[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Startling Stories, February 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Man, _n._ A pentagonal, dipolar, monoplane dominant, of
intelligence 96, native of District 10039817. Unabsorbed.
It is a truism that a human being can get used to very nearly
everything. The hardy Eskimo, lying belly-down on a plain of ice that
stretched unbroken to the sky, probably spent little of his time in
meditating upon the vastness and inscrutability of the Universe ... he
was thinking of his dinner. And Charles Samson, seven hundred years
later, looked past his long nose at a scene of equal majesty--our
galaxy, viewed from a ship in mid-arc--in a similar frame of mind.
It was approximately sixteen hours, galactic time; a trifle later
according to Samson's stomach. He had played a vicious game of handball
with his wife an hour and a half before, and now he was hungry.
The Eskimo, although a patient man, might have reflected that it was
unreasonable of this particular seal to wake up and look around him at
this precise moment. Samson, equally virtuous, told himself that his
wife might have chosen a more opportune time to experiment with her
cookery. Midge had conceived an idea for a soufflé such as had never
before been seen by Man, and had accordingly been adding new circuits
to the autochef for the past eighty-five minutes.
If she ran to form, the soufflé--which would be a triumph, in spite of
seventeen separate miscalculations--would be served in about twenty
minutes more. Samson would have preferred an artless slab of steak
_now_.
These, it may be considered, were picayune thoughts to occupy a brain
which had been interminably trained and tested, stocked with a fabulous
assortment of knowledge, and then sent out, with one other human mind
for company, to patrol a hegemony ten billion times as vast as Caesar's.
At the moment, however, there was nothing world-shaking for it to do.
Charles and Midge, like a thousand other teams of trouble-shooters
assigned to the volume of space known as Slice 103, earned their pay by
intense, difficult, and sometimes dangerous labor which averaged three
months out of the year; the rest of their time was spent in traveling
from one assignment to the next, or simply in drifting, waiting for
something of importance to turn up.
Two days ago, for example, they had been halfway along a leisurely arc
between the Hilkert system and the observatory settlement on de Broglie
II, when Slice H.Q. had buzzed them and told them to change course
for Kenilworth IV--an isolated and obscure one-man post out on the
perimeter of the Slice. Tomorrow, as likely as not, another message
would inform them that the trouble, whatever it was, had simmered
down. Then they would blast into a new arc, and it would be six days,
at least--even if another wild-goose chase did not intervene--before
they touched ground. Meanwhile, they amused themselves as well as they
could....
* * * * *
As for the stars, which lay spread out to the infinity beyond the
inch-thick vitrin of the ship's veranda window, the trouble with them
was that they were always the same. Maugham records that when he first
saw the Taj Mahal, he felt an ineffable surprise and joy; but on the
following day, it was only a beautiful building. He had seen it before.
Samson had been in space for something over half his lifetime.
Accordingly, when the communicator bell rang, it shattered no
meditations on the relations of Man to Nature; on the contrary, Samson,
uncoiling himself and walking through the doorway into the lounge,
carried with him the firm mental image of a ham sandwich, with relish
and mustard.
"Let's hear it," he said.
Obediently, the communicator uncorked a quiet male voice: "Harlow
calling the Samsons. Acknowledge if you're awake, will you? Over."
Midge appeared at the opposite end of the room, brushing a strand
of black hair back from her forehead. "We read you, Harlow," said
Samson. "Go ahead. Over." The light-tube which encircled the ceiling,
having turned pink at Harlow's "Over," glowed spectrum-white again at
Samson's, indicating that the communicator was ready to receive.
"Something?" said Midge, coming forward.
Samson waved his hand at her, palm down, in a gesture that meant "Shut
up and listen." Simultaneously, Harlow's voice began again: "I'll give
you the story, anyhow; you can pick it up from the cube later if you're
not reading me now. Kids, this Kenilworth thing is a lot bigger than
it looked two days ago. It may be even bigger than I think it is now,
in which case we'll all have to start digging hidey-holes. It's all
yours--I haven't got anybody else within two weeks' run of the place.
So listen."
There was a pause and a click, which Samson identified as the sound of
Harlow's teeth gripping his ever-present pipe. Then, "Here's the call
I got from Jackson, the Kenilworth deputy. That was three days ago.
I don't think there's anything in it that I missed, but I'll let you
decide that. It came in at three-oh-five hours G.T."
A younger voice said excitedly, "Jackson, Kenilworth IV, calling
Harlow, Slice 103 H.Q. Urgent. Harlow, hold onto your hair. _The
Kassids are back._ Over to you."
Harlow's recorded voice, sounding sleepy, answered: "Better hold onto
yours. Who are the Kassids, and what if they're back? I didn't even
know they were gone. Over."
"Who are the Kassids! Just the big medicine men of Slices 42, 43, 102
and 103, is all! See your manual, page 9581 _et seq._ They landed on
KenilFour ten days ago; I just got the message. It seems the local boys
told them about me as soon as they got past the language difficulty,
and they're anxious to meet me. I'm going over there now--call you back
in about six hours. Over."
"Give them a big, juicy kiss for me," said Harlow. "Clearing."
His voice began again immediately: "You can look up the Kassids in
the manual; I had to. They're a legend, a group of legends, fifteen
thousand years old. At that point, my opinion was either that a gang of
backwoods Messiahs were passing themselves off as 'Kassids' in hopes of
gain and glory, or else that some of Jackson's charges were playing a
big fat joke on him. So I rolled over and went back to sleep. The only
thing is, Jackson never called back.
"I waited twenty-four hours and then alerted you. It still didn't look
big. Jackson might have crash-landed somewhere and broken his leg. Or
he might have got hold of some local antiquities and forgotten to eat,
sleep, breathe or say his prayers. Nothing else happened until several
hours ago. Then this came in, from an experimental organics outfit on
Loblich VII."
* * * * *
The Samsons listened to a high, exasperated voice complaining that a
maniac named Jackson had landed at the station, 'preached a kind of a
sermon,' and taken off again with seventeen of the group's twenty-two
members. The group was now hopelessly undermanned; eight years' work
would be ruined unless H.Q. sent them trained replacements sooner than
immediately.
Harlow demanded more information. What had Jackson's 'sermon' consisted
of, exactly?
"He talked about Love," said the organics man irritably. "And
Peace--and a Message for the Universe. Stuff like that. If you ask me,
the man's insane. And if you want to know why three-quarters of this
outfit dumped their work and walked out with him, don't ask me. When do
we get those replacements?"
There was another pause, punctuated by the click of pipestem against
teeth. "Now that," said Harlow, "began to seem a little smelly. If
you'll look at the tank, you'll see that Loblich is the nearest human
settlement to Kenilworth, and it's a long jump--Jackson must have
blasted at maximum to get there in two and a half days. But from
Loblich to any of three well-settled systems is just a hop.
"So I got the signal pattern of Jackson's ship out of the files and
had a warning broadcast to all the patrol centers in 103 and adjoining
Slices. I also started a call going out to Jackson at twenty-minute
intervals. He didn't answer it. That was all, until fifteen minutes ago.
"Jackson turned up in a landing orbit around Xavier III. The local
patrol put a beam on him and warned him not to land. But instead of
shunting into a parking orbit and waiting for instructions, as he was
told, Jackson headed for open space under full drive.
"The patrol burned him out of the sky. There was nothing left to pick
up."
This time the pause was longer. "If he had landed," Harlow's tired
voice said finally, "and if he'd got anything like the same percentage
of response in a larger group, this thing would already be too big to
stop. I tell myself that." The Samsons could hear his teeth grating
against the pipestem. "All right, that's all I can give you," he said
after a moment. "Land on KenilFour, get in touch with these Kassids,
talk to them and find out what this is all about and how they do it.
I've got two cruisers and a battleship on the way from the naval
station in Kleinmuller, and if it turns out that they'll do any
good, they'll be there in fifteen days. But we've got to have more
information. And just incidentally, don't let them sell you whatever
they sold Jackson. If you do, I can't offer you any guarantee you won't
end up the way he did." There was a thump, and then a gargling noise
that meant Harlow was sucking on an empty pipe. "Take every precaution
you can think of," he finished. "Keep in continuous touch after you
land. Over."
"Check, Papa," said Samson. "Clearing."
Samson, who was tall, beefy and blond, looked at Midge, dark and
apparently fragile, who was curled into a very small ball among the
cushions on the other side of the room. "Did you know Jackson?" he
asked.
She nodded soberly. "A very good boy," she said.
"M-hm. You got that manual?"
"Here." She put the cube into the reader set into the table in front
of her, and began scanning for page 9581. Samson walked over and sat
beside her.
There was a good deal about the Kassids, also known as the Akassa, the
Ksits, the Karsis, the Krassit, the Karss and the Krathis. All the
older races in this section of the galaxy had legends about them. It
was not particularly surprising that Harlow had had to look them up;
they were just one item among the tangled mass of folk-legend and myth
that had been gleaned from a thousand inhabited worlds.
* * * * *
Nobody, said the manual, knew whether the Kassids had been a historic
culture or a widespread myth. They were magicians, or demigods, or, as
Jackson had put it, big medicine men; they were purer and nobler than
anybody else, they knew more about everything, they could change their
shapes at will, et cetera. The fact that more than five hundred planets
had the same or similar legends proved nothing, because all the races
in question, dull as they were, had had limited interstellar travel
millenia before the arrival of Man. Most of the legends agreed that the
Kassids had gone away, amid weeping and wailing from the lesser tribes,
some fifteen thousand years ago.
But now they were back--and something they had done to Jackson had made
him leave his post, and caused seventeen other people to leave theirs,
and had got them all killed.
"I won't say I like it much," Midge said. "How are you fixed for ideas?"
"Information first," said Samson didactically; "ideas after." He added,
not to Midge, "Take a message."
The light-tube glowed pink.
"Charles Samson to Head Librarian, Lubyanka Central Archives. Urgent.
Request all available material on the Kassids, K-A-S-S-I-D-S. Don't
digest it--put it straight through on facsimile. Over to you."
He clipped a fresh cube into the receiver in the center of the room.
After twenty minutes, a female voice said, "Information coming through.
Over." The recording light glowed; Samson turned on the reader and
glanced at the page of type that appeared on the screen. "I read you.
Thanks. Clearing."
"Coffee, chef," said Midge resignedly. "And two ham sandwiches." She
came over and sat beside Samson. "Hold that page till I finish it."
Samson was a man with an open mind, a faculty which served him well in
dealing with the weird and wild inhabitants of many planets in Slice
103, but which, it occurred to him, was not just the thing wanted for
the task in hand. He kept his misgivings to himself, however, and aided
by numerous steaming pots of coffee served up by the ship's autochef,
bored his way determinedly through the twenty tubes of surmise,
conjecture and hearsay provided by Lubyanka Archives. Midge, who had
a female-superiority complex, sat and took it alongside him, cube for
cube.
* * * * *
When they had finished, as Midge took the trouble to remind him, they
had learned next to nothing that wasn't in the Slice 103 manual. "A
total loss, wasn't it?" she demanded.
"Sure. Just a precaution; there _might_ have been something in there
that the manual skipped. If it doesn't rain one Sunday, do you give up
wearing waterproofs?"
Midge's expression indicated that the question deserved no answer.
"You've had your information--_now_ have you got any ideas?"
"Well," said Samson reflectively, "Harlow seems to think there's some
kind of compulsion involved, maybe hypnotic. I don't see how we can
exclude the possibility, even though that kind of contact between alien
minds is supposed to be impossible. But I've got a hunch that's not it.
I think maybe they simply talked to Jackson--they _convinced_ him--and
he did the same to the seventeen that followed him."
"In my own fumbling way," said Midge, "I got that far three hours ago.
Because if it was compulsion of any kind, why did it only work on
seventeen out of twenty-two? I even made a stab at answering another
little technical question--why didn't Jackson use the communicator?"
"That's easy enough," said Samson. "If you got a call from somebody
you didn't know, and he started spouting pseudo-religious propaganda
at you, would you listen quietly until he was finished, or would you
cut him off and complain to the Privacy Commission? And if he'd called
anybody who knew him--you or Harlow, for example--we would have smelled
something. Jackson might have found himself cut off before he ever left
Kenilworth, if he'd tried that. He couldn't take the chance."
"But if you don't mind," Midge said coolly, "what I meant by my
question was, have you got any ideas about what we're going to do?"
"Sure. I'll go in there doped to the eyebrows. I'll use--"
"Wait," said Midge. "Please. You said, 'I'll go in?'"
"That's right. I go in; you stay in the ship and watch. You also
listen, but through a whisper mike--you'll hear everything I say but
not what the other fellow says. In other words, I go over the cliff,
you hold my legs. Catch on?"
Midge said nothing.
"As I was saying, I'll use antihypnotics, and you might as well give me
a good dose of countersuggestion, too, but those are just playing it
safe. What I'm counting on to do the stunt is arnophrene."
"Arnophrene!" Midge stared at him.
"Sure. In heavy dosage, the stuff inhibits your ability to add two and
two. You can follow an argument, in pieces, and even make reasonably
intelligent replies, but you can't hang onto it long enough to put it
all together. In other words, if they convince me of anything, it'll
be on the order of 'Your nose is on the front of your face'... I'll be
sick as a dog afterwards, of course, and I may not remember much of
what they feed me. But you can hold my head, and drag the information
out of me under hypno if you have to. Remember to be careful what you
ask for, in that case--we want to know who these people are and what
they're up to, not what they think about the Great Spirit."
Midge kept looking at him somberly. "I don't like it," she said.
"I don't like it either. Neither will Harlow, if he has to get me
burned down for trying to save souls ... although, come to think of
it, I can think of ways to play it smarter than Jackson did. Make a
phony report, duck out somewhere along the line between here and
H.Q., and then find me a nice uninhabited planet to hide on for a
while. Pirate another ship later, maybe; wear a false beard." He
sighed. "But, come to think of it again, I guess all that has occurred
to Harlow, too."
He looked at Midge. "What'll you do if I should get sold before you can
yank me out of there?"
Her eyes were steadier than her husband's. "Follow you down and buy
myself a tambourine," she said. "What did you think?"
* * * * *
Midge's small hands were painfully tight on the edge of the control
panel. On the screen before her, reproduced with excellent fidelity in
spite of the transmitter's peanut size, appeared whatever Samson was
seeing: at the moment, the interior of a bronze-green room and two of
the roly-poly, stumpy-legged tentacled autochthons of Kenilworth IV.
She could see Samson's hands, whenever he happened to raise them; she
could not see his face.
On a smaller screen to the left was a view from a pickup in the
ship's hull--a grassy plain, seen from above, with a huge, black,
lozenge-shaped spaceship and a cluster of the little KenilFour air-cars.