William Tenn - Of Men And Monsters

Eric paid attention, and he learned. He learned some chemistry, some physics, some biology. He learned about chlorophyllous plants which he had never been near in his entire life and about one-celled animals which had been around him and about him all through his life but which he had been unable to see any more than the plants.

“And your people really have? Through those microscope things?”

“Not microscope things, Eric—microscope thing. We have exactly one set of clumsy, hand-ground lenses. In the time when our ancestors owned the Earth, they had—oh, they must have had dozens. But they were an advanced, technologically oriented civilization: it was no trick for them to make two, three, even five microscopes at once. I mean that—don’t look dubious—I’m not trying to feed you myths and legends. These were people, remember, who had achieved space travel themselves before the Monsters arrived, not interstellar flight, as the Monsters had, and not colonization as yet of other worlds, but they were making their way from planet to planet of their own system in ships that were almost as wonderful and complicated as those the Monsters suddenly turned up in. Our tragedy was that all the peoples of the Earth had at their disposal no more than about ten space ships—simple interplanetary exploring craft—when the Monsters came pouring out of the stars with an invasion fleet of thousands. Another century of development, maybe only fifty years, and we’d have had a space navy that wouldn’t have been brushed aside by the first Monster patrol to arrive in the solar system.”

Eric smiled and stared through the bottom of the cage at other cages suspended in the white vastness where human captives lay sleeping or walked about restlessly. “ The suddenness of the attack…” he quoted.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s part of the catechism I had to learn as a boy—from the Ancestor-Science faith I was brought up in. I remember how shocked I was when my uncle said it was all garbage. I was so upset! But then I learned to live with the idea. You know, that it was garbage, a flock of nonsense imposed on us by our elders to keep us from asking questions and learning the truth about our past. And now, here I am again, learning that the people who have searched out more records concerning our ancestors than anyone else in the burrows—they have no more to say, basically, than that, as to why humanity succumbed. The suddenness of the attack… It makes me wonder whether any beliefs are true. Or—I don’t know—whether all beliefs are true.”

“Hey, there.” Rachel reached up and grabbed a handful of his hair. She pulled his head back and forth gently. “Just a little education and you feel you’re ready for metaphysics.”

“Is that metaphysics?” Eric asked, delighted to have rediscovered an ancient human technique all by himself.

The girl elaborately ignored his question. “You have a lot of hard facts to learn yet,” she went on, “you old Eric the Eye you, even if you do gulp down information like so much drinking water. Maybe all beliefs are true—in certain ways, for certain people, at certain times. They wouldn’t be beliefs if they didn’t contain some significant core of reality. Like the stories that have come down tous of a group of our ancestors who believed that man was getting too much above himself, and that the arrival of the Monsters constituted a judgment, a judgment from some supernatural force to obliterate our civilization. They felt that space travel and atomics were just the last straw, and that once we developed those, the supernatural force was compelled to write us off. Well, you know something? They might have been right.”

“They were? How?”

Rachel slid the repeatable slate, covered with scientific diagrams, back into a cloak pocket. Then she walked to the wall of the cage near which they had been sitting and leaned against it, rubbing her forehead against t’-e smooth, cold surface. She looked very tired.

“In a couple of ways, Eric. You take your pick. First, religiously. It’s always possible that there was—or is—such a supernatural force, capable of coming to just such a judgment. And when you look at how puny, how ridiculously tiny, our species appears today, scuttling about the dwelling places of the Monsters, it does seem that back then, in our last great period, we did get slightly above ourselves. Now, if you ask me why—to use some ancestral phraseology—we should be cast down and the Monsters raised up, I tell you frankly I don’t have the least idea. I only say that if you postulate a supernatural force, you are not necessarily postulating a mode of thought understandable by human beings nor necessarily sympathetic to their aspirations.”

Eric rose and stood beside her. He leaned against the wall With his back, not taking his eyes off her, completely fascinated by the concepts which her pretty mouth was shaping. “Nor,” he suggested, “do we necessarily postulate a mode of thought sympathetic to Monster aspirations.”

“Perhaps. But what do we know of Monster aspirations, of the way they live with each other, compared to the ways human beings have always lived with each other? They might be, among themselves, decent and brotherly creatures—and how would we find out? We know as little about them as they know about us. They don’t even seem to consider us intelligent, to connect us with the planet-wide civilization they destroyed centuries ago. Well, who knows? In their eyes, maybe it wasn’t a real civilization, maybe we look more natural to them in our present state. And us? We don’t understand the first thing about them after I don’t know how many auld lang synes of observation—what kind of government they have, if they have a government, what kind of language they have, if they have a language, what kind of sex life they have, if they have a sex life.”

“What they originally used the explosive red blobs for, why some of them will rush and trample us and others will panic and dash away,” Eric added, thinking of the practical problems with which he had been grappling at the times when Rachel had been asleep and he had paced back and forth in the cage by himself. “All that you’re saying, though, is that they’re different: they’re not provably better. Maybe this supernatural force thought so, but then I’d argue with it: I’d question its assumptions. On what other basis did our ancestors—this group of them who believed the coming of the Monsters was a judgment—on what other basis could they have been right?”

Rachel smiled at him, her eyes a tiny distance from his face. “You’d argue with the supernatural force, would you, Eric—you’d tell it that it was wrong? I’ll bet you would: I can just see you doing it. You’re the sum of everything that was ever good and bad about the human male. The second basis is moral; you might say it derived from an abiding and justified sense of guilt.”

“Justified? What kind of guilt?”

“Certain beliefs, as I said… somewhere, in each, there’s a significant core of reality. Man was lord of the Earth for a long time, Eric, and for that long time he was guilt-ridden. All of his religion and all of his literature—the literature that was written by sane men and not madmen—was filled with guilt. If you put the legendary part aside and just look at the things he really did, he had reason to be. He enslaved his fellow men, he tortured and humiliated them. He destroyed his fellow civilizations, he demolished their temples and universities and used the stones to build outhouses. Sometimes men would trample on women and mock their hurt, sometimes women would trample on men and mock their hurt. In some places parents would keep children in chains for all of their growing up; in other places children would send useless parents out with orders to die. And this was with his own species, with homo sapiens. What did he do with species that were brothers and with whom he grew to maturity? We know what he did with Neanderthal man: how many others lie in the unmarked graves of anthropological history?”