The Human Edge (33 page)

The speaker crackled at him.

"Keysman?"

He said nothing.

"Keysman? This is the Captain. Can you hear us?"

Kator held his silence, a slight smile on his Ruml lips.

"Keysman!"

Kator leaned forward to the voice-collector before him. He whispered into it.

"No use—" he husked brokenly, "natives . . . surrounding me here. Captain—"

Kator paused. There was a moment's silence, and then the Captain's voice broke in.

"Keysman! Hold on. We'll get ships down to you and—"

"No time—" husked Kator. "Destroying self and ship. Get Home . . ."

He reached out to his controls and sent the little ship leaping skyward into the dark. As it rose, he fired a cylindrical object back into the ground where it had lain. And, three seconds later, the white, actinic glare of a phase-shift explosion lighted the landscape.

But by that time, Kator was drilling safely upward through the night darkness.

He took upwards of four hours, local time, to return to the Expedition Headquarters. There was no response as he approached the surface above the hidden ship and its connected network of rooms excavated out of the undersurface. He opened the passage that would let his little ship down in, by remote control, and left the small ship for the big one.

There was no one in the corridors or in the outer rooms of the big ship. When Kator got to the gathering room, they were all there, lying silent. As he had expected, they had not followed his orders to return to the Ruml Homeworld. Indeed, with the ship locked and the keys lost with their Keysman, they could not have raised ship except by an extreme butchery of their controls, or navigated her once they had raised her. They had assumed, as Kator had planned, that their Keysman—no doubt wounded and dying on the planet below—had been half-delirious and forgetful of the fact he had locked the ship and taken her keys.

With a choice between a slow death and a fast, they had taken the reasonable choice; and suicided politely, with the lesser ranks first and the Captain last.

Kator smiled, and went to examine the ship's recorder. The Captain had recited a full account of the conversation with Kator, and the Expedition's choice of action. Kator turned back to the waiting bodies. The Expedition's ship had cargo space. He carried the dead bodies into it and set the space at below freezing temperature so that the bodies could be returned to their families—that in itself would be a point in his favor when he returned. Then he unlocked the ship, and checked the controls.

There was no great difference between any of the space-going vessels of the Ruml; and one man could handle the large Expedition ship as well as the smallest scout. Kator set a course for the Ruml Homeworld and broke the ship free of the moon's surface into space.

As soon as he was free of the solar system, he programmed his phase shift mechanism, and left the ship to take itself across immensity. He went back to his own quarters.

There, things were as they had been before he had gone down to the planet of the Muffled People. He opened a service compartment to take out food, and he lifted out also one of the alcohol-producing cultures. But when he had taken this last back with the food to the table that held his papers, badges, and the cube containing the worm, he felt disinclined to swallow the culture.

The situation was too solemn, too great, for drunkenness.

He laid the culture down and took up the cube containing the worm. He held it to the light above the table. In that light the worm seemed almost alive. It seemed to turn and bow to him. He laid the cube back down on the table and walked across to put his smashed recording device in a resolving machine that would project its story onto a life-size cube of the room's atmosphere. Then, as the lights about him dimmed, and the morning he had seen as he emerged from his small ship the morning of that same day, he hunkered down on a seat with a sigh of satisfaction.

It is not every man who is privileged to review a few short hours in which he has gained a Kingdom.

The Expedition ship came back to the Ruml Homeworld, and its single surviving occupant was greeted with the sort of excitement that had not occurred in the lifetime of anyone then living. After several days of due formalities, the moment of real business arrived, and Kator Secondcousin Bruto gas was summoned to report to the heads of the fifty great families of the Homeworld. Now those families would number fifty-one, for The Brutogas would after this day—at which he was only an invited observer—be listed among their number. Fifty-one long-whiskered male Rumls, therefore, took their seats in a half-circle facing a small stage, and out onto that stage came Kator Secondcousin to salute them all with claws over the region of his heart.

"Keysman," said the eldest family head present, "give us your report."

Kator saluted again. His limp was almost gone now but his whiskers were barely grown a few inches. Also, he seemed to have lost weight and aged on the Expedition.

"My written report is before you, sirs," he said. "As you know we set up a headquarters on the moon of the planet of the Muffled People. As you know, my Captain and men, thinking me dead, suicided. As you know, I have returned."

He stopped talking and saluted again. The family heads waited in some surprise. Finally, the eldest broke the silence.

"Is that
all
you have to say, Keysman?"

"No, sirs," said Kator. "But I'd like to show you the recording I made of the secret place of the Muffled People before I say anything further."

"By all means," said the eldest family head. "Go ahead."

Kator saluted again, and put the smashed recorder into a resolving machine at one edge of the stage. He stood beside it while the heads of the great families watched the incidents from Kator's landing to the moment of his fall in the factory building that had smashed the recorder.

"After I fell," said Kator, as he switched the resolving machine off beside him, "I came to hear two natives discussing the fact they had been unable to find anyone prowling about. They left, and I got away, back to my small ship. From then on, it was simple. I waited until darkness ensured that it was safe for me to take off unnoticed. Then I armed the device I had rigged to simulate a small phase-shift explosion, and called Expedition Headquarters. As I'd planned, my voice-message and my imitation explosion with its indication that the ship's keys were lost for good, left the rest of the Expedition no choice but polite suicide. I gave them ample time to do so before I re-entered the Expedition ship and headed her Home."

Kator stopped talking. There was a remarkable silence from the fifty-one faces staring at him for a long moment—and then a rising mutter of question and incredulity. The strong voice of the eldest family head cut across this.

"Are you telling us you
planned
the suicides of your Captain and men?"

Kator's face twisted in a sudden, apparently uncontrollable fashion. Almost as if he had been ready to laugh.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I planned it."

There was another dead silence.

"In the name of . . . 
why?
" burst out the eldest. At one side of the half-circle of faces, the face of The Brutogas looked stricken with paralysis.

Kator's face twisted again.

"Our ancestor, The Morahnpa," he said, "once ensured the conquest of a world and a race by his own individual actions. Because of this, and to encourage others who might do likewise, the principle was laid down that whoever might match The Morahnpa's action, might have, as The Morahnpa did, complete sovereignty over the
natives
of such a conquered world, after the conquest was accomplished. That is—other men might be entitled to take their advantages of the world and race itself. But its true conqueror, during his lifetime, would be the final authority on the planet."

"What's history got to do with this?" It was noticeable that the use of Kator's title of Keysman had begun to be forgotten by the eldest of the family heads. "The Morahnpa not only earned his right to a world, he was in such a position that the world could not be taken without his assistance."

"Or the Muffled People's world without mine," said Kator. "I had intended to return with a situation that was quite clear-cut. I left our base on the moon unhidden when I returned. It would be bound to be discovered within a limited time. During that limited time, I would offer my knowledge of where the place of strength of the Muffled People was—in turn for the planet of the Muffled People being granted to me as my kingdom—as his world was to The Morahnpa."

"In that case," said the eldest, "you made a mistake in showing us your recording."

"No," said Kator. "I've renounced my ambition."

"Renounced?" The fifty-one faces watched Kator without moving as the eldest spoke. "Why?"

Kator's face twitched again.

"Let me show you the rest of the recording."

"The rest—" began the eldest. But Kator was already turning to the resolving machine. He turned it on.

For a second there was nothing to be seen—only the bright flicker of a destroyed recording. Then, this cleared magically and the fifty-one found themselves looking at a native of the Muffled People—the same who had spoken to Kator earlier on the recording.

He took the container of burning vegetation out of his mouth, knocked the vegetation out of it on a rock beside him, overhanging the creek, and put the pipe away. Then he addressed them in perfect Ruml.

"Greetings," he said. "To all, and particularly to those heads of leading families who are viewing this. As you possibly already know, I am a member of that race you Ruml refer to as Muffled People, but which are correctly called humans"—he pronounced the native word carefully for them—"
Heh-eu-manz.
With a little practice you'll find it not hard at all to say."

There was the beginning of a babble from the semicircle of seats.

"
Quiet!
" barked the eldest head of family.

" . . . We humans," the native was saying, smiling at them, "have quite a warlike history, but we really don't like wars. We prefer to be independent, but on good terms with our neighbors. Accordingly, let me show you some of the means we've developed to obtain our preference."

The scene changed suddenly. The assembled Ruml saw before them one of the small, long-tailed, scavenging animals Kator had used as collectors. This was smaller than Kator's and white-furred. It was nosing its way up and down the corridors of a topless box—here being baffled by a dead end corridor, there finding an entrance through to an adjoining corridor.

"This," said the voice of the native, "is a device called a 'maze' used to test the intelligence of the experimental animal you see. This device is one of the investigative tools used in our study of a division of knowledge known as 'psychology'—which corresponds to a certain extent with the division of knowledge you Ruml refer to as Family-study."

The scene changed back to the native on the creekbank.

"Psychology teaches us humans many useful things about how other organisms must react—this is because it is founded upon basic and universal desires, such as the urge of the individual or the race to survive."

He lifted the pole he held.

"This," he said, "though it was used by humans long before we began to study psychology consciously, operates upon psychological principle—"

The view slid out along the rod, down the line attached to its tip, and through the surface of the water. It continued underwater down the line to a dirt worm like the one in Kator's cube. Then it moved off to the side a few inches and picked up the image of a native underwater creature possessing no limbs, but a fan-shaped tail and minor fans farther up the body. The creature swam to the worm and swallowed it. Immediately it began to struggle and a close-up revealed a barbed metal hook in the worm. The creature, however, for all its struggling was drawn up out of the water by the native, who hit it on the head and put it in a woven box.

"You see," said the native, cheerfully, "that this device makes use of the subject's—a 'fish' we call it—desire to survive, on a very primitive level. To survive the fish must eat. We offer it something to eat, but in taking it, the fish delivers itself into our hands, by fastening itself to the hook attached to our line.

"All intelligent, space-going races we have encountered so far seem to exhibit the universal desire to survive. To survive, most seem to believe that they must dominate any other race they encounter, or risk domination themselves. Our study of psychology shows that this is a false assumption. To maintain its domination over another intelligent race, a race must eventually bankrupt its resources, both physical and non-physical. However—it is entirely practical for one race to maintain its domination long enough to teach another race that domination is impractical.

"The worm on my hook," he said, "is known as 'bait.' The worm you found in the wreckage of the human spaceship was symbolic of the fact that the wreckage itself was bait. We have many such pieces of bait drifting outwards from our area of space here. And as I told Kator Secondcousin Brutogas, you never can tell what you'll catch. The object in catching, of course, is to be able to study what takes the bait. Now, when Kator Secondcousin took the spaceship wreckage in tow, there was a monitor only half a light-year away that notified us of that fact. Kator's path home was charted and we immediately went to work, here.

"When your expeditionary ship came, it was allowed to land on our moon and an extensive study was made not only of it, but of the psychology of the Rumls you sent aboard it. After as much could be learned by that method as possible, we allowed one of your collectors to find our underground launching site and for one of your people to come down and actually enter it.

"We ran a number of maze-level tests on Kator Secondcousin while he was making his entrance to and escaping from the underground launching site. You'll be glad to hear that your Ruml intelligence tests quite highly, although you aren't what we'd call maze-sophisticated. We had little difficulty influencing Kator to leave the conveyor belt and follow a route that would lead him onto a surface too slippery to cross. As he fell we rendered him unconscious—"