Killbird

Giver: I don't know exactly why I'm here, except that such boards are made up, traditionally, of each of the three old earth types and an equal number of you New Ones. Prof. Gore: Moil is being modest in her turn. She was my student, and a brilliant one. She, too, was on the planet. Next, please. Capt. T. Willis: I was in command of the U.P.X. Old Earth when disturbances were noted on a planet of the core star now called Tom Thumb. Prof. Gore: Somewhat facetiously, I must say. And now our U.P. representatives. Ambassador John Zees: I am here because I was on a tour of the Lightning sector planets and was handy. Prof. Gore: Ah, a general modesty seems to be the rule. Let me say that Ambassador Zees is a man who is outstanding in many fields. He is a scholar and a scientist who has worked on the Brett Drive project. He has traveled possibly as much or more than any other living man and knows our United Planets as well as any man. He was a member of the Board of Determination in the Dead Worlds inquiry and his thinking was largely responsible for my theory regarding the events there. Secretary Anne Barker: Well, I won't be modest. I'm Secretary of U.P. Sector Lightning and damned proud of it, being the highest-ranked woman in the U.P. But I will stick to business and won't ask you to vote for me in the coming U.P. Presidential elections. Prof. Gore: Madam Secretary, you already have my vote, so you don't have to ask for it. And now that we're acquainted and you've read the remarkable manuscript which was the result of hypnoprobe on a most curious planet, I'd like to turn teacher for a moment and give you a few of my thoughts. We live in a remarkable time. In just a few hundred years events of singular importance have occurred. First there was the reunion of the two branches of our race with the discovery of our native world and of our remote ancestors, who had changed a bit— Adm. Talltree the Healer: To put it mildly. Prof. Gore: —and for the better: the Healer with his ability to cure cells and improve the health of both branches of the race, the Power Giver with her remarkable gifts of levitation; the Far Seer with his greatly advanced mind which has helped the race to advance and which deals best with pure theory and opens up endless fields for exploration. This reunion, in itself, changed the course of human events. And, for the first time, it gave purpose to a rather neglected branch of the service known as X&A, Exploration and Alien Search. We Old Ones, or mere humans, who left the old earth and forgot our origin, were slightly xenophobic, and with good reason, for before the reunion, we had discovered the grim and terrible destruction of those planets which became known as the Dead Worlds, and we had come face to face with evidence of alien presence, at least in the past, and a power which could gut and kill entire planets. The discovery of true aliens, beings with some pretty impressive psi powers, even though they turned out to be the original race of man mutated following a thermonuclear war on old earth, and the presence of the Dead Worlds, and the return of X&A ships from the colliding galaxies in Cygnus with the remarkable manuscript which has become known as the Legend of Miaree—all served to warn us, and to frighten some of us. We saw the possibility of other life somewhere in our universe, even in our own galaxy, for the size of it is not yet comprehended even by the most astute of us. Until a few months ago, we knew of four races. Ourselves, counting both branches as one; the Dead Worlders, who were indeed deadly, leaving nothing to hint at their nature save their savagery; and the two races of the colliding galaxies. Now all races have shown a remarkable tendency toward one activity, and that activity is killing each other. The Dead Worlds are indeed dead, and the events of the Dead Worlds Expedition of LaConious of Tigian, which made discoveries still quite puzzling to us, served to reemphasize the threat which still hangs over man. The two remarkable humanoid races of the Cygnus galaxies died in mutual destruction. Old earth was ravaged by war. It is saddening to me to realize that of all known races in our universe—of course, there may be and most probably are others which we have not yet encountered—none to our knowledge has lived in peace with itself. It is this aspect of the new encounter with an alien species which, I feel, must occupy much of our thought. Why are intelligent species warlike? Why do they belie their intelligence and, in the case of the Dead Worlds and the Cygnus civilizations, destroy themselves, or as in the case of old earth, ruin a planet and almost wipe out a race? I hope that each of you has studied the available information, especially the hypnoprobe material dealing with the story of Eban the Hunter. Ha—I find myself addressing you as students. Now, to add to our understanding, I think a description of the planet and its people and an account of events would be instructive. Admiral Talltree? Adm. Talltree the Healer: To keep things in order, I call upon Captain Willis, who was in command of the nearest X&A ship when detection of activity was made on the planet called Tom Thumb. Capt. Willis: We were on a routine probe on the outskirts of Lightning Sector. Detection was made by our Far Seer. He sensed thermonuclear radiation coming from a source which was not a natural star, and I blinked back to headquarters for permission to investigate. We went in after taking all precautions. As you say, Professor Gore, we all remember the Dead Worlds and the old earth, and newks popping off makes my hair stand on edge. We found a life-zone planet circling a Xanthos II type sun, a three planet, as are most life-zone planets, and our instruments measured considerable radiation, concentrated on one landmass. We sent down a Healer and he reported back that it was pretty hot, too hot even for him with his radiation resistance, and that the populace, apparently a stone-age culture living in a devastated land which had once before been reduced by newks, was dying by the hundreds. I say hundreds only because that was the number of people. The landmass was quite thinly populated by nomadic tribes. The salvo of newks—our officer estimated over two hundred hits in the ten-megaton range using high neutron radiation—had blanketed the entire landmass. It seemed strange as hell to us for a salvo of heavy newks to be targeted at a landmass peopled by stone-age men. We started a search for the origin of the salvo and found radiation levels to be much lower on the other large landmass of the planet, but the winds aloft were carrying the residue of the salvo over and it was pretty hot. We sent down Lieutenant Moil to take a look, and she reported back that the landmass was thickly peopled, with concentrations in the mountainous areas. I knew I had something. Those were men down there, even if they were pygmies, or dwarfs. They were about thirty inches in height and they lived in sort of stone age with some tools fashioned of metal from the scraps left by a highly technological culture. But they were men. So I held off and waited for a team headed by Admiral Talltree to arrive. Adm. Talltree the Healer: As is the rule, we did not make overt contact with the aliens. My team, consisting of myself, Moil the Power Giver and Lieutenant Elk the Healer, member of the Old Earth's crew, made observations, and after several days of overflight, using instruments, we found the source of the salvo. There were one hundred launch silos in a small valley in the heart of the mountains. Surprisingly, there was a tribe of the small people living there, and they gave us some surprises. They used hang gliders and flew, and they lived there with those one hundred silos as if they didn't even mind them. And they had to have seen the launch. Our big question was, who fired those missiles? We rigged a protective ship for the Old Earth's Far Seer and took him down into the valley. We picked a time when the entire tribe was gathered so that the Far Seer's mind could control all of them. At the end of Eban's tale you can see where we entered, and the Far Seer's mind took over. After that it was simple. We merely probed all of them. We found that the leader, who called himself Eban the Hunter, knew more than the others, so their stories were not presented to this board. Thus, from Eban, we learned that he himself had launched the strike on the other landmass with no idea of what he had done. It was a diabolical thing, the way those people, who from what we were able to learn must have been humanoid and very much like the Old Ones of our race, reached up from their graves and coaxed Eban into killing more people than he'd ever seen, people he didn't even know existed. Revenge from the grave. Having wiped each other out, returning themselves to a stone age, the dying ones rigged the complex. Their thinking must have been colored by the knowledge that they were dying, that their entire race was wiped out and that only mutants or severely weakened members would survive. And they reached up from the grave to smite the poor mutated remnants of their enemies and, as «God» told Eban, to give the earth to their own mutated descendants. We searched, using the most delicate instruments and all the senses of Power Giver, Far Seer and Healer, to find other hidden missiles, and there were none. Only the people of Eban's landmass had seen into the future and the possibility of one last blow at the enemy. Prof. Gore: Thank you, admiral. I'd like some general observations now. It is my conclusion that Eban's people are basically peaceful. Any comment? Sec. Anne Barker: To me, Eban showed a great potential for violence. He killed two «inbreeders» without qualms— Moil the Power Giver: Pardon me. He did have qualms. He regretted it. Sec. Anne Barker: He was the stronger. He could have overpowered them without killing them. And he could certainly have overpowered the woman, Yuree, rather than kill her with an ax. No. I think he showed primitive tendencies toward violence, and it is my contention that his race is several thousand years away from being developed into civilized beings. Moil the Power Giver: He abolished death. He resolved to preach peace to all his people. I think he is gentle and sensitive and worth contacting. Degan the Far Seer: That brings us to the central issue. Contact or no? At this level of development I am not sure contact would be beneficial to Eban's people. As I understand it they have a certain resistance to the levels of radioactivity on the planet. It is unfortunate that we did not discover them in time to prevent the last salvo of thermonuclear weapons, which killed so many, but we did not. We can in no way hold Eban responsible for that. The question is, is Eban the result, the product, of a race with built-in killer senses? Would he—of course, I speak of his race in general—become a useful part of the U.P., or would the killer come out in him in the future? Together, using the lesson of old earth as an example, we have