On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Reunion Day, a throng of
well-heeled celebrants filled the dining room and overflowed onto the
terraces of the Star Tower Dining Room, from whose 5,700 foot height
above the beaches, the Florida Keys, a hundred miles to the south, were
visible on clear days.
The _Era_ reporter stood beside the vast glass entry way surveying the
crowd, searching for celebrities from whom he might elicit bits of color
to spice the day's transmission.
At the far side of the room, surrounded by chattering admirers, stood
the Ambassador from the New Terran Federation; a portly, graying, jolly
ex-Naval officer. A minor actress passed at close range, looking the
other way. A cabinet member stood at the bar talking earnestly to a ball
player, ignoring a group of hopeful reporters and fans.
The _Era_ stringer, an experienced hand, passed over the hard pressed
VIP's near the center of the room and started a face-by-face check of
the less gregarious diners seated at obscure tables along the sides of
the room.
He was in luck; the straight-backed gray-haired figure in the dark
civilian suit, sitting alone at a tiny table in an alcove, caught his
eye. He moved closer, straining for a clear glimpse through the crowd.
Then he was sure. He had the biggest possible catch of the day in his
sights; Admiral of Fleets Frederick Greylorn.
The reporter hesitated; he was well aware of the Admiral's reputation
for near-absolute silence on the subject of his already legendary
cruise, the fabulous voyage of the _Galahad_. He couldn't just barge in
on the Admiral and demand answers, as was usual with publicity-hungry
politicians and show people. He could score the biggest story of the
century today; but he had to hit him right.
You couldn't hope to snow a man like the Admiral; he wasn't somebody you
could push around. You could sense the solid iron of him from here.
Nobody else had noticed the solitary diner. The _Era_ man drifted
closer, moving unhurriedly, thinking furiously. It was no good trying
some tricky approach; his best bet was the straight-from-the-shoulder
bit. No point in hesitating. He stopped beside the table.
The Admiral was looking out across the Gulf. He turned and glanced up at
the reporter.
The news man looked him squarely in the eye. "I'm a reporter, Admiral,"
he said. "Will you talk to me?"
The Admiral nodded to the seat across from him. "Sit down," he said. He
glanced around the room.
The reporter caught the look. "I'll keep it light, sir," he said. "I
don't want company either." That was being frank.
* * * * *
"You want the answers to some questions, don't you?" the Admiral said.
"Why, yes, sir," the reporter said. He started to inconspicuously key
his pocket recorder, but caught himself. "May I record your remarks,
Admiral?" he said. Frankness all the way.
"Go ahead," said the Admiral.
"Now, Admiral," the reporter began, "the Terran public has of course
..."
"Never mind the patter, son," the Admiral said mildly. "I know what the
questions are. I've read all the memoirs of the crew. They've been
coming out at the rate of about two a year for some time now. I had my
own reasons for not wanting to add anything to my official statement."
The Admiral poured wine into his glass. "Excuse me," he said. "Will you
join me?" He signalled the waiter.
"Another wine glass, please," he said. He looked at the golden wine in
the glass, held it up to the light. "You know, the Florida wines are as
good as any in the world," he said. "That's not to say the California
and Ohio wines aren't good. But this Flora Pinellas is a genuine
original, not an imitation Rhine; and it compares favorably with the
best of the old vintages, particularly the '87."
The glass arrived and the waiter poured. The reporter had the wit to
remain silent.
* * * * *
"The first question is usually, how did I know I could take the Mancji
ship. After all, it was big, vast. It loomed over us like a mountain.
The Mancji themselves weighed almost two tons each; they liked six gee
gravity. They blasted our communication off the air, just for practice.
They talked big, too. We were invaders in their territory. They were
amused by us. So where did I get the notion that our attack would be
anything more than a joke to them? That's the big question." The Admiral
shook his head.
"The answer is quite simple. In the first place, they were pulling six
gees by using a primitive dumbbell configuration. The only reason for
that type of layout, as students of early space vessel design can tell
you, is to simplify setting up a gee field effect using centrifugal
force. So they obviously had no gravity field generators.
"Then their transmission was crude. All they had was simple
old-fashioned short-range radio, and even that was noisy and erratic.
And their reception was as bad. We had to use a kilowatt before they
could pick it up at 200 miles. We didn't know then it was all
organically generated; that they had no equipment."
The Admiral sipped his wine, frowning at the recollection. "I was pretty
sure they were bluffing when I changed course and started after them. I
had to hold our acceleration down to two and a half gees because I had
to be able to move around the ship. And at that acceleration we gained
on them. They couldn't beat us. And it wasn't because they couldn't take
high gees; they liked six for comfort, you remember. No, they just
didn't have the power."
* * * * *
The Admiral looked out the window.
"Add to that the fact that they apparently couldn't generate ordinary
electric current. I admit that none of this was conclusive, but after
all, if I was wrong we were sunk anyway. When Thomas told me the nature
of the damage to our radar and communications systems, that was another
hint. Their big display of Mancji power was just a blast of radiation
right across the communication spectrum; it burned tubes and blew fuses;
nothing else. We were back in operation an hour after our attack.
"The evidence was there to see, but there's something about giant size
that gets people rattled. Size alone doesn't mean a thing. It's rather
like the bluff the Soviets ran on the rest of the world for a couple of
decades back in the war era, just because they sprawled across half the
globe. They were a giant, though it was mostly frozen desert. When the
showdown came they didn't have it. They were a pushover.
"All right, the next question is why did I choose H. E. instead of going
in with everything I had? That's easy, too. What I wanted was
information, not revenge. I still had the heavy stuff in reserve and
ready to go if I needed it, but first I had to try to take them alive.
Vaporizing them wouldn't have helped our position. And I was lucky; it
worked.
"The, ah, confusion below evaporated as soon as the Section chiefs got a
look at the screens and realized that we had actually knocked out the
Mancji. We matched speeds with the wreckage and the patrols went out to
look for a piece of ship with a survivor in it. If we'd had no luck we
would have tackled the other half of the ship, which was still intact
and moving off fast. But we got quite a shock when we found the nature
of the wreckage." The Admiral grinned.
"Of course today everybody knows all about the Mancji hive intelligence,
and their evolutionary history. But we were pretty startled to find that
the only wreckage consisted of the Mancji themselves, each two-ton slug
in his own hard chitin shell. Of course, a lot of the cells were
ruptured by the explosions, but most of them had simply disassociated
from the hive mass as it broke up. So there was no ship; just a cluster
of cells like a giant bee hive, and mixed up among the slugs, the
damnedest collection of loot you can imagine. The odds and ends they'd
stolen and tucked away in the hive during a couple hundred years of
camp-following.
"The patrols brought a couple of cells alongside, and Mannion went out
to try to establish contact. Sure enough, he got a very faint
transmission, on the same bands as before. The cells were talking to
each other in their own language. They ignored Mannion even though his
transmission must have blanketed everything within several hundred
miles. We eventually brought one of them into the cargo lock and started
trying different wave-lengths on it. Then Kramer had the idea of
planting a couple of electrodes and shooting a little juice to it. Of
course, it loved the DC, but as soon as we tried AC, it gave up. So we
had a long talk with it and found out everything we needed to know.
* * * * *
"It was a four-week run to the nearest outpost planet of the New Terran
Federation, and they took me on to New Terra aboard one of their fast
liaison vessels. The rest you know. We, the home planet, were as lost
to the New Terrans as they were to us. They greeted us as though we were
their own ancestors come back to visit them.
"Most of my crew, for personal reasons, were released from duty there,
and settled down to stay.
"The clean-up job here on Earth was a minor operation to their Navy. As
I recall, the trip back was made in a little over five months, and the
Red Tide was killed within four weeks of the day the task force arrived.
I don't think they wasted a motion. One explosive charge per cell, of
just sufficient size to disrupt the nucleus. When the critical number of
cells had been killed, the rest died overnight.
"It was quite a different Earth that emerged from under the plague,
though. You know it had taken over all of the land area except North
America and a strip of Western Europe, and all of the sea it wanted. It
was particularly concentrated over what had been the jungle areas of
South America, Africa, and Asia. You must realize that in the days
before the Tide, those areas were almost completely uninhabitable. You
have no idea what the term Jungle really implied. When the Tide died, it
disintegrated into its component molecules; and the result was that all
those vast fertile Jungle lands were now beautifully levelled and
completely cleared areas covered with up to twenty feet of the richest
topsoil imaginable. That was what made it possible for old Terra to
become what she is today; the Federation's truck farm, and the sole
source of those genuine original Terran foods that all the rest of the
worlds pay such fabulous prices for.
"Strange how quickly we forget. Few people today remember how we loathed
and feared the Tide when we were fighting it. Now it's dismissed as a
blessing in disguise."
The Admiral paused. "Well," he said, "I think that answers the questions
and gives you a bit of homespun philosophy to go with it."
* * * * *
"Admiral," said the reporter, "you've given the public some facts it's
waited a long time to hear. Coming from you, sir, this is the greatest
story that could have come out of this Reunion Day celebration. But
there is one question more, if I may ask it. Can you tell me, Admiral,
just how it was that you rejected what seemed to be prima facie proof of
the story the Mancji told; that they were the lords of creation out
there, and that humanity was nothing but a tame food animal to them?"
The Admiral sighed. "I guess it's a good question," he said. "But there
was nothing supernatural about my figuring that one. I didn't suspect
the full truth, of course. It never occurred to me that we were the
victims of the now well-known but still inexplicable sense of humor of
the Mancji, or that they were nothing but scavengers around the edges of
the Federation. The original Omega ship had met them and seen right
through them.
* * * * *
"Well, when this hive spotted us coming in, they knew enough about New
Terra to realize at once that we were strangers, coming from outside the
area. It appealed to their sense of humor to have the gall to strut
right out in front of us and try to put over a swindle. What a laugh for
the oyster kingdom if they could sell Terrans on the idea that they were
the master race. It never occurred to them that we might be anything but
Terrans; Terrans who didn't know the Mancji. And they were canny enough
to use an old form of Interlingua; somewhere they'd met men before.
"Then we needed food. They knew what we ate, and that was where they
went too far. They had, among the flotsam in their hive, a few human
bodies they had picked up from some wreck they'd come across in their
travels. They had them stashed away like everything else they could lay
a pseudopod on. So they stacked them the way they'd seen Terran frozen
foods shipped in the past, and sent them over. Another of their little
jokes.
"I suppose if you're already overwrought and eager to quit, and you've
been badly scared by the size of an alien ship, it's pretty
understandable that the sight of human bodies, along with the story that
they're just a convenient food supply, might seem pretty convincing. But
I was already pretty dubious about the genuineness of our pals, and when
I saw those bodies it was pretty plain that we were hot on the trail of
Omega Colony. There was no other place humans could have come from out
there. We had to find out the location from the Mancji."
"But, Admiral," said the reporter, "true enough they were humans, and
presumably had some connection with the colony, but they were naked
corpses stacked like cordwood. The Mancji had stated that these were
slaves, or rather domesticated animals; they wouldn't have done you any
good."
"Well, you see, I didn't believe that," the Admiral said. "Because it
was an obvious lie. I tried to show some of the officers, but I'm afraid
they weren't being too rational just then.
"I went into the locker and examined those bodies; if Kramer had looked
closely, he would have seen what I did. These were no tame animals. They
were civilized men."
"How could you be sure, Admiral? They had no clothing, no identifying
marks, nothing. Why didn't you believe they were cattle?"
"Because," said the Admiral, "all the men had nice neat haircuts."