A Present From Joe
Astounding Science Fiction – February 1949
(1949)*
Eric Frank Russell
illustrated by Orban

The Martians had their own ways of doing things; they needed uranium, had none, and were quite able to trick Earth into an unwitting, unwilling donation ...

-

	"Then," continued Queth, with suitable condescension, "in those days of long ago it was estimated that the rate of dehydration gave us no more than four thousand years to live. After that—the end!"

	Fernith gave a shudder and piped: "So we are going to die?"

	"No, no, of course not." Queth paraded importantly around the huge projection room. Here, surrounded by the gigantic instruments of his planet's science, he cut an imposing figure; he had majesty too great to be worth impressing on any mere child. But Fernith was not any mere child. He was the only son of the Overlord, the next in natural succession, and Queth's boss-to-be. "No, we shall not die," assured Queth. "Our ingenuity will save us in good time." 

	"How?"

	Queth sat down, passed a hand across his great brow. How to explain ten centuries' accumulation of technicalities, briefly and clearly? Mentally, he consigned Fernith to perdition while outwardly he managed to look profound.

	"We shall migrate to another and better planet," he said at last.

	"How?"

	"In spaceships."

	"All of us?"

	"No, not all of us. We are far too many." He sought for words. "The most worthy of us. You and your father and the scientists and warriors and those we think best fitted to live."

	"And the others will stay here and die?"

	"I am afraid so."

	"Serves them right," observed Fernith, callously. "Supposing there are people already on this other planet?"

	"There are. We'll keep some for our own use, and dispose of the others."

	"They'll die, too?"

	"Definitely," promised Queth. "We won't have much choice about it, We'll have to push them out of existence to make room for ourselves. That's as it should be. The lower forms of life must give way to the higher."

	"Oh, wonderful!" enthused Fernith. "Plenty of killings! Will it be soon?"

	"We aren't quite sure about that."

	"Why not? Why can't we start now?"

	Queth sighed, favored the projector feed-lines with a martyred look. "Because we can't traverse space without spaceships—and we haven't any spaceships."

	"Why not?"

	Pausing to murmur something under his mental shield, Queth replied: "Because we haven't any konium."

	"What's konium?"

	"It's a special element of tremendous explosive power. It is the only power-source potent enough to drive a ship through space. There is none of it on this world, not one little bit, not an ounce."

	"Is there some on the moons?" Fernith persisted.

	"It is doubtful," said Queth, cautiously. "There may be—but not much,"

	"Why can't we get it from the moons?"

	"Because, my dear Fernith, we must have konium even to reach the moons. We are in the awkward position where we must have konium to reach sources of konium."

	Fernith thought it over while the other watched him covertly, then he asked: "If we haven't got any, how do you know that there is any anywhere?"

	"We deduced its existence theoretically, worked out its properties mathematically, and finally detected it spectroscopically," declared Queth.

	"What's all that mean?"

	"I suggest you ask your father," Queth snapped, his patience evaporating. Hastily, he added, "He is a great and clever man." He moved toward his desk. "Please pardon me. I am very busy."

	With much relief, he watched Fernith wander out. Darn the kid. Just like his autocratic parent, nosey, interfering, unscrupulous, bloodthirsty.

	Dismissing the child from his mind, he applied himself to checking the mechanical shift of the overhead battery of huge antennas. At all costs they had to be kept beamed on that precise point in space, that fateful point from which might come salvation.

-

	Ronsed entered in the early evening, flopped into a chair, and said: "The checkers have just reported. It has come off."

	"You mean—?" Queth looked at him.

	"Yes, they're at war again. I offer you my congratulations." Ronsed settled himself lower. "The prognosticators were wrong in time by six years, but what are six years? They proved correct in the end." He studied Queth worriedly. "I hope they continue to prove right. Heaven help us if they don't!"

	"Always the pessimist," said Queth.

	"Pessimism has nothing to do with it. Rather is it a matter of not underestimating one's opponents."

	"Collaborators," Queth contradicted.

	"Opponents," insisted Ronsed. "One does not slaughter collaborators."

	"Not until they cease collaborating," Queth observed, cynically.

	Ronsed fidgeted in his chair and was silent a long time. Then he grumbled: "I have forebodings. As long as I have known about this scheme I have had direst forebodings. The plan is faulty. It embodies an arbitrary assumption that may be the death of us yet."

	"What assumption?"

	"That these creatures on the other world lack sufficient native intelligence to discover what is happening and who is doing it."

	"Pish!" exploded Queth. "What have the checkers just told you? What did you come here to tell me? That they are at war again, precisely as planned! Millions of blind mice—see how they run!"

	"I'll give you that. Everything has worked out nicely to date. But it has to keep on working right up to zero hour." He glanced at the calendar. "And the sands of time are running down. A mere six hundred years—all that's left out of four thousand!"

	"No matter," scoffed Queth.

	"The psycho-charts show that they're being speeded up satisfactorily, and that we should be through with the scheme in less than one third of the time left to us. That time-margin makes success almost a certainty."

	"I'm glad you said almost."

	"You have about two hundred years of life ahead of you," Queth went on. "I will gamble that we triumph within your lifetime. You'll live to see it."

	"Maybe." Ronsed shrugged skeptically. "And maybe not."

-

	The door opened, Harna came in saying to Queth, "Heard the news?"

	"Yes, Roused told me."

	Harna squatted on the edge of a table and wrinkled his eyes at Roused. "What do you think of it, Gloomy?"

	"It's working all right—so far."

	"So far!" echoed Harna. He turned his attention to Queth. "He's at it again, eh?"

	Roused said, sharply, "There's nothing wrong with me. My glands are as good as yours. My digestion's as good as yours. My imagination is better."

	"Imagine me a few things," invited Harna, amusedly.

	"We've developed a science so wonderful that we're bemused by it, and forget that it's peculiarly our own." Ronsed pointed to the sky. "I can conceive them having things just as peculiarly their own."

	"You'd better enlarge upon that," Queth put in.

	"We are telepathic wizards," obliged Ronsed, determinedly, "far, far ahead of these bipeds whom we are influencing. We can amplify, project and receive on neural bands common to ourselves and the bipeds. We can even send telepathic beat transmissions which send back pulses. All this means that we can examine and influence their minds over immense distances. We can comprehend their world and their mode of life so far as those things can be understood by our readings of alien minds. Within limits, we can warp them in ways best suited to our purpose. But it isn't enough. Basically, their minds are not like ours, and the difference is dangerous because unknown."

	"But—" began Harna.

	"I've not finished yet. Do you remember that report on conversational hiatus? It proved that the bipeds have a nontelepathic method of communication which even now we do not understand. It showed that two bipeds holding conversation don't necessarily broadcast thought-responses in logical sequence. Ergo, one of them, or both, must be communicating by other means something that does not correspond with his thoughts, something false, something calculated to conceal rather than reveal his mental flow. What is this other means? We don't know! How much more don't we know?"

	"We know how they react to our stimuli," said Queth, shrewdly.

	"We know how the mass of them react," Ronsed retorted. "But suppose that a few of their cleverest minds get curious about the same phenomenon? How are we going to pick them out and thus be warned? We haven't the selectivity to rake through that telepathic uproar for a few big-brains. Whenever we do manage to sort out a couple of individuals we get them haphazardly, by sheer luck."

	"I don't see your point," protested Harna. "We know that they detected our pulses twenty years ago, and promptly dismissed them as natural phenomena. That's good enough, isn't it?"

	"It's good enough until some nosey individual correlates ray-intensity with hysteria, charts both, proves a relationship, and finally traces the beats to a common source in space—here! How do we know someone's not doing it now?"

	"Guesswork," sneered Harna. "Your brains are addled. May the Red Sun be your protector if the Overlord hears of this!"

	"What have you got to offer against it?"

	"This," Harna shot back. "What we do know. That this other world has konium in plentiful supply. That its people are capable of building konium-powered spaceships and eventually would have built them anyway, without any suggestions from us. That, if sufficiently stimulated by us, their science can be speeded up, they can conquer space and be induced to come here in good time to save our skins. We know that we can persuade them to build what we cannot manufacture, to bring us what we haven't got. We know that we can use them by remote control, and conquer space by proxy! Lastly, we know that since we can influence them at this distance, we can make them our mental slaves once we're established on their world. What more does anyone want than that?" '

	"Never in all my life did I more sincerely hope that you are right and I am wrong." Ronsed got up, went to the door. "But I never take things for granted when dealing with unknown quantities." He shook his head slowly from side to side and went out.

	"Much intelligence and little faith," Harna commented sardonically. "So sad!"

	"When we start out for our new home do you suppose that Ronsed will be among those present?" asked Queth.

	"No." Harna stared blankly at the wall. "We conquerors will have no room in our ranks for such a quivering fat-belly."

-

	As time went on the reports of the checkers created a series of gala days.

	"The war grows and grows."

	"Frenzy-impulses have brought them to the boil."

	"The war has extended to a worldwide conflagration."

	"Stark demands of survival are giving their science a tremendous impetus."

	Upon the twelfth day of the Double Moons—and Fernith's birthday—came the great news, "They are using rocket missiles."

	The Overlord announced a public holiday. Joyously waving their flame-bulbs, great crowds made marches of adoration through the streets, filled with neural bands with such a medley of congratulatory messages that listening checkers temporarily lost touch with the other planet.

	Later, much later, the Overlord himself made the broadcast: "They are using konium! In celebration, I declare this a free day!"

	The crowds were twice as great, and the checkers lost contact for a full planetary revolution. So great was the telepathic uproar that some of it seeped through the screens of the projector room, causing Queth to seek solace with a bottle.

	The bottle's bright green and potent contents were halfway down when Ronsed arrived. Queth burped, eyed him glassily, pushed the bottle toward him.

	"Drink," he invited. "It may help you to withstand laughter aimed at fools."

	"The last laugh has yet to be heard." Ronsed waved the bottle away. "Now they possess konium and rockets. Add those two items together and you have the result you want, the result of centuries of conspiracy—or have you?"

	"Why not?"

	"Because certain of them may have secret knowledge and secret thoughts."

	"Bushwa!" defined Queth, unhesitatingly.

	"Or if they haven't, they may acquire them before they're due here."

	"Go away," Queth suggested. "Go away. You tire me with your eternal miseries." He sucked the bottle noisily.

	"Then let me likewise tire the Overlord."

	"Eh?" Queth almost dropped the bottle.

	"I crave an interview with the Overlord."

	"You're drunk!" Tilting his bottle, Queth emptied it, burped twice in rapid succession, looked blearily at the other. "Drunk as a telemaniac checker!" He ruminated awhile, then added; "About what do you wish to see him?"

	"About the salvation scheme. I think it ought to be altered before it's too late."

	"Oh, you do, do you? After many generations of careful psychological planning, Ronsed comes along and says it ought to be changed. By the Red Sun, that drink must be strong—it makes my mind credit you with the craziest thoughts."

	"You're receiving me all right. I think the plan is wrong. I wish to say so to the Overlord, and explain why, and suggest that it be changed."

	"In what way?" Queth queried.

	"I believe that we should use our telepathic projectors to reveal ourselves openly to these bipeds, to tell them of our predicament and ask their assistance."

	"You think they'll give it?" asked Queth, incredulously.

	"I don't know," Ronsed admitted. "But I feel that we'll stand a better chance meeting them squarely."

	"Nonsense! Stuff and nonsense! We shall conquer them, completely and absolutely, with our own wisdom. They will find themselves confronted by a set of circumstances impossible to foresee because, to them, our genius is utterly alien. Before they can realize it, we shall have fastened them with fetters of their own ignorance."

	"My dear Queth," commented Ronsed, "has it not occurred to you that they may possess wisdom equally as alien?"

	"I overlook nothing. All things have occurred to me," Queth boasted, "including the fact that you are a miserable nuisance. With your ifs and buts and maybes you are a menace to general morale, so much indeed that the Overlord would have your hide if he knew but the half of it." Queth studied the other disdainfully. "Your application to interview the Overlord is hereby rejected."

	"You will not permit me to see him?"

	"Certainly not! Do you think I crave punishment for causing his mind to be afflicted by such thoughts as yours?"

	"May the stars grant that these bipeds prove as dull-witted as you expect," prayed Ronsed. He went slowly to the door, held it open, and added: "If success does come, Queth, your greatness will be recognized and the Overlord will reward you as none have been rewarded before. But if you fail, you will not know how greatly you have failed. You will be dead!" He closed the door behind him.

	Queth kicked the bottle across the room, gazed irefully at the door. Ronsed and his persistent moanings! He directed his glare of annoyance at the door for some time, finally fixed the neurophone on his head, swung its antenna until the beam pointed at the distant Records Office.

	"See that the name of Computator Ronsed is placed upon the list of those forbidden to migrate," he ordered.

	The thought-waves of Harna came back, saying, "It will be a pleasure. Has he been worrying you again?"

	"Yes, he spoiled my quiet hour with a bottle."

	"Too bad," Harna sympathized. "I wonder that you have endured him so long. It's a pity that you cannot have him transferred to the Eastern Desert where he may nurse his stupid apprehensions in solitude."

	"That's an idea." Queth mulled it over, then went on, "I shall enter a complaint with the Overlord. He will take action. We shall be well rid of this prophet of despair by tomorrow's eve."

	"You owe me a bottle for the suggestion," said Harna, with prompt opportunism. "I will split it with you the hour Ronsed departs." He managed to beam a mental snicker before he cut off.

-

	The old Overlord had passed away and suffered his ceremonial cremation, and Fernith had sat for twelve long years in the seat of power by the time the bipeds reached their own satellite. Checkers sitting and listening through anxious, excited watches had anticipated the event for months, but no hint of what was expected had been allowed to reach the public.

	When at last the news broke, Queth took it in person to Fernith. Marching importantly into the presence, he genuflected with the minimum of reverence as became his own high station.

	"Your mightiness," he announced, "the bipeds have burst into space."

	"Ah!" Fernith clutched the arms of his throne. A reddish gleam crept into his eyes. "They have landed on their satellite?"

	"Yes—with ten ships. They launched twelve. Only two failed to make it. The others are now upon their moon."

	"That is good, extremely good!" Fernith coiled his tentacles with satisfaction. "Let it be known that I declare three days of freedom."

	"It shall be announced," Queth promised.

	"And now, what do the prognosticators say?"

	Queth frowned. "Your mightiness, they declare that the moment has arrived for you to call a council to consider our strategy afresh. There is a difficulty about which our best psychologists are divided."

	"A difficulty?" Fernith fastened hard eyes upon him. "What difficulty can there be?"

	"It is this: that the bipeds can be motivated by us only so long as our suggestions are not in blatant contradiction of facts. Now their arrival on their moon has lent importance to a fact which is awkward for us insofar as it may cause great delay in their attempts to get here."

	"And that fact is—?"

	"That the morning star—the planet Sarken—is nearer to them. We are almost twice as far away. It is logical for them to try and reach Sarken first." Queth made a gesture of disgust. "If they get to Sarken they may waste a thousand years exploring and settling it before they decide to come this way—unless we can devise some means to make them ignore Sarken in favor of us."

	"But Sarken is uninhabited and uninhabitable," countered Fernith. "We have never been able to pick a single thought from its great blanket of atmosphere."

	"Perhaps its atmosphere has the faculty of screening all underlying thoughts," Queth ventured. "Or possibly its life forms think in frequencies far outside the range of our receivers. But that is not the point. The point, your mightiness, is that we must find a way to persuade the bipeds to come here before it is too late—and that will be difficult because it will be contrary to logic."

	"Then I shall summon the council," Fernith decided. "A means must be found somehow, anyhow. It is a matter of life or death to us." He gave a harsh chuckle and finished, "Life or death to these bipeds also."

	"Yes, your mightiness," agreed Queth, laughing dutifully.

-

	The council was in session all through the night. The situation, they agreed, created something of an impasse. It was not until the early hours of the morning that Alrath, most respected expert on biped psychology, ended the discussion.

	"It is of no avail to stimulate yet another world war," he said. "The biped tribes have united since the last great holocaust and they need all their unity to cope with space-conquest now that it has reached its present stage. If, as Werkin suggests, we afflict them with a new ideology they will divide and waste their energies. The time for stimulation by warfare has now gone by."

	"Then we are left only with that imbecile Ronsed's suggestion," put in Queth. "That we draw them here by revealing ourselves openly."

	"Not at all," Alrath contradicted. "The Red Sun forbid that any of us should listen to Ronsed. If anyone desires partnership rather than mastery, he is mad!" His challenging gaze went round the table. "These bipeds have much curiosity and great ambition. We know that—for those are the psychic factors we have manipulated successfully for centuries. Let us continue to manipulate them."

	"Go on," ordered Fernith.

	"Consider the situation. Do they reach their moon with one modest spaceship? They do not! They send twelve and ten get there. Next year, they will send fifty. The year after they will be ready with a hundred. Their ambitions are equaled only by their energy."

	"So?" prompted Fernith, eagerly.

	"So I think it will not he too hard to obsess them with the notion of trying to reach both planets, Sarken and ours. The suggestion will be acceptable to them because it does not contradict the logic of Sarken's nearness, while, at the same time, it appeals to their ambitions—a double triumph rather than a single one."

	"But surely that will halve their efforts as far as we are concerned," someone objected.

	Alrath gave him a look of scorn. "Do we care whether they land fifty ships on Sarken so long as they land one here? One is enough—one ship capable of taking back one trained mind-master. After that, all their vessels will come to this world!"

	A murmuring ran around the council table until Fernith hushed it with; "Do all agree with Alrath's plan?"

	"It is the best," they said. "Then I so order it!" Fernith glanced at Queth. "Direct the broadcasters to transmit the urge to double-conquest, continually, without cease."

	"We have to cease when we're on the other side of the sun," a mind observed, incautiously forgetting its shield.

	Catching the thought, Fernith purpled and roared: "Do you think I don't know that, idiot! Even as a whimpering babe I learned that we strengthen and fade as we near or leave the bipeds' planet. Why, even those silly, servile two-leggers can realize—" He paused, appalled at where his anger was leading him. A silence lay around the table, a brooding, slightly fearful silence.

	Ronsed was halfway through his twenty-seventh year of grim exile in the Eastern Desert. A dull red sun hung low in the sky and a thin wind was stirring the dry, pink-colored sands. Sitting at a window, he gazed absently at the barren, uninspiring scene of which he had long grown weary.

	That morning, the world-wide neurocast had announced the rationing of water, first fateful sign of the long expected end. From now on there was to be a fixed amount of the precious liquid per person per day. That world of the bipeds had plenty of water, in fact it was more water than land. The fact had been known long before they'd had telescopes to confirm it, for they had garnered the information from biped minds. One does not tend to develop other-worldly types of scientific instruments when one's own types are nearly as good.

	Yes, nearly—hut not quite as good. The telereceivers were blind to worlds without minds, or rather to worlds which did not release detectable thoughts—worlds like Sarken, for instance. They had known surprisingly little of Sarken or any other nonbroadcasting planet until they had picked telescopes and spectroscopes out of bipeds' brains. Undoubtedly, the bipeds were supremely clever in their own strange, alien way—Too clever for comfort.

	For generation after bloody generation the bipeds had been stirred and stimulated with one end in view, and those who had done it owed them plenty. Was their cleverness great enough to enable them to recognize the debtor, name the debt—and enforce payment?

	Shifting uneasily in his seat, Ronsed reached for his neurophone and waited for the evening broadcast. Not one living creature existed within, his horizon; the periodic broadcasts from the cities was his only company, his only opportunity to listen to another mind. Such was the least penalty of those who blocked the path to conquest, and he was growing tired of it, so tired that by now he desired the greater penalty—death!

	If only Fernith and Queth had been possessed of enough intelligence to appeal to the bipeds, instead of driving them onward with a mental whip; if they had offered co-operation instead of plotting mastery, there might have been some hope. But now—

	He shrugged fatalistically. The neurophone clicked softly within his mind and an excited thought-form came through.

	"Six days ago eight spaceships left the bipeds' satellite for Sarken and one for this planet., None of these vessels are visible to us, but we have extracted data on their progress from the minds of bipeds who are watching through their bigger instruments. Our vessel is near and due to land very soon. We are keeping the neurocast open in readiness for the great event."

	Ronsed sweated. The telepathic carrier-wave fizzed deeply within his brain while he waited. He regarded his two front tentacles as if he had never seen them before. Their tips vibrated, and were damp,

-

	After a long time, the mind returned with; "The oncoming spaceship has now been observed crossing the orbit of our lesser moon. A curious feature is that we are quite unable to receive its pilot's thoughts in spite of the fact that anticipatory excitement must he causing him to broadcast furiously. It is thought that the ship's load of konium must have a blanking effect."

	"Or possibly there is no pilot on board—nothing but a robot," suggested Ronsed to himself. He tried to stop the quivering in his tentacle tips, and failed.

	Night had fallen and still he sat there in complete darkness when the neurocast again spoke over a hushed and waiting world.

	"This is relayed from a mobile amplifier. The bipeds' spaceship is about to land at a point north of the city of Kaltrak. It is gleaming in brilliant sunshine. Those with selectorphones may reset and see the vision through my eyes."

	Ronsed depressed a switch, closed his own eyes, picked up the faraway scene. It had the eerie, dreamlike quality of all telepathically transmitted pictures.

	A huge, shining cylinder was scudding through the sands before the distant observer. It plowed to a halt while a long stream of dust settled slowly behind it. The observer moved forward, neared it. A pair of mind-masters came into view hurrying ahead of him, ready to take over whoever might emerge.

	Though phantasmal, the scene was very clear. Ronsed could perceive the fastening clips on the back of the nearest mind-master's uniform, noted that one of them was bent.

	As the picture came closer, he could see the streaks left by space-particles on the vessel's metal skin, and a row of lenses resembling scanners, and a four-word name inscribed on the spaceship's prow. He strove to comprehend those queer, angular letters as be looked at the name. They read:

A Present From Joe.

	Ronsed stood up, opened his eyes, lost the scene on the other side of his world. For a moment, he stared vaguely at the pall of darkness outside his window.

	An instant later the entire horizon flamed with intense white light. He lifted his shaking tentacles to cover his eyes. He did not succeed.

	The tentacles and the eyes and the room he was in, and all the ground outside, in fact the whole of the planet Mars became one vast swirl of maddened atoms in approximately two and one-fifth seconds.

	The bipeds had solved the problem.

	After their own fashion.

The End