The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces

by Sam Moskowitz

  If he could only wipe the droplets out of the slot, The Hostiles were gone. It was so hard to move! He tried. As he stumbled out of the Penny Arcade on to the railing walk of the pier's end, the youngsters caught one last glimpse of him; both hands raised and fumbling at the back of his head.

  Then he was gone. They didn't see him hit the railing in his blindness, didn't hear the wood give way, didn't hear the splash as he—disordered, discarded machinery—tumbled into the obliterating waves below.

  "What was the matter with him?" Dave asked. "I wouldn't of let him have it if I knew he'd take it so big."

  "Aw, forget it!" Marty counseled. "So you made like Buck Rogers with a zap-gun and he got sore. Some people haven't got any sense of humor."

  "Check," said Bea. "And people without a sense of humor aren't human!"

  "Yeah," Pat sighed as they turned to open the magazine. "He looked like he was ready to blow his top!"

  Hands Across Space

  by Chad Oliver

  Within the last few hundred years, unknown communities, semi-civilized tribes that for ages have lived out their lives alone, have been uncovered. In most cases, they are scientifically and culturally behind the rest of the civilized world, and if they do not actually welcome the intrusion, they do not have the force to resist it. But the time must come when a race as advanced as ourselves will appear from out of space. Then the problem of making first contact and establishing relationship will call for a careful, infallible scientific approach on the part of both sides.

  The first step in the scientific method involves the observation of facts and the formulation of THE PROBLEM…

  *

  The man names Copa Paco did not, of course, think of himself as an alien. On the contrary, there was no doubt in his mind that he was a human being, and shared species relationship with all others on Capella IV. The only aliens involved in the affair were from Earth.

  Naturally enough, considering the circumstances, Copa Paco was nobody’s fool. He was quite well aware of such factors as ethnocentrism, to say nothing of egotism. He knew that what you chose to define as “alien” depended pretty much on where you happened to be sitting at the time.

  That didn’t make his problem any easier, however.

  He cursed his pipe audibly; the damned thing went out at regularly predictable intervals no matter how carefully he smoked it. He knocked out the ashes and a soggy lump of unburned tobacco into a desk vaporizer, refilled the pipe, and lit it again with a fatalistic acceptance of the facts of life. He blew out a small cloud of blue smoke, aimed in the general direction of the air purifier, and felt a little better.

  He walked over to the viewscreen and looked into it. The stars looked back at him, and the system of Sol was very close. He began to feel worse again. The palms of his hands started to sweat.

  “I wish the whole planet would drop dead,” Copa Paco said.

  “You’d better take it easy, guy,” advised Dota Tado, the semantics expert. “If you blow your top, we’re through. Anyway, you’re mixing your metaphors, or something.”

  “I wish you’d drop dead also,” communicated Copa Paco, puffing harshly on his pipe.

  “Civil war,” said Dota Tado. “A great beginning. You’re supposed to be a co-ordinator, remember? Don’t you read your own propaganda? You’re a disgrace to the force. I’d have you shot at sunrise, except that there isn’t any sunrise.”

  “Oh, go to hell,” responded Copa Paco, but he smiled in spite of himself. Dota was a good man; he knew his business. “I’m okay, really,” he said. “Just spouting off steam. It’s just that every once in a while you get to thinking about it, and how close it is, and how much depends on it—you know.”

  “Yes, I know. I know, too, that you’ll come through with flying colors; stop worrying about it.”

  “Good advice,” admitted Copa Paco. “Try to take it.”

  The ship throbbed around them with the surging power of the overdrive, and both men fell silent. Copa Paco smoked his pipe carefully, nursing it along.

  He felt the cold sweat in his hands and wiped them on his handkerchief.

  It was a nasty problem—nasty because it had never been faced before.

  Nasty because there was no known solution. He went over it again, step by step.

  The world of Capella IV—his world—was quite similar to Earth. It was, in fact, almost identical. This was largely a coincidence, since the Aurigae system, of which Capella was a part, happened to be a binary, with Capella being a good sixteen times as large as Sol, though of the same general type.

  It was a coincidence that had consequences, however.

  Life had evolved on Capella IV in exactly the same manner that it had on Earth. All of the details were notprecisely the same, of course, but there was a part-for-part correspondence of generalized stages. Capella IV had its aquatic forms, its amphibians, its reptiles, its mammals. It had its own counterpart of the Dryopithecus-Meganthropus-Pithecanthropus chain, culminating finally in Homo sapiens—an erect biped, pleased with his brain, handy with his hands, variable in his color.

  The biped had dreamed of the stars, and his dreams had come true.

  “Unfortunately,” Copa Paco said aloud.

  Dreams were different when they came true. For one thing, the people involved were no longer dreaming. When they woke up, the monster with ten legs and fetid breath didn’t disappear. He was still there.

  The people of Capella IV had gone out into space, trying to find out what sort of a universe they lived in, trying to find out whether or not they had neighbors.

  They had.

  The galaxy teemed with life.

  But not with “neighbors,” unless mere physical proximity was the only criterion of neighborliness. They found that life took many forms. They found out how different life could be. There was absolutely no basis for getting together; nothing in common whatsoever. It wasn’t that the life-forms were hostile; hardly. They didn’t even have a concept of hostility, or of friendliness. They were different.

  Alien.

  Isolated.

  Twenty-five years ago, they had contacted the Earth. They had found a life-form physically indistinguishable from themselves, with a fairly similar civilization and a crude form of interplanetary—not interstellar—travel based on thrust-jet principles. The ships of Capella IV were powered by fields of negative electricity.

  The people of Earth had hydrogen bombs.

  The people of Capella IV had force fields and overdrive.

  For twenty-five years, the two peoples had surveyed each other, discussed each other, sparred with each other. They had exchanged radio telephotographs and information. They had probed and speculated. They had wondered and guessed. For twenty-five years.

  Of course, they were afraid of each other. The people from Capella IV were afraid of the bomb, which they didn’t have. The people from Earth were afraid of the overdrive, which they didn’t have, and which meant that the Capella ships could attack the Earth, and then retreat to the stars where they could not be followed.

  Both were afraid of each other, because they weren’t sure they understood each other.

  Espionage through scientific means had given each world much information about the other.

  They had never met, face to face. Until now.

  Copa Paco stared glumly at his cold pipe, which had gone out again. He tapped the refuse into the vaporizer and put the pipe away. He stared into the viewscreen, hypnotically.

  He could see Earth now, far away.

  They had finally decided to take a chance, these two peoples separated by forty-two light-years and an ocean of emptiness. They had agreed to meet—one man from each planet, unarmed.

  It had to be in the system of Sol, of course, because there was no way for the people of Earth to get to Capella. They had picked a very small, specially constructed chamber on the planet called Mars for the meeting. Each group had built half of it, and each had inspected it a thousand times. They had taken t
urns every 100 Mars days to make certain that no workers of the opposites races ever saw each other or met on Mars in person.

  Ten years had been required for that compromise.

  One man from each group, meeting in a tiny room on a neutral planet, a planet without life of its own. Each man representing cultures separated by a universe and millions of years of independent evolution. Each man carrying a responsibility almost too fantastic to be real.

  If the meeting were a success, there might be a future with boundless possibilities.

  If it were a failure, if there were trickery, if they had made a mistake—

  It might depend on a little thing, a nothing-thing. How could you tell? “John Smith” was a common name on Earth; to a man from Capella IV it was excruciatingly funny, as well as illogical. The people of Capella IV had systematic names, names that placed each person as to status and role by the pattern of alternating morphemes—Copa Paco, Lota Talo, Dota Tado. This seemed funny to the men of Earth, who, in turn, when a baby was born named it practically anything that suited their fancy.

  The little things were different, and that could be very dangerous, even assuming good intentions on both sides.

  If you had to pick one individual to represent your entire species, one upon whom your very existence might well depend, whom would you pick?

  Whom could you pick?

  The man named Copa Paco looked into the viewscreen, staring at the stars and the planets and the darkness.

  That was his problem—and he knew, too, that this same problem had to be faced by a man on Earth, a man like himself. A man who even now must be wondering, trying to decide

  Whom would he pick?

  After the formulation of the problem, the next step, in strict chronology, involves the working out of the hypothesis, or trial solution. Passing this by for the moment, however, we turn to what is actually the third step, the testing of the hypothesis in experience, or THE EXPERIMENT…

  John Graves walked steadily through the sand canyon and listened to his breathing in his oxygen mask. It was slow and even, neither excited nor lethargic, and he smiled with satisfaction. He had been a little worried before, but now he knew that he was not going to be afraid.

  He was ready.

  The cold wind hissed and whispered through the tunnels and twisted valleys, and then whined eerily out upon the cold desert beyond, losing itself in fine clouds of driven sand. It wrapped its icy fingers around John Graves as he walked, and it spoke of many things …

  Mars.

  It had never known life of its own; its only significance had been given to it by the thoughts and fears and dreams of a people over forty-eight million miles away.

  John Graves felt a warm pride at the thought. His people.

  First, perhaps, it had been a campfire in the sky, a cold fire that gave no warmth, to be looked at and puzzled over by the first man huddled around their own fire, listening to the night sounds around them.

  Then it had become a god. Mars, god of war …

  Finally, it had become a planet, one of several, orbited about the sun. The planet, with time, had become a symbol, a lure, an invitation across the empty miles. It had called out to the men of Earth, and they had come.

  And this was the reality, at least for now. A cold desert of shifting sands and sculptured canyons, silent except for the sigh of the winds.

  Neutral ground.

  A meeting-place.

  John Graves came out of the sand canyon and into the desert, his feet slipping slightly on the uncertain floor of the planet. Ahead of him, squatting all alone in the middle of the great plain, was the tiny building that housed a room for two.

  He looked at his watch, and it was time.

  Coining out of the desert from the other side, half hidden by the drifting curtains of reddish sand, he could see a dark figure moving slowly toward the building.

  The two men from different star-systems stood in the little room and stared at each other. They were almost close enough to touch, but they did not touch.

  The room was antiseptically plain. It was absolutely without character. It had dull gray walls and a single overhead light in the ceiling. It had a small gray table in the exact center of the room, and two hard gray chairs, one at each end of the table. There was an air-conditioning unit it one corner, and no other machinery of any kind within a two-hundred mile radius.

  No one was taking any chances.

  John Graves kept a smile on his face—it having been first determined, of course, that smiles meant the same thing to both of the representatives. It wouldn’t do at all to smile at a man from a culture in which a smile was the equivalent of saying, “I find you mentally repulsive and physically appealing, and so I will eat you for supper.” His job was threefold: he had to make a good impression, he had to protect the secrets of his people, and he had to evaluate the other man in the room.

  He examined the man from Capella IV courteously but intently. The man from Capella IV examined him the same way.

  John Graves couldn’t see very much. The other man was clad in what appeared to be a light spacesuit, complete with helmet. He seemed to be definitely humanoid in construction—he had two arms and two legs and one head. Behind the glass in his helmet, he could make out a pleasant face, rather brownish in color, with blue eyes and an open smile. The man seemed to be waiting for something.

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  Finally, John Graves reached up and took off his oxygen mask. He sniffed the air, and it was good.

  No tricks so far, then. He noticed that the other man was smiling more broadly, hut he made no attempt to remove his helmet. He simply stood there, waiting.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” asked John Graves, his voice cutting through the silence like a knife and sounding abnormally loud in his ears.

  “Not at all,” replied the other man instantly. His voice was low and well-modulated, crystal-clear through his helmet speaker.

  John Graves fished out a cigarette and lit it. He inhaled a deep draught of smoke and blew it out through his nose, being careful to keep it away from the alien.

  “My name is John Graves,” he said.

  “My name is Noco Cono,” the other man said. Neither volunteered any more information. The silence thickened. Again, John Graves took the initiative, thinking: Evidently he’s just going to respond to my cues; it’s up to me to direct the interview. He Sat down in one of the chairs. The other man did not hesitate but lowered himself into the other one, still not making any move toward removing either his helmet or his spacesuit. Hardly the impulsive type, thought John Graves.

  They looked at each other across the table. “Well, where do we go from here, Mr. Cono?” asked John Graves, reflecting again that it was quite decent of the aliens to agree to speak English during the interview.

  Noco Cono chuckled pleasantly. “An excellent question, John Graves,” he said. “I really must apologize for my seeming reticence; you are of course aware of the circumstances under which we meet.”

  Careful, thought John Graves. Could that be a psychological probe? He said: “Not at all, my friend. It is as much my fault as it is yours. I hope I may express the wish that we can meet again one of these days, and speak as man to man.”

  “That is my wish, also,” the spacesuited figure said. “This is, of course, a difficult situation for both of us. I feel as though I were under a microscope.” “I too,” agreed John Graves.

  They indulged in some highly tentative exploratory conversation, they both chuckled many times over their mutual recognition of the awkwardness of the situation, and their talk was, if not friendly, at least cordial.

  Then the silence came again. They sat across the table from each other in the little gray room, looking at each other.

  What of the discussion of their closely related planets? Of the universe? Of philosophies, related or opposing? Here there seemed to be a block—an unexplainable block …

  When the agreed-upon termin
ation time had arrived, neither of them had said a great deal.

  John Graves had done his best to give a good impression, but he was not sure whether or not he had succeeded. How could one tell? Everything had seemed pleasant enough, but the other man had never offered to remove his helmet or his spacesuit, and evidently wasn’t going to do so. Why? Graves had never been able to get a good look at the man.

  They both stood up, and there was tension in the room. It wasn’t exactly fear, nor was it hope, but it was compounded of both of these. So much depended on the outcome of this simple little visit, so much could be gained or lost… .

  They both felt it.

  “I know that we’re both thinking the same thing,” John Graves said slowly. “I can’t speak with much authority, but just as a man. I hope with all my heart that this a beginning, and not an ending.” The spacesuited man nodded. “I feel the same way, my friend,” he said. “This has been a tough job for both of us, and I hope that out of it great things will come. I hope that this is not goodbye. I hope that both of our peoples will be blessed with—understanding. Understanding. That is a good word. Next to a sense of humor, it is what one needs the most.” They walked to the door together. John Graves stopped and put on his oxygen mask, and then they both walked back outside. They paused, and John Graves put out his hand. The other man took it, gently, in his spacesuit glove, and they shook hands, Earth fashion. Then the other man waved briefly and set out across the desert for the rendezvous with his ship.

  John Graves watched him go for a moment, registering all the data, no matter how unimportant. Then lie turned and walked through the shifting sands, back into the sand canyon, his hands in his pockets. He did not look back.

  As previously indicated, we have left out a step in our scientific method, a step between the problem and the experiment. The step did occur, of course, and we go back for it now. Between the problem and the experiment comes the trial solution, or THE HYPOTHESIS…