The Third Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  “Now what?” Nasha said.

  Dorle took out his hand weapon. “Stand back. I can’t think of any other way.” He pressed the switch. The bottom of the door glowed red. Presently it began to crumble. Dorle clicked the weapon off. “I think we can get through. Let’s try.”

  The door came apart easily. In a few minutes they had carried it away in pieces and stacked the pieces on the first step. Then they went on, flashing the light ahead of them.

  They were in a vault. Dust lay everywhere, on everything, inches thick. Wood crates lined the walls, huge boxes and crates, packages and containers. Tance looked around curiously, his eyes bright.

  “What exactly are all these?” he murmured. “Something valuable, I would think.” He picked up a round drum and opened it. A spool fell to the floor, unwinding a black ribbon. He examined it, holding it up to the light.

  “Look at this!”

  They came around him. “Pictures,” Nasha said. “Tiny pictures.”

  “Records of some kind.” Tance closed the spool up in the drum again. “Look, hundreds of drums.” He flashed the light around. “And those crates. Let’s open one.”

  Dorle was already prying at the wood. The wood had turned brittle and dry. He managed to pull a section away.

  It was a picture. A boy in a blue garment, smiling pleasantly, staring ahead, young and handsome. He seemed almost alive, ready to move toward them in the light of the hand lamp. It was one of them, one of the ruined race, the race that had perished.

  For a long time they stared at the picture. At last Dorle replaced the board.

  “All these other crates,” Nasha said. “More pictures. And these drums. What are in the boxes?”

  “This is their treasure,” Tance said, almost to himself. “Here are their pictures, their records. Probably all their literature is here, their stories, their myths, their ideas about the universe.”

  “And their history,” Nasha said. “We’ll be able to trace their development and find out what it was that made them become what they were.”

  Dorle was wandering around the vault. “Odd,” he murmured. “Even at the end, even after they had begun to fight they still knew, someplace down inside them, that their real treasure was this, their books and pictures, their myths. Even after their big cities and buildings and industries were destroyed they probably hoped to come back and find this. After everything else was gone.”

  “When we get back home we can agitate for a mission to come here,” Tance said. “All this can be loaded up and taken back. We’ll be leaving about—”

  He stopped.

  “Yes,” Dorle said dryly. “We’ll be leaving about three day-periods from now. We’ll fix the ship, then take off. Soon we’ll be home, that is, if nothing happens. Like being shot down by that—”

  “Oh, stop it!” Nasha said impatiently. “Leave him alone. He’s right: all this must be taken back home, sooner or later. We’ll have to solve the problem of the gun. We have no choice.”

  Dorle nodded. “What’s your solution, then? As soon as we leave the ground we’ll be shot down.” His face twisted bitterly. “They’ve guarded their treasure too well. Instead of being preserved it will lie here until it rots. It serves them right.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t you see? This was the only way they knew, building a gun and setting it up to shoot anything that came along. They were so certain that everything was hostile, the enemy, coming to take their possessions away from them. Well, they can keep them.”

  Nasha was deep in thought, her mind far away. Suddenly she gasped. “Dorle,” she said. “What’s the matter with us? We have no problem. The gun is no menace at all.”

  The two men stared at her.

  “No menace?” Dorle said. “It’s already shot us down once. And as soon as we take off again—”

  “Don’t you see?” Nasha began to laugh. “The poor foolish gun, it’s completely harmless. Even I could deal with it alone.”

  “You?”

  Her eyes were flashing. “With a crowbar. With a hammer or a stick of wood. Let’s go back to the ship and load up. Of course we’re at its mercy in the air: that’s the way it was made. It can fire into the sky, shoot down anything that flies. But that’s all! Against something on the ground it has no defenses. Isn’t that right?”

  Dorle nodded slowly. “The soft underbelly of the dragon. In the legend, the dragon’s armor doesn’t cover its stomach.” He began to laugh. “That’s right. That’s perfectly right.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Nasha said. “Let’s get back to the ship. We have work to do here.”

  * * * *

  It was early the next morning when they reached the ship. During the night the Captain had died, and the crew had ignited his body, according to custom. They had stood solemnly around it until the last ember died. As they were going back to their work the woman and the two men appeared, dirty and tired, still excited.

  And presently, from the ship, a line of people came, each carrying something in his hands. The line marched across the gray slag, the eternal expanse of fused metal. When they reached the weapon they all fell on the gun at once, with crowbars, hammers, anything that was heavy and hard.

  The telescopic sights shattered into bits. The wiring was pulled out, torn to shreds. The delicate gears were smashed, dented.

  Finally the warheads themselves were carried off and the firing pins removed.

  The gun was smashed, the great weapon destroyed. The people went down into the vault and examined the treasure. With its metal-armored guardian dead there was no danger any longer. They studied the pictures, the films, the crates of books, the jeweled crowns, the cups, the statues.

  At last, as the sun was dipping into the gray mists that drifted across the planet they came back up the stairs again. For a moment they stood around the wrecked gun looking at the unmoving outline of it.

  Then they started back to the ship. There was still much work to be done. The ship had been badly hurt, much had been damaged and lost. The important thing was to repair it as quickly as possible, to get it into the air.

  With all of them working together it took just five more days to make it spaceworthy.

  * * * *

  Nasha stood in the control room, watching the planet fall away behind them. She folded her arms, sitting down on the edge of the table.

  “What are you thinking?” Dorle said.

  “I? Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was thinking that there must have been a time when this planet was quite different, when there was life on it.”

  “I suppose there was. It’s unfortunate that no ships from our system came this far, but then we had no reason to suspect intelligent life until we saw the fission glow in the sky.”

  “And then it was too late.”

  “Not quite too late. After all, their possessions, their music, books, their pictures, all of that will survive. We’ll take them home and study them, and they’ll change us. We won’t be the same afterwards. Their sculpturing, especially. Did you see the one of the great winged creature, without a head or arms? Broken off, I suppose. But those wings— It looked very old. It will change us a great deal.”

  “When we come back we won’t find the gun waiting for us,” Nasha said. “Next time it won’t be there to shoot us down. We can land and take the treasure, as you call it.” She smiled up at Dorle. “You’ll lead us back there, as a good captain should.”

  “Captain?” Dorle grinned. “Then you’ve decided.”

  Nasha shrugged. “Fomar argues with me too much. I think, all in all, I really prefer you.”

  “Then let’s go,” Dorle said. “Let’s go back home.”

  The ship roared up, flying over the ruins of the city. It turned in a huge arc and then shot off beyond the horizon, heading into outer space.

  * * * *

  Down below, in the center of the ruined city, a single half-broken detector vane moved slightly, catching th
e roar of the ship. The base of the great gun throbbed painfully, straining to turn. After a moment a red warning light flashed on down inside its destroyed works.

  And a long way off, a hundred miles from the city, another warning light flashed on, far underground. Automatic relays flew into action. Gears turned, belts whined. On the ground above a section of metal slag slipped back. A ramp appeared.

  A moment later a small cart rushed to the surface.

  The cart turned toward the city. A second cart appeared behind it. It was loaded with wiring cables. Behind it a third cart came, loaded with telescopic tube sights. And behind came more carts, some with relays, some with firing controls, some with tools and parts, screws and bolts, pins and nuts. The final one contained atomic warheads.

  The carts lined up behind the first one, the lead cart. The lead cart started off, across the frozen ground, bumping calmly along, followed by the others. Moving toward the city.

  To the damaged gun.

  NOT STUPID ENOUGH, by George H. Scithers

  Bill Wilkes stared, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the nearly naked Immigration official. He closed his mouth and firmly reminded himself that he was light-years from Earth, and the thatched roof and log beams of the Customs and Immigration shed should have warned him. Still—Bill glanced back over his shoulder and out across the small spaceport at the reassuring bulk of the freighter that had just delivered him and a dozen other passengers to Garth. Even the unloading equipment was no more than a few dozen years out of date; and then, suddenly, this. Bill turned back to the impressively muscular humanoid to study more carefully the headband and feather, worn Amerindian style, and the bronze-headed ax, belted to the Garthian’s hip.

  The Garthian official finished with the passenger ahead of Bill. He glanced up, noticed Bill’s stare, and twitched a bushy green eyebrow in response. “Cultural shock? ’S fact, this gets it over earlier than if we be in Terran costume,” he said, with hardly a trace of an accent, as he reached for the young Earthman’s travel document. After a moment, he looked up from the document at Bill, eyebrows pulled together in a puzzled scowl. “You be connected with that Wilkes who—”

  “His grandson,” said Bill. “I heard that in spite of what happened, you have been putting up statues of him, and I wanted to find out what—”

  “Not in spite,” said the big humanoid “Because of.” He stopped scowling, twitched his eyebrows. He gestured at a heap of pillows on a low log platform nearby. “Be seated, wait. After I check the others on, we talk.” The Garthian turned to the next passenger in line, reached for his travel document.

  While the rest of the passengers filed past Immigration and moved on to claim their baggage from Customs, Bill sat on a pillow. His initial worry gradually turned to indignation, then both were forgotten as he watched a small, furry day-bat scurry around the floor of the shed with wings furled. Emboldened by the young Earthman’s stillness, the day-bat hopped up onto the pillows, then opened its wings and flitted off. Bill glanced up; the big Garthian was approaching. Bill stood up, remembering his indignation; but before he could speak, the Garthian plopped his muscular body down on the pillows, stretched himself in a prodigious yawn, and relaxed.

  “Be comfortable, please,” said the Garthian. He twitched his eyebrows as he looked up at Bill. The Earthman started to speak, then grinned instead and sat down. “What do you know about the visit of your ancestor here?” asked the big humanoid.

  “Well,” said Bill, squirming for a more comfortable position on the pillows, “I’ve read his diary. And the official report of the expedition he was on, which doesn’t say too much. The thing you’ve got to remember is that back then, Earth—Terra—was still in the Neo-Victorian reaction to the Hallucinated Age. At least, grandfather was, and it sort of gave him a jolt when the local mayor or chief or whoever he was, invited him to…uh—”

  “Help service his woman?” The big Garthian twitched an eyebrow in amusement. “Of course even by then, our wisemen and your biographers…no, no, biologists, decided we be not interfertile, even though we correspond in bore and stroke.”

  “Bore and—? Oh.” Bill felt his face go warm, saw the Garthian twitch his bushy green eyebrows again, and grinned back.

  “High-Chief-by-Election Khlaj was conservative and—you do not have the word—one who observes proper ritual. So, interfertile or not, he extended invitation to service in the proper form. ’S fact, he got a jolt when your ancestor spoke forth a lecture on promiscuity. And then…”

  * * * *

  The leader of the first Terran expedition to Garth had been in the middle of supper when Dr. Wilkes burst in, panting, “I have it, I have it!”

  “Sit down, damnit, Doctor, and stop waving your arms around,” Captain Smithson had grumbled. “The green-hairs aren’t attacking, are they?”

  “No. Hardly. Just the—reverse,” Dr. Wilkes had said, between puffs. “They invited me—to an orgy.”

  “Well, well, Doctor,” the captain had said. “You’re the expedition’s psychologist; you don’t have to ask me for permission to…ah…observe the natives’ religious—”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. It isn’t religious at all; it isn’t even public…I mean it isn’t even—”

  “Do sit down,” the captain had said firmly. He had taken another mouthful of supper, then said, “Orgies tend to be something less than private, Dr. Wilkes. And while I wouldn’t presume to prescribe in your field of study, an occasional one does do some—”

  “That’s just it. They never get together in private; all their procreative activity is in indecent groups and orgies.”

  “So?” the expedition’s botanist had asked. “Maybe something in their instincts requires that they—”

  “No, no, no. I talked to them. Preached to them, almost. They just never thought of being private about it, you know, monogamous. But with a little persuasion—”

  “Persuasion!”

  “Don’t you see? That’s the key to the whole Garthian behavioristic complex. No interspecific competition of exclusive access to the chosen female, no system of paternal descent, no basis even for monotheism replacing polytheistic idolatry, which is the basis for the concept of a law-bound universe, on which our whole scientific—”

  “Yes, yes, but aren’t you getting a bit emotionally involved?” the captain had asked.

  “Involved? Even…even tomcats don’t invite their neighbors in for…for…you’ve seen how primitive they are, living in dirty huts—”

  “It seems to me,” the expedition’s zoologist had objected, “that you are getting emotional. The huts are clean, even if they’re built of rammed earth. And I’ve never seen a tribe of tomcats with an elected chief and a system of letters of credit, even if they are written on pieces of bark. And the bridgekeeper on the river a couple dozen kilometers west has been doing some interesting work on the statistics of day-bat breeding. Furthermore—”

  “I AM NOT GETTING EMOTIONAL.”

  “Furthermore, I haven’t seen any signs of a, as you call it, polymorphic idolatry to get replaced.”

  “Polytheistic, you pot-head. And if you can’t see it’s our plain duty to enlighten these poor savages, then—”

  “Pot-head? I am not going to sit here and get insulted by a sanctimonious shrink who’s meddling—”

  “GENTLEMEN!” the captain had bellowed at that point. “That’s better. Dr. Wilkes, if you do not shut up and sit down, I shall have the chief machinist make me some irons so I can put you in them. Just because we are one hundred thirty-five light-years from Terra is no reason we can’t have a quiet, peaceful supper at the end of a hard day. I daresay Chief Khlaj keeps better order during his orgies than some of the meals in this madhouse, and—”

  * * * *

  “…Your ancestor began his crusade to reform all Garth,” the big Garthian native said. “He persuaded the captain of the expedition to allow it, saying that it was to our own good. So in spite of the Terran rules—”


  “Yes, that was the biggest problem,” said Bill, rolling over onto his stomach and tucking a pillow under one elbow. “According to grandfather’s diary, he had as hard a time persuading the captain not to interfere as he did persuading…uh…Chief Khlaj to give up orgies in favor of restricting sex to just the…uh…essential two participants. Talking the young bucks into the idea of not sharing their mates was almost easy, compared to those two. He had a lot in the diary about substitution and sublimation and reinforcement of post-adolescent intraspecific competition which I didn’t—still don’t understand at all.”

  “Well, ’s fact that my folk didn’t understand that part either. What they did understand was that he said giving up orgies meant getting Terran technology. That wasn’t fact, as they found out; but at the time it did make sense.” The Garthian twitched his eyebrows; Bill found himself smiling back.

  “But—” Bill’s smile faded. “He didn’t mean to lie. According to the diary, he thought if he got you going with monogamy, then monotheism and the whole idea of a rational universe running on universal laws would take hold, superseding a lot of local superstitions and capricious gods and like that. Instead—”

  “Instead, there were no capricious gods until your ancestor persuaded the village storyteller to invent some.”

  “Only, Grandfather didn’t realize he—the storyteller—was inventing them on demand, though he did mention the storyteller seemed to have an endless supply.” He glanced out the side of the Customs and Immigration shed, away from the spaceport, spotted a pair of thin lines strung from tree to tree through the woods. “Hey, you do have electric power, then.”

  “’S fact. We decided there be no reason to cut down trees and cut off branches and put trees back in holes. Our power lines be strung from trees already there. And drains and running water in some of the towns.” The big native rolled over, sat up. “Of course, we insisted the first visiting Terran running-water engineer be not admitted to Garth until a drains engineer has been here and started teaching and building. Otherwise”—his eyebrows lifted as he looked directly at the young Earthman—“it be as bad as a man who teaches first and learns afterwards.”