The Sword, Frank Quattrocchi [read aloud books .txt] 📗

"Amen". Harrison wove his way through them wondering where the hundreds of such evangelists had come from so suddenly.

"Ya know, folks, the angels themselves got uppity once. They wanted to be like Gawd himself, they did. Now, it's us."

There was a small flutter of laughter among the crowd. It was very quickly suppressed—so quickly that Harrison gained a new appreciation of the tenor of the crowd.

"That's right, laugh! Laugh at our folly!" continued the thin-faced, bright-eyed man. "It was a sword that the angel used to kick Adam and Eve out of the garden. The sword figures all through the bible, folks. You ought to read the bible. You ought to get to know it. It's all there. All there for you to read...."

By Christ, thought Harrison. Here was an aspect of the concept, sword, he had not considered. Morphological thinking required that all aspects of a concept be explored, all plotted against all others for possible correlation....

No. That was silly. The bible was a beautiful piece of literature and some people believed it inspired. But the great good men who wrote the bible had little scientific knowledge of a sword. They would simply describe the weapon as a modern fiction writer would describe a blaster—without knowing any more about one than that it existed and was a weapon.

Surely the ISC's weapons expert could be trusted to know his swords.

"Go on home," Mills pleaded. "You're shot and you know it. You said yourself this isn't our show."

"You go home, Bob. I'm all right."

"George ... you're acting strange. Strange as hell."

"I'm all right. Leave me alone," snapped Harrison becoming irritable.

Mills watched silently as the haggard man slipped a tablet into his mouth.

"It's all right, Bob," smiled Harrison weakly. "I know how to use Benzedrine."

"You damn fool, you'll wreck yourself...."

But the engineer ignored him. He continued paging his way through the book—the bible, no less. George Harrison and the bible!

Mills was awakened by the telephone. Reaching in the dark for it he answered almost without reaching consciousness.

It was Harrison.

"Bob, listen to me. If an angel were to look at us right now, what would he think?"

"For God's sake!" Mills cried into the instrument. "What's up? You still at the office?"

"Yeah, answer the question."

"Hold on, George. I'll be down and get you. What you been drinking?"

"Bob, would he—she—think much of us? Would the angel figure we were...."

"How the hell would I know?"

"No, Bob, what you should have asked is 'how the hell would he know.'"

In a daze Mills heard the click as the other hung up.

"Mr. Harrison, your assistant is looking for you."

"Yes, I know, Kirk. But will you do it?"

"Mr. Harrison, we only got one of them. If we screw it up it'll take time to make another and today's the day, you know."

"I'll take the blame."

"Mr. Harrison, you look kind of funny. Hadn't I better...."

Harrison was sketching a drawing on a piece of waste paper. He was working in quick rough strokes, copying something from a book.

"They'll blame us both, Mr. Harrison. Anyway, it might hold up somebody who's got a real idea...."

"I have a real idea, Kirk. I'm going to draw it for you."

The metal worker noticed that the book Harrison was copying from was a dictionary, a very old and battered one.

"Here, can you follow what I've drawn?"

The metal worker accepted it reluctantly, giving Harrison an odd, almost patronizing look. "This is crazy."

"Kirk!"

"Look, Mr. Harrison. We worked a long time together. You...."

Harrison suddenly rose from the chair.

"This is our one chance of beating this thing, no matter how crazy it seems. Will you do the job?"

"You believe you got something, eh," the other said. "You think you have?"

"I have to have."

"Gentlemen," said the President of the Intersolar Council. "There is very little to say. There can be no denying the fact that we have exhausted our efforts at finding a satisfactory solution.

"The contents of this book of reports represents the greatest concentration of expert reasoning perhaps ever applied to a single problem.

"But alas, the problem remains—unsolved."

He paused to glance at his wristwatch.

"The aliens return in an hour. As you very well know there is one action that remains for us. It is one we have held to this hour. It is one that has always been present and one that we have been constantly urged to use.

"Force, gentlemen. It is not insignificant. It lies at our command. It represents the technology of the Intersolar alliance. I will entertain a motion to use it."

There were no nay votes.

The alien arrived on schedule. The ship grew from a tiny bright speck in the sky to full size. It settled to a graceful landing as before on the strip and silently moved into the revetment.

Again it spoke in the voice of the frog, but the tone was, if anything, less human this time.

"Earthmen, we have come for your solution."

At that instant a hundred gun crews stiffened and waited for a signal behind their carefully camouflaged blast plates and inside dummy buildings....

Harrison was running. The Administration building was empty. His footsteps echoed through the long, silent halls. He headed for an emergency exit that led directly to the blast tunnel. All doors were locked.

The only way was over the wall. He paused and tossed the awkward, heavy object over the ten-foot wall. Then, backing toward the building, he ran and jumped for a hold onto the wall's edge. He failed by several inches to reach it.

"Earthmen, we have come for your solution."

He ran at the wall once more. This time he caught a fair hold with one hand. Digging at the rough concrete with his feet he was able to secure the hold and begin pulling his body upward.

Quickly he was over the wall and onto the apron, a hundred yards from the shining metal ship.

"Wait!" he shouted. "Wait, for God's sake!"

Picking up the object he had tossed over the wall, he raised it above his head and ran toward the alien ship.

"Wait! Here is the solution," he gasped.

Somehow the command to fire was not given. There was a long moment of complete silence on the field. Nothing moved.

Then the voice of the frog boomed from the alien ship.

"The solution appears to be correct."

The alien left three days later. Regular communications would begin within the week. Future meetings would work out technical difficulties. Preliminary trade agreements, adequately safeguarded, were drafted and transmitted to the ship. The Races of Man and the Races of Wan were in harmony.

"It was simply too obvious for any of us to notice," explained Harrison. "It took that street-corner evangelist to jar something loose—even then it was an accident."

"And the rest of us—" started Mills.

"While all of us worked on the assumption that the test involved a showing of strength—a flexing of technological muscle."

"I still don't see—"

"Well, the evangelist put the problem on the right basis. He humbled us, exalted the aliens—that is, he thought the alien was somehow a messenger from God to put us in our places."

"We were pretty humble ourselves, especially the last day," protested Mills.

"But humble about our technology," put in Harrison. "The aliens must be plenty far beyond us technologically. But how about their cultural superiority. Ask yourself how a culture that could produce the ship we've just seen could survive without—well destroying itself."

"I still don't understand."

"The aliens developed pretty much equally in all directions. They developed force—plenty of it, enough force to kick that big ship through space at the speed of light plus. They must also have learned to control force, to live with it."

"Maybe you better stick to the sword business," said Mills.

"The sword is the crux of the matter. What did the alien say about the sword? 'It is defective.' It is defective, Bob. Not as an instrument of death. It will kill a man or injure him well enough.

"But a sword—or any other instrument of force for that matter—is a terribly ineffectual tool. It was originally designed to act as a tool of social control. Did it—or any subsequent weapon of force—do a good job at that?

"As long as man used swords, or gunpowder, or atom bombs, or hydrogen bombs, he was doomed to a fearful anarchy of unsolved problems and dreadful immaturity.

"No, the sword is not useful. To fix it—to 'correct that which renders it not useful'—meant to make it something else. Now what in the hell did that mean? What can you do with a sword?"

"You mean besides cut a man in two with it," said Mills.

"Yes, what can you do with it besides use it as a weapon? Here our street-corner friend referred me to the right place: The bible!

"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

"The aliens just wanted to know if we meant what we said."

"Do we?"

"We better. It's going to take a hell of a lot more than a silly ploughshare to convince those babies on that ship. But there's more to it than that. The ability of a culture finally to pound all of its swords—its intellectual ones as well as its steel ones—into ploughshares must be some kind of least common denominator for cultures that are headed for the stars."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sword, by Frank Quattrocchi