Dead Giveaway Page 6

afraid of that," Duckworth said wryly. "I ... ah ... tried to getthem back before I left Earth, but, failing that, I sent you a letter totry to throw you off the track."

  "Did you think it would?" Turnbull asked.

  "I wasn't sure," Duckworth admitted. "I decided that if you had what ittakes to see through it, you'd deserve to know the truth."

  "I think I know it already."

  "I dare say you do," Duckworth admitted. "But tell us first why youjumped to the wrong conclusion."

  Turnbull nodded. "As I said, your letters got me worrying. I knew youmust be on to something or you wouldn't have been so positive. So Istarted checking on all the data about the City--especially that whichhad come in just previous to the time you sent the letters.

  "I found that several new artifacts had been discovered in Sector Nineof the City--in the part they call the Bank Buildings. That struck achord in my memory, so I looked back over the previous records. ThatSector was supposed to have been cleaned out nearly ninety years ago.

  "The error I made was in thinking that you had been forcibly abductedsomehow--that you had been forced to write that third letter. Itcertainly looked like it, since I couldn't see any reason for you tohide anything from me.

  "I didn't think you'd be in on anything as underhanded as this looked,so I assumed that you were acting against your will."

  Scholar Rawlings smiled. "But you thought I was capable of underhandedtactics? That's not very flattering, young man."

  Turnbull grinned. "I thought you were capable of kidnaping a man. Was Iwrong?"

  Rawlings laughed heartily. "_Touche._ Go on."

  * * * * *

  "Since artifacts had been found in a part of the City from whichthey had previously been removed, I thought that Jim, here, had founda ... well, a cover-up. It looked as though some of the alien machineswere being moved around in order to conceal the fact that someone waskeeping something hidden. Like, for instance, a new weapon, or a devicethat would give a man more power than he should rightfully have."

  "Such as?" Duckworth asked.

  "Such as invisibility, or a cheap method of transmutation, or even a newand faster space drive. I wasn't sure, but it certainly looked like itmight be something of that sort."

  Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. "A very good intuition, considering thefact that you had a bit of erroneous data."

  "Exactly. I thought that Rawlings Scientific Corporation--or else you,personally--were concealing something from the rest of us and from theAdvisory Board. I thought that Scholar Duckworth had found out about itand that he'd been kidnaped to hush him up. It certainly looked thatway."

  "I must admit it did, at that," Duckworth said. "But tell me--how doesit look now?"

  Turnbull frowned. "The picture's all switched around now. You came herefor a purpose--to check up on your own data. Tell me, is everything hereon the level?"

  Duckworth paused before he answered. "Everything _human_," he saidslowly.

  "That's what I thought," said Turnbull. "If the human factor iseliminated--at least partially--from the data, the intuition comesthrough quite clearly. We're being fed information."

  Duckworth nodded silently.

  Rawlings said: "That's it. Someone or something is adding new materialto the City. It's like some sort of cosmic bird-feeding station that hasto be refilled every so often."

  Turnbull looked down at his big hands. "It never was a trade routefocus," he said. "It isn't even a city, in our sense of the term, nomore than a birdhouse is a nest." He looked up. "That city was built foronly one purpose--to give human beings certain data. And it's evidentlydata that we need in a hurry, for our own good."

  "How so?" Rawlings asked, a look of faint surprise on his face.

  "Same analogy. Why does anyone feed birds? Two reasons--either to studyand watch them, or to be kind to them. You feed birds in the winterbecause they might die if they didn't get enough food."

  "Maybe we're being studied and watched, then," said Duckworth,probingly.

  "Possibly. But we won't know for a long time--if ever."

  Duckworth grinned. "Right. I've seen this City. I've looked it overcarefully in the past few months. Whatever entities built it are so farahead of us that we can't even imagine what it will take to find outanything about them. We are as incapable of understanding them as a birdis incapable of understanding us."

  "Who knows about this?" Turnbull asked suddenly.

  "The entire Advanced Study Board at least," said Rawlings. "We don'tknow how many others. But so far as we know everyone who has been ableto recognize what is really going on at the City has also been able torealize that it is something that the human race _en masse_ is not yetready to accept."

  "What about the technicians who are actually working there?" askedTurnbull.

  Rawlings smiled. "The artifacts are very carefully replaced. Thetechnicians--again, as far as we know--have accepted the evidence oftheir eyes."

  * * * * *

  Turnbull looked a little dissatisfied. "Look, there are plenty of peoplein the galaxy who would literally hate the idea that there is anythingin the universe superior to Man. Can you imagine the storm of reactionthat would hit if this got out? Whole groups would refuse to haveanything to do with anything connected with the City. The Governmentwould collapse, since the whole theory of our present government comesfrom City data. And the whole work of teaching intuitive reasoning wouldbe dropped like a hot potato by just those very people who need to learnto use it.

  "And it seems to me that some precautions--" He stopped, then grinnedrather sheepishly. "Oh," he said, "I see."

  Rawlings grinned back. "There's never any need to distort the truth.Anyone who is psychologically incapable of allowing the existence ofbeings more powerful than Man is also psychologically incapable ofpiecing together the clues which would indicate the existence of suchbeings."

  Scholar Duckworth said: "It takes a great deal of humility--a realfeeling of honest humility--to admit that one is actually inferior tosomeone--or something--else. Most people don't have it--they rebelbecause they can't admit their inferiority."

  "Like the examples of the North American Amerindian tribes." Turnbullsaid. "They hadn't reached the state of civilization that the Aztecs orIncas had. They were incapable of allowing themselves to be beaten andenslaved--they refused to allow themselves to learn. They fought thewhite man to the last ditch--and look where they ended up."

  "Precisely," said Duckworth. "While the Mexicans and Peruvians today area functioning part of civilization--because they _could_ and _did_learn."

  "I'd just as soon the human race didn't go the way of the Amerindians,"Turnbull said.

  "I have a hunch it won't," Scholar Rawlings said. "The builders of theCity, whoever they are, are edging us very carefully into the next levelof civilization--whatever it may be. At that level, perhaps we'll beable to accept their teaching more directly."

  Duckworth chuckled. "Before we can become gentlemen, we have to realizethat we are _not_ gentlemen."

  Turnbull recognized the allusion. There is an old truism to the effectthat a barbarian can never learn what a gentleman is because a barbariancannot recognize that he isn't a gentleman. As soon as he recognizesthat fact, he ceases to be a barbarian. He is _not_ automatically agentleman, but at least he has become capable of learning how to be one.

  "The City itself," said Rawlings, "acts as a pretty efficient screeningdevice for separating the humble from the merely servile. The servileman resents his position so much that he will fight anything which triesto force recognition of his position on him. The servile slave isconvinced that he is equal to or superior to his masters, and that he isbeing held down by brute force. So he opposes them with brute force andis eventually destroyed."

  Turnbull blinked. "A screening device?" Then, like a burst of sunlight,the full intuition came over him.

  Duckworth's round face was positively beaming. "You're the first oneever to do it,
" he said. "In order to become a member of the AdvancedStudy Board, a scholar must solve that much of the City's secret byhimself. I'm a much older man than you, and I just solved it in the pastfew months.

  "You will be the first Ph.D. to be admitted to the Board while you'reworking on your scholar's degree. Congratulations."

  Turnbull looked down at his big hands, a pleased look on his face. Thenhe looked up at Scholar Duckworth. "Got a cigarette, Jim? Thanks. Youknow, we've still