Quis Custodiet …?

Startling Stories – July 1948

(1948) *

Margaret St. Clair

The spy Kynnastor plans to steal a great secret horn a world made barren and drear by atomic bomb destruction!

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? (Who will have custody of the custodians themselves?) —Latin tag -

PARKER’S eyes glittered as he tal ked about those mutant-martyrs to Kyn nastor.

“They know how to die in style ,” Parker said.

Kynnastor listened, marveling. These For mers baffled him. One couldn’t make even the first step toward understanding them.

“I thought they were a bunch of cowards ,” he said, sustaining his role.

“Who told you that?” Parker demanded. Frowning he scratched the gray hair on his chest. “It certainly isn’t true. No, they ‘re brave, heroically brave. And it isn’t the bravery of insensitivity and ignorance, either. The Blo wn-ups are quite as aware of danger as we are. They’re genuinely brave. Also they’re full of attributes our people always considered as virtues. They’re loyal, devoted, self-sacrificing.”

“They’re quite a lot like us, really,” Mirna said, putting her gun d own in the rack. She had been out on patrol. “To look at. I mean.”

“There must be ways of telling, them, though,” Kynnastor said reflectively. -

“Oh , there are.” Mirna sat down on a box and began cleaning mud from her shoes with a stick. “The chief thing, of course, is that they’re all so big. The smallest one I ever saw was quite a bit bigger then Kynnastor here, a n d they’re almost always six feet four. That’s why people call them ‘the Blown-ups’ instead of homo mutatus, which would be-scientifically cor rect. And then they have’ three-chambered hearts, their articulation’s funny and they have phosphorescent blood. They only look like us on the surface, when you come down to it.”

‘Kynnastor nodded. For the first time in his life he felt a degree of gratitu de for the dwarfish stature which had made him un pleasantly conspicuous among his own peo ple.

“The main differences are mental, though,” Mirna went on. “I don’t know what Dad means by saying they have so. many virtues. They certainly, aren’t any too in t elligent.”

Parker smiled. “Mirna always over-esti mates intelligence,” he said teasingly. “Nat urally—she has so much of it herself.” And then, as the girl frowned and started to speak, “Seriously, my dear, our people in the old days considered intelligenc e a very dubious virtue. And homo .mutatus isn’t stupid any how. He’s only intensely practical.”

“That’s just it,” Mirna replied. “From everything I’ve ever seen or heard of them, they aren’t interested in anything unless it promises immediate practical re sults, some thing to benefit them personally. That’s stupid, Dad—you know it is.”

Kynnastor lowered his eyes. As so often before in the days since he had attached him self to this camp of the Formers, he had the feeling that they were talking in alien tong ues —using some foggy, incomprehensible lan guage about a subject which didn’t exist. Mirna said that being practical was stupid.-What could she mean ? -

“Is that why we’re fighting them?” he asked.

Both the girl and her father stared at him. There was sus picion in the man’s look, and Kynnastor felt his heart speed up and seem to miss a beat. Of course there was ,the bomb strapped in his armpit, but he was not supposed to use it except as a last resort. It wasn’t practical; at present, to destroy the Former s’ camp. He was here only to gather information to take back.

* “By gosh, you sound as if you’d never seen a Blown-up in your life,” Parker said at last, “Have you been with humans all the time?”

“Yes, until m father died.”

Parker relaxed. “That accounts for it,” he said. “You have’ to be around them, I guess, before you understand. You’ve never seen one of their camps? No, I guess that’s not the way to explain it to you. Well, then, have you studied history?”

Kynnastor nodded. “Yes,” he said. He had, ind eed, studied rather more history than was usual among his people, since it wasn’t a subject they considered practical. But he felt, uneasily, that perhaps the Formers’ ver sion of history wouldn’t agree with theirs.

“All right. Tell me, how did the people t hat were left feel after the big bombs fell?”

Kynnastor considered. “It was a great shock to them,” he said.

Parker was not altogether satisfied. “That’s a whale of an understatement,” he replied. He opened the flap of the tent and spat out of it. “My gr eat-great -great-great— Golly, I don’t know how many ‘greats’ to put on it; he lived nearly three hundred years ago—anyhow this man who was one of my ancestors kept a diary, I remember reading it when I was a youngster, seven or eight years old, with the t ears running down my cheeks. Marlow wasn’t a literary man, but somehow he got it across.

“Those who were left felt a horrible guilt. The population of North America had been around two hundred and twenty million, and after the bombs there were about six th ou sand, and a lot more of them died. It’s been estimated that there weren’t more than five hundred thousand people left alive in the world. Five hundred thousand out of all the billions.

“But it wasn’t the loss of human life that made the survivors suf f er so, nor the fact that air and earth and water were still full of death, nor the naked struggle to survive. (There was nothing at all to eat, Kynnastor, except what they could find in cans.) It was —well, Marlow writes, ‘I f every human being had died, it wouldn’t matter so much. What does matter is that, when we blasted the whole earth, we betrayed something more important than we are. We betrayed life itself.’

“That part of the diary is funny reading,” Parker went on thoughtfully, “because Mar low didn’t know what was wrong with him, of course, and he thought he was going off his head. He had a long description of a trip he made in search of other people, and he speaks over and over again of the awful desolation of the country he went through, as dead and empty as Hell itself .”’

“Two or three times he quotes a line from some poem—‘Oh happy living things! No tongue their beauty might declare!’ Then he says that in the whole time since the big bombs he hasn’t seen a single thing that was alive —not a moss, no t a lichen, not a cricket, not an ant.

“In the end, he began to work things out. There are several pages in which he speaks of the link between sea water and the salt of tears and the salinity of the blood, where he compares the movement of sap in a plant and the circulation through the arteries and. the veins. And then he comes out with it, in quite a modern-sounding way: ” ‘We were the custodians, the curators of life. It was our task to treasure and to under stand. If all had gone well, some day—’ t hey were just on the edge of interplanetary travel when, the big bombs fell—‘some day we should have been custodians of the stars. Time will not forgive us for our failure. We will never forgive ourselves .’ “

The incomprehensible passion in Parker’s voice di ed into the air. Kynnastor remained looking down at the floor, baffled and wearied by the flow of words. At last he looked to ward Mirna. There was a glint of tears in her eyes. The smoky air of the tent must have irritated them.

“There’s a happy ending, t hough, Kyn,” she said. “Tell him what the last entry in the diary is, Dad.”’

: “Unh? Oh, that. The last words Marlow wrote were, ‘Today I. found a blade of grass .’ “

There was a fumbling at the flap of the tent and Joe came in. He was carrying something behi nd his back.

“I’ve got something for you, Mirna,” he said to the girl, smilingly. “Guess what it is,”

Mi rn a’s cheeks grew pink. (Now, why should that be? Kynnastor thought.) “I can’t,” she said after a moment “Don’t tease me, Joe, Give it to me.”

Beaming, t he young man held out his burden to the girl. It was small and squirm ing and odiously alive.

“It’s a dog, a little dog,” he said.

“A dog? You mean a real dog, like people used to have?” Mi rn a’s voice was rough with incredulity and delight. “Where did you g et it, Joe?”

“Bert found it in one of those deep shafts in the Grass Valley mines. Don’t ask me how it got there. I’m afraid it’s blind, though, Mirna. It walks around all right, but its eyes—her eyes—don’t seem to work.”

“That doesn’t matter/’ Mirna’s hand s moved over the creature’s fur as though they caressed something beyond all price. Her fingers were trembling. “Oh, this is won derful!” she burst out. “Look, when the dog’s grown perhaps we can find a mate for her. Joe, this is wonderful!”

The young man pulled her face back to rest against his shoulder and rubbed her cheek caressively .

“Got to go now,” he announced. “I’m glad you like the dog. Number three dyna mo’s acting sick again.”

He went out. Mirna, looking after him, sighed. “I wish he didn’t have to spend so much time patching up the dynamos,” she said. “He’s been working on something really interesting. But there, I suppose we’re lucky to have the dynamos at all. The only other human camp we’ve been able to talk to by radio, is near Salt Lake, has only one dynamo, and it’s always out of repair. Any how, Kyn, do you understand about the Blown-ups now?”

“Yes.” For the life of him, Kynnastor couldn’t keep dubiety from showing in his tone.

“No, you don’t,” Mirna said, studying him so that he felt uneas y again. “Tell him about the camps, Dad.”

Parker scratched at his chest. “Well, look,” he said rumblingly . “At this camp— at any human camp—we do all we can to raise things, especially non-mutated stuf f. They’re practically sterile, of course. A grass pla nt won’t have more than two or three seeds, and only one of them will be viable. But we do what we can with them. Even the mutated stuff is better than nothing, and we’ve got a good bit of it around, though to me it all looks alike. I can’t tell one kind o f big blistered leaf from another. But it’s green, and alive.

“It’s the same way with animals. Bart has a blindworm in a box he’s feeding, and Alice has a horned toad, and Sam has a blue legless lizard, and so on. In the days before the bombs they wouldn’t have amounted to muc h, but to us they’re wonderful.”

“The Blown-ups’ camps haven’t anything. They live off synthetic foodstuffs, and what ever they find alive, they kill. It isn’t aggres siveness, or even a pleasure in destroying, the way it was in the o ld days with our people who liked hunting. The hunters might kill animals, but they wanted the species to be alive. The Blown-ups kill because they don’t want anything to be alive.

“They always make their camps in the middle of one of the sand-glass areas—and do you know what they do? I guess you’ll find this hard to believe, since you’ve been with humans all your life. But they send out men with flame-throwers twice a month and they go over an area half a mile or so wide around the camp with them. With fla me throwers, Kynnastor, so that the sand won’t ever be anything else but dead. The. Blown-ups love death. That’s why we’re fighting them.”

Still holding the dog cuddled under one arm, Mirna rose to her feet. “I’ve got to get over to the shop and get to wor k before dark ,”‘ she said. “You’ve asked several times about what I’m doing, Kyn. Do you want to come and see?” She picked up her gun.

Rigid with suspicion, Kynnastor followed her. It was impossible that so carelessly, so casually. Mirna was about to show him the new weapon the Formers were rumored to be working on. It must be a trap.

The shop was the only permanent sub stantial building in the camp.’ It was built out of glassy green slag, held together with lead dowels. Somebody had put a lot of work in on it. Mirna pushed open the door wit h the elbow of the arm in which she was carrying the dog, and led Kynnastor down a corridor “They let me have this room for a lab,” Mirna said, stretching up to turn on the light. “Joe’s got the on e next door for his stu ff, Look down there, by the window. There, what do you think of it?”

Kynnastor looked in the direction she in dicated and grew sick. One could be sur prised at nothing the Formers did, not even when a weapon they were rumored to be working on was no weapo n at all, but a hairy-leaved, greenish-yellow plant. But how disgusting they were, how perverse, how (the epithet came into his mind unbidden) dirt-devouring. A plant!

“What is it?” he asked, forcing warmth into his voice.

“It’s a tomato,” Mirna answered pride-fully. “A tomato plant. The first one any-body has seen in three hundred years. I checked with an old botany book, and there’s no doubt of it. Lycopersicum esculentum . A genuine tomato plant!” She shifted her gun to th e arm that held the puppy and bent over the leaves. “I thought this morning I noticed —wait now—yes, it is, yes. One, two, three, four ... Kyn, it’s setting fruit!” ‘

Kynnastor swallowed. “How did you get it?” he asked. “Did Joe find the seeds?”

Mirna s hook her head. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes shone. “No, not that. I made it myself .”’

“Made it?”

“Well, in a way. A simple process, but a tedious one. Do you want to hear about it?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Well, about five years ago I took a leaf cutt ing from a mutated plant near Yuba City I grew it in a normal nutrient solution for a couple of months. You understand I didn’t grow a new plant from it—I only increased the area of leaf tissue. Then I took a cutting from the original cutting, changed the solu tion for a fresh batch, and grew my new cutting on. After I’d been doing this for about a year, I grew a whole new plant .from the leaf. It wasn’t a normal plant by any means, but it had lost one or two of its mutated characters, so I kept on with the experiment. It took four more years but you see what I got.”

“That’s wonderful,” Kynnastor replied. He did indeed wonder at her.

“Oh” I don’t know,” Mirna answered with a touch of discontent. Her dark brows grew together in a frown. “It’s nothing b asic, just a technique. Of course, techniques can be useful sometimes. The main trouble with this one is that it’s so slow. Think how long it would take to reconstitute just one member of all the genera we used to have, even if we assume that they’ve survi ved in a mutated form. And they have not No, the stuff that Joe’s working on looks lots more-promising.”’

Kynnastor grew alert. “What’s that?” he asked.

“He’s been working with radioactive po tassium. One of his biggest difficulties is that, the materials h e needs are so hard for us to get. His apparatus isn’t over three inches long, because he couldn’t get enough cad mium and so on to allow him to make it bigger. But anyhow, when he treats mutated plant material with it, the germ cells mutate again. And the mutations are always lethal. It causes a disintegration of the chromo somes. And the funny thing is that it has absolutely no effect o n non-mutated mater ial.”

Kynnastor nodded doubtfully. The con tusion in his mind was pushing him toward utterance. Even if one accepted the Formers’ premise that life was somehow desirable, Mirna’s evaluation of Joe’s work was not logical.

“How is it promising?” he asked after a second. “You don’t want to destroy the mutated plants, do you ? And that’s a ll his apparatus doe s.”

‘Of course we don’t,” Mirna replied. “But he’s got something basic, something with possibilities. It’s something new. She waved her hand at the microscope, the carboys of solution, the plants growing in stoppered flasks— “In work like ours, you mustn’t ask what anything’s good for. It may be desirable or it may not. That’s not the point. Our job is only to find out what it is.”

Kynnastor nodded again. He had reached a decision which pleased him. He thought the shop was unguarded at night, but even if i t were not, a guard should not present too much difficulty. He would set the bomb he had been carrying in his armpit to explode in Mirna’s laboratory,” and Joe’s apparatus, obviously so portable, would go back with him to his own people.

It would not matte r that Kynnastor would be going beyond what he had been sent to do. Blowing up the laboratory was a practical, sensible thing, and since Mirna set so high a value on Joe’s apparatus, taking it would be wise in any case. It might be useful besides. It might be more practical than the flame throwers for keeping the area around the camp clean of life. Tonight, he thought. Yes, tonight!’

“My arm’s tired,” Mirna said. She put the dog down on one of the long tables and stood rubbing her arm. “I wonder what it was like in the old days,” she said thought fully, “when every place where there was s oil, something grew. I’ve read about it in books and tried and tried to imagine it. Plants grew everywhere, in the sand beside the ocean and on the tops of mountain peaks. They even had plants they didn’t want, called weeds. There were fields of wheat and fruit trees and vines that they cultivated, and even in the cities there were parks with flowers and trees. It must have been wonderful! But anyhow, today’s an important da y. It’s the day the tomato plant fruited. It’s the day we found the dog.”

She ruffled up the puppy’s fur and it began wriggling and licking her hand. For a strange, dizzying moment Kynnastor found himself looking through Mirna’s eyes. For that instant a dog was a priceless, a marvel ous thing, and a tomato plant opulence, riches unspeakable. Involuntarily he. put out his hand to the creature and it licked his fingertips.

The warm, wet tongue made him feel sick. Slowly, so that Mirna should not notice it, he began to draw away his hand. The puppy sniffed inquiringly at his fingers and began to growl, softly, and then with genuine ferocity. It slashed at him with its tiny, needle-sharp teeth.

“You awful little dog!” Mirna exclaimed,-picking the puppy up and sha king it. “Did she hurt you, Kyn ? I’m so sorry. I’ll go get a bandage for the cut.”

Blood was dripping from his finger to the floor, “Don’t bother,” Kynnastor said hastily. “It’s nothing, Mirna, nothing at all.”

“Oh, you’ve got to have it bandaged.” She mo ved so that she stood between him and the door and her shadow fell upon the spots of blood. “I’m so sorry. I—” She stopped. She was staring down at the phosphorescent blood.

Her gun was at his breast instantly. With out turning her head she shouted, “Joe! Dad! I’ve got a spy!”

They stripped him naked and searched his clothing and his body with great thorough ness. The bomb in his armpit they found at once.

“Kill him,” Parker advised disgustedly. “A Blown-up,” he said. “I’ll be hanged! Look at the way his hi p-joints work, I didn’t know Blown-ups came that small.”

“I don’t think this one is typical,” Mirna replied absently. Her gun was trained on Kynnastor unwaveringly, but she seemed to be thinking of other things.

“I’ve got a better idea than that,” Joe said . He lowered his voice so that Kynnastor should not hear.

“We’ll keep him prisoner for a couple of months. During that time I build another projector, the smallest I can, I think I can get it down to about seven-eighths of an inch. Then we put it in a caps ule, anesthetize him, and bury the capsule in the fatty tissue of his back. We can make another incision at the-same time so he’ll think we were experimenting on him. Then we let him escape and go back to his home camp, and we can power the projector b y brachywave .”

“I get if,” Parker said, enthusiastically. “It’s a first-class, idea. The germ cells in every Blown-up that gets near him will mutate lethally, and they’re always visiting each other’s camps. With any luck, it’ll sterilize the whole bunch of them. A fine i dea! Keep on covering him, Mirna , while we tie him up.“.

“No,” Mirna said.

Her voice was authority. Parker looked at her. “Why not?” he said, “We need them too much,” Mirna an swered soberly.

“Need them ?” Parker was outraged. “Mirna, you’re, out of, your head. Need them ? The blasting, sand-loving murderers! All they can do is kill . They don’t belong on the same planet with us.”

“We need; them, though,” Mirna paused and seemed to hunt for words. “How long is it since the big bombs fell ?” she ask ed at last. “Nine human generations, three hundred years. It isn’t long enough. We haven’t learned it yet.”

“Learned what?” Joe said.

“That we’re the custodians. Without the Blown-ups, we might forget. Don’t you see ? It’s a lesson we’ve only begun to lear n.”

“We’ve learned it,” Parker stated posi tively. “The big bombs blew the old bases of our culture sky-high., We’ve changed. We don’t see or feel things the way people used to. We could never go back to the old ways.”

“I’m afraid we could,” Mirna said. “There were thousands of human generations before the bombs, and none of them understood it the way we do. Long before the bombs our people chopped down the forests and left bu rned-over stumps where “the trees used to stand. They plowed up the grasslands a nd made deserts out of them. They tore the heart out of the continents and sent it floating down in the muddy water of the rivers to lie at the bottom of the sea. The bombs only finished something that had been long ago begun.

“Earth’s, done for. We destroyed it. But we won’t always be on earth. Some day we’ll visit the other worlds. And then we’ll have a chance, again, to be custodians.”

“Mirna’s right about that, of course,” Joe said; “There isn’t a human being’ alive now who doesn’t think so too. But what have the Blown-ups got to do with it?”

“We think so now because the Blown-ups are alive .. They print it in letters so big that we can’t help but read.” Mirna’s voice was soft.

“We’re the custodians. But who’s to see that we’re faithful, that we don’t betray our task ? The Blown-ups are our opposites, the magnet’s other pole. Maybe some day . we won’t need them any more. Until then, they teach us. Until then—don’t you see, Joe?—they’re our custodians.”

Joe made a noise in his throat. “It’s too big a chance-to take,” he said. “Maybe Mirna’s right—listening to her I almost think she is. But before that time she’s speaking of comes, if it ever does, the Blown-ups may have wiped us out. Wiped us out, and eve ry other living thing. It’s too big a chance.”

“It’s a chance we have to take.” Mirna’s voice was as level as her eyes. “Let him go.”

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Half wading through , half sliding over, the sand-glass slopes as he approached his peo ple’s camp. Kynnasto r wondered b riefly why the Formers had let him go. (How beautiful, how grateful to the eye the sand-glass was, in its wonderful lifeless purity.) It was illogi cal, surely, to release a spy.

His eyes caught a minute flicker of green to his left that the flame-throwers must have missed. He ground it down with his heel and kicked sand over it. Yes, it was illogical .. But then, so was everything the Formers did .

The End

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Quis Custodiet ...?