Seed of the Gods

society and it almost makes me believe in their nature worship, because we've come on this at a crucial time and we have the power to help them. Basically, that's the case, Jack. We help or they die. I hope you haven't made a decision yet, because now I'm going to hit you right in the balls with a few facts we've dug up. One, our archaeologists have made test borings and excavations. We have to do this in out-of-the-way places, in order to avoid making contact, but we've been able to do some interesting things. It's difficult to state anything with much authority, because by our measurements this world has been in bad shape for the last 75,000 N.Y. You can imagine what 75,000 New Years of corrosive rains and uncontrolled erosion can do to a planet— especially one that has been burned good with atomics. Yep. That's what I said. She was burned bald. Just like the worlds of the planet-killers. Only these people did it the hard way, with old-fashioned atomics. The signs are unmistakable—all the old, decaying isotopes. They must have been very funny bombs they used, because they produced a lot of carbon isotopes with long half-lives. I know that I'm going to be asked how, with the amount of radiation that must have been present 75,000 N.Y. ago to leave this much hot stuff now, anyone at all survived to found this new race. Well, I haven't got the answer, only proof that they did survive, because they are here. I've monitored as many interviews as I could. The ones with the pointed heads who have no eyes or ears call themselves Far Seers. That's because they can send their radarlike senses out to vast distances. The Far Seers are the priests of the nature religion, logically explaining that nature abhors a vacuum as far as life is concerned. The Far Seers believe that all the far suns they can sense have planets and that those planets swarm with life like themselves. Incidentally, Jack, the Far Seers screw the computer beings, called Keepers, with astounding frequency. They're very virile cats, but completely sterile, like that creature out of our mythology, the mule. That is their only pleasure, but they're not just dirty old men, because the Keepers are also sterile but well developed sexually, and enjoy it too. That's just an aside, but I think it shows as much as anything that these fellows have basic human traits. I've looked into the records of the Far Seers, kept in the back part of the minds of the Keepers. I know about as much about the history of this race as they know themselves. I do it, of course, with the help of the little bastard from Belos II, who can't concentrate, but has to keep looking into my mind to see if I'm having too many wet dreams or something. It's interesting to note that these people are about as foggy about their beginnings as we are about ours. They have some incomplete legends, just as we do. They think they're mutations of a race they call the Old Ones. They believe that nature adapts life to meet the conditions of a world. They believe that in times of crisis nature comes up with a New One to pull life through. This is like saying that environment shapes life, isn't it? Here on this world it seems to. These people have adapted to conditions that would kill one of us in nothing flat. Their legends tell of nature forming the First Healer. He could live with what they picture as small, hard projectiles: radiation. He apparently did, for the Healer calls on that strange ability of his to repair radiation-damaged cells and his scales bounce off all kinds of radiation in quantities that would kill a horse. His organs don't collect the bad stuff either. They throw it out and vent it, along with the waste gases and unused toxic content of the air, through the gills. Then this First Healer, breeding with what they call the Old Ones, produced the Keepers and the Far Seers. I'd guess that it was the Old Ones who did in the planet with atomics. There's a beautiful series of pictures in one of their records that is called, roughly, The Book of Rose the Healer. They don't know what a rose is, but the picture of a rose is still in their minds after the conditions that would have produced a rose have been gone for 75,000 N.Y. Rose the Healer said that the Old Ones fornicated even in death, producing the Healers. That sounds rather human, doesn't it? The Healers, of course, were mutants—instant adaptation, believe it or not. I suspect the legends condense the process somewhat. But we have to believe what we see and what we find. We have here a world that, at one time, was highly technological, to the point of atomics. We've found a few decomposing chunks of metal to indicate that they were working with some advanced alloys of an atomic culture type. We've found a sizable city under the sea. We can't get to it because it's under a few hundred feet of sludge, but we detect decomposed metals, stone, everything to indicate that it was a real city. It was submerged, I'd guess, either by the melting of the icecaps or by the distortion of the planetary crust which is indicated by wide rifts, the deepest of which splits the crust almost to the molten core in the south of the western hemisphere. Both these events occurred 75,000 N.Y. ago. We've found a few traces of plastics, but a lot of it must have been burned with the surface stuff. I'm sure that, given time, well find some underground deposits that will tell us more. So this world was much like some of ours, with atomics, metals, and plastics. It killed itself. The present race mutated from the original race, which was also humanoid, because the forms of the things we can identify by instrument in the sunken city point definitely to a humanoid origin. The question is, who were the Old Ones? I think I have an answer to that. I know we don't have enough proof for what I'm coming to, not yet, but I say we have to take the risk and supply the justification later. We followed the prescribed approach to a life-zone planet. We came in slowly and carefully and did a lot of instrument work at long range. When we detected no probes from the planet we looked for a base close in and decided on a large, airless satellite that kept just one face to the planet, as do the satellites of some of our worlds. We came down on the back side and peeked around the horizon with instruments. Although we found nothing, we went through normal routine. We sent crews around to the side facing the planet to probe her and measure her. I had come down with a cold and was sacked out, groggy with drugs, when one of my junior officers came in with his ass in an uproar. What he told me made the drug-wooziness leave me like a hangover after a dose of Zarts. I got into a suit and took a jumper around to where one of my crews were milling around a veritable junkpile. Yep. We were not the first ones to land on that satellite. Someone had been there ahead of us. Two of those someones were still there. This, too, is not in the report, Jack. I suppose it should have been sent immediately Code 1, but you and I both know there's nothing that whets the curiosity of an X&A stat clerk like a Code 1 rating. It would have been all over the U.P. But a Personal-Personal communication like this is fairly sacred. Inside a five-foot-high half-dome of semi-opaque material were two beings with huge chests. They were lying on a little bed with their arms around each other. They looked as if they were asleep, but we knew they had to be dead, because we were on the night side of the satellite and it was colder than hell. There was no air outside and our instruments showed no oxygen inside. We thought they might be breathing the inert gases, but we could detect no movement. It was a male and a female of the breeder species. The female had cute little silvery and gold scales. The male was as horny as any Phebus lizard in any zoo. The thing that stoned our people was the lack of any propellant device. I mean, you could see through the whole fucking thing and the plastic-like material was soft to the touch. There was nothing in it to account for its having got here. The two beings were obviously dead. It took a few hours to get ready, and then I opened the lock. It was a funny thing, that lock. It opened easily, but when it was closed the material overlapped itself and formed an airtight seal. Well, after we'd taken all the pictures and measurements our scientists wanted, I went in. As per regulations, the telepath from Belos II accompanied me, even though I knew in my mind that there was no chance of contact, since they had to be dead. The air in the dome was completely dead—no oxygen at all. Along the walls, in little tanks, were dead Breathers, looking like tiny flower buds. I was casing the joint when Dr. Janti, creepy little fink that he was, came on with his communicator full blast and almost ruptured my eardrums. He was yelling, «It's alive. It's alive.» All the dead air had evacuated through the open lock. I ordered the lock closed and then I told Janti to vent his spare oxygen into the air. We emptied our tanks and suits of all but a reserve. There must have been just enough air in that cold dome to give a mouse a full breath, but it was enough for that big fellow with the scales. I'll be damned if he didn't move. I was paralyzed. I won't say I forgot my duty, but I ignored regulations. This was the first intelligent life we'd ever encountered and I wasn't about to bug out of there and let it die. I watched, my hackles rising, as his big, thick, scaled chest heaved. Then I got some more oxygen into the dome. Soon we had it filled with good, sweet air. And that scaled monster sat up. «Contact, please, Dr. Janti,» I ordered. The alien was sitting on the little bed looking at us with a set of blue eyes unlike anything I'd ever seen—huge, soft, alive. Think of the eyes of one of those Satina sea nymphs and multiply them four times. He looked at us and the little creep from Belos II went probing into his mind. Meantime, this scaled cat was breathing us down to nothing. His lungs and cells could hold almost all the oxygen we pumped in. I was watching him. He looked at us. His face wasn't built for expression, being pretty well hidden by scales. He made no hostile move; he just looked. When he shifted his eyes to Janti, I felt a force in the air that I couldn't put my finger on. It was just something that came out of him. Then Janti lost control and started screaming that the alien had to be killed. The alien looked down at his female. She wasn't moving. She was dead. I felt an overwhelming sense of despair, as if the planet-killers had done in all our worlds with all my friends, family, crew, all the girls I'd ever loved, all the sweet grass I'd walked on and sat on, all the good, blue water, all the sweet air, everything. Gone. I don't have the words to describe the total sadness I felt. I wanted to reach out to him, but Janti was screaming that the alien had to be killed and that we had to blast the planet before it was too late. I had never realized that Janti was a psychopath. Whose mind can heal the mindhealer's mind? But all the time he'd been one of those damned doom-sayers and he was sure we'd run into a form of life that would do us all in unless we acted quick. In all this turmoil the scaled fellow turned and made an animal sound. It was a sound of pure pain. He put his arms around the female and held her dead body close. He rocked and rocked. It was quiet in the dome, because the good doctor had finally made his escape, taking all the air out with him. I pumped it up again. Then I went out and threatened to smash Janti's faceplate and let in space to boil his blood. Janti recovered his sanity and came back into the dome but he couldn't get any communication. I ordered him to contact, breaking every rule in the book. The scaled fellow was closed off tightly and Janti couldn't find a chink. He said the alien's mind was like a solid ball of steel. So I had to watch as this first intelligent being we've met in all our history died. He held the female close and rocked back and forth. I had tears running down inside my helmet. There was plenty of air in the dome, but the alien wouldn't breathe. He seemed to will himself to death. It took a long, long time and there was nothing we could do to reach him. We tried contact on all levels. But he was closed. Janti said his mind was the most powerful he had ever encountered. In the end we tried to pump oxygen into his mouth, but he merely voided it from his gills. He was from the planet, of course And the way he got to the satellite is one of the most incredible stories I've ever run into, fiction or otherwise. I've told you that the female breeders fly. Well, when we went down to the planet we landed on this fellow's home continent. As I've described, it's a piece of desolate real estate if I've ever seen one. It wasn't much better than the planet's moon. Janti and his help made hypno-contact. Luckily our encounter with the live one on the moon had warned us of the strength of their minds. If we'd made direct contact those Far Seer types would have sensed us. It turned out that the fellow we met on the moon was a hero, and their last hope. Everyone knew all about him. He'd been sent to the satellite because of their wild belief in nature. They just knew that there was a happy, sweet-aired world up there, so they sent these damned kids, and I say lads because the life span of a male breeder is about twenty-two N.Y. and that of the female breeder even less. The female breeder literally consumes her life substance in flight. But how did they manage to get there? Well, they had come up with something new. It wasn't a machine or anything like that. It was a mutation, those two beings were propelled to the moon of that planet on power of mind, Jack. Somehow, this Healer—he was called the New One—was able to «blend his flesh» with others. It was somewhat like a blood transfusion, only infinitely more complete, for he could go into the body of the others and heal them, as he healed himself, on the cell level. His fantastic capacity to store oxygen, combined with what food and air they could carry in that dome, gave him enough energy to send that whole crazy space ship, and that's what it was, all the way to the moon. Don't ask me why they didn't freeze. There was no artificial heat in the thing. Our boys think he might have been able to diffuse the heat from direct sunlight around the dome with his scales. At any rate, he had to have been exposed to direct sunlight and to the freezing cold. He must have had a fantastic tolerance for extremes in temperature, for when we found him he came out of his coma unharmed, except for a small ashlike deposit on his scales. The female had apparently died of a variety of things, cold, heat, radiation, and lack of oxygen. They went there expecting to find life and they found airless space and heat and cold and death. Back on the planet everyone knew all about the trip all over the western continent, and even in the eastern areas, too. We were interested in our first alien, naturally, so we traced him through the records in the minds of the Keepers and compiled the stat that we've submitted as exhibit one. Now maybe you're thinking it's a sad story but no justification for us to step in. I know that there are isolationists high up in the council of President Borne and they'll agree with Janti that these people could threaten us with their fantastic mental powers. How would we control people who can teleport, send fatal force from their mind, and live in conditions that would kill us in three minutes? I know that a lot of powerful people are going to insist on following regulations—no contact until a thorough study has been made. But if the study were carried out according to regulations, it would take twenty N.Y. Jack, we can't let these people die. We've spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to find exactly what we've found here, a civilization of intelligent beings. They're different, but not that different. They're gentle. When we pieced together the account of Rack the Healer from the minds of the Keepers and the others it was so human that there wasn't a one of us who wasn't touched. I like to think that Rack would be pleased with his book. It was taken from a lot of sources and the end of it is not yet written. We found a part of Rack's book in the mind of his infant child, a Keeper living in the east. We found more of it in the minds of his friends and their Keepers. I wanted you to read it even before you scanned the official reports, because I think it shows that these are nice people, Jack. They must be saved. Hell, I'm selfish. I want one of those Far Seers in my crew some