“Marvelous!” he chortled, and then rattled on excitedly, “Of course, I’ll do everything I can to help. I’ll provide transport—”
“That will not be necessary,” the Chief interrupted flatly. “We have no more trust in your larger powers than you have yourself. We have our own spaceships, quite adequate to any undertaking. We do not make an ostentatious display of them, any more than we make a display of the other mechanical aspects of our culture. We do not use them, as your Earthlings would, to go purposely skittering about. Nevertheless, we have them, stored away in the event of need.”
But not even this contemptuous rebuff could spoil Whitlow’s exultation. His face was radiant. Halfformed tears made him blink his hectic eyes. His Adam’s apple bobbed chokingly.
“Ah my friends. my good, good friends! If only I could express to you. what this moment means to me! If I could only tell you how happy I am when I envisage the greater moment that is coming! When men will look up from their trenches and foxholes, from their bombers and fighters, from their observation posts and headquarters, from their factories and homes, to see this new menace in the skies. When all their petty differences of opinion will drop away from them like a soiled and tattered garment. When they will cut the barbed-wire entanglements of an illusory hate, and join together, hand in hand, true brothers at last, to meet the common foe. When, in the accomplishment of a common task, they will at last achieve perfect and enduring peace!”
He paused for breath. His glazed eyes were lovingly fixed on the blue star of Earth, now just topping the horizon.
“Yes,” faintly came the Chiefs dry thought. “To one of your emotional temperament, it will probably be a very satisfying and touching scene—for a little while.”
Whitlow glanced down blankly. It was as if the Chief’s last thought had lightly scratched him—a feathery flick from a huge poisoned claw. He did not understand it, but he was conscious of upwelling fear.
“What-” he faltered. “What.. .do you mean?”
“I mean,” thought the Chief, “that hi our invasion of Earth it probably won’t be necessary for us to use the divide-and-rule tactics that would normally be indicated in such a case—you know, joining with one faction on Earth to help defeat the other—warring beings never care who their allies are—and then fomenting further disunities, and so on. No, with our superiority in armament, we can probably do a straight cleanup job and avoid bothersome machinations. So you’ll probably have that glimpse of Earthlings united that you set so much store by.”
Whitlow stared at him from a face white with dawning horror. He licked his lips. “What did you mean by —‘for a little while’?” he whispered huskily. “What did you mean by ‘glimpse’?”
“Surely that should be obvious to you, Mr. Whitlow,” replied the Chief with offensive good humor.
“You don’t for one minute suppose we’d make some footling little invasion and, after overawing the Earthlings, retire? That would be the one way to absolutely assure their eventual counterinvasion of Mars. Indeed, it would probably hasten it—and they’d come as already hostile destroyers intent on wiping out a menace. No, Mr. Whitlow, when we invade Earth, it will be to protect ourselves from a potential future danger. Our purpose will be total and complete extermination, accomplished as swiftly and efficiently as possible. Our present military superiority makes our success certain.”
Whitlow goggled at the Chief blankly, like a dirty and somewhat yellowed plaster statue of himself. He opened his mouth—and shut it without saying anything.
“You never believed, did you, Mr. Whitlow,” continued the Chief kindly, “that we’d ever do anything for your sake? Or for anyone’s— except us coleopteroids?”
Whitlow stared at the horrible, black, eight-legged eggs crowding ever closer—living embodiments of the poisonous blackness of their planet.
All he could think to mumble was: “But. but I thought you said. it was a misconception to think of alien beings as evil monsters intent only on ravaging. and destroying—”
“Perhaps I did, Mr. Whitlow. Perhaps I did,” was the Chiefs only reply.
In that instant Mr. Whitlow realized what an alien being really was.
As in a suffocating nightmare, he watched the coleopteroids edge closer. He heard the Chiefs contemptuously unguarded aside to the Senior, “Haven’t you got hold of his mind yet?” and the Senior’s “No,” and the Chiefs swift order to the others.
Black eggs invaded his lightsphere, cruel armored claws opening to grab—those were Mr. Whitlow’s last impressions of Mars.
Instants later—for the device provided him with instantaneous transportation across any spatial expanse —Mr. Whitlow found himself inside a bubble that miraculously maintained normal atmospheric pressure deep under the tideless Venusian seas. The reverse of a fish in a tank, he peered out at the gently waving luminescent vegetation and the huge mud-girt buildings it half masked. Gleaming ships and tentacled creatures darted about.
The Chief Molluscoid regarded the trespasser on his private gardens with a haughty disfavor that even surprise could not shake.
“What are you?” he thought coldly.
“I. I’ve come to inform you of a threatened breach in an agelong truce.”
Five eyes on longish stalks regarded him with a coldness equal to that of the repeated thought: “But what are you?”
A sudden surge of woeful honesty compelled Mr. Whitlow to reply, “I suppose. I suppose you’d call me a warmonger.”
The Man Who Never Grew Young
MAOT is becoming restless. Often toward evening she trudges to where the black earth meets the yellow sand and stands looking across the desert until the wind starts.
But I sit with my back to the reed screen and watch the Nile.
It isn’t just that she’s growing young. She is wearying of the fields. She leaves their tilling to me and lavishes her attentions on the flock. Every day she takes the sheep and goats farther to pasture.
I have seen it coming for a long time. For generations the fields have been growing scantier and less diligently irrigated. There seems to be more ram. The houses have become simpler—mere walled tents. And every year some family gathers its flocks and wanders off west.
Why should I cling so tenaciously to these poor relics of civilization—I, who have seen king Cheops’ men take down the Great Pyramid block by block and return it to the hills?
I often wonder why I never grow young. It is still as much a mystery to me as to the brown farmers who kneel hi awe when I walk past.
I envy those who grow young. I yearn for the sloughing of wisdom and responsibility, the plunge into a period of lovemaking and breathless excitement, the carefree years before the end.
But I remain a bearded man of thirty-odd, wearing the goatskin as I once wore the doublet or the toga, always on the brink of that plunge yet never making it.
It seems to me that I have always been this way. Why, I cannot even remember my own disinterment, and everyone remembers that.
Maot is subtle. She does not ask for what she wants, but when she comes home at evening she sits far back from the fire and murmurs disturbing fragments of song and rubs her eyelids with green pigment to make herself desirable to me and tries in every way to infect me with her restlessness. She tempts me from the hot work at midday and points out how hardy our sheep and goat are becoming.
There are no young men among us any more. All of them start for the desert with the approach of youth, or before. Even toothless, scrawny patriarchs uncurl from their grave-holes, and hardly pausing to refresh themselves with the food and drink dug up with them, collect their flocks and wives and hobble off into the west.