Dead Giveaway

by Randall Garrett

It's difficult for the average person to grasp just how much information can be packed into a city covering ten thousand square miles with a population density equal to that of Manhattan. How long would it take the hypothetical Man From Mars to investigate New York or London if he had only the City to work with, if he found them just as they stand except that the inhabitants had vanished?

The technological level of the aliens could not be said to be either "above" or "below" that of Man: it could only be said to be "different." It was as if the two cultures complemented each other; the areas of knowledge which the aliens had explored seemed to be those which Mankind had not yet touched, while, at the same time, there appeared to be many levels of common human knowledge which the aliens had never approached.

From the combination of the two, whole new fields of human thought and endeavor had been opened.

No trace of the alien spaceships had been uncovered, but the anti-gravitational devices in their aircraft, plus the basic principles of Man's own near-light-velocity drive had given Man the ultralight drive.

Their knowledge of social organization and function far exceeded that of Man, and the hints taken from the deciphered writings of the aliens had radically changed Man's notions of government. Now humanity could build a Galactic Civilization—a unity that was neither a pure democracy nor an absolute dictatorship, but resulted in optimum governmental control combined with optimum individual freedom. It was e pluribus unum plus. Their technological writings were few, insofar as physics and chemistry were concerned. What there were turned out to be elementary texts rather than advanced studies—which was fortunate, because it had been through these that the cultural xenologists had been able to decipher the language of the aliens, a language that was no more alien to the modern mind than, say, ancient Egyptian or Cretan.

But without any advanced texts, deciphering the workings of the thousands of devices that the aliens had left behind was a tedious job. The elementary textbooks seemed to deal with the same sort of science that human beings were used to, but, at some point beyond, the aliens had taken a slightly different course, and, at first, only the very simplest of their mechanisms could be analyzed. But the investigators learned from the simpler mechanisms, and found themselves able to take the next step forward to more complex ones. However, it still remained a fact that the majority of the devices were as incomprehensible to the investigators as would the function of a transistor have been to James Clerk Maxwell.

In the areas of the social sciences, data was deciphered at a fairly rapid rate; the aliens seemed to have concentrated all their efforts on that. Psionics, on the other hand, seemed never to have occurred to them, much less to have been investigated. And yet, there were devices in Centaurus City that bore queer generic resemblances to common Terrestrial psionic machines. But there was no hint of such things in the alien literature.

And the physical sciences were deciphered only slowly, by a process of cut-and-try and cut-and-try again.

The investigations would take time. There were only a relatively small handful of men working on the problems that the City posed. Not because there weren't plenty of men who would have sacrificed their time and efforts to further the work, but because the planet, being hostile to Man, simply would not support very many investigators. It was not economically feasible to pour more men and material into the project after the point of diminishing returns had been reached. Theoretically, it would have been possible to re-seal the City's dome and pump in an atmosphere that human beings could live with, but, aside from every other consideration, it was likely that such an atmosphere would ruin many of the artifacts within the City.

Besides, the work in the City was heady stuff. Investigation of the City took a particular type of high-level mind, and that kind of mind did not occur in vast numbers.