"That might have been their miscalculation," mused Root "Assume that they knew nothing of crime, of anti-social action. If everybody did what he was told to do their privacy was safe forever." Root laughed. "Maybe they didn't know human beings so well after all."
The captain refilled the glasses and they drank in silence, "Wonder where they came from," he said at last.
Root shrugged. "I suppose we'll never know. Some other hot dry planet, that's sure. Maybe they were refugees or some peculiar religious sect or maybe they were a colony."
"Hard to say," agreed the captain sagely. "Different race, different psychology. That's what we run into all the time."
"Thank God they weren't vindictive," said Root, half to himself. "No doubt they could have killed us any one of a dozen ways after I'd sent out that emergency call and they had to leave."
"It all ties in," admitted the captain. Root sipped the brandy, nodded. "Once that ULR signal went out, their isolation was done for. No matter whether we were dead or not, there'd be Earthmen swarming around the station, pushing into their tunnels-and right there went their secret."
And he and the captain silently inspected the hole across the pond where the tremendous space-ship had lain buried under the spine-scrub and rusty black creeper.
"And once that space-ship was laid bare," Root continued, "there'd be a hullabaloo from here to Fomalhaut A tremendous mass like that? We'd have to know everything-their space-drive, their history, everything about them. If what they wanted was privacy that would be a thing of the past. If they were a colony from another star they had to protect their secrets the same way we protect ours."
Barbara was standing by the ruins of the station, poking at the tangle with a stick. She turned and Root saw that she held his pipe. It was charred and battered but still recognizable.
She slowly handed it to him.
"Well?" said Root
She answered in a quiet withdrawn voice: "Now that I'm leaving I think I'll miss Dicantropus." She turned to him, "Jim..."
"What?"
"I'd stay on another year if you'd like."
"No," said Root. "I don't like it here myself."
She said, still in the low tone: "Then-you don't forgive me for being foolish ..."
Root raised his eyebrows. "Certainly I do. I never blamed you in the first place. You're human. Indisputably human."
"Then-why are you acting-like Moses?"
Root shrugged.
"Whether you believe me or not," she said with an averted gaze, "I never-"
He interrupted with a gesture. "What does it matter? Suppose you did-you had plenty of reason to. I wouldn't hold it against you."
"You would-in your heart"
Root said nothing.
"I wanted to hurt you. I was slowly going crazy-and yon didn't seem to care one way or another. Told-him I wasn't-your property."
Root smiled his sad smile. I'm human too."
He made a casual gesture toward the hole where the Di-cantrop spaceship had lain. "If you still want diamonds go down that hole with a bucket. There're diamonds big as grapefruit. It's an old volcanic neck, it's the grand-daddy of all diamond mines. I've got a claim staked out around it; we'll be using diamonds for billiard balls as soon as we get some machinery out here."
They turned slowly back to the Method.
"Three's quite a crowd on Dicantropus," said Root thoughtfully. "On Earth, where there're three billion, we can have a little privacy."
Where Hesperut Falls
My servants will not allow me to kill myself. I have sought self-extinction by every method, from throat-cutting to the intricate routines of Yoga, but so far they have thwarted my most ingenious efforts.
I grow ever more annoyed. What is more personal, more truly one's own, than a man's own life? It is his basic possession, to retain or relinquish as he sees fit. If they continue to frustrate me, someone other than myself will suffer. I guarantee this.
My name is Henry Revere. My appearance is not remarkable, my intelligence is hardly noteworthy, and my emotions run evenly. I live in a house of synthetic shell, decorated with wood and jade, and surrounded by a pleasant garden. The view to one side is the ocean, to the other, a valley sprinkled with houses similar to my own. I am by no means a prisoner, although my servants supervise me with the most minute care. Their first concern is to prevent my suicide, just as mine is to achieve it.
It is a game in which they have all the advantages-a detailed knowledge of my psychology, corridors behind the walls from which they can observe me, and a host of technical devices. They are men of my own race, in fact of my own blood. But they are immeasurably more subtle than I.
My latest attempt was clever enough-although I had tried it before without success. I bit deeply into my tongue and thought to infect the cut with a pinch of garden loam. The servants either noticed me placing the soil in my mouth or observed the tension of my jaw.
They acted without warning. I stood on the terrace, hoping the soreness in my mouth might go undetected. Then, without conscious hiatus, I found myself reclining on a pallet, the dirt removed, the wound healed. They had used a thought-damping ray to anaesthetize me, and their sure medical techniques, aided by my almost invulnerable constitution, defeated the scheme.
As usual, I concealed my annoyance and went to my study. This is a room I have designed to my own taste, as far as possible from the complex curvilinear style which expresses the spirit of the age.
Almost immediately the person in charge of the household entered the room. I call him Dr. Jones because I cannot pronounce his name. He is taller than I, slender and fine-boned. His features are small, beautifully shaped, except for his chin which to my mind is too sharp and long, although I understand that such a chin is a contemporary criterion of beauty. His eyes are very large, slightly protuberant; his skin is clean of hair, by reason both of the racial tendency toward hairlessness, and the depilation which every baby undergoes upon birth.
Dr. Jones' clothes are vastly fanciful. He wears a body mantle of green film and a dozen vari-colored disks which spin slowly around his body like an axis. The symbolism of these disks, with their various colors, patterns, and directions of spin, are discussed in a chapter of my History of Man-so I will not be discursive here. The disks serve also as gravity deflectors, and are used commonly in personal flight
Dr. Jones made me a polite salute, and seated himself upon an invisible cushion of anti-gravity. He spoke in the contemporary speech, which I could understand well enough, but whose nasal trills, gutturals, sibilants and indescribable friccatives, I could never articulate.
"Well, Henry Revere, how goes it?" he asked.
In my pidgin-speech I made a noncommittal reply.
"I understand," said Dr. Jones, "that once again you undertook to deprive us of your company."
I nodded. "As usual I failed," I said.
Dr. Jones smiled slightly. The race had evolved away from laughter, which, as I understand, originated in the cave-man's bellow of relief at the successful clubbing of an adversary.
"You are self-centered," Dr. Jones told me. "You consider only your own pleasure."
"My life is my own. If I want to end it, you do great wrong in stopping me."
Dr. Jones shook his head. "But you are not your own property. You are the ward of the race. How much better if you accepted this fact!"
"I can't agree," I told him.
"It is necessary that you so adjust yourself." He studied me ruminatively. "You are something over ninety-six thousand years old. In my tenure at this house you have attempted suicide no less than a hundred times. No method has been either too crude or too painstaking."
He paused to watch me but I said nothing. He spoke no more than the truth, and for this reason I was allowed no object sharp enough to cut, long enough to strangle, noxious enough to poison, heavy enough to crush-even if I could have escaped surveillance long enough to use any deadly weapon.