I knew the reason for my nightmares.
I knew why, time and again when I had expected Aza-Kra to be reading my mind, I had found that he wasn’t. He did it only when he had to; it was too painful.
And one thing more:
I knew that when the true history of this time came to be written, I needn’t worry about my place in it. My name would be there, all right, but nobody would remember it once he had shut the book.
Nobody would use my name as an insulting epithet, and nobody would carve it on the bases of any statutes, either.
I wasn’t the hero of the story.
It was Aza-Kra who had come down alone to a planet so deadly that no-one else would risk his life on it until he had softened it up. It was Aza-Kra who had lived for nearly a month with a suspicious, irrational, combative, uncivilized flesh-eater. It was Aza-Kra who had used me, every step of of the way—used my provincial loyalties and my self-interest and my prejudices.
He had done all that, weary, tortured, half-starved... and he’d been scared to death the whole time.
We made two stops up the coast and then moved into Algeria and the Sudan: landing, unloading, taking off again, following the dawn line. The other ships, Aza-Kra explained, would keep on circling the planet until enough food had been distributed to prevent any starvation until the next harvests. This one was going only as far as the middle of the North American continent—to drop me off. Then it was going to take Aza-Kra home.
I watched what happened after we left each place in a vision device they had. In some places there was more hesitation than in others, but in the end they always took the food: in jeep-loads, by pack train, in baskets balanced on their heads.
Some of the repeaters worried me. I said, “How do you know it’ll get distributed to everybody who needs it?”
I might have known the answer: “They will distribute it. No man can let his neighbor starve while he has plenty.”
The famine relief was all they had come for, this time. Later, when we had got through the crisis, they would come back; and by that time, remembering the food, people would be more inclined to take them on their merits instead of shuddering because they had too many eyes or fingers. They would help us when we needed it, they would show us the way up the ladder, but we would have to do the work ourselves.
He asked me not to publish the story of Chillicothe and the month we had spent together. “Later, when it will hurt no one, you can explain. Now there is no need to make anyone ashamed; not even the officials of your government. It was not their fault; they did not make the planet as it was.”
So there went even that two-bit chance at immortality.
It was still dawn when we landed on the bluff across the river from my home; sky and land and water were all the same depthless cool gray, except for the hairline of scarlet in the east. Dew was heavy on the grass, and the air had a smell that made me think of wood smoke and dry leaves.
He came out of the ship with me to say good-by.
“Will you be back?” I asked him.
He buzzed wordlessly in a way I had begun to recognize; I think it was his version of a laugh. “I think not for a very long time. I have already neglected my work too much.”
“This isn’t your work—opening up new planets?”
“No. It is not so common a thing, that a race becomes ready for space travel. It has not happened anywhere in the galaxy for twenty thousand of your years. I believe, and I hope, that it will not happen again for twenty thousand more. No, I am ordinarily a maker of—you have not the word, it is like porcelain, but a different material. Perhaps some day you will see a piece that I have made. It is stamped with my name.”
He held out his hand and I took it. It was an awkward grip; his hand felt unpleasantly dry and smooth to me, and I suppose mine was clammy to him. We both let go as soon as we decently could.
Without turning, he walked away from me up the ramp. I said, “Aza-Kra!”
“Yes?”
“Just one more question. The galaxy’s a big place. What happens if you miss just one bloodthirsty race that’s ready to boil out across the stars—or if nobody has the guts to go and do to them what you did to us?”
“Now you begin to understand,” he said. “That is the question the people of Mars asked us about you ... twenty thousand years ago.”
The story ends there, properly, but there’s one more thing I want to say.
When Aza-Kra’s ship lifted and disappeared, and I walked down to the bottom of the bluff and across the bridge into the city, I knew I was going back to a life that would be a lot different from the one I had known.
For one thing, the Herald-Star was all but done for when I came home: wrecked presses, half the staff gone, supplies running out. I worked hard for a little over a year trying to revive it, out of sentiment, but I knew there were more important things to be done than publishing a newspaper.
Like everybody else, I got used to the changes in the world and in the people around me: to the peaceful, unworried feel of places that had been electric with tension; to the kids—the wonderful, incredible kids; to the new kind of excitement, the excitement that isn’t like the night before execution, but like the night before Christmas.
But I hadn’t realized how much I had changed, myself, until something that happened a week ago.
I’d lost touch with Eli Freeman after the paper folded; I knew he had gone into pest control, but I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing until he turned up one day on the wheat-and-dairy farm I help run, south of the Platte in what used to be Nebraska. He’s the advance man for a fleet of spray planes working out of Omaha, aborting rabbits.
He stayed on for three days, lining up a few of the stiffnecked farmers in this area that don’t believe in hormones or airplanes either; in his free time he helped with the harvest, and I saw a lot of him.
On his last night we talked late, working up from the old times to the new times and back again until there was nothing more to say. Finally, when we had both been quiet for a long time, he said something to me that is the only accolade I am likely to get, and oddly enough, the only one I want.
“You know, Bob, if it wasn’t for that unique face of yours, it would be hard to believe you’re the same guy I used to work for.”
I said, “Hell, was I that bad?”
“Don’t get shirty. You were okay. You didn’t bleed the help or kick old ladies, but there just wasn’t as much to you as there is now. I don’t know,” he said. “You’re—more human.”
More human.
Yes. We all are.