Murray Leinster - Propagandist

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MURRAY LEINSTER

PROPAGANDIST

You REMEMBER the Space Assassins, of course. They were that race of which no human being ever

saw a living member, and escaped to tell about it afterward. You also remember the deadly, far-flung

search that

was made for their base, their home. They'd been sniping our ships for a long time. But then a squadron

of their space fleet raided the Earth colony on Capella Three and without warning or provocation or

alternative slaughtered every one of the colony's half million human population. Then the hunt for them

began.

This is the story of one of the incidents of that hunt —and also it's the story of a dog named Buck.

Buck trailed his master sedately into the control room of the light cruiser Kennessee. He waited patiently

until the skipper looked up from the electron telescope. Then Buck's master—Holden—sat down with

the sheaf of wave records he'd brought from the communications room. Buck blinked wisely at the

skipper and lay down on the floor with an audible, loose-jointed thump. He put his nose between his

paws and sighed heavily. But the sigh was not of un-happiness. Buck was a simple dog. He was friendly

with everybody on the Kennessee, from the skipper himself to the lowliest mess boy, but his master and

private deity was Junior Lieutenant Holden. Whithersoever Holden went, there Buck went also—

regulations permitting—and waited until Holden wanted to go somewhere else.

Now he ky on the foamite flooring. He heard his master's voice, and the skipper's in reply. They were

concerned and uneasy. Buck dozed. Little, half-formed dreams ran through his slumber. Memory

dreams, mostly, of himself racing gloriously through tall grass on the green fields of Earth, with Holden

always somewhere near. The voices of the two men formed a half-heard background to his dozing.

The men were troubled. The Kennessee rode a comet's orbit through the solar system of Masa Gamma,

her drive off and giving no sign of life. She was impersonating a barren visitor from the void, spying out

the ground for what would be—if she was successful—the monstrous destruction of an entire

race by planet-smasher guided missiles and the merciless weapons of an Earth fleet. The men did not

like it. They'd hoped that some other ship would be the one to meet with success in its search. But they

had their orders.

Some weeks back the ship had dropped from overdrive to less-than-light speed far beyond the outermost

of the Masa Gamma planets. She'd decelerated to an appropriate speed and course for a wanderer, and

she'd begun her ride along a comet's path through the eleven-planet system. And almost immediately her

receptors had picked up evidence of civilization here. Space radio signals. They were unintelligible, of

course, but they told that here was a civilization comparable to human culture on a technical basis. And

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that was what the Keimessee, with every other light ship of Earth's space navy, was hunting for. There

was a race which, without known contact with Earthmen, was the deadly enemy of humanity. For years

past, exploring ships from Earth had dropped out of sight with ominous frequency. There had been

suspicions, but no proof of an inimical race which destroyed humans wherever it came upon them. But

six months ago the Earth colony on Capella Three had been wiped out, terribly, by raiders of whom

nothing was known except that they were not human. So somewhere there was a race which held Earth

to be its enemy. It had to be found. If it could not be negotiated with, it must be destroyed before it grew

strong enough to wipe out all of humankind. And the men on the Kennessee knew that they might have

found it on the planets of Masa Gamma. This system had never been explored before, and this

civilization which had space radio might be the one—

Buck, the dog, dozed lightly on the control-room floor. Little fragments of dreams ran through his half-

slumbering consciousness: the smells in the engine room; an irrelevant fragment of chasing a cat; a

moment or two in which he sniffed elaborately at a

tree ... A slightly louder comment made him open his eyes.

"They've interplanetary travel, sir, at least"—that was Holden. "We've picked up space-radio messages

from definitely between planets. It looks like this is the race we were sent to find."

The skipper nodded.

"It could be. But if they're to be smashed on our report, we need to make sure. That's orders, too. Can

they smash the Kennessee? That's the test for the enemy. If this race can't kill us, they're not the enemy

we're looking for. If they can, they are. We've got to find out."

"But interplanetary travel is good evidence—"

"It's not interstellar travel," said the skipper. "We'll send a torp back immediately with all the data to

date. But you've picked up no whango waves, Holden. We've no proof that these folk can travel between

the stars. The enemy can."

"They might be concealing the fact," said Holden. "They'd have picked up our whango wave on arrival.

They might be laying for us, waiting for us to walk into their parlor where they can smash us without a

chance to fight back or report. That would be typical."

He stood up and Buck got immediately to his four paws and wagged his tail. His master, Holden, was

going to go somewhere. So Buck was going with him. He waited contently. To Buck, happiness was

going where Holden went, being wherever Holden was, simply soaking in the sensation of being with

Holden. It was a very simple pleasure, but it was all he asked of fate or chance. When Holden petted him

or played roughly with him, Buck was filled with ecstatic happiness, but now he waited contentedly

enough simply to follow Holden.

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