«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.