.
I made myself inconspicuous and allowed him to pass.
I followed him through the door to the Bureau, slipped past the again unconscious night man, and went back to bed. I immediately fell asleep. When I awoke my light-key was in its accustomed place once more.
That was the morning of the day the Oberonian Empire died once and for all. . . .
Barbara King saw the blow struck. "I was on the way from my room," she said that night while we were celebrating. "I had a little time to spare and I had an idea of what was coming, so I walked along the promenade. Lucky the Earth-section happened to be facing the right direction then. It was a big, blue flare of light. It blotted out the stars, almost blinded me."
"And it killed the Oberonian dictator," I said. "But I'm still wondering about some of the details."
I turned to the steel-bodied Mercurian who stood by, mentally benign. "I realize you could find out everything that was going on in the minds of the Oberonians by thought-reading. That's how you knew they were in tight-beam radio connection with the dictator on their new allotropic-mercury ship. And when you rigged up that super-heterodyne gadget on their secret transmitter, it started a vibration in the receiver located on the ship. I'll take your word for it that a vibration of that certain special type is all that's necessary to destroy one of their ships, by destroying the complex arrangement of the mercury atoms. But what I want to know is—how did you happen to bring the gadget with you?"
The Mercurian's thoughts turned suddenly grave. "For that we owe a debt to my predecessor, the delegate who destroyed himself. Thought transmission is normally carried on only at short distances. But by a special intense effort, thought can be made to reach any individual to whom the sender is attuned, wherever he may be, within hundreds of millions of miles. The consequences of an effort like that cause insanity to the sender.
"My predecessor—who was also my intimate friend—deliberately forced his brain to destroy itself by working it too hard. His mind reached out to me on Mercury, told me all that had happened. Then, when the first symptoms of degeneration began to be felt, he killed himself. And that served a purpose too. As a substitute for a dead man, my coming aroused no curiosity. As a diplomat, my effects were inviolate. I was able to bring in the 'gadget' with impunity."
Barbara nodded. "I was pretty sure that the Mercurian would do something."
I leaned back and lit a cigarette, feeling good. These minor powers with their mental powers were mighty handy allies.
Early in 1942 I got a telegram from my former masters at Popular Publications offering to rehire me. It was not as elevated a job as I had had before. I would not be a Real Editor, with buy-or-bounce decision-making power over my very own magazines. I would be an assistant to Alden H. Norton on his group of pulps. On the other hand there were advantages. As a Real Editor I had earned $20 a week; as a lowly assistant they were willing to pay me $35.
It required no thought. The steady paycheck was irresistible. Besides, Al Norton was a good man to work for. He had come aboard in the first place as editor of the sports magazines, had accumulated titles in the fields of mystery, horror, Western and air-war, and had inherited my two sf magazines. I was helping on all of them.
It seems to me now that they were pretty awful specimens, considered as examples of American literature. Once in a great while there was some good writing. Surprisingly, some of it was in the sports magazines; even a little in the Westerns. A few individual writers—Joel Townsley Rogers in particular struck me as stunningly good, compared to the hacks he was usually surrounded with—seemed literate. But mostly editing the stories was about as much fun as repairing sewer pipes. You could take a certain amount of pride in the skill with which you did the job, but the end product was not noble.
Pulp writers in those days had very few recognized rights. The concept that an author, any author, had a certain privilege of control over the published version of his work did not apply to them. Mostly they didn't deserve it, being pretty poor writers, but whether they deserved it or not the idea of giving them such rights never crossed any of our minds.
It was not just at Popular Publications. My friend and colleague, Horace Gold, worked for Popular's chief competitor at the time, a firm known as the Thrilling Group. There each day's work by an editor was checked over by the boss. He didn't bother to read the stories. He did carefully assess the quantity of pencil markings on each page. If there wasn't a lot, the editor was called on the carpet. No one did that to us at Popular, but the stories provided an imperative of their own.
The air-war magazines were particularly awful; some of them were written entirely on contract, by single authors. Editing them was agony. When the two magazines written by contract authors were killed because of the paper shortage of World War II, the two authors each opined that they would have to find new markets. I'll try the Saturday Evening Post, said one of them, while the other decided he would change over to mystery novels, because he thought there would be money in the film rights. We snickered behind our hands—but the Saturday Evening Post did indeed buy everything the first author sent them, at about twenty times as high a rate as we had ever paid him; and the other's mysteries have, in fact, been made into at least two very successful films.
As John F. Kennedy was wont to remark, it is not a fair world.
With competition like the slop I was editing every day, I was emboldened to try to write for markets outside the science-fiction field, and it turned out that I could sell them without much trouble. The first sales I made were love poems. Like most literate teen-agers, I had put a few together to impress girls. It was a revelation to me that people would give me money for them. Other revelations were in store. I had sold a love poem which began:
You never knew I waited for your footsteps in the spring
Or counted fifty at your door before I dared to ring. . . .
I was paid about a dime a line for these things, which came, as you can see, to twenty cents for the sample above. Then the editor took pity on me. She was a stocky, good-natured ex-circus aerialist named Jane Littell, and she pointed out that the same poem could have been written:
You never knew
I waited for
Your footsteps in the spring,
Or counted fifty
At your door
Before I dared to ring. . . .
instantly tripling my income.
There wasn't much income in love poetry at best, though. I liked Janie, but I couldn't bring myself to write stories for her love pulps; nor, ever, have I been able to write a Western. But I tried all the rest. My card file for that period is laced with titles like Cure for Killers and R.A.F. Wings East. What the pulps demanded was tightness of plot, action and pace. I learned a lot about that; maybe more than was good for me. And I think some of that pulp tightness begins to show up even in the sf I wrote around that time, like Earth, Farewell!, which appeared in the February 1943 issue of Astonishing Stones.