Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

Giyt almost longed for the old days in his Bal Harbor slide, when he could daydream or scheme about the conquest of Guatemala or Thailand in as much detail, and for as long, as he liked, with no constraints on his time except the ones he imposed on himself.

Actually, Giyt did manage a little of that daydreaming. It came from his tap into the Petty-Prime system.

The things that Giyt saw when he looked in on the Petty-Primes weren’t all that interesting in themselves; in fact, they were almost always either hopelessly confusing or terminally dull. The Petty-Prime local news programs were even less interesting than the humans’. Perhaps the Petty-Primes themselves thought so, too, because most of their transmission time was spent on those interminable soap-opera things or on sports events or on horrible cacophonous music. The dramatic programs he couldn’t figure out and the music he couldn’t stand at all, but the sports kept him interested for a while. He tried to deduce the rules of the games—the one, for instance, in which two teams of eighteen or twenty Petty-Primes confronted each other in an arena. Each of the players carried a little live reptile the size of a shrew, and when they released them the creatures streaked for the opposite team, which did its best to stomp them into mush. That much was clear, but how the game was scored or who won, Giyt could not tell. Or the other kind of contest in which two Petty-Primes engaged in barehanded combat—but had their work cut out for them if they wanted to do each other any real harm, because they were tied to each other, back to back. Or the one—

Well, they were all pretty weird, but then, Giyt thought, probably the Petty-Primes would feel the same way about, for instance, ice hockey or sumo wrestling. What the Petty-Prime sports events did for Giyt was to give him a feeling for the funny little creatures as real people, with all their own habits and faults and relationships and interests.

That was where the new varieties of daydreams started. Giyt wondered if the Petty-Primes had their own history of wars and invasions and conquests. And then he began to think of how you might go about conquering the world of the Petty-Primes.

Thinking of it purely as an intellectual enterprise, it didn’t seem that it would be all that hard to do. There didn’t appear to be any large military forces among the Petty-Primes, though to be sure, a sports arena was not the most probable place to look for them. But even if they had combat-ready troops and an arsenal, surely Earth weaponry could take them out in a fair fight.

He considered how you could go about getting Earth forces to a place where that fair fight could happen. The first thing to do, he decided, was to transmit some heavy-duty mass killer weapon through the terminal to wipe out all the Petty-Primes nearby, then a couple of divisions of fast :moving armor to establish a beachhead. What sort of weapons for that first blow? That took some thought. Maybe chemical, maybe biological; you didn’t want to use anything nuclear because that would wreck the terminal, too. The best thing of all would be to find something that would kill Petty-Primes but not Earth humans. For that you would need to know a lot about Petty-Prime biochemistry.

It took only a moment to check that out, and he. was pleasantly surprised to find that there was, in fact, a considerable store of such data already in the banks.

Of course, before you could get that sort of operation off the ground you would have to secure your staging base on Tupelo itself. That would involve neutralizing all the other races on the planet, but that should be pretty straightforward: arrest the leaders, evacuate the area around the EPR terminal, bring in the weapons from Earth and the assault troops to follow—

But Tupelo’s eetie leaders would probably resist, and that would mean killing. Not just killing creatures on another planet a zillion kilometers away, but murdering actual neighbors. Nonhuman neighbors, sure.

But even theoretically, even in this mind game, did he actually want to kill, say, Mrs. Brownbenttalon and her husband?

It occurred to him that the commanders of some expeditionary force from Earth, assuming anyone on Earth were crazy enough to want to try anything like that, would have no such compunctions: eetie freaks would be just eetie freaks to them. (But that, of course, wasn’t going to happen; it was precisely to prevent any such lunatic effort that all six races had to be present to allow transmissions to come in.)

Then it occurred to him that one of those eetie freak races might, just possibly, be crazy enough to want to try to invade Earth in the same way; and then he understood why there had been all those soldiers with their machine guns around the EPR terminal on Earth when he and Rina had come through it to get here.

That made Giyt thoughtful in a different way. It seemed that somebody had been thinking about the prospects of invasions before him. Not just as a daydream, either, but as a real-world possibility.

That was not an enjoyable thought. The human race on Earth had pretty much got over its addiction to wars. Talk, sure. But no action. Nobody had the armaments for real war any more. Like most of his predecessors, the current American president followed the policy of speaking as loudly and offensively as possible, but carrying no stick at all.

But what did this stuff in the files mean? Was the cycle going to start again in space? Maybe right here on Tupelo?

Giyt shook his head at his own folly. Not a chance! That was ridiculous. There were no signs of that sort of pre-battle tension, and even if there were, there just weren’t any weapons on the planet to carry out such a scheme.

That was when he heard the rat-a-tat-tat- boom from outside.

That startled him, and it almost felt for a moment as though it was those machine guns firing. It wasn’t, though; he realized that at once. It was only the dumb thing the Kalkaboos did with their firecrackers every morning to greet the dawn. But it told him that sunrise had come. His private time was over. Any minute now Rina would be coming in to find out if he wanted pancakes or cereal for breakfast. And he hadn’t made a dent in his real work.

He sighed and went back to the dreary business of trying to understand the commission reports. Briefly he wondered if he had made a serious mistake in trading his idyllic life in Bal Harbor for the irksome constraints of this new existence on Tupelo. He couldn’t honestly say that he had any good reason to be happier here.

The funny thing was that he actually was happier. Not for himself. For Rina. There was no doubt that the woman was blossoming by the hour here on Tupelo; and how strange it was, Giyt thought wonderingly, that he found himself happy simply because she was.