The Liberation of Earth
William Tenn

This, then, is the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters. Heigh-ho, here is the tale.
      August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we
progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive an-cestors, our unliberated,
unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds. Still the tale must be told, with all of
its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.
      Why must it be told? Have any of you a better thing to do? We have had water and weeds and lie
in a valley of gusts, So rest, relax and listen. And suck air, suck air.
      On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known
as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous
silver cigar.
      The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly
materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran, how they shouted, how they pointed!
      How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of their chiefest institutions, that a strange metal
craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order here to cause military
aircraft to surround it with loaded weapons, gave instructions there for hastily grouped scientists, with
signaling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras
took pictures of it; men with typewriters wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of
it.
      All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.
      Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship, and the first of the aliens stepped out
in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic
garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely
folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.
      Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about
halfway up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a
response when he had finished, and, receiving none, retired into the ship.
      That night, the first of our liberation! Or the first of our first liberation, should I say? That night,
anyhow! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice-hockey, televising,
smashing atoms, red-baiting, conducting giveaway shows, and signing affidavits—all the incredible
minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live—as
com-pared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.


The big question, of course, was—what had the alien said? Had he called on the hu-man race to
surrender? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he
considered a reasonable offer—for, let us say, the north polar icecap—politely withdrawn so that we
could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that
he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race—and would we
please direct him to the proper authority so that he might submit his credentials?
     Not to know was quite maddening.
     Since decision rested with the diplomats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that
night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations
waited under the belly of the motionless starship. The delegation had been instructed to welcome the
aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind's
friendly inten-tions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more
than one atom bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag—along with the U.N. banner and their
own national emblem. Thus did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.
     When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the
three official languages of the United Nations—English, French and Russian—asked him to consider this
planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before—which
was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him as it was completely
incomprehen-sible to the representatives of world government.
     Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a sus-picious similarity
between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled
over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by aliens of this
particular type, humanity's most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries
of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to
any subsequent exploring party.
     However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the
dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment. Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences
for our kind.
     You, sir, now you sit back and listen. You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well
enough do I remember, how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did;
you will listen until too much high land be-tween water holes blocks me off from life.
     Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints,
recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.


Pursuant to the young Hindu's suggestions, the one professor of comparative lin-guistics in the world
capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar ver-sion of the dead dialect was summoned from
an academic convention in New York, where he was reading a paper he had been working on for
eighteen years: An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in
Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.
     Yea, verily, all these things—and more, many more—did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance
contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?
     The disgruntled scholar, minus—as he kept insisting bitterly—some of his most essential word lists,
was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous
black shadow of the alien spaceship.
     Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not
been allayed by a new and disconcerting development. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship
carrying great quantities of immense, shim-mering metal which they proceeded to assemble into
something that was obviously a machine—though it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built,
and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood
courteously in the neighborhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go
through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost for-gotten when the cornerstone of the
library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the U.N. would reply, each one hoping desperately to
make up for the alien's lack of fa-miliarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand gestures and
facial expres-sions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out
the difficulties in such physical, gestural communication with creatures possessing—as these aliens
did—five manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.
     The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the
aliens, trying to amass a usable vocabulary in a language whose pecu-liarities he could only extrapolate
from the limited samples supplied him by one who must inevitably speak it with the most outlandish of
foreign accents—these vexations were minor indeed compared to the disquiet felt by the representatives
of world government. They beheld the extraterrestrial visitors move every day to a new site on their
planet and proceed to assemble there a titanic structure of flickering metal which muttered nostalgically to
itself, as if to keep alive the memory of those faraway factories which had given it birth.
      True, there was always the alien who would pause in his evidently supervisory la-bors to release the
set little speech; but not even the excellent manners he displayed, in listening to upward of fifty-six replies
in as many languages, helped dispel the panic caused whenever a human scientist, investigating the
shimmering machines, touched a projecting edge and promptly shrank into a disappearing pinpoint. This,
while not a frequent occurrence, happened often enough to cause chronic indiges-tion and insomnia
among human administrators.


Finally, having used up most of his nervous system as fuel, the professor collated enough of the
language to make conversation possible. He—and, through him, the world—was thereupon told the
following:
      The aliens were members of a highly advanced civilization which had spread its culture throughout
the entire galaxy. Cognizant of the limitations of the as-yet-un-derdeveloped animals who had latterly
become dominant upon Earth, they had placed us in a sort of benevolent ostracism. Until either we or our
institutions had evolved to a level permitting, say, at least associate membership in the galactic federation
(under the sponsoring tutelage, for the first few millennia, of one of the older, more wide-spread and
important species in that federation)—until that time, all invasions of our privacy and ignorance—except
for a few scientific expeditions conducted un-der conditions of great secrecy—had been strictly
forbidden by universal agreement.
      Several individuals who had violated this ruling—at great cost to our racial sanity, and enormous
profit to our reigning religions—had been so promptly and severely punished that no known infringements
had occurred for some time. Our recent growth-curve had been satisfactory enough to cause hopes that
a bare thirty or forty centuries more would suffice to place us on applicant status with the federation.
      Unfortunately, the peoples of this stellar community were many, and varied as greatly in their ethical
outlook as in their biological composition. Quite a few spe-cies lagged a considerable social distance
behind the Dendi, as our visitors called themselves. One of these, a race of horrible, worm-like organisms
known as the Troxxt—almost as advanced technologically as they were retarded in moral
devel-opment—had suddenly volunteered for the position of sole and absolute ruler of the galaxy. They
had seized control of several key suns, with their attendant planetary systems, and, after a calculated
decimation of the races thus captured, had announced their intention of punishing with a merciless
extinction all species unable to appre-ciate from these object-lessons the value of unconditional
surrender.
      In despair, the galactic federation had turned to the Dendi, one of the oldest, most selfless, and yet
most powerful of races in civilized space, and commissioned them—as the military arm of the
federation—to hunt down the Troxxt, defeat them wher-ever they had gained illegal suzerainty, and
destroy forever their power to wage war.
      This order had come almost too late. Everywhere the Troxxt had gained so much the advantage of
attack that the Dendi were able to contain them only by enormous sacrifice. For centuries now, the
conflict had careened across our vast island uni-verse. In the course of it, densely populated planets had
been disintegrated; suns had been blasted into novae; and whole groups of stars ground into swirling
cosmic dust.
      A temporary stalemate had been reached a short while ago, and—reeling and breathless—both
sides were using the lull to strengthen weak spots in their perimeter.
     Thus, the Troxxt had finally moved into the till-then peaceful section of space that contained our
solar system—among others. They were thoroughly uninterested in our tiny planet with its meager
resources, nor did they care much for such celestial neighbors as Mars or Jupiter. They established their
headquarters on a planet of Proxima Centauri—the star nearest our own sun—and proceeded to
consolidate their offensive-defensive network between Rigel and Aldebaran. At this point in their
explanation, the Dendi pointed out, the exigencies of interstellar strategy tended to become too
complicated for anything but three-dimensional maps; let us here ac-cept the simple statement, they
suggested, that it became immediately vital for them to strike rapidly, and make the Troxxt position on
Proxima Centauri untenable—to establish a base inside their lines of communication. The most likely spot
for a such a base was Earth.


The Dendi apologized profusely for intruding on our development, an intrusion which might cost us
dear in our delicate developmental state. But, as they explained—in impeccable pre-Bengali—before
their arrival we had, in effect, become (all un-knowingly) a satrapy of the awful Troxxt. We could now
consider ourselves liberated.
      We thanked them much for that.
      Besides, their leader pointed out proudly, the Dendi were engaged in a war for the sake of
civilization itself, against an enemy so horrible, so obscene in its nature, and so utterly filthy in its
practices, that it was unworthy of the label of intelligent life. They were fighting, not only for themselves,
but for every loyal member of the galac-tic federation; for every small and helpless species; for every
obscure race too weak to defend itself against a ravaging conqueror. Would humanity stand aloof from
such a conflict?
      There was just a slight bit of hesitation as the information was digested. Then—"No!" humanity
roared back through such mass-communication media as televi-sion, newspapers, reverberating jungle
drums, and mule-mounted backwoods mes-senger. "We will not stand aloof. We will help you
destroy this menace to the very fabric of civilization! Just tell us what you want us to do!"
      Well, nothing in particular, the aliens replied with some embarrassment. Possibly in a little while there
might be something—several little things, in fact—which could be quite useful; but, for the moment, if we
would concentrate on not getting in their way when they serviced their gun-mounts, they would be very
grateful, really...
      This reply tended to create a large amount of uncertainty among the two billion of Earth's human
population. For several days afterward, there was a planet-wide ten-dency—the legend has come down
to us—of people failing to meet each other's eyes.
      But then Man rallied from this substantial blow to his pride. He would be useful, be it ever so
humbly, to the race which had liberated him from potential subjugation by the ineffably ugly Troxxt. For
this, let us remember well our ancestors! Let us hymn their sincere efforts amid their ignorance!
      All standing armies, all air and sea fleets, were reorganized into guard-patrols around the Dendi
weapons; no human might approach within two miles of the murmuring machinery without a pass
countersigned by the Dendi. Since they were never known to sign such a pass during the entire period of
their stay on this planet, however, this loophole-provision was never exercised as far as is known; and
the immediate neighborhood of the extraterrestrial weapons became and remained henceforth
wholesomely free of two-legged creatures.


Cooperation with our liberators took precedence over all other human activities. The order of the day
was a slogan first given voice by a Harvard professor of government in a querulous radio round table on
"Man's Place in a Somewhat Overcivilized Universe."
    "Let us forget our individual egos and collective conceits," the professor cried at one point. "Let us
subordinate everything—to the end that the freedom of the solar system in general, and Earth in
particular, must and shall be preserved!"
      Despite its mouth-filling qualities, this slogan was repeated everywhere. Still, it was difficult
sometimes to know exactly what the Dendi wanted—partly because of the limited number of interpreters
available to the heads of the various sovereign states, and partly because of their leader's tendency to
vanish into his ship after ambiguous and equivocal statements—such as the curt admonition to "Evacuate
Washington!"
      On that occasion, both the Secretary of State and the American President perspired fearfully
through five hours of a July day in all the silk-hatted, stiff-collared, dark-suited diplomatic regalia that the
barbaric past demanded of political leaders who would deal with the representatives of another people.
They waited and wilted be-neath the enormous ship—which no human had ever been invited to enter,
despite the wistful hints constantly thrown out by university professors and aeronautical designers—they
waited patiently and wetly for the Dendi leader to emerge and let them know whether he had meant the
State of Washington or Washington, D.C.
      The tale comes down to us at this point as a tale of glory. The capitol building taken apart in a few
days and set up almost intact in the foothills of the Rocky Moun-tains; the missing Archives that were
later to turn up in the Children's Room of a Public Library in Duluth, Iowa; the bottles of Potomac River
water carefully borne westward and ceremoniously poured into the circular concrete ditch built around
the President's mansion (from which, unfortunately, it was to evaporate within a week because of the
relatively low humidity of the region)—all these are proud moments in the galactic history of our species,
from which not even the later knowledge that the Dendi wished to build no gun site on the spot, nor even
an ammunition dump, but merely a recreation hall for their troops, could remove any of the grandeur of
our determined cooperation and most willing sacrifice.
      There is no denying, however, that the ego of our race was greatly damaged by the discovery, in the
course of a routine journalistic interview, that the aliens totaled no more powerful a group than a squad;
and that their leader, instead of the great scien-tist and key military strategist that we might justifiably have
expected the Galactic Federation to furnish for the protection of Terra, ranked as the interstellar
equiva-lent of a buck sergeant.
      That the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy, had
waited in such obeisant fashion upon a mere noncommissioned officer was hard for us to swallow, but
that the impending Battle of Earth was to have a historical dignity only slightly higher than that of a patrol
action was impossibly humiliating.


And then there was the matter of "lendi."
      The aliens, while installing or servicing their planetwide weapon system, would occasionally fling
aside an evidently unusable fragment of the talking metal. Sepa-rate from the machine of which it had
been a component, the substance seemed to lose all those qualities which were deleterious to mankind
and retain several which were quite useful indeed. For example, if a portion of the strange material was
at-tached to any terrestrial metal—and insulated carefully from contact with other substances—it would,
in a few hours, itself become exactly the metal that it touched, whether that happened to be zinc, gold, or
pure uranium.
      This stuff—"lendi," men have heard the aliens call it—was shortly in frantic de-mand in an economy
ruptured by constant and unexpected emptyings of its most important industrial centers.
      Everywhere the aliens went, to and from their weapon sites, hordes of ragged hu-mans stood
chanting—well outside the two-mile limit—"Any lendi, Dendi?" All attempts by law-enforcement
agencies of the planet to put a stop to this shameless, wholesale begging were useless—especially since
the Dendi themselves seemed to get some unexplainable pleasure out of scattering tiny pieces of lendi to
the scrab-bling multitude. When policemen and soldiery began to join the trampling, mur-derous dash to
the corner of the meadows wherein had fallen the highly versatile and garrulous metal, governments gave
up.
     Mankind almost began to hope for the attack to come, so that it would be relieved of the festering
consideration of its own patent inferiorities. A few of the more fa-natically conservative among our
ancestors probably even began to regret liberation.
     They did, children; they did! Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes were among the very first
to be dissolved and melted down by the red flame-balls. One cannot, after all, turn one's back on
progress!
     Two days before the month of September was over, the aliens announced that they had detected
activity upon one of the moons of Saturn. The Troxxt were evidently threading their treacherous way
inward through the solar system. Considering their vicious and deceitful propensities, the Dendi warned,
an attack from these worm-like monstrosities might be expected at any moment.
     Few humans went to sleep as the night rolled up to and past the meridian on which they dwelt.
Almost all eyes were lifted to a sky carefully denuded of clouds by watch-ful Dendi. There was a brisk
trade in cheap telescopes and bits of smoked glass in some sections of the planet, while other portions
experienced a substantial boom in spells and charms of the all-inclusive, or omnibus, variety.

The Troxxt attacked in three cylindrical black ships simultaneously: one in the Southern Hemisphere,
and two in the Northern. Great gouts of green flame roared out of their tiny craft, and everything touched
by this imploded into a translucent, glass-like sand. No Dendi was hurt by these, however, and from each
of the now-writhing gun mounts there bubbled forth a series of scarlet clouds which pursued the Troxxt
hungrily, until forced by a dwindling velocity to fall back upon Earth.
     Here they had an unhappy after-effect. Any populated area into which these pale pink cloudlets
chanced to fall was rapidly transformed into a cemetery—a cemetery, if the truth be told as it has been
handed down to us, that had more the odor of the kitchen than the grave. The inhabitants of these
unfortunate localities were subjected to enormous increases of temperature. Their skin reddened, then
blackened; their hair and nails shriveled; their very flesh turned into liquid and boiled off their bones.
Altogether a disagreeable way for one-tenth of the human race to die.
     The only consolation was the capture of a black cylinder by one of the red clouds. When, as a result
of this, it had turned white-hot and poured its substance down in the form of a metallic rainstorm, the two
ships assaulting the Northern Hemisphere abruptly retreated to the asteroids into which the
Dendi—because of severely lim-ited numbers—steadfastly refused to pursue them.
     In the next twenty-four hours, the aliens—resident aliens, let us say—held con-ferences, made
repairs to their weapons, and commiserated with us. Humanity bur-ied its dead. This last was a custom
of our forefathers that was most worthy of note, and one that has not, of course, survived into modern
times.
     By the time the Troxxt returned, Man was ready for them. He could not, unfortu-nately, stand to
arms as he most ardently desired to do, but he could and did stand to optical instrument and conjurer's
oration.
     Once more the little red clouds burst joyfully into the upper reaches of the strato-sphere; once more
the green flames wailed and tore at the chattering spires of lendi; once more men died by the thousands in
the boiling backwash of war. But this time, there was a slight difference: the green flames of the Troxxt
abruptly changed color after the engagement had lasted three hours; they became darker, more bluish.
And, as they did so, Dendi after Dendi collapsed at his station and died in convulsions.
     The call for retreat was evidently sounded. The survivors fought their way to the tremendous ship in
which they had come. With an explosion from her stern jets that blasted a red-hot furrow southward
through France, and kicked Marseilles into the Mediterranean, the ship roared into space and fled home
ignominiously.
    Humanity steeled itself for the coming ordeal of horror under the Troxxt.


They were truly worm-like in form. As soon as the two night-black cylinders had landed, they strode
from their ships, their tiny segmented bodies held off the ground by a complex harness supported by long
and slender metal crutches. They erected a dome-like fort around each ship—one in Australia and one in
the Ukraine—cap-tured the few courageous individuals who had ventured close to their landing sites, and
disappeared back into the dark craft with their squirming prizes.
     While some men drilled about nervously in the ancient military patterns, others pored anxiously over
scientific texts and records pertaining to the visit of the Dendi—in the desperate hope of finding a way of
preserving terrestrial independence against this ravening conqueror of the star-spattered galaxy.
     And yet all this time, the human captives inside the artificially darkened space-ships (the Troxxt,
having no eyes, not only had little use for light, but the more sed-entary individuals among them actually
found such radiation disagreeable to their sensitive, unpigmented skins) were not being tortured for
information—nor vivi-sected in the earnest quest of knowledge on a slightly higher level—but educated.
     Educated in the Troxxtian language, that is.
     True it was that a large number found themselves utterly inadequate for the task which the Troxxt
had set them, and temporarily became servants to the more suc-cessful students. And another, albeit
smaller, group developed various forms of frus-tration hysteria—ranging from mild unhappiness to
complete catatonic depres-sion—over the difficulties presented by a language whose every verb was
irregular, and whose myriads of prepositions were formed by noun-adjective combinations derived from
the subject of the previous sentence. But, eventually, eleven human beings were released, to blink madly
in the sunlight as certified interpreters of Troxxt.
     These liberators, it seemed, had never visited Bengal in the heyday of its millen-nia-past civilization.
     Yes, these liberators. For the Troxxt had landed on the sixth day of the ancient, al-most mythical
month of October. And October the Sixth is, of course, the Holy Day of the Second Liberation. Let us
remember, let us revere. (If only we could figure out which day it is in our calendar!)


The tale the interpreters told caused men to hang their heads in shame and gnash their teeth at the
deception they had allowed the Dendi to practice upon them.
      True, the Dendi had been commissioned by the Galactic Federation to hunt the Troxxt down and
destroy them. This was largely because the Dendi were the Galactic Federation. One of the first
intelligent arrivals on the interstellar scene, the huge crea-tures had organized a vast police force to
protect them and their power against any contingency of revolt that might arise in the future. This police
force was ostensibly a congress of all thinking life forms throughout the galaxy; actually, it was an efficient
means of keeping them under rigid control.
      Most species thus-far discovered were docile and tractable, however; the Dendi had been ruling
from time immemorial, said they—very well, then, let the Dendi continue to rule. Did it make that much
difference?
      But, throughout the centuries, opposition to the Dendi grew—and the nuclei of the opposition were
the protoplasm-based creatures. What, in fact, had come to be known as the Protoplasmic League.
      Though small in number, the creatures whose life cycles were derived from the chemical and
physical properties of protoplasm varied greatly in size, structure, and specialization. A galactic
community deriving the main wells of its power from them would be a dynamic instead of a static place,
where extragalactic travel would be encouraged, instead of being inhibited, as it was at present because
of Dendi fears of meeting a superior civilization. It would be a true democracy of species—a real
bio-logical republic—where all creatures of adequate intelligence and cultural develop-ment would enjoy
a control of their destinies at present experienced by the silicon-based Dendi alone.
      To this end, the Troxxt—the only important race which had steadfastly refused the complete
surrender of armaments demanded of all members of the Federation—had been implored by a minor
member of the Protoplasmic League to rescue it from the devastation which the Dendi intended to visit
upon it, as punishment for an unlawful exploratory excursion outside the boundaries of the galaxy.
      Faced with the determination of the Troxxt to defend their cousins in organic chemistry, and the
suddenly aroused hostility of at least two-thirds of the interstellar peoples, the Dendi had summoned a
rump meeting of the Galactic Council; declared a state of revolt in being; and proceeded to cement their
disintegrating rule with the blasted life-forces of a hundred worlds. The Troxxt, hopelessly outnumbered
and out-equipped, had been able to continue the struggle only because of the great inge-nuity and
selflessness of other members of the Protoplasmic League, who had risked extinction to supply them with
newly developed secret weapons.
      Hadn't we guessed the nature of the beast from the enormous precautions it had taken to prevent the
exposure of any part of its body to the intensely corrosive atmo-sphere of Earth? Surely the seamless,
barely translucent suits which our recent visi-tors had worn for every moment of their stay on our world
should have made us suspect a body chemistry developed from complex silicon compounds rather than
those of carbon?
      Humanity hung its collective head and admitted that the suspicion had never occurred to it.
      Well, the Troxxt admitted generously, we were extremely inexperienced and pos-sibly a little too
trusting. Put it down to that. Our naiveté, however costly to them—our liberators—would not be allowed
to deprive us of that complete citizenship which the Troxxt were claiming as the birthright of all.
      But as for our leaders, our probably corrupted, certainly irresponsible leaders...


The first executions of U.N. officials, heads of states, and pre-Bengali interpreters as "Traitors to
Protoplasm"—after some of the lengthiest and most nearly-perfectly-fair trials in the history of
Earth—were held a week after G-J Day (Galaxy-Joining Day), the inspiring occasion on which—amidst
gorgeous ceremonies—Humanity was invited to join, first the Protoplasmic League and thence the New
and Demo-cratic Galactic Federation of All Species, All Races.
      Nor was that all. Whereas the Dendi had contemptuously shoved us to one side as they went about
their business of making our planet safe for tyranny, and had—in all probability—built special devices
which made the very touch of their weapons fatal for us, the Troxxt—with the sincere friendliness which
had made their name a byword for democracy and decency wherever living creatures came together
among the stars—our Second Liberators, as we lovingly called them, actually preferred to have us help
them with the intensive, accelerating labor of planetary defense.
      So humanity's intestines dissolved under the invisible glare of the forces used to assemble the new,
incredibly complex weapons; men sickened and died, in scrab-bling hordes, inside the mines which the
Troxxt had made deeper than any we had dug hitherto; men's bodies broke open and exploded in the
undersea oil-drilling sites which the Troxxt had declared were essential.
      Children's schooldays were requested, too, in such collecting drives as "Platinum Scrap for
Procyon" and "Radioactive Debris for Deneb." Housewives also were im-plored to save on salt
whenever possible—this substance being useful to the Troxxt in literally dozens of incomprehensible
ways—and colorful posters reminded: "Don't salinate—sugarfy!"
      And over all—courteously caring for us like an intelligent parent—were our mentors, taking their
giant supervisory strides on metallic crutches while their pale little bodies lay curled in the hammocks that
swung from each paired length of shining leg.
      Truly, even in the midst of a complete economic paralysis caused by the concen-tration of all major
productive facilities on other-worldly armaments, and despite the anguished cries of those suffering from
peculiar industrial injuries which our medical men were totally unequipped to handle, in the midst of all
this mind-wrack-ing disorganization, it was yet very exhilarating to realize that we had taken our law-ful
place in the future government of the galaxy and were even now helping to make the Universe Safe for
Democracy.


But the Dendi returned to smash this idyll. They came in their huge, silvery space-ships, and the
Troxxt, barely warned in time, just managed to rally under the blow and fight back in kind. Even so, the
Troxxt ship in the Ukraine was almost immedi-ately forced to flee to its base in the depths of space. After
three days, the only Troxxt on Earth were the devoted members of a little band guarding the ship in
Australia. They proved, in three or more months, to be as difficult to remove from the face of our planet
as the continent itself; and since there was now a state of close and hostile siege, with the Dendi on one
side of the globe and the Troxxt on the other, the battle assumed frightful proportions.
      Seas boiled; whole steppes burned away; the climate itself shifted and changed under the grueling
pressure of the cataclysm. By the time the Dendi solved the prob-lem, the planet Venus had been blasted
from the skies in the course of a complicated battle maneuver, and Earth had wobbled over as orbital
substitute.
      The solution was simple: since the Troxxt were too firmly based on the small con-tinent to be driven
away, the numerically superior Dendi brought up enough firepower to disintegrate all Australia into an ash
that muddied the Pacific. This oc-curred on the twenty-fourth of June, the Holy Day of First Reliberation.
A day of reckoning for what remained of the human race, however.
      How could we have been so naive, the Dendi wanted to know, as to be taken in by the chauvinistic
pro-protoplasm propaganda? Surely, if physical characteristics were to be the criteria of our racial
empathy, we would not orient ourselves on a narrow chemical basis! The Dendi life-plasma was based
on silicon instead of carbon, true, but did not vertebrates—appendaged vertebrates, at that, such as we
and the Dendi—have infinitely more in common, in spite of a minor biochemical difference or two, than
vertebrates and legless, armless, slime-crawling creatures who happened, quite accidentally, to possess
an identical organic substance?
      As for this fantastic picture of life in the galaxy...Well! The Dendi shrugged their quintuple shoulders
as they went about the intricate business of erecting their noisy weapons all over the rubble of our planet.
Had we ever seen a representative of these protoplasmic races the Troxxt were supposedly protecting?
No, nor would we. For as soon as a race—animal, vegetable, or mineral—developed enough to
constitute even a potential danger to the sinuous aggressors, its civilization was systematically
dis-mantled by the watchful Troxxt. We were in so primitive a state that they had not considered it at all
risky to allow us the outward seeming of full participation.
      Could we say we had learned a single useful piece of information about Troxxt technology—for all
of the work we had done on their machines, for all of the lives we had lost in the process? No, of course
not! We had merely contributed our might to the enslavement of far-off races who had done us no harm.
      There was much that we had cause to feel guilty about, the Dendi told us gravely—once the few
surviving interpreters of the pre-Bengali dialect had crawled out of hid-ing. But our collective onus was as
nothing compared to that borne by "vermicular collaborationists"—those traitors who had supplanted our
martyred former leaders. And then there were the unspeakable human interpreters who had had linguistic
traffic with creatures destroying a two-million-year-old galactic peace! Why, killing was almost too good
for them, the Dendi murmured as they killed them.


When the Troxxt ripped their way back into possession of Earth some eighteen months later, bringing
us the sweet fruits of the Second Reliberation—as well as a complete and most convincing rebuttal of the
Dendi—there were few humans found who were willing to accept with any real enthusiasm the
responsibilities of newly opened and highly paid positions in language, science, and government.
      Of course, since the Troxxt, in order to reliberate Earth, had found it necessary to blast a
tremendous chunk out of the Northern Hemisphere, there were very few hu-mans to be found in the first
place...
      Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secre-tary General of the
United Nations when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This
was the liberation, by the way, which swept the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our
forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.
      Possibly it was at this time—possibly a liberation or so later—that the Troxxt and the Dendi
discovered the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions
demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zigzagged coruscatingly and murderously away in
the direction of Aldebaran.
      That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from par-ent to child, to
child's child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my
father I heard it as I ran with him from water puddle to distant water puddle, across the searing heat of
yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick
green weed, whenever the planet beneath us quivered in omen of a geological spasm that might bury us in
its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration threatened to fling us into empty space.
      Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across
miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for
each other's carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air, which leaves
our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.
      Naked, hungry, and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry, and thirsty do we scamper
our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.
      The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father
before him. Suck air, grab clusters, and hear the last holy obser-vation of our history:
"Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thor-oughly
liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!"


                                                Afterword


Though this story was read aloud during protests by students in the nineteen sixties at rallies opposing
our participation in the Vietnam War, it was actually written during and about the Korean War, a decade
earlier.
      My feelings about that situation were really quite simple.
      North Korea invaded South Korea across the thirty-eighth parallel. The United States, acting for the
United Nations (read, please, the Galactic Federation), came to the aid of South Korea, driving the
North Koreans all the way back. Thereupon, the People's Repub-lic of China, with the backing of the
Soviet Union, came to the aid of North Korea, driving the U.S. forces back in turn. The entire matter has
not been entirely resolved to this day, leaving the country in a kind of military stasis, with armistice and
peace talks coming up in a desultory fashion at Panmunjom, the approximate midpoint.
      The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies
Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a re-sult, the organized
Left inveighed against what it called "Truman's War," and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the
official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle
against the godless Communists.
     In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean
(and later a Vietnamese) in such a situation. (But recently I have come to the conclusion that if I had been
a Korean, North or South, under those same circumstances, I would very much have welcomed the U.S.
intervention. Am I growing old? Or just official?)
     As was pretty much the case with "Brooklyn Project," absolutely none of the top sci-ence-fiction
magazines wanted to touch the story. It was finally purchased by Bob Lowndes of Columbia Publications
for his Future Science Fiction, then the butcher-paper bottom of the field.
     When I at last read the story in print, I was quite proud of it. But nobody, absolutely nobody,
seemed to notice it.
     Not even the F.B.I.


Written 1950 / Published 1953