Our Children's Children (4 page)

“Steve,” said the President, “I know that what you have must be important.” It was just short of a rebuke.

“I think so, Mr. President,” said Wilson. “Molly Kimball is bringing in one of the refugees who says he is a spokesman for at least the Virginia group. I thought you might want to see him, sir.

“Sit down, Steve,” said the President. “What do you know about this man? Is he really a spokesman? An accredited spokesman?”

“I don't know,” said Wilson. “I would suppose he might have some credentials.”

“In any case,” said the Secretary of State, “we should listen to what he has to say. God knows, no one else has been able to tell us anything.”

Wilson took a chair next to the Attorney General and settled into it.

“The man sent a message ahead,” he said. “He thought we should know as soon as possible. He suggested an artillery piece, firing high explosive rounds, be placed in front of every door or time tunnel or whatever the people are coming out of.”

“There is some danger, then?” asked the Secretary of Defense.

Wilson shook his head. “I don't know. He apparently was not specific. Only if anything happened at any tunnel we should fire an explosive charge directly into it. Even if there were people in it. To disregard the people and fire. He said it would collapse the tunnel.”

“What could happen?” asked Sandburg.

“Tom Manning passed on the word from Molly. Quoted the spokesman as saying we would know. I got the impression it was precautionary only. He'll be here in a few minutes. He could tell us.”

“What do you think?” the President asked the others. “Should we see this man?”

“I think we have to,” said Williams. “It's not a matter of protocol, because in the situation as it stands we have no idea what protocol might be. Even if he isn't what he says he is, he can give us information, and so far we have none at all. It isn't as if we were accepting him as an ambassador or official representative of those people out there. We could use our judgment as to how much of his story we'd accept.”

Sandburg nodded gravely. “I think we should have him in.”

“I don't like the idea of a press association bringing him in,” said the Attorney General. “They'd not be particularly disinterested parties. There would be a tendency to palm their own man off on us.”

“I know Tom Manning,” said Wilson. “Molly, too, for that matter. They won't trade on it. Maybe they would have if he had talked to Molly, but he wouldn't talk to anyone. The President, he said, was the only man he'd talk with.”

“The act of a public-spirited citizen,” said the Attorney General.

“If you're talking about Manning and Molly,” said Wilson, “yes, I think so. Your opinion may differ from mine.”

“After all,” said the Secretary of State, “we'd not be seeing him in any official capacity unless we made it so. We'd not be bound by anything we say.”

“And,” said the Secretary of Defense, “I want to hear more about blowing up those tunnels. I don't mind telling you they have bothered me. I suppose it is all right so long as only people are coming out of them. But what would we do if something else started coming through?”

“Like what?” asked Douglas.

“I don't know,” said Sandburg.

“How deeply, Reilly, does your objection go?” the President asked the Attorney General.

“Not deeply,” said Douglas. “Just a lawyer's reaction against irregularity.”

“Then I think,” said the President, “that we should see him.” He looked at Wilson. “Do you know, has he got a name?”

“Maynard Gale,” said Wilson. “He has his daughter with him. Her name is Alice.”

The President nodded. “You men have the time to sit in on this?”

They nodded.

“Steve,” said the President. “You as well. He's your baby.”

8

The village had known hunger, but now the hunger ended. For, sometime in the night, a miracle had happened. High up in the sky, just beyond the village, a hole had opened up and out of the hole poured a steady stream of wheat. The foolish boy with the crippled leg, who belonged to no one, who had simply wandered into the village, who was crippled in his mind as well as in his body, had been the first to see it. Skulking through the night, skulking as well as he could with one leg that dragged, unable to sleep, looking for the slightest husk that he could steal and chew upon, he had seen the grain plunging from the sky in the bright moonlight. He had been frightened and had turned about to run, but his twisting hunger would not let him run. He had not known what it was to start with, but it was something new and it might be something he could eat and he could not run away. So, frightened still, he had crept upon it and finally, seeing what it was, had rushed upon it and thrown himself upon the pile that had accumulated. He had stuffed his mouth, chewing and gasping, gulping to swallow the half-chewed grain, strangling and coughing, but stuffing his mouth again as soon as he managed to clear his throat. The overloaded stomach, unaccustomed to such quantities of food, revolted, and he rolled down off the pile and lay upon the ground, weakly vomiting.

It was there that others found him later and kicked him out of the way, for with this wondrous thing that had happened and that had been spotted by a man of the village who had happened to go out to relieve himself, they had no time for a foolish, crippled boy who had merely attached himself to the village and did not belong there.

The village was aroused immediately and everyone came with baskets and with jars to carry off the wheat, but there was far more than enough to fill all the receptacles that the village had, so the headmen got together and made plans. Holes were dug in which the grain was dumped, which was no way to treat good wheat, but it must be hidden, if possible, from the sight of others and it was the only thing they could think of to do immediately. With the dryness and the drought upon the land there was no moisture in the ground to spoil the wheat and it could be safely buried until the time when something else could be devised to store it.

But the grain kept pouring from the sky and the ground was baked and hard to dig and they could not dispose of the pile, which kept growing faster than they could dispose of it.

And in the morning soldiers came and, thrusting the villagers to one side, began hauling the wheat away in trucks.

The miracle kept on happening, the wheat pouring from the sky, but now it was a less precious miracle, not for the village alone, but for a lot of other people.

9

“I would suppose,” said Maynard Gale, “that you would like to know exactly who we are and where we're from.”

“That,” agreed the President, “might be an excellent place to start.”

“We are,” said Gale, “most ordinary, uncomplicated people from the year 2498, almost five centuries in your future. The span of time between you and us is about the same as the span of time between the American voyages of Christopher Columbus and your present day.

“We are traveling here through what I understand you are calling, in a speculative way, time tunnels, and that name is good enough. We are transporting ourselves through time and I will not even attempt to try to explain how it is done. Actually I couldn't even if I wanted to. I do not understand the principles, other than in a very general way. If, in fact, I understand them at all. The best that I could do would be to give you a very inadequate layman's explanation.”

“You say,” said the Secretary of State, “that you are transporting yourselves through time back to the present moment. May I ask how many of you intend to make the trip?”

“Under ideal circumstances, Mr. Williams, I would hope all of us.”

“You mean your entire population? Your intention is to leave your world of 2498 empty of any human beings?”

“That, sir, is our heartfelt hope.”

“And how many of you are there?”

“Give or take a few thousand, two billion of us. Our population, as you will note, is somewhat less than yours at the present moment and later I will explain why this.…”

“But why?” asked the Attorney General. “Why did you do this? You must know that the world's economy cannot support both your population and our own. Here in the United States, perhaps in a few of the more favored countries of the world, the situation can be coped with for a limited period of time. We can, as a matter of utmost urgency, shelter you and feed you, although it will strain even our resources. But there are other areas of the Earth that could not do this, even for a week.”

“We are well aware of that,” said Maynard Gale. “We are trying to make certain provisions to alleviate the situation. In India, in China, in some African and South American areas we are sending back in time not only people, but wheat and other food supplies, in the hope that whatever we can send through may help. We know how inadequate these provisions will be. And we know as well the stress which we place upon all the people of this time. You must believe me when I say we did not arrive at our decision lightly.”

“I would hope not,” said the President, somewhat tartly.

“I think,” said Gale, “that in your time you may have taken note of published speculations about whether or not there are other intelligences in the universe, with the almost unanimous conclusion that there must surely be. Which raises the subsidiary question of why, if this is so, none of these intelligences has sought us out, why we've not been visited. The answer to this, of course, is that space is vast and the distances between stars are great and that our solar system lies far out in one of the galactic arms, far from the greater star density in the galactic core, where intelligence might have risen first. And then there is the speculation concerning what kind of people, if you want to call them that, might come visiting if they should happen to do so. Here I think the overwhelming, although by no means unanimous, body of opinion is that by the time a race had developed star-roving capability they would have arrived at a point of social and ethical development where they would pose no threat.

“And while this may be true enough, there would always be exceptions and we, it seems, up in our own time, have become the victims of one of these exceptions.”

“What you are saying,” said Sandburg, “is that you have been visited, with what appear to have been unhappy results. Is that why you sent ahead the warning about the planting of artillery?”

“You haven't done that yet? From the tone of your voice.…”

“There has not been the time.”

“Sir, I plead with you. We discussed the possibility that some of them might break through the defenses we set up and invade the tunnels. We have strong defenses, of course, and there are strict orders, which will be carried out by devoted men, to destroy any tunnel where this might happen, but there always is the chance that something could go wrong.”

“But your warning was so indefinite. How will we know if something.…”

“You would know,” said Gale. “There would be no doubt at all. Take a cross between a grizzly bear and a tiger, elephant size. Let it move so fast that it seems no more than a blur. Give it teeth and claws and a long, heavy tail armed with poison spines. Not that they look like bears or tigers, or even elephants.…”

“You mean they carry nothing but claws and teeth.…”

“You're thinking of weapons, sir. They don't need weapons. The are unbelievably fast and strong. They are filled with thoughtless bloodlust. They take a lot of killing. Tear them apart and they still keep coming on. They can tunnel under fortifications and tear strong walls apart.…”

“It is unbelievable,” said the Attorney General.

“You are right,” said Gale, “but I am telling you the truth. We have held them off for almost twenty years, but we can foresee the end. We foresaw it a few years after they first landed. We knew we only had one chance—to retreat, and the only place we could retreat to was into the past. We can hold them off no longer. Gentlemen, believe me, five hundred years from now the human earth is coming to an end.”

“They can't follow you through time, however,” said the President.

“If you mean, can they duplicate our time capability, I am fairly sure they can't. They're not that kind of being.”

“There is a serious flaw in your story,” said the Secretary of State. “You describe these alien invaders as little more than ferocious beasts. Intelligent, perhaps, but still mere animals. For intelligence to be transformed into a technology such as would be necessary to build what I suppose you would call a spaceship, they would require manipulatory members—hands, tentacles, something of the sort.”

“They have them.”

“But you said.…”

“I'm sorry,” said Gale. “It cannot all be told at once. They have members armed with claws. They have other members that end in the equivalent of hands. And they have manipulatory tentacles as well. Theirs is a strange evolutionary case. In their evolutionary development, apparently, and for what reason we do not know, they did not trade one thing for another, as had been the case in the evolution of the creatures of the Earth. They developed new organs and abilities, but they let loose of none of those they already had. They hung onto everything. They loaded the evolutionary deck in favor of themselves.

“I would suspect that if they wished they could build most efficient weapons. We have often wondered why they didn't. Our psychologists think they know why it is. They postulate that these aliens are a warrior race. They glory in killing. They may have developed their space-traveling capability for no other reason than that they might find other things to kill. Killing is a personal thing for them, an intensely personal experience, like religion once was for the human race. And since it is so personal, it must be done personally, with no mechanical aids. It must be done with claws and fangs and poison tail. They may feel about mechanical killing aids as an accomplished swordsman of some hundreds of years ago must have regarded the first guns, with contempt as a cowardly way to fight. Perhaps each one of them must continually reassert his manhood or his beasthood, his selfhood, perhaps, and the only means by which he can do this is slaughter, personally accomplished. Their individual standing, their regard for themselves, the regard of their fellows for them, may be based upon the quality and the quantity of their killing. Once a fight is done they eat their victims, or as many of them as they can, but whether this is for sustenance or is a ritualistic matter of course we do not know. In fact, we know little of them. There has been, as you can imagine, no communication with them. We have photographed them and we have studied them dead, but this is only superficial to any understanding of them. They do not fight campaigns. They seem to have no real plan of battle, no strategy. If they had, they would have wiped us out long ago. They make sudden raids and then they retire. They make no attempt to hold territory as such. They don't loot. All they seem to want is killing. At times it has seemed to us that they have deliberately not wiped us out, as if they were conserving us, making us last as long as possible so we'd still be there to satisfy their bloodlust.”