Part 2

The doctor winced at the word "creatures." But his reply was soft.

"No," he said. "That coincidence would be too great. But they have no such desires; they will be happy to produce their own future generations of citizens. They have deliberately controlled their birthrate until they could find a home. Earth can be that home, Mr. Ridgemont, but they wish to be sure of a welcome."

* * * * *

The Secretary stood up, and came to the front of the desk to face the doctor.

"Dr. Woodward," he said, "your story is an incredible one, but for the moment I'll assume that everything you've said is true. Naturally, visitors from another planet--who mean us no harm, and who can impart knowledge to us--would be more than welcome on Earth. They would be celebrated by every man of Science on this planet."

"Borsu understands that. But it's not the scientists whose welcome they seek. It's the people of Earth."

"Doctor, I cannot speak for the people of Earth." Ridgemont frowned, and rubbed his forehead. "Where would these aliens of yours want to live? How would they live? Assimilated among the peoples of Earth? In their own community, a nation reserved for them alone?"

"I can't say. These are questions to be decided by others--"

"Does this Borsu expect us to guarantee this welcome? To assure them that they will be received with open arms? People are strange. Once the initial excitement of their arrival is over, who can say how ordinary citizens will react?"

"You must understand that they come in peace and friendship. They are tired, weary of searching for a home. They need our help--"

"You say they're _blue_, doctor." Ridgemont's eyes were penetrating. "Do you think the world can withstand still another race problem? Do you?"

"I don't know," Woodward said miserably. "I'm only Borsu's friend, Mr. Ridgemont, his emissary. I can't answer questions like this. I thought that you, a man of science--"

"As a scientist, your Borsu fascinates me, of course. I'd like to interrogate him for years. I'd like to dissect his mind and body until I know everything about him and his people. But you're asking me a different question. You're asking--do I want Borsu as a neighbor?"

Woodward stood up. His face was pale, and the leg that wasn't there throbbed with pain. He was sweating, a gray sweat that coursed down his seamed cheek and soiled the collar of his shirt.

"I don't feel well," he said. "If you'd excuse me--"

"Of course," Ridgemont said solicitously. "We can talk more about this later, when you feel up to it...."

"Yes," Woodward said.

* * * * *

That night, in a hotel room in Washington, Dr. Carl Woodward died of a coronary thrombosis.

Secretary of Science Ridgemont, however, was curious enough about the doctor's story to send a deputation to his home in Pennsylvania. As a simple precaution, one of the men in the party was an armed policeman named Sergeant Kemmer. At the first sight of the blue-skinned man, Kemmer became alarmed enough to draw his gun. Borsu recognized the weapon, and its dangerous potential, from his reading. Frightened, he tried to flee through the front door, and Kemmer misinterpreted his movement as an attack. He fired three times. One of the bullets penetrated Borsu's temple, and killed him instantly.

Three months passed before the next delegation from the aliens appeared on Earth. This time, their arrival was detected, and the visitors were brought safely to the local authorities in the Nebraska community where their vessel landed. Their names were Cor, Basuc, and Stytin. Stytin was a female, lovely in her blue-skinned shapeliness.

A team of scientists were dispatched from Washington, Tokyo, and London to take charge of the alien trio. It was another two weeks before their marvelous facility with language permitted them to talk intelligently to their examiners.

On November 8, 1973, Stytin, the blue female, was found assaulted, mutilated, and murdered in the woods near the town of Ponchi. The brutal slaying shocked the scientists, who tried to assure Cor and Basuc that the episode had not been typical of the behavior of the people of Earth. But Cor and Basuc, who had no memory-record of killing, became terrified, and fled. Cor was shot and killed by a farmer, and Basuc was accidently drowned while forging a stream during his escape.

The death of the four aliens, however, didn't prevent the migration from beginning. Hunger--not for food alone, but for the blessed green promise of the Earth--drove the blue aliens to make the journey before receiving assurance of their welcome. Their tiny two, three, and four-man craft began dotting the heavens, filling the world with fears and panics that were only partially allayed by the repeated assurances of the world's leaders. Despite explanations and pleas for order, the blue people were frequently slain the moment their ships touched Earth. There was never an official estimate of the deaths, but it was certain that well over three thousand of the aliens lost their lives before ever tasting a drop of cool Earth water, or knowing the shade of an Earth tree, the peaceful blue of an Earth sky.

Finally, the killings were over. Less than seven thousand Blues survived the perilous journey, protected upon their arrival by contingents of armed soldiers, sped to the scene of the landings in time to stop the citizens from their slaughter.

* * * * *

It was Mostyn Herbert, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who made the first speech of welcome, before the general assembly.

"The world," he said, "has seen a new migration in these past months, an event which has brought new hours of infamy to the human race. The savagery of man to beast, the bestiality of man to man, has now been exceeded by our shameful record of cruelty towards these homeless wanderers from a forgotten world. We have slain almost a third of their number wantonly and without cause. They proffered to us the wisdom and knowledge of their own civilization, and asked for nothing in return but sanctuary. We have answered them with murder, and rape, and a bigotry that has exceeded all others in the long and reeking history of human injustice. It is time for the human race to call a halt; not merely for the sake of our alien visitors, but for the sake of the almighty soul of Man. We must hold out our hand, and say 'Welcome. Welcome to Earth!'"

Moved by the plea of the Secretary-General, the assembly voted to form a 12-nation commission to study the problem. Many governments made offers of hospitality to the aliens; the United States, Canada, Australia, the Scandinavian and Low Countries, all expressed a willingness to set aside land areas for the exclusive use of the aliens. The U.S.S.R. made no offer of land, but suggested that the Blues could be completely integrated into Russian society. The choice was left to the Blues and their leader, an Elder named Trecor.

The wisdom of Trecor's decision became a subject of debate for generations to come. He declined to isolate his people as a "nation," separate and apart from the human race. He declined to have them as boarders within any one sovereign state. Instead, he asked that the Blues be divided into small communities and dispersed over the world, where each could work out their individual destiny. His purpose was a noble one: he wished to make his people truly the neighbors, even the partners, of the Earthmen.

And so it was.

In the United States, a Blue community began a collective farming project on acreage deeded to them by the government in Kansas. Within three years, the crops of winter wheat and corn produced on the Blue farmlands were so superior in quality that they provoked the admiration, and envy, of every farmer in the district. In '77, the year of the Terrible Twisters, only the Blue farmlands were miraculously spared the destruction of their fields. The ignorant claimed that some spiritual agency had helped the Blues; the more enlightened credited the sturdiness of their crops. But both became united in a sullen resentment of the Blues, the strangers who had committed the unpardonable sin of prospering in a season of want. From these beginnings came the illicit organization of terrorists who called themselves the Dom-Dom, a name originally meaning Defenders of Mankind. Between the years 1977 and 1991, the Dom-Dom could take the blame for the violent deaths of more than a thousand Blues.

* * * * *

In New Zealand, another farming community of Blues fared better than their fellows in Kansas. But in the year 1982, they fell victim to the still-unnamed plague which Earthmen merely called the Blue Disease. It seemed to strike only the aliens, but it resembled typhoid in its symptoms and deadly progress. The Blues themselves became unable to cope with the disease; their pleas for outside medical help brought only a handful of Earth physicians. When one of them, a Dr. Martin Roebuck, died of a seizure that the Blues swore was unrelated to the plague, the others fled in fear of contagion. Their statement to the world press claimed that the biological differences between Earthmen and Blues were too great for Earth medicine to be of value. And so the Blues of New Zealand died. The white flash of their funeral pyres lit the night again and again.

In Russia, a non-farming community of Blues, composed mainly of artists and scientists, lived in a government-constructed "city" and were carefully nurtured and pampered like talented, precocious children. After five years of this treatment, the Blues sickened of it and yearned for a freer life. With the eyes of the world upon them, the Russians quickly agreed to the Blue demands. Yes, they could do as they please, live as they please, work as they please. One by one, their privileges were withdrawn. The Blues found that they had to provide their own food, their own clothing, maintain their own shelters; the Russians had given them independence with a vengeance. They found themselves unable to care for their own elementary needs; they were like helpless children; they began quarreling among themselves. For the first time in the remembered history of the race, a Blue killed another Blue; it was said that the shame of this episode was the cause of the Elder Trecor's death. Eventually, the Blues surrendered; they preferred the easy comforts of their prison, and begged their jailers to lower the bars again.

In the thirty-six years of the Blues' residence on Earth, only four thousand births were recorded; while ten thousand of the race perished.

It was in the year 2009, following the Kansas City Massacre by the Dom-Dom, in which eight hundred Blues died under the flamethrowers of the terrorists, that the Decision was reached. It was relayed to the world by an Elder named Dasru, whose prepared statement was read to the United Nations.

"We came to your world unbidden and unwelcome," the statement said. "We came to your world asking no privilege, bearing no arms, wishing for no more than forbearance for our differences, patience for our ignorance, and sympathy for our homelessness. We offered love and received hatred. We came in peace and died in war.

"We love the sweet green fields of your planet, its clear water and skies, its generous soil. But you have never permitted Earth to become our home, and so we leave you. We leave you, people of the cruel planet. Rather than suffer your bigotry, and yes, your tolerance, we leave you. We go to seek another homeland, and in the minds of our future generations no memory of this hated visit shall remain. We shall Forget you, Earth; but may you always remember, what drove us from your world."

Then the exodus began. One by one, the small spacecraft of the Blues began to rise towards the heavens. Before the next Spring came to Earth, the Blues were gone.

Ky-Tann cleared his throat, and looked at his young wife. Devia stared at Deez.

"How long ago?" Ky-Tann asked. "When did this happen?"

"Perhaps three, four thousand years ago," Deez said. "They left the Earth to its fate, and eventually that fate was extinction. Some defect in its sun caused an outburst of nuclear fire, and shriveled the planet to what it has become. But still _she_ stands, their goddess of welcome, lifting her torch to the empty skies.

"When we dug up that statue, do you know what we found? There was an inscription on the base. When we learned the story of that planet's past, the irony of those words was poignant."

"Do you remember them?"

"I could never forget them," Deez said, and his eyes were dark. "_Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore; send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door._"

There was silence. Ky-Tann became aware of his wife's tears.

He went to her, and she wiped her eyes. "I'd better put Su-Tann to bed," she said, trying to smile at Deez. "Did you see her tooth, Deez? It's her very first."

Ky-Tann took his wife's blue hand, and kissed her blue cheek. "A beautiful tooth," he said.