Chapter 19

From the very moment he had heard that “Stanley Martin” had arrived to take charge of the project, Bart Stanton pushed all thoughts of his brother out of his mind. He had fouled up once by thinking of himself rather than thinking of what had to be done; he would not make that mistake again.

Nor, apparently, did Martin have any desire to meet Bart Stanton. He took control of the project smoothly. Apparently Mannheim had taken into account the possibility of his own death and had arranged things accordingly. Although Martin was not a member of the World Police, his own record showed that he had the ability to handle the job, and an Executive Session had unanimously accepted Colonel Mannheim’s wishes in the matter. There was little else they could do; the very fact that Mannheim had died in the way he had, ordering the guard to hold his fire, had stilled those voices on the Executive Council who had been wavering before.

Martin had come in to Earth almost secretly, without fanfare, and the general public was totally unaware that anything at all had happened.

Special messages, going through the channels known to be tapped by the Nipe, said that it would not be in the public interest to admit that the Nipe could actually penetrate the defenses of World Police Headquarters, so the Nipe was not surprised when the public news channels announced quietly that Colonel Walther Mannheim, the man who had been decorated twelve years before for the quelling of the Central Brazilian Insurrection, had died peacefully in his sleep. The funeral was quiet, but with full honors.

Stanton stopped worrying about such things. Until he had done the job that he had been rebuilt for, he was determined to make that goal his sole purpose. As the weeks sped by, he kept determinedly to his regime, exercising regularly to keep himself in top physical condition, and studying the three-dimensional motion studies of the Nipe in action.

Only one of these made him ill the first time he watched it, but it was the only recording of the Nipe actually in the process of killing a man, so he watched, over and over again, the shots taken from the gun tower when the Nipe attacked Colonel Mannheim.

A full-sized mockup of the Nipe’s body had been built, with the best approximation possible of the Nipe’s bone structure and musculature, and Stanton worked with it to determine what, if any, were the Nipe’s physical limitations.

His only periods of relative relaxation occurred when he discussed the psychological peculiarities of the Nipe mind with George Yoritomo.

One afternoon, after a particularly strenuous boxing session, he walked into Yoritomo’s office with a grin on his face. “I’ve been considering the problem of the apparent paradox of a high technology in a ritual-taboo system.”

Yoritomo grinned back delightedly and waved Stanton to a chair. “Excellent! It is always much better if the student thinks these things out for himself. Now, while I fill this hand-furnace with tobacco and fire up, you will please explain to me all about it.”

Stanton sat down and settled himself comfortably. “All right. In the first place, there’s the notion of religion. In tribal cultures, the religion is usually--uh--animistic, I think the word is.”

Yoritomo nodded silently.

“They believe there are spirits everywhere,” Stanton said. “That sort of belief, it seems to me, would grow up in any race that had imagination, and the Nipes must have had plenty of that, or they wouldn’t have the technology that we know they do have. Am I on the right track?”

“Very good. Very good,” Yoritomo said in approval. “But what evidence have you that this technology was not given to them by some other, more advanced race?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” Stanton stared into space for a moment, then nodded his head. “Of course. It would take too long to teach them. It wouldn’t be worth all the trouble it would take to make them unlearn their fallacies and learn the new facts. It would take generations to do it unless this hypothetical other race killed off all the adult Nipes and started the little ones off fresh. And that didn’t happen, because if it had, the ritual-taboo system would have died out, too. So that other-race theory is out.”

“The argument is imperfect,” Yoritomo said, “but it will suffice for the moment. Go on about the religion.”

“Okay. Religious beliefs are not subject to pragmatic tests. That is, the spiritual beliefs aren’t. Any belief that could be disproven by such a test would eventually die out. But beliefs in ghosts or demons or angels or life after death aren’t disprovable by material tests, any more than they are provable. So, as a race increases its knowledge of the physical world, its religion would tend to become more and more spiritual.”

“Agreed. Yes. It happened so among human beings,” said Yoritomo. “But how do you link this fact with ritual-taboo?”

“Well, once a belief gains a foothold,” Stanton said, “it is very difficult to wipe it out, even among human beings. Among Nipes, it would be well-nigh impossible. Once a code of ritual and of social behavior had been set up, it became permanent.”

“For example?” Yoritomo urged.

“Well, shaking hands, for example,” Stanton said after a pause. “We still do that, even if we don’t have it fixed solidly in our heads that we must do it. I suppose it would never occur to a Nipe not to perform such a ritual.”

“Just so,” Yoritomo agreed vigorously. “Such things, once established in the minds of the race, would tend to remain. But it is a characteristic of a ritual-taboo system that it resists change. Change is evil. Change is wrong. We must use what we know to be true, not try something that has never been tried before. In a ritual-taboo system, a thing which is not ritual is, ipso facto, taboo. How, then, can we account for their high technological achievements?”

“The pragmatic engineering approach, I imagine,” Stanton said. “If a thing works, then go ahead and use it. It is usable. If not, it isn’t.”

“Approximately,” said Yoritomo. “But only approximately. Now it is my turn to lecture.” He put his pipe in an ashtray and held up a long, bony finger. “Firstly, we must remember that the Nipe is equipped with a functioning imagination. Secondly, he has in his memory a tremendous amount of data, all ready at hand. He is capable of working out theories in his head, you see. Like the ancient Greeks, he finds no need to test such theories--unless his thinking indicates that such an experiment would yield something useful. Unlike the Greeks, he has no aversion to experiment. But he sees no need for useless experiment, either.

“Oh, he would learn, yes. But once a given theory proved workable, how resistant he would be to a new theory. Innovators, even in our own culture, have a very hard time working against the great inertia of a recognized theory. How much harder it would be in a ritual-taboo society with a perfect memory! How long--how incredibly long--it would take such a race to achieve the technology the Nipe now has!”

“Hundreds of thousands of years,” said Stanton.

Yoritomo shook his head briskly. “Puh! Longer! Much longer!” He smiled with satisfaction. “I estimate that the Nipe race first invented the steam engine not less than ten million years ago!”

He kept smiling into the dead silence that followed.

After a long minute, Stanton said: “What about atomic energy?”

“At least two million years ago,” Yoritomo said. “I do not think they have had the interstellar drive more than some fifty thousand years.”

“No wonder our pet Nipe is so patient,” Stanton said with a touch of awe in his voice. “How long do you suppose their individual life-span is?”

“Not so long, in comparison,” said Yoritomo. “Perhaps no longer than our own at the least, or perhaps as much as five hundred years. Considering the tremendous handicaps against them, they have done quite well, I think. Quite well, indeed, for a race of illiterate cannibals.”

“How’s that again?” Stanton realized that the scientist was quite serious.

“Hadn’t it occurred to you, my friend, that they must be cannibals?” Yoritomo asked. “And that they must be very nearly illiterate?”

“No,” Stanton admitted, “it hadn’t.”

“The Nipe, like man, is omnivorous,” Yoritomo pointed out. “Specialization tends to lead any race up a blind alley, and dietary restrictions are a particularly pernicious form of specialization. A lion would starve to death in a wheat field. A horse would perish in a butcher shop full of steaks. A man will survive as long as there is something around to eat--even if it’s another man.”

Yoritomo picked up his pipe and began tapping the ashes out of it. “Also,” he went on, “we must remember that Man, early in his career of becoming top dog on Earth, began using a method of removing the unfit. Ritual traces of it remain today in some societies--the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, for instance, or the Christian Confirmation. Before and immediately after the Holocaust, there were still primitive societies on Earth--in New Guinea, for instance--which still made a rather hard ordeal out of the Rite of Passage, the ceremony whereby a boy becomes a man--if he passes the tests.”

Yoritomo was filling his pipe, a look of somber satisfaction on his lean face. “A few millennia ago, a boy who underwent those tests was killed outright if he failed. And was eaten. He had not shown the ability to overrule with reason his animal instincts. Therefore, he was not a human being, but an animal. What better use for a young and succulent animal than to provide meat for the common larder?”

“And you think the same process must have been used by the Nipes?” Stanton asked.

Yoritomo nodded vigorously as he applied a match flame to the tobacco in his pipe. “The Nipe race must, of necessity, have had some similar ritualistic tests or they would not have become what they are,” he said when he had puffed the pipe alight. “And we have already agreed that once the Nipes adopted something of that kind, it remained with them. Not so? Yes.

“Also, it can be considered extremely unlikely that the Nipe civilization--if such it can be called--has any geriatric problem. No, indeed. No old-age pensions, no old folks’ homes, no senility. No, nor any specialists in geriatrics, either. When a Nipe becomes a burden because of age, he is ritually murdered and eaten with all due solemnity.”

Yoritomo pointed his pipestem at Stanton. “Ah. You frown, my friend. Have I made them sound heartless, without the finer feelings of which we humans are so proud? Not so. When Junior Nipe fails his puberty tests, when Mama and Papa Nipe are sent to their final reward, I have no doubt that there is sadness in the hearts of their loved ones as the honored T-bones are passed around the table.”

He put the pipe back in his mouth and spoke around it. “My own ancestors, not too far back, performed a ritual suicide by disemboweling themselves with a long, sharp knife. Across the abdomen--so!--and up into the heart--so! It was considered very bad form to faint or die before the job was done. Nearby, a relative or a close friend stood with a sharp sword, to administer the coup de grace by decapitation. It was all very sad and very honorable. Their loved ones bore the sorrow with great pride.”

His voice, which had been low and tender, suddenly became very brisk. “Thank goodness it has gone out of fashion!”

“But how can you be sure they’re cannibals?” Stanton asked. “Your argument sounds logical enough, but you can’t be basing your theory on that alone.”

“True! True!” Yoritomo jabbed the air twice with a rapid forefinger. “Evidence for such a theory would be most welcome, would it not? Very well, I give you the evidence. He eats human beings, our Nipe.”

“That doesn’t make him a cannibal,” Stanton objected.

“Not strictly, perhaps. But consider. The Nipe is not a monster. He is not a criminal. No. He is a gentleman. He always behaves as a gentleman. He is shipwrecked on an alien planet. Around him, he sees evidence in profusion that ours is a technological society. But that is a contradiction! A paradox!

“For we are not civilized! No! We are not rational! We are not sane! We do not obey the Laws; we do not perform the Rituals. We are animals. Apparently intelligent animals, but animals nevertheless. How can this be?

“Ha! says the Nipe to himself. These animals must be ruled over by Real People. It is the only explanation. Not so?”

“Colonel Mannheim mentioned that,” Stanton said. “Are you implying that the Nipe thinks there are other Nipes around, running the world from secret hideouts, like the villains in a Fu Manchu novel?”

“Not quite,” said Yoritomo, laughing. “The Nipe is not at all incapable of learning something new. In point of fact, he is quite good at it, as witness the fact that he has learned many Earth languages. He picked up Russian in less than eight months simply by listening and observing. Like our own race, his undoubtedly evolved a great many languages during the beginnings of its progress--when there were many tribes, separated and out of communication with each other. It would not surprise me to find that most of these languages have survived and that our distressed astronaut knows them all. A new language would not bother him in the least.