The result was that hardly anyone today knew anything that I did not. In fact, my picture of the catastrophe was clearer than most. The ordinary Sibyllan had neither time nor energy for studying the past. The educational level had plummeted; children generally left school to work before they were twelve Earth-years old. Folklore took the place of books.

  The books themselves were vague. No real census or scholarship was possible. “Casualties were heavy,” said the chroniclers, and told many tales of suffering and heroism. But the figures they gave were obvious guesswork, often contradicting someone else’s. I believed I could make a better estimate myself on the basis of one fact. The Sibyllan population which the original colonizing scheme had projected for this decade was some two hundred thousand. The actual population was a twentieth of that.

  After a while, Laurie and I quit. We could do more good back in Jimstown, helping prepare for the exodus. With facilities as primitive as they were here, that was going to be a harrowing job. Our crew would stay after the Fleet left and search for further clues. Besides, I didn’t fancy traveling after dark.

  We had to, though. Passing near a scarp, our car was struck by a boulder when the crust shivered and started a landslide. The damage took hours to fix—in that smoldering light and abominable wind. We could have called for a flitter, but that would have meant leaving the car till dawn. It might be totally wrecked, and it could ill be spared. We drove on.

  Cumae went under the mountains. Night thickened as clouds lifted. Presently it was absolute, except where our headlights speared before us, picking out bushes that tossed in the wind and occasional three-eyed animals that slunk between them. The air grew louder, thrusting against the sides, making them quiver and resonate until the noise filled our skulls. Then the rain came, a cloudburst such as Earth has never seen, mixed with hail like knucklebones.

  “We’d better take shelter!” I yelled. Laurie could barely hear me through the drumbeat and the howling. “High ground—get away from flash floods—” Lightning blinded me; the whole heaven was incandescent, again and again and again, and thunder picked me up and shook me. I strained over the charts, the inertial navigator, yes, this way, a farmstead…

  We could not have made it on wheels. The ground effect held us above mudslides, water avalanches, flattened crops and splintered orchards. Barely, it held us, though the hurricane tried to fling us back into the rising river which had been a valley. I do not know how long it was before we found the cottage, save that it was long indeed.

  The house stood. Like most dwellings on Sibylla, it was a fortress, rock walls, shuttered slit windows, ponderous doors, roof held down by cables. In thin air, driven by high temperature differentials and solar irradiations, you must expect murderous weather from time to time. The barns were smashed, there having been insufficient manpower and materials to build them as sturdily, and no doubt the cattle and crops were lost. But the house stood.

  I reached its lee, threw out a couple of ground anchors, put the autopilot on standby, and opened the escape hatch. Laurie slipped, the wind caught her, she almost went downhill to her death. I grabbed her, though, got dragged into the mud but hung on somehow. Clinging together, we fought our way through a universe of storm to the house. The door was bolted from within. Our pounding was lost in the racket. I remembered about hurricane doors before the hail beat us unconscious. We found one on the south side, an airlock-type arrangement which could safely admit refugees. At that, I had hell’s own time reclosing and dogging the outer door before we opened the inner.

  We stumbled through, into a typical Sibyllan home. One room served for cooking, eating, sleeping, handcrafting, everything. Screens offered some pretense of privacy, but here they stood unused against the sooty, unornamented walls. A brick oven gave reasonable warmth, but the single lantern was guttering and demon-shaped shadows moved in every corner.

  A man and his wife sat on a bench by a cradle that he must have made himself. She had her face against his breast, her arms around his neck, and wept, not loudly, only with a despair so complete that she had no strength left to curse God. He held her, murmuring, sometimes stroking her faded hair. With one foot he rocked the cradle.

  They didn’t notice us for a moment. Then he let her go and climbed erect, a burly man, his beard flecked with gray, his clothes clean but often patched. She remained seated, staring at us, trying to stop her tears and comprehend what we were.

  Wind, rain, thunder invaded the stout walls. I heard the man say, slowly, “You’re from Earth.”

  “Yes.” I introduced us. He shook hands in an absentminded fashion and mumbled his own name too low for me to catch.

  “You can stay here, sure,” he added. “We got food in the cupboard till the storm passes. Afterward, Jimstown’s walking distance.”

  “We can do better than that,” I said, commanding a smile forth, trying to ignore our drowned-rat condition, for they needed whatever comfort was to be gotten. “We have a car.”

  Laurie went to the woman. “Don’t cry, please, my dear,” she murmured; somehow I heard her through the noise, and her head shone in the murk. “I know your farm’s wiped out. But you’re leaving soon anyway, and we’ll see you’re taken care of, you and your whole fam—Oh!” She stopped. Her teeth gleamed, catching at her lip.

  The woman was not pregnant. But, craning my neck, I too saw that the cradle stood empty.

  “I buried her around sundown,” the man said, looking past me. His tone was flat and his face was stiff, but the scarred hands kept twisting together. “A little girl. She lived several weeks. We hoped—And now the rain must’ve washed her out. I did think Sibylla might have let her sleep. We wrapped her up snug, and gave her a doll I’d made, so she wouldn’t be too lonesome after we were gone. But everything’s scattered now, I reckon.”

  ‘‘I’m sorry,” I groped. “Maybe…later—” Barely in time, I saw Laurie’s furious headshake. “What a terrible thing.”

  Laurie sat down by the wife and whispered to her.

  Once, on our way home, she told me what had been confided that night, hoping it would influence my report. This was the one child they had had, after five miscarriages. The birth was difficult and the doctor did not think any more were possible.

  I told her it was no surprise. Standing by that cradle, I had recalled the few children elsewhere and the many graves. And at once, like a blow to the guts, wildly swearing to myself I must be wrong, I saw the face of the alien enemy.

  * * *

  Jules d’Indre sat behind his desk, a shriveled, fussily dressed man whom it was wise to respect. He nodded, quick dip of bald head, as Brenner and I came in. “Be seated, citizens,” he did not invite, he ordered.

  I found the edge of a chair. My pulse thuttered and my palms were wet. Brenner leaned back, meeting those eyes, faintly smiling. “How d’you do, sir?” he drawled.

  “Let us not waste words,” d’Indre said. “Perhaps you are not aware how uncommon a physical confrontation in line of business is on Earth. I would normally use a vidiphone three-way, and during working hours. Can you guess why I did otherwise?”

  “Informality,” Brenner said. “No record, no snoops, no commitments to anything. Suits me. We lived old-fashioned on Sibylla. Not that we wanted to, understand.” His smile departed, his voice grew crisp, I had a sense of sparks flying. “It gave us some old-fashioned ideas, however, like about the rights of man.”

  D’Indre’s schoolmaster accent did not alter. “Rights are forfeited when one perpetrates a felony.”

  “Who’s done what and with which unto whom?”

  “The Colonial Fleet has been tied up on a useless mission for almost seventy years. Billions of munits have been spent.” D’Indre leaned forward. He tapped a pencil on the edge of the desk, tick-tick into an all-underlying silence. “The first thing I wish to know, Brenner, is how many were privy to the hoax.”

  The leather visage sought mine. “What made you report the attack was faked?” Brenner asked calmly, even amiably.

  “I didn’t want to,” burst from me. “I tried—everything—my whole team did. We couldn’t risk Earth being unprepared, if there was any chance a hostile fleet existed. And”—I noticed my hands reach toward him—“we didn’t want to hurt you!”

  “I know,” he said, briefly serious. His tone lightened again: “But I’ve got a curiosity. The fake was arranged by some mighty smart men. Time must’ve faded the evidence What put you on?”

  “Oh…any number of things,” I forced myself to say. “Close study of certain pictures turned up some unlikely perspectives in them. Analysis of crater material gave results that were consistent with the explosion of stationary plants, not of warheads. Any warhead we could think of needs a fission trigger, or it’d be too bulky. Analyzing the bones of supposed missile victims, we got clear indications that they’d died years earlier. Some of the diaries and correspondence, allegedly from the immediate post-attack period, contradict each other more than is reasonable when you apply symbolic logic. I could go on, but it’s in the report. No single detail conclusive, but no doubt left after the whole jigsaw puzzle was fitted together.”

  I wet my lips. “Sir,” I said to d’Indre, “our team discussed suppressing the facts. We decided we couldn’t do that to Earth. But you should know we did seriously consider it. We were that sorry for these people.”

  Tick-tick. “You have not answered my question, Brenner.”

  “Hey?” The Sibyllan coughed. “How many were in on the conspiracy? Just a few key men that my dad recruited. Still fewer today. The least number necessary to keep things shuffled around so nobody who wasn’t in on it would suspect.”

  “That has to be true, sir,” I blurted. “Ten thousand ordinary mortals can’t keep a secret or act a role.”

  “Obvious.” Tick-tick.“How did you, or rather your predecessors, avoid massacring their own populace?”

  “Well, everybody thanked his luck that he’d not been in a target area or was evacuated in time,” Brenner said. “He heard about casualties, but they’d always happened somewhere else, in places where nobody lived that he knew. He couldn’t check up, supposing it occurred to him. Sibylla never had global electronic communications, or fast transport except for some official flitters. What did exist—like a newspaper or three—was lost when the towns went. Took quite a spell even to re-establish a mail service. Meanwhile everything was confused, and refugees were getting relocated among strangers, and—The stunt wasn’t easy, Dad told me. But it did come off. Later, histories and chronicles and such were written; and who had reason to suspect them? Everybody knew our numbers were way below the original forecasts, and dwindling. But accurate pre-disaster figures were filed only in certain heads now, that kept their mouths shut. And nobody had time to sit down and think hard. So it came to be taken for granted that the loss of people was mainly, if not entirely, due to the attack and its aftermath. I assure you, sir, nearly everyone among us honestly believes in the alien enemy.”

  His gaze challenged d’Indre. “Do what you like to me and my partners,” he said. “We were ready for this, if the truth should come out. But you can’t punish ten thousand who also got foxed!”

  “Presumably the Director will not wish to do so,” d’lndre said as if stating a theorem. “Nevertheless, the problem of assimilating them, so that they can make a living on this overcrowded world, may well prove insoluble. And individuals are apt to be subjected to mob violence. And it is politically impossible to send them to a different planet, when so many others desire that for themselves. Did the conspirators foresee this?”

  “Yes,” Brenner said. He sat straight. The big fists clenched on his knees. “But there was no mucking choice. We had to get off Sibylla. We—my father’s group—didn’t think Earth would fetch us just because we were slowly dying. We’d already gotten too many refusals of our pleas for help, only a little help. ‘Too expensive,’ we were told. ‘They cope with the same problems elsewhere. Why can’t you?’ Unquote.

  “Expensive!” The word ripped from him, together with a detonating obscenity. I started where I sat. D’Indre did not change expression, but he stopped tapping that pencil. Brenner clamped lips together, took a breath, and went doggedly on: ‘‘To be quite frank, sir, on the basis of what knowledge I have, I wouldn’t put it past certain officials to fake incoming messages from a colony that stopped sending.”

  For the first time, I saw d’lndre lose color. The pencil broke in his fingers. Doubtless Brenner noticed too, for he paused through several still seconds before he finished: “Survival knows no law. My father and his men created a false enemy so their grandchildren could be saved from the real one.”

  “Which was?” d’Indre whispered.

  “Sibylla, of course,” Brenner said, almost as softly. ‘‘The world where everything was wrong. Where the sum total defeated us. Like a woman who wouldn’t miscarry too often in high gravity, except that she never got enough ultraviolet or oxygen, and did get too many hard roentgens, and had a poor diet, and was overworked, and the very daylight wasn’t the right color for easy vision…An entire world, fighting us on a hundred different fronts, never letting up. That was the alien enemy. We wouldn’t have lasted another century.”

  I said into the silence which followed: “Earth has known some analogies. Like the Vikings, around the year 1000. They made themselves rulers of England, Ireland, Normandy, Russia. They ranged unbeatable through half of Europe. They settled Iceland, they discovered America. But they could not hold Greenland. They had a colony there, and it hung on for maybe four hundred years, always more isolated, poorer, smaller, hungrier, weaker. In the end it perished. When archaeologists dug up the skeletons of the last survivors, every one was dwarfed and deformed. Greenland had beaten them.”

  “I’ve read about it,” Brenner said. “Men won in the end. Eskimos, who had the right technology for the place. Europeans, later, with sheer power of machinery. We, our race, we’ll lick Sibylla yet, one way or another. But it’s taken the first battle. In such cases, a good general retreats.”

  D’Indre had recovered his poise. “I also know the history,” he said. “Captain Simić’s report was exhaustive. I wished, however, to add a personal encounter to my data store before deciding what disposal of this affair I should advise.”

  Brenner folded his arms and waited.

  “As a matter of fact,” d’Indre said, “Captain Simić has already proposed a solution which seems viable to me. Parts of Earth remain empty because development has been economically unfeasible. The tropical deserts, for example, the Sahara or the Rub’ al-Qali. Sand, stone, drought, low water table or none, fierce heat and light, no worthwhile minerals. Converting them by machine would tie up too much capital equipment and skilled personnel that are badly needed elsewhere. Theoretically, the task could be accomplished by minimal robotic and maximal hand labor. But who among the proles combines the necessary attitude and hardihood? It will be interesting to see if the Sibyllans do.”

  Briefly, humanness broke through him. “I am sorry, especially for the children,” he said. “But under present circumstances, this is the best that anyone can give you.”

  Brenner remained steady. “I sort of expected it,” he said. “The captain dropped a few hints on our way down here. What about us, uh, conspirators?”

  D’Indre spread his hands. “Your colony will need leadership. I daresay the Director will rule that providing such leadership is an acceptable expiation.”

  Brenner’s own right hand crashed on the desk. Laughter roared from him. “Why, man!” he cried. “After what we’ve been up against, you think a nice kind Earthside desert’s going to be any problem?”

  Discussion dragged on. I took small part. My mind wandered and wondered. I didn’t speak, lest I jeopardize the solution that was being hammered out. But take these people, I thought. A world battled them for generations. What those now alive had experienced was of no importance compared to what their germ plasm had experienced. With that natural selection in their past, what would they do with their future?

  Ten thousand of them among billions—set down in the worst lands on Earth—could make a difference? Nonsense!

  I got rid of the notion. I took command of my ship and went off on a voyage. I came home after eighty-five years and found that I had not thought nonsense after all.

  Eventide

  Gone sunset amberful, the lake

  Lies mirror-quiet for the pines

  That ring it round with shadow heights

  Through which a ghost of golden shines

  To burnish blue those metal bits

  Above the water, wing and wing,

  Where, silent as in space itself,

  Three dragonflies are cometing.

  Enough Rope

  Hurulta, Arkazhik of Unzuvan, fitted his own personality. A magnificent specimen of Ulugani malehood, two and a half meters tall, so broad that he seemed shorter, he dwarfed the thin red-haired human before him. His robes were a barbaric shout of color, as if he were draped in fire and rainbows, and the volume of his speaking made the fine crystal ornaments in the audience chamber tremble and sing, ever so faintly. But the words were hard and steady and utterly cold.

  “Our will in this matter is unshakable,” he said curtly. “If the League wants to go to war over it, that will be the League’s misfortune.”

  Wing Alak of Sol III and the Galactic League Patrol looked up into the hairless blue face and ventured an urbane smile. The Ulugani were humanoid to several degrees of classification—six fingers to a hand, clawed feet, pointed ears, and the rest meant little when you dealt with the fantastic variety of intelligent life making up Alak’s compatriots. This race looked primitive—small head, beetling eyebrow ridges, flat nose and prognathous jaw—but inside, they were as bright as any other known species.