Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

“I noticed a certain nonreceptiveness to Mager’s opinions in the papers.” Wystan grinned.

She did not smile back.

The large alien had made no sound during the exchange. He pricked up his ears and swiveled his large muzzle (that in an Earth creature would unmistakably indicate a vegetarian habit), as if he were chairing a committee meeting; patiently allowing them to run on as long as they refrained from any sudden movements.

Agnes shrugged. Godwin marveled at how this table-pounder had tightened up all her characteristic gestures — possibly only since first encountering the aliens. She finally smiled a little bit, and he hoped he was being over sensitive in reading contempt into the twist of her lips. “Take over, anyhow, and I’ll get the message off to Harms,” she said. “If they’ve got to lift ship, you’ve got to put it over to them exactly why. Myself, I wouldn’t know how to tell a truly peaceable creature that he’s in danger of being blown to atoms by those who might better be helping him.”

Wystan had not the faintest idea what he was going to say or do. He addressed himself to Mager. “Do they understand any of this?” he asked, nodding at the great benign-looking creature sitting so stiffly upright before him — only a few feet away, but the distance was enormous.

Apparently not subject to the same restrictions on his movements as the rest of that roomful of humans and aliens, Mager had been engaged in pantomime and onesided conversation with a small group clustered behind the leader; they had welcomed him back as if he were the original lost colonist. “Why, certainly,” he said. “Well, not understand. I mean, lots of things we take for granted before we ever open our mouths, they either don’t have them or they have them all different. But they know what I mean, a good part of the time.”

Massaging that part of his head which felt so unaccustomedly bald, Godwin essayed to take over. “The Last President of the Federated World said, ‘Our swords are now at long last beaten into ploughshares,’“ he intoned, in the ringing accents that every schoolchild could imitate. “ ‘Meaning: One does not wage war on oneself.’ Can you convey that concept to the aliens?”

Buzzing like a small angry bee, Agnes let Mager carry the message, but (for Godwin’s own personal benefit and at length) she insisted immediately that the concept was fallacious. “We do indeed wage war on ourselves, all the time. You, Wystan Godwin, are the most outstanding example of that fact I have ever encountered, and I have had a rather busy life.”

Mager reported back: the aliens agreed one does not wage war on oneself, but the Last President’s oratory was lost on them. They had never waged war on anyone. The Leloc had been one nation since before the beginning of their recorded time. “Their notion of individual conflict, however, utterly rules out compromise or surrender. A Leloc challenged stands and fights to the death, or is killed by his, ah, friends.”

“Well, can you convey to them that we, here, are friendly, but that outside there is one whom we must consider — unwillingly — as one of us, who fears them without reason? Who will destroy them — bomb them out of existence— tomorrow evening, if they stay here, but who cannot touch them if they will simply change their locus? In other words, will they please lift ship and land somewhere — anywhere — else, to prevent their total destruction? Otherwise, tomorrow evening — boom.”

Mager wagged his head commiseratingly. “That’s a stiff order, sir. I can tell you in advance that the chances are small. They have already acknowledged that they are challenged, and they stand. On their big fat dignity, see.”

Mager returned to the group of aliens with whom he had been working. Sporting an invisible tail and with his hands curled close to his chest so that even Godwin could see that he was “being” a Leloc, he began by making a small leap from one point to another. Then he turned to the portable Liaison-stores blackboard and sketched rapidly.

Up to now, Mager’s conferences with the Leloc had been lively, with activity and chattering and busyness on both sides. This time, all the aliens sat silent and impassive. Mager turned and inclined his head in Godwin’s direction, at the same time making a stylized gesture which surely suggested. . protection? Blessing? Every muzzle swung to follow his gesture and Godwin stood up, feeling a complete idiot. He gravely imitated the protection sign, bowed deeply, and resumed his seat. Except that the Leloc leader had stood when he did, there was no acknowledgment; unless you counted the leader’s averted muzzle and half-closed eyes as a kind of negative remark.

The long night consisted of long waits, piled one on another, overlapping and intertwined. It was not war, not even (intentionally anyhow) a war of nerves, but it was certainly stalemate.

Godwin began to have a dreamlike illusion of being back in school again as he and Agnes entered upon quiet, friendly discussions of the situation that flared into bickering on the turn of a phrase.

“I wonder why they came back,” he said, “after so long. I wouldn’t have.”

“They didn’t think they were gone longer than six months,” she snapped irritably. “Can’t you get that through your head?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. He just was not used to people snarling at him any more. No, not “people;” no one but Agnes ever had.

“This whole thing makes me so sick,” she burst out. “It should have been our ship that went out to the stars, not theirs that came to us. Where did Earth take the wrong path, into cautious conservatism and the perfectly stable society?”

“The wrong path!” said Wystan. “Earth has been free of war for how long now?”

“Oh — pacifism,” she sneered.

“Not a bit of it. We have an enormous and well-trained standing army, in the event that we should ever need it. Its being a peacetime army means only that we are not geared to shoot first and inquire later — and that’s just as well, isn’t it? Since the plague, since national barriers disappeared — and that was long before the population dropped so low — we operate like one enormous sparsely populated village. We have plenty of warriors but no wars.”

“No excitement, either,” she countered.

“What kind of excitement are you looking for? Plague again? Famine? All the traditional horsemen? We’ve had all four, and conquered them. You don’t sufficiently value the goods of the world we’ve made.”

“Well, you do; enough for both of us. I stand with the few human beings who still like to ask questions that have difficult answers. And I’m working — through Liaison, understand — for people like Mager, whose whole lives are a sterile waste.”

“Now. . with the whole world a garden?”

“Amusement park, you mean! And that’s the worst of it! After Earth made so many brave efforts to clean the whole universe, to settle for one parochial corner, and cower in it! All Mager’s talents were being channeled away in sheer time-wasting, until the Leloc came to us.”

“But these Leloc are plain and simply lost, unable to get home, not even knowing where they are.”

“Just the same, they have crossed space. They’ve seen the stars, while mankind is well on the way back into the cliffs and caves again.”

She said, “Wystan, have you ever read Thoreau? I have. I’ve memorized great swatches of Walden. Listen to this — this is the way Mager’s talents were being channeled away.” She closed her eyes and began to recite: “. . like the humbler esculents, which though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.” Her eyes flashed again.