Takeoff! Read online

  Magruder was a biologist. In the past ten years, he had prowled over half a dozen planets, collecting specimens, dissecting them with precision, and entering the results in his notebooks. Slowly, bit by bit, he was putting together a pattern-a pattern of life itself. His predecessors stretched in a long line, clear back to Karl von Linne, but none of them had realized what was missing in their work. They had had only one type of life to deal with-terrestrial life. And all terrestrial life is, after all, homogenous.

  But, of all the planets he’d seen, he liked New Hawaii best. It was the only planet besides Earth where a man could walk around without a protective suit of some kind-at least, it was the only one discovered so far.

  He heard a faint swishing in the air over his head and glanced up quickly. The night things shouldn’t be out this early!

  And then he saw that it wasn’t a night thing; it was a metallic-looking globe of some kind, and

  There was a faint greenish glow that suddenly flashed from a spot on the side of the globe, and all went black for Ed Magruder.

  Thagobar Verf watched dispassionately as Lieutenant Pelquesh brought the unconscious specimen into the biological testing section. It was a queer-looking specimen; a soft-skinned, sluglike parody of a being, with a pale, pinkish-tan complexion and a repulsive, fungoidal growth on its head and various other areas.

  The biologists took the specimen and started to work on it. They took nips of skin and samples of blood and various electrical readings from the muscles and nerves.

  Zandoplith, the Chief Psychologist, stood by the commander , watching the various operations.

  It was Standard Procedure for the biologists; they went about it as they would with any other specimen that had been picked up. But Zandoplith was going to have to do a job he had never done before. He was going to have to work with the mind of an intelligent being.

  He wasn’t worried, of course; it was all down in the Handbook, every bit of Proper Procedure. There was nothing at all to worry about.

  As with all other specimens, it was Zandoplith’s job to discover the Basic Reaction Pattern. Any given organism could react only in a certain very large, but finite number of ways, and these ways could be reduced to a Basic Pattern. All that was necessary to destroy a race of creatures was to get their Basic Pattern and then give them a problem that couldn’t be solved by using that pattern. It was all very simple, and it was all down in the Handbook.

  Thagobar turned his head from the operating table to look at Zandoplith. “Do you think it really will be possible to teach it our language?”

  “The rudiments, Your Splendor,” said the psychologist. “Ours is, after all, a very complex language. We’ll give him all of it, of course, but it is doubtful whether he can assimilate more than a small portion of it. Our language is built upon logic, just as thought is built upon logic. Some of the lower animals are capable of the rudiments of logic, but most are unable to grasp it.”

  “Very well; we’ll do the best we can. I, myself, will question it.”

  Zandoplith looked a little startled. “But, Your Splendor! The questions are all detailed in the Handbook!”

  Thagobar Verf scowled. “I can read as well as you, Zandoplith. Since this is the first semi-intelligent life discovered in the past thousand years or so, I think the commander should be the one to do the questioning.”

  “As you say, Your Splendor,” the psychologist agreed.

  Ed Magruder was placed in the Language Tank when the biologists got through with him. Projectors of light were fastened over his eyes so that they focused directly on his retinas; sound units were inserted into his ears; various electrodes were fastened here and there; a tiny network of wires was attached to his skull. Then a special serum which the biologists had produced was injected into his bloodstream. It was all very efficient and very smoothly done. Then the Tank was closed, and a switch was thrown.

  Magruder felt himself swim dizzily up out of the blackness. He saw odd-looking, lobster-colored things moving around while noises whispered and gurgled into his ears.

  Gradually, he began to orient himself. He was being taught to associate sounds with actions and things.

  Ed Magruder sat in a little four-by-six room, naked as a jaybird, looking through a transparent wall at a sextette of the aliens he had seen so much of lately.

  Of course, it wasn’t these particular bogeys he’d been watching, but they looked so familiar that it was hard to believe they were here in the flesh. He had no idea how long he’d been learning the language; with no exterior references, he was lost.

  Well, he thought, I’ve picked up a good many specimens, and here I am, a specimen myself. He thought of the treatment he’d given his own specimens and shuddered a little.

  Oh, well. Here he was; might as well put on a good show—stiff upper lip, chin up, and all that sort.

  One of the creatures walked up to an array of buttons and pressed one. Immediately, Magruder could hear sounds from the room on the other side of the transparent wall.

  Thagobar Verf looked at the specimen and then at the question sheet in his hand. “Our psychologists have taught you our language, have they not?” he asked coldly.

  The specimen bobbled his head up and down. “Yup. And that’s what I call real force-feeding, too.”

  “Very well; I have some questions to ask; you will answer them truthfully .”

  “Why, sure,” Magruder said agreeably. “Fire away.”

  “We can tell if you are lying,” Thagobar continued. “I t will do you no good to tell us untruths. Now-what is your name?”

  “Theophilus Q. Hassenpfeffer,” Magruder said blandly.

  Zandoplith looked at a quivering needle and then shook his head slowly as he looked up at Thagobar.

  “That is a lie,” said Thagobar.

  The specimen nodded. “It sure is. That’s quite a machine you’ve got there.”

  “It is good that you appreciate the superiority of our instruments,” Thagobar said grimly. “Now-your name.”

  “Edwin Peter St. John Magruder.”

  Psychologist Zandoplith watched the needle and nodded.

  “Excellent,” said Thagobar. “Now, Edwin—”

  “Ed is good enough,” said Magruder.

  Thagobar blinked. “Good enough for what?”

  “For calling me.”

  Thagobar turned to the psychologist and mumbled something. Zandoplith mumbled back. Thagobar spoke to the specimen.

  “Is your name Ed?”

  “Strictly speaking, no,” said Magruder.

  “Then why should I call you that?”

  “Why not? Everyone else does,” Magruder informed him.

  Thagobar consulted further with Zandoplith and finally said: “We will come back to that point later. Now...uh...Ed, what do you call your home planet?”

  “Earth.”

  “Good. And what does your race call itself?”

  “Homo sapiens.”

  “And the significance of that, if any?”

  Magruder considered. “It’s just a name,” he said, after a moment.

  The needle waggled.

  “Another lie,” said Thagobar.

  Magruder grinned. “Just testing. That really is a whizzer of a machine.”

  Thagobar’s throat and face darkened a little as his copper-bearing blue blood surged to the surface in suppressed anger. “You said that once,” he reminded blackly.

  “I know. Well, if you really want to know, Homo sapiens means ‘wise man.’ “

  Actually, he hadn’t said “wise man”; the language of the Dal didn’t quite have that exact concept, so Magruder had to do the best he could. Translated back into English, it would have come out something like “beings with vast powers of mind.”

  When Thagobar heard this, his eyes opened a little wider, and he turned his head to look at Zandoplith. The psychologist spread his horny hands; the needle hadn’t moved.

  “You seem to have high opinions of yourselves,”
said Thagobar, looking back at Magruder.

  “That’s possible,” agreed the Earthman.

  Thagobar shrugged, looked back at his list, and the questioning went on. Some of the questions didn’t make too much sense to Magruder; others were obviously psychological testing.

  But one thing was quite clear; the lie detector was indeed quite a whizzer. If Magruder told the exact truth, it didn’t indicate. But if he lied just the least tiny bit, the needle on the machine hit the ceiling-and, eventually, so did Thagobar.

  Magruder had gotten away with his first few lies-they were unimportant, anyway-but finally, Thagobar said: “You have lied enough, Ed.”

  He pressed a button, and a nerve-shattering wave of pain swept over the Earthman. When it finally faded, Magruder found his belly muscles tied in knots, his fists and teeth clenched, and tears running down his cheeks. Then nausea overtook him, and he lost the contents of his stomach.

  Thagobar Verf turned distastefully away. “put him back in his cell and clean up the interrogation chamber. Is he badly hurt?”

  Zandoplith had already checked his instruments. “I think not, Your Splendor; it is probably only slight shock and nothing more. However, we will have to retest him in the next session anyhow. We’ll know then.”

  Magruder sat on the edge of a shelf-like thing that doubled as a low table and a high bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable seat in the world, but it was all he had in the room; the floor was even harder.

  It had been several hours since he had been brought here, and he still didn’t feel good. That stinking machine had hurt! He clenched his fists; he could still feel the knot in his stomach and—

  And then he realized that the knot in his stomach hadn’t been caused by the machine; he had thrown that off a long time back.

  The knot was caused by a towering, thundering-great, ice-cold rage.

  He thought about it for a minute and then broke out laughing. Here he was, like a stupid fool, so angry that he was making himself sick! And that wasn’t going to do him or the colony any good.

  It was obvious that the aliens were up to no good, to say the least. The colony at New Hilo numbered six thousand souls-the only humans on New Hawaii, except for a couple of bush expeditions. If this ship tried to take over the planet, there wouldn’t be a devil of a lot the colonists could do about it. And what if the aliens found Earth itself? He had no idea what kind of armament this spaceship carried nor how big it was—but it seemed to have plenty of room inside it.

  He knew it was up to him. He was going to have to do something, somehow. What? Could he get out of his cell and try to smash the ship?

  Nope. A naked man inside a bare cell was ~bout as helpless as a human being can get. What, then?

  Magruder lay on his back and thought about it for a long time.

  Presently, a panel opened in the door and a red-violet face appeared on the other side of a transparent square in the door.

  “You are doubtless hungry ,” it said solemnly. “An analysis of your bodily processes had indicated what you need in the way of sustenance. Here.”

  The quart-size mug that slid out of a niche in the wall had an odd aroma drifting up from it. Magruder picked it up and looked inside. It was a grayish-tan, semitranslucent liquid about the consistency of thin gravy. He touched the surface with his finger and then touched the finger with his tongue. Its palate appeal was definitely on the negative side of zero.

  He could guess what it contained: a score, more or less, of various amino acids, a dozen vitamins, a handful of carbohydrates, and a few percent of other necessities. A sort of pseudo-protoplasmic soup; an overbalanced meal.

  He wondered whether it contained anything that would do him harm, decided it probably didn’t. If the aliens wanted to dope him, they didn’t need to resort to subterfuge, and besides, this was probably the gunk they had fed him while he was learning the language.

  Pretending to himself that it was beef stew, he drank it down. Maybe he could think better on a full stomach. And, as it turned out, he was right.

  Less than an hour later, he was back in the interrogation chamber. This time, he was resolved to keep Thagobar’s finger off that little button.

  After all, he reasoned to himself, I might want to lie to someone, when and if I get out of this. There’s no point in getting a conditioned reflex against it.

  And the way the machine had hurt him, there was a strong possibility that he just might get conditioned if he took very many jolts like that.

  He had a plan. It was highly nebulous-little more than a principle, really, and it was highly flexible. He would simply have to take what came, depend on luck, and hope for the best.

  He sat down in the chair and waited for the wall to become transparent again. He had thought there might be a way to get out as he was led from his cell to the interrogation chamber, but he didn’t feel like tackling six heavily armored aliens all at once. He wasn’t even sure he could do much with just one of them. Where do you slug a guy whose nervous system you know nothing about, and whose body is plated like a boiler?

  The wall became transparent, and the alien was standing on the other side of it. Magruder wondered whether it was the same being who had questioned him before, and after looking at the design on the plastron, decided that it was.

  He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and waited for the first question.

  Thagobar Verf was a very troubled Dal. He had very carefully checked the psychological data with General Orders after the psychologists had correlated it according to the Handbook. He definitely did not like the looks of his results.

  General Orders merely said: “No race of this type has ever been found in the galaxy before. In this case, the commander will act according to GO 234,511,006-R-g, Ch. MMCDX, Par. 666.”

  After looking up the reference, he had consulted with Zandoplith. “What do you think of it?” he asked.” And why doesn’t your science have any answers?”

  “Science, Your Splendor,” said Zandoplith, “is a process of obtaining and correlating data. We haven’t enough data yet, true, but we’ll get it. We absolutely must not panic at this point; we must be objective, purely objective.” He handed Thagobar another printed sheet. “These are the next questions to be asked, according to the Handbook of Psychology.”

  Thagobar felt a sense of relief. General Orders had said that in a case like this, the authority of action was all dependent on his own decision; it was nice to know that the scientist knew what he was doing, and had authority to back it.

  He cut off the wall polarizer and faced the specimen on the other side.

  “You will answer the next several questions in the negative,” Thagobar said. “It doesn’t matter what the real and truthful answer may be, you will say N 0; is that perfectly clear?”

  “No,” said Magruder.

  Thagobar frowned. The instructions seemed perfectly lucid to him; what was the matter with the specimen? Was he possibly more stupid than they had at first believed?

  “He’s lying,” said Zandoplith.

  It took Thagobar the better part of half a minute to realize what had happened, and when he did, his face became unpleasantly dark. But there was nothing else he could do; the specimen had obeyed orders.

  His Splendor took a deep breath, held it for a moment, eased it out, and began reading the questions in a mild voice.

  “Is your name Edwin?”

  “No.”

  “Do you live on the planet beneath us?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have six eyes?”

  “No.”

  After five minutes of that sort of thing, Zandoplith said: “That’s enough, Your Splendor; it checks out; his nervous system wasn’t affected by the pain. You may proceed to the next list.”

  “From now on, you will answer truthfully,” Thagobar said. “Otherwise, you will be punished again. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly clear,” said Magruder,

  Although his voice sounded perf
ectly calm, Magruder, on the other side of the transparent wall, felt just a trifle shaky. He would have to think quickly and carefully from now on. He didn’t believe he’d care to take too much time in answering, either .

  “How many Homo sapiens are there?”

  “Several billions.” There were actually about four billions, but the Dal equivalent of “several” was vaguely representative of numbers larger than five, although not necessarily so.

  “Don’t you know the actual number?”

  “No,” said Magruder. Not right down to the man, I don’t.

  The needle didn’t quiver. Naturally not—he was telling the truth, wasn’t he?

  “All of your people surely aren’t on Earth, then?” Thagobar asked, deviating slightly from the script. “In only one city?”

  With a sudden flash of pure joy, Magruder saw the beautifully monstrous mistake the alien had made. He had not suspected until now that Earthmen had developed space travel. Therefore, when he had asked the name of Magruder’s home planet, the answer he’d gotten was “Earth.” But the alien had been thinking of New Hawaii! Wheeee!

  “Oh, no,” said Magruder truthfully. “We have only a few thousand down there.” Meaning, of course, New Hawaii, which was “down there.”

  “Then most of your people have deserted Earth?”

  “Deserted Earth?” Magruder sounded scandalized. “Heavens to Betsy, no! We have merely colonized; we’re all under one central government.”

  “How many are there in each colony?” Thagobar had completely abandoned the script now.

  “I don’t know exactly ,” Magruder told him, “but not one of our colonized planets has any more occupants on it than Earth.”

  Thagobar looked flabbergasted and flicked off the sound transmission to the prisoner with a swift movement of his finger.

  Zandoplith looked pained. “You are not reading the questions from the Handbook,” he complained.

  “I know, I know. But did you hear what he said?”