The Waiting Game

Astounding - January 1951

(1951) *

Randall Garrett Illustrated by Orbam

On Earth, many life-forms have found different ways to accomplish a given end. In the Galaxy, intelligences may find differing—and not at all recognizable!—ways to win! Therein may lie Man’s danger ...

“During the early years of its expansion, the Solar Federation discovered only two races of beings who had mastered the science of interstellar travel: the decadent remnants of the long-dead Grand Empire of Lilaar, and the savagely nonhuman race of the Thassela.”

The Biology of Intelligent Races, by Jasin Beone , YF 402.

Major Karl Gorman looked gloomily out of the main port of the forward observation deck at the pin-head disk of light far ahead. Sol, and bright blue Earth swinging round it, though the ship was as yet too far away for him to see the planet.

Would it, he wondered, be the same as the rest? The closer he had come to the Federation capitol, the worse it had become, until now, after Procyon, he was almost sick. He had thought of making the dog-leg jump to Sirius, but had decided against it. He might as well jump right into the, middle of the whole mess!

He turned away from the starry view before him and walked back toward the bar, feeling the eyes of the crowd on his uniform.

They weren’t all looking at him, of course; a Spacefleet major wasn’t that unusual. But a few of them had noticed the tiny silver spearhead on his shoulder, and knew it for what it was.

And men from the Federation Outposts were rare.

Gorman bought his drink and stared angrily at the hard, dark, blocky face that was reflected in the bar’s shining surface. He’d been on the ship for more than three days, now, and this was the first time he had felt the necessity of leaving his cabin. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone around him; they just weren’t his kind of people.

A low, resonant voice next to him jarred his train of thought, and he turned his head with a jerk.

“Ah, home from the wars, major?” the tall, hairless, pleasantly smiling being beside him asked.

Gorman silenced his biting request to be left alone before it began; after all, there wasn’t any reason not to be civil.

“No, my home is on Ferridel III. This is the first time I’ve ever been to Earth.”

“Not surprising,” commented the other. “There aren’t very many outpost officers from Earth. After all, two years is a long time to spend just traveling.”

Gorman finished his drink and ordered another. “It sure is.”

“If I am not being too personal, major, may I ask why you are making the trip?”

Major Gorman looked up at the being’s face. He knew what he was, of course; a Lilaarian. But this was the first time he had ever talked to one.

“Not at all. I suffer from a disease known as Utter Boredom. All my life, sir, I have been either fighting or getting ready to fight the Thassela. The war has been going on for more than two hundred years, and, as my home was right in the thick of it, I have been bred and trained in its atmosphere.

“Now, however, the war in my sector is nearly over; it has reduced itself to mopping-up operations on whatever of the Thassela are left. Therefore”—he paused to finish his second drink and order a third by a gesture to the steward—”I, a professional Thassela-killer, having no more Thassela to kill, have nothing to do but kill time.”

“Please, major! This talk of … ah … such things distresses me,” the pleasant bass voice admonished.

“Oh.” Gorman looked at him. “I … I’m sorry. I forgot.” He remembered now what he had heard of the Lilaar. Their religion, or something, forbade talk of death.

“You see, your race is not too well represented in my part of the Federation, and it is only in the past few -months that I have seen any of your people. In fact, you are the first I have ever spoken to.”

“Quite all right. The error was mine. Please go on.”

“Oh, there’s nothing much more.

I decided to come to Sol and Earth in search of high adventure—pretty girls to be rescued from evil, villains to ki … er … punish, and all that sort of thing.”

“You sound bitter, major,” the Lilaarian commented analytically.

“I am, sir, I am. What do I find? I find people tending flower gardens, listening to soft music and admiring fine objets d’art, that’s what I find!”

“And you find this distasteful?” the other asked, somewhat surprised.

Hastily, Gorman covered his tracks. “Why … no-o-o, it’s just that it’s not what I was looking for, you understand.”

He had remembered another thing he had heard about the Lilaar —they were not in the least mechanically or scientifically minded. Instead, they were the masters of the very music and art which he had just been on the verge of denouncing. He decided to change the subject.

“By the way, my name is Gorman, Karl Gorman.” He held out his hand, and tried not to show his surprise at the unusual touch of the sixdigited hand with the double-opposed thumbs, one on either side.

“Sarth Gell. May I buy you another drink?”

Gorman accepted, then, waxing warm inside, asked a question.

“Sarth, do you mind if I ask you something? As I say, I have always been a fighting man; I never had much time for history. When did the Federation contact your race?”

Sarth Gell leaned back, smoothed a hand over his hairless skull and said: “It was some three hundred years ago, in the Year of the Federation 313, to be exact, that one of the exploratory ships first contacted us.”

Gorman nodded. “That region is almost straight out beyond Altair, isn’t it?”

“Yes. About eleven hundred lightyears.”

“So?” Gorman raised an eyebrow. “You must be a long way from home, too.”

“Oh, no,” chuckled Gell. “Not at all. I was born and raised on Tridel of Sirius. I am no more of Lilaar than you are of Earth.”

Gorman signaled, and the steward brought more drinks. The conversation went on.

The huge passenger vessel bored on through the emptiness. Or perhaps that isn’t the right term. Around? Past? Between, maybe? However she did it, at top speed she could make nearly a thousand light-speeds, although she wasn’t doing that now. Her engines cut down and down as she approached Earth, until, finally, at one light, there-was the familiar buzzy shiver as the-ship passed into a more normal existence, although the accelerator field didn’t cut itself out until the velocity dropped far below even that relatively low figure.

When the field cut, Major Gorman didn’t even feel it. He was boiled to the ears.

He woke up in the hotel near the spaceport feeling just as he should feel, and lifted his head from his pillow with the care usually observed in such cases.

That sweet liquor! he thought. I ought to have more sense than to drink stuff with so much junk in it! I wonder how many of the higher alcohols it’s loaded with?

Edging himself off the bed, he reached into his uniform pocket and got the box of small blue capsules he carried for such emergencies, swallowed one and waited. When it had taken effect, he decided that all he’d need to feel perfect again was enough water to cancel the dehydration brought on by the liquor, and some breakfast, to take the dark-brown taste out of his mouth.

The breakfast helped, but by noon he felt ill again. Not from liquor, but from the same thing that had made him so sick all the way from Ferridel.

Oh, Earth was beautiful, all right. All green and parklike , with tall trees, pretty flowers, tinkling fountains, and fairy buildings. All very lovely. And dull as the very devil!

He prowled around the city all the rest of the day, and by nightfa ll , he was ready to call it quits ..

He’d gone into three or four of the establishments that purported to be bars, and found that no one drank anything but the sweet and aromatic synthetics, all of which would have made his stomach uneasy. He’d tried to talk to two or three of the girls, but they didn’t seem to want to talk about anything but the soft strains of some melody or other that whispered through the late afternoon air. If he’d known the phrase, he would have called them mid-Victorian, although they possessed none of the hypocrisy of that long-forgotten age, and absolutely none of its sense of humor.

It was, he decided, even worse than Procyon; at least he’d been able to buy some decent liquor there.

When he got back to his hotel, Sarth Gell was waiting for him.

“Good evening, Karl, I see you’ve been out. How do you like our lovely city?”

“Oh, fine, Sarth, just fine,” lied Gorman. “Very nice. Of course, I’m used to the Outposts, but I think I’ll get used to this pretty quick.” But he knew better. He knew he couldn’t spend thirty-six years of his life smashing the onslaught of the evilly monstrous Thassela and then settle down to music.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Gell smiled. “I wanted to ask you to accompany me to the concert tonight. I have a special seat.”

Oh, great, moaned Gorman inwardly, just great! I’m so happy I could simply die!

The concert hall was filled with people, all beautifully dressed to set off the softly shifting pastel colors of the walls and floor. There was no ceiling; just the sighing breeze pushing fluffy little clouds across the face of the planet’s one white satellite.

He watched as the great curtains drifted silently away, disclosing the musicians. Each was seated before the multi-keyed control board at his own panel; one hundred of them poised motionless, waiting for their signal.

Then the control master came out, sat down at the master panel and flexed his fingers.

Gorman looked closer. Six fingers! He hadn’t noticed it at this distance, but now he could see that every one of those musicians was a Lilaarian. He glanced sideways at Gell, but his companion was looking straight at the orchestra.

Somewhere, from deep within his brain, a soft murmuring note sounded. It became a chord. It grew louder, and he actually did not realize until it grew fairly loud that it had come, not from his own mind, but from the orchestra before him.

As the music grew louder and wove in and out of itself, it became definitely apparent that the people of Lilaar were really master musicians. The shifting colors of the walls swirled in time to the undulating harmony of the orchestra.

He listened, and, after a little while, the music faded as it had begun, in a single note, dying in his brain.

He waited for the second composition, and was disturbed by Sarth Gell’s touch upon his arm. He turned and noticed that everyone else was quietly leaving. Startled, he glanced at his wrist watch. Three hours! And he hadn’t even realized it!

The next day, he went to the Great Library and began a search through the history section. Nothing too new, he decided. Something written back in the late Four or early Five Hundreds, at least a century old.

He finally found what he was looking for, selected two chapters for the reader, and flipped the switch.

“As has been related in previous chapters,” it began, “several nonhuman races of fair intelligence were discovered, but it was not until YF 313 that any race was found which had ever had interstellar travel.

“In that year, Expedition Ship 983, commanded by Colonel Rupert Forbes, discovered—”

The great ship hung high above the atmosphere of the planet, the engines quiescent. Colonel Forbes waited impatiently for the arrival of the scout ship. When it finally came, he ordered Lieutenant Par l an to report immediately, in person.

“I don’t want anything formal, lieutenant,” he said. “Just, tell me what you found.”

“Well, sir, the planet is inhabited all right, and they’re almost human.” He handed a sheaf of photographs to the colonel and went on. “You can see for yourself. They live in huge cities that look as if at one time they’d been really something, but now they’re falling to pieces; they look old, old as the mountains—weatherbeaten , if you know what I mean, sir.

“Anyway, these people just live in them, they don’t build them. And they don’t use any kind of power.

They light the buildings with lamps that burn some kind of oil, and they do their work by hand.”

“I see,” nodded Colonel Forbes, “backward and ignorant, eh?”

“Yes, sir, in a way. Though they must have had quite a civilization at one time, from the looks of things.”

“I think I’ll get Philology busy on the language right away, and—”

“A thorough study of the language took the better part of a year, and by that time, several other facts made themselves apparent. First, that the natives had no knowledge whatever of science; second—”

“A funny bunch of people, colonel,” commented Lieutenant Parlan . “They believe that they are a part of what might be translated roughly as ‘The Great Empire of Heaven.’ Their word for themselves is ‘Lilaar,’ but that also means ‘sky’ or ‘universe.’ The birth rate is appallingly low; only one child per couple every fifteen or twenty years. I don’t see how they kept themselves from extinction this long.”

Colonel Forbes rubbed a thumb across his chin. “How do you think they’ll react to Federation rule?”

“Duck soup. They have absolutely no weapons; they are strict vegetarians; they’re the laziest and most sheeplike , peaceful people I ever saw.”

“Very well, I’ll send my report in.”

The report went in by subspace radio, propagated at a velocity which, though finite, is so great that the means of measuring it is unknown—the distance required is too great.

Expedition Ship 968 shot off toward her next target, a sun some three point two lightyears distant.

Colonel Forbes addressed his staff: “Gentlemen, we have been away from Earth for better than two years. This is the last stop on our cruise. From here we return home!” There were general smiles and pleased murmurings all around.

“We have done well,” Forbes continued. “We have discovered twelve planets which humanity can colonize, and more than that, one planet inhabited by intelligent beings, a discovery which is extremely rare among ships of the Exploratory Forces.

“Lieutenant Par l an, our contact officer, is, at this moment, exploring the thirteenth and last planet. When he reports back—I expect him any minute—I hope we shall be able to report that we have discovered thirteen habitable worlds on our outward trip; more than any other ship has so far found. To that, we can add the discovery of an alien race on one of the few—”

“Two,” came the voice of Lieu tenant Parl an from the door.

“I beg your pardon?” blinked Forbes, startled at the interruption.

“I said two, sir. We have found two planets inhabited by nonhuman races—or rather race.”

“Please be more explicit, lieutenant,” the colonel said sharply.

“The planet below us, sir, is populated by the Lilaar!”

“All in all, the next seventy years of exploration in that region uncovered seventy-one planets of the Grand Empire of Lilaar, all of which—”

Gorman snapped it off. That was enough. It tallied. He set the other chapter he had selected, and started the reader again.

“Beginning in YF 380, several Expeditionary ships stopped sending in their reports abruptly, and were never heard of again. Because of the obvious dangers inherent in interstellar exploration, not too much significance was attached to these disappearances, although it was noticed that the incidents all took place in one section of the outermost fringes of the Federation. It was not until early in 384 that the truth became known.

“In that year, Expedition Ship 770 reported that it was being attacked by alien forces. They subsequently ceased to report.

“Federal Security forces immediately went into action. The Bio-mathematical Section had long warned of the probability of inimical alien life, and thus the Government was prepared. The cry of ‘Remember the Seven Seven Oh!’ became the battle cry of the Federation. The Interstellar Secrecy and Security Act went into effect and—”

Again Gorman cut the reader off. One more check and he would have what he wanted.

He and the librarian went through the Laws of the Federation for several minutes until he found the original draft of the Act.

It read: “For the security of the Solar Federation … no person, corporation, planetary or system government … shall build or construct … any interstellar vessel, for any use whatsoever, except upon explicit contract with the Federal Government.

“All such now in use shall be … turned over to the Federal Government without delay.

“No subspace radio shall … operate or be operated … without explicit instructions from the Federal Government.”

There was more, but that was all that interested Gorman. He was sure, n o w. Here was what he was looking for.

He had had a small smile at the part that stated that no “person or corporation” would build a spaceship. Any “person or corporation” wealthy and powerful enough to construct one would have long since ceased to be a “person or corporation” as such—they would have become a government.

Then he went out to the Federal Radio Office, sent an Interstellar ‘Gram—three eighty-five a letter for nineteen letters—paid, and left for dinner. After dinner, he poked around until he found a bar near the spaceport which sold a concoction that wasn’t so ungodly sweet, had three drinks, and went to bed.

Next morning, he had company.

“Fleet Intelligence,” said the smartly uniformed captain who stood in the doorway as Gorman opened it. His credentials were in his hand, but Gorman just gave them a quick glance.

“Come in,” he said, mentally parenthesizing that for an Intelligence man, the guy didn’t look too intelligent. Soft, bland face, wide-open eyes that kept blinking like a couple of synchronized camera shutters, and a prim mouth. Behind him were two more nonentities just like him in lieutenant’s uniforms. They all trooped into the room, one right after the other.

“May I see your papers, major?” asked the captain.

“Certainly, captain.” He handed over the thick sheaf of folded papers in their heavy official envelope. The Intelligence man scrutinized them for the better part of ten minutes, moving his lips in a not-quite-inaudible whisper as he did so.

“They seem to be quite in order, sir,” he said when he finished. “They seem to be quite in order.”

“May I ask what the trouble is, captain ?”

“Well, to be frank, there were quite a few people who wondered just how a Spacefleet major, wearing an Outpost Spearhead, happened to get the extended leave required to come to Earth, especially with a war on out there.”

Gorman absorbed that statement for a full second before the full import struck him. The fathead actually did not know the war was over! And had been for better than two and a half years!

He worded his second question cautiously.

“Tell me, captain, isn’t this stuff -radioed into GHQ?”

The captain looked startled. “Why … ah … yes … yes, I believe it is. But after all, major, you must realize that such things are merely for the record. Now that we have checked your papers, I have no doubt that my superiors will check them against the files to confirm them, but up to now, there has been no reason to look over those ‘grams. They are simply received and filed until needed.”

Gorman, still cautious, worded his next question a little more broadly. “But why? I should think you’d want to know what’s going on in the Galaxy.”

The captain’s smile was a little superior. “My dear major, do you realize the immensity of correspondence that must come from better than seventy thousand million cubic lightyears of space filled with uncounted thousands of billions of living beings? Why, it couldn’t possibly be all correlated! I’m afraid, major, that you are thinking in terms of planetary governments. The Federation simply couldn’t be run that way.”

Gorman realized then why no one knew the war was over. It wasn’t, really; there were still a few mopping-up operations to be taken care of, still a few Thassela attempting to flee from the Federation Spacefleet. No one headquarters anywhere in the Outposts had sent the specific message: WAR OVER EXCEPT FOR MOP-UP. It would take a correlation of all the millions upon millions of reports from each of the widely scattered planets of the far-flung Outpost stars.

He chuckled mentally at the thought that several thousand of the clerks in the Federation offices each knew a tiny fraction of the fact that the Human-Thassela War was over. And who was he to tell them ? After all, he was no official spokesman for the Outpost Fleet; he might not—he probably wouldn’t—be believed.

“You’re probably right, captain; I must seem a bit provincial to you. Well, if you’re quite satisfied I—”

“Ah—one more question, major.” He ruffled through a notebook. “What was the meaning of the ‘gram you sent to a Major Mark Gorman on Kaibere IV last night? It reads: Altair cap sppt six mos. What does that mean?”

Gorman shrugged. “At three eighty-five, space rates, I saved a devil of a lot of money by not saying, ‘Dear Mark, please meet me at the Altair capitol spaceport six months from now.’ O.K.?”

“Why say ‘Altair capitol’? ‘Pelma’ would have been a great deal shorter. Would’ve saved you fifteen-forty.” The captain did not seem to be questioning in an official manner, now, he just seemed genuinely interested.

“I’m no stellographer . Neither is Mark. Tell me; what is the only planet of Meargrave?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you could get there ?”

“Yes. Easily.”

“What if I told you to go to Hell?”

“What?” The captain looked scandalized, shocked, and insulted, all in one face.

“Hell, my dear captain, happens to be the only planet of Meargrave.” Gorman particularly liked to use that example. It had a shock effect he was fond of.

“Oh.” The face cleared. “I see what you mean. Well, sir, I think everything is in order. Thank you, major, for your co-operation.”

He saluted and left, the two lieutenants following silently after.

Gorman sat down on the bed, looked wonderingly after them for a moment, then grinned.

“What a bunch of fogheads . The Thassela could have battled their way clear in to Procyon before they’d know it.”

He had six months to wait. The first three he spent on Earth. He wanted to se e the entire planet but he just didn’t have the time; therefore a representative sample would have to do.

He noticed quite early that most of Earth’s inhabitants, both Human and Lilaarian, avoided him after first contact, especially if he mentioned anything about the war, or if they happened to see and know the Silver Spearhead. He knew what they must be thinking: Here is a soldier, a killer, back from his awful business. Here is a man who has been t rained to murder other beings. What if he gets bored with us? What if we anger him somehow? What then? Would he not just as soon kill a Human or Lilaarian as a Thasselan? Perhaps. It would not be too wise to associate with him, at any rate. .

They were polite, but evasive.

Not, he reflected, that he blamed them. He was probably the first real veteran they had ever seen. To them, the war had not been close. They had lived with it all their lives, as he had, but it was not the same. To them, it was a vague thing; something two thousand lightyears away that they heard of once in a great while and dismissed distastefully.

If a fully armed and armored Thasselan battle fleet had started for Earth yesterday, it would be a full two years at top speed before they would arrive; There would be plenty of time to prepare.

Even the planets near the periphery of the Federation shared, to some slight extent, the feeling Earthmen had toward the returned fighting man. He remembered Telsonn , two ship-months, a hundred and fifty lightyears, in from the front. They had had men, sons, fathers, and husbands, who had fought in the war, although not actually as fighting men, and even they shied away from their homecoming relatives as though they were some other sort of life.

Here on Earth, of course, it was immensely worse. For the past century or more, no Earthman had volunteered for front duty, and it had not been necessary to order them there; the war had been going well, even then. The only duty imposed upon Spacefleet men of Earth was the Ferry Service; the duty of taking the fabulously expensive and highly necessary spaceships out for a month or two to some relay point where they would be picked up by another crew and taken a little farther, and so on until they reached their destination. The original crew would return by luxury liner to Earth for a leave, then pick up another ship.

After three months, Gorman grabbed the first available ship for Altair and—what was it?—Pelma, the System’s capitol.

The great automatic ship had only three p assengers besides himself. No one did much traveling any more, and those who did weren’t very interesting to talk to. Major Gorman kept to his cabin most of the time.

When he had begun his long journey in from Ferridel, now almost three years ago, he had been vastly interested in the liners, so different were they from the battleships he was used to. They were completely automatic, pursuing and correcting their courses through those immense distances with unerring precision, requiring no human hand at their control. Indeed, no human being could possibly move fast enough or think fast enough to control anything moving at nearly two hundred million miles per second.

The ships were robots, and for that very reason they had been fascinating. But they were blind, reasonless robots, designed to take their course and return. They had no real intelligence, and they soon palled on him. He had come to ignore them completely.

The trip took only a few days, but he was heartily glad when it was over.

Pelma of Altair, he soon discovered, was a great deal like Earth. Too much, in fact. The one redeeming factor was that here there were fewer people who recognized the Spearhead on his shoulder. Several times, on Earth, he had been tempted to put on civilian clothes, and had even gone so far as to try a suit on, but in the first place, it was strictly against military law, and in the second, civvies didn’t feel natural on his body.

After he had been there a few days, he received another visit from Intelligence, and they had evidently had no word from Earth that he was cleared there. The interview was shorter than the first had been, but the end result was the same. Major Gorman went on about his business.

Life suddenly became infinitely more bearable in the middle of the fourth week. She was sitting on a little grassy knoll in one of the innumerable parks, scattering food to a flock of the little bushy-tailed mammals that seemed to infest so many planets in this part of the Federation. Gorman watched her for a long time, trying to figure out an angle of approach that would work-but wouldn’t be too obvious.

She seemed to have some of the animals rather well tamed; they would come right up to her with their funny scrambling gait, snatch the food right out of her fingers, and then run off, nibbling it between their forepaws.

Suddenly,’ she screamed and jerked her hand away from one of the beasts. Gorman saw immediately what had happened: one of the little monsters had bitten her.

Arise, brave soul, and dash to her rescue, Gorman thought, and made motions to suit.

“What happened, Miss?” he asked, pretending a great worry over what he knew was an inconsequential wound.

She was crying and could hardly speak, but she held the injured and bleeding digit out for his inspection.

“Hm -m-m,” he hm -mm’d . He took an ampoule out of the E-kit at his belt, aimed it at the tip of the finger he was holding, and squeezed the end. It spat a fine cloud of mist at the ragged little incision. Then he wrapped the finger.

“I think that’ll do it. You can go to a physician if you want, but I don’t believe it will be necessary.”

She smiled prettily. “It doesn’t hurt a bit, now. Thank you”—her gray eyes darted to his collar—”Major, thank you very much.”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to run off,” cautioned Gorman. “You really ought to go somewhere and sit down for a while; animal bites can be poisonous sometimes, you know. Is there somewhere we can—”

She looked a little worried. “Why … why, yes, I know a diner down the parkway . Do you really think-?”

Gorman didn’t know quite what to think. Was she taking him seriously, or did she think he wasn’t quite bright? Who cared? Play it along, boy, play it along.

“I wasn’t thinking of a diner, exactly. You see, it is a well-known fact that alcohol is just the thing for bites—provided that they’re treated first, of course.”

She brightened again. “Oh, really ? I didn’t know that. I suppose I had better have some, then.”

They had some. The place labeled itself a “cocktail lounge,” but it mixed drinks out of the assorted flavors and synthetics, then spiked them with a little bit of straight ethanol. It took quite a little talking to convince the steward that he should jigger up the mechanism so it would serve the ethanol with nothing but soda water and a dash of bitters, but Gorman finally did it. It took him almost as long to convince the girl that she should drink the stuff, but he finally did that, too.

Her name, it turned out, was Lanina Indar , and she was a music interpreter.

Upon “questioning, Gorman discovered that a music interpreter interpreted music, a fact which he had already suspected. He asked her to explain further.

“Well, you see, it’s this way. Lilaarian music all means something. It’s very, very old music, most of it, dating back to the old Grand Empire itself. The Lilaarians know, or, rather, they feel exactly what the music means. It’s really a language of sorts, you know, except that it expresses mood and emotion rather than ideas or anything like that. You see?”

Gorman did see, after a fashion. He waved a vague gesture into the air. “What is that saying?”

She listened for a moment to the soft, pulsing rhythm, then closed her eyes. Her lips began to move softly.

“We dream of peace, to sleep and dream; to quietness and gentle sleep our goal; we rest forever—”

She went on like that for the better part of ten minutes, and Gorman was reminded, somehow, of an old poem he had read in one of the museums he had visited - on Earth. Something about—

“… To die, to sleep; To sleep : perchance to dream: ay , there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause.”

That, at least, was a rough translation. He wondered, fleetingly, what that ancient bard would have thought of Earth today. Then, his thoughts were broken by Lanina’s voice.

“See? Isn’t it beautiful? Of course, to really understand it, you have to listen closely and listen to a lot of it, but eventually, you really get the feel of the music; then it comes easily.”

“It sounds a little morbid to me,” Gorman murmured.

“Oh no it isn’t, really; it isn’t at all. It’s sort of beautiful and peaceful.”

“Are they all like that?”

“Oh, no. Some of them deal with pure beauty, others with light and color, and—”

Gorman listened for a long time, nodding his head occasionally, and sticking in an appropriate remark now and then, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was thinking.

Here I am again, listening to a nice dissertation on Lilaarian music. Tomorrow night, it will be flowers, and the next night it will be statuary, and the night after that light symphonies of music again.

No! I’m going to get this piece of fluff to talk about something else if I have to completely re-educate her all by myself!

He knew from the beginning that such an education would have to be begun on her level. He began by painting word-pictures of the awful beauty of interstellar space, of the grandeur of the vast loneliness and emptiness between the stars; he went from there to the wonders of adventure, the desire to explore and see things that no man had ever seen before. He talked carefully, choosing each word for semantic content on the girl’s own level, twisting the conversation back toward his own goal every time she tried to throw it off course.

In the end, he didn’t think he had been too successful. After two months of education, it was a little disheartening to find that she didn’t really seem to be interested in what he was saying. A blow to the ego, to say the least.

She was with him the day Mark arrived. They were eating dinner in the spaceport cafe, when the ship arrived. Lanina had kept nagging him to tell her who they were going to meet, but all he’d tell her was “a relative.”

When Major Mark Gorman came in and sat down, she watched the back-slapping and greetings with slightly startled eyes.

“Why, you’re twins!” she exclaimed, at last.

“Oh, no,” laughed Karl. “Mark is older than I by several years. Right, grampaw ?”

“Right. But look, junior, where’s your manners?”

“Oh. Sorry. Lanina, Mark Gorman.”

Lanina searched Mark’s face carefully. When he took off his cap she smiled. “You don’t look any older, but I can see now that you aren’t identical twins. Your hair is light-brown, almost the same color as mine; Karl’s is almost black.”

Mark rubbed his hands together briskly. “Well, son, what’s on the agenda? How was Earth? I didn’t come through there, so I figured you’d have to tell me all about it.”

Gorman looked comically downcast. “We are the Forgotten Men. No one appreciates us around here. In fact, nobody even knows we exist.”

“That’s about the way I had it made out. Shame.”

They eyed each other sadly for a moment, then broke out laughing. “Come on,” said Gorman, “I know of a little place where the three of us can talk. I have bribed the automatics to make something that borders on being fit to drink. You have to watch those synthetics. They flavor them with some frightful messes.”

The conversation that night was sometimes over Lanina’s head. Most of the time the men talked to her, and the conversation was very stimulating, but every once in a while, they seemed to run across some private joke that she couldn’t fathom, especially those about Lilaarians . Oh, well. She didn’t understand Spacefleet men, anyway.

The next morning, they were in the Spaceport office quite early, poring over timetables, making calculations, checking back over odd passenger lists, and looking up immigration and emigration statistics. It was nearly nighttime before Karl Gorman was able to place his hand over a section of the tank chart and say: “Here.”

“Here what?” Lanina asked confusedly.

Mark smiled. “My friend, the idiot, the y not have told you, my dear, but I am a man with itchy feet. We were just deciding on the proper spot for my vacation—for the next five or six years.”

The girl turned pleading eyes on Karl. “You … you aren’t going with him? Are you?”

“Nope. I have decided to become a homebody. I like Pelma.”

“But won’t you have to go back to duty?”

“Nope, again. I am on ‘indefinite leave’; don’t have to go back until they call me.” To which he added mentally: And I don’t think they will.

The years passed swiftly for Karl Gorman, and yet, in another way, they were easy-going and full. Before the end of the first year he had acquired an apartment, and the lettering on the door said: KARL GORMAN, THEORETICAL MATHEMATICIAN.

It was as good a title and profession as any, and quite true, although there was little call for his services. Nevertheless, he worked at it. He and Lanina set up a small calculator in one of the rooms, and he patiently taught her how to set up equations on it after he had written them out. She never really quite learned what she was doing, but after he showed her how the music of Lilaar could be interpreted mathematically, she loved the work he gave her to do.

Meanwhile, the little, and highly illegal subspace radio began receiving reports from Mark’s equally illegal set.

Karrvon ; three hundred lightyears from Earth; Index, point six three.

Ressalin : four hundred twenty lightyears; Index, point five oh.

Mensidor ; six hundred ninety lightyears ; Index, point three nine.

Hessor -Del; eight hundred lightyears; Index, point two one.

Thilia : twelve hundred lightyears ; Index, point oh eight’.

And Gorman carefully fed them all into the computer, came -up with figures that were meaningless to anyone but himself, fed these back in, and came up with figures that were even more meaningless, if possible.

At other times, he computed Lanina’s music for her, although he told her Hot to tell anyone where she had obtained her results.

“Every other interpreter would want me to do it, and I haven’t that much time,” was the absolutely untruthful answer he gave her.

And, again, he would go out to art galleries and measure lines and curves and color wave length and intensity. And these, too, went into the computer, and came out unrecognizable.

And one morning, when nearly six years had passed, Gorman and Lanina were eating breakfast when the door chime announced a visitor.

Mark Gorman was back again.

The Spacefleet Intelligence men and the CTD were forty-five minutes behind him. This time they hadn’t delegated the duty to a mere captain; having evidently decided they should outrank their quarry, they had sent two colonels.

“Which one of you is Major Gorman?” asked the tough-looking CID man.

Two thumbs jerked simultaneously. Two voices said: “Him.”

The colonel glared. “Let me see your papers!”

He looked them over, then looked back at the two who were standing at attention before him. “Very funny. And for that remark, I think we’ll take both of you in.”

“On what charge, sir?” asked Mark.

“Grand larceny and interstellar piracy. To be explicit, for feloniously disrupting the robot controls of, diverting the course of, and taking illegal possession of an interstellar passenger liner.”

Karl gazed upon Mark with a mock glower. “Shame on you.”

Mark tried to look innocent. “Well, nobody was using it.”

“Enough!” barked the colonel savagely. “Let’s go !”

Lanina said nothing, but her eyes were wide with terror. When they left, she was sobbing quietly.

An hour later, the Majors Gorman were sitting on a bench in a windowless cell, watching the door slide shut with a click.

“And now what?” asked Karl.

“And now, my boy, we are to be left for a time in order to thoroughly discuss our crime, so that concealed pickups can relay the complete details to our stuffy friend, the colonel.”

Then the shock came. Energy rippled searingly through their bodies, and they sagged slowly to the floor.

When they opened their eyes, they were seated in a softly luxurious room in comfortable chairs, bound there by restraining, but not uncomfortable straps. Before them was a large, finely paneled desk. Behind it was seated a Lilaarian. Karl recognized him. It was Sarth Gell.

“Ah, you are awake,” said Gell.

“An astute observation, to say the least, Master Gell.”

“Oh,” said Mark. “You know this pleasant fellow?”

“Ah, yes. We got sotty together some years back.”

“Permit me to correct your brother, Mark Gorham,” Gell interjected softly. “He got sotty . Lilaaria n s , in case you didn’t know, eschew intoxicants in any form.”

“I didn’t know,” Mark murmured. “But it’s fascinatin ‘ information. Do go on.”

“I shall. I am about to make a very long, but, I trust, not tiresome speech. I hope both of you can restrain your admittedly very witty remarks until I am through.

“To begin with, let me tell you that I know exactly what you two have been doing for the last several years, and have followed your progress with avid interest. You have discovered that we of the Lilaar have begun to, and eventually will, take over complete control of the Federation, although the Federation will not exist as such by that time.

“As you, Mark, have discovered in your wanderings in that stolen spaceship, the regularly scheduled flights in that portion of the Galaxy are no longer being made. The planets there have not made any reports to Earth for some years, in some cases more than a century. Because of the very carefully planned decay of Earth’s correlation system, they do not as yet know this, and by the time they do, it will be too late.

“And you, Karl, have discovered that our subtly hypnotic art forms are the means we use to further our purpose.

“Because you have discovered these things, I am sorry to say that I must forever prevent that information from reaching Earth. You will never report what you have found.

“Now as to why and how we have done this. To begin, I must go back a good many centuries; back to the first century of the Federation. And I must also explain exactly who and what the Lilaar are.

“We of the Lilaar, you see, are immortal.”

Karl Gorman’s eyes narrowed. “Precisely what do you mean by ‘immortal ‘, Gell? That’s a pretty broad term.”

“By that, I mean that we do not suffer, as you do, from the racial disease known as ‘old age.’ Except for accidents and a few rare diseases, there is nothing to keep us from living forever. You must understand this in order to understand what you have seen.

“Our birth rate, as you know, has been referred to as being extremely low. Actually, quite the reverse is true. Each couple averages one birth every thirty years. That means that our population is doubled every sixty Earth-years!

“Of necessity, therefore, we had to expand. And in doing so we found that we had competition. You, of Earth, and the Thassela. We are not, however, fighters. Because of the vast value of life, we cannot, by our very nature, /take the life of an intelligent living being.” Gell’s face twisted as he said this, as though he were going to be sick at the very thought of death.

He paused to relax for a moment, then went on.

“When your first ship found us, in YF 313, the Plan had already been in operation for some two hundred of your years. We pretended to be decadent. We made you believe that our glorious Grand Empire was dead. Neither is true.

“We knew in the beginning that you r race, being inherently what it was, would eventually win the Thassela-Human war. Therefore, we are permitting you to do so. At the same time, we are completely undermining your once-tight and compact organization of government. The Federation should collapse in about one hundred fifty to two hundred years, at which time you will have won the war with the Thassela.”

“It is obvious,” remarked Mark calmly, “that you have, and can use, a space drive capable of much greater velocities than ours. Tell me, why don’t you use it?”

Cell’s brows lifted in surprise. “You are a very observant young man in some ways, but in others you are not. But”—he shrugged—”I will answer the question. Yes, we have had the infinity drive for many hundreds of years. We do not use it within the boundaries of the Federation unless absolutely necessary because it interferes with subspace radio, and is, therefore, detectable.

“Our kidnaping you from under the noses of the Spacef l eet CID was done only because of the extreme urgency of the situation. We could not permit you to return to Earth.”

“May I ask why you are dooming the Federation?” Mark asked.

“We need the planets which you are using. Our population growth has required a tremendous amount of shifting about in the Federation, and a great deal of name-changing in order that your race may never discover the fact that we do not . . , ah … die.” The last word was almost a whisper. “This is a nuisance and a bother. We are, however, eliminating it, since there will soon be no subspace radios in operation near our portion of the Federation to report the fact that there are certain irregularities in our life span.”

Gell placed his fingertips together and smiled benevolently.

“Our plan, as you can see, is working well. The Thassela are too monstrously savage, too physically unlike us to have permitted our infiltration. The Humans, on the other hand, have proved themselves relatively easy to manage.

“And, if you will reason it out logically, you will see that it is all for the best. Both you humans and the Thassela are basically unfit for the role of Galactic rulers. You are basically killers; destroyers of life; diseases which should never have evolved!” His voice shook with loathing.

“Careful, Gell,” Karl Gorman cut in. “You’ll get high blood pressure.” But Sar t h Gell was calm again.

“The disease will be permitted to run its course, but by isolating the colonies of infection we will be able to control and eventually eliminate it. The immortals must rule the galaxy.”

“What about us? If you can’t murder us in cold blood, what do you intend to do to put us permanently out of the way?” Mark was purposely gory for Gell’s discomfort.

“We are leaving you here. The whole planet is yours. It will not be required by our race for another century. This house has been constructed for your comfort, but there is nothing else on this entire world in the way of civilized artifacts. You can not build spaceships; on the nearer of the two satellites is a device which will prevent your sending a subspace message, even if you should be able to construct a radio. You will remain here for the rest of your lives.”

“This planet? Where are we?” Mark’s voice was cold.

“While you were unconscious, you were transported here by one of our infinity ships. When this sun sets, I rather imagine you will like the view; you are in the center of the vast star clouds beyond Sagittarius, thirty thousand lightyears from Earth. When I return, this planet will again be vacant and ready for our use. The Lilaar can afford to wait.

Sarth Gell, the Lilaarian, turned and left the room. In a few moments the ground quivered a little, and there was the distant buzz of a space vessel as it lifted, leaving the two behind to work, their way out of the straps that bound them to the chairs, knowing they could never work their way out of the vaster bonds of space.

“Are they gone?” Karl asked after a moment.

Mark Gorman’s brain reached out through the twists of spacetime and contacted that of the robot in the Lilaarian ship. And the stupid, unimaginative thing answered truthfully.

Mark smiled. “Yes, they’re gone.”

The two stood, the binding straps splitting and rending as they did so.

“Now what, Grandfather?” Karl asked.

“I have been sending in my reports regularly, ever since we were assigned to discover why the Federation Government had become so lax. Now we know. I’ll finish my report so that you can send in the math involved.”

“Check. I’ll wait.”

Mark Gorman lay on a soft couch in the Lilaar-provided room, and closed his eyes. Again his brain reached out, this time further, much further than before. Finally he contacted it, fitted himself in, and took control.

And, more than thirty thousand lightyears away, on Ferridel III, a robot controlled printer began to make impressions on a strand of ultrafine plastic, subtly altering its molecular structure.

-

A REPORT ON THE GRAND

EMPIRE OF THE LILAAR

From: Mark of Ferridel III; somewhere in the center of the Galaxy.

To: Commanding General, Outpost Spacefleet, Control Division.

Via: Interbrain Paracontrol beam.

From the above portions of this report, I believe it will be possible for our psychologists to find the precise stresses necessary to disrupt their Empire. These will, I believe, be slight, since it is my opinion that they are already psychotic to some degree in that they do not admit their position in the basic realities of the Universe.

I give as examples the references to their living “forever”; a self-obvious fallacy, and their so-called “infinity” drive, also as obvious. The long and boastful speech which Sarth Gell made just before he deserted us here is also significant. Their basic revulsion to death is another factor, in that it springs, not from a high moral code, but from fear.

It is because of this fear, I believe, that they, like Earth, do not know that the Thasselan war is over. They avoided the entire sector. It is also responsible for their ignorance of our existence.

Earth, because of the Lilaarian disruption of Federal Coordination. and Correlation, has forgotten us.

My grandson, Karl, will send in the complete mathematical analysis through me as soon as he has incorporated the data just received, but for those, not equipped with computer brains, I think the following will explain in some measure our position: When, three centuries ago, it became obvious that no ordinary robot could control an-interstellar battleship to the extent necessary to overwhelm the antlike coordination of the Thassela, Dr. Theodore Gorr was sent to the Outpost planets to build a robot’ which could do the job required.

At this time, the Lilaar were not as yet beginning their actual infiltration, since they had not been accepted as citizens of the Federation; therefore, they knew nothing of Dr. Gorr’s highly secret mission. When Dr. Gorr produced the first Gorr-man on Ferridel III, he probably did not realize that the real enemy of Earth was attacking from far across the Federation, but nevertheless, as is well known, we were so equipped as to be able to ward off attack in almost any conceivable form.

The Lilaar, naturally, could know nothing of this, but they could have deduced it logically had not their fear of death kept them from the immediate area of the war. No human being is capable of computing the forces and the vectors thereof which obtain at ultra-light velocities in interstellar space. Had the Lilaar known that our fighting ships do not have built-in control robots, they would have known that they were controlled by some other type, and thus would have known of our existence. My grandson, by the way, has shown that the probable deduction would have been wrong, insofar as our method of ship control would have been assumed to be by the so-called “subspace” radio, and not by the actual application of mental energy.

Our activities for the past ten years w ere so calculated as to be suspicious only to the Lilaar. This was necessary because Karl’s equations showed that the final factors could only come from a Lilaarian speaking of his own free will.

Karl, therefore, stayed on Pelma of Altair after his preliminary reconnaissance, while I inspected the area already under the control of Lilaar. My grandson, as you know, while only thirty at the time he was commissioned a major twelve years ago, is deserving of the rank in every way. He is, however, one of the new Type Beta Gorr-men, whose purpose is socio-mathematical computation, and therefore is not telepathic and cannot direct a ship as we of Type Alpha because of the extra brain capacity required for these forms of higher-stage computers.

On Pelma, he set up a “front” as a practical mathematician and actually bought himself an electrical computer which he taught a young human girl to operate, in order to free his brain of the tiresome details of some of the simpler problems. He investigated Lilaarian art-forms, computed their hypnotic qualities, figured in the indices of general effect which I gave him from space, and entered all these into what he calls the Lilaarian Equations.

In general, these equations show the following: A. The Lilaar, because their fear of death prevents them from practicing birth control, will so overpopulate their planets that they will starve, since they require as fuel the hard-to-synthesize carbohydrates, but can not also utilize, as we do, the lower alcohols.

B. Even their so-called “infinity drive” can not move them to new planets fast enough, as a little figuring with geometrical progression will show. Their population doubles every sixty years; therefore, their portion of the Galaxy can be shown to be an expanding sphere which must double in volume every second generation.

The Lilaarians must, however, go to planets outside the “surface” of that sphere, a surface which is constantly decreasing in proportion to the total volume. Theoretically, this would reach a point where it would be physically impossible for them to be “emitted” from the “radiating surface” fast enough. Long before that point is reached, however, the area in the center of this sphere will begin to starve. The death of its inhabitants will start a mass psychosis of the entire race which will eventually destroy them.

C. The Lilaar will be unable to admit this, even to themselves, and will, therefore, do nothing to prevent it.

We will stay upon this planet until the scientists of Ferridel learn the secret of the Lilaar drive, which, it is estimated, will not take more than from ten to sixty Earth-years.

We can well afford to wait.

Mark of Ferridel III Major, Spacefleet Ship Control

The End