Randall Garrett: The Best Policy

The knot was caused by a towering, thundering-great, ice-cold rage.

He thought about it for a minute and then broke out laughing. Here he was, like a stupid fool, so angry that he was making himself sick! And that wasn’t going to do him or the colony any good.

It was obvious that the aliens were up to no good, to say the least. The colony at New Hilo numbered six thousand souls—the only humans on New Hawaii, except for a couple of bush expeditions. If this ship tried to take over the planet, there wouldn’t be a devil of a lot the colonists could do about it. And what if the aliens found Earth itself? He had no idea what kind of armament this spaceship carried nor how big it was—but it seemed to have plenty of room inside it.

He knew it was up to him. He was going to have to do something, somehow. What? Could he get out of his cell and try to smash the ship?

Nope. A naked man inside a bare cell was about as helpless as a human being can get. What, then?

Magruder lay on his back and thought about it for a long time.

Presently, a panel opened in the door and a red-violet face appeared on the other side of a transparent square in the door.

“You are doubtless hungry,” it said solemnly. “An analysis of your bodily processes has indicated what you need in the way of sustenance. Here.”

The quart-size mug that slid out of a niche in the wall had an odd aroma drifting up from it. Magruder picked it up and looked inside. It was a grayish-tan, semitranslucent liquid about the consistency of thin gravy. He touched the surface with his finger and then touched the finger with his tongue. Its palate appeal was definitely on the negative side of zero.

He could guess what it contained: a score, more or less, of various amino acids, a dozen vitamins, a handful of carbohydrates, and a few percent of other necessities. A sort of pseudo-protoplasmic soup; an overbalanced meal.

He wondered whether it contained anything that would do him harm, decided it probably didn’t. If the aliens wanted to dope him, they didn’t need to resort to subterfuge, and besides, this was probably the gunk they had fed him while he was learning the language.

Pretending to himself that it was beef stew, he drank it down. Maybe he could think better on a full stomach. And, as it turned out, he was right.

Less than an hour later, he was back in the interrogation chamber. This tune, he was resolved to keep Thagobar’s finger off that little button.

After all, he reasoned to himself, I might want to lie to someone, when and if I get out of this. There’s no point in getting a conditioned reflex against it.

And the way the machine had hurt him, there was a strong possibility that he just might get conditioned if he took very many jolts like that.

He had a plan. It was highly nebulous—little more than a principle, really, and it was highly flexible. He would simply have to take what came, depend on luck, and hope for the best.

He sat down in the chair and waited for the wall to become transparent again. He had thought there might be a way to get out as he was led from his cell to the interrogation chamber, but he didn’t feel like tackling six heavily armored aliens all at once. He wasn’t even sure he could do much with just one of them. Where do you slug a guy whose nervous system you know nothing about, and whose body is plated like a boiler?

The wall became transparent, and the alien was standing on the other side of it. Magruder wondered whether it was the same being who had questioned him before, and after looking at the design on the plastron, decided that it was.

He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and waited for the first question.

Thagobar Verf was a very troubled Dal. He had very carefully checked the psychological data with General Orders after the psychologists had correlated it according to the Handbook. He definitely did not like the looks of his results.

General Orders merely said: “No race of this type has ever been found in the galaxy before. In this case, the commander will act according to GO 234,511,006-R-g, Ch. MMCDX, Par. 666.”

After looking up the reference, he had consulted with Zandoplith. “What do you think of it?” he asked. “And why doesn’t your science have any answers?”

“Science, Your Splendor,” said Zandoplith, “is a process of obtaining and correlating data. We haven’t enough data yet, true, but we’ll get it. We absolutely must not panic at this point; we must be objective, purely objective.” He handed Thagobar another printed sheet. “These are the next questions to be asked, according to the Handbook of Psychology.”

Thagobar felt a sense of relief. General Orders had said that in a case like this, the authority of action was all dependent on his own decision; it was nice to know that the scientist knew what he was doing, and had authority to back it.

He cut off the wall polarizer and faced the specimen on the other side.

“You will answer the next several questions in the negative,” Thagobar said. “It doesn’t matter what the real and truthful answer may be, you will say No; is that perfectly clear?”

“No,” said Magruder.

Thagobar frowned. The instructions seemed perfectly lucid to him; what was the matter with the specimen? Was he possibly more stupid than they had at first believed?

“He’s lying,” said Zandoplith.

It took Thagobar the better part of half a minute to realize what had happened, and when he did, his face became unpleasantly dark. But there was nothing else he could do; the specimen had obeyed orders.

His Splendor took a deep breath, held it for a moment, eased it out, and began reading the questions in a mild voice.

“Is your name Edwin?”

“No.”

“Do you live on the planet beneath us?”

“No.”

“Do you have six eyes?”

“No.”

After five minutes of that sort of thing, Zandoplith said: “That’s enough, Your Splendor; it checks out; his nervous system wasn’t affected by the pain. You may proceed to the next list.”

“From now on, you will answer truthfully,” Thagobar said. “Otherwise, you will be punished again. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear,” said Magruder.

Although his voice sounded perfectly calm, Magruder, on the other side of the transparent wall, felt just a trifle shaky. He would have to think quickly and carefully from now on. He didn’t believe he’d care to take too much time in answering, either.

“How many Homo sapiens are there?”

“Several billions.” There were actually about four billions, but the Dal equivalent of “several” was vaguely representative of numbers larger than five, although not necessarily so.

“Don’t you know the actual number?”

“No,” said Magruder. Not right down to the man, I don’t .

The needle didn’t quiver. Naturally not—he was telling the truth, wasn’t he?

“All of your people surely aren’t on Earth, then?” Thagobar asked, deviating slightly from the script. “In only one city?”

With a sudden flash of pure joy, Magruder saw the beautifully monstrous mistake the alien had made. He had not suspected until now that Earthmen had developed space travel. Therefore, when he had asked the name of Magruder’s home planet, the answer he’d gotten was “Earth.” But the alien had been thinking of New Hawaii! Wheeee !

“Oh, no,” said Magruder truthfully. “We have, only a few thousand down there.” Meaning, of course, New Hawaii, which was “down there.”

“Then most of your people have deserted Earth?”

“Deserted Earth?” Magruder sounded scandalized. “Heavens to Betsy, no! We have merely colonized; we’re all under one central government.”