The Greks Bring Gifts

by Murray Leinster

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

THE GREKS WERE PEOPLE-HATERS They came to Earth in their space ship, bearing fabulous gifts - such as machines that did any day job automatically, and fertilizer that made plants shoot up overnight. But they presented their gifts with contempt, and with a look in their eyes that made people feel "creepy". Still, because of the brave new world they promised, they Greks could be forgiven anything - until they left and people discovered the machines were breaking down. Then their only choice was to beg the Greks to come back, on their own terms. And they knew the terms would be hard...

Release date: November 26, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

WE WHO remember the coming of the Greks find it hard to explain to a later generation just how terrifying that coming was, and why we acted as we did. After all, even at the beginning and for a really considerable time, the Greks made no menacing move. Their ship simply came casually around the edge of the moon and moved off some thousands of miles to one side. Then it stopped. It lay there motionless in space, as if looking us over and debating what to do about us, or with us. It could not be said that the ship made any alarming move or gave any evidence of untoward intentions. But we had hysterics.

Mainly, perhaps, that was because the Grek ship was monstrous. It was fully a quarter of a mile long, and thick in proportion. It glittered with a total-reflection surface material which kept it from either radiating heat to the emptiness of between-the-stars, or from absorbing heat when close to a white-hot sun. It was huge beyond imagining. We humans had sent probes to Mars and Venus, but we hadn’t yet landed a working party on the moon. The only space drive we could imagine was rockets, and we’d gotten rockets to do about all they could. Which wasn’t much. Until we saw the Grek ship, we couldn’t conceive of anything as gigantic, as powerful, and as deadly as that seemed to be.

So when the ship did appear, and lay still in space apparently considering what to make of Earth and its quaint aborigines, we gibbered. We felt that if there were another intelligent race in our galaxy, it must be made in the image and likeness of men. And if we’d been able to build a ship like the Grek one, and if we’d found a world like Earth, we’d have taken it over. If it had a primitive race in residence on it, we’d have enslaved or massacred them.

Naturally, then, we expected the Greks to act as we would have done in their place. So we had hysterics. But if we’d known from the beginning what we found out later, hysterics wouldn’t have begun to express our feelings!

At that, though, we were lucky. The Greks could have arrived half a century earlier, before the idea of broadcasting had been thought of and applied. We’d have been much worse off if newspapers had been the only way to distribute information. In other ways we were even luckier. One of the strangest ways was the good fortune we had in Jim Hackett. He was old enough to have been nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics, and young enough to have been refused it because of his youth. But apparently nobody thought of him at all. Certainly not as a piece of good luck.

At the moment we couldn’t imagine good luck in any form. On all of Earth hysteria succeeded hysterics. There were financial panics in all the civilized countries. Some people seemed to think that if Earth were to be destroyed or conquered by creatures from outer space, it would somehow be useful to have money credits in soundly managed banks. There were political crises, as if who was in office would matter if all human government—or humanity itself—were to be abolished. And, of course, great numbers of people tried to flee the cities in the belief that there would be greater safety where there were fewer numbers. This however, may have been true.

Meanwhile the Grek ship lay perfectly still in space. It made no move. It sent no signals. It showed no signs of life. Ultimately, that quietness had its effect. From crazy and tumultuous rioting, which had many cities in flames and turned loose death and destruction everywhere, things calmed down a little. As nobody knew how the riots had started nobody knew how they happened to stop. But in eighteen hours there was relative order again. We were no less frightened, but we’d become bewildered. We calmed to mere desperation. For the first time in three generations there was practically no tension in international affairs. The heads of government communicated in a common funk that allowed of sincerity. The danger was equal for all nations. So presently there was a shaky, jittering alliance of all the world against the Grek ship. Which remained motionless.

Things couldn’t go on in that state, obviously, so we attempted to make contact with the ship from beyond the stars. The attempts ranged from the idiotic to the absurd. An effort was made to open up two-way conversations by sending sequences of microwave pulses which said explicitly that two times two is four, and two times three is six, and so on to more rarefied mathematical conversation, such as a witticism about nine times twelve. There were attempts to communicate by means of television signals to the neighborhood of the moon, to inform the Greks—we didn’t know that name yet—that we called ourselves men, that we were civilized, that we conversed by sounds, and that this sound meant this object and that sound that. Not less than twelve different languages were used by different people trying this process, but—somehow there came a breakthrough.

Two days after their first appearance, the Greks replied. Their answer consisted of six completely unrelated words, evidently transmitted from recordings the Greks had made of the confusions transmitted to them. Together the words had no meaning, but they did convey the idea that the Greks recognized them as meaningful and invited more systematic broadcasts on the same order.

To us, at the time, that set of six random words had the impact of a stay of execution in a death house. The Greks ceased to be inexplicable and terrifying, and became merely strangers who could not speak a human language and humbly asked to be helped to learn one. So we immediately began to assist them.

Eventually they stopped our instructions by beaming down a coherent and meaningful message. Nobody knows how they learned which words meant what—not in the case of verbs, anyhow—or how they contrived a lucid if lawless grammar. These are things we haven’t found out yet. But the message arrived, and it was intelligible. It was warmly, blandly, deliciously comforting. We humans almost started to riot again out of pure relief.

The message said that the Grek ship greeted the inhabitants of this third planet out from the local sun. The ship was, so they said, a sort of school ship for spacemen of the Nurmi cluster. It trained aspirants for officers’ ratings in the space merchantships of that area, where there were thousands of civilized planets. The officers and teaching faculty were members of a race called Greks, and the ship was taking a class of Aldarian student spacemen on a training voyage. It had come upon the Earth by pure accident, while giving its students an exercise in the examination of unfamiliar solar systems. It had occurred to the Grek instructors that their student crewmen would find it very educational to make contact with a new intelligent race, to pass on such technical information as might be useful, and even—if the inhabitants of Earth approved —to prepare them for a sound commercial relationship later with the worlds the Aldarians knew.

For these reasons, therefore, the Grek ship asked permission to land. It had established communication for that purpose. The Greks’ intention—so they said—was purely and solely to benefit us, to make us healthy and wealthy and wise.

And we believed them! Heaven help us, we believed them!

EVERYBODY was comforted. Everybody was happy. Nobody would have thought, of course, that visitors from beyond the stars were do-gooders of purest ray serene. But we were desperately anxious to believe it, once the idea was suggested. More details came from the monstrous ship. Yes, they were utterly altruistic and wholly philanthropic. They traveled from star to star, innocently engaged in making people happy while they trained astrogators and engineroom officers as benevolent as themselves. What more would we want? How could we improve on that as bait? We couldn’t.

But the Greks could. They did.

They landed their ship in Ohio in an enormous earthen cradle Army engineers scooped out for them. In preparing the earth cradle, the military men thoughtfully buried four atomic fission bombs where they would be handy if we needed them. They were arranged to be detonated from a distance. There were also ballistic missiles with atomic warheads, prudently placed in concealment a good way from the landing site. They could blast even the Grek ship to incandescent, radioactive gas if the need arose. But apparently we were much ashamed of this afterward. From the moment of their landing until after their departure, it seems that nobody thought a single naughty thought about the Greks. They were wonderful! They were making everybody rich! For six months the Greks were deliriously revered.

It is still hard for us who went through all this to make another generation understand why we acted and felt as we did. But now we know what the Greks are like. Then we didn’t. Now we know what they came for. Then we were intoxicated by the gifts they brought us. We hadn’t discovered that unearned riches are as bad for a race as for a person. And the Greks had made us rich.

In the six months the Greks were aground we acquired broadcast power. Not yet an adequate supply for all the waste a planet’s population could achieve. Not yet. But anybody who had a receiving unit could draw from the air all the power he needed to light or heat his house and run his ground car or his small-sized business, if he had one. We had desalting plants turning salt water into fresh for the irrigation of the Sahara Basin, and we anticipated having all the fresh water we could use in all the arid regions of the world. We had fish-herding electronic devices that drove unbelievable quantities of ocean fish into estuaries to be netted. We had a sinter field which made the minerals in topsoil more available to plants, and our crops promised to be unmanageably huge. We had plastics we hadn’t dreamed of, materials we could hardly believe, and new manufacturing processes.…

After six months the Greks announced that they were going away. They’d leave us to the enjoyment of our new wealth. We owed them nothing. What they had done had been done out of the goodness of their hearts. True, they made most of their benefactions through their furry Aldarian student spacemen. We liked the Aldarians, though it was odd that they had external ears but were totally deaf. We felt uncomfortable in the presence of Greks. The feeling Greks produced in human beings was usually described as “creepy.” But we were grateful to them. We idolized them. Being the kind of idiots we were, we practically worshipped the Greks for their benefactions!

If all this seems improbable, it’s true just the same. The rest of the tale may make it believable.

The rest may as well begin with Jim Hackett on the day before the leaving of the Greks. The date of their departure had been proclaimed a planetary holiday, the first in human history. All of Earth would take the day off to do honor to those gray-skinned, bald and uninterested creatures who had remade our world much nearer to our hearts’ desire.

At the lift-off spot itself, in Ohio, it was estimated that not less than a million and a half human beings would congregate to tell the Greks goodbye. In the rest of America there were to be other gigantic farewell parties. They’d be linked to the actual lift-off spot by closed-circuit television. In Europe, in Asia, in Australia, in South America, in Africa—everywhere—the world prepared to do honor to the Greks on their departure.

In the United States, naturally, the celebration began with the worst traffic foul-up in the history of self-propelled vehicles. And Hackett was caught in it. He was going to the lift-off ceremony for a reason of his own. He’d made a suggestion to an archaeologist he knew, and he wanted to see what it turned up, if anything. He’d picked up Lucy Thale—she’d been Doctor Lucy Thale this past full month—at the hospital where she’d been interning. She wanted to see the Greks go away. After four hours of stop-and-go crawling, Hackett swerved off the official main highway to the liftoff site and turned onto a secondary road.

There was an enormous difference. The two-lane main road had been a solid, packed, crawling mass of vehicles. Now and again they halted by necessity. Sooner or later they started up again, to crawl at five to ten miles an hour until perforce they halted once more. When he got on the narrower road, though, Hackett could make fifty miles an hour or better.

It was a singularly perfect day, with remarkably green grass and an unusually blue sky, and little white clouds sailing overhead. This road wound and twisted, and the main highway gradually moved farther and farther away toward the horizon, until one couldn’t even smell the gas fumes from its fuel-driven cars. Seven-eighths of the cars on the road were still that kind. The cars that ran on broadcast power were coming out of the factories, but there weren’t anywhere near enough of them to meet the public demand. There were other difficulties about them, too. But everybody knew that everything would be ironed out shortly.

Hackett drove, thinking absorbedly to himself. Lucy Thale took a deep breath of the purer air.

“It’ll be a good thing,” she said, “when all cars run on broadcast power. It was stifling on the highway!”

Hackett grunted.

“It’s the heaviest traffic in history. I can imagine only one way it could be heavier.”
. . .