Devi-en said, “I can’t discuss this subject.”
“No?” The wild one was screaming. “What are you going to do about it? How long will you wait? Why not nudge it a little? Don’t just wait, vulture. Start one.”
Devi-en jumped to his feet. “What are you saying?”
“Why else are you waiting, you dirty—” He choked on a completely incomprehensible expletive, then continued, breathlessly, “Isn’t that what vultures do when some poor miserable animal, or man, maybe, is taking too long to die? They can’t wait. They come swirling down and peck out his eyes. They wait till he’s helpless and just hurry him along the last step.”
Devi-en ordered him away quickly and retired to his sleeping room, where he was sick for hours. Nor did he sleep then or that night. The word “vulture” screamed in his ears and that final picture danced before his eyes.
Devi-en said firmly, “Your Height, I can speak with the wild one no more. If you need still more data, I cannot help you.”
The Arch-administrator looked haggard. “I know. This vulture business—Very difficult to take. Yet you notice the thought didn’t affect him. Large-primates are immune to such things, hardened, calloused. It is part of their way of thinking. Horrible.”
“I can get you no more data.”
“It’s all right. I understand.—Besides, each additional item only strengthens the preliminary answer; the answer I thought was only provisional; that I hoped earnestly was only provisional.” He buried his head in his grizzled arms. “We have a way to start their nuclear war for them.”
“Oh? What need be done?”
“It is something very direct, very simple. It is something I could never have thought of. Nor you.”
“What is it, your Height?” He felt an anticipatory dread.
“What keeps them at peace now is that neither of two nearly equal sides dares take the responsibility of starting a war. If one side did, however, the other—well, let’s be blunt about it—would retaliate in full.”
Devi-en nodded.
The Arch-administrator went on. “If a single nuclear bomb fell on the territory of either of the two sides, the victims would at once assume the other side had launched it. They would feel they could not wait for further attacks. Retaliation in full would follow within hours; the other side would retaliate in its turn. Within weeks it would be over.”
“But how do we make one of them drop that first bomb?”
“We don’t, Captain. That is the point. We drop the first bomb ourselves.”
“What?” Devi-en swayed.
“That is it. Compute a large-primate’s mind and that answer thrusts itself at you.”
“But how can we?”
“We assemble a bomb. That is easy enough. We send it down by ship and drop it over some inhabited locality—”
“Inhabited?”
The Arch-administrator looked away and said uneasily, “The effect is lost otherwise.”
“I see,” said Devi-en. He was picturing vultures; he couldn’t help it. He visualized them as large, scaled bird (like the small harmless flying creatures on Hurria, but immensely large), with rubber-skinned wings and long razor-bills, circling down, pecking at dying eyes.
His hands covered his eyes. He said shakily, “Who will pilot the ship? Who will launch the bomb?”
The Arch-administrator’s voice was no stronger than Devi-en’s. “I don’t know.”
“I won’t,” said Devi-en. “I can’t. There is no Hurrian who can, at any price.”
The Arch-administrator rocked back and forth miserably. “Perhaps the Mauvs could be given orders—”
“Who could give them such orders?”
The Arch-administrator sighed heavily. “I will call the Council. They may have all the data. Perhaps they will suggest something.”
So after a little over fifteen years, the Hurrians were dismantling their base on the other side of the Moon. Nothing had been accomplished. The large-primates of the planet had not had their nuclear war; they might never have.
And despite all the future horror that might bring, Devi-en was in an agony of happiness. There was no point in thinking of the future. For the present, he was getting away from this most horrible of horrible worlds.
He watched the Moon fall away and shrink to a spot of light, along with the planet, and the Sun of the system itself, till the whole thing was lost among the constellations.
It was only then that he could feel anything but relief. It was only then that he felt a first tiny twinge of it-might-have-been.
He said to the Arch-administrator, “It might all have been well if we had been more patient. They might yet have blundered into nuclear war.”
The Arch-administrator said, “Somehow I doubt it. The mentalic analysis of—”
He stopped and Devi-en understood. The wild one had been replaced on his planet with minimal harm. The events of the past weeks had been blanked out of his mind. He had been placed near a small, inhabited locality not far from the spot where he had been first found. His fellows would assume he had been lost. They would blame his loss of weight, his bruises, his amnesia upon the hardships he had undergone.
But the harm done by him—
If only they had not brought him up to the Moon in the first place. They might have reconciled themselves to the thought of starting a war. They might somehow have thought of dropping a bomb; and worked out some indirect, long-distance system for doing so.
It had been the wild one’s word-picture of the vulture that had stopped it all. It had ruined Devi-en and the Arch-administrator. When all data was sent back to Hurria, the effect on the Council itself had been notable. The order to dismantle the Base had come quickly.
Devi-en said, “I will never take part in colonization again.”
The Arch-administrator said mournfully, “None of us may ever have to. The wild ones of that planet will emerge and with large-primates and large-primate thinking loose in the Galaxy, it will mean the end of—of—”
Devi-en’s nose twitched. The end of everything; of all the good Hurria had done in the Galaxy; all the good it might have continued to do in the future.
He said, “We ought to have dropped—” and did not finish.
What was the use of saying that? They couldn’t have dropped the bomb for all the Galaxy. If they could have, they would have been large-primate themselves in their manner of thinking, and there are worse things than merely the end of everything.
Devi-en thought of the vultures.