A Star Above It and Other Stories Read online

  Of one thing, Conan Lang was sure—whenever man stopped trying, stopped working and dreaming and reaching for impossible heights, whenever he settled back in complacency, on that day he shrunk to atrophied insignificance.

  Sirius Ten had been a relatively easy project because of the planet-wide nature of its culture. Sirius Ten had only one huge land mass, and one great sea. The natives all shared basically the same life pattern, built around the cultivation of dry ricefruit, and the teams of the Applied Process Corps were faced with only one major problem rather than hundreds of them as was more often the case. It was true that certain peoples who lived on the shores of the sea, together with one island group, had a variant culture based on fishing, but these were insignificant numerically and could for practical purposes be ignored.

  The dry ricefruit was grown by a cutting and burning method, under which a field gave a good yield only once before the land was exhausted and the people had to move on. Under these conditions, individual ownership of land never developed, and there were no inequalities of wealth to speak of. The joint families worked different fields every year, and since there was no market for a surplus there was no effort made to cultivate more land than was really needed.

  The Oripesh natives of Sirius Ten had a well-developed cult of ancestor worship, thinking of their dead as always watching over them and guiding their steps. Since whatever the ancestors did automatically had the sanction of tradition behind it, it was through them that the Corps had decided to work—it being simply a question of palming off Corps Agents as ancestors come back from their dwelling place in the mountains to help their people. With careful preparations and experienced men, this had not proved overly difficult—but there were always miscalculations, accidents. Men were not like chemicals, and they did not always react as they were supposed to react. There was always an individual variable to be considered. That was why if a Corps Agent lived long enough to retire you knew both that he knew his stuff and that he had had more than his share of plain old-fashioned luck.

  Sirius Ten had to be shifted from Stage Four to Stage Five. This was a staggering change in economics, social structure, and technology—one that had taken men on Earth many centuries to accomplish. The men of the Applied Process Corps had to do it in a matter of a few years. And so they set out, armed with a variety of ricefruit that grew well in marshy land and a sound knowledge of irrigation.

  With such a lever they could move a world.

  It was three years to the day when Conan Lang returned to Sirius Ten. The patrol ship came in on her antigravs and he waited eagerly for the outlift shaft to open. His heart was pounding in his chest and his lips were dry—it was almost like coming home again.

  He swung his newly-strong body into the outlift and came out of it in the green field he had planted so long ago. He look a deep breath of the familiar humid air and grinned broadly at the hot, burning sun over his head. It was good to be back—back at a place like so many other places he had known, places that were as close to a home as any he could ever have without Kit. The breeze whispered softly through the green ricefruit and he waved at Julio, who came running across the field to meet him. These were, he knew, his kind of people—and he had missed Andy all these years.

  “Hey there, Julio!” he laughed, shaking Medina’s hand. “How goes it?”

  “Pretty good, Conan,” Julio said quietly. “Pretty good.”

  “The kid—how’s the kid?”

  “Andy is dead,” said Julio Medina.

  Conan Lang stood stock-still while an iron fist smacked into his stomach with cold, monotonous precision. Andy dead. It could not be, could not be. There had been no word, nothing. He clenched his fists. It couldn’t be true.

  But it was. He knew that with ice cold certainty.

  “It just happened the other day, Conan,” Julio said. “He was a fine boy.”

  Conan Lang couldn’t speak. The whole planet, his mind tortured him. The whole stinking planet isn’t worth Andy’s life.

  “It was an accident,” Julio said, his voice carefully matter-of-fact. “Warfare has sprung up between the rival villages like we figured. Andy was out after information and he got between them—he was hit by mistake with a spear. He never had a chance, but he managed to walk away and get back here before he died. The Oripesh don’t suspect that he wasn’t a god and could die just like anyone else. He saved the rest of us by coming back here—that’s something.”

  “Yeah,” Conan Lang said bitterly, “that’s something.”

  “I buried him here in the field,” Julio Medina went on. “I thought he’d like that. He … said good-by to you, Conan.”

  It had been a long time since Conan Lang had had tears in his eyes. He turned without a word and walked away, across the green field and into the hut where he could be alone.

  V

  From that time on, by unspoken mutual consent, the two men never again mentioned the kid’s name. They gave him the best possible write-up in their reports, and that was all that they could ever do for Andy Irvin.

  “I think we’ve about done it here, Conan,” Julio told him. “I’d like to have you make your own check and see if you come up with the same stuff I did. There’s a lull in the raiding right now—the natives are worried because that spear hit an ancestor by mistake and they’re pretty well occupied with rituals designed to make us feel better about the whole thing. You shouldn’t have any trouble, and that ought to about wind things up.”

  Conan Lang nodded. “It’ll be good to get home again, eh, Julio?”

  “Yes, you know that—and for you it should be for keeps.”

  Conan Lang raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s no secret that you’re due to be kicked upstairs,” Julio said. “I rather think this is your last field job.”

  “Well, it’s a nice theory anyhow.”

  “You remember all us old men out here in the stars, the slave labor of the Process Corps. Bring us all home, Conan, and we’ll sit around in the shade and drink wine and fish and tell lies to each other.”

  “Consider it done,” said Conan Lang. “And I’ll give you all some more medals.”

  “I’ve got medals.”

  “Can’t have too many medals, Julio. They’re good for what ails you.”

  “They’re not good for what ails me,” said Julio Medina.

  Conan Lang smiled and fired up his pipe. The kid, his mind whispered. The kid liked that pipe. He thrust the thought from his mind. A man had to take death in his stride out here, he told himself. Even when it was a kid who reminded you of yourself a million years ago—

  A million years ago.

  “I’ll start in tomorrow,” Conan Lang said, puffing on his pipe. “Do you know Ren, Julio?”

  “The chief’s son? Yes.”

  “How did he come out?”

  “Not well, Conan. He lost his woman, Loe, to one of the men we made wealthy; he has not been the same since.”

  “We’re great people, Julio.”

  “Yes.”

  Conan Lang was silent then and the two men stood together in the warm evening air, watching the great double sun float slowly down below the horizon as the long black shadows came marching up from the far edge of the world.

  Next morning, Conan Lang was off with the dawn on his final check. He pretty well knew what he would find. Julio Medina was an experienced hand and his information was reliable. But it was always a shock when you saw it for yourself. You never got used to it. To think that such a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing could change a planet beyond recognition. A ricefruit—

  It was already hot when he passed the native fields. Their ricefruit plants were tall and healthy, and their irrigation channels well constructed. He shook his head and walked on to the native village.

  Where the open, crude, friendly village had stood there was a great log wall. In front of the wall was a series of deep and ugly-looking moats. Behind the wall, he could see the tops of sturdy wooden buildings, a far cry f
rom the huts of only a few short years ago. Conan Lang made no attempt at concealment but walked openly up to the moats and crossed them on a log bridge. He stopped outside the closed gate.

  “You will remember me who walked through the flames,” he said loudly in the Oripesh tongue. “You will open the gate for your brother as he would visit you.”

  For a moment nothing happened, and then the gate swung open. Conan Lang entered the village.

  The native guard eyed him with suspicion, but he kept his distance. Conan Lang noticed that he had a bow by the log wall. There was nothing like constant warfare for the production of new weapons, he reflected. Civilization was bringing its blessings to the Oripesh with leaps and bounds.

  Conan Lang walked through the village unmolested, taking rapid mental notes. He saw storehouses for ricefruit and observed slaves being marched off to work in the fields. The houses in the village were strong and comfortable, but there was a tense air in the village, a feeling of strain. Conan Lang approached a native and stopped him.

  “Brother,” he said, “I would see your chiefs. Where are they?”

  The native looked at him warily. “The Oripesh have no chiefs,” he said. “Our king is in council.”

  Conan Lang nodded, a sick feeling inside him. “It is well,” he said. “Ren—I would see him.”

  The native jerked his thumb contemptuously toward the back of the village. “He is there,” he said. “Outside.”

  Conan Lang moved through the village, watching, missing nothing. He went all the way through and came out through the back wall. There, the old-style native huts baked in squalor under the blazing sun. There was no log wall around them, although they were inside the moat system. A pig rooted around for garbage between the huts.

  “Slums,” Conan Lang said to himself.

  He walked among the huts, ignoring the fearful, suspicious eyes of the natives. He found Ren preparing to go out into the fields. The chief’s son was thin. He looked tired and his eyes were dull. He saw Conan and said nothing.

  “Hello, Ren,” said Conan Lang.

  The native just looked at him.

  Conan Lang tried to think of something to say. He knew what had happened—the chiefs and their sons had been so busy with ritual work for the tribe that they had lagged behind in the cultivation of the new ricefruit. They had stuck to the old ways too long and their people had passed them by.

  “I can help you, my brother,” Conan Lang said softly. “It is not too late.”

  Ren said nothing.

  “I will help you with a field of your own,” said Conan Lang. “Will you let me help you?”

  The native looked at him and there was naked hate in his eyes. “You said you were my friend,” he said. Without another word, he turned and left. He did not look back.

  Conan Lang wiped the sweat from his forehead and went on with his work. The sensitive part of his mind retreated back in to a dark, insulated corner and he let his training take over. He moved along, asking questions, watching, taking mental notes.

  A little thing, he thought.

  A new kind of plant.

  A week later, Conan Lang had completed his check. He sat by the evening cook fire with Julio, smoking his pipe, watching the shadows in the field.

  “Well, we did a good job,” he said. “It’s awful.”

  “It would have come without us,” Julio reminded him. “It does no good to brood about it. It is tough, sometimes, but it is a small price to pay for survival.”

  “Yes,” said Conan Lang. “Sure.”

  “Your results check out with mine?”

  “Mostly. It’s the same old story, Julio.”

  Conan Lang puffed slowly on his pipe, reconstructing what had happened. The new ricefruit had made it valuable for a family to hang on to one piece of land that could be used over and over again. But only a limited amount of the land could be used, because of natural factors like the presence or absence of available water. The families that had not taken the plunge right away were virtually excluded, and the society was divided into the landed and the landless. The landless gradually had to move further and further from the main village to find land upon which to grow the older type of ricefruit—sometimes their fields were so far away that they could not make the round trip in a single day. And they could not get too far away and start over, because of the tribal warfare that had broken out between villages now that valuable stores of ricefruit were there for the taking. The old joint family co-operation broke down, and slaves became economically feasible.

  Now that the village need not be periodically moved, it too became valuable and so was strongly fortified for defense. One old chief, grown powerful with fields of the staple ricefruit, set himself up as a king and the other chiefs went to work in his fields.

  Of course, Sirius Ten was still in transition. While the old patterns were being destroyed, new ones, less obvious to the untrained eye, were taking their place. Disintegration and reintegration marched hand in hand, but it would be tough on the natives for a while. Process Corps techniques had speeded up the action almost beyond belief, but from here on in the Oripesh were on their own. They would go on and on in their individual development—although no two peoples ever went through exactly the same stages at the same time, it was possible to predict a general planet-wide trend. The Oripesh would one day learn to write, since they already had a crude pictographic system for ritual use. When the contact finally came from the hostile stars in the future, what histories would they have written? Who would they remember, what would they forget? Would there be any twisted legend or myth left that recalled the long-ago time when the gods had come out of the mountains to change the lives of their people?

  That was the way to look at it. Conan Lang tapped out his pipe on a rock. Just look at it like a problem, a textbook example. Forget about the people, the individuals you could not help, the lives you had made and the lives you had destroyed. Turn off that part of your mind and think in terms of the long-range good.

  Or try to.

  “We’re all through here, Julio,” Conan Lang said. “We can head for home now.”

  “Yes,” said Julio Medina. “It has been a long time.”

  The two men sat silently in the darkness, each thinking his own thoughts, watching the yellow moon sail through silver stars.

  After the patrol ship had been signaled, there was nothing to do but wait until their pickup could be co-ordinated with the time schedules of the other Corps men and the operational schedule of the star cruiser. Conan Lang busied himself with his reports while Julio sprawled in the shade and devised intricate and impossible card games with a battered deck that was old enough to be in itself of anthropological interest.

  Conan Lang was playing a game, too. He played it with his mind and he was a somewhat unwilling participant. His mind had played the game before and he was tired of it, but there was nothing he could do about it. There wasn’t any button that would turn his mind off, and while it was on it played games.

  It was engaged in putting two and two together.

  This was not in itself uncommon, although it was not as widespread as some people fondly imagined it to be. But Conan Lang played the game where others did not see even one, much less a set of twos with a relationship between them. There is nothing so hard to see as what is termed obvious after the fact. Conan Lang’s mind had played with the obvious all his life; it would not let well enough alone. He didn’t like it, there were times when he would have preferred to junk it all and go fishing without a thought in his head, but he was stuck with it. When his mind wanted to play the game, it played and that was that.

  While he waited for the patrol ship, his mind was playing with a set of factors. There was the history of Earth, taken as a vast overall sequence. There were thinking machines, atomic power, and the field techniques of the Process Corps. There was the fact that Earth had no record of ever having been contacted by another world—they had always done the contacting themselves. There
was the new principle that Admiral White had spoken to him about, the integration-acceleration factor for correlating data. There was the incredible, explosive energy of man that had hurled him light-years into space. There was his defiant heart that could tackle the prodigious job of reshaping a galaxy when the chips were down.

  Conan Lang put two and two together, and he did not get four. He got five.

  He didn’t know the answers yet, but he knew enough to formulate the right questions. From past experience he knew that that was the toughest part of the game. Incorrect answers were usually the products of off-center questions. Once you had the right question, the rest was a matter of time.

  The patrol ship came for them finally, and Conan Lang and Julio Medina walked across the soil of Sirius Ten for the last time. They crossed the field where the green plants grew, and neither tried to say what was in his heart. Three had come and only two could leave. Andy Irvin had lived and worked and dreamed only to fall on an alien planet light-years away from Earth that could have been his. He was part of the price that was exacted for survival—and he was also a kid with stars in his eyes who had gotten a rotten, senseless break.

  After the patrol ship had gone, the green leaves of the ricefruit plants stretched hungrily up toward the flaming sun. The clean water chuckled along the irrigation trenches, feeding the roots in the field. Softly, as though sad with all the memories it carried, the lonesome breeze whispered through the empty hut that had housed the men from Earth.

  VI

  Through the trackless depths of interstellar space the star cruiser rode on the power from her atomics. The hum that filled the ship was a good sound, and she seemed to quiver with pride and impatience. It did make a difference which way you were going in space, and the ship was going home.