It was a backward world, all right—in a special and very deadly manner!
God knows I didn't want Hacker in the preliminary delegation right from the start. I wasn't thinking, either, of the screwball ways history can go about poetically repeating itself sometimes. I just knew that an uppity, smart-alecky kid of fifty could only cause trouble.
He already had.
Rayna had been our earlier landfall on the First Interstellar Expedition. It possessed a fairly intelligent form of life, even if the Raynans were oviparous and technologically retarded. Hacker had taken over the bulldozer to clear the area around our craft, Terra I, and he had been repeatedly told to stay very close to it. But no, he insisted on flattening out the peat-like top of the nearest hill too. Unfortunately that hilltop was an incubation bed for Raynan fledglings. The massacre involved not only a vast number of hatching eggs but five adult females, and we had to get away pronto while thousands of paper limbs waved threateningly at the murderers from Earth.
I'm only the Science Chronicler of this expedition but Dr. Barnes is Chief Medical Officer. His protests should have mattered where mine didn't. "I'm a hundred per cent behind Johnson," he told Captain Weber. "That kid's no damned good. The three of us will go into town with these Newtaneans and, sure as I'm standing here, Hacker will do something wrong."
Captain Weber, looking worried as usual, tried to explain. "He'll just do the chauffeuring." But he got off that tack immediately when he saw we were not following along. "Look, I know he's a pest. But this is a political matter, for the good of the Space Corps. His great-great-uncle is President of the World Council. For all I know the old man hates his guts, won't listen to a word he says, but let's not take any chances. We're going to need plenty of these expeditions. And hyper-drive craft take an awful lot out of the economy."
The upshot of the matter was that we patriotically agreed to the setup. The captain gave Hacker a good chewing-out about respecting the rights of the Newtaneans.
The kid turned out to be surprisingly amenable on that score. "They're human!" he said, and I could see he was very sincere about it. "I wouldn't do anything to hurt them, sir. What's more, they must be almost as smart as we are and I'm not about to commit suicide."
So the three of us got into the jeep and rolled out of Terra I onto Newtane's soil.
I still felt uncomfortable about Hacker, though. He had tasted blood on Rayna and the effect of that on him had been unusually bad; he had acquired a reckless attitude toward the rights of intelligent life, his own included.
As if to prove me wrong, he drove very carefully over the special road the Newtaneans had laid out overnight from our landing area to the highway a mile or so away. The three carloads of scowling plenipotentiaries up ahead looked appealingly funny. While the Newtaneans were remarkably, even handsomely, like us (except for a certain closeness of the eyes and a reversed ordering of their fingers) their facial muscles carried different emotional convictions. On our landing ten hours before those officials had thought our smiling faces indicated angry aggressiveness and we had been equally uncertain about their intentions. But their Semanticizer had eventually made the true state of affairs clear. Evolution had determined that an upward set of Newtanean facial muscles meant a bad situation, a downward set pleasure and cordiality. The more they scowled the more we smiled and everybody was very happy about the potential flowering of transgalactic culture that we were instituting.
When we turned onto the magnificent superhighway, however, Hacker became furious. He kept trying to pull over to the right but a steady stream of scarab-shaped cars, filled with curious sightseers, kept getting in his way.
"This is crazy," he cried.
"I think they drive on the left here," Dr. Barnes tried to explain.
"That's what I mean—they're crazy!"
"They did it that way in England for centuries," I said. "It took a long time to get them to change."
"Fine, fine." Suddenly he laughed, as if pleased with his capacity for tolerance. "If it's good enough for them it's good enough for us visitors. They sure know how to build beautiful roads!"
I suppose I should have been pleased with this shift toward good humor but I wasn't. I just could not like the youngster. He had been forgivably cocky for his age before, but now something nasty had been added.
Still, he remained on his best behavior as we approached Crona, the capital city. Its golden towers gleamed in the sun and everywhere there were crowds of beautiful tan people, waving to us and happily scowling their welcome.
The lead cars stopped before a particularly elegant skyscraper that was set in the middle of vast, symmetrical gardens. We got out and were greeted by dignitaries accompanied by technicians with Semanticizing equipment. (If this equipment worked slowly, it was still faster than any we'd developed.) The men who came toward us were puzzled when we extended our hands but, once the translation came through and they understood it was an Earth custom, they copied our gesture. Only they all put out their left hands. It took a while before reasonable contact could be made.
"Interesting," said Dr. Barnes. "They all seem to be left-handed."
"I don't see what's so interesting about that," Hacker snorted through his puggish nose. "I've seen left-handed people on Earth."
"Good for you," the doctor answered drily.
Hacker looked a little annoyed but for once managed to keep quiet.
I explained to the receiving delegation how hyper-radio contact could be established with our system for information exchanges and then told them tomorrow's group from Terra I would be much larger. It would be in a position to set out the technical arrangements in all the necessary detail.
The dialogue crept along as translations were made, but finally an especially regal figure stepped forward and told us the rest of the proceedings would take place within the building. We followed the Newtaneans into a hall so vast that we still seemed to be outdoors. Subtle colors were playing free-form patterns on the walls and the synesthetic reaction was that of hearing a music too beautiful, too perfect, for the relative crudity of the human ear to grasp alone. "This," Hacker laughed, "is my idea of heaven!"
I wasn't about to unbend and openly agree with him on anything. But celestial it really was. And then the subtly rich smells of the food began to play on our nostrils. It was brought out on great automatic servers and robot arms set heaping, steaming plates before the fifty Newtaneans. We, of course, had to refuse, taking out our compacted rations and setting them before us.
All the Newtaneans were still meat-eaters. The main course was a small fowl, thoroughly browned in gravy. For me the most interesting thing about it was that four drumstick legs stuck out of each torso rather than the regulation two found on all earth-based birds. For Hacker, though, a more practical matter was involved.
"I'd sure like to try a helping of that bird," he said.
The two of us, naturally, were shocked. "That must have been a living creature once," said Barnes.
"So what?"
"Well, our civilization is essentially vegetarian. They just haven't reached our level as yet in that respect."
"Nuts loaf to you!" Hacker snapped. "And synthetic yeast pie too! I've eaten flesh."
That really upset me. I know there's still a little surreptitious meat-consumption on Earth—genetics shows we must get a few throwbacks in every generation—but I'd never before met anyone who openly boasted about it. Synthetic foods meet gourmet needs better than traditional ones do anyway. (Of course, I don't mean the dull compacted stuff we get on long space hops but the food served on Terran planets themselves.) Any Earthman eating flesh back home is deliberately trying to taste the atavistic sensations of savagery.
"You know how immoral that is," I told him.
"Hacker, let's forget the moral issue," Barnes said, considering him with disgust. "Let's just be sensible. We don't know enough about Newtane yet to eat anything."
Hacker laughed. "Why, it smells just like our own food, only better." He picked at his vita-concentrate. "Oh, let's forget about the whole thing."
We tried to. Several dignitaries rose to their full seven feet and spoke slowly into Semanticizers, flinging their queer hands out for emphasis with their thumbs waving where our pinkies do. Suddenly, though, Hacker got up from his seat and hurried down the long table to the place where the leading spokesman was eating. He leaned over him, speaking into the nearest translator, and I could see the Newtanean smiling broadly, as if trying to refuse something, while Hacker frowned. Finally the smile faded into a friendly scowl. Nothing good could be coming out of this.
A minute later a robot arm proffered a loaded plate to Hacker and he started back to us with it. Barnes rose to stop him, but before Hacker reached us he had taken two mouthfuls of the meat.
I have never seen such sheer self-satisfied delight on a human face as after those first bites.
"You shouldn't be doing that," Barnes said when he sat down next to us again.
"You're just old fogies," Hacker grunted through a meat-stuffed mouth. "This is the best food I've ever eaten."
He somehow shoveled another load of meat between his lips.
Thirty seconds later his face twisted into a caricature of the human physiognomy, all writhing lines, as if every muscle were breaking loose from its neighbors. The last unswallowed portion of food erupted from his mouth and he fell forward into the vile mess.
He was dead.
Pandemonium spread through the hall. Everywhere wildly smiling faces expressed despair at such an end for an honored guest. Barnes sprang into action, pulling the portable medical kit from his belt and immediately starting blood tests while some native doctors joined him with their emergency equipment. "Must start revitalizing immediately," he said, then stopped, ashen-faced, as he studied an analyzer tube. "Fantastic! No, it can't be!"
The Newtaneans were equally bewildered. They rushed Hacker to a nearby treatment chamber. All I could do was wait, while the Newtanean leader explained that Hacker had told him we had authorized his trying the food. There was no need to doubt his story. It was just what the kid would have done. I did my best to assure him that we knew his intentions had been honorable.
A half-hour later Barnes returned, a robot platform following with Hacker, body covered by a preservative glaze, on it.
"Nothing can be done," he said. "I've tried everything. Hacker's too thoroughly dead for anything ever to bring him back. We'll just have to take his body home for further study."
"But what killed him?" I demanded.
"A dozen or so things out of a thousand possibilities."
"You mean you don't have any idea?"
"Oh, I have some idea. Too many ideas in fact. Look, Johnson, chemistry's not your specialty but this is fairly elementary. All life contains protein, right?"
"Right."
"And all protein consists of amino acids. Every natural protein back home is built on levo—left turn—amino acids. Here it is just the opposite, the mirror image of what we know. Every amino acid is dextro—to the right!"
"But how can it be different here?"
"Johnson, they could ask the same question about us with equal justification—or, rather, equal lack of justification."
I was trying to feel my way through the confusion. "Barnes, I know a world could be made of anti-matter but—"
"No, no. Anti-matter is a reversal of changes within the atom. These atoms are the same as ours. It's the organization that is different—regular molecules with a different twist."
"But why should it have killed him then? We absorb starch and reject cellulose which is closely related. But the body just refuses to accept the cellulose. It doesn't necessarily go ahead and die."
"Starch and cellulose are both dextro, old man. This is a more fundamental difference. Maybe the body just throws off some of these compounds too. But there were some—plenty, I suspect—it couldn't throw off." He glanced toward the stiffening corpse, sympathetically.
"The poor kid couldn't leave well enough alone."
Well, we are two universal days out from Newtane and soon we will drop from hyper-drive as we reach the orbit of Pluto. I shouldn't still be feeling as uneasy as I do. I'm sure I shouldn't. We have had five friendly, informative days with the people of a great civilization remarkably like ours, and President Hacker has radioed he understands perfectly that we were not responsible for the tragedy, nobody was. The kid, it seems, wasn't the apple of his eye anyway.
Ninety men and one corpse returning to the security of terra firma. I should, when all is said and done, be happy with the way most things have worked out. But I am a Chronicler and I know the peculiarly symbolic, seemingly superficial ways in which history manages to repeat itself.
It is more than three centuries since the last war on Earth between rightists and leftists. That was a matter of differing concepts of economics and politics. I can't help wondering, though, whether there are not even more fundamental points of eventual conflict in the universe that we have barely discovered. If there are, I'm beginning to suspect they'll still have something to do with the unfathomable difference between Right and Left, a difference that took many lives centuries ago—and may not be through with us yet.