Arthur Zirul - Final Exam

They waited in their little groups, arms about each other resembling small football huddles, the better to keep them in one tight mass when they left ship. The first faint whistle of the upper atmosphere through the hole in the stern alerted them for the count off.

“Ready! Degravs on!” the captain’s voice tinned through their earphones. “Five… four… three… two… one… NOW!”

Like spilled fruit the groups tumbled out of the hatches. In a few seconds they were all out and caught in the grip of the upper air currents. The winds snatched them up, tumbled them about like multi-legged bowling balls, and whipped them away into the blue distance even before their degravitator fields had reached full effect. By the time they had reached five thousand feet they had decelerated to a gentle fall. By then, however, they had been so widely scattered by the winds that no one group was in sight of another.

Two of the groups fell in the Pacific Ocean in the midst of a tropical storm. One of them washed up on the beach of Kauai Island, in the Hawaiian group, several hours later. More dead than alive, they managed to crawl out of their buoyant suits and into the palm jungle. The other group was lost forever in the wild sea. One landed in North America; in a suburb of New York. Another fell in the deserted, frozen wastes of Antartica. They were forced to leave the warm safety of their suits when their power packs ran out. They froze to death soon afterwards. The last group alighted near Kamkov, a small village in East Russia.

Alma, Amika, and Babla, the three members of the first group to jump, were sitting huddled by the bole of a Royal Palm tree intensely studying the map spread out before them. They paid scant attention to the warm beauty of the Hawaiian island about them. Their recent ordeal in the ocean had left their aesthetic senses somewhat dulled. They were still weak, though a few meals of coconuts and berries had added a good deal to their vigor.

“According to this map,” Amika pointed, “we’re a helluva distance from rendezvous point, almost a quarter of the circumference of this globe I’d say.”

“Most of that distance is water, too,” Alma observed. “After our tuss’e with that insane ocean I’ll be blasted if I’ll swim it.”

“We’ll have to try contacting the nearest intelligent life, and ask for help,” Babla said, as he rose and looked over the sunny beach.

“Doyou think that’s wise?” Amika asked, as Babla shot him a cold glance. “That is to say, I realize that you’re a trained alien sociologist and I’m just a crummy radio op, but I’d still hate to end up stuffed, in some barbarian’s museum.”

“We made a very careful study of this planet through our scopes before we landed,” Babla lectured a trifle coolly. “We discovered unmistakable signs of a very advanced culture. In fact, the captain placed our rendezvous point on the outskirts of the biggest city we could find; so that we could get assistance from the most obvious source—where the most inhabitants are.

“Need I remind you that the prime order of your Interstellar Manual states, in effect, when in need of aid contact the first intelligent species that possesses at least a fifth-level culture. A fifth-level, or higher culture, may be identified by the architectural criteria illustrated in the manual. The theory is simple; any culture advanced enough to build a fifth-level structure can be trusted to be intelligent enough to recognize your predicament and to offer aid.

“You must, of course, be extremely wary of barbaric, moron-level cultures; they understand only brute force. However, you may feel secure in the knowledge that once you identify an advanced culture you need not fear barbarians; the planet has by then progressed enough to have left its savage stages behind.”

“That’s all well and good for our star system,” Alma argued, “but remember, we’re in mighty strange waters; in fact we’re here purely by accident. As far as I know, nobody has ever seen this part of the galaxy before.”

“You talk like a child I” Babla snapped. “What held true on the more than one hundred planets we have occupied most certainly will hold true here. Enough of this nonsense, let’s get moving before darkness or we’ll never get to rendezvous point! Follow me, I think I see a road over there past that grove of trees.”

The two spacemen rose slowly and followed behind Babla as he led the way to the single-lane dirt road ahead.

Mike Honosura sat comfortably in a rocking chair on the front porch of his general store. He puffed lazily at his pipe and blew gray clouds into the dazzling Pacific sunset.

Lovely island , Kauai , he thought. Too bad my honorable grandparents chose to remain in Japan. They would have liked it here .

His flat, Oriental face was turned towards the road; he liked to watch the workers come in from the cane fields at night. Wiamea wasn’t much of a town, even for Kauai; but at least it offered some recreation. The workers liked it. They weren’t anywhere as fussy as the tourists, for which Honosura was most thankful. A movement in the bushes alongside the road caught his eye. He turned in time to see the three aliens step out onto the road. His eyes widened till they threatened to rupture the lids. His pipe fell from his suddenly slack-jawed mouth and clattered unheeded to the floor.

“My most Honorable Ancestral Gods,” he half whispered, “protect me!”

Hitch Pilitrovsky surveyed his little farm from the doorway of his thatched roof hut. The commissar of agriculture had permitted him to keep the land, mainly because it was too isolated on its rocky hillside to have been made part of the collective farm for the district. Ilitch’s arrangement with the State was simple: He did all the work and they shared the crop with him. They let him keep all he could eat. At the moment Hitch was daydreaming about the crop due for harvest. His eyes rested lovingly on the fat, waving grain.

“Ah, they will be proud of me this year,” he mused. “I shall have the biggest crop in the district, now, if only I didn’t have to give so much to the commissar, I could—”

He immediately put up his almost automatic mind censor and looked nervously about as if expecting the secret police to pop out of a haystack.

“Ilitch!” his wife called from inside the hut. “Come in to eat before the soup gets cold. What are you dreaming about out there?”

“Nothing, my love.” Ilitch sighed, as he looked in at his wife. She was a big woman, big as Melna, his horse. He had fallen in love with her the day he had seen her pitch four wagonloads of hay in a row. Now he found himself wondering if perhaps there weren’t other things about a woman that mattered also. He remembered seeing an American magazine during the war; the women in those pictures—weak as kittens, but, by Stalin, what—

The mind censor clicked in again.

As Ilitch turned to go in he chanced to look up. He stopped stock-still there in the doorway. Slowly floating down to his farm were three metal balls with corrugated tubes sticking out of them like arms and legs. The “arm” tubes were entwined about each other so that the three balls looked liked children at play. Hitch’s eyes followed them down while the rest of him stood there as if carved. They came to a gentle, vibrationless stop not ten feet from where he stood. The balls separated from each other almost immediately. A small glass section in the front of each began to screw outwards.

Cakna, Drul, and Druit climbed out of their suits and stretched thankfully. Almost as soon as they saw Ilitch, they went for their sidearms. Ilitch’s thatched hut was far from a fifth-level structure, and they weren’t going to take chances with barbarians, particularly not barbarians that size. But they had no need for their weapons. Ilitch’s staring eyes had suddenly become glassy; he slid down the door jamb, sat hard on the ground, and fell heavily forward in a dead faint.