And again, later, there were planes flying overhead and parachutes blooming in the sky. But it was day, here. It would be day for a long while yet. The sun wouldn't set for some six weeks to come, and then it would set only briefly.
This was forty-eight hours before the Grek ship returned to Earth. When it did turn up, it didn't appear as a silver speck beyond the nearer planets, increasing slowly in size as it came nearer. That might have been tactful, but the Greks did not think of it.
The Grek ship came casually out from behind the edge of the moon. It came deliberatly toward Earth. It was huge. It was monstrous. It is probable that the Greks sent calls to their two main installations on Earth. If so, there was no answer. But the enslaved Aldarians in the dummy broadcast transmitters replied promptly, and the Aldarians assigned to teach Grek science to human students were prompt to respond. That was enough. The Grek ship came on. It seems certain that there were no misgivings on board. The Greks knew the state of human civilization. The race of men was primitive in its development. Its technology was absurd. No human being was able to understand how any Grek machine worked. Compared to the Greks, men were savages! At least they had been less than two months before, and it would take millenia for them to overtake the Greks if they were allowed to try. But they wouldn't be.
Moreover, the human race had sent message after message, imploring the Greks to come back and direct them, guide them,—in effect, rule them. They would be docile, and if they ever developed ideas unlike their present tearful gratitude to and for all things Grek—
So the Grek ship came down. Where the enormous viewing-stands had been built for the ceremony of its departure, there were ragged flags and not much bunting and very few humans. But men knew well enough that they were unable to live without the Greks once they'd encountered them. Presently they would discover how promptly they'd die if they displeased them.
But just now there was the matter of landing.
The ship came down and down and down, and it was a monstrous, ungainly object. But it was beautifully controlled. It swung slightly to align itself perfectly with the scooped-out earthen cradle men had prepared for it eight months before. It was the length of five large city blocks, and its thickness was that of the height of a sixty-story building. It was more gigantic than any structure the human race had ever built on solid ground—and it roamed among the stars!
The delegation for welcoming the Greks back to Earth set up a shout of greeting. It was, as it happened, a very small sound in the vastness of the empty stands. But some of the delegates were weeping with joy that now everything would turn out all right with the wise, kind Greks to decide everything for them, and everybody would be rich and nobody would have to do anything in particular . . .
The Grek ship settled neatly and tidily and perfectly in the berth designed for it. Hackett and Lucy watched, Hackett with a surpassing grimness. A door began to open for someone to come out and be greeted by men who essayed to give the Earth and all its people into the benevolent and munificent hands of the Greks.
Then several things happened. They did not seem related, somehow, but they all happened at the same time and place. There were a dozen or so modified sinter-field generators under the grandstand. They had been built after consultation with a garage mechanic who'd tried to mend such a generator of small size when it was smashed in a truck-car collision. These dozen sinter-field generators were changed from the original model. They projected a beam instead of a field, and in this stepped-up beam metal crumbled to powder.
There were some super-laser-beam projectors, of which the idea had come from a burned-out high school science classroom. They would burn a hole through half a mountainside if desired, and repeat the blast with every alternation of the current supplied them.
There were guided missiles carrying relatively miniature artillery shell atomic bombs. They developed the destructive power of no more than five hundred tons of chemical high explosive. And they could not be inactivated. A small device like an Aldarian hearing aid made sure of the fact.
And there was a high power beam of the nerve stimulus field, which could tell every Aldarian in the ship, as if his hearing had been restored, that now was the time to revolt.
It was quite odd that all these things went into operation at once. All of them were strictly focused upon one particular part of the Grek ship. Oddly enough that was the part of the ship reserved for Greks, so certain captured Aldarians affirmed. There was a great space between that infinitely luxurious living space and the stable-like quarters reserved for Aldarians—they being domestic animals only.
They all went into action at once, with no particularly dramatic preface. But the first three hundred feet of the ship shivered and billowed downward and out. It had suddenly become metallic powder, nothing more. As it fell, from the height of a fifty-story human building, intolerably brilliant laser-beams flashed into it like so many lightning bolts, at sixty bolts to the second and with a dozen projectors flinging them.
There was only one guided missile used. It went off, of course. It scattered metal dust far and wide, and proved conclusively that there were no more Greks left alive in the ship. Further bombardment would have been undesirable. Technical reasons aside, there were very nearly two thousand Aldarian slaves in the ship. They were the technicians and the scientists responsible for the ship and all its capabilities. The Greks specialized in ruling, in slave-owning. It turned out to be a weakness. The Aldarians, when they found they were free, only regretted very, very bitterly that no Greks had been left alive so they could kill them.
But even they found some small satisfaction in the fact that the instruments used to destroy the Grek ship had been, in the last analysis, only variations on the devices the Greks had brought to Earth as gifts.
Everybody knows, of course, what happened after that. The destruction of the Grek ship ended immediately all fond notions of pie in the sky and working one day a week and all the rest. But, rather strangely, we seemed to feel that something else was more important after we'd learned and digested the lessons to be drawn from the things the Aldarians told us. We went back to work. Resolutely. We who went through the coming of the Greks were like the humans of today. We could be fools, but also we could be something more.
When we heard the story of the Aldarians, we were enraged. We liked the Aldarians. A fine high sense of mission came to us. We immediately resolved that Earth must be protected against the chance of another Grek ship coming to Earth with plans about our liberty and the futures of our children. We began grimly to build ships of space to protect them. The Aldarians helped with strictly practical information and aid, besides. We acquired a space fleet.
And we continued to learn from the Aldarians. The Greks were liars. There were no thousands of civilized planets in the Nurmi cluster. In fact, the Greks didn't come from there. There was no organized interstellar commerce, with gigantic ships plying from world to world upon their lawful occasions. There were civilized planets, yes. But there were Greks. And the Greks were not a civilization. Centuries or millenia gone by, they'd made some discoveries. They built space ships. They searched for colonizable planets. They found partly civilized ones instead. So they changed their plans. They conquered them and ruled them.
When on a given world there ceased to be slaves by thousands or tens of thousands for each individual Grek, they had their slaves build them a ship and some of them searched for another habitable, partly civilized world to be conquered and ruled. The Aldarians had been victims. There'd been others. Earth, by all the rules of reason, should have been a victim, too. But the Greks would be our deadly enemies if they ever learned we'd destroyed a Grek ship. If Earth could defend itself, it was dangerous!