Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (20 page)

“I don’t believe it,” the man in the fireman costume burst out. “This is crazy, what you’re saying is crazy, just plain nuts. What the hell is this anyway, some kind of a rib?”

“He’s serious, Jerry,” Callahan said calmly.

“The hell he’s serious, Mike, did you hear what he said? You telling me you believe all this stuff?”

“Jerry’s right,” the duck said. “This guy’s nuts.”

“Oh, you fools!” Raksha burst out. “Are you too ignorant to see the pattern? Your whole history makes sense only by positing the four most far-fetched twistings and contradictions to human nature. Use Occam’s Razor, by the Brood. Could any race be so suicidal and have lived for this long? Do you really think it accidental that your people went from outhouses to zero-gravity toilets in half a century? From the Merrimac to Skylab in one short century? By our own standards we have turned your planet upside-down in a twinkling-are your lives so short that you have not perceived their acceleration? The pace of progress yanks you ahead faster than you can run. Do you not notice?”

Callahan looked across the crowded, oblivious room to Tom Hauptman behind the bar. “Some of us notice,” he said softly.

The fireman shook his head. “I don’t buy it. That sounds like some crazy sci-fi notion. Conspiracy of aliens my foot, I don’t believe in little … “

“… green men?” Raksha finished. “The signs are everywhere around you, Jerry. The squelching of the Air Force’s study of unidentified flying objects should have alerted anyone with eyes and ears-save that we had carefully engendered a climate of ridicule and disbelief. We have become more cautious since then. But look beyond the physical evidence: do you believe it blind chance that physics has leaped vast spans while psychology muddled off into blind alleys? Do you really believe man so incurious about himself that it has taken him thousands of years to even begin a science of sociology? Do you think it simply bad luck that the technology of your survival systems, of your food and water and power distribution networks, consistently fail to keep pace with population increase and are already strained to the failing point, even in the face of a technical revolution?

“Does it make sense that after living side by side with natural drugs and hallucinogens of all types for millenia, men have suddenly become dependent on them? Has the worldwide depression, economic and spiritual, escaped you? Does it not surprise you that no language spoken by any people on Earth corresponds with observable reality? Did you think the simultaneous collapse of an ages-old ethical system and a two-century-old value system to be mere unfortunate happenstance? You Broodless fool, did you really think God died of natural causes?

“No, my friend. Charles Fort was quite correct: you are property, and on the whole not very bright property. You follow your political and philosophical leaders blindly to the slaughter, grateful to be led, and one in a hundred of you is a Telasco or a McConnell, with the sense to pull out of the mad death-race. You must see it, man,” he said to Telasco, “you rejected the world we Krundai made for you.”

“Jerry,” I said, “one of my most precious possessions is a lapel-button, white with black letters. It says ‘Go Lemmings Go.’ Raksha is telling the truth.”

The fireman shook his head like an enraged bull. “This is crazy,” he insisted. “How can you be telling us all this? I mean, if you’re right, what makes you think we won’t tear you to pieces?”

“This is Callahan’s Place,” the alien said simply. “I am here for absolution.”

That brought us all up short, even Jerry. He stiffened; his mouth opened but there were no words in it.

“Why?” cried Doc Webster in agony. “How could a race so old and wise be so savage and murderous?”

“We are not,” Raksha returned, agony in his own voice. “You kill animals for food-we ourselves have never killed.”

“People are not animals,” Tony said with quiet force.

“To my people you are,” insisted the green one. “You lack a … an attribute for which there are naturally no words in your tongue. That attribute is central to the Krundai; without it, even if you went to the Great Pouch at the end of your days, you could not suck. To us you are less-than-Krundai. The Sign of the Brood is not upon you: you are food. My people feel no more guilt over engineering your destruction than you would if you could talk a cow into butchering itself.”

“Why all this dancing around?” Callahan asked him

“Why not just wipe us out? Sounds to me like you’ve got the moxie.”

“I have told you,” Raksha cried. “We abhor violence. The fact that you can be inducted to inflict it upon yourselves, is, to us, proof that you are food, less-than-Krundai. If you and other races did not spare us the necessity, we should be forced to kill our own food like beasts. But the Great Brood saw our needs and fashioned the lesser races to breed and feast upon, without the need to nurture violence in our own hearts. First the winged, heat-seekingfeegh of Krundar, which fell from the skies into our fires; then the blue-skinned ones of our neighbor planet, who destroyed their atmosphere just before developed interplanetary travel; then the Krill from a nearby solar system, who warred to extinction among themselves. It has, always been so; it is unforgivably bad form to slay one’s own meat oneself. It indicates that one is not in the favor of the Brood.”

“When did your people begin sort of … encouraging the food into the pot?” Callahan asked.

“So long ago that it would be meaningless to you,” Raksha told him. “We learned early that the gifts of the Brood are not free; we must labor for them, to earn a place in the Pouch.”

“I still don’t see how you could have done it,” Jerry said, baffled but obviously believing now, convinced by the pain in the furry alien’s voice and the aura of shame around him.

“In the same way that a statesman can be induced to do what he knows is insane,” Raksha explained, “by appealing subtly to his own self-interest. We ran a continuous and subtle propaganda campaign, took away any valid reason for living other than personal enrichment and comfort, and then saw to it that the immediate personal interest of millions of people served our ends. One of the simplest methods was to install in an enormous number of people the compulsion to amass more money than they could possibly use: enough were successful to leech national economies into anemia. Another was to whip up an intense interest in sex, far beyond the demands of nature, to keep population-growth beyond your capacity to adapt. Much work was required to squelch interest in space-programs before they could provide an escape valve. You humans are so short-sighted, your lives themselves so short. It is easy to manipulate you.”

“So what changed your mind?” Callahan asked. “You personally, I mean. If we ain’t fit for this here Pouch, why are you spilling the beans?

“I … I …” he stammered.

“We’re nothing but dumb animals, right? Well, Colonel Sanders doesn’t apologize to the chickens-why are you here?”

The green man groped for words, his pointed ears waving nervously.

“I … I don’t know,” he said at last. “°I cannot satisfactorily explain it to myself. There is a climate of belief which runs all through your thought and literature, a conviction that you humans have a higher destiny. This idea has been of use to the Krundai many times, but we did not plan it; it was there when we came. It may be that it is contagious. I do not know; there is something about you humans, a … a curious dignity that upsets my heart and troubles my nights.”

Finn spoke up, startling me. “I think I know what you mean, friend Raksha,” he said in that flat voice of his. “Michael,” he went on, turning to Callahan, “do not be so certain that Colonel Sanders does not apologize to his chickens, as you put it. I have myself brought about the extermination of several races, in the days when I served the Masters, and yet last week when I slaughtered my pigs, I grieved for them. They were stupid and dirty and mute-but even a pig may have dignity.

“They did not, could not, comprehend why they died-and yet in an irrational way I wished I could explain it to them.” He turned, spoke again to the furry Krundai. “I believe I understand your motivation,” he said. “I felt it too, once, and forebore to destroy this world. It seemed a planet of madmen-although much of that appears to be the doing of you and yours. But I knew that not, for you were well-hidden.

“Yet still I stayed the hands of my Masters, betrayed my purpose, because I learned here in this room that men have love.”

“That is the quality I selected for in a human audience,” Raksha admitted. “The thing you call love we Krundai had always found to be a symptom of the attribute I spoke of earlier. That humans possess the symptom without the attribute is one of the great anomalies that complicated my thought and delayed my confession until now.”

“This propaganda stuff you talked about,” Callahan persisted. “I still want to know how you put it across. Whisper in the Wright Brothers’ car? Write newspaper editorials? Spead rumors?”

“Sometimes,” Raksha said, and hesitated. His features assumed a deeper green. “And sometimes,” he went on with obvious reluctance, “by direct intervention.”

“Disguised as humans, you mean? Fifth column and that?” The big Irishman seemed to be prompting, seeking something from Raksha that I couldn’t figure out.

“All the Krundai on your world have, at one time or another, impersonated humans for varying reasons. One of us was Saul of Tarsus, another Torquemada, another Thomas Edison. Otto Hahn was yet another.”

“And you,” Callahan bored on impacably. “Who were you?”

I remembered suddenly how long ago Raksha had said he began to regret his job, and my blood went cold as ice.

“I…” he said, biting the words off with an effort, “I was known to men as Adolph Hitler.”

The silence was a living thing that gnawed at our reason, paralyzed our thought. All around us a Halloween party continued insanely, heedless men laughing and dancing, the four gorillas in the corner playing poker. There was not a damn thing any of us could say, and after a time Raksha went on listlessly, “It was an easy role to play. It took no significant fraction of the training I had received in crowd control. It was so easy that I had time to think, to observe, to learn first-hand what I was doing.

“Perhaps it was because I was born here, and have seen Krundar only once. For whatever reason, I began to doubt; subconscious uncertainty spoiled my work. The major purpose of that campaign was to prolong hostilities long enough to force the development of atomic weapons, and I nearly succeeded in aborting the mission by folding too quickly. But my colleagues were able to redeem my error by drawing out the Pacific conflict just long enough. I told myself my depression was the stigma of personal failure, but I knew in my heart that it was in fact the repair of my mistakes that unsettled me. I have thought on it long and hard since, and now I am here and I have spoken.”

Doc Webster produced a hipflask from somewhere on the south slope of his belly, upended it and slapped it down empty. On all sides of us, people drank and chattered and laughed, oblivious to the drama in their midst.

The Doc found his voice someplace; it sounded rusty.

“What do you want from us?” he croaked.

“Absolution.”

I looked at Tony and Jerry and Finn, winced as I thought for the first time in months of my dead wife and child, killed years ago in a crash when the brakes I installed myself to save a buck failed in traffic. This was the place for absolution, all right-it was Callahan’s stock in trade. And this seemed like our greatest challenge.

The brawny Irishman’s voice shocked me when he spoke: it was as cold and hard as an axe-handle in February. “That word has another word in it,” he said. “Solution. First let’s find a solution, and then absolution will take care of itself. How can you stop this pogrom?”

Raksha’s fur bristled; he looked flustered. “I cannot,” he wailed.

“Can’t you talk your people out of this?” Sam Thayer asked. “Won’t they listen to you?”

“Impossible,” the alien said flatly. “They could not conceivably understand my words … I am not sure I do myself. Have vegetarians made any real impact on your planet?”

“They have wherever they could convince folks that a cow might have a soul,” the Doc asserted.

“But you do not have the attribute,” Raksha insisted.

“I don’t know what the hell this ‘attribute’ is,” Callahan growled, “but I get the idea we have the potential for it; the symptoms, I believe you said. Could it be we never developed it because our people have been under the … protection of yours since our infancy?”

“No Krundai would believe that,” Raksha replied. “If I voiced such an opinion, I would be judged insane and induced to suicide.”

“Can you sabotage the campaign?” Telasco asked. “Join our side and do the guerrilla? With you to help we might …”

“No,” Raksha said violently. “I cannot betray my people. It is unthinkable.”

“It was unthinkable for me once,” Tony persisted. “But when I saw what I had become, I repudiated what my people were doing, worked to stop it.”

“Me too,” Jerry chimed in.

“You do not understand,” Raksha hissed. “You are not-Krundai-and this Finn may belong to a powerful, warlike race for all I know. I have committed an unthinkable crime by relying on your discretion and telling you all this-I can do no more.”

Tony had a soldier’s tactical mind. “Can you tell us where and how to locate your people? We’ll stop them.”

Finn spoke up before Raksha could answer. “That is not …”

“Possible,” Callahan finished quickly, and I got the funny idea he’d kicked Finn’s shin under the table. “If these boys led us by the hand to the atom bomb, there ain’t a lot we can do to stop ‘em, Tony.”

“But … ouch,” said Finn, and shut up.

“No,” Callahan went on, “if anyone can help us, Raksha, it’s you. Or did you just fall by to make a headsman’s apology?”

“I can do nothing for you,” Raksha said miserably. “I seek only absolution.”

“Brother,” I said sympathetically, “you’re caught between a falling rock and a hard place.” Sam and the Doc also began to make noises of commiseration, and Bill Gerrity started to ask Raksha what he was drinking. Just the men of Callahan’s, offering understanding and help, as always.