Hugo awards the short st.., p.141
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 141
Suddenly one of them, surely the First Greeter, extruded tentacles in clusters and rolled swiftly to the wall of record files the rows and rows of cabinets from which we had taken the tapes we had projected. He touched them, rolled to the screen, and pointed to the carts. A single, infinitely dignified tone came from him.
"Records," Lindy said. "They're giving us their history. They're doomed, but they'd like the Universe to know that they've lived, that they've learned and achieved and enjoyed. They're willing to go. They just don't want to be forgotten."
I don't know how she does it. But we all sensed that she was right. The egg-beings sensed it too. They had got through. Their soft medley of sound was thankful and contented.
"Run out a loading belt, bring in a trailer load," Johnny ordered. "We'll have a look."
"A good look," Pegleg muttered.
But that's what they were. Many of the bright boxes were filled with tapes, rolls and rolls of them, each inscribed with wavering lines in bewildering and complete confusion. Some were packed with metallic sheets thinner than the thinnest paper, but sturdy and resistant. From edge to edge they were covered with symbols in many colors. Records. The records of a planet. Of a race. Of an evolution. A galactic treasure beyond imagining.
Rasmussen gave the order; loading belts ran out all along the ship, and hour after hour the little trailers rolled up and discharged their loads onto the endless moving surfaces. We're an explorer ship. We have space for the specimens, the artifacts of an intensive look-see. So storage was no problem. I could imagine how eagerly the archaeologists, the historians, the mathematicians, the cryptologists were eyeing this treasure trove. But it depressed me. When we got down to the point of interpreting them, the beings who had recorded, compiled and packed them would be no more, would be part of a tenuous mass of gas outrushing into the depths of the galaxy.
"I want to see!" Lindy said. "They'll show me. I'm special. I'm sure they will."
She got it across to them, too. At the screen she pointed to the great fan of the transmitter complex, to them and then to herself. They fluted with understanding—and beckoned. It was the last thing we could do, and most of the field units took advantage of it. Time remained. Rest and sleep could wait, while a planet lived its last hours.
Spacesuited again, we followed our guests, now our hosts, through the exit ports. Long lines of white-clad members of field teams swarmed out behind us. The egg-beings seemed not to object. There was no possible reason why they should. But we, as Lindy said, were special.
Our four guides climbed back into their little cars, fluted positive notes into the medley of sounds rising from their countrymen, and presto—we had transportation. A car with a trailer ranged alongside each of us, and we were beckoned to climb aboard. The flat trailer beds seemed as soft as sponge rubber, but they held us, one person to a vehicle. Promptly we rolled toward the great fan at a dizzying five miles an hour.
A description of that tour does not belong here. You've read it in Rasmussen's official report (ISC Annals, Vol. 72, A. D. 2119. The Log of the Stardust), or you've had it piecemeal in a hundred news media items. It's here only because it's part of a sequence, or an order of happenings, when we had to explore a star system, a planet, and a civilization in less than thirty hours. It's significant because it gave us the beginnings of our understanding of the level of technology which these odd little egg-beings had achieved.
For hours the little cars rolled noisily up the gently sloping ramps, switching back, detouring into lofty chambers packed with mazes of strange machinery, occasionally debouching onto wide outlook window spaces from which the country stretched away to a far horizon. The metallic length of the Stardust on the ground below grew smaller and smaller as we climbed, and the tiny cars were beetles swarming around it. We spent half an hour on the highest point, on the very crest of the fan, a flat parking area that might have held a hundred or more of the little cars. And as I think back, we said almost nothing during the whole unreal experience.
The roiling, pulsing, unhappy sun was setting. This world would never see it set again. We watched it for a brief while, then followed our guides back down through the miles of sloping corridors, glowing with multicolored illumination, and finally out into an early darkness sprinkled with an alien canopy of stars.
The night seemed long. The Stardust teams worked with the structured efficiency that makes us the best, each team the extended arm of a master scientist. The Stardust gleamed like a giant glowworm. The brilliance of magnaflashes lit up the countryside for miles. Scoutboats darted in and away again. And over all, the many colors of the lights of the transmitter complex cast a strange, somber glow. In spite of the seething activity, it all seemed like an enormous wake. Which, in a way, I suppose it was.
I was glad when the night thinned, and finally the sullen orange sun climbed into view. I welcomed Stony Price's solemn announcement on intercom, "Official. Nova minus two hours. Staging minus thirty minutes." A sober Stony Price. No clowning with communiques now.
Outside the little cars still swarmed and scurried about in their thousands. But the last of our people came in. Personnel check was complete. The many checklists were finished and verified. We were ready.
"Staging minus sixty seconds!"
Lindy and I sat side by side, holding hands, watching the second sweep of the chronometer approach the sixty mark, waiting for the antigrav lift that would precede the familiar Nirvana-like state of Ultraspan.
And nothing happened.
Our fingers still clung while the chronometer made another sixty-second circle. The Stardust lay inert. No lift. No motion. Then the shaken voice of Stony Price on intercom. "Revision. Staging minus twenty minutes. A small difficulty."
In crisis, I am one of Johnny Rasmussen's four first-line replacements. Any one of us, in emergency, could take over operations and run the ship. Cap'n Jules Griffin, Moe Cheng, and Pegleg are the others. I arrived at the control room last, but only by about a couple of seconds.
Cap'n Jules sat in his control chair as always, his square face unchanging. Rasmussen reported.
"There is an energy hold on the antigrav units. We can't lift."
Moe Cheng's slits of eyes gleamed with anger, but Pegleg looked almost happy. Or at least he looked vindicated.
"Outside energy! Applied where it counts! We showed them too much!"
"But why?" I protested. "We have their records. They want them saved. They want the galaxy to know. I'd swear it!"
"Play-acting," Pegleg said. "If they can't live, why should we? They've analyzed our lift-off mechanism and nullified it. All the while that we've been gathering data, so have they. In an hour and a half, we all go together."
I've never admired Johnny Rasmussen more than at that moment. Impeccably dressed as always, bis moustaches newly waxed, he could have been considering a minor detail of operation. His tanned face showed no stress. He seated himself, punched for a brandy from the console alongside. He said nothing until he'd had a sip.
"Cap'n Jules," he said quietly, "I think I know the answer, but why not Ultraspan direct? It has no relation to conventional energy application."
Cap'n Jules shook his white head stolidly.
"We're in contact; so essentially the Stardust is a part of the mass of the planet. Even Ultraspan couldn't stage a planet."
"So?"
"We'd disintegrate," the captain said. "Or theory says we would. Never been tried, of course."
"In an hour and twenty minutes we disintegrate anyway. That'll be our last resort, our last experiment Meanwhile, we try to get them to release us. How, Roscoe?"
"I always get the easy assignments." I tried to keep a calm face, but it was a job to hold my voice steady. "Still, when I'm in deep trouble, I always look in the same direction. This time I think it's practical. Call my wife. Call Lindy—and her guitar."
"Of course." Rasmussen looked like he should have thought of it himself. He made the call. In a few minutes she came into the control room, a quiet, pale Lindy, but with live green eyes sparkling, and a faint wink for me as she passed.
"They're holding us, Dr. Peterson," Rasmussen said. "Somehow they've nullified the antigravs. Do you think you could find out why?"
Lindy looked from face to face. She saw nothing but chagrin and disillusionment, I'm afraid.
"Maybe I can't," she said slowly, "but if they're doing it, there is a reason. They don't want us destroyed."
"All the little atoms and ions that used to be me will take satisfaction hi that as they blow out across the universe," Pegleg said.
Lindy's eyes crinkled suddenly, deeply. She turned toward the waiting microphone. Johnny Rasmussen sipped his brandy, and his lean face was faintly quizzical. Pegleg's very sourness had lifted our spirits a little.
Lindy worked. How she worked. Her guitar queried and scolded and pled. The egg-beings crowded around the starship, row on row and rank on rank of little cars. The illusion of the tuning orchestra was more complete than it had ever been. They answered her with flutings and bell tones and deep, majestic chords. But they showed no indication that they understood what she wanted. We couldn't detect any concern that we were overstaying our time. And all the while that time grew shorter.
At nova minus thirty minutes, Rasmussen admitted defeat.
"Thank you, Dr. Peterson. I'm afraid they've won. Our outlook now seems to be the same as theirs. But at nova minus ten we'll try our last experiment. Even in contact with the planet, we'll try Ultraspan."
I don't think Lindy heard the last part of that. Excitedly she grasped Johnny Rasrnussen by the arm, almost spilling his brandy. And, even with disintegration staring you in the face, you just don't do that!
"That's it!" she cried. "Oh, of course that's it! The one thing we couldn't take away before! They want us to feel like they feel, to know what it's like to face the certainty of Eternity! They'll let us go, Johnny! They don't plan for us to die!"
And they proved it for her. Through the packed masses of little cars somehow a roadway opened. A pale blue car came through, hauling a blue trailer. On the trailer sat a large blue casket. The whole blue unit drew up at the location of the port nearest us. That was sealed, of course. No sign of it from outside. But they knew.
A single high clear note came from the thousands of diaphragms, a snaky forest of tentacles sprouted, waved and retracted.
"That's for Lindy," I said. I'd heard that note again and again.
Rasmussen gave the order; a loading belt extruded, and the blue casket came aboard. We broke the simple fastenings, and Lindy opened it there in the control room.
For a brief moment the contents of the casket made no sense at all. Then suddenly we knew. Even Cap'n Jules left his chair to join the circle looking down at the smooth, slightly quivering mass of clear gelatin that filled the box to the brim. Embedded in it were rows and rows of tiny green capsules, layer on layer of them. Thousands.
"They don't want to die," Lindy breathed. "They're saying, 'Find us a planet; find us a home with a healthy sun. Let our race and our culture and our knowledge live on.'"
"I don't understand, Dr. Peterson." Cap'n Jules Griffin's heavy, colorless voice was evidence that he didn't. Cap'n Jules is a genius, but he has no imagination whatever.
"These are their spawn, their babies." Lindy looked ready for tears. "Probably the most highly selected genes they could arrange for in a hurry. They themselves will die, of course. But their race is here in this box. We can lift off now, Cap'n Jules. The antigravs are free. They want us to go."
And a moment later the Stardust stirred gently, raised herself like a soap bubble on a breeze, and swept slowly hi a great circle around the magnificent fan of the transmitter, the thousands of tiny, colorful cars and their occupants dwindling to insect size.
"Nova minus fifteen minutes! Staging minus sixty seconds!" Stony Price sounded vastly relieved.
A sound began and grew and poured from our speakers, a single pure deep organ-tone. Benediction and good-bye!
Lindy and I held hands there in the control room; Pegleg and Rasmussen and Moe Cheng settled into chairs. Our senses blurred into the timeless nothingness of Ultraspan. Then reality returned. The Stardust floated in alien space. On our screens, four light-years away, the twin stars of Mizar A gleamed cheerily, although one of them seemed somewhat smudged and murky. But our view was four years old. We all winced when the chronometers swept past nova zero, then sat for a few minutes in a sort of numb sadness.
"They're gone," Lindy said. "Sun and planet snuffed out. Perhaps the other twin rendered unstable by the energy release. But the life and the wisdom it all made possible have escaped." She patted the blue casket.
It was tragedy. We knew them briefly, but they were our friends and we mourned. Yet we knew that such things happened often even in our galaxy. How much more so across the universe?
In perspective, this was simply a single blink of the Celestial Eye.
ALL THE LAST WARS AT ONCE
George Alec Effinger
We interrupt this p—
—upt this program to—
—terrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this bulletin pieced together from the archives of the General Motors Corporation.
"Good afternoon. This is Bob Dunne, NBC News in New Haven, Connecticut. We're standing here in the lobby of the Hotel Taft in New Haven, where the first international racial war has just been declared. In just a few seconds, the two men responsible will be coming out of that elevator. (Can you hear me?)
"—elevator. Those of you in the western time zones are probably already—"
The elevator doors opened. Two men emerged, smiling and holding their hands above their heads in victorious, self-congratulatory boxers' handshakes. They were immediately mobbed by newsmen. One of the two men was exceptionally tall and black as midnight in Nairobi. The other was short, fat, white, and very nervous. The black man was smiling broadly, the white man was smiling and wiping perspiration from his face with a large red handkerchief.
"—C News. The Negro has been identified as the representative of the people of color of all nations. He is, according to the mimeographed flyer distributed scant minutes ago, Mary McLeod Bethune Washington, of Washington, Georgia. The other man with him is identified as Robert Randall La Cygne, of La Cygne, Kansas, evidently the delegate of the Caucasian peoples. When, and by whom, this series of negotiations was called is not yet clear.
"At any rate, the two men, only yesterday sunk in the sticky obscurity of American life, have concluded some sort of bargaining that threatens to engulf the entire world in violent reaction. The actual content of that agreement is still open to specu—
"—or at any later date."
A close-up on Washington, who was reading from a small black notebook.
"We have thus reached, and passed, that critical moment. This fact has been known and ignored by all men, on both sides of the color line, for nearly a generation. Henceforth, this situation is to be, at least, honest, if bloodier. Bob and I join in wishing you all the best of luck, and may God bless."
"Mr. Washington?"
"Does this necessarily mean—"
"—iated Press here, Mr. Washing—"
"Yes? You, with the hat."
"Yes, sir. Vincent Reynolds, UPI. Mr. Washington, are we to understand that this agreement has some validity? You are aware that we haven't seen any sort of credentials—"
Washington grinned. "Thank you. I'm glad you brought that up. Credentials? Just you wait a few minutes, and listen outside. Ain't no stoppin' when them rifles start poppin'!"
"Mr. Washington?"
"Yes?"
"Is this to be an all-out, permanent division of peoples?"
"All-out, yes. Permanent, no. Bob and I have decided on a sort of statute of limitations. You go out and get what you can for thirty days. At the end of the month, we'll see what and who's left."
"You can guarantee that there will be no continuation of hostilities at the end of the thirty days?"
"Why, sure! We're all growed up, now, ain't we? Sure, why, you can trust us!"
"Then this is a war of racial eradication?"
"Not at all," said Bob La Cygne, who had remained silent, behind Washington's broad seersucker back. "Not at all what I would call a war of eradication. 'Eradicate' is an ugly term. 'Expunge' is the word we arrived at, isn't it, Mary Beth?"
"I do believe it is, Bob."
Washington studied his notebook for a few seconds, ignoring the shouting newsmen around him. No attempt was made by the uniformed guards to stop the pushing and shoving, which had grown somewhat aggravated. Then he smiled brightly, turning to La Cygne. They clasped hands and waved to the flashing bulbs of the photographers.
"No more questions, boys. You'll figure it all out soon enough; that's enough for now." The two men turned and went back into the waiting elevator.
(Tock tockatock tocka tock tock) "And now, the Six O'clock Report (tocka tock tocka tocka), with (tocka-tock) Gil Monahan."
(Tocka tocka tock tock tocka)
"Good evening. The only story in the news tonight is the recently declared official hostilities between members of all non-Caucasian races and the white people of the world. Within minutes of the original announcement, open warfare broke out in nearly every multiracially populated area in the U.S. and abroad. At this moment the entire globe is in turmoil; the scene everywhere flickers between bloody combat in the streets and peaceful lulls marked by looting and destruction of private property.
"What has happened, in effect, is a thirty-day suspension of all rational codes of conduct. The army and National Guard are themselves paralyzed due to their own internal conflicts. A state of martial law has been declared by almost all governments, but, to our knowledge, nowhere has it been effectively enforced.
"There seems to be absolutely no cooperation between members of the opposite sides, on any level. Even those who most sympathized with the problems of the other are engaged in, using Mary McLeod Bethune Washington's terms, 'getting their own.' Interracial organizations, social groups, and even marriages are splintering against the color barrier.
