The head of the station said dryly, “Plausible enough, but we have to act under orders, Worden. Did you explain that?”
“They know,” said Worden. “So they’ve got set to defend themselves if necessary. They’ve set up smelters to handle metals. They get the heat by sun mirrors, concentrating sunlight. They’ve even begun to work with gases held in containers. They’re not far along with electronics yet, but they’ve got the theoretic knowledge and they don’t need vacuum tubes. They live in a vacuum. They can defend themselves from now on.”
The head said mildly, “I’ve watched Butch, you know, Worden. And you don’t look crazy. But if this sort of thing is sprung on the armed forces on Earth there’ll be trouble. They’ve been arguing for armed rocket ships. If your friends start a real war for defense—if they can—maybe rocket warships will be the answer.”
Worden nodded.
“Right. But our rockets aren’t so good that they can fight this far from a fuel store, and there couldn’t be one on the Moon with all of Butch’s kinfolk civilized—as they nearly are now and as they certainly will be within the next few weeks. Smart people, these cousins and such of Butch!”
“I’m afraid they’ll have to prove it,” said the head “Where’d they get this sudden surge in culture?”
“From us,” said Worden. “Smelting from me, I think. Metallurgy and mechanical engineering from the tractor mechanics. Geology—call it lunology here—mostly from you.”
“How’s that?” demanded the head.
“Think of something you’d like Butch to do,” said Worden grimly, “and then watch him.”
The head stared and then looked at Butch. Butch—small and furry and swaggering—stood up and bowed profoundly from the waist. One paw was placed where his heart could be. The other made a grandiose sweeping gesture. He straightened up and strutted, then climbed swiftly into Worden’s lap and put a skinny furry arm about his neck.
“That bow,” said the head, very pale, “is what I had in mind. You mean—”
“Just so,” said Worden. “Butch’s ancestors had no air to make noises in for speech. So they developed telepathy. In time, to be sure, they worked out something like music-sounds carried through rock. But like our music it doesn’t carry meaning. They communicate directly from mind to mind. Only we can’t pick up communications from them and they can from us.”
“They read our minds!” said the head. He licked his lips. “And when we first shot them for specimens they were trying to communicate. Now they fight.”
“Naturally,” said Worden. “Wouldn’t we? They’ve been picking our brains. They can put up a terrific battle now. They could wipe out this station without trouble. They let us stay so they could learn from us. Now they want to trade.”
“We have to report to Earth,” said the head slowly, “but—”
“They brought along some samples,” said Worden. “They’ll swap diamonds, weight for weight, for records. They like our music. They’ll trade emeralds for textbooks—they can read now! And they’ll set up an atomic pile and swap plutonium for other things they’ll think of later. Trading on that basis should be cheaper than war!”
“Yes,” said the head. “It should. That’s the sort of argument men will listen to. But how—”
“Butch,” said Worden ironically. “Just Butch! We didn’t capture him—they planted him on us! He stayed in the station and picked our brains and relayed the stuff to his relatives. We wanted to learn about them, remember? It’s like the story of the psychologist…
There’s a story about a psychologist who was studying the intelligence of a chimpanzee. He led the chimp into a room full of toys, went out, closed the door and put his eye to the keyhole to see what the chimp was doing. He found himself gazing into a glittering interested brown-eye only inches from his own. The chimp was looking through the keyhole to see what the psychologist was doing.
Critical Difference
I
MASSY WAKED THAT morning when the only partly opened port of his sleeping-cabin closed of itself and the room-warmer began to whir. He found himself burrowed deep under his covering, and when he got his head out of it the already bright room was bitterly cold and his breath made a fog about him.
He thought uneasily, It’s colder than yesterday! But a Colonial Survey officer is not supposed to let himself seem disturbed, in public, and the only way to follow that rule is to follow it in private, too. So Massy composed his features, while gloom filled him. When one has just received senior service rating and is on one’s very first independent survey of a new colonial installation, the unexpected can be appalling. The unexpected was definitely here, on Lani III.
He’d been a Survey Candidate on Khali II and Taret and Arepo I, all of which were tropical, and a junior officer on Menes III and Thotmes—one a semiarid planet and the other temperate-volcanic—and he’d done an assistant job on Saril’s solitary world, which was nine-tenths water. But this first independent survey on his own was another matter. Everything was wholly unfamiliar. An ice planet with a minus point one habitability rating was upsetting in its peculiarites. He knew what the books said about glacial-world conditions, but that was all.
The denseness of the fog his breath made seemed to grow less as the room-warmer whirred and whirred. When by the thinness of the mist he guessed the temperature to be not much under freezing, he climbed out of his bunk and went to the port to look out. His cabin, of course, was in one of the drone-hulls that had brought the colony’s equipment to Lani III. The other emptied hulls were precisely ranged in order outside. They were duly connected by tubular galleries, and very painstakingly leveled. They gave an impression of impassioned tidiness among the upheaved, ice-coated mountains all about.
He gazed down the long valley in which the colony lay. There were monstrous slanting peaks on either side. They partly framed the morning sun. Their sides were ice. The flanks of every mountain in view were ice. The sky was pale. The sun had four sundogs placed geometrically about it. It shone coldly upon this far-out world. Normal post-midnight temperatures in this valley ranged around ten below zero—and this was technically summer. But it was colder than ten below zero now. At noon there were normally tiny trickling rills of surface thaw running down the sunlit sides of the mountains—but they froze again at night and the frost replaced itself after sunset. And this was a sheltered valley—warmer than most of the planet’s surface. Thee sun had its sundogs every day, on rising. There were nights when the brighter planets had star-pups, too.
The phone-plate lighted and dimmed and lighted and dimmed. They did themselves well on Lani III—but the parent world was in this same solar system. That was rare. Massy stood before the plate and it cleared. Herndon’s face peered unhappily out of it. He was even younger than Massy, and inclined to lean heavily on the supposedly vast experience of a Senior Officer of the Colonial Survey.
“Well?” said Massy—and suddenly felt very undignified in his sleeping-garments.
“We’re picking up a beam from home,” said Herndon anxiously, “but we can’t make it out.”
Because the third planet of the sun Lani was being colonized from the second, inhabited world, communication with the colony’s base was possible. A tight beam could span a distance which was only light-minutes across at conjunction, and not much over a light-hour at opposition—as now. But the beam communication had been broken for the past few weeks, and shouldn’t be possible again for some weeks more. The sun lay between. One couldn’t expect normal sound-and-picture transmission until the parent planet had moved past the scrambler-fields of Lani. But something had come through. It would be reasonable for it to be pretty well hashed when it arrived.