First Person Peculiar (18 page)

Back during the 4
^th
(or was it the 5
^th
?) resurrection of Amazing Stories, I started writing a series of connected tales for them under the broad title of “The Miracle Brigade.” They got three issues out, I got three stories written, and then they folded yet again, and I was too busy to ever go back and revisit the Brigade. Here’s one of them, to give you the flavor.

Cobbling Together a Solution

A Miracle Brigade Story

God save us from do-gooders.

They mean well, there’s never any question of that. Humans are the most generous, compassionate race in the galaxy. We can’t stand to see another being suffer, or go without, or lack anything that would make its life better.

With all that as a given, you wouldn’t think anyone with such good intentions could fuck things up so badly. But we do, time and again. Sometimes it’s the Department of Alien Affairs. Sometimes it’s the Department of Agricultural Development. Sometimes it’s the HDB—the Department of Housing, Dwellings, and Burrows. Sometimes it’s even the Department of Galactic Health.

They go out to those distant worlds, these well-meaning idealists, intent on improving the lot of every living thing, of ushering us all into a galactic Utopia—a galactic group hug, one of my associates calls it. They pour money and manpower and machinery into the problem. They supervise every aspect of it. They keep copious records. They learn from their mistakes. And finally, one day, their job is done and they leave with full hearts, convinced that they’ve contributed their bit toward that Utopia. They go home, knowing they’ve left some obscure little world a better place than when they found it.

That’s when I go to work.

You don’t read or hear about me and my group, because the Republic would rather pretend that we don’t exist, that there’s no need for us. That’s okay. We’re not in it for the publicity. We do our job because, when you really think about the galaxy, there are a hell of a lot of Them out there and not very many of Us, and it’s in our best interest to put things right after the idealists are done.

That’s us—The Miracle Brigade.

Oh, that’s not our official name. In fact, we don’t have an official name. Like I said, officially we don’t even exist. Ask anyone in the government; every last one will swear that he’s never heard of us, that indeed there’s no call for our services. But we’re all that stands between Man and a galaxy that might someday decide it can do very well without us.

What do we do?

A little of everything. Take MacArthur 4, for example.

It’s populated by a mildly humanoid race—two hands, two feet, walk upright, don’t look too much like your kid’s worst nightmare. Not very advanced, not very warlike, not very creative. The planet’s real name was Beta Prognani II—Beta for the binary it circled, Prognani because it was first mapped by Guiseppe Prognani, who modestly named it after himself. Once it became known that the natives were not only humanoid but also sentient, we took a sudden interest in this obscure little world. Three hundred million natives, properly assimilated, meant three hundred million taxpayers, three hundred million customers for the Republic’s goods, at least a few million conscripts for the Republic’s navy, and maybe a source of cheap labor if we decided the planet had anything worth mining.

They hadn’t developed space flight yet, so of course they’d never met a Man—or anyone else—before. In fact, they were still living in huts and caves. The most sophisticated dwelling on the whole planet looked like an enormous teepee, maybe sixty feet in diameter.

The first ones to land were the missionaries. They spent about ten years trying to Christianize a bunch of aliens who didn’t think Christ died for their sins, or even that they had committed any. They had their own gods, and they resented a bunch of strangers coming to their world and saying that God was created in our image. (Yeah, I know, the official line is that we were created in God’s image—but put yourself in the alien’s position. Any way you cut it, we were trying to convince them that God looked like us rather than them.)

After ten years the Republic pulled all the evangelists out of there before they lost the planet for us forever. By this time Canphor VII had sent emissaries to Beta Prognani II, and since the Canphorites don’t have any use for God or religion, they didn’t try to impose their version of either on the locals, which certainly made them more popular than we were.

So the Republic took a good hard look at the situation and decided that we’d better do something in a hurry to win the populace back (not that they’d ever been with us in the first place.)

The first thing they did was to appoint a governor with a mandate to improve the inhabitants’ standard of living. As near as anyone can tell, he turned about two square miles of lakeside property into a vacation spa for himself and his friends and never set foot outside his confines, never learned the local language, never made a single recommendation for exploiting the planet’s resources or bettering the locals’ lives.

It only took the Republic eight years to replace him.

The next governor was named Philip MacArthur (in case you were wondering how the planet got its current name). MacArthur was a career diplomat—a career governor, actually; this was his fourth assignment, which is why it was MacArthur 4 rather than MacArthur 2—and he wasn’t going to sit around just enjoying the sunshine and taking an occasional swim in the lake, no sir. He was going to make MacArthur 4 a better place, and the natives would be so grateful that they would literally beg to join the Republic and come under its economic and military sphere of influence.

After all, he’d left his last three worlds with the knowledge that he’d done his job and done it well. (I didn’t know about MacArthurs 1 and 3, but I’d had to go to MacArthur 2 after he left and figure out what to do with the huge fishing industry he’d set up without realizing that the natives were vegetarians who had no idea what to do with three tons a day of fresh seafood.)

Well, the first thing Philip MacArthur did was come up with an informal name for the locals—Blue Demons, due to the bluish cast to their skins and the vestigial horns on their heads. That lasted for about five months, until a couple of Blue Demons who had learned Terran explained to their brethren that the humans had named them after evil, supernatural beings. Within a week they had burned down every human structure on MacArthur 4—and since the governor was in his mansion at the time, the Republic had to appoint a new governor.

This one’s name was Vasily Petrovitch, and he’d had even more experience than his predecessor at governing worlds. His first official act was to petition to change the name of the world to Petrovitch 7 on all existing maps and charts. His second act was to sue the Department of Cartography for insisting that the world was and would remain Beta Prognani II. By the time he’d run through his appeals and actually traveled to MacArthur 4 to begin governing the place, almost two years had passed.

Petrovitch decided to make the rounds of the various villages, explaining to each community that we’d meant no disrespect and that while he personally thought “Blue Demons” was a rather cute, endearing sobriquet, we were happy to apologize and call them whatever they wanted. It was when he tried to hire an interpreter that he made two more discoveries: first, MacArthur 4 had a barter economy, and no interpreter was willing to work for money, and second, he needed close to 100 translators, because MacArthur 4’s natives spoke 17 major languages and 86 minor dialects.

That was when Petrovitch decided that the way to win the Blue Demons over, other than calling them the all-but-unpronounceable name they preferred, was to unite them through a single language and a single government.

It didn’t take him long to decide that Terran was the ideal language for the Blue Demons, despite the fact that the structure of their mouths and the shape of their tongues made it impossible for them to utter explosives. In addition, the few Blue Demons who actually managed to learn Terran tended to sound dead drunk whenever they spoke it.

Then he had to confront the problem of how to spread the word that the planet needed a single governing body and a new language. He couldn’t do it by radio or video, because radio and video didn’t exist on MacArthur 4. He couldn’t do it with computers, because they’d never seen a computer. Besides, there was no electric or nuclear power on the planet, and he knew he could never convince the Republic to pay for the cost of wiring the whole world while they all lived in huts and teepees.

So he called in a team of experts, mostly alien anthropologists. Their conclusion: since two-thirds of the Blue Demons never visited even a neighboring village, the first order of business was to make them a mobile society. You can’t minister to a single tribe without arousing the ire and jealousy of all the others, and you can’t have a global community if they’re not talking to each other.

But they
can’t
talk to each other, noted Petrovitch. That’s one of the problems we’re trying to solve.

They’re just like Men or any other race, said the experts with absolute conviction. Put them in a room together and sooner or later they’ll find a way to communicate—and once a single language becomes dominant, it will be that much easier to convert them all to Terran, and
then
we can start doing great things for them, bring them God and medicine and space travel and all the other benefits of a galactic civilization.

So the trick, they concluded, is to make it easy for the Blue Demons’ far-flung communities to make contact with each other.

How we do that, asked Petrovitch.

We cover the planet with a series of roads, said the experts. Super-highways, even.

But they don’t have any vehicles, noted Petrovitch.

Trust us, said the experts. We’ll build roads from one village to another, and the Blue Demons will follow them. Within a few years we can introduce automobiles, and then communications systems, and then …

How much is this going to cost, asked Petrovitch.

We have no idea, said the experts with a collective shrug; that’s not our concern.

It’s
our
concern, agreed the economists, and it seems only reasonable to make the Blue Demons pay for the roads. After all, they’re the ones who will benefit from them.

What do you propose they pay with, asked Petrovitch. They don’t use money, you know.

We’ll take payment in those alien cattle they breed and use for barter, said the economists. (They weren’t really cattle, of course. In fact, they didn’t look anything like cattle—but calling them cattle was easier than finding out what they actually were, and so cattle they became.)

What will we do with the cattle, asked Petrovitch.

Let nature take its course, explained the economists. They produce one calf a year. If the mother weighs 1,200 pounds and the calf weighs 120 before his first birthday, that’s a ten percent per annum return on our investment. Once we’re a major economic player in the planetary economy, we’ll be in a better position to introduce the Republic’s currency and gently bring the Blue Demons into the system. Of course, they added, we’ll never charge for medicine or any other form of humanitarian aid, because that’s the kind of race we are.

Petrovitch had a feeling that there was a flaw in there somewhere, but they were the experts, not him. He considered everything he was told, approved a master plan, and left to pursue his court case. He died of a brain aneurism—or perhaps it was a broken heart—shortly after losing his final appeal to change the planet’s name from MacArthur 4 to Petrovitch 7.

It was seven years later that the Republic took a plebiscite to see if MacArthur 4 would like to apply for membership.

Not a single Blue Demon voted.

Obviously they didn’t understand what we’re asking them to do, concluded the experts. So they went around with interpreters to explain the glories of being a cog in the vast and all-powerful Republic machine. This time 187 Blue Demons voted. 186 opposed joining. The remaining voter spent most of his time rubbing cattle dung all over his body and howling at the moon, and somehow didn’t seem representative of his people, no matter how much the Republic tried to convince itself that it was the 186 who were out of step with the rest of the Blue Demons.

So they sent in more experts to study the situation—and in the fullness of time they paid a visit to the Miracle Brigade, as they always do.

The Republic’s representative was a mousy little fellow named Duncan Smythe. He never used a simple word when he could latch onto a complex one, he never walked when he could mince, and he seemed very unhappy that he didn’t have a longer nose so he could look down it at me.

“So that’s the situation,” he said after laying the problems out for me. “We’ve expended almost two billion credits creating the most exhaustive system of roads and highways on this godforsaken little dirtball, and in four months of observation not a single Blue Demon ever availed himself of them. Furthermore, we’ve offered to inoculate them against diseases, and they have categorically refused to accept our magnanimous gesture.” He paused uncomfortably, then continued: “And we almost had a riot when we tried to convert them to a monied economy.”

“A riot,” I repeated, unsurprised.

“A riot,” he confirmed.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You told them you were installing a hut tax, and the only way for them to pay it was to work for cash.”

“How did you know?” he said, surprised.

“Because no bureaucrat ever met an old, discredited idea that he wasn’t certain would work if only he was in charge of it,” I replied. “Which did they do—burn their own huts or kill your tax collectors?”

“Neither,” replied Smythe. “They slaughtered half our herd of cattle under cover of night, and offered to let the other half live only if we paid them a tribute exactly equal to the planetary total of hut taxes.”

I smiled. “And here everyone was saying that they weren’t creative.”

“You say that almost admiringly,” he accused me.

“I admire innovation,” I said. “And since I’m not likely to find it in the Republic’s bureaucracy, I tend to admire it wherever I encounter it.”