The Astral Mirror (30 page)
Authors: Ben Bova
Odal scooped up a handful of pebbles and tossed them in Hector’s general direction.
That should make him duck. Perhaps he'll stumble and crack his helmet open.
He grinned at that. That's it. Kor wants him dead, and that’s the way to do it. Pin him under a big rock, then bury him alive under more rocks. A few at a time, stretched out nicely. Break some of his bones in the process, and let him sweat while his oxygen supply runs out. That should put enough strain on his nervous system to hospitalize him, at least. Then he can be assassinated by more conventional means. Perhaps he’ll even be as obliging as Massan, and have a fatal stroke.
A large rock. One that's light enough to lift and throw, yet also big enough to pin him for a few moments. Once he's down, it will be easy enough to bury him under more rocks.
Odal spotted a boulder of the proper size, a few meters away. He backed toward it, throwing small stones in Hector’s direction to keep the Watchman busy. In return, a barrage of stones began striking all around him. Several hit him, one hard enough to knock him slightly off balance.
Slowly, patiently, Odal reached his chosen weapon: an oblong boulder, about the size of a small chair. He crouched behind it and tugged at it experimentally. It moved slightly. Another stone zinged off his arm, hard enough to hurt. Odal could see Hector clearly now, standing atop a small rise, calmly firing stones at him. He smiled as he coiled, cat-like, and tensed himself. He gripped the boulder with his outstretched arms and hands.
Then in one vicious uncoiling motion he snatched it up, whirled around, and hurled it at Hector. The violence of the action sent him tottering awkwardly as he released the boulder. He fell to the ground, but kept his eyes fixed on the boulder as it tumbled end over end, directly at the Watchman.
For an eternally long instant Hector stood motionless, seemingly entranced. Then he leaped sideways, floating dream-like in the low gravity as the stone bore inexorably past him.
Odal pounded his fist on the ground in fury. He started up, only to have a good-sized stone slam against his shoulder and knock him flat again. He looked up in time to see Hector fire again. A stone puffed into the ground inches from Odal’s helmet. The Kerak major flattened himself. Several more stones clattered on his helmet and oxygen tank. Then nothing.
Odal looked up and saw Hector squatting, reaching for more ammunition. The Kerak warrior stood up quickly, his own fists filled with stones. He cocked his arm to throw...
Something made him turn around and look behind him. The boulder loomed before his eyes, still tumbling slowly as it had when he’d thrown it. It was too big and too close to avoid. It smashed into Odal, picked him off his feet, and slammed him against the upjutting rocks a few meters away.
Even before he began to feel the pain inside him, Odal began trying to push the boulder off. But he couldn’t get enough leverage. Then he saw the Star Watchman’s form standing over him.
“I didn’t really think you’d fall for it,” Hector’s voice said in his earphones. “I mean... didn’t you realize that the boulder was too massive to escape completely after it missed me? You just threw it into orbit... uh, a two-minute orbit, roughly. It
had
to come back... all I had to do was keep you in the same spot for a few minutes.”
Odal said nothing, but strained every cell in his pain-racked body to get the boulder off him. Hector reached over his shoulder and began fumbling with the valves that were pressed against the rocks.
“Sorry to do this... but I’m not killing you... just defeating you. Let’s see, one of these is the oxygen valve, and the other, I think, is the emergency rocket pack. Now, which is which?”
Hector’s hand tightened on a valve and turned it sharply. A rocket roared to life and Odal was hurtled free of the boulder, shot completely off the planetoid. Hector was bowled over by the blast and rolled halfway around the tiny chunk of rock and metal.
Odal tried to reach the rocket throttle, but the pain was too great. He was slipping into unconsciousness. He fought against it. He knew he must return to the planetoid and somehow kill his opponent. But gradually the pain overpowered him. His eyes were closing, closing...
And quite abruptly he found himself sitting in the booth of the dueling machine. It took a moment for him to realize that he was back in the real world. Then his thoughts cleared. He had failed to kill Hector. He hadn’t even defeated him.
And at the door of the booth stood Kor, his face a grim mask of anger.
For the moment, Leoh’s office behind the dueling machine looked like a great double room. One wall had been replaced by a full-sized view screen, which now seemed to be dissolved, so that he was looking directly into the austere metallic utility of a star-ship compartment.
Spencer was saying, “So this hired assassin, after killing four men and nearly wrecking a government, has returned to his native worlds.”
Leoh nodded. “He returned under guard. I suppose he’s in disgrace, or perhaps even under arrest.”
“Servants of a dictator never know when they’ll be the ones who are served—on a platter.” Spencer chuckled. “And the Watchman who assisted you, this Junior Lieutenant Hector, where is he?”
“The Dulaq girl has him in tow, somewhere. Evidently it’s the first time he’s been a hero.”
Spencer shifted his weight in his chair. “I’ve long prided myself on the conviction that any Star Watch officer can handle almost any kind of emergency. From your description of the past few weeks’ happenings, I was beginning to have my doubts. However, Junior Lieutenant Hector seems to have scraped through.”
“He turned out to be an extremely valuable man,” Leoh said, smiling. “I think he’ll make a fine officer.”
Spencer grunted an affirmative.
“Well,” Leoh said, “that’s the story, to date. I believe that Odal is finished. But the Kerak Worlds have annexed the Szarno Confederacy and are rearming in earnest now. And the Acquatainian government is still very wobbly. There will be elections for a new Prime Minister in a few days, with half a dozen men running and no one in a clear majority. We haven’t heard the last of Kanus, either, not by a long shot.”
Spencer lifted a shaggy eyebrow. “Neither,” he rumbled, “has
he
heard the last from
us.”
Every year, Science Fiction Writers of America—the professional organizations of SF writers, agents, and impedimenta—produces a Nebula Awards book, in which the stories honored with Nebula Awards are reprinted, together with solicited contributions from SFWA members. Several years ago Kate Wilhelm, who was editing that year’s volume, asked me to write an essay on the future of scientific research. Although there have been many discoveries and developments in the time since I originally wrote this essay, its basic tenets still hold true.
Where is science heading? Is it taking us on a one-way ride to oblivion, or leading the human spirit upward to the stars? Science fiction writers have been predicting both, for centuries.
“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided,” Patrick Henry said, “and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
Look at the past, at the way science and technology have affected the human race. Look far back. Picture all of humanity from the earliest
Homo erectus
of a half-million years ago as a single human being. Now picture science as a genie that will grant that person the traditional three wishes of every good fable.
We have already used up one of those wishes. We are working on the second one of them now. And the future of humankind, the difference between oblivion and infinity, lies in our choice of the third wish.
Our three wishes can be given classical names: Prometheus, Apollo, and Athena.
Long before there was science, perhaps even before there was speech, our primitive ancestors discovered technology. Modern man thinks of technology as the stepson of scientific research, but that is only a very recent reversal of a half-million-year-long situation. Technology
—tool-making—
came first. Science
—understanding—
came a long time later.
Look at the Prometheus legend. It speaks the truth as clearly as any modern science fiction story. It speaks of the first of our three wishes.
Prometheus brought the gift of fire. He saw from his Olympian height that man was a weak, cold, hungry, miserable creature, little better than the animals of the fields. At enormous cost to himself, Prometheus stole fire from the heavens and gave it to man. With fire, man became almost godlike in his domination of all the rest of the world.
Like most myths, the legend of the fire-bringer is fantastic in detail and absolutely correct in spirit. Anthropologists who have sifted through the fossil remains of early man have drawn a picture that is much less romantic, yet startlingly close to the essence of the Prometheus legend.
The first evidence of man’s use of fire dates back some half-million years. The hero of the story is hardly godlike in appearance. He is
Homo erectus,
an ancestor of ours who lived in Africa, Asia, and possibly Europe during the warm millennia between the second and third glaciations of the Ice Age.
Homo erectus
was scarcely five feet tall. His skull was rather halfway between the shape of an ape’s and our own. His brain case was only two-thirds of our size. But his body was fully human: he walked erect and had human, grasping hands.
And he was dying. The titanic climate shifts of the Ice Age caused drought even in tropical Africa, his most likely home territory. Forests dwindled. Anthropologists have found many
H.
erectus
skulls scratched by leopard’s teeth. Our ancestors were not well-equipped to protect themselves. Picture Moon Watcher and his tribe from Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001.
It was a gift from the skies that saved
Homo erectus
from oblivion. Not an extraterrestrial visitor, but a blast of lightning that set a bush afire. An especially curious and courageous member of the
erectus
clan overcame his very natural fear to reach out for the bright warm promise of the flames. No telling how many times our ancestors got nothing for their curiosity and courage except a set of burnt fingers and a yowl of pain. But eventually they learned to handle fire safely, and to use it.
With fire, humankind’s technology was born.
Fire, the gift of Prometheus, satisfied our first wish, which was: feed me, warm me, protect me.
Fire not only frightened away the night-stalking beasts and gave our ancestors a source of warmth, it helped to change the very shape of their faces and their society.
Homo erectus
was the world’s first cook. He used fire to cook the food that had always been eaten raw previously.
Cooked food is softer and juicier than raw food. Cooking cuts down greatly on the amount of chewing that must be done. Our ancestors found that they could spend less time actually eating and have more time available for hunting or traveling or making better spear points.
More important, the apelike muzzle of
Homo erectus,
with its powerful jaw muscles, was no longer needed. Faces became more human. The brain case grew as the jaw shortened. No one can definitely say that these two face changes are related. But they happened at the same time. The apelike face of the early hominids changed into the present small-jawed, big-domed head of
Homo sapiens sapiens.
Beyond that, fire was the first source of energy for any animal outside its own muscles. Fire liberated us from physical labor and unleashed forces that have made us masters of the world. Fire is the basis of all technology. Without fire we would have no metals, no steam, no electricity, no books, no cities, no agriculture, nothing that we would recognize as civilization.
The gift of Prometheus satisfied our first wish. It has fed us, kept us warm, protected us from our enemies. Too well. It has led to the development of a technology that is now itself a threat to our survival on this planet.
The price Prometheus paid for giving fire to us was to be chained eternally to a rock and suffer daily torture. Again, the myth is truer than it sounds. The technology that we have developed over the past half-million years is gutting the earth. Forests have been stripped away, mountains leveled, our air and water fouled with the wastes of modern industry.
For our first wish, the wish that Prometheus answered, was actually: feed me, warm me, protect me,
regardless of the consequences.
Our leopard-stalked ancestors gave no thought to the air pollution arising from their primitive fires. And our waist-coated entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution did not care if their factories turned the millstream into an open sewer.
But today, when the air we breathe can kill us and the water is often unfit to drink, we care deeply about the consequences of technology.
The gift of Prometheus was a first-generation technology. It bought the survival of the human race at the price of eventual ecological danger. Now we seek a second-generation technology, one that can give us all the benefits of Prometheus’s gift without the harmful by-products.
This is our second wish. We have already asked it, and if it is truly answered, it will be answered by Apollo. The sun god. The symbol of brilliance and clarity and music and poetry. The beautiful one.
Although our first-generation technology predated actual science by some half-million years, the second-generation technology of Apollo cannot come about without the deep understandings that only science can bring us. To go beyond the ills of first-generation technology, we must turn to science, to the quality of mind that sees beyond the immediate and makes the desire to know, to understand, the central theme of human activity.
Science is something very new in human history. As new, actually, as the founding of America. In the year 1620, when the Puritans were stepping on Plymouth Rock, Francis Bacon published the book that signaled the opening of the scientific age:
Novum Organum.