Part 1

This Star Shall be Free -----------------------

By Murray Leinster

[Illustration: There were helmets with transparent windows, from which eyes looked out. But the windows were filled with water....]

Tork was a simple man of the caves. How could he dream that the star box held the power to make his people gods--or only a lost memory in stone?

The urge was part of an Antarean experiment in artificial ecological imbalance, though of course the cave-folk could not guess that. They were savages with no interest in science or, indeed, in anything much except filling their bellies and satisfying other primal urges. They inhabited a series of caves in a chalk formation above a river that ran through primordial England and France before it joined the Rhine and emptied into the sea.

They did not understand the urge at all--which was natural. It followed the disappearance of the ship from Antares by a full two hours, so they saw no connection between the two. Anyhow, it was just a vague, indefinite desire to move to the eastward--an impulse for which they had no explanation whatever.

Tork was spearing fish from a rock out in the river when the ship passed overhead. He was a young man, still gangling and awkward. He wasn’t up to a fight with One-Ear, yet, and had a bad time in consequence. One-Ear was the boss male of the cave-dwellers’ colony in the cliff over the river. He wanted to chase Tork away or kill him, and Tork had to be on guard every second. But he felt safe out on his rock.

He had just speared a fine ganoid when he heard a howl of terror from the shore. He jerked his head around. He saw Bent-Leg, the other adult male, go hobbling in terror toward his own cave-mouth, and he saw One-Ear knock two of his wives and three children off the ladder to his cave, so he could get in first. The others shrieked and popped into whatever crevice was at hand, including the small opening in which Tork himself slept when he dared. Then there was stillness.

Tork stared blankly. He saw no cause for alarm ashore. He ran his eyes along the top of the cliff. He saw birch and beech and oak, growing above the chalk. His eyes swept the stream. There were old-men’s stories of sea-monsters coming all the way up from the deep bay (which would some day be the English Channel). But the surface of the river was undisturbed. He scanned the farther shore. There were still a few of the low-browed ogres from whom Tork’s people had taken this land, but Tork knew that he could outrun or outswim them. And there were none of them in sight, either.

All was quiet. Tork grew curious, and stood up on his rock. Then he saw the ship.

It was an ovoid of polished, silvery metal. It was huge, two hundred feet by three hundred, and it floated tranquilly a hundred yards above the tree-tops. It moved to the stream, and then drifted smoothly in a new direction up the river. It was going to pass directly over Tork’s head.

It was so strange as to be unthinkable, and therefore it smote Tork with a terror past expression. He froze into a paralytic stillness, staring up at it. It made no sound. It had no features. Its perfectly reflecting sides presented to Tork’s dazed eyes a distorted oval reflection of the river and the stream-banks and the cliffs and all the countryside for many miles around. He did not recognize the reflection. To him it seemed that the thing’s hide was mottled, and that the mottlings shifted in a horrifying fashion.

It floated on, unwavering, as if its mass were too great to be affected by the gentle wind. Tork stood frozen in the ultimate catalepsy of a man faced with terror neither to be fought or fled from. He did not see the small, spidery frameworks built out from the shining hull. He did not see the tiny tubes moving this way and that, as if peering. He did not see several of the tubes converging upon him. He was numbed, dazed.

Nothing happened. The silver ovoid swam smoothly up above the river. Presently the river curved, and the ship from Antares went on tranquilly above the land. A little later it rose to clear a range of low hills. Later still, it vanished behind them.

* * * * *

When he recovered, Tork swam ashore with his fish, shouting vaingloriously that there was nothing to be afraid of. Heads popped timorously into view. Children appeared first, then grown-ups. One-Ear appeared last of all, with his red-rimmed eyes and whiskery truculence. There were babblings. Then--they died down. The cave-folk could not talk about the thing. They had no words for it. There were no precedents, however far-fetched, to compare it with. They babbled of their fright, but they could not talk about its cause.

In an hour, it appeared to have been forgotten. Tork cooked his fish. When his belly was quite full, a young girl named Berry stopped cautiously some yards away from him. She was at once shy and bold.

“You have much fish,” she said, with a toss of her head.

“Too much,” said Tork complacently. “I need a woman to help eat it.”

He looked at her. She was most likely One-Ear’s daughter, but she was slim and curved and desirable where he was bloated and gross and bad-tempered. An interesting, speculative idea occurred to Tork. He grinned tentatively.

She said, “One-Ear smelled your fish. He sent me to get some. Shall I tell him he is a woman if he eats it?”

Her eyes were intent; not quite mocking. Tork scowled. To let her give such a message would be to challenge One-Ear to mortal combat, and One-Ear was twenty years older and sixty pounds heavier than Tork. He tossed the girl a fish, all cooked and greasy as it was.

“I give you the fish,” said Tork grandly. “Eat it or give it to One-Ear. I don’t care!”

She caught the fish expertly. Her eyes lingered on him as she turned away. She turned again to peer at him over her shoulder as she climbed the ladder to One-Ear’s cave.

At just about that time the urge came to Tork. He suddenly wanted to travel to eastward.

Travel, to the cave-folk, was peril undiluted. They had clubs and fish-spears which were simply sharpened sticks. They had nothing else. Wolves had not yet been taught to fear men. The giant hyena still prowled the wild. There were cave-bears and innumerable beasts no man of Tork’s people could hope to cope with save by climbing the nearest tree. To want to travel anywhere was folly. To travel eastward, where a saber-tooth was rumored to den, was madness. Tork decided not to go.

But the urge remained exactly as strong as before. He summoned pictures of monstrous dangers. The urge did not deny them. It did not combat them. It simply ignored them. Tork wanted to travel to the east. He did not know why.

After half an hour, during which Tork struggled with himself, he saw the girl Berry come out of One-Ear’s cave. She began to crack nuts for One-Ear’s supper, using two stones. One-Ear’s teeth were no longer sound enough to cope with nuts.

Tork looked at her. Presently an astounding idea came to him. He saw that the girl glanced furtively at him sometimes. He made a secret beckoning motion with his hand. After a moment, Berry got up and moved to throw a handful of nutshells into the stream. She stood idly watching them float away. She was only a few feet from Tork.

“I go to the east,” said Tork in a low voice, “to look for a better cave than here.”

Her eyes flicked sidewise to him, but she gave no other sign. She did not move away, either. Tork elaborated: “A fine cave. A deep cave, where there is much game.”

She glanced at him again out of the corners of her eyes. Tork’s own eyes abruptly burned. He said, greatly daring: “Then I will come and take you to it!”

The girl tossed her head. Among the cave-folk, property-right in females--even one’s own daughters--preceded all other forms of possession. Were One-Ear to hear of this invasion of his proprietary rights, there would be war to the death immediately. But the girl did not move away; she did not laugh. Tork felt vast pride and enormous ambition stir within him. After a long, breathless instant the girl turned away from the water and went back to the pounding of nuts for One-Ear. On the way her eyes flickered to Tork. She smiled a faint, almost frightened smile. That was all.

But it was enough to send Tork off within the next half-hour with his club in his hand and high romantic dreamings in his heart--and a quite sincere conviction that he was moving eastward to find a cave in which to set up housekeeping.

Because of this, the journey became adventure. Once Tork was treed by a herd of small, piggish animals rather like the modern peccary. Once he fled to the river and dived in because of ominous rustlings which meant he was being stalked by something he didn’t wait to identify. And when, near nightfall, he picked a tree to sleep in, and started to climb it, he was halfway up to its lowest branch when he saw the ropelike doubling of the thickness of a slightly higher branch. He got down without rousing the great serpent, and went shivering for three miles--eastward--before he chose another tree to sleep in. But before he went to sleep he arranged these incidents into quite heroic form, suitable to be recounted to Berry.

* * * * *

Tork went on at sunrise. He paused once to stuff himself with blackberries--and left that spot via nearby trees when something grunting and furry charged him. In mid-morning he heard a far-away, earth-shaking sound that could come from nothing but saber-tooth himself. Then he heard a curious popping noise that he had never heard before, and the snarl ceased abruptly. The hair fairly stood up on Tork’s head. But the urge to move eastward was very strong indeed now. It seemed to grow stronger as he traveled. No other creatures seemed to feel it, however. Squirrels frisked in the trees. Once he saw a monstrous elk--the so-called Irish elk--whose antlers had a spread of yards. The monster looked at him with a stately air and did not flee. Tork was the one who gave ground, because the cave-folk had no missile weapons save stones thrown by hand. He made a circuit around the great beast.

Then he abruptly ran into tumbled ground, where there were practically no trees but very many rocks. It would be a perfect place for lying-in-wait. Also he saw the mouths of several very promising caves. If the urge had not become uncontrollably strong, he would have stopped to investigate them. But he went on. Once his sensitive nostrils smelled carrion, mingled with the musky animal odor of a great carnivore. Mentally he went into gibbering terror. In his mind he fled at top speed. But the urge was incredibly strong. He went on like someone possessed. He had freedom to dodge, to creep stealthily, to take every precaution for silence and to avoid the notice of the animals which had no need to fear one club-armed man. He could even run--provided he fled to eastward. It was no longer possible for him to turn back.

The urge continued to strengthen. After some miles he became an automaton--a blank-faced gangling figure, sun-bronzed and partly clad in an untanned hide. He carried a club and in his belt there was a sharpened stick which was his idea of a fish-spear. He trudged onward, his eyes unseeing, automatically adjusting his steps to the ground, apathetically moving around great masses of stone in his way. He was, for a time, completely at the mercy of any carnivore which happened to see him.

He did not even falter when he saw the great, silvery ovoid which had passed over his head the day before. He marched toward it with glassy eyes and an expressionless face. Yet the shape was vastly more daunting on the ground than in the air. It was still absolutely mirror-like on its outer surface. It still seemed featureless, because the spidery mounts of its scanning-tubes were tiny. But its monstrous size was more evident.

It rested on the ground on its larger, rounded end. Its smaller part pointed upward. It was three hundred feet high--three times the height of the tallest trees about it, some of which had been crushed by its weight as it descended. Their branches projected from beneath it. It was a gigantic silver egg, the height of a thirty-story building, and a city block thick. It rested on squashed oak-trees in completely enigmatic stillness, with no sign of life or motion anywhere about it.

Tork walked up to it stiffly, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. He moved into the very shadow of the thing. Then he stopped. The urge abruptly ceased.

Pure terror sent him into howling, headlong flight. And instantly the urge returned. Twenty yards from the outward-bulging silvery metal, he crashed to earth. Then he stood up and stiffly retraced his steps toward the ship. Again compulsion left him and he wailed and fled--and within twenty yards he slowed to a walk, and turned, and came back in blind obedience.

Ten times in all he tried to flee, and each time returned to the shadow of the motionless, mirror-like ovoid. The tenth time he stood still, panting, his eyes wild. He saw his own reflection on the surface of the thing. He croaked at it, thinking that here was another captive. His image made faces at him, but no sound. He could not make it answer. In the end he turned his back upon it sullenly. He stood shivering violently, like any wild thing caught and made helpless.

Half an hour later he saw something moving across the ground toward the great silver egg. There was a faint, faint sound, and a gigantic curved section of the egg opened. Sloshing water poured out and made puddles. There was a smell as of the ocean. The approaching thing, a vehicle, floated nearer, six feet aboveground, with strange shapes upon it and a tawny-striped mass of fur which Tork knew could be nothing but saber-tooth. Tork trembled in every limb, but he knew he could not flee.

Just before the vehicle floated into the opening made by the dropped curved plate, two of the shapes descended from it and came curiously toward Tork.

He shook like an aspen-leaf. He half-grasped his club and half-raised it, but he was too much unnerved to attack.

The shapes regarded him interestedly. They wore suits of a rubbery fabric bulging as if from liquid within. There were helmets with transparent windows, from which eyes looked out. But the windows were filled with water.

The creatures from Antares halted some paces from Tork. One of them trained a small tube upon him, and immediately he seemed to hear voices.

“We called you here to be kind to you. We saw you yesterday, standing upon a rock.”

Tork merely trembled. The second shape trained a tube upon him, and he heard another voice. There was no difference in the timbre, of course, because Tork’s own brain was translating direct mental impressions into words; but he knew that the second figure spoke.

“It is an experiment, Man. We come from a far star, mapping out worlds our people may some day need. Yours is a good world, with much water. We do not care for the land. Therefore we do not mind being kind to you who live on the land.... You have fire.”

Tork found his brain numbly agreeing. He thought of fire, and cookery, and the two creatures seemed to find his thoughts interesting.

“You have intelligence,” said the first creature brightly, “and it has occurred to us to make an experiment in ecology. How do you get food?”

Tork grasped only the final sentence. Again he thought numbly. Gathering nuts. Picking berries. Spearing fish with a sharpened stick. Digging shellfish. Small animals such as rabbits and squirrels, knocked over by lucky stones. He thought also of One-Ear, who had been well-fed enough yesterday merely to demand fish. On other occasions he had come bellowing, club in hand, and chased Tork away from the food he had gathered for himself.

“That is bad,” said the voice in Tork’s mind, but it seemed amused. “We shall show you ways to get much food. All the food you desire. We shall show you defenses against animals. It will be interesting to see what comes of an ecological imbalance so produced. You will wait here.”

* * * * *

The two shapes moved away--they floated a little above the ground, Tork noted dazedly--and entered the ship. The curved plate closed behind them. There was a whistling of air somewhere. To a man of later millennia, the sound might have suggested a water-lock closing, being filled with water so that water-dwelling creatures could swim from it freely into the liquid-filled interior of the ship from Antares. To Tork, it suggested nothing.

Nothing happened for hours. Then, suddenly, Tork saw a great elk moving steadily and hypnotically toward the ship from Antares. It reached a spot less than fifty yards from the ship’s side, and seemed suddenly to be released from compulsion. It turned and bounded away; then its flight slackened and stopped. It came back toward the ship. Fifty yards away, again it tried to escape, and again was recaptured.

Tork watched, wide-eyed.

Rabbits appeared, hopping toward the ship. They appeared by dozens and then by hundreds. The steady advance, converging from all directions, came to a halt in milling confusion at a fixed distance from the gigantic glistening egg.

The curved plate opened again, and again there was a great sloshing of water and the smell of the sea. Four or five shapes emerged, floating above the ground. Even before he saw tubes trained upon him, Tork was aware of fragments of thought-conversation.

“I acknowledge that an experiment on land cannot possibly affect our later use of this planet.” Another intonation, indignant: “But it is cruel! Give these creatures unlimited food and the means of defense and you condemn their descendants to starvation!” Then other voices said disjointedly, “I insist that a new ecological balance of low birth-rate will result--” “Land-animals are of no concern to us--” “Stability of nature--” “Some new factor will nullify the experiment absolutely--”

Tork was a savage. He was of the cave-folk, and he had never come into contact with an abstraction in his life. Because these were thoughts, he perceived them. He even understood them. But they had no reference to any of the other things in his mind or experience. So they lingered only like the fragments of a dream.

The creatures placed a sort of box before him. It seemed to Tork like a stone. There was a pattern of color leaning against it which after laborious study he discovered to be a reduced appearance of a human being. It was the first picture he had ever seen. Actually, it was a picture of him--the key pattern of the urge which had brought him, if the matter were fully understood. But he heeded the mental voices, referring to the box he thought a stone.

“This is a device which projects a desire. Since you are merely a man, we have stabilized the device so that it projects one desire only. That desire is of coming to the place from which the desire is projected. We drew you to this place by tuning the projection to you. It made you wish to come here.”

Tork’s brain assimilated the information after a fashion. Very patiently, the mental voices corrected his impressions. They went on:

“This device will now project only that desire, but we have left the tuning variable. Any human may change the tuning now. Stand close to the device and think of an animal, and the device will tune to animals of that sort and make them wish to come wherever the device may be.”

Tork thought of saber-tooth, and cringed. The mental voices were amused, again.

“Even that is arranged. Here is a picture of a man. Look at it and you will think only of a man, and the device will only call man to you. Here also is a picture of an elk. Place this by the device and look at it, and your thoughts of elk will tune the device, so elk will wish to come to you. Rabbits--”

Tork was frightened. It would be pleasant enough to be able to make squirrels or rabbits--he saw hundreds of rabbits now, out of the corner of his eye--come to be knocked on the head. But an elk? What could a man do with an elk? An elk could trample and toss----

“Naturally,” said the voice in his mind, with some dryness, “we give you safety from animals also, if you change your habits to make use of our gifts. We have made spears with points of stone, which you can soon learn to duplicate. With the picture-device you can draw animals to you, and with the spears you can kill them. Moreover--”

The voices in his mind went on and on. There were a bow and arrows. There were stone knives. For the purpose of the experiment, each instrument save the hypnotic device itself had been carefully designed to be understood by primitive minds.

“We of Antares seek new worlds for our race to inhabit. We have chosen your world for later use, and shall remain upon it for perhaps a hundred of your years, to survey it. We shall be able to see the first results of what we do today. Then we shall go back to our own world, and when we return we will see the final result of our gifts to you. What happens on the land, of course, will not affect our use of the seas.”

Another mental voice interrupted, protesting that the man was not given a fair chance to refuse the gifts. The instructor went on drily: “Your species can now multiply without limit. We think that you will overrun all the land and destroy all other animals for food, and ultimately destroy yourselves. But we are not sure. We are curious to learn. You can refuse the gift if you choose.”

Tork blinked. He understood--temporarily. But he was human and a savage. The prospect of unlimited food outweighed all other possible considerations. He was frightened, but he wanted all the food that could be had. Definitely.

Instructions continued. Presently Tork understood the spears, and was naively astonished. He understood the bows and arrows, and was amazed. He grew excited. He wanted to use the marvelous new things. He felt that the shapes were amused by him.

The land-suited figures floated back to the water-lock of the ship. It closed. He was left alone. He fingered the weapons. Another great plate lowered. But this was not a lock; it was a window. A vast expanse of transparent stuff appeared. Behind it was water, and in the liquid the Antareans--no longer in their rubbery suits--swam within the great metal egg, watching.