The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (64 page)

“Limited but definite intelligence,” said the report. “Is aware of social relationships neither hostile nor friendly, but tolerant. Is familiar with machines and regards them without fear but without interest. Has an extraordinary air of self-confidence and seems justified in opposing the wishes of more intelligent beings, though offering no hostility unless an attempt is made to force it to comply… Appears to be a member of a subject species to the makers of the space craft, though its utility is not clear, since it has neither prehensile claws nor any apparent technical aptitude for the supervision of machines… We are setting up psychoscanning devices to attempt to extract information from its memories, of course without its awareness of the process. Meanwhile we are making every effort to leave it emotionally undisturbed…

A later report:

“…Psychoscanners have been able to secure excellent pictures and sound memories from the animal. It is of a species which lives in symbiosis with the creatures operating the space craft. Its utility to the superior race is not yet clear, but its subservience to them—they are not much unlike us—is proven by the records forwarded with this report. The animal’s vision appears to be comparatively poor, but its hearing and smell are excellent. Its memories of smells, in particular, are especially vivid. We have vision-memory records of various members of the spaceship’s crew, but smell-memories of every individual. Apparently, however, little or no technical information can be had from the animal because of the disinterest of the ‘Buck’—this is the auditory memory of the animal’s name for itself—in such matters. Memories of the naval base and of the presumed home planet of the invaders are concerned almost exclusively with smells. It is extremely concerned with trees and posts and the smells associated with them… We regret that no useful technical information can be had…

An order from the Department of War:

URGENT. FIRST ATTENTION. THIS ORDER SUPERSEDES ALL OTHERS WHATSOEVER AND CLAIMS THE OBEDIENCE OF EVERY CITIZEN BEFORE ANY OTHER ACTIVITY WHATEVER.

The Planetary Council has decided that information obtained from the Buck will determine our attitude toward the invaders. The fullest data must be secured concerning the relative loyalty of superior and inferior. Subject races can be psychologically conditioned to loyalty to tyrannical superiors. To what extent was this done to the Buck, and how? To what extent are rights conceded to the inferior race? What punishments are inflicted for mistakes of the race of inferior intelligence? What social stigma attaches to them? To what degree does the Buck expect loyalty to his kind from the superior race? What is the nature of the compact between the two—explicit or implied—and to what extent is it observed by the superior? What…

* * * *

The order continued in exhausting detail. It was based upon the realization that Buck—as a domestic animal—contained within his skull an absolutely objective picture of the human race. Buck would not be unbiased in his contemplation of his memories, but his memories would be right. A dog’s-eye view of humanity would be, within its limits, an extraordinarily revealing view.

The planetary Council accepted the conclusion that no technical or military information could be had from Buck. But what information it could obtain would be priceless. No man could be truthful about his own race, talking to an alien entity. But a dog—

The planetary Council pushed its preparations for war. It had very little hope of anything but never-ending battle through all the centuries of the future. But what hopes it had were centered in Buck.

* * * *

Buck himself found life confusing. The place where the lifeboat had landed was fenced in now, and he was inside the fence. The things which were not men treated him with respect, and he treated them with the self-respecting courtesy of a well-mannered dog. They pointed things at him, and he was bored. But presently they had a loud-speaker which made noises. Once it barked at him in exact similitude of another dog—in fact, Buck remembered a dog at the Rigel base whose bark had sounded exactly like that. He barked back angrily. But the loud-speaker did not bark again. Another time, Holden’s voice came out of it. And Buck leaped in frenzied joy, his tail wagging until it was almost a blur, and gave tongue in such howlings of heartbroken joy as a dog does give when his master returns after many days. When he realized that it was the loud-speaker, he could not accept the disappointment. He went whimpering about the enclosure, searching for Holden.

There were other stimuli applied to Buck, too. One of the Masans brought him food. At first Buck sniffed at it gingerly. If he must eat of unfamiliar things, he preferred food of his own killing. But ultimately he tolerated the Masan and ate. The Masan had a loud-speaker attached to his body, and it said “Buck” on various occasions, and at first Buck’s tail wagged joyously at the familiar syllable. But even when the Masan himself mastered the articulation of the name, Buck did not accept him fully. He wanted men. Especially, he wanted Holden. He dozed, and dreamed of Holden. He slept, and sometimes his dreams were such as to make his paws make tiny, jerking, frustrated movements, and sometimes he barked or whimpered or whined in his sleep. But the whinings were of the desperate joy he felt when in his dreams he saw Holden.

He had no idea that the things pointed at him by the Masans made records of his memories as they were evoked by the increasing stock of stimuli the Masans were able to apply. Buck had understood the meaning of well over a hundred words, when combined with certain tones of voice. These words invariably provoked similar responses as the loud-speaker uttered them from the record of Buck’s memories.

While the preparations for the destruction of the
Kennessee
went on, the Masans studied Buck intensively. With their increasing comprehension of his brain, they tried to win his friendship. The one Masan assigned to the task tried painstakingly to fill the part of Holden. He used the memory-recordings of Holden’s voice. He tried to reproduce the strokings that Buck’s memories said caused quiverings of ecstasy. Once he tried to tussle with Buck, as Holden did. And that took courage, because Buck was a big and powerful dog and the Masan was slight and relatively frail.

But Buck would not play. He was polite and he was amiable within the limits a dog sets for himself toward other animals also useful to man—horses, for example, and cows and sheep and very occasionally a cat. But a dog will not play with a gamboling lamb nor run with a freed colt. Buck was reserved. His loyalty to man, and especially to Holden, could not be broken. And though he did eat, and condescendingly tolerated the Masan scientist—considered to have one of the two or three best brains in the system—who tried to replace Holden in his affections, he began to pine away as days and days passed by and began to stretch into weeks. He grew thin, though he was abstractedly aware that the people who were not men had begun very definitely to like him.

After all, a man’s dog doesn’t thrive when he’s separated from the man.

* * * *

The
Kennessee
rode on in the orbit it had chosen. Maynard had made an unhappy, abject apology to Holden for the desertion of Buck, and Holden accepted it, and neither of them felt at all better afterward. A man would have been left behind under exactly the same circumstances, but a dog is somehow different. He can’t take care of himself. His abandonment couldn’t be helped, but it rankled.

The material brought back from Masa Four was duly examined. The space-radio records piled up, and electron-telescope examination of the planets continued, and evidences of a highly developed civilization accumulated—while scannerbeam observation of the
Kennessee
from Masa Four went on unendingly.

It was a dubious situation extended almost to the breaking point. The lifeboat voyage had produced a reaction of ground vehicles and atmosphere fliers. It gave an impression of limited offensive power. But, on the other hand, there was interplanetary travel here. And the scanner beam on the
Kennessee
and the instant detection of the lifeboat was proof that the people of this system knew exactly what the
Kennessee
was.

A civilization without defense weapons but with interplanetary ships and space radio should have tried to make contact with the
Kennessee.
If only to placate invaders, some attempt to open communication should have been made. Absence of such efforts was ominous. The appearance was that of a race which played possum until it could strike an overwhelming blow. So the
Kennessee
stayed in a state of nerve-racking alertness, with detectors out all around, and relays set to throw on overdrive should a high-velocity guided missile seem to draw near.

“It looks bad,” admitted the skipper to Holden. “We’d have tried to make contact, in their shoes. But whoever raided the Capella colony simply rode in and started killing. Maybe these people are that sort. Anyhow, if they do get us, our fleet will know who did it and come take them apart with planet-smasher bombs.”

Holden said dourly:

“I wish I’d been in that lifeboat. When do we send back another message torp?”

“We make no more landings,” said the skipper. He added, “You’d never be able to find where the other boat landed, and anyhow Buck—”

“Was probably blasted the instant they saw him,” said Holden.

He couldn’t blame, anybody, but he was angry. He missed Buck.

On the twelfth day after Buck’s landing, an interplanetary ship took off from Masa Four. The
Kennessee
had now ridden in beyond that planet and was headed for a perihelion point on the other side of Masa Gamma. If she survived to get there, it was the skipper’s intention to put on overdrive and go back to base with all his records. But this interplanetary ship changed all plans. It appeared to be a rocket, in that it left behind a trailing cloud of vapor which looked like ejected gases. The spectroscopes, though, showed it to be merely hydrocarbon—smoke particles. And it altogether lacked the backward velocity which would have proved it a means of propulsion. It was simply a trail of vapor, as if for advertisement.

In two days it had climbed well away from the planet and changed direction in a long smooth curve. The Navigation Officer came to the control room shortly after, to report that it was on an interception course, with interception speed, and would draw gradually closer to the
Kennessee
until contact was made. Then its trail of vapor broke, and swelled, and broke, and swelled, as if unmistakably to draw attention from the cruiser.

The control-room loud-speaker boomed shortly. Holden’s voice:

“Sir!” he said harshly. “That phony rocket is beaming signals at us, running up and down the spectrum and trying frequency and amplitude modulation and everything else. Listen!”

The speaker said resonantly: “Woof!” It was Buck’s joyous bark. An instant later came the word “Buck” in a distorted but definitely recognizable version of Holden’s own voice. And then, quite insanely, “Lie down, sir!” “Come get it, boy.” “Fetch it, Buck,” and all the other phrases to which the dog Buck had been trained to respond. As a means of opening communication between alien and mutually suspicious races, the vocabulary known to a big brown dog named Buck lacked dignity, but nothing could have been much more informative.

“You see what it means, sir!” said Holden in a strained voice. “They got the stuff out of Buck’s brain, somehow! They read his memories! They must have, somehow! They want to make contact!” Then he said thickly, “But if they killed him to rummage in his brain—”

“Mr. Holden,” said the skipper, “answer them, please. Speak as if to Buck himself, and see what happens.”

In the speaker in the control room he heard Holden’s voice as he spoke into another microphone.

“Buck!” said Holden hoarsely. “If you hear me, speak up, boy! Buck! Do you hear me?”

And then the loud-speaker bellowed with the joyous uproar with which Buck replied to his master. He barked and bayed and yelped and whined all at once, and then barked crazily like a creature gone quite mad with joy.

“He…he heard me, sir,” said Holden unsteadily. “They didn’t hurt him! I…I think, sir—”

“Quite so, Mr. Holden,” said the skipper sedately. “I was about to order you to take a lifeboat and take another chance to learn something of these people. Suppose you go over and make contact with them? A race which knows a good dog when it sees one, and is honest enough to return him to his master, can’t be the race that massacred half a million people on Capella Three!”

* * * *

The Masan scientist who’d tried to replace Holden in Buck’s affections nevertheless grew rather friendly with Holden after the
Kennessee
landed on Masa Four. A message torp, sent back to base, had explained the situation and the reason for friendly contact with the Masan civilization. Of course, if the
Kennessee
vanished, the Masans would be known to be definitely responsible, but that did not seem to bother them. And it did not bother the humans, either.

The Masan scientist explained to Holden:

“It has worked out very well. With your atomic power, you can put any amount of energy into the power beam we’ve showed you, for battle with our common enemy. It is odd that we made power beams to fuel our interplanetary ships because we didn’t have atomic energy, and you made atomic energy because you didn’t have power beams!”