We swam back and put our clothes on again. The village was abustle, preparing a feast for us. Pengwil joined them. I stayed behind, walking the beach, too restless to sit. Staring out across the waters and breathing an ocean smell that was almost like Earth’s, I thought strange thoughts. They were broken off by Mierna. She skipped toward me, dragging a small wagon.

  “Hello, Mister Cathcart!” she cried. “I have to gather seaweed for flavor. Do you want to help me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She made a face. “I’m glad to be here. Father and Kuaya and a lot of the others, they’re asking Mister Lejeune about ma-the-matics. I’m not old enough to like functions. I’d like to hear Mister Haraszthy tell about Earth, but he’s talking alone in a house with his friends. Will you tell me about Earth? Can I go there someday?”

  I mumbled something. She began to bundle leafy strands that had washed ashore. “I didn’t used to like this job,” she said. “I had to go back and forth so many times. They wouldn’t let me use my oontatherium because he gets buckety when his feet are wet. I told them I could make him shoes, but they said no. Now it’s fun anyway, with this, this, what do you call it?”

  “A wagon. You haven’t had such a thing before?”

  “No, never, just drags with runners. Pengwil told us about wheels. He saw the Earthfolk use them. Carpenter Huanna started putting wheels on the drags right away. We only have a few so far.”

  I looked at the device, carved in wood and bone, a frieze of processional figures around the sides: The wheels weren’t simply attached to axles. With permission, I took the cover off one and saw a ring of hard-shelled spherical nuts. As far as I knew, nobody had explained ball bearings to Pengwil.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking,” Mierna said. “If we made a great big wagon, then an oontatherium could pull it couldn’t he? Only we have to have a good way for tying the oontatherium on, so he doesn’t get hurt and you can guide him. I’ve thinked…thought of a real nice way.” She stooped and drew lines in the sand. The harness ought to work.

  With a full load, we went back among the houses. I lost myself in admiration of the carved pillars and panels. Sarato emerged from Lejeune’s discussion of group theory (the natives had already developed that, so the talk was a mere comparison of approaches) to show me his obsidian-edged tools. He said the coast dwellers traded inland for the material, and spoke of getting steel from us. Or might we be so incredibly kind as to explain how metal was taken from the earth?

  The banquet, music, dances, pantomimes, conversation, all was as gorgeous as expected, or more so. I trust the happy-pills we humans took kept us from making too grim an impression. But we disappointed our hosts by declining an offer to spend the night. They guided us back by torch-glow, singing the whole distance, on a twelve-tone scale with some of the damnedest harmony I have ever come across. When we reached the boat they turned homeward again. Mierna was at the tail of the parade. She stood a long time in the coppery light of the single great moon, waving to us.

  * * *

  Baldinger set out glasses and a bottle of Irish. “Okay,” he said. “Those pills have worn off by now, but we need an equivalent.”

  “Hoo, yes!” Haraszthy grabbed the bottle.

  “I wonder what their wine will be like, when they invent that?” Lejeune mused.

  “Be still!” Vaughan said. “They aren’t going to.”

  We stared at him. He sat shivering with tension, under the cold fluoroluminance in that bleak little cabin.

  “What the devil do you mean?” Haraszthy demanded at last. “If they can make wine half as well as they do everything else, it’ll go for ten credits a liter on Earth.”

  “Don’t you understand?” Vaughan cried. “We can’t deal with them. We have to get off this planet and—Oh, God, why did we have to find the damned thing?” He groped for a glass.

  “Well,” I sighed, “we always knew, those of us who bothered to think about the question, that someday we were bound to meet a race like this. Man…what is man that thou art mindful of him?”

  “This is probably an older star than Sol,” Baldinger nodded. “Less massive, so it stays longer on the main sequence.”

  “There needn’t be much difference in planetary age,” I said. “A million years, half a million, whatever the figure is, hell, that doesn’t mean a thing in astronomy or geology. In the development of an intelligent race, though—”

  “But they’re savages!” Haraszthy protested.

  “Most of the races we’ve found are,” I reminded him. “Man was too, for most of his existence. Civilization is a freak. It doesn’t come natural. Started on Earth, I’m told, because the Middle East dried out as the glaciers receded and something had to be done for a living when the game got scarce. And scientific, machine civilization, that’s a still more unusual accident. Why should the Jorillians have gone beyond an Upper Paleolithic technology? They never needed to.”

  “Why do they have the brains they do, if they’re in the stone age?” Haraszthy argued.

  “Why did we, in our own stone age?” I countered. “It wasn’t necessary for survival. Java man, Peking man, and the low-browed rest, they’d been doing all right. But evidently evolution, intraspecies competition, sexual selection…whatever increases intelligence in the first place continues to force it upward, if some new factor like machinery doesn’t interfere. A bright Jorillian has more prestige, rises higher in life, gets more mates and children, and so it goes. But this is an easy environment, at least in the present geological epoch. The natives don’t even seem to have wars, which would stimulate technology. Thus far they’ve had little occasion to use those tremendous minds for anything but art, philosophy, and social experimentation.”

  “What is their average IQ?” Lejeune whispered.

  “Meaningless,” Vaughan said dully. “Beyond 180 or so, the scale breaks down. How can you measure an intelligence so much greater than your own?”

  There was a stillness. I heard the forest sough in the night around us.

  “Yes,” Baldinger ruminated, “I always realized that our betters must exist. Didn’t expect we’d run into them in my own lifetime, however. Not in this microscopic sliver of the galaxy that we’ve explored. And…well, I always imagined the Elders having machines, science, space travel.”

  “They will,” I said.

  “If we go away—” Lejeune began.

  “Too late,” I said. “We’ve already given them this shiny new toy, science. If we abandon them, they’ll come looking for us in a couple of hundred years. At most.”

  Haraszthy’s fist crashed on the table. “Why leave?” he roared. “What the hell are you scared of? I doubt the population of this whole planet is ten million. There are fifteen billion humans in the Solar System and the colonies! So a Jorillian can outthink me. So what? Plenty of guys can do that already, and it don’t bother me as long as we can do business.”

  Baldinger shook his head. His face might have been cast in iron. “Matters aren’t that simple. The question is what race is going to dominate this arm of the galaxy.”

  “Is it so horrible if the Jorillians do?” Lejeune asked softly.

  “Perhaps not. They seem pretty decent. But—” Baldinger straightened in his chair. ‘‘I’m not going to be anybody’s domestic animal. I want my planet to decide her own destiny.”

  That was the unalterable fact. We sat weighing it for a long and wordless time.

  The hypothetical superbeings had always seemed comfortably far off. We hadn’t encountered them, or they us. Therefore they couldn’t live anywhere near. Therefore they probably never would interfere in the affairs of this remote galactic fringe where we dwell. But a planet only months distant from Earth; a species whose average member was a genius and whose geniuses were not understandable by us: bursting from their world, swarming through space, vigorous, eager, jumping in a decade to accomplishments that would take us a century—if we ever succeeded—how could they help but destroy our painfully built civilization? We’d scrap it ourselves, as the primitives of our old days had scrapped their own rich cultures in the overwhelming face of Western society. Our sons would laugh at our shoddy triumphs, go forth to join the high Jorillian adventure, and come back spirit-broken by failure, to build some feeble imitation of an alien way of life and fester in their hopelessness. And so would every other thinking species, unless the Jorillians were merciful enough to leave them alone.

  Which the Jorillians probably would be. But who wants that kind of mercy?

  I looked upon horror. Only Vaughan had the courage to voice the thing:

  “There are planets under technological blockade, you know. Cultures too dangerous to allow modern weapons, let alone spaceships. Joril can be interdicted.”

  “They’ll invent the stuff for themselves, now they’ve gotten the idea,” Baldinger said.

  Vaughan’s mouth twitched downward. “Not if the only two regions that have seen us are destroyed.”

  “Good God!” Haraszthy leaped to his feet.

  “Sit down!” Baldinger rapped.

  Haraszthy spoke an obscenity. His face was ablaze. The rest of us sat in a chill sweat.

  “You’ve called me unscrupulous,” the Trader snarled. “Take that suggestion back to the hell it came from, Vaughan, or I’ll kick out your brains.”

  I thought of nuclear fire vomiting skyward, and a wisp of gas that had been Mierna, and said, “No.”

  “The alternative,” Vaughan said, staring at the bulkhead across from him, “is to do nothing until the sterilization of the entire planet has become necessary.”

  Lejeune shook his head in anguish. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. There can be too great a price for survival.”

  “But for our children’s survival? Their liberty? Their pride and—”

  “What sort of pride can they take in themselves, once they know the truth?” Haraszthy interrupted. He reached down grabbed Vaughan’s shirt front, and hauled the man up by sheer strength. His broken features glared three centimeters from the Federal’s. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” be said. “We’re going to trade, and teach, and xenologize, and fraternize, the same as with any other people whose salt we’ve eaten. And take our chances like men!”

  “Let him go,” Baldinger commanded. Haraszthy knotted a fist. “If you strike him, I’ll brig you and prefer charges at home. Let him go, I said!”

  Haraszthy opened his grasp. Vaughan tumbled to the deck. Haraszthy sat down, buried his head in his hands, and struggled not to sob.

  Baldinger refilled our glasses. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “it looks like an impasse. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, and I lay odds no Jorillian talks in such tired clichés.”

  “They could give us so much,” Lejeune pleaded.

  “Give!” Vaughan climbed erect and stood trembling before us. “That’s p-p-precisely the trouble. They’d give it! If they could, even. It wouldn’t be ours. We probably couldn’t understand their work, or use it, or…It wouldn’t be ours, I say!”

  Haraszthy stiffened. He sat like stone for an entire minute before he raised his face and whooped aloud.

  “Why not?”

  * * *

  Blessed be whisky. I actually slept a few hours before dawn. But the light, stealing in through the ports, woke me then and I couldn’t get back to sleep. At last I rose, took the drop-shaft down, and went outside.

  The land lay still. Stars were paling, but the east held as yet only a rush of ruddiness. Through the cool air I heard the first bird-flutings from the dark forest mass around me. I kicked off my shoes and went barefoot in bare grass.

  Somehow it was not surprising that Mierna should come at that moment, leading her oontatherium. She let go the leash and ran to me. “Hi, Mister Cathcart! I hoped a lot somebody would be up. I haven’t had any breakfast.”

  “We’ll have to see about that.” I swung her in the air till she squealed. “And then maybe take a little flyaround in this boat. Would you like that?”

  “Oooh!” Her eyes grew round. I set her down. She needed a while longer before she dared ask, “Clear to Earth?”

  “No, not that far, I’m afraid. Earth is quite a ways off.”

  “Maybe someday? Please?”

  “Someday, I’m quite sure, my dear. And not so terribly long until then, either.”

  “I’m going to Earth, I’m going to Earth, I’m going to Earth.” She hugged the oontatherium. “Will you miss me awfully, Big-Feet-Buggy-Eyes-Top-Man-Underneath-And-Over? Don’t drool so sad. Maybe you can come too. Can he, Mister Cathcart? He’s a very nice oontatherium, honest he is, and he does so love crackers.”

  “Well, perhaps, perhaps not,” I said. “But you’ll go, if you wish. I promise you. Anybody on this whole planet who wants to will go to Earth.”

  As most of them will. I’m certain our idea will be accepted by the Council. The only possible one. If you can’t lick ’em…get ’em to jine you.

  I rumpled Mierna’s hair. In a way, sweetheart, what a dirty trick to play on you! Take you straight from the wilderness to a huge and complicated civilization. Dazzle you with all the tricks and gadgets and ideas we have, not because we’re better but simply because we’ve been at it a little longer than you. Scatter your ten million among our fifteen billion. Of course you’ll fall for it. You can’t help yourselves. When you realize what’s happening, you won’t be able to stop, you’ll be hooked. I don’t think you’ll even be able to resent it.

  You’ll be assimilated, Mierna. You’ll become an Earth girl. Naturally, you’ll grow up to be one of our leaders. You’ll contribute tremendous things to our civilization, and be rewarded accordingly. But the whole point is, it will be our civilization. Mine…and yours.

  I wonder if you’ll ever miss the forest, though, and the little houses by the bay, and the boats and songs and old, old stories, yes, and your darling oontatherium. I know the empty planet will miss you, Mierna. So will I.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go build us that breakfast.”

  Honesty

  In other times I played the troubadour,

  Or thought I did, like any lovesick youth,

  And for my Lady’s sake let fancy soar

  On flashing-feathered wings above dull truth.

  By foam-born Venus foamily I swore

  That in my love of her was naught uncouth,

  But ’twas her heart and soul I did adore,

  Those beauties which we know defy time’s tooth.

  The devil now may have such dreary bliss!

  Your mortal self is what has made me blest,

  Your shining eyes, deep riches of your hair

  The springtime drunkenness within your kiss,

  The lovely upward surging of your breast,

  Soft skin, round hip, slim leg—those things are fair.

  The Alien Enemy

  Winter darkness falls early on Rotterdam. When my flitter had parked, I walked to a parapet and saw light in star clusters, nebulae, comet tails, filling the spaces of the city. Windows were blinking out in the offices, where towers lifted row on row from the waterfront. But vehicles swarmed, signs danced, shops beckoned, the pavements made a luminous web as far inland as I could see—it appeared to flicker with the ground traffic that counted endless rosaries along it—and the harbor and canals interwove a softer sheen. I was too high to make out people through all that gloom and glow. They were melted into a mere humanity, and their voices came to me as the distant surf of machines.

  Up here was less illumination, just some tubes around the lanes and walkways, a fluorescent door to the elevator head, and whatever spilled down from the beacon. So although the air was raw and damp in my nostrils, forcing my hands into tunic pockets, I could look past the electric star which marks this building, out to a few of the real stars. Orion was aloft and the Charles Wain stood on its head over the Pole. I shivered and wished the Ministry of Extraterrestrial Affairs had picked some other place for a centrum, an island farther south where the constellations bloom after dark like flowers.

  But even the Directorate has to make compromises. The desirable places on Earth filled up long ago, and then the less desirable, and then the undesirable, until the only clear horizons left are on the mountain roofs, the icecaps, the stone-and-sand deserts, whatever is still worse to make a living from than the bottom of a megalopolis. The bureaucrats I work for did not do so badly; the Low Countries complex has much to recommend it. They control a lot of wealth and are correspondingly influential.

  Anyway, I don’t have to live in Rotterdam, except a few days at a time, reporting in or getting briefed. Otherwise I mostly spend my furloughs at one or another resort, as expensive and exclusive as possible. Thus I needn’t observe what man has inflicted on this planet his mother while I was gone. Spaceman’s pay accumulates wonderfully on the long hauls, years or decades in a stretch. I can afford whatever I want on Earth: even clean air, trees, a brook to drink from, a deer to glimpse, unlighted nights when I take a girl out and show her the stars I have visited.

  Let me see, I thought, once this is over with here, where should I go? Hitherto I’ve avoided places where Cumae is visible. But why, really? Hm…catalogued HR 6806, 33.25 light-years distant, K2 dwarf of luminosity 0.62 Sol…yes, I’ll want a small telescope as well as some large brags for the girl…

  One star detached itself and whirred toward me. Startled, I realized that this must be Tom Brenner coming. Suddenly I was in no more mood to brag about what I had done at Cumae than I was on first returning. I didn’t want to confront him, especially alone. If I hurried, I could be inside before he set down. I could await him together with d’Indre, impregnable in the apparatus of government.

  But no. I had seen too much—we had both seen too much, he and I, and all those men and women and children for whom he must speak tonight—on the high plains of his planet. In our very separate ways, we had both known the terror of the alien enemy. I could never be totally an official to him. So I stayed by the parapet, waiting. The breath came out of me like smoke and the cold crept inside.