He was crazy as a coot, of course, but a special kind of crazy. If it hadn’t been so ghastly, you might have called it glorious crazy.
You wanted to laugh him off or brush him to one side, for that was the kind of jerk he was, but he wouldn’t laugh or brush.
I don’t know if I heard a sound—a footstep, maybe—or if I just sensed another presence, but all at once I knew we’d been joined by someone. I half got up and swung around toward the building and there, just outside the entrance, stood what looked at first to be a kind of moth made up in human size.
I don’t mean it was an insect—it just had the look of one. Its face was muffled up in a cloak it wore and it was not a human face and there was a ruff rising from its head like those crests you see on the helmets in the ancient plays.
Then I saw that the cloak was not a cloak at all, but a part of the creature and it looked like it might be folded wings, but it wasn’t wings.
“Gentlemen,” I said as quietly as I could, “we have a visitor.”
I walked toward the creature soft and easy and alert, not wanting to frighten it, but all set to take evasive action if it tried to put the finger on me.
“Be ready, Hutch,” I said.
“I’m covering you,” Hutch assured me and it was a comfort to know that he was there. A man couldn’t get into too much trouble with Hutch backing him.
I stopped about six feet from the creature and he didn’t look as bad close up as he did at a distance. His eyes seemed to be kind and gentle and his funny face, alien as it was, had a sort of peacefulness about it. But even so, you can’t always tell with aliens.
We stood there looking at one another. The both of us understood there was no use in talking. We just stood and sized one another up.
Then the creature took a couple of steps and reached out a hand that was more like a claw than hand. He took my hand in his and tugged for me to come.
There were just two things to do—either snatch my hand away or go.
I went.
I didn’t stop to get it figured out, but there were several factors that helped make up my mind. First off, the creature seemed to be friendly and intelligent. And Hutch and all the others were there, just behind me. And over and above all, you don’t get too far with aliens if you act stand-offish.
So I went.
We walked into the silo and behind me I heard the tramping feet of the others and it was a sound that was good to hear.
I didn’t waste any time wondering where the creature might have come from. I admitted to myself, as I walked along, that I had been half-expecting something just like this. The silo was so big that it could hold many things, even people or creatures, we could not know about. After all, we’d explored only one small corner of the first floor of it. The creature, I figured, must have come from somewhere on the upper floors as soon as he learned about us. It might have taken quite a while, one way or another, for the news to reach him.
He led me up three ramps to the fourth floor of the building and went down a corridor for a little way, then went into a room.
It was not a large room. It held just one machine, but this one was a double model; it had two bucket seats and two helmets. There was another creature in the room.
The first one led me over to the machine and motioned for me to take one of the seats.
I stood there for a while, watching Hutch and Pancake and Frost and all the others crowd into the place and line up against the wall.
Frost said: “A couple of you boys better stay outside and watch the corridor.”
Hutch asked me: “You going to sit down in that contraption, Captain?”
“Why not?” I said. “They seem to be all right. There’s more of us than them. They don’t mean us any harm.”
“It’s taking a chance,” said Hutch.
“Since when have we stopped taking chances?”
The creature I had met outside had sat down in one of the seats, so I made a few adjustments in the other. While I was doing this, the second creature went to a file and got out two sticks, but these sticks were transparent instead of being black. He lifted off the helmets and inserted the two sticks. Then he fitted one of the helmets on his fellow-creature’s head and held out the other to me.
I sat down and let him put it on and suddenly I was squatting on the floor across a sort of big coffee-table from the gent I had met outside.
“Now we can talk,” said the creature, “which we couldn’t do before.”
I wasn’t scared or flustered. It seemed just as natural as if it had been Hutch across the table.
“There will be a record made of everything we say,” said the creature. “When we are finished, you will get one copy and I will get the other for our files. You might call it a pact or a contract or whatever term seems to be most applicable.”
“I’m not much at contracts,” I told him. “There’s too much legal flypaper tied up with most of them.”
“An agreement, then,” the creature suggested. “A gentlemen’s agreement.”
“Good enough,” I said.
Agreements are convenient things. You can break them any time you want. Especially gentlemen’s agreements.
“I suppose you have figured out what this place is,” he said.
“Well, not for sure,” I replied. “Library is the closest that we have come.”
“It’s a university, a galactic university. We specialize in extension or home-study courses.”
I’m afraid I gulped a bit. “Why, that’s just fine.”
“Our courses are open to all who wish to take them. There are no entrance fees and there is no tuition. Neither are there any scholastic requirements for enrollment. You yourself can see how difficult it would be to set up such requirements in a galaxy where there are many races of varying viewpoints and abilities.”
“You bet I can.”
“The courses are free to all who can make use of them,” he said. “We do expect, of course, that they make proper use of them and that they display some diligence in study.”
“You mean anyone at all can enroll?” I asked. “And it don’t cost anything?”
After the first disappointment, I was beginning to see the possibilities. With bona fide university educations for the taking, it would be possible to set up one of the sweetest rackets that anyone could ask for.
“There’s one restriction,” the creature explained. “We cannot, obviously, concern ourselves with individuals. The paperwork would get completely out of hand. We enroll cultures. You, as a representative of your culture—what is it you call yourselves?”
“The human race, originally of the planet Earth, now covering some half million cubic light-years. I’d have to see your chart …”
“That’s not necessary at the moment. We would be quite happy to accept your application for the entrance of the human race.”
It took the wind out of me for a minute. I wasn’t any representative of the human race. And if I could be, I wouldn’t. This was my deal, not the human race’s. But I couldn’t let him know that, of course. He wouldn’t have done business with me.
“Now not so fast,” I pleaded. “There’s a question or two I’d like to have you answer. What kind of courses do you offer? What kind of electives do you have?”
“First there is the basic course,” the creature said. “It is more or less a familiarization course, a sort of orientation. It includes those subjects which we believe can be of the most use to the race in question. It is, quite naturally, tailored specifically for each student culture. After that, there is a wide field of electives, hundreds of thousands of them.”
“How about final exams and tests and things like that?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, surely,” said the creature. “Such tests are conducted every—tell me about your time system.” I told him the best I c
ould and he seemed to understand.
“I’d say,” he finally said, “that about every thousand years of your time would come fairly close. It is a long-range program and to conduct tests any oftener would put some strain upon our resources and might be of little value.”
That decided me. What happened a thousand years from now was no concern of mine.
I asked a few more questions to throw him off the track—just in case he might have been suspicious—about the history of the university and such.
I still can’t believe it. It’s hard to conceive of any race working a million years to set up a university aimed at the eventual education of an entire galaxy, travelling to all the planets to assemble data, compiling the records of countless cultures, correlating and classifying and sorting out that mass of information to set up the study courses.
It was just too big for a man to grasp.
For a while, he had me reeling on the ropes and faintly starry-eyed about the whole affair. But then I managed to snap back to normal.
“All right, Professor,” I said, “you can sign us up. What am I supposed to do?”
“Not a thing,” he said. “The recording of our discussion will supply the data. We’ll outline the course of basic study and you then may take such electives as you wish.”
“If we can’t haul it all in one trip, we can come back again?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely. I anticipate you may wish to send a fleet to carry all you need. We’ll supply sufficient machines and as many copies of the study recordings as you think you will need.”
“It’ll take a lot,” I said bluntly, figuring I’d start high and haggle my way down. “An awful lot.”
“I am aware of that,” he told me. “Education for an entire culture is no simple matter. But we are geared for it.”
So there we had it—all legal and airtight. We could get anything we wanted and as much as we wanted and we’d have a right to it. No one could say we stole it. Not even Doc could say that.
The creature explained to me the system of notation they used on the recording cylinders and how the courses would be boxed and numbered so they could be used in context. He promised to supply me with recordings of the electives so I could pick out what we wanted.
He was real happy about finding another customer and he proudly told me of all the others that they had and he held forth at length on the satisfaction that an educator feels at the opportunity to pass on the torch of knowledge.
He had me feeling like a heel.
Then we were through and I was sitting in the seat again and the second creature was taking the helmet off my head.
I got up and the first creature rose to his feet and faced me. We couldn’t talk any more than we could to start with. It was a weird feeling, to face a being you’ve just made a deal with and not be able to say a single word that he can understand.
But he held out both his hands and I took them in mine and he gave my hands a friendly squeeze.
“Why don’t you go ahead and kiss him?” asked Hutch. “Me and the boys will look the other way.”
Ordinarily, I’d have slugged Hutch for a crack like that, but I didn’t even get sore.
The second creature took the two sticks out of the machine and handed one to me. They’d gone in transparent, but they came out black.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
We got out as fast as we could and still keep our dignity—If you could call it that.
Outside the silo, I got Hutch and Pancake and Frost together and told them what had happened.
“We got the Universe by the tail,” I said, “with a downhill pull.”
“What about Doc?” asked Frost.
“Don’t you see? It’s just the kind of deal that would appeal to him. We can let on we’re noble and big-hearted and acting in good faith. All I need to do is get close enough to grab him.”
“He won’t even listen to you,” said Pancake. “He won’t believe a word you say.”
“You guys stay right here,” I said. “I’ll handle Doc.”
I walked back across the stretch of ground between the building and the ship. There was no sign of Doc. I was all set to holler for him, then thought better of it. I took a chance and started up the ladder. I reached the port and there was still no sign of him.
I moved warily into the ship. I thought I knew what had become of him, but there was no need to take more chances than I had to.
I found him in his chair in the dispensary. He was stiffer than a goat. The gun lay on the floor. There were two empty bottles beside the chair.
I stood and looked at him and knew what had happened. After I had left, he had got to thinking about the situation and had run into the problem of how he’d climb down off that limb and he had solved it the way he’d solved most of his problems all his life.
I got a blanket and covered him. Then I rummaged around and found another bottle. I uncorked it and put it beside the chair, where he could reach it easy. Then I picked up the gun and went to call the others in.
I lay in bed that night and thought about it and it was beautiful. There were so many angles that a man didn’t know quite where to start.
There was the university racket which, queerly enough, was entirely legitimate, except that the professor out in the silo never meant it to be sold.
And there was the quickie vacation deal, offering a year or two on an alien planet in six hours of actual time. All we’d need to do was pick a number of electives in geography or social science or whatever they might call it.
There could be an information bureau or a research agency, charging fancy prices to run down facts on any and all subjects.
Without a doubt, there’d be some on-the-spot historical recordings and with those in hand, we could retail adventure, perfectly safe adventure, to the stay-at-homes who might hanker for it.
I thought about that and a lot of other things which were not quite so sure, but at least probable and worth investigating, and I thought, too, about how the professors had finally arrived at what seemed to me a sure-fire effective medium for education.
You wanted to know about a thing, so you up and lived it; you learned it on the ground. You didn’t read about it or hear about it or even see it in plain three-dimension—you experienced it. You walked the soil of the planet you wanted to know about; you lived with the beings that you wished to study; you saw as an eye-witness, and perhaps as a participant, the history that you sought to learn.
And it could be used in other ways as well. You could learn to build anything, even a spaceship, by actually building one. You could learn how an alien machine might operate by putting it together, step by simple step. There was no field of knowledge in which it would not work—and work far better than standard educational methods.
Right then and there, I made up my mind we’d not release a single stick until one of us had previewed it. No telling what a man might find in one of them that could be put to practical use.
I fell asleep dreaming about chemical miracles and new engineering principles, of better business methods and new philosophic concepts. And I even figured out how a man could make a mint of money out of a philosophic concept.
We were on top of the Universe for sure. We’d set up a corporation with more angles than you could shake a stick at. We would be big time. In a thousand years or so, of course, there’d be a reckoning, but none of us would be around to take part in it.
Doc sobered up by morning and I had Frost heave him in the brig. He wasn’t dangerous any longer, but I figured that a spell in pokey might do him a world of good. After a while, I intended to talk to him, but right at the moment I was much too busy to be bothered with him.
I went over to the silo with Hutch and Pancake and had another session with the professor on the double-seat machine and picked out a batch of electives an
d settled various matters.
Other professors began supplying us with the courses, all boxed and labeled, and we set the crew and the engine gang to work hauling them and the machines aboard and stowing them away.
Hutch and I stood outside the silo and watched the work go on.
“I never thought,” said Hutch, “that we’d hit the jackpot this way. To be downright honest with you, I never thought we’d hit it. I always thought we’d just go on looking. It goes to show how wrong a man can be.”
“Those professors are soft in the head,” I said. “They never asked me any questions. I can think of a lot they could have asked that I couldn’t answer.”
“They’re honest and think everyone’s the same. That’s what comes of getting so wrapped up in something you have time for nothing else.”
And that was true enough. The professor race has been busy for a million years doing a job it took a million years to do—and another million and a million after that—and that never would be finished.
“I can’t figure why they did it,” I said. “There’s no profit in it.”
“Not for them,” said Hutch, “but there is for us. I tell you, Captain, it takes brains to work out the angles.”
I told him what I had figured out about previewing everything before we gave it out, so we would be sure we let nothing slip away from us.
Hutch was impressed. “I’ll say this for you, Captain—you don’t miss a bet. And that’s the way it should be. We might as well milk this deal for every cent it’s worth.”
“I think we should be methodical about this previewing business,” I said. “We should start at the beginning and go straight through to the end.”
Hutch said he thought so, too. “But it will take a lot of time,” he warned me.
“That’s why we should start right now. The orientation course is on board already and we could start with that. All we’d have to do is set up a machine and Pancake could help you with it.”
“Help me!” yelled Hutch. “Who said anything about me doing it? I ain’t cut out for that stuff. You know yourself I never do any reading—”
“It isn’t reading. You just live it. You’ll be having fun while we’re out here slaving.”