“Those are just three of the questions we can’t answer,” he said. “He claims that his home world revolves around a sun in our constellation of Aquarius; he says that it isn’t visible from Earth. He also—”
I said, “He talks—? You’ve taught him to speak English?” For some reason that was hard to accept; then I remembered the linguists.
“Yes. Quite well, considering that he doesn’t have vocal cords like ours. He uses a tympanum under each of those vertical openings in his body—those are his mouths. His name is Aza-Kra, by the way. I was going to say that he also claims to have come here alone?As for the ship, he says it’s hidden, but he won’t tell us where. We’ve been searching that area, particularly the hills near Cayuga and the lake itself, but we haven’t turned it up yet. It’s been suggested that he may have launched it under remote control and put it into an orbit somewhere outside the atmosphere. The Lunar Observatory is watching for it, and so are the orbital stations, but I’m inclined to think that’s a dead end. In any case, that’s not my responsibility. He had some gadgets in his possession when he was captured, but even those are being studied elsewhere. Chillicothe is what you saw a few minutes ago, and that’s all it is. God knows it’s enough.”
His intercom buzzed. “Yes.”
“Dr. Meshevski would like to talk to you about the technical vocabularies, sir.”
“Ask him to hold it until the conference if he possibly can.”
“Yes, sir”
“Two more questions we can’t answer,” Parst said, “are what his civilization is like and what he came here to do. I’ll tell you what he says. The planet he comes from belongs to a galactic union of highly advanced, peace-loving races. He came here to help us prepare ourselves for membership in that union.”
I was trying hard to keep up, but it wasn’t easy. After a moment I said, “Suppose it’s true?”
He gave me the cold eye.
“All right, suppose it’s true.” For the first time, his voice was impatient. “Then suppose the opposite. Think about it for a minute.”
I saw where he was leading me, but I tried to circle around to it from another direction; I wanted to reason it out for myself. I couldn’t make the grade; I had to fall back on analogies, which are a kind of thinking I distrust.
You were a cannibal islander, and a missionary came along. He meant well, but you thought he wanted to steal your yam-fields and your wives, so you chopped him up and ate him for dinner.
Or:
You were a West Indian, and Columbus came along. You treated him as a guest, but he made a slave of you, worked you till you dropped, and finally wiped out your whole nation, to the last woman and child.
I said, “A while ago you mentioned three or four years as the possible term of the Project. Did you—?”
“That wasn’t meant to be taken literally,” he said, “It may take a lifetime.” He was staring at his desk-top.
“In other words, if nothing stops you, you’re going to go right on just this way, sitting on this thing. Until What’s-his-name dies, or his friends show up with an army, or something else blows it wide open.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, damn it, don’t you see that’s the one thing you can’t do? Either way you guess it, that won’t work. If he’s friendly—”
Parst lifted a pencil in his hand and slapped it palmdown against the desk-top. His mouth was tight. “It’s necessary,” he said.
After a silent moment he straightened in his chair and spread the fingers of his right hand at me. “One,” he said, touching the thumb: “weapons. Leaving everything else aside, if we can get one strategically superior weapon out of him, or the theory that will enable us to build one, then we’ve got to do it and we’ve got to do it in secret.”
The index finger. “Two: the spaceship.” Middle finger. “Three: the civilization he comes from. If they’re planning to attack us we’ve got to find that out, and when, and how, and what we can do about it.” Ring finger. “Four: Aza-Kra himself. If we don’t hold him in secret we can’t hold him at all, and how do we know what he might do if we let him go? There isn’t a single possibility we can rule out. Not one.”
He put the hand flat on the desk. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, infinity. Biology, psychology, sociology, ecology, chemistry, physics, right down the line. Every science. In any one of them we might find something that would mean the difference between life and death for this country or this whole planet.”
He stared at me for a moment, his face set. “You don’t have to remind me of the other possibilities, Dahl. I know what they are; I’ve been on this project for thirteen weeks. I’ve also heard of the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, and the Constitution of the United States. But this is the survival of the human race we’re talking about.”
I opened my mouth to say “That’s just the point,” or something equally stale, but I shut it again; I saw it was no good. I had one argument—that if this alien ambassador was what he claimed to be, then the whole world had to know about it; any nation that tried to suppress that knowledge, or dictate the whole planet’s future, was committing a crime against humanity. That, on the other hand, if he was an advance agent for an invasion fleet, the same thing was true only a great deal more so.
Beyond that I had nothing but instinctive moral conviction; and Parst had that on his side too; so did Frisbee and the President and all the rest. Being who and what they were, they had to believe as they did. Maybe they were right.
Half an hour later, the last-thought I had before my head hit the pillow was, Suppose there isn’t any Aza-Kra? Suppose that thing was a fake, a mechanical dummy?
But I knew better, and I slept soundly.
That was the second day. On the third day, the front pages of the more excitable newspapers were top-heavy with forty-eight-point headlines. There were two Chicago stories. The first, in the early afternoon editions, announced that every epidemic victim had made a complete recovery, that health department experts had been unable to isolate any disease-causing agent in the stock awaiting slaughter, and that although several cases not involving stockyard employees had been reported, not one had been traced to consumption of infected meat. A Chicago epidemiologist was quoted as saying, “It could have been just a gigantic coincidence.”
The later story was a lulu. Although the slaughterhouses had not been officially reopened or the ban on fresh-meat sales rescinded, health officials allowed seventy of the previous day’s victims to return to work as an experiment. Within half an hour every one of them was back in the hospital, suffering from a second, identical attack.
Oddly enough—at first glance—sales of fresh meat in areas outside the ban dropped slightly in the early part of the day (“They say it’s all right, but you won’t catch me taking a chance”), rose sharply in the evening (“I’d better stock up before there’s a run on the butcher shops”).
Warden Longo, in an unprecedented move, added his resignation to those of the fifty-seven “conscience” employees of Leavenworth. Well-known as an advocate of prison reform, Longo explained that his subordinates’ example had convinced him that only so dramatic a gesture could focus the American public’s attention upon the injustice and inhumanity of the present system.
He was joined by two hundred and three of the Federal institution’s remaining employees, bringing the total to more than eighty per cent of Leavenworth’s permanent staff.
The movement was spreading. In Terre Haute, Indiana, eighty employees of the Federal penitentiary were reported to have resigned. Similar reports came from the State prisons of Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, and from city and county correctional institutions from Kansas City to Cincinnati.