He looked at me unwinkingly.
“What good has it done to keep apart?”
I opened my mouth, and shut it again. Last time it had been Japan, an island chain a little smaller than California. In the next one, half the world would have been against us.
“The problem is not easy, it is very difficult. But to solve it by helping is possible. To solve it by doing nothing is not possible.”
“Harbors,” I said. “Shipping. Soil conservation. Communications. Flood control.”
“You do not believe these things can be done if there are no nations?”
“No. We haven’t got time enough to pick up all the pieces. It’s a hell of a lot easier to knock things apart than to put them together again.”
“Your people have done things more difficult than this. You do not believe now, but you will see it done.”
After a moment I said, “We’re supposed to become a member of your galactic union now. Now that you’ve pulled our teeth. Who’s going to build the ships?
“Those who build them now.”
I said, “Governments build them now.”
“No. Men build ships. Men invent ships and design ships. Government builds nothing but more government.”
I put my fists in my pockets and walked over to the window. Outside, a man went hurrying by in the rain, one hand at his hat-brim, the other at his chest. He didn’t look around as he passed; his coffee-brown face was intent and impersonal. I watched him until he turned the corner, out of sight.
He had never heard of me, but his life would be changed by what I had done. His descendants would know my name; they would be bored by it in school, or their mothers would frighten them with it after dark ... .
Aza-Kra said, “To talk of these things is useless. If I would lie, I would not tell you that I lie. And if I would lie about these things, I would lie well; you would not find the truth by questions. You must wait. Soon you will know.”
I looked at him. “When your friends come.”
“Yes,” he said.
And the feathery tips of his neck-spines delicately trembled.
They came on the last day of August—fifty great rotiform ships drifting down out of space. No radar spotted them; no planes or interceptor rockets went up to meet them. They followed the terminator around, landing at dawn: thirty in the Americas, twenty in Europe and Asia, five in Africa, one each in England, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan.
Each one was six hundred feet across, but they rested lightly on the ground. Where they landed on a sloping land, slender curved supporting members came out of the doughnut-shaped rim, as dainty as insect’s legs, and the fat lozenge of the hub lowered itself on the five fat spokes until it touched the earth.
Their doors opened.
In twenty-four days I had watched the nations of the Earth melt into shapelessness like sculptures molded of silicone putty. Armies, navies, air forces, police forces lost their cohesion first. In the beginning there were individual desertions, atoms escaping one at a time from the mass; later, when the pay failed to arrive, when there were no orders or else orders that could not be executed, men and women simply went home, orderly, without haste, in thousands.
Every useful item of equipment that could be carried or driven or flown went with them. Tractors, trucks, jeeps, bulldozers gladdened the hearts of farmers from Keokuk to Kweiyang. Bombers, small boats, even destroyers and battleships were in service as commercial transports. Quartermasters’ stores were carried away piecemeal or in ton lots. Guns and ammunition rusted undisturbed.
Stock markets crashed. Banks failed. Treasuries failed. National governments broke down into states, provinces, cantons. In the United States, the President resigned his office on the 18th and left the White House, whose every window had been broken and whose lawn was newly landscaped with eggshells and orange rind. The Vice-President resigned the next day, leaving the Presidency, in theory, to the Speaker of the House; but the Speaker was at home on his Arkansas farm; Congress had adjourned on the 17th.
Everywhere it was the same. The new Governments of Asia and Eastern Europe, of Spain and Portugal and Argentina and Iran, died stillborn.
The Moon colonies had been evacuated; work had stopped on the Mars rocket. The men on duty in the orbital stations, after an anxious week, had reached an agreement for mutual disarmament and had come down to Earth.
Seven industries out of ten had closed down. The dollar was worth half a penny, the pound sterling a little more; the ruble, the Reichsmark, the franc, the sen, the yen, the rupee were waste paper.
The great cities were nine-tenths deserted, gutted by fires, the homes of looters, rats and roaches.
Even the local governments, the states, the cantons, the counties, the very townships, were too fragile to stand. All the arbitrary lines on the map had lost their meaning.
You could not say any more, “Japan will—” or “India is moving toward—” It was startling to realize that; to have to think of a sprawling, amorphous, unfathomable mass of infinitely varied human beings instead'of a single inclusive symbol. It made you wonder if the symbol had ever had any connection with reality at alclass="underline" whether there had ever been such a thing as a nation.
Toward the end of the month, I thought I saw a flicker of hope. The problem of famine was being attacked vigorously and efficiently by the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and thousands of local volunteer groups: they commandeered fleets of trucks, emptied warehouses with a calm disregard of legality, and distributed the food where it was most needed. It was not enough—too much food had been destroyed and wasted by looters, too much had spoiled through neglect, and too much had been destroyed in the field by wandering, half-starved bands of homeless—but it was a beginning; it was something.
Other groups were fighting the problem of these wolfpacks, with equally encouraging results. Farmers were forming themselves into mutual-defense groups, “communities of force.” Two men could take any property from one man of equal strength without violence, without the penalty of pain; but not from two men, or three men.
One district warned the next when a wolf-pack was on the way, and how many to expect. When the pack converged on a field or a storehouse, men in equal or greater numbers were there to stand in the way. If the district could absorb say, ten workers, that many of the pack were offered the option of staying; the rest had to move on. Gradually, the packs thinned.
In the same way, factories were able to protect themselves from theft. By an extension of the idea, even the money problem began to seem soluble. The old currency was all but worthless, and an individual’s promise to pay in kind was no better as a medium of exchange; but promissory notes obligating whole communities could and did begin to circulate. They made an unwieldly currency, their range was limited, and they depreciated rapidly. But it was something; it was a beginning.
Then the wheel-ships came.
In every case but one, they were cautious. They landed in conspicious positions, near a city or a village, and in the dawn light, before any man had come near them, oddly-shaped things came out and hurriedly unloaded boxes and bales, hundreds, thousands, a staggering array. They set up sun-reflecting beacons; then the ships rose again and disappeared, and when the first men came hesitantly out to investigate, they found nothing but the beacon, the acre of carefully-stacked boxes, and the signs, in the language of the country, that said:
THIS FOOD IS SENT BY THE PEOPLES OF OTHER WORLDS TO HELP YOU IN YOUR NEED. ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS.