Irving E. Cox

“ But his mockery was slowly tainted with fear, as the sun mounted the heavens and my armed men still held the tribe in the village.
The stretcher bearers arrived with Dayhan. She was awake. She sat up against my shoulder, holding tight to my hand. Softly she spoke to the tribe as I had:
"It is not the gods that rule us. There are no taboos; the glacier is but a thing of ice, without life. I have seen for myself. I have walked unharmed on the tabooed ground. In truth, we must migrate to the south, but my Lord has taught us that we must go of our own will and not because of fear of the sun god." ”

“ Baiel and I had already told them about the primitive village; the expedition had learned the tribal tongue as we brought the knowledge back to the Olympus. Now, for the first time, I told them frankly that we were never going to leave the planet. Hand-picked, psycho-processed personnel, the expedition adjusted readily to the new reality. Without the benefits of the machines of our earthly civilization, we were faced with extreme hardships on such an unfriendly world. Our only sound course was to join the village tribe and survive through mutual efforts. ”

“ So that was why Baiel had gone back to the Olympus! He had returned to the village with a portable amplifier concealed under his fur cloak. "Baiel is no priest," I told the Chief. "He speaks for no god. The great voice you hear is made by a machine, such a thing as this weapon that we use to slay meat for the tribe."
"You speak knowingly, Seus-man, because you, too, are a priest of the sun. You showed us that much last night. Some of my tribe say you and all your people are not simple priests, but brother gods."
"We are men." ”

“ But in small things, like the brief spring thaws that slowly ate away their planet-capping glacier, we could erode and destroy their shell of savagery.
Because of its application to my own situation with Dayhan, the first teaching I undertook was cleanliness. On the Earth it is an old joke that, when we build, we plan the bathing facilities first; our space ships are notably awkward to maneuver because we include so many elaborate baths. To us, filth equates with savagery. ”

“ The old priest knelt at Baiel's feet, offering up a chunk of glacial ice in token of brother glacier's submission.
"There is one all-powerful god!" Baiel cried. "Only one. And I, Baiel, I am his priest."
"All-powerful; the only one," the villagers responded.
It was at that point that I intervened. The tribe stared at me in bewilderment. I took one of the heaters and dismantled it.
"This was made by men," I explained. "By men like yourselves. See, this is no more than a substance like the hard veins of metal you find in your rocks. In time you can learn to make these as we do." ”

“ I was sent by the sun god to lead you to safety, and you have not heeded me. The god will strike, now, at the glacier and tear this ground from beneath your feet. I give you one chance more. Offer up Captain Theusaman in sacrifice and I, Baiel, will lead you to a new world. But you must make the sacrifice at once. The god grows impatient."
My men closed around Dayhan and me protectively, but at first there was no need. The concept bewildered the tribe. They had accepted me, too, as priest of the sun; the god could not demand my blood. ”

“ Satisfy brother glacier, and the village would be safe.
At the grove Baiel suddenly joined the priest. They whispered together for a moment. Then Baiel raised his arms and spoke.
"Wait! We bring the tribe the new gods of the sun. Our gods are stronger than brother glacier. Let them speak to the ice, and no life need be given."
"Let the new gods satisfy the old!" ”

“ To the nearly insurmountable problems set by nature, this tribe had added one final prison of their own creation, the taboos and superstitions that penned them fast on the brink of the glacier. As things stood, the tribe would not survive. To become men as we were, they had to be freed of the weight of the gods, freed of superstition so they could deal with the facts of reality. With our help the tribe might eventually learn how to create a civilization. Without it, they were doomed.
Hesitantly I explained myself to Baiel. ”

“ Someone had looked into the cave and found it empty. Baiel and ten of his faction had fled; thirty of the tribe had departed with them.
The shock was paralyzing to those who stayed behind. The tribe began to wail its lamentation. The god had deserted them! I moved from group to group, repeating my familiar theme:
"The gods can neither harm nor save you. That you must do for yourselves."
It had no effect. They stared at me with vacant eyes. They repeated dumbly in reply: "The sun god is gone. He leaves us to the mercy of brother glacier." ”

“ In another ten years, Theusaman, the glacier will have moved over the Olympus. It will be ground into dust."
"That's hardly the point."
"It writes finale to the past. It means this planet is ours—it must be—whether we want it or not."
"Ours, and theirs, Baiel."
He threw back his head and laughed. "In the Academy, Theusaman, we're taught to face reality, not to romanticize it. This tribe is semi-human, if you like; I'm charitable enough to grant that. But they aren't men, any more than the primitive species on the Earth were men. ”

“ There have never been any people on any of the planets we've explored."
Baiel dropped his scalpel and stepped back from the table, kneading his chin thoughtfully. "Bonn said that an identical chemistry and atmosphere, plus identical time phase, would produce an identical chronology of the species. This planet may do that. It should have been obvious when we had the negative tests for fissionable material. The Earth itself is the only planetary body we know where we've had to build separation plants to recover the metal." ”

“ They have since built many villages and they have learned the art of agriculture and of domesticating cattle. They have thrived and grown and joined with other tribes. They will survive and someday rule their planet.
As Baiel once predicted, the glacier is rapidly retreating. The process began with the heat generated by the exposed dorsal tube of the dead Olympus. Each spring the run-off of melting water is greater than the ice which accumulates during the winter. When the glacier is gone, it will give my people a fertile world like our own Earth. ”

“ Then one of the young hunters scooped up soil, as I had, and said brightly, "Earth. Yes, your name for the hunting ground. Earth! It is a good name."
"No. We are Earthmen!"
"Yes, Earthmen—all of us. Not beasts that howl by night and haunt the forest trails. Men. We are men. But also we have a tribe."
I tried to make my explanation more explicit. "We came here in a sky carrier which is named the Olympus. It rests now up by the great ice wall. There are others like us, too, who may—" I stopped, because one by one they were rising and moving away from me. ”

“ We were sent out to record the conditions beyond the periphery of the Earth charts, and it's vitally important for us to return with the data."
"I'm aware of that, Baiel."
"Then face the facts. We've blown our dorsal tubes and lost our emergency fuel. Unless we restock with fissionable material, we've no chance of getting back to Earth. You believe we can restock on that unknown planet out there, but—"
"I know we can. I've seen the spectroanalysis; it doesn't lie."
"Not in the statement of data. But—with the best of intentions—a man can lie in the generalization he draws from the data. ”

“ This planet is the Earth as it was millennia in the past, in the age of the great glaciers. The ice cap here has obviously reached its maximum penetration. It will begin to recede now, decade by decade, and civilization will slowly take root where now there is nothing but primitive savagery."
"Civilization, out of that brain, Baiel?" ”

“ No Earthman was certified for space travel unless he had first been successfully psycho-processed. In effect, that meant that we took a scientific rather than an emotional view of any given set of data. Since each of us was faced with an identical pattern of facts, I assumed that each of us would approximate the same generalization.
To a degree, that happened. We all realized the need to teach the tribe; no one proposed bringing machines from the Olympus to give the savages the products of our culture without their specifics. ”

“ Your sun god is all-powerful. It is your own people who prevent us. They hold the priest, Baiel, with his followers, imprisoned in the cave by means of your weapons, the brothers-of-the-sun. They tell us it is not the sun god who speaks, but Baiel himself. ”

“ It's far enough from the glacier for agriculture to be practical, and—"
"The problem isn't to find the place, Baiel, but to conquer their taboo against migration."
"But you can do that, Captain; just teach the little savages to reason the way men do. Nothing to it." He smiled, then, and held out his hand. "Face it, Captain Theusaman; admit you're wrong! Last night you had to call on the gods; you couldn't control them any other way. If the sun god orders a migration, we can have them on their way in two hours." ”

“ I snapped. "I'm glad you recognize that as a possibility, Baiel."
"Even if none of us survives, our data will still be there; sooner or later an Earth ship would find the Olympus."
"You risk more than I do, Baiel."
"But our information would be saved for the scientific processors."
"I prefer to save the men. We know they can live on that planet, even if we find no fissionable material. The issue is settled."
"There's one other consideration, Captain Theusaman. With our dorsal tubes gone, we can't maneuver. ”

“ Our Haydens aroused no interest, except for a vague and superstitious awe. The mechanism of the weapon was entirely beyond their comprehension; they wrote it off as a kind of magic closely allied to the mysteries practiced by their priest. Our garments were of greater significance. The tribe was irresistibly drawn to caress the sleek material, to hold it against their cheeks and chatter excitedly over its unexpected warmth.
Once, as we sat in a circle around the fire, the Chief asked me the name of our tribe.
"We are Earthmen."
"The Earth tribe? ”

“ You must tell that to your people. The harm came to you after you found us, Dayhan—from Baiel. Only man is cruel to man, not the gods."
I pulled her arm around my shoulder and we began the slow, painful walk back to the village. We had to stop frequently to rest. Twice I loosed the tourniquet to permit the blood to circulate in her lower leg.
It was four hours before we reached the edge of the forest. There two of my men met us. They had begun to search the forest for me when Baiel returned to the village alone. We improvised a stretcher for Dayhan and carried her between us. ”

“ At the end of the Earth's ice age, the continents were widely populated by the last of nature's failures. Then, abruptly—we've never known where he originated, or how—man himself came on the scene. Overnight he wiped out the half-men and took over the planet. Man has come here, now, Theusaman; these failures will survive only so long as we need them. At the moment, they constitute a convenient labor force. A handful of us can control them by controlling their gods."
I drew my Hayden. "As I said, Baiel, I'm still in command of this expedition." ”

“ That night the power failed in the Olympus and the winter cold settled slowly into the cabins. The residue of fuel energy left in the tanks was not enough to power the heating grids, and our portable solar heaters were ineffectual in the cavernous space of our cabins. Our food tanks froze over; the producing cultures died. Baiel and I built an open furnace in the control room, and the expedition crowded there around the fire. ”

“ We can't allow nature to forget the proper chronology of the species, can we?"
"It will be slow work, but—"
"But not impossible. Their life span averages less than thirty years; ours exceeds a century. ”