Too bright!

  “It would be straining the obvious, your excellency,” said Alak, “to point out that the Unzuvan Empire comprises just one planetary system of which only Ulugan is habitable, whereas the Galactic League embraces a good million stars. It cannot have been omitted from all calculation. But I must say that, under these circumstances, I am puzzled; perhaps your excellency would condescend to enlighten me with regard to your attitude on this disparity.”

  Hurulta snorted, showing a formidable mouthful of teeth. During the years in which Alak, as chief representative of the League and its Patrol, had been visiting Ulugan—off and on—and particularly during the past several months of mounting crisis during which Alak had been here continuously, he had learned to regard the Solarian as a weak, wordy, and pedantic bumbler. Now one huge blue fist crashed into the palm of the other hand and he grinned contemptuously.

  “Let us not bandy words,” he said. “The nearest border of the League is almost a thousand light-years away, which would make your lines of communication ridiculously long if you tried to attack. Also, in spite of this distance, we have had our own agents in your territory for years. We know that the temper of the League population is…well, let us not say decadent, let us be kindly and say pacific. It would not react favorably to a war which could only mean expense and grief for it. Moreover, the Patrol is a minimal force, designed merely to keep order within the bounds of the League itself. Policemen! We have built up a war machine.”

  He shrugged massively. “Why go on?” he rumbled. “It is only our intention to claim the natural rights of Ulugan. You go your way, we will go ours; we do not wish to fight you, but neither do we feel bound to respect the morals of an altogether different civilization. You can, at best, only be a nuisance if you try to stop us; and if the nuisance becomes too great, we are not afraid of fighting a thousand-year war to exterminate it. We are a warrior race and you are not: there is the essential difference, and mere statistics will not change it.”

  He sat down behind his desk and fiddled absently with a jeweled dagger. His voice was remote, uninterested. “You may inform your government that Ulugan is already commencing the occupation of Tukatan and the other planets in its system. That is all. You may go.”

  To dismiss an ambassador thus was like a slap. Alak had to fight himself for an instant before self-control came. Then his gaunt sharp face smoothed itself out, and his tone was unctuous.

  “As your excellency wishes, so be it. Good day.”

  He bowed and backed out of the magnificent room.

  * * *

  Scene: An upper office in the League Patrol Intelligence—Sol Sector—building, Britn, Terra. A sparsely furnished room, a few relaxers, a desk, the control-studded board of a robofile. One wall is transparent, opening on a serene landscape of rolling, wooded hills, a few private dwelling-units, the distant bulk of a food factory. Overhead, the sky is full of white clouds and sunshine, now and then the metal gleam of an airboat. It all seems incredibly remote from the troubled world of Galactic politics.

  Characters: Myrn Kaltro, sector chief, a big gray-haired man in the iridescent undress uniform of a human Patrol officer. Jorel Meinz, sociotechnic director of the Solar System, small, dark, intense, conservatively dressed in gold and crimson. Wing Alak, unattached field agent, enough of a dandy to wear the latest fashion in civilian clothes—plain gray and blue. But then, he has been away from home for a good many years.

  Background: In a civilization embracing nearly a million separate intelligent races, most of them with independent governments of their own, a civilization which is growing almost daily, it is impossible for even a well-informed administrator to keep track of all significant events. Jorel Meinz has hardly heard the name “Ulugan” before today; now he is being asked to authorize an action which may change Galactic history.

  He fumbled out a cigar and inhaled it into lighting. His words were quick, jerky, harsh. “What has Sol to do with this? It’s a matter for the entire League Council.”

  “Which won’t meet for another two years,” said Kaltro. “As our friend Hurulta well knows. It would take six months just to get a quorum together for an emergency session. Oh, they timed it well, those Ulugani.”

  “Well, the high command of the Patrol can exercise broad discretion,” Meinz grimaced. “Too broad. I don’t mind saying I haven’t liked all reports of your activities which have come to me. However, in this case—”

  “The high command is prepared to act,” said Kaltro. “I’ve contacted all members. Nevertheless, the situation is unprecedented. The Patrol was created to enforce peace within the League. Nothing was said about dealing with a power outside it. If we act against Ulugan, we’ll be on legally shaky ground, and there may be a day of reckoning which would do a lot of harm. Many local politicians are spoiling to take a crack at the Patrol, push through constitutional amendments limiting its scope—if they can persuade enough beings that the Patrol has become an irresponsible machine capable of starting wars on its own initiative, they may succeed.”

  “I see. But what can I do?”

  “Your influence can swing the Solar Parliament into authorizing the Patrol to act against Ulugan. In effect, Sol will say: ‘As far as we’re concerned, the Patrol can have emergency powers, and use them immediately.’ Thereafter, we’ll proceed.”

  “But one system can’t do that. The Patrol belongs to the whole League!”

  “Please.” Kaltro lifted shaggy gray brows and smiled, creasing his face as if it were a stiff brown fabric. “You’re a practical political engineer. You know as well as I do that Sol is still the leading system in the League. If it’ll back us, enough other planets will follow that lead to put us in the clear when the business is brought up at the next Council. Technically, it’ll be a post facto O.K. on what we’ll already have done, but that’ll suffice. It’ll have to!”

  “Well—” Meinz rolled his cigar between bony fingers, scowling at it. “Well, all right, I see your point. But you still haven’t seen mine. Why should I help you take action against Ulugan?”

  He held up a hand. “No, wait, let me finish. As I understand it, Ulugan is a one-system empire lying nearly a thousand light-years outside our territorial bounds. It wants to incorporate one other system into itself. The natives of that system object, to be sure, and ask us for help—but the hard-boiled League Patrol is, I am certain, the last organization in the universe to get interested in noble crusades. The operation of crushing Ulugan would be enormously expensive. The logistic difficulties alone would make it a project of many years—even if it could succeed, which is by no means certain. The Ulugani could, and certainly would, retaliate with raids on our territory, perhaps they could penetrate to Sol itself. After all, interstellar space is so huge that any kind of blockade or defense line is utterly impossible. And you know what horror and destruction even a raid can bring, what with the power of modern weapons.

  “The League is not a nation, empire, or alliance. It was formed to arbitrate interstellar disputes and prevent future wars. Such other services as it performs are relatively minor; and its systems are, politically and commercially, so loosely knit that it could never evolve into a true federal government. In short, it is totally unable to put forth the united effort of a war. If Ulugan is as determined as Agent Alak says, it may be able to bring the League to terms even if it is one planet against a million. The League may not feel the game is worth the candle, you see. And the resentment at having been involved in a war of which ninety per cent of its citizens would never have heard before death rained on them from the sky—that resentment could destroy the League itself   !”

  He put the cigar back to his mouth and blew a huge cloud of smoke. “In short, gentlemen,” he finished, “if you want my support for this project of yours, you’re going to have to give me a pretty good reason.”

  Kaltro cocked an eye at Wing Alak. The field agent nodded slightly and took out a cigarette for himself. He waited till he had it going before he spoke:

  “Let me recapitulate a little, director. Ulugan is a dense, metallic planet of a red dwarf sun. Terrestroid, which means a human can live there but not very comfortably—one-point-five Terran gravity, high air pressure, cold and stormy. The natives are a gifted species, but turbulent, not very polite or moral, all too ready to follow a leader blindly. Those are cultural rather than genetic traits, of course, but they’ve been pretty well drilled in by now. The history of Ulugan is one of mounting international wars, which pushed the technological development ahead fast but exhausted the natural resources of the planet. In short, a history not unlike ours prior to the Unification; but they never developed a true psychological technology, so their society still contains many archaisms.

  “They invented the faster-than-light drive about two centuries ago and started exploring—and exploiting, quite ruthlessly—the nearer stars. They still had nations then, and quarreling over the spoils led to a slam-bang interstellar war. One nation, Unzuvan, finally conquered all the others and absorbed them into a racial empire. That was about thirty years back. It was shortly thereafter that a long-range exploration party from the League, off to study the starclouds near Galactic center, chanced on them. Naturally, even though they are remote from our integrated territory, they were invited to join us. All races of suitably high civilization are, and so far none had refused. They did. Quite rudely, too. Said they were perfectly capable of gaining everything we offered for themselves, and be damned if they’d give up any of their sovereignty.”

  “Um-m-m. Paranoid culture, then,” said Meinz.

  “Obviously. Well, the League…or rather, its agent the Patrol…did what it could. Sent embassies, cultural missions, and so on, in the hope of gradually converting them. I’ve been more or less in charge for the past fifteen years, though of course I could only get out there once in a while. Too much else to do. We had no luck, anyway, except—” Briefly, Alak grinned. “Well, we do have an efficient intelligence service.”

  “Spies, you mean?” asked Meinz impatiently.

  “No, never! What, never? Hardly ever!” Alak’s classical quotation was lost on Kaltro, who merely grunted, but Meinz smiled. “We weren’t too interested in the military-political details of Ulugan,” went on the field agent cryptically. “Mostly, we studied the neighboring stars. No one could object to scientific study of primitive planets, could they?

  “I’ll see that you get our complete dossier on Ulugani sociodynamics, but briefly, the set-up is simple. There’s a hereditary emperor and a military aristocracy ruling a subservient class of peasants and workers. The aristocracy is hand in glove with the big commercial interests—it’s a sort of monopoly capitalism, partly controlled by the state and partly controlling the state. No, that’s a poor way to phrase it. Let’s say that the industrial trusts and the military caste together are the state. The supreme power is, for all practical purposes, lodged in the Arkazhik, a kind of combined premier and war minister. Right now he’s one Hurulta, an able, aggressive, ambitious being with some colorful dreams of glory.

  “Very well. Ulugan, under Hurulta, wants to start conquering itself an empire. Specifically, they intend to annex Tukatan, a fertile planet with a backward population. In fact, by now, in the time it’s taken me to get here, they have begun doing so. But you know they aren’t going to stop there.”

  “No,” said Meinz after a pause. “No, I suppose not.” Then, briskly: “But after all, what does it concern us? A thousand light-years away—”

  “That thousand light-years is shrinking,” said Kaltro. “The League territory is expanding, through exploration, colonization, the joining of new systems. The Ulugani empire will also expand, toward us. Our analysts estimate that in a mere two hundred years, there will be contact. You know that an interstellar civilization can’t be big merely in space; it has to be big in time, too. We have to think ahead.”

  “Um-m-m—” Meinz rubbed his chin.

  “My guess is that if we don’t stop Ulugan now, we won’t even have those two centuries,” said Alak. “They’re spoiling for trouble. A real war would unite their still new empire like nothing else.”

  Meinz nodded. “A good point. But can you stop them? To try and then fail would be—catastrophic.”

  “We can only try,” said Kaltro gravely. “I won’t hide from you that the situation is, well, precarious. But I don’t see how we can afford not to try.”

  “Still…war—” Meinz twisted his mouth, as if it held a sour taste. “The ruination of planets. The killing of a billion innocent civilians to get at a few guilty leaders. The legacy of hatred. The corrosive effects of victory on the so-called victors. The Patrol has always existed to prevent war. If it instigated one—”

  “Our intention,” said Kaltro, “is to stop Ulugan without starting a war.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you that. We have to have our secrets.”

  “And if you do provoke them into declaring one—?”

  Alak shrugged. “That,” he said, “is the chance we have to take.”

  “I warn you,” said Meinz, “if you get us into real trouble, the Council will have your personal hides.”

  To that, neither of the Patrolmen replied.

  * * *

  Presently the administrator left. He took with him a bulky file of reports and sociodynamic calculations, and he gave no definite promises. But Kaltro nodded gravely at his agent. “He’ll agree,” he said.

  “He’d better,” said Alak. “I tell you, the situation is worse than I can describe, You have to be on such a planet and feel the hate and tension building up. Like…well…It feels sticky. You want to go wash yourself.”

  “Can you handle the operation?” asked Kaltro. “I’ll have to stay behind to fend off outraged citizens.”

  “I can try,” said Alak. There was a bleakness on his lips.

  “And look, Wing,” said Kaltro, “this is an unprecedented situation, I know. We’re acting outside the League, and you might feel free, in real emergency, to violate the Prime Directive. Don’t.”

  “I know,” said Alak. “Any Patrolman who does—mnemonic erasure and cashiering from the service. No reasons or excuses accepted. It will be observed in this operation, too. Even if it costs us the war.”

  He left after a while, to begin on the mountain of paper work which is the essence of a large-scale mission. Not bureaucratic red tape, but necessary organizational detail, and nothing glamorous about it. Nothing of jack-booted heroes, roaring warships, and flaming guns.

  But then, the League Patrol had little to do with such matters anyway. They who would end war cannot resort to it themselves, or the injustice, butchery, and waste of it will provoke a hatred that must finally destroy them. The Patrol cultivated a wholly fictitious reputation as a terrible enemy, it cooked news releases about its battles and it maintained a number of impressive fighting ships. When sweet reasonableness failed to enforce the arbitration of the League, the Patrol used bluff; when that failed, it used bribery, blackmail, fomented revolution, any means that came to hand. But always and forever it held by the Prime Directive which was its own most closely watched secret.

  Under no circumstances whatsoever may the Patrol or any unit thereof kill an intelligent being.

  * * *

  A thousand warships lanced through an interstellar night. In their van were the scouts, flanking them were the cruisers, riding magnificently at their center were the monstrous dreadnoughts each of which could annihilate all life on an ordinary-sized planet. They convoyed another thousand noncombatant vessels—transports, supply craft, flying workshops. Behind them lay the stars of the League, lost in a cold glory of constellations; before them were the swelling suns of the loose cluster holding Ulugan.

  The task force found the particular star it was looking for, a yellow dwarf some ten light-years from Tumu—which is simply the Unzuvani word for “sun”—and took up an orbit around the clouded second planet. Scouts dropping down through the atmosphere used infrared scopes to see through the mists and the hot, spilling rains; geosonic probes tested a thousand kilometers of swamp and jungle and sullen tideless ocean before reporting a stable surface. Then the big workships began landing.

  Wing Alak stood in the phosphorescent twilight of the sixth day looking at the labor that went on around him. Blasters had driven back the jungle, exposing a raw red scar. Now, under the white glare of floodlights, robotracs moved ponderously back and forth, laying the foundations of a landing field. He could not see through the dimness and the acrid mists to the prefab barracks which housed his workers.

  The planet was humanly habitable—just barely. Alak’s clothes hung wetly around him and he cursed in a tired voice and wished it weren’t too humid for him to sweat. The ceaseless thin buzz of the sanitator about his neck, destroying air-borne molds and bacteria that would otherwise soon have destroyed him, was in a fair way to driving him crazy. And to think, he reflected in one corner of his soggy brain, I could have been a food factory technician at home.

  The scaly, tentacled Sarrushian Patrolmen who made up most of his gang sloshed happily through the muck. This hellhole was almost like their own planet. Not quite—there were some dangerous animals around, you could hear them stamping and roaring out in the fever-mists. And a weird sort of tree that shot poisoned thorns had killed two of his men already.

  Won’t those stupid Ulugani ever catch on?

  It was no coincidence that the message should have come just then, for Alak had had few other thoughts since he first landed. The lean, beak-faced Karkarian who was his chief aide came from the communications shack and saluted, awkward in the space armor which was necessary for him here. His voder spoke tonelessly: “Subspace call, sir. From Tumu.”

  “Oh, good!” Alak felt too miserable to do more than nod, but he followed the tall metallic shape with a tinge of energy. It began to rain, and he was soaked before he reached the shack. Not a very dignified spectacle for the eyes of the Ulugani in the screen.