When the alien began to stir, they were already in null-space, on the first point-to-point jump of the three-day trip that would bring them back to Earth. The alien opened his eyes; and Hank, looking up from his job of repairing the coffee maker, saw the other’s stare full upon him.
“Oh!” said Hank. He stopped work, went across the room and brought back the black box on wheels to within reach of the alien’s bound hands. The alien reached out and touched it. The box spoke, echoing his gobble.
“What did I do wrong?”
Hank nodded at the coffee maker. He sat down and went back to work on it. It was in bad shape, having evidently suffered some kind of an explosion.
“I had that set to turn on when I came back in,” he said. “Closing the air-lock doors turned it on. Convenient little connection I installed about a year or so back. Only, it just so happened I’d drawn the last cup out of it before I went out. There was just enough moisture in it to cause a steam explosion.”
“But the water? The smoke?”
“The automatic sprinkling system,” explained Hank, “It reacts to any spot of dangerously high temperature in the room here. When the coffee maker split open, the heating element was exposed. The sprinkling system began flooding the place.”
“But the smoke?”
“Some burnable reading material I had on top of the coffee maker. Now that,” said Hank, finishing his repairs on the coffee maker, “was something I was absolutely counting on—that the books would fall down onto the burner. And they did.” He slapped the coffee maker affectionately and stood up. He looked down at the alien. “Afraid you’re going to be somewhat hungry for the next three days or so. But as soon as we get to Earth, you can tell our nutritionists what you eat and they’ll synthesize it for you.”
He grinned at the other.
“Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “You’ll find we humans aren’t all that tough to take when you get to know us.”
The alien closed his eyes. Something like a sigh of defeat came from the black box.
“So you had no weapon,” it said.
“What do you mean?” said Hank, dropping into the chair at the control board, indignantly. “Of course I had a weapon.”
The eyes of the alien flew wide open.
“Where is it?” he cried. “I sent robots in. They examined this ship of yours right down to the elements that hold it together. They found no weapon. I found no weapon.”
“You’re my prisoner aren’t you?” said Hank.
“Of course I am. What of it? What I’m asking is to see your weapon. I could not find it; but you say you still have it. Show it to me. I tell you, I do not see it!”
Hank shook his head sadly; and reached for the controls of the Andnowyoudont to set up the next jump.
“Brother,” he said, “I don’t know. If you don’t see it—after all this—then I pity your people when my people really get to know them. That’s all I’ve got to say!”
IN THE BONE
This yarn can be considered a companion piece to “Sleight of Wit,” taking a similar situation, but this time with deadly seriousness. The intrepid human was out exploring the galaxy, confident that his highly advanced technology could handle anything he ran into. Then he ran into an alien with much more advanced technology at its disposal. The alien thought the game was all over, but there was still that ol’ human edge….
I
Personally, his name was Harry Brennan.
Officially, he was the John Paul Jones, which consisted of four billion dollars’ worth of irresistible equipment—the latest and best of human science—designed to spread its four thousand components out through some fifteen cubic meters of space under ordinary conditions—designed also to stretch across light-years under extraordinary conditions (such as sending an emergency messenger-component home) or to clump into a single magnetic unit in order to shift through space and explore the galaxy. Both officially and personally—but most of all personally—he represents a case in point.
The case is one having to do with the relative importance of the made thing and its maker.
It was, as we know, the armored horseman who dominated the early wars of the Middle Ages in Europe. But, knowing this, it is still wise to remember that it was not the iron shell that made the combination of man and metal terrible to the enemy—but rather the essentially naked man inside the shell. Later, French knights depending on their armor went down before the clothyard shafts of unarmored footmen with bows, at Crécy and Poitiers.
And what holds true for armor holds true for the latest developments of our science as well. It is not the spacecraft or the laser on which we will find ourselves depending when a time of ultimate decision comes, but the naked men within and behind these things. When that time comes, those who rank the made thing before its maker will die as the French knights died at Crécy and Poitiers. This is a law of nature as wide as the universe, which Harry Brennan, totally unsuspecting, was to discover once more for us, in his personal capacity.
Personally, he was in his mid-twenties, unremarkable except for two years of special training with the John Paul Jones and his superb physical condition. He was five eleven, a hundred seventy-two pounds, with a round, cheerful face under his brown crew-cut hair. I was Public Relations Director of the Project that sent him out; and I was there with the rest to slap him on the back the day he left.
“Don’t get lost, now,” said someone. Harry grinned.
“The way you guys built this thing,” he answered, “if I got lost the galaxy would just have to shift itself around to get me back on plot.”
There was an unconscious arrogance hidden in that answer, but no one marked it at the time. It was not the hour of suspicions.
He climbed into the twelve-foot-tall control-suit that with his separate living tank were the main components of the John Paul Jones, and took off. Up in orbit, he spent some thirty-two hours testing to make sure all the several thousand other component parts were responding properly. Then he left the solar system.
He clumped together his components, made his first shift to orbit Procyon—and from there commenced his explorations of the stars. In the next nine weeks, he accumulated literally amazing amounts of new information about the nearby stars and their solar systems. And—this is an even better index of his success—located four new worlds on which men could step with never a spacesuit or even a water canteen to sustain them. Worlds so like Earth in gravity, atmosphere, and even flora and fauna, that they could be colonized tomorrow.
Those were his first four worlds. On the fifth he encountered his fate—a fate for which he was unconsciously ripe.
The fact was the medical men and psychologists had overlooked a factor—a factor having to do with the effect of Harry’s official John Paul Jones self upon his entirely human personal self. And over nine weeks this effect changed Harry without his ever having suspected it.
You see, nothing seemed barred to him. He could cross light-years by touching a few buttons. He could send a sensing element into the core of the hottest star, into the most poisonous planetary atmospheres or crushing gravities, to look around as if he were down there in person. From orbit, he could crack open a mountain, burn off a forest, or vaporize a section of icecap in search of information just by tapping the energy of a nearby sun. And so, subtly, the unconscious arrogance born during two years of training, that should have been noted in him at take-off from Earth, emerged and took him over—until he felt that there was nothing he could not do; that all things must give way to him; that he was, in effect, master of the universe.