Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (14 page)

What was going to be done with them? Why? Who was behind all this? Where were they going to be taken? Perhaps they were going to be eaten, and the vaulting hold that stretched enormously about them was a kind of extraterrestrial pantry?

No one knew. Most of them shivered, expecting the worst; a few speculated sanely; but no one knew.

All night, all day, the loading went on. It was indiscriminate. No human boundaries were recognized. A load of Portuguese fishermen was deposited in the midst of a previous load of Chinese farmers from a collective in Kwantung. The Roman Catholic fishermen sank to their knees and followed an apoplectic Methodist minister from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in prayer; the ingratiating young chairman of the collective farm bustled about organizing a Marxist study group for a squeaking crowd of stylish matrons from Johannesburg, South Africa, whose Ladies' Aid Society meeting had been picked up en masse.

When a hold contained enough people to occupy all the cots in it, the ceiling opened no more, and activity moved to another hold or another ship. Thus, half the Congress of the United States of America was dropped wholesale into the student body and faculty of the largest elementary school in Bucharest, while the other half vainly tried gaining information and establishing authority among the surrounding Madras dirt farmers and the rather puzzled inmates of a Damascus prison.

The loading went on for five days and five nights. Nothing stopped the loading; nothing delayed it. Guided missiles with nuclear warheads not only disappeared just as they arrived at target, but their sources became the very next object of attention. Every last launching site in the Arizona desert and the Siberian tundra was visited and cleared a few minutes after it fired its rockets. Here and there, military detachments fought on valiantly to the end, their commanding officers watching in stupefaction as bullets and shells bounced harmlessly off the alien robots who plodded patiently through murderous enfilading fire on their way to pick up the occupants of regimental or divisional headquarters.

A thorough job was done. Submarines were brought to the surface and emptied of their crews; men at the bottom of the world's deepest mine shafts, with their arms locked desperately about the supporting timbers, were gently but insistently pried loose by the robot tentacles and carried to a last open hold.

Every living human on Earth was taken up to the alien spaceships. But no animals. The animals all remained behind, they and the empty fields and the tall forests and the seas that swirled unendingly along the white beaches of the world.

When the loading was complete, the space fleet moved away as a unit. The acceleration was so smooth that few of the humans even suspected that they were under way. The space fleet moved away from Earth, away from our Sun, and plunged into the black gulfs of the universe.

Except for the shock of being torn from familiar environments so abruptly, the humans aboard the ships had to admit they were not too badly off. There were several water fountains in each hold; there were adequate plumbing facilities; the cots were quite comfortable and so were the temperatures maintained.

Twice each day, exactly twelve hours apart, chimes were sounded and a dozen large soup tureens materialized in the middle of the floor. These tureens were filled with thick white dumpling-like objects bobbing in a greenish liquid. The dumplings and the soup were apparently nourishing, and acceptable to the palates of a thousand different cuisines—though dismally boring as a steady diet. After everyone had eaten, the chimes sounded again and the tureens vanished; they vanished like great, moistureless bubbles. And then there was nothing to do but wander about, try to learn your neighbor's language, sleep a little, worry about the future a little—and wait for the next feeding.

If trouble started, as for example between a factory of Australian steel workers and a tribe of Zulu warriors over the favors of some nurses from a Leningrad hospital—if large trouble, incipient riot, mass fighting, ever got started—it was stopped immediately. A series of robots would materialize through the floor, one after another, each one exactly like the other. Each robot would grab as many individual belligerents as its tentacles could hold and keep them apart until the passage of time and the ridiculous position in which they found themselves brought the angry people back to a state of relative calm. Then, without making a comment or even a single illuminating gesture, the robots disappeared, exactly like the soup tureens.

They were certainly well taken care of. On that point, eventually, all agreed. But why? For what purpose?

Certainly, there seemed to be a sinister overtone to the hospitality they were enjoying. The care and concern lavished upon them, not a few noted darkly, were all too reminiscent of a farmer in a barnyard or a shepherd with a flock of fat, highly marketable sheep.

Or was it possible, the optimists argued, that these highly advanced aliens were mixing humanity in the melting pots of the holds deliberately? Having impatiently observed our squabbling and wars and homicidal prejudices, had they decided with a kind of godlike irritation to make of us one cohesive race once and for all?

It was hard to tell. No alien ever manifested himself. No robot ever said another word, once the holds were closed. Despite the best efforts of all the inhabitants of a given hold, despite the untiring ingenuity of the human race in all of the ships, there was no communication between the people of Earth and their alien hosts for the entire lengthy voyage.

All they could do was wonder—eat, sleep, talk, and wonder—as the fleet of enormous spaceships traveled on and on. They went past star system after star system, they went past worlds in gaseous birth and worlds cracked and dead.

And as the days passed—marked only by sleep periods and carefully rewound wristwatches—most people decided that the complete lack of communication, as well as the casual way they had been handled, suggested a contempt that was very disquieting.

Many great and minor changes took place among the inhabitants of the holds. The young Danish housewife who had been separated from her husband and children grew tired of fighting off the advances of the Trobriand Islanders about her and made her choice simply, in terms of the huskiest and most importunate of her suitors; the member-delegates of the United Nations Security Council gave up trying to effect a rapprochement with the gabardined followers of Chaim ben Judah-David, the wonder-working rabbi from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and sat in bitter isolation in their corner of the hold, announcing from time to time that they constituted the only world government legally capable of dealing with the aliens in the name of humanity as a whole. As soon, of course, as the aliens asked for such representatives...

That was the rub, and all felt it to some degree, and felt it more and more as the days were marked off into weeks and the weeks into months. In the bowels of every one of them—diplomat and devout Hasidic Jew, pale woman from the shores of the North Sea and brown man from the wide Pacific Ocean—nervousness about the future rattled and clattered. What was going to happen to them? What could the aliens want with the whole human race?

Most of them did not know exactly when the ships came to their destination and stopped. The realization that the voyage was over came only when the holds opened above their heads and welcome sunlight roared in. Except that—once the first wildly happy cheers had died away—they noticed this was red sunlight, not yellow.

And then there was the debarkation.

Done with much less struggling, of course, much less screaming and fear-wet excitement. The robots were almost welcomed as they reversed the process of a few months ago. Men and women, with a few neurotic or superstitious exceptions, fought to be the first picked up by the hard, shining, segmented tentacles and transferred to the smaller ships that were attached to the sides of the large transports like so many baby spiders.

When the small ships landed, the human cargo enthusiastically continued to help the robots as much as it could in its own unloading. Ship after ship, now empty, sped back to the great fleet above for more humans, while those who once again found themselves standing on soil and vegetation looked about them.

It was not Earth. That alone was certain.

They were on a hard grey planet whose surface was broken by few of the hills and none of the mountains that most of them associated with topography. A rather dry-smelling grey planet, poor in oceans and barely stippled here and there with tiny, lake-like seas. A gusty grey planet without trees to shush the steady complaint of its winds. There were only broad-leaved, gritty-stemmed plants that grew ankle-high.

All the colors were wrong. The plants looked like sick blue spinach. The sun above them was a liverish bronze, old and stained. The sky was made of bile—cloudless, featureless essence of thick green bile.

And on the night side, no moon floated through the absolutely unfamiliar constellations. It was deeply dark on the night side, and with the darkness a sharp stink belched from the ground-huddled plants. The stink was spread efficiently by the ever-wandering, ever-wailing winds.

No, it was not Earth. It was not at all like Earth... Earth, so exceptionally far away.

A Finnish farmer watched a small boy from Dakar tear off a limp blue leaf and munch on it experimentally. The boy spat out the leaf with an explosion of saliva and wiped his tongue furiously upon his arm. The farmer prodded a shoe into the ground and worried:
Grey dust, that's all it is. What could I grow in it that I could eat? I don't have any seeds, but even if I did, could they grow in this damn dust?
A New Zealand sheep rancher bit deep into a fingernail as he wondered:
We didn't bring any herds with us, but say we had—what in hell would they be grazing on? No sheep in its right mind would go near those blue weeds.
A Bolivian mining engineer arose from an examination of the soil and said to his still-nightgowned wife: "My first impression, and a pretty strong one, is that this planet is rich in copper—and not much else. Not that there's anything wrong with copper, you understand, only there's just so much you can do with it. You can't make typewriters out of copper... You can't make automobiles or airplanes out of copper."

Men looked around in vain for wood that could be used to build houses, for stone with which to raise temples and altars and idols; they saw nothing but the green sky, the blue plants, and the grey, grey soil. Fishermen peered anxiously into the tiny seas and saw nothing swimming, nothing crawling, nothing wriggling; they saw only seaweed, purplish-blue seaweed floating in thin, ragged patches.

A little boy from Chattanooga, Tennessee, toddled up to his mother where she stood talking in a low voice to a group of worried neighbors. He tugged at her skirt until he attracted her attention. "It's an ugly world, Mommy," he told her decisively. "It's an ugly, no-good world, and I don't like it. I want to go home."

She picked him up and hugged him to her, but before she could say anything—while she was still searching for words and thoughts—the robots started to build.

They came down, the robots, from the great ships hanging motionless above, each carrying a section of a prefabricated dwelling. These they fitted together rapidly into immensely long barracks, filled with the familiar cots. Each long barracks held one shipload of people; each was furnished with toilets and water-fountains which bubbled good potable water; each had multitudes of tiny loudspeakers mounted along the walls and ceilings.

When they had assembled the barracks, the robots herded the people into them. They spread their tentacles wide, and they insistently, patiently pushed people ahead of them through the entrances. So many to a barracks, irrespective of age, sex, nationality, or family connection. When a barracks had been filled, the robots shunted the very next individual—husband, commanding officer, twin sister—into another and empty barracks. They were as efficient as ever, and, by this time, most human beings had learned it was useless to oppose them. The robots did their job well, gently and courteously for non-sentient creatures, but as ever, with the single-minded purposefulness of drones.

The humans sat on the cots and waited until all of them were housed. Then the robots disappeared. In their place came the familiar soup tureens and the familiar dumplings. People everywhere ate. They ate their fill, glancing at each other sideways and shrugging their shoulders. They finished, and the tureens disappeared.

Now, for the first time, the people of Earth heard the voice of the aliens, the owners and masters of the robots, the navigators of the grape-cluster ships.

It was an explanation (at last,
at last
, an explanation!) and it came from the many little loudspeakers in the barracks. It was given simultaneously in every language of mankind—you moved about the barracks until you found a speaker emitting words you understood—and it was listened to with great, almost frantic attention.

To begin with, the aliens explained, it was necessary for us to understand how highly civilized they were. That was very important. It was the foundation, it was the basic reason for everything they had done. They were a civilized race, enormously civilized, anciently civilized, civilized beyond our most poetic dreams of civilization.

We, as a race, were on the first stumbling steps of that civilization. We were primitive, insignificant, and—if we might pardon them for saying so—slightly ridiculous. Our technology was elementary, our ethical and spiritual awareness almost nonexistent.

But we were a race of living creatures and we did have a speck, a promise, of civilization. Therefore, they had no alternative: they had to save us. They had to go to all the trouble and expense we had witnessed and would witness in the future. As civilized creatures there was absolutely nothing else they could do.

We should know that not all creatures in the universe were as civilized as they. Wars were fought, weapons were used. They themselves had recently developed, purely for purposes of self-protection, a new weapon...