The Baron said wearily, “I can’t navigate this craft, nor can the Count. We have no way of getting back.”
Ronny stared at him. “Where’s your crew?”
“They’ve evidently been sacrificed to the gods—or something along that line. Cutting the heart out with what looked like an obsidian knife!” A spasm of horror went over the former strongman’s face.
The Baron didn’t seem to be particularly coherent. Ronny sat himself down and looked at the scholarly Count. “Suppose you bring me up to date.”
“I am not sure I can, in complete detail; but I have a theory.”
“All right, take your time. Richardson, take a look through the ship.”
Richardson left.
“The Count said unhappily, “I am not quite sure where to start.” He looked into Ronny’s face. “Citizen Bronston, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps primitive man, say Cro-Magnon man, might have been more intelligent than modern man?” He hurried on before getting an answer. “Don’t confuse intelligence with accumulated knowledge. You can take a man with an I.Q. of ninety and fill him with a great deal of accumulated knowledge. Keep at it long enough and you can get him a doctor’s degree. On the other hand, you can take a man with an I.Q. of 150 and place him in the right—or rather, the wrong—surroundings and he’ll wind up with very little education at all. He’ll be smart, but will possess little accumulated knowledge.
“In primitive times, if a man was slow in the head, he died. The race needed better brains and bred for them. But as we solved the problems of defense against other animals and against nature, as we learned to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves, the need became less pressing. Our less intelligent survived, and lived to breed. Finally we achieved to the point where there was an abundance of everything for all, and the need of having superior brains fell away. No longer were the most brainy in the community given the best food, the best women—the best the community could offer in all desirable things. They were no longer at a premium.”
“What in Zen are you driving at?” Ronny asked impatiently.
“One of my theories is that these Dawnmen are the end product of having an abundance for all for a megayear or so. They don’t need intelligence.”
Ronny took a breath. “All right, and what are some more of your theories?” Through this, the Baron was sitting, staring into emptiness again.
Fitzjames said, “If I am correct, in the Dawnworld culture, the form of their early industrial revolution differed from ours on Earth. Remember my using the example of the caste system in India? Well, on the first Dawnworld, wherever it was, automation didn’t finally take over, conformity did. What it became was a very high industrial level, beehive-type culture. The individual workers are genetically predisposed to particular kinds of endeavor, and very readily and rapidly learn that specialty… but can’t learn anything else.
“They’re a contented people, a happy people. Everybody is happy—or he’s a genetic defective, and disposed of. Because he is a genetic defective, or he’d be happy.”
Ronny was staring at him. The scholar cleared his throat and went on. “They are evidently not aggressive or warlike. But they’re insect-like in the all-out-and-no-counting-the-casualties defense of their territories and their ways of doing things. They probably can’t be aggressive, because they’re one hundred percent ritualistic, and they have no ritual for aggression, nor for exploiting a new planet. Their expanding to new planets probably ended megayears ago.
“We were at first amazed, when we landed, that they ignored our presence. But they couldn’t do anything else, because they don’t have any rituals that acknowledge our existence. They haven’t any rituals that take strangers, whatever their business, into account at all.”
The Baron looked up. He sighed deeply and said, “Tell him, Fitzjames. I grow weary of your pedantic talk.”
The count hurried on. “They do have rituals that concern treatment of criminals. Steal something from them, and you come under those rituals and your classification as stranger —to be ignored—is superceded by the new classification criminal, and that, they do react to.”
“Tell him,” the Baron said petulantly.
“Their defectives are killed in a human sacrifice ceremony, which must have religious aspects going back to the very dawn of their culture.”
Ronny looked from one of them to the other. “You sent out your men to grab any of their devices not nailed down.”
“Yes,” the Baron said.
The count continued. “My theory is that the little aliens, whose planets were destroyed by changing their atmospheres, did much the same. They took a longer time. They charted a considerable number of the star systems the Dawnmen occupy. They photographed. They operated very slowly, evidently fascinated. But then they took their steps and tried to appropriate some of the devices these Dawnmen use. Perhaps they tried to trade for them, buy them, loan them, or whatever, but there was no possible way to do so. The Dawnmen are simply not interested in any contact whatsoever with any alien race. So the little aliens finally resorted to theft— and that was their end.”
Richardson came back into the lounge. He said to Ronny, “There’s nobody else aboard.”
The Baron said, “We watched it all, the Count and I. The men were taken one by one to the top of the pyramid. It was an elaborate ceremony. It must go back to a period when they were on the level of the Aztecs. They cut open the chest cavity and pulled the still throbbing heart out. The Count and I watched from an altitude of about one hundred feet. There was nothing we could do. It was obvious to us that if we attempted to use weapons, they would have destroyed us in split seconds.”
“Had we interfered,” the count said, “we, too, would have become criminals. As it was, we were the only ones who had not attempted theft, and hence were left alone.”
The Baron ended the story. “I can operate this craft well enough to take off and land, but I am no navigator. I request that one or two of your officers be sent to help us.”
Ronny opened his mouth to answer, but, at that moment, a new element entered into the lounge of the spacecraft.
From nowhere a voice came into the consciousness of each of them.
You are at last correct, Maximilian Wyler. You must return to the planet which our researching of your mind tells us you think of as Mother Earth. There is naught for you here.
Ronald Bronston, we detect that your motives for landing upon this… Dawnworld… were not criminal in intent, nor have you committed depredation upon us. It is our custom to send warning to stranger worlds—who are potential depredators—by the way of strangers who have landed among us, but have committed no criminal act. You are such. However, our researching your health indicated that your life span has been so altered that perhaps it would not encompass the period required to spread the warning. Hence, we have made certain rectifications so that your span of years will equal that of a normal lifetime as we know it to be—some two and a half of what you call centuries. Ronny Bronston sucked in air.
“Who are you?” Count Fitzjames blurted.
Researching your own mind, Felix Fitzjames, brings to our attention that in attempting to analyze our culture, you compared our society to the cast system of your India. Indeed, you had elements of correctness. By why did you forget about the Brahmins among us? Why did you assume that the equivalents of the sudras with whom you have come in contact, were the sum total of our race ? The voice addressed them as a group again. Go back to your Mother Earth. Do not be afraid of the Dawnworlds. Felix Fitzjames was correct to this extent: We are not aggressive. We have no designs against you. So long as you have none against us, our cultures need never conflict. Farewell. . . .