The Gentle Vultures
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"The Gentle Vultures" is a short story by Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the magazine if: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1958, and was reprinted in the collection Nine Tomorrows in 1959.
The story is one of a number that Asimov wrote expressing his abhorrence of the cold war nuclear arms race, but its lightly ironic flavor has earned it more positive critical responses than those drawn by the bitter moralism of Silly Asses and Darwinian Pool Room.
The Hurrians, a small, tailed, vegetarian small-primate species have found on their space travels that large, non-tailed omnivorous intelligent ape species always end up destroying themselves in a nuclear war. The Hurrians adopted the policy of helping to rebuild the remains of a planetary society after nuclear war, while extracting tribute and genetically modifying the inhabitants into a more peaceful race. They are not acting completely selflessly, either: as is discovered in the subsequent conversation with a captured human, each race "helped" in this fashion pays the Hurrians a "modest" contribution, choosing the product that this race is best at. In one case, an otherwise poor race pays in its own members, by forfeiting a set number of beings into slaves each year.
The Hurrians learned of Earth at the beginning of the Cold War but were surprised that an atomic war did not develop. They establish a base on the Moon to wait for Earth to destroy itself with nuclear bombs, but after fifteen years, the war has not come, although their calculations provided for a much quicker resolution. They cannot simply leave either: the dominant social theories provide that "primates" of Earth will soon develop space travel and, presumably because of their violence, quickly set chaos among the civilizations.
In desperation, they kidnap a human to try to discover why the nuclear war has not happened. The human taunts the Hurrians by calling them vultures, since the Hurrians never try to stop the nuclear wars, but wait for them to end before helping. After conversing with the human and analyzing his conversation, the Hurrians reach an astounding conclusion. As the inspector, who came to supervise such an unusual case, tells to the resident director of the base, the war will not start by itself; it needs to be "helped". Refusing to understand the meaning of the word, the director fearfully asks for clarification, and is told that the Hurrians need to drop an atomic bomb themselves, in order to initiate the conflict which will then escalate on its own. Such a method, while computed to be the only way to start the war, and as such, to prevent the destruction of advanced space civilizations, is nevertheless completely unacceptable to the Hurrians, a race of absolute pacifists who cannot envision killing a sentient being.
Even though such an act is needed, explains the director, it simply cannot be done, for no Hurrian will be able to drop the bomb himself, or even order someone else to do that. Unable to solve this dilemma, the Hurrians are forced to return home, plagued by the visions of humans conquering the space.
| Nine Tomorrows |
| I Just Make Them Up, See! | Rejection Slips | Profession | The Feeling of Power | The Dying Night | I'm in Marsport Without Hilda | The Gentle Vultures | All the Troubles of the World | Spell My Name with an S | The Last Question | The Ugly Little Boy |
