Part 1

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE BARBARIANS

BY TOM GODWIN

_The execution violated the basic laws of Tharnar. But the danger was too great--The Terrans couldn't be permitted to live under any circumstances...._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Tal-Karanth, Supreme Executive of Tharnar, signed the paper and dropped it in to the out-going slot of the message dispatch tube. It was an act that would terminate one hundred and eighty days of studying the tapes and records on the Terran ship and would set the final hearing of the Terran man and woman for that day.

And, since the Terrans were guilty, their execution would take place before the sun rose again on Tharnar.

He went to the wide windows which had automatically opened with the coming of the day's warmth and looked out across the City. The City had a name, to be found in the books and tapes of history, but for fifty thousand years it had been known as the City. It was the city of all cities, the center and soul of Tharnarian civilization. It was a city of architectural beauty, of flowered gardens and landscaped parks, a city of five hundred centuries of learning, a city of eternal peace.

The gentle summer breeze brought the sweet scent of the flowering _lana_ trees through the window and the familiar sound of the City as it went about its day's routine; a sound soft and unhurried, like a slow whisper. Peace for fifty thousand years; peace and the unhurried quiet. It would always be so for the City. The Supreme Executives of the past had been chosen for their ability to insure the safety of the City and so had he.

He turned away from the window and back to his desk, to brush his hand across the gleaming metal top of it. No faintest scratch marred the eternalloy surface, although the desk had been there for more than thirty thousand years. It was permanent and never-changing, like the robot-operated fleet that guarded Tharnar, like the white and massive Executive Building, like the way of life on Tharnar.

The Terrans would have to die, lest the peace and the way of life on Tharnar be destroyed. They were of a young race; a race so young that his desk had already been in place for fifteen thousand years when they began emerging from their caves. They were a dangerously immature race; it had been only three hundred years since their last war with themselves. Three hundred years--three normal Tharnarian lifetimes. And the Tharnarians had not known war for six hundred lifetimes.

A race so young could not possess a civilized culture. The Terrans were--he searched for a suitable description--barbarians in spaceships. They lacked the refinement and wisdom of the Tharnarians; they were a dangerous and unpredictable race. It could be seen in their history; could be seen in the way the two Terrans had reacted to their capture.

He pressed one of the many buttons along the edge of his desk and a three-dimensional projection appeared; the scene that had taken place one hundred and eighty days before when the Terrans were brought to Tharnar.

The ship of the Terrans stood bright silver in the sunlight, slim and graceful against the bulk of the Executive Building behind it. The Terrans descended the boarding ramp, the left wrist of the man chained to the right wrist of the girl. Two armed robots walked behind them, their faces metallically impassive, and four armed Tharnarian guards waited at the bottom of the ramp to help take the Terrans to their place of imprisonment.

The Terrans approached the guards with a watchfulness that reminded him of the old films of the coast wolves that had once lived on Vendal. They did not walk with the studied, practiced, leisure of the Tharnarians but as though they held some unknown vitality barely in check. The face of the man was lean and hard, the black eyes inscrutable as flint. The girl looked at the guards with a bold nonchalance, as though they were really not formidable at all. Somehow, by contrast with the Terrans, the guards appeared to be not grimly vigilant but only colorless.

There seemed to be a menace in the way the man watched the guards; there was the impression that he would overpower them and sieze their weapons if given a shadow of a chance. And the girl--what would she do, then? Would she flash in beside him to help him, as the female coast wolves always helped their mates?

He switched off the projection, feeling a little repugnance at the thought of executing the Terrans. They were living, sentient beings, and intelligent, for all their lack of civilization. It would have been better if they had been of some repulsive and alien physical form, such as bloated, many-legged giant insects. But they were not at all repulsive; they were exactly like the Tharnarians.

Exactly?

He shook his head. Not exactly. The similarity was only to the eye--and not even to the eye when one looked closely, as he had looked at the images. There was a potential violence about them, lurking close beneath their deceptively Tharnarian physical appearance. The Terrans were not like the Tharnarians. There was a difference of fifty thousand years between them; the difference between savage barbarianism and a great and peaceful civilization.

He looked again across the City, listening to its softly murmuring voice. In hundreds of centuries the City had known no strife or violence. But what if the barbarians should come, not two of them, but thousands? What would they do?

He was sure he knew what they would do to the gentle, peaceful City and the faint twinge of remorse at the thought of executing the Terran man and girl paled into insignificance.

Under no circumstance could they be permitted to live and tell the others of Tharnar and the City.

* * * * *

Bob Randall shifted his position a little in the wide seat and the chain that linked his wrist with Virginia's rattled metallically, sounding unduly loud in the quiet of the room.

Virginia's black hair brushed his cheek as she turned her face up to him, to ask in a whisper so low it could not be heard by the four guards who stood beside and behind them:

"It's almost over, isn't it?"

He nodded and she turned her attention back to the five judges seated at the row of five desks before them. The gray-haired one at the center desk, Bob knew, was the one in charge of the proceedings and his name was Vor-Dergal. He had gained the knowledge by watching and listening and it was the only information he had acquired. He did not know the names of the other four judges, nor even for sure that they were judges and that it was a trial. There had been no introductions by the Tharnarians, no volunteering of information.

Vor-Dergal spoke to them:

"In brief, the facts are these: You claim that your mission was of a scientific nature, that the two of you were sent from Earth to try to reach the center of the galaxy where you hoped to find data concerning the creation of the galaxy. Your ship carried only the two of you and is one of several such ships sent out on such missions. Since the voyages of these small exploration ships were expected to require an indefinite number of years and since the occupants would have to endure each other's company for those years, your government thought it more feasable to let the crew of each ship consist of a man and a woman, rather than two men."

He saw Virginia's cheek quiver at the words, but she managed to restrain the smile.

"Our system was reached in your journey," Vor-Dergal continued, "and you swung aside to investigate our sister planet, Vendal. You were met by a guard ship before reaching Vendal and it fired upon you. Instead of turning back, you destroyed it with a tight-beam adaptation of your meteor disintegrator."

Vor-Dergal waited questioningly and Bob said:

"Our instruments showed us that the guard ship was robot-operated. They could discern nothing organic in the ship, nothing alive. The same instruments showed us that this planet, Vendal, possessed operating mines and factories and no organic life other than small animals. We knew that machines neither voluntarily build factories nor reproduce other machines, yet the mines and factories were operating. We thought it might be a world where the inhabitants had all died for some reason and the robots were still following the production orders given them when the race lived."

"And so you wilfully destroyed the guard ship that would have turned you back?"

"We did. It was a machine, operated by machines. And so far as we knew, it was protecting a race that had died a thousand years before. It was all a mystery and we wanted to find the answer to it."

Vor-Dergal and the others accepted the explanation without change of expression. Vor-Dergal resumed:

"Three more guard ships appeared when you were near Vendal. In the battle that followed, you severely damaged one of them. And when your ship was finally caught in the guard cruiser's tractor beams, you resisted the robots. When they boarded your ship, you destroyed several of them and were subdued only when the compartments of your ship were flooded with a disabling gas."

"That's true," Bob said.

"In summary: You deliberately invaded Tharnarian territory, deliberately damaged and destroyed Tharnarian ships, and would have landed on Vendal had the guard ships not prevented it.

"Your guilt is both evident and admitted. Are there any extenuating circumstances that have not been presented at this hearing?"

"No," Bob said.

None had been presented all day for the good reason that there was not a single factor of the circumstances that the Tharnarians would consider extenuating.

"Your guilt was evident from the beginning," Vor-Dergal said. "We have spent the past one hundred and eighty days in studying the books and tapes in your ship. What we learned of your history and your form of civilization leaves us no alternative in the sentence we must pass upon you."

The chain clinked faintly as Virginia lifted her hand to lay it on his arm and she gave him a quick glance that said, "_Here it comes!_"

Vor-Dergal pronounced sentence upon them:

"Tomorrow morning, at thirty-three twelve time, you will both be put to death by a robot firing squad."

Virginia's breath stopped for a moment and her hand gripped his arm with sudden pressure but she gave no other indication of emotion and her eyes did not waver from Vor-Dergal's face.

Vor-Dergal looked past her to the guards. "Return them to their cell."

The guards produced another chain, to link their free arms together behind their backs, and they were marched across the room and out the door.

Outside, the sun was setting, already invisible behind a low-lying cloud. Bob calculated the designated time of their execution in relation to the Terran time as given by his watch and found that thirty-three twelve would be about halfway between daylight and sunrise.

* * * * *

Tal-Karanth stood by the open windows and watched the guards return the Terrans to their cell. Extra guards, both robot and Tharnarian, had been posted inside and outside the prison building for the night to prevent any possibility of an escape. Other robots stood guard around the Terran ship, although it was inconceivable that the Terrans could ever overpower the prison guards and reach their ship.

But it had been inconceivable that a ship as small as the Terran ship could ever destroy a Tharnarian guard cruiser. The tight-beam adaptation circuit of the meteor disintegrators was very ingenious.

Why had the Tharnarian cruisers not had the same weapon? They possessed the same general type of meteor disintegrators; the same adaptation circuit would transform a Tharnarian cruiser's meteor disintegrators into terrible weapons. Why had no one ever thought of doing such a thing? Why had it been taken for granted for fifty thousand years that the cruiser's blasters were the ultimate in weapons?

What other weapons did the Terrans on Earth possess? How invincible would their cruisers be if a small exploration ship could destroy a Tharnarian cruiser?

The captive Terrans could not be permitted to return to Earth and tell the others of Tharnar. Neither could they be permitted to live out their lives in prison on Tharnar. Someday, somehow, they might escape and return to Earth, or send a message to Earth. The robot fleet of Tharnar could never withstand an attack by a Terran fleet; the fate of Tharnar and the quiet and gentle City would be written in blood and dust and ashes.

There was the sound of rubber-padded metal feet in the distance and he saw six more robots marching out to add their numbers to the robots already guarding the Terran ship. The ship, itself, was not far from the Executive Building; close enough that his eyes, still sharp despite his seventy years, could make out the name on it: _The Cat_.

_The Cat._ And a cat was--he recalled the definition to be found among the Terran books--_any of various species of carnivorous and predatory animals, noted for their stealth and quickness, and their ferocity when angered_.

* * * * *

The robot shoved the plastic food tray under the cell door and went back down the corridor. Virginia turned away from the single window, where _The Cat_ could be seen as a silhouette merging into the darkness.

"Last supper, Bob," she said. "Let's eat, drink, and be merry."

He went to the door to get the tray and noticed the three robots and two Tharnarian guards down the left hand stretch of corridor and the same number down the right. Virginia came up beside and said, "They're not taking any chances we won't be here in the morning, are they?"

"No," he said, picking up the tray. "None to speak of."

He carried the tray to the little table in the center of the room and Virginia seated herself across from him as she had done each meal for the past six months. But she toyed with the plastic spoon and did not begin to eat at once.

"I wonder why they made it a firing squad?" she asked. "You'd think they would have used something ultra-civilized and refined, such as some painless and flower-scented gas."

"Spies were executed with firing squads during the last Terran war, three hundred years ago," he said. He smiled thinly. "I suppose they consider us spies and want us to feel at home in the morning."

"I'm glad they do. I don't want it to be shut up in a room--I would rather be out under the open sky." She poked at the rim of her tray again. "They never did tell us why, Bob. They didn't tell us anything, only that they had no alternative. We didn't hurt any Tharnarians; we only destroyed one of their ships and some of their robots."

"We upset their sense of security and showed them they're not secure at all. I suppose they're afraid of an attack from Earth."

"They didn't tell us anything," she said again. "They act as though we were animals."

"No," he said, "they don't seem to have a very high opinion of our low position on the social evolution scale."

He began to eat in the manner of one who knows the body needs nourishment to take advantage of any opportunity for escape, even though the mind may be darkly certain that no such opportunity shall arise.

"You ought to eat a little, Ginny," he said.

She tried, and gave up after a few bites.

"I guess I'm just not hungry--not now," she said. She glanced at the darkened window where _The Cat_ had become invisible. "How long until daylight again, Bob?"

He looked at his watch. "Seven hours."

"Seven hours?" A touch of wistfulness came into her voice. "I never noticed, before, how short the nights are."

* * * * *

The robot laid the material Tal-Karanth had requested on his desk, the records and tapes from the Terran ship, and withdrew. Tal-Karanth sighed wearily as he inserted the first tape in the projector, wondering again why he felt the vague dissatisfaction and wondering why he hoped to find an answer among the material from the Terran ship. It would be an all night task--and he could hardly expect to find more than he already knew. Tharnar was not safe and secure from discovery by Terrans in the years to come and faith in the robot fleet had been an illusion.

Before setting the projector in operation he put through a call to his daughter.

Thralna's image appeared before him, reclining on a couch while two robots worked at caring for her finger nails. She raised up a little as his image appeared before her and the robots stepped back.

"Yes, Father?" she asked.

She waited for him to speak, her wide gray eyes on his image and her jet-black curls framing her young and delicately beautiful face. For a moment she reminded him of someone; someone more mature and stronger--

With something of a shock he realized it was the Terran girl his daughter reminded him of; that the Terran girl seemed the more mature of the two although Thralna was twenty-eight and the Terran girl was twenty-one. They had the same gray eyes and black curls, the same curve to the jaw, the same chin and full lips....

But the similarity was only incidental. There was a grace and a gentleness to Thralna's beauty; a grace and gentleness that was the result of fifty thousand years of civilization. Beneath the superficial beauty of the barbarian girl lay only an animal-like vitality and potential violence....

"Yes, Father?" Thralna asked again in her carefully modulated voice.

"Are you going to the theatre tonight, Thralna?"

"Yes. Tonight's play was written by D'ret-Thon and it's supposed to be almost as good as one of the classics. Why do you ask, Father?"

"I called to tell you that I have to work late tonight. I may not be home until morning."

"Couldn't you let a robot do it?"

"No. I have to do it, myself."

"Does it have to do with those two aliens?"

"Yes."

A little frown of worry appeared and as quickly disappeared. Her slim fingers touched her forehead for a moment, to smooth away any vestige of a wrinkle, then she said, "It will be such a relief when they're finally disposed of. Whenever I think of how they might escape and get into the City, it frightens me. Are you sure they can't escape, Father?"

"There is no possibility of their escaping," he said. "You go ahead with your plans for the evening. Will you come home when the show is over?"

"Not for a while. Kin is taking me dancing, afterward."

"Where you went last time--the place where they were reviving the old dances?"

"No. Nobody goes there anymore. Those old dances were rather fun but they were so--so tiring. Our modern dances are much slower and more graceful, you know."

"All right, Thralna," he said in dismissal. "Enjoy yourself."

"Yes, Father."

She was reclining on the couch again, her eyes closed, when he switched off the image. He sat for a little while before turning on the tape projector, recalling his conversation with her and a feeling growing within him that he was almost on the verge of discovering still another menace to Tharnar.

* * * * *

Virginia held her hands to her face to shade her eyes as she looked out the window. "What you can see of the city from here is all bright with lights," she said, "but there's no one on the streets. Only some robots. Everyone in the city must be in bed."

"That's the way it's been every night," he said. "Early to bed and late to rise--they're an odd race. I've wondered what they do to pass away the time. But what they're doing now is something you should be doing--resting."

She turned away from the window. "I'm not sleepy. I keep thinking of _The Cat_ out there waiting for us and how we might get to it if we could only get hold of a blaster."

"Which we can't try to do until they come for us in the morning. Some rest now might mean a lot then."

"All right, Bob." She went to him and sat beside him on his cot. "What is it now--how much more time?"

"About three hours."

She leaned her head against him and he put his arm around her. "I guess I am a little tired," she said. "But don't let me go to sleep."

"All right, Ginny."

"It's only three hours and never any more, if we aren't lucky in the morning. And if we aren't lucky, I don't want to have wasted our last three hours."

* * * * *

Tal-Karanth stood before the window again and watched the City as it slept in the pre-dawn darkness. How many slept in the City? Once there had been three million in the City but each census found the population to be less. Five years before there had been less than a million--two-thirds of the City was a beautiful shell that housed only the robots that cared for it.

What was wrong? And why had it never occurred to him before that there was something wrong?

He went back to his desk, where the material from the Terran ship littered the eternalloy top of it, and sat down again. He was tired, and frustrated. A menace faced Tharnar, and no one seemed to realize it. The coming of the barbarians had awakened him to the fallacy of trusting the robot fleet, but there was still another danger. And the robot fleet would be more helpless before the newly discovered danger than it would be before the Terran ships.

He pressed a button and music filled the room; music that had always before been soothing and restful to hear. But it sounded flat and meaningless compared with the throbbing barbarian music he had heard that night and he switched it off again.

What was wrong? It was one of the latest compositions; one that had been acclaimed as almost as good as one of the classics.

Almost as good.... Like the play Thralna had attended, like the art exhibits, the athletic records, the scientific discoveries, like everything in the City and on Tharnar. Almost as good--but never quite as good as they had been fifty thousand years before.

Was that part of the answer?

No--not part of the answer. Part of the problem, part of the danger greater than a barbarian invasion. There was no answer that he could see. Something had been lost by the Tharnarians fifty thousand years before and he was neither sure what it was nor how to give it back to them.

He pressed the button that would connect him with Security Officer Ten-Quoth. Of the two problems, it was only within his power to handle the immediate phase of the first problem; to make the final authorization of the execution of the Terrans.

* * * * *

Bob looked again at the window which had lightened to a pale gray square. It was already daylight outside; it would not be long until the guards came for them. Virginia had fallen asleep at last, more tired than she had thought, and she still slept with her head against his shoulder and with his arm around her to support her. He straightened his legs slowly, not wanting them to be numb from lack of circulation when the guards came and not wanting to awaken Virginia to grim reality any sooner than he had to.

But the slight movement was enough. She opened her eyes drowsily, then the sleepiness gave way to the hard jolt of remembrance and realization. She looked at the gray window and asked, "How much longer?"

"Within a few minutes."

"I wish you hadn't let me sleep."

"You were tired."

"I didn't want to sleep--I didn't think I would." Then she changed the subject, as though to keep it from going into the sentimental. "I see the robot never did come back for the tray. We'll be leaving a messy room, won't we? I wonder if they'll disinfect it to make sure it's clean when we're gone? You know"--she smiled a little--"fleas and things."

She lifted her face to kiss him on the cheek, then she rose and moved to the window.