"I don't think—I can't!"said Hackett more bitterly still. "He could have orders from the Greks. If they're contemptuous enough of us, they might think it amusing to let us beat out our brains against their cleverness, let us see their tricky apparatus. We'd never be smart enough to understand them. Not raising an alarm could be an expression of contempt."
Lucy shook her head.
"Maybe," she said in an odd tone, "maybe the Greks are more unpleasant than we think. Maybe the Aldarian didn't dare admit that he and the others had failed to stop you from getting into the place. Maybe the Greks would have punished them for that failure, even if they killed you when you were discovered."
Hackett growled to himself, "That could be . . ."
"And also," said Lucy, "it was a pretty remarkable thing for you to walk through screens and force-fields that even gnats can't get through. Maybe the Aldarians hope that some day the Greks will run into a race that's more intelligent than the Greks. Maybe that's the Aldarians' only hope, and you're the only indication they've ever had that it might be coining true. He wouldn't dare give you any sign of his hope. Maybe Aldarians don't dare even trust each other, much less people like us, so all he dared do was let you escape so he can hope, though he doesn't really believe, that a race that is more intelligent than the Greks has been found." She hesitated and said, "You know, maybe it has."
"Not me," said Hackett savagely. "Do you know what I made out of what I saw of the power-broadcast equipment?"
"What?"
"That it's not power-broadcast equipment. It's only a receiver, tricked up differently from the small ones, but only a receiver. The Greks are such liars that when they set up power broadcasters they lie about it by putting up dummy ones! And we can't have the least idea where the real ones are!"
Lucy hesitated a long time. Then she said, "You said something once . . . You found there was power in the Aldarian hearing aid. Now you know how a receiver works, more or less. The Aldarians know a lot of Grek science. Could they have included a miniature and very much simplified power receiver for the energy that instrument uses?"
"I'll see," said Hackett dourly. "Or try to! But what difference will it make if it's so and we find it out?"
It did not seem that anything would be of any use whatever. A day earlier, a delegation of assorted citizenry had waited on the Aldarians conducting the education of human students in the sciences of the Greks. The students had different reactions to their instruction. Some of them grew more and more unhappy as their human habits of thinking insisted that they studied nonsense. Others adopted a fine, idealistic attitude which said that it was not necessary to understand Grek science in order to believe in it, and that if one believed in it firmly enough, there would come a time when comprehension must develop. The Aldarian instructors did not teach this doctrine. Some of the students thought they detected a peculiar expression on their faces when it was mentioned in a burst of fervor for all things Grek. But they permitted their students to believe it if they chose.
It was to these instructors that a delegation had gone. They spread out the world's situation as they saw it. There was utter paralysis of the human economy and utter loss of faith in human leadership, because it seemed to try to postpone the benefits of the gifts of the Greks. There was such collapse of confidence that even paper currency had ceased to buy things. The delegation begged the Aldarians to try somehow to contact the Greks in their faster-than-light travel to their home, to beg them to return and direct us in the stabilization of our society; to beg them at least to give us advice, to tell us humans what to do . . .
The Aldarian instructors, blinking, read the elaborate confession of the bankruptcy of humanity from mere contact with a more advanced and more intelligent race. The petition represented exactly the view of the larger part of the human race. We who agreed with it then do not feel comfortable now. But remember—we did not know of the garbage pit discoveries. We didn't know the Greks were liars and the Aldarians slaves, or that Grek devices were one part operative and nine parts deception to keep us from understanding them.
The Aldarians asked questions, to bring out why men begged the Aldarians to make us companions in their slavery. The delegation explained. People were on the verge of starvation because they had lost confidence in everything—even in money.
The Aldarians asked politely what money was. The delegation answered, confusedly, that humans needed a medium of exchange that everybody accepted. Paper money no longer served the purpose. After many writ-ten-in questions and answers, it developed that people believed in gold.
The Aldarians seemed relieved and briskly proposed to help. In the process of de-salting sea water for the Sahara depression, to make a vast fresh water lake where only desert had been, they had accumulated vast stores of minerals. Every element on Earth was to be found dissolved in its seas. Naturally every one came out with the salt. The Aldarians brightly offered to supply any imaginable quantity of gold. They had de-salted more than a cubic mile of sea water and could offer some thousands of tons of gold. If more were needed, it could be obtained.
There was, of course, a complete collapse of all values that still remained. Even gold was no longer money if it could be had in any desired quantity. There was a total stop of business. When food couldn't be bought or bartered for there remained only one answer to hunger: Take it.
Some places—Traylor, for example—were far enough from cities to be free of hungry mobs. There were some organizations—Army posts, for example— which were held together by a combination of previous habit and discipline. But our human civilization began to go downhill and fast.
But again, just as the one-man businesses did not collapse with the larger ones, so there were still people who behaved sanely as individuals, as families, and sometimes even larger groups. All over the world there were tumults and lootings and unorganized disorder, but also all over the world there were humans who reacted to this disaster as they would have reacted to an earthquake or a plague, sanely and with courage. And this human fraction would be available if any hope sprang up. It was not, on the whole, very well represented in the first delegation to ask for the return of the Greks.
There was a curious side effect from the complexity of the Grek devices. On the East Coast a Grek fish-herding device ceased to work and there was panic in the population near one estuary, because a large part of the food supply there was fish. It was simple, stark necessity that the herder be gotten back to work. The proprietor of a television repair shop undertook the work. He took the fish-herding unit apart and put it together again. It worked. He'd puttered with it ignorantly and had a number of parts left over, but it worked.
A garage mechanic tried to reconstruct a sinter-field generator, knocked out of operation and partly crushed by a collision of the truck that carried it. He stripped it down, straightened out bent parts and found some parts that were ruined, destroyed. He began to reassemble it, checking the way current went through it as he put back each part. It began to work when by Grek standards it was only partly complete. The garage mechanic found it embarrassingly efficient. It not only loosened the chemical bonds of minerals, so plants could make use of fertilizing elements formerly locked up in topsoil but it reduced metals to powder. He had to put extra, unnecessary parts back to throttle down its activity.
Word got to the FBI and somebody had an inspiration. Every office of that organization was informed that it was at least as important to get information about repairs to Grek devices as to arrest low number public enemies. Trickles of information began to come in. Some of them were disheartening. One was that sinter fields, in making any amount of fertilizing elements available to crops, made the same amount of fertilizer available to weeds. Agriculture was not simplified to a mere making of holes and dropping seeds in them. Bigger and better weeds were consequences of Grek technology in agriculture.