Seed of the Gods

strongest aesthetic sensibilities. But you've got all this if you've read the rather unusual transcript we sent as exhibit one in this affair. I hope you have read it, thoroughly, because this whole thing means a lot to me, and I sincerely feel that it means a helluva lot to all of us. So here's this society working together. They never, never, except in rare cases of severe law-breaking, do any harm to any living thing. They're the dominant form on the planet, and there's not much else. There's a large, spiderlike thing and another insect type about the size of a phralley dog which looks like an ant and makes a fantastic amount of sting fluid. Then there are the half-plant, half-animal creatures, the size of the period dot on a blinkstat typer, which can eat the atmosphere and synthesize oxygen. These little bugs are keeping the race more or less alive. The people know they're living on a dying planet, but they don't know why it's dying. They have a semi-religion and worship nature as a force for good. Their god is life itself. They think the role of nature is to people worlds with life of an intelligent nature, and to them that means individuals like themselves. But their faith is being tested, because their best minds predict death for the race in about one generation. We think they have plus or minus nine years, New Years, that is, before the air is gone. We may be slightly underestimating their survival capacity, but it is my considered opinion—and the opinion of my staff —that the situation is urgent. They're going to die. The little oxygen-makers they call Breathers are being killed in their natural habitat by a worsening of the sea and air conditions. Colonies of the Breathers are kept inside, but the Breathers are relatively short-lived and cannot be bred satisfactorily in captivity. New Breathers have to constantly be brought in from the sea with much labor and difficulty. And in about nine years there ain't gonna be no supply of new Breathers, as one of my mech-mates says. For the first time in history we're face to face with an intelligent alien society and it almost makes me believe in their nature worship, because we've come on this at a crucial time and we have the power to help them. Basically, that's the case, Jack. We help or they die. I hope you haven't made a decision yet, because now I'm going to hit you right in the balls with a few facts we've dug up. One, our archaeologists have made test borings and excavations. We have to do this in out-of-the-way places, in order to avoid making contact, but we've been able to do some interesting things. It's difficult to state anything with much authority, because by our measurements this world has been in bad shape for the last 75,000 N.Y. You can imagine what 75,000 New Years of corrosive rains and uncontrolled erosion can do to a planet— especially one that has been burned good with atomics. Yep. That's what I said. She was burned bald. Just like the worlds of the planet- killers. Only these people did it the hard way, with old-fashioned atomics. The signs are unmistakable—all the old, decaying isotopes. They must have been very funny bombs they used, because they produced a lot of carbon isotopes with long half-lives. I know that I'm going to be asked how, with the amount of radiation that must have been present 75,000 N.Y. ago to leave this much hot stuff now, anyone at all survived to found this new race. Well, I haven't got the answer, only proof that they did survive, because they are here. I've monitored as many interviews as I could. The ones with the pointed heads who have no eyes or ears call themselves Far Seers. That's because they can send their radarlike senses out to vast distances. The Far Seers are the priests of the nature religion, logically explaining that nature abhors a vacuum as far as life is concerned. The Far Seers believe that all the far suns they can sense have planets and that those planets swarm with life like themselves. Incidentally, Jack, the Far Seers screw the computer beings, called Keepers, with astounding frequency. They're very virile cats, but completely sterile, like that creature out of our mythology, the mule. That is their only pleasure, but they're not just dirty old men, because the Keepers are also sterile but well developed sexually, and enjoy it too. That's just an aside, but I think it shows as much as anything that these fellows have basic human traits. I've looked into the records of the Far Seers, kept in the back part of the minds of the Keepers. I know about as much about the history of this race as they know themselves. I do it, of course, with the help of the little bastard from Belos II, who can't concentrate, but has to keep looking into my mind to see if I'm having too many wet dreams or something. It's interesting to note that these people are about as foggy about their beginnings as we are about ours. They have some incomplete legends, just as we do. They think they're mutations of a race they call the Old Ones. They believe that nature adapts life to meet the conditions of a world. They believe that in times of crisis nature comes up with a New One to pull life through. This is like saying that environment shapes life, isn't it? Here on this world it seems to. These people have adapted to conditions that would kill one of us in nothing flat. Their legends tell of nature forming the First Healer. He could live with what they picture as small, hard projectiles: radiation. He apparently did, for the Healer calls on that strange ability of his to repair radiation-damaged cells and his scales bounce off all kinds of radiation in quantities that would kill a horse. His organs don't collect the bad stuff either. They throw it out and vent it, along with the waste gases and unused toxic content of the air, through the gills. Then this First Healer, breeding with what they call the Old Ones, produced the Keepers and the Far Seers. I'd guess that it was the Old Ones who did in the planet with atomics. There's a beautiful series of pictures in one of their records that is called, roughly, The Book of Rose the Healer. They don't know what a rose is, but the picture of a rose is still in their minds after the conditions that would have produced a rose have been gone for 75,000 N.Y. Rose the Healer said that the Old Ones fornicated even in death, producing the Healers. That sounds rather human, doesn't it? The Healers, of course, were mutants—instant adaptation, believe it or not. I suspect the legends condense the process somewhat. But we have to believe what we see and what we find. We have here a world that, at one time, was highly technological, to the point of atomics. We've found a few decomposing chunks of metal to indicate that they were working with some advanced alloys of an atomic culture type. We've found a sizable city under the sea. We can't get to it because it's under a few hundred feet of sludge, but we detect decomposed metals, stone, everything to indicate that it was a real city. It was submerged, I'd guess, either by the melting of the icecaps or by the distortion of the planetary crust which is indicated by wide rifts, the deepest of which splits the crust almost to the molten core in the south of the western hemisphere. Both these events occurred 75,000 N.Y. ago. We've found a few traces of plastics, but a lot of it must have been burned with the surface stuff. I'm sure that, given time, well find some underground deposits that will tell us more. So this world was much like some of ours, with atomics, metals, and plastics. It killed itself. The present race mutated from the original race, which was also humanoid, because the forms of the things we can identify by instrument in the sunken city point definitely to a humanoid origin. The question is, who were the Old Ones? I think I have an answer to that. I know we don't have enough proof for what I'm coming to, not yet, but I say we have to take the risk and supply the justification later. We followed the prescribed approach to a life-zone planet. We came in slowly and carefully and did a lot of instrument work at long range. When we detected no probes from the planet we looked for a base close in and decided on a large, airless satellite that kept just one face to the planet, as do the satellites of some of our worlds. We came down on the back side and peeked around the horizon with instruments. Although we found nothing, we went through normal routine. We sent crews around to the side facing the planet to probe her and measure her. I had come down with a cold and was sacked out, groggy with drugs, when one of my junior officers came in with his ass in an uproar. What he told me made the drug-wooziness leave me like a hangover after a dose of Zarts. I got into a suit and took a jumper around to where one of my crews were milling around a veritable junkpile. Yep. We were not the first ones to land on that satellite. Someone had been there ahead of us. Two of those someones were still there. This, too, is not in the report, Jack. I suppose it should have been sent immediately Code 1, but you and I both know there's nothing that whets the curiosity of an X&A stat clerk like a Code 1 rating. It would have been all over the U.P. But a Personal-Personal communication like this is fairly sacred. Inside a five-foot-high half-dome of semi-opaque material were two beings with huge chests. They were lying on a little bed with their arms around each other. They looked as if they were asleep, but we knew they had to be dead, because we were on the night side of the satellite and it was colder than hell. There was no air outside and our instruments showed no oxygen inside. We thought they might be breathing the inert gases, but we could detect no movement. It was a male and a female of the breeder species. The female had cute little silvery and gold scales. The male was as horny as any Phebus lizard in any zoo. The thing that stoned our people was the lack of any propellant device. I mean, you could see through the whole fucking thing and the plastic-like material was soft to the touch. There was nothing in it to account for its having got here. The two beings were obviously dead. It took a few hours to get ready, and then I opened the lock. It was a funny thing, that lock. It opened easily, but when it was closed the material overlapped itself and formed an airtight seal. Well, after we'd taken all the pictures and measurements our scientists wanted, I went in. As per regulations, the telepath from Belos II accompanied me, even though I knew in my mind that there was no chance of contact, since they had to be dead. The air in the dome was completely dead—no oxygen at all. Along the walls, in little tanks, were dead Breathers, looking like tiny flower buds. I was casing the joint when Dr. Janti, creepy little fink that he was, came on with his communicator full blast and almost ruptured my eardrums. He was yelling, «It's alive. It's alive.» All the dead air had evacuated through the open lock. I ordered the lock closed and then I told Janti to vent his spare oxygen into the air. We emptied our tanks and suits of all but a reserve. There must have been just enough air in that cold dome to give a mouse a full breath, but it was enough for that big fellow with the