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’Indre 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.»