The President wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.
“How do you differentiate this—sponsor from the being most people call God?”
The little man hesitated. “I’m not sure I do. I told you I was an agnostic, not an atheist. However, I do not believe He sits on a cloud and has a long white beard.”
“Mr. Baylor, I particularly wish to thank you for coming here. I am fully aware that you, as head of the Communist Party in the United States, are against everything I stand for. Yet I wish to ask you what the opinion of the Communists here is of the broadcast of yesterday evening.”
“There is no matter of opinion. We know what it is.”
“Of your own knowledge, Mr. Baylor, or because Moscow has spoken?”
“That is irrelevant. We are perfectly aware that the Capitalistic countries instigated that broadcast. And solely for the purpose of inciting us to start the war.”
“And for what reason would we do that?”
“Because you have something new. Something in electronics that enabled you to accomplish what you accomplished last night and that is undoubtedly a decisive weapon. However, because of the opinion of the rest of the world, you do not dare to use it if you yourselves—as your warmongers have been demanding, as indeed you have been planning to do—start the war. You want us to start it and then, with world opinion on your side, you would be able to use your new weapon. However, we refuse to be propagandized.”
“Thank you, Mr. Baylor. And may I ask you one question strictly off the record? Will you answer in the first person singular, not plural, your own personal, private opinion?”
“You may.”
“Do you, personally, really believe we instigated that broadcast?”
“I—I do not know.”
“The afternoon mail, Walter?”
“Well over a hundred thousand letters, Mr. President. We have been able to do only random sampling. They seem to be about the same as the telegrams. General Wickersham is anxious to see you, sir. He thinks you should issue a proclamation to the army. Army morale is in a terrible state, he says, and he thinks a word from you—”
The President smiled grimly. “What word, Walter? The only single word of importance I can think of has already been given—and hasn’t done army morale any good at all. Tell General Wickersham to wait; maybe I’ll be able to see him within a few days. Who’s next on the list?”
“Professor Gresham of Harvard.”
“His specialty?”
“Philosophy and metaphysics.”
The President sighed. “Send him in.”
“You actually mean, Professor, that you have no opinions at all? You won’t even guess whether X is God, devil, extra-galactic superman, terrestrial scientist, Martian—?”
“What good would a guess do, Mr. President? I am certain of only one thing—and that is that we will never know who or what X is. Mortal or immortal, terrestrial or extra-galactic, microcosmic or macrocosmic, four dimensional or twelve, he is sufficiently more clever than we to keep us from discovering his identity. And it is obviously necessary to his plan that we do not know.”
“Why?”
“It is obvious that he wants us to disobey that command, isn’t it? And who ever heard of men obeying a command unless they knew—or thought they knew—who gave it? If anybody ever learns who gave that command, he can decide whether to obey it or not. As long as he doesn’t know, it’s psychologically almost impossible for him to obey it.”
The President nodded slowly. “I see what you mean. Men either obey or disobey commands—even commands they think come from God—according to their own will. But how can they obey an order, and still be men, when they don’t know for sure where the order came from?”
He laughed. “And even the Commies don’t know for sure whether we Capitalists did it or not. And as long as they’re not sure—”
“Did we?”
The President said, “I’m beginning to wonder. Even though I know we didn’t, it doesn’t seem more unlikely than anything else.” He tilted back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. After a while he said softly, “Anyway, I don’t think there’s going to be a war. Either side would be mad to start it.”
There wasn’t a war.
Something Green
The big sun was crimson in a violet sky. At the edge of the brown plain, dotted with brown bushes, lay the red jungle.
McGarry strode toward it. It was tough work and dangerous work, searching in those red jungles, but it had to be done. And he’d searched a thousand of them; this was just one more.
He said, “Here we go, Dorothy. All set?”
The little five-limbed creature that rested on his shoulder didn’t answer, but then it never did. It couldn’t talk, but it was something to talk to. It was company. In size and weight it felt amazingly like a hand resting on his shoulder.
He’d had Dorothy for—how long? At a guess, four years. He’d been here about five, as nearly as he could reckon it, and it had been about a year before he’d found her. Anyway, he assumed that Dorothy was of the gender sex, if for no better reason than the gentle way she rested on his shoulder, like a woman’s hand.
“Dorothy,” he said, “reckon we’d better get ready for trouble. Might be lions or tigers in there.”
He unbuckled his sol-gun holster and let his hand rest on the butt of the weapon, ready to draw it quickly. For the thousandth time, at least, he thanked his lucky stars that the weapon he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his spacer had been a sol-gun, the one and only weapon that worked practically forever without refills or ammunition. A sol-gun soaked up energy. And, when you pulled the trigger, it dished it out. With any weapon but a sol-gun he’d never have lasted even one year on Kruger III.
Yes, even before he quite reached the edge of the red jungle, he saw a lion. Nothing like any lion ever seen on Earth, of course. This one was bright magenta, just enough different in color from the purplish bushes it crouched behind so he could see it. It had eight legs, all jointless and as supple and strong as an elephant’s trunk, and a scaly head with a beak like a toucan’s.
McGarry called it a lion. He had as much right to call it that as anything else, because it had never been named. Or if it had, the namer had never returned to Earth to report on the flora and fauna of Kruger III. Only one spacer had ever landed here before McGarry’s, as far as the records showed, and it had never taken off again. He was looking for it now; he’d been looking for it systematically for the five years he’d been here.
If he found it, it might—just barely might—contain intact some of the electronic transistors which had been destroyed in the crash-landing of his own spacer. And if it contained enough of them, he could get back to Earth.
He stopped ten paces short of the edge of the red jungle and aimed the sol-gun at the bushes behind which the lion crouched. He pulled the trigger and there was a bright green flash, brief but beautiful—oh, so beautiful—and the bushes weren’t there any more, and neither was the lion.
McGarry chuckled softly. “Did you see that, Dorothy? That was green, the one color you don’t have on this bloody red planet of yours. The most beautiful color in the universe, Dorothy. Green! And I know where there’s a world that’s mostly green, and we’re going to get there, you and I. Sure we are. It’s the world I came from, and it’s the most beautiful place there is, Dorothy. You’ll love it.”
He turned and looked back over the brown plain with brown bushes, the violet sky above, the crimson sun. The eternally crimson sun Kruger, which never set on the day side of this planet, one side of which always faced it as one side of Earth’s moon always faces Earth.