Futures Past (30 page)

  
And it would be in order to take the creature aboard for investigation. A living, intelligent being could not be treated as an experimental animal—that was forbidden by law. But a creature that had died was a different matter. Even if the resuscitation and regrowth techniques of the Srilla brought it back to life, it was still technically a dead specimen.

  
Looking at the rocket ship pictured on his screen the captain felt suddenly uneasy. It was chemically fueled, and carried a small surplus. His ship's tractor beams could do strange things sometimes, like giving certain metals a high charge of static electricity. Suppose a spark , . . "Wait!" he called urgently. He was too late.

  
The view-screen flared white. The ship shuddered as it ran through the expanding sphere of vapor and debris. Too bad, the captain thought, no specimen. But the biologist wasn't giving up so easily.

  
With the scanner they had used watching the orbiting rocket coupled to his tractor beam, the biologist was frantically fishing through the area of the explosion. Twisted and tangled pieces of rocket, large and small, flicked into view on the screen to be discarded as being only metal. Then: something black and shapeless, streaked with red —the burnt and tattered rag of what once had been a living creature, still held to a length of metal by a wisp of strapping, and there was a single piece of that enigmatic spongy stuff only slightly burned.

  
The biologist gave a brief "Wheep" of exultation. The image swelled as he drew everything in the area toward them, then it blanked out as the collection passed behind the curve of the ship. The biologist rolled heavily from his cupola and left, without saluting, for the airlock.

  
Discipline had gone to pieces, the captain thought tiredly, and it was his own fault. Even now he could stiffen them to attention or set them doing anything he wished with just a few sharply spoken words. But he didn't want to make the effort. And there were so few of them left anyway; why not let them take it easy, or amuse themselves like the biologist. Himself, he didn't want to do anything, anything at all. He wished everyone would go away, so he wouldn't have to speak, or listen, or even think....

  
"This is stupid," the weapons officer burst out, anger making his voice a discordant screech. "While he wastes time satisfying his professional curiosity, we are steadily losing physical efficiency. If this job isn't done at once, we won't be able to do it properly. And you know as well as I do what sort of culture grows from a civilization that has been almost, but not completely, wiped out. A race of killers—"

  
"Attend!"

  
The captain was angry, and the pain of speaking made him angrier still. He knew that the weapons officer was right in what he had said, but the captain did not like insubordination—even when nothing much mattered anymore—and suddenly he hated the other for dragging him out of his deep, almost pleasant lethargy back into a pain-wracked state filled with the responsibility of making decisions. He said harshly: "We have been judge and executioner to many planets such as this. Very few have not been found wanting and allowed to survive. This one will be given exactly what it deserves. Now," he softened his tone slightly, "get me a report on the present operating efficiency of the ship."

  
The weapons officer saluted so carefully that the captain wondered if he was being insulted again, then he turned to the intercom.

  
Judge and executioner, the captain thought grimly as he sank back into the padding. Many of them had been beautiful worlds, not unlike some of the planets briefly called "home" by the Srilla before they were forced to leave them. All contained intelligent life, usually of the wrong sort, and some of it was of a surprisingly high level. The captain winced at the too recent memory.

  
In the solar system they had just left—or rather, been blown out of—the natives' technology had been at least the equal of his own. Caught between the fire of an orbiting fortress and a well-placed battle squadron, his ship battered and falling apart, his only chance of survival had been to retreat into the safety of hyperspace. But, in the very instant of his "fading out," one of the enemy's helium torpedos caught him, knocking them off course and lethally irradiating the whole ship.

  
With the fatalism that had become a part of his race, they accepted what had happened, deciding only to return into normal space for a look at the stars before the end.

  
But they materialized near an inhabited planet, and found that they still had work to do.

  
The captain thought of the pitiful condition of his ship and crew, and decided that it was his most difficult job as well as being the last. He looked up as the weapons officer turned to face him.

  
"Another engineer has .. . has . .." he left the sentence unfinished: the Srilla were an extremely long-lived race, and it was difficult to speak of one dying without showing some emotion. The weapons officer went on, "Otherwise the position is as before, except that the biologist is ready with a preliminary report on the native."

  
The captain gestured toward the wall speaker, and the biologist's slow, almost pedantic, voice filled the room.

  
"The specimen has extensive burns," he began, "but its nervous system is reasonably intact. Besides renewing the damaged tissue, this means that we can thought-probe the creature's mind when it is revived. Our judgment will therefore be based on complete and accurate information." He paused, and the captain could imagine the struggle it was for him to keep the mounting excitement and curiosity he felt from showing in his voice. He resumed, "The creature is well-designed physically, but curiously underdeveloped. Taking into consideration the size and composition of this planet I would have expected something larger. Perhaps this is an especially small one because of the necessity of saving weight.

  
"The fuel," he continued, "which I was able to analyze from its spectrum as it exploded, is a low-powered chemical type, and I'm amazed that the ship reached the altitude which it did. And the being would have died anyway, because there was not enough fuel left in its tanks for the return trip." His voice grew vaguely uneasy. "I don't understand this. There were ways in which the ship could be lightened, mechanisms with overlapping functions and so on, so that a return would be possible. Maybe . . ." He hissed slightly in puzzlement, and ended, "It's been some time since we've had a regrowth. I think you might find it interesting."

  
With an effort the captain altered his body's center of gravity and rolled onto the floor of the control room. Immediately a wave of pain and weakness sent him sliding against a nearby bulkhead. He hadn't realized he was so far gone. Maybe he shouldn't waste time with the creature, but follow the weapons officer's suggestion of destroying the life on this planet at once. If he delayed, then collapsed before being able to carry out the sentence . . . He compromised by having the weapons officer remain by his panel in the control room while he went to examine the specimen.

  
It was a pity, the captain thought as he watched the creature in the regrowth tank, that the metabolism of the Srilla was not so simple and straightforward as this. If it had been, then he and his surviving crew would have gone through a similar process and emerged alive and whole, instead of being the radiation rotted near-corpses that they now were. But the Srilla were an old race, and their physical cell-structure was as bewilderingly complex as the tangle of conflicting motivations which drove them into creating such things as the Execution Ships.

  
The captain looked down at the raw, pink, and still hairless skin forming over the newly grown layers of muscles. Animal! Somehow he knew that this one was going * to be like the others, a vicious, power-hungry brute.

  
Why, he groaned despairingly, echoing the half prayer, half curse that rose constantly from every member of his race, did bestiality and intelligence march together? Why did the gift which set a being above the animals succeed only in making him more cruel, sadistic, and predatory?

  
Think of a race old, wise, and peace-loving, spreading slowly and naturally over the millenia from star to star. Their ways were gentle, and even racial memory held no hint of violence in their past. This was the Srilla. Then imagine them meeting another race—a poisonous, exploding mushroom race, scattering its spore across the galaxy like a corrosive blight, and attacking and destroying every thing in its path. Then shortly afterwards the awful discovery that the Srilla were alone, because every new culture found was, or would certainly develop into, an identical copy of that first accursed race. In short, that almost every being in the galaxy was a potential enemy. At first the enemy had a name, then soon there were too many of them. They were just__the enemy.

  
Retaliatory action was impossible. The Srilla could not hit back, or even defend themselves, because that would have meant killing, and the philosophy they had held for thousands of years made violence toward any intelligent being unthinkable. That was at first. But the shame of constantly retreating, of fleeing from world to world, from an enemy which they might possibly have beaten began to put cracks in the noble white pillar that was their pacifist philosophy. Some of them were able to fight back.

  
The Executioners, as they called themselves, were unaffected by the thought of killing—except, the captain amended grimly, when they dreamed at night. Hypnotic conditioning coupled with some very delicate brain surgery removed every trace of the softer emotions as well as the glandular network responsible for them. The treatment, on those able to take it, made it possible to begin a program of extermination that would have horrified even the enemy.

  
By this time the number of Srilla able to fight was too small to attack the enemy directly—long life in their race was counterbalanced by a very low birthrate—so they were left alone. Over the centuries, it was hoped, the more highly advanced cultures of the enemy would gradually kill each other off. The hope was probably a vain one. Instead, the Srilla searched out planets containing races whose cultural patterns were fixed and—even though their technology was on the bow and arrow level—if those races showed signs of becoming counterparts of the enemy, they were ruthlessly obliterated. The best way to deal with vermin was to make sure that they never reached maturity.

  
And somewhere, sometime, there would be another race that was good, and kind, and intelligent, and yet be able to stand against the enemy without losing those attributes. ...

  
"Captain!" the biologist called excitedly, jerking him back to awareness of his surroundings. "The revivification is successful. I will be able to receive thought impressions in a few minutes." Embarrassed then, he brought his tone down to a more sober level and explained that he had been able to analyze the spongy substance retrieved with the specimen, and while it was undoubtedly a food of some sort, he couldn't see the need for it when the creature had proved to be well-fed already.

  
The captain made a pretense of interest, but he wished suddenly that he had listened to the weapons officer instead of allowing the biologist to talk him into waiting. True, it was his duty to weigh all the available evidence before passing judgment, but he was so very tired. It seemed as though he had traveled for eons, being judge and executioner to a myriad worlds, always hoping to find just one culture that showed the promise of true civilization. He had yearned—secretly—for that discovery since his first captaincy, but the few cultures he had not needed to wipe out were so physically impotent that any hopes he had were long since dead. The galaxy, all of it, was evil.

  
The captain was tired, and disillusioned. This was, after all, his last job, so nobody would know of his one and only lapse. He turned to call up the weapons officer.

  
"This is very strange," the biologist said suddenly. He had an induction plate of the thought probe pressed against his brain case and his eyes were closed in concentration. He opened one of them enough to extend a similar plate to his superior. The captain hesitated, then accepted it. A short delay would not matter much.

  
He wished fervently that he hadn't.

  
Fear; hatred; cunning. A surly, vicious killer whose mind fairly screamed savage instability, and an all-pervading animal selfishness that was completely without gratitude. Utterly amoral, too, presupposing that it could recognize a code of morals if it saw one, something which the captain doubted very much. In short, a creature without a single saving trait.