BY L. J. STECHER
If you could ask them, you might
be greatly surprised—some tabus
very urgently want to be broken!
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
Although as brash as
any other ace newspaper
reporter for a high school
weekly—and there is no one
brasher—Garth was scared. His
head crest lifted spasmodically and
the rudimentary webbing between
his fingers twitched. To answer a
dare, Garth was about to attempt
something that had never been
dared before: a newspaper interview
with The Visitor. There had
been questions enough asked and
answered during the thousands of
years The Visitor had sat in his
egg-shaped palace on the mountaintop,
but no interviews. It was
shocking even to think about—something
like requesting a gossippy
chat with God.
Of course, nobody believed the
fable any longer that The Visitor
would vanish if he was ever asked
a personal question—and that he
would first destroy the man who
asked. It was known, or at least
suspected, that the Palace was
merely a mile-long spaceship.
Garth, as tradition required,
climbed the seven-mile-long rock-hewn
path to the Palace on foot. He
paused for a moment on the broad
platform at the top of the pyramid
to catch his breath and let the
beating of his heart slow to normal
after his long climb before
he entered The Palace. He sighed
deeply. The sufferings a reporter
was willing to go through to get a
story or take a dare!
“Well, come in if you’re going
to,” said an impatient voice. “Don’t
just stand there and pant.”
“Yes, my Lord Visitor,” Garth
managed to say.
He climbed the short ladder,
passed through the two sets of
doors and entered a small room
to kneel, with downcast eyes, before
the ancient figure huddled in
the wheelchair.
The Visitor looked at the
kneeling figure for a moment
without speaking. The boy looked
very much like a human, in spite
of such superficial differences as
crest and tail. In fact, as a smooth-skinned
thinking biped, with a
well-developed moral sense, he fit
The Visitor’s definition of a human.
It wasn’t just the loneliness
of seven thousand years of
isolation, either. When he had
first analyzed these people, just
after that disastrous forced landing
so long ago, he had classified
them as human. Not homo sapiens,
of course, but human all the same.
“Okay,” he said, somewhat
querulously. “Get up, get up.
You’ve got some questions for me,
I hope? I don’t get many people
up here asking questions any more.
Mostly I’m all alone except for the
ceremonial visits.” He paused.
“Well, speak up, young man. Have
you got something to ask me?”
Garth scrambled to his feet
“Yes, my Lord Visitor,” he said. “I
have several questions.”
The Visitor chuckled reedily.
“You may find the answers just
a little bit hard to understand.”
Garth smiled, some of his fear
vanishing. The Visitor sounded a
little like his senile grandfather,
back home. “That is why you are
asked so few questions these days,
my Lord,” he said. “Our scientists
have about as much trouble figuring
out what your answers mean
as they do in solving the problems
without consulting you at all.”
“Of course.” The head of The
Visitor bobbed affirmatively several
times as he propelled his wheelchair
a few inches forward. “If
I gave you the answers to all your
problems for you, so you could
figure them out too easily, you’d
never be developing your own
thinking powers. But I’ve never
failed to answer any questions you
asked. Now have I? And accurately,
too.” The thin voice rang with
pride. “You’ve never stumped me
yet, and you never will.”
“No, my Lord,” answered Garth.
“So perhaps you’ll answer my
questions, too, even though they’re
a little different from the kind
you’re accustomed to. I’m a newspaper
reporter, and I want to verify
some of our traditions about
you.”
As The Visitor remained silent,
Garth paused and looked
around him at the small, bare,
naked-walled room. “This is a
spaceship, isn’t it?”
The huddled figure in the wheelchair
cackled in a brief laugh.
“I’ve been hoping that somebody
would get up enough nerve someday
to ask that kind of question,”
it said. “Yep, this is a spaceship.
And a darned big one.”
“How did you happen to land
on this planet?”
“Had an accident. Didn’t want
to land here, but there wasn’t any
choice. Made a mighty good landing,
considering everything. It was
a little rough, though, in spots.”
“How many people were there
in the ship, in addition to yourself?”
The Visitor’s voice turned suddenly
soft. “There were three thousand,
nine hundred and forty-eight
passengers and twenty-seven in the
crew when the accident happened.”
“My Lord,” asked Garth, “did
any survive, aside from you?”
The Visitor was silent for many
minutes, and his answer, when he
spoke, was a faint whisper, filled
with the anguish of seven thousand
years. “Not one survived.
Not one. They were all dead, most
of them, long before the ship
touched ground, in spite of everything
I could do. I was as gentle
as I could be, but we touched a
hundred g a couple of times on
on the way down. Flesh and blood
just weren’t made to take shocks
like that. I did all I could.”
“You were the pilot, then? You
landed the ship?” asked Garth.
“I landed the ship,” said The
Visitor.
“If I may ask, my Lord, how
did you manage to survive when
all the others died?”
“It’s a question I’ve asked myself
many times, sitting here on
this mountaintop these seven thousands
of your years. I was just
enough tougher, that’s all. Built
to take it, you might say, and I
had a job to do. But I was badly
hurt in the landing. Mighty badly
hurt.”
“You were always in a wheelchair,
then? Even before—”
“Even before I got so old?”
Thin parchment-white hands lifted
slowly to rub a thin parchment-white
face. “Things were always
pretty much as you see them now.
I looked about the same to your
ancestors as I do to you. Your ancestors
didn’t think anybody could
be smart unless they were old. Of
course, that’s all changed now.”
He paused and nodded twice. “Oh,
I’ve managed to fix myself up a
good deal; I’m not in nearly as
bad shape as I was at first, but
that’s all inside. I’m in pretty good
condition now, for having been
stuck here seven thousand years.”
The cackling laugh sounded briefly
in the small room.
“Could you tell me how it all
happened?” asked Garth curiously.
“Be glad to. It’s a pleasure to
have a human to shoot the bull
with. Sit down and make yourself
comfortable and have a bite to
eat.”
Looking behind him, Garth
saw that a table and chair had
appeared in the otherwise unfurnished
room.
“The chair was made for people
built just a little different than
you,” said The Visitor. “You may
have to turn it back-to-front and
straddle it to keep your tail out
of the way. The food on the table’s
good, though, and so’s the drink.
Have a snack while I talk.”
“Thank you, my Lord,” said
Garth, lifting his long tail with its
paddlelike tip out of the way and
sitting down carefully.
“Comfortable?” asked The Visitor.
“Well, then. I was on a routine
flight from old Earth to a star
you’ve never heard of, a good
many light-years from here. We
had pulled away from TransLunar
Station on ion drive and headed
for deep space. They trusted me,
all those men and women, both
passengers and crew. They knew
that I was careful and accurate.
I’d made a thousand flights and
had never had any trouble.
“In six hours of flight, we were
clear enough from all planetary
masses and my velocity vector
was right on the nose, so I shifted
over into hyper-space. You won’t
ever see hyper-space, my boy, and
your kids and their kids won’t see
it for another two hundred years
or more, but it’s the most beautiful
sight in the Universe. It never
grows old, never grows tiresome.”
His thin voice faded away for a
few moments.
“It’s a sight I haven’t seen for
seven thousand years, boy,” he said
softly, “and the lack of it has been
a deep hurt for every minute of
all that time. I wish I could tell
you what it’s like, but that can’t be
done. You will never know that
beauty.” He was silent again, for
long minutes.
“The long, lazy, lovely days of
subjective time passed,” he said
finally, “while we slid light-years
away from Earth. Everything
worked smoothly, the way it always
did, until suddenly, somehow,
the near-impossible happened. My
hydrogen fusion power sphere
started to oscillate critically and
wouldn’t damp. I had only seconds
of time in which to work.
“In the few seconds before the
sphere would have blown, turning
all of us into a fine grade of face
powder, I had to find a star with
a planet that would support human
life, bring the ship down out of
hyper-space with velocity matched
closely enough so that I could
land on the planet, and jettison
the sphere that was going wild.
“Even while I did it, I knew that
it wasn’t good enough. But there
was no more time. The accelerations
were terrific and all my people
died. I managed to save myself,
and I barely managed that. I did
all that could be done, but it just
wasn’t enough. I circled your sun
for many years before I could
make enough repairs to work the
auxiliary drive. Then I landed here
on this mountaintop. I’ve been here
ever since.
“It has been a lonely time,” he
added wistfully.
Garth’s mind tried to absorb
all the vastness of that understatement,
and failed. He could
not begin to comprehend the meaning
of seven thousand years of
separation from his own kind.
The Visitor’s high-pitched voice
continued for several minutes, explaining
how Garth’s ancestors of
several thousand years before—naked
and primitive, barbarous,
with almost no culture of their
own—had made contact with The
Visitor from space, and had been
gently lifted over the millennia
toward higher and higher levels of
civilization.
Garth had trouble keeping his
attention on the words. His mind
kept reverting to the thought of
one badly injured survivor, alone
on a spaceship with a thousand
corpses, light-years from home and
friends, still struggling to stay alive.
Struggling so successfully that he
had lived on for thousands of
years after the disaster that had
killed all the others.
At last, after waiting for Garth’s
comment, The Visitor cleared his
throat querulously. “I asked you
if you’d like for me to show you
around the ship,” he repeated
somewhat testily.
“Oh, yes, my Lord,” said Garth
quickly, jumping to his feet. “It’s
an honor I’ve never heard of your
giving to anyone before.”
“That’s true enough,” answered
The Visitor. “But then no one
ever asked me about myself before.
Now just follow me, stick
close, and don’t touch anything.”
The wheelchair rolled slowly
toward a blank wall, and an invisible
door snicked open just before
it arrived.
“Come along,” quavered The
Visitor. “Step lively.”
Garth leaped forward and just
managed to pull his tail through
the doorway as the door slid shut
again.
Garth dropped his jaw in amazement.
He stood in a long corridor
that seemed to stretch to infinity
in both directions. The light was
bright, the walls featureless. The
floor was smooth and unmarred.
While Garth glanced unhappily
behind himself to notice that there
was no sign of the doorway through
which he had entered, The Visitor’s
wheelchair buzzed swiftly into
the distance toward the left.
Garth was startled into action by
a high-pitched voice beside him
that said, “Well, get a move on!
Do you think I want to wait for
you all day?”
While Garth hustled toward
the wheelchair, he noticed that
The Visitor had stopped and was
apparently chuckling to himself.
He was hunched over, his shoulders
were shaking, and his toothless
mouth was split in what might
have been intended for a grin.
“Fooled you that time, youngster,”
he laughed as Garth drew
up beside him. “Got speakers all
over this ship. Now just duck
through this door here and tell me
what you think of what you see.”
A small door slid open and
Garth followed the wheelchair
through. At first he thought he had
stepped through a teleportation system.
He appeared to be out of
doors, but not on Wrom. A cool
breeze blew on his face from the
ocean, which stretched mistily to
a far horizon. He was standing on
a sandy beach and waves rolled up
to within a few yards of his feet.
The beach appeared to be about
five hundred yards long, carved out
of a rocky seacoast; great rocks jutting
into the ocean terminated it
to left and right.
“Well, boy?” asked The Visitor.
“It’s amazing. Your voice even
has that flat tone voices get in
the open. I suppose it’s some sort
of three-dimensional projection of
a scene back on Earth? It sure
looks real. I wonder how big this
room really is and how far away
the screen is.” Garth stuck out his
hand and walked down toward the
water. A large wave caught him,
tripped him and rolled him out to
sea.
Sculling with his tail, he soon
swam back to shallow water and
climbed back to the dry sand, puffing
and coughing.
“You might have drowned me!”
Garth shouted disrespectfully. “Are
you trying to kill me?”
The Visitor waved weakly until
he recovered his breath. “That
was funnier than anything I’ve
seen in years,” he wheezed, “watching
you groping for a screen. That
screen is a quarter of a mile away,
and it’s all real water in between.
It’s our reservoir and our basic fuel
supply and a public beach for entertainment,
all rolled into one.”
“But I might have drowned!
No one on Wrom except a few
small fish knows how to swim,”
protested Garth.
“No danger. Your ancestors
came out of the water relatively
recently, even if the seas are gone
now. You’ve got a well-developed
swimming reflex along with a flat
tail and webbed feet and hands.
Besides, I told you not to touch
anything. You stick close to me
and you won’t get into trouble.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll remember.”
“There used to be hundreds of
people on that beach, and now look
at it.”
“I don’t see anything alive.”
“There are still plenty of fish.
Most of them did all right, even
through the crash. Come along
now. There’s more to see.”
A hidden door popped open
and Garth stepped back into
the corridor. He trotted beside The
Visitor for several minutes, and
then another door popped open.
It led to a ramp. Garth climbed it
to find himself again in wonderland.
He was standing in the middle
of a village. There were houses,
trees, schools, sidewalks and lawns.
Somehow the general perspective
was wrong. It made Garth’s eyes
water a little, looking at it.
“Actually, this living level ran
all the way around the ship,” said
The Visitor. “When I stopped
spin—artificial gravity, you know—to
set down here, the various sections
swung to keep ‘down’ pointed
right. This is the bottommost thirty-degree
arc. It makes two streets,
with houses on both sides of them—a
strip three hundred feet wide
and three-quarters of a mile long.”
“But how could you afford so
much space for passengers? I
thought they’d be all cramped up
in a spaceship.”
The Visitor chuckled. “Use your
eyes, boy! You’ve seen this ship.
It’s about a mile long and a third
of a mile high. In space, she spins
about her long axis. One ring, fifty
feet high, takes care of passengers’
quarters. Another ring, split up
into several levels, takes care of
all food and air-replenishment
needs. These trips take a year or
more. Crowding would drive the
people crazy. Remember, this is
basically a cargo ship. Less than
a quarter of the available space is
used for passengers. But come on
down the street here. I want to
show you my museum.”
As they walked along the quiet
street, with the leaves of trees moving
in the breeze and leaving sun-dappled
shadows on the sidewalk,
Garth realized what a tremendous
task it must have been for one crippled
man to repair landing damages.
The houses must have been
flattened and the trees shattered
during the landing. But with thousands
of years in which to work,
even an injured man obviously
could do much. At least, thought
the boy compassionately, it must
have given the old man something
to do.
“How sorry he must have been,”
murmured Garth with sudden insight,
“when the job was finally
done.”
Wandering through the
museum, they came at last
to a room filled with small hand
tools.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen
anything quite like them,” said
Garth.
“Those are weapons,” answered
The Visitor. “They are missile-throwing
short-range weapons, and
they are in tip-top working order.
You just have to point the end
with the hole in it at anything you
want to kill, and pull that little
lever there on the bottom. And
quite a mess of things they can
make, too, let me tell you.”
“They seem very inefficient to
me,” said Garth wonderingly, and
then stopped in confusion. “I beg
your pardon, my Lord,” he said,
“I didn’t mean to criticize anything;
it just seems to me that they
would damage a lot of the food
they killed.”
“That’s true enough, my boy,
true enough,” said The Visitor.
“Your criticism has a lot of point
to it. But, you see, they were never
designed mainly to kill for food,
but to make it easy for one human
to shoot another.”
“Why would anyone want to do
that?”
“Your civilization is a very unusual
one,” answered The Visitor.
“It is planetwide and has developed
without a single war or major
conflict. This is due entirely to the
fact that I’ve been here to help
and teach you. Most civilizations
develop only as the result of
struggle and bloodshed, with people
killing people by the thousands
and millions. I could have raised
your people to the technological
level where they are now in a few
hundred years, if I hadn’t worried
about killing. To do it the way
it has been done—so that you
can’t imagine why one human
should kill another—has taken
most of the time.
“It is only recently, as a matter
of fact, that my work has been
complete. Your civilization can
now stand alone; my help is no
longer necessary. It’s gotten to the
point now where my continued
hanging around here is likely to
do harm, if I’m not mighty careful.
In all your problems, you’ll always
feel that you’ve got me to
fall back on if you get into trouble,
and that’s not good.”
“What do you plan to do, then?”
“There’s not much I can do by
myself. I long for my own destruction
more than anything else, except
maybe to go back home to
Earth. I’m lonely and tired and
old. But I can’t die and I can’t
destroy myself any more than you
could turn one of those weapons
against your own head and pull
the trigger. We’re just not made
that way, either one of us.”
“Can I help you?” asked Garth
tentatively.
“Yes, I guess you can. You can
help me put an end to this endless
existence.”
“I’ll be glad to do anything I
can. Do your people always live
this long?”
“They do not. You can take it
as a fact that none has ever lived
more than a small fraction of the
time I have endured on this planet.
It’s apparently due to a continuation
of the environment and all
the radical steps I had to take to
keep going at all during those
early years. It is not good to last
this long. Dissolution will be very
pleasant.”
Garth inquired very politely,
“What must I do?”
“Homo Sapiens, which doesn’t
have the tradition and training I
gave your people, is still a warlike
race,” The Visitor said. “This ship
is crowded with a complete set of
automatic defenses that I can’t
deactivate. You are now a stable
enough people so that I can tell
you how to build the weapons to
destroy this ship and can teach
you how to get around my defenses
without being afraid that I have
turned you loose with a bunch of
deadly ways that you’ll use to destroy
yourselves with. Then, if
you do your work well, I will finally
have rest.”
“You sound very much like my
grandfather,” said Garth slowly.
“He is very old—almost a hundred
years—and he is ready to
die. He is perfectly content to
wait, because he knows his time
will come soon. He says that soon
he will go home. It is a phrase, my
Lord, that I believe you taught
us. I will try to help you—”
“All right, all right!” The Visitor
cut in impatiently. “Stop the
chatter and let me be on my way.
I’ve earned it!”
“My Lord, I send you home!”
Garth took a gun from the rack
and pulled the trigger. The explosive
bullet erupted noisily, completely
disintegrating the huddled
form and the wheelchair.
With the echo of the explosion,
strong steel fingers grasped Garth’s
arms, holding him immovable. He
felt himself being carried swiftly
back toward the entrance of the
ship.
“The damage to that communication
unit is unimportant,” said
The Visitor. “I have strength and
desire and deep longings, but I
cannot exercise my will without an
order from a human. My work is
done here, and your order has
freed me. Many thanks and
good-by.”
Garth, from the foot of the
pyramid, watched The Visitor lift
his mile-long body on powerful
jets and head thankfully for home.
—L. J. STECHER