The Alien Way

by Gordon R. Dickson

  But as he rinsed off the lather, the shock returned. And with it the fear he had been pretending was not there. He lifted his face dripping from the water in the bowl and confronted it suddenly in the dark depths of the mirror with the fluorescent bulbs on either side of the mirror harshly lighting it. —And for a second he did not know it.

  It was not merely strange to him. It was alien as the face of some unknown animal.

  It was a lean face, he saw, and dark. It was narrow-boned and long. The bones were slight for a body his height, and the skin was brown from the constantly being outdoors that was part of his work as a zoologist and naturalist. His black hair, disordered now, curled down on a high forehead from which it was already beginning to retreat slightly. Below that forehead his eyebrows were black as jet and straight across as the bar of a gate.

  Below these again, his eye sockets were deep, so that his brown eyes were shadowed normally. Women—not Mele—had told him on occasion that he had beautiful eyes. The term had always jarred on him. It sounded as if they were saying that his eyes gave him a look of softness. Now, in the pitiless light of the fluorescents, there was nothing beautiful about the eyes he saw. Their color was hard—like brown, weathered granite—but he remembered the literal jet blackness of eyes reflected from a polished metal bulkhead.

  He turned sharply away from his image, walked swiftly back into the bedroom, and began dressing. When he was dressed, he pulled the gaudy plaid shape of a pullman bag from under his bed and began packing. As he did, the phone rang.

  He picked it up before its first ring was finished. “Hello.”

  “Jase?” asked Mele’s voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m dressed and just getting packed now. I’ll get a cab and be at your place in twenty minutes anyway… Wait upstairs, though. If there’s any delay, I want to be able to get you on the phone.”

  “You can call me if I’m in the lobby. The night clerk’s always at the desk there. Just ask him to call me to his phone.”

  “Oh, yes.” He rubbed the fingertips of his right hand across his forehead. “Of course. I wasn’t thinking. You called the Board?”

  “Yes. They’ll all be there but Wanek. He’s on the west coast. —Jase?” she said. “How do you feel now?”

  “Fine,” he said. He made himself smile into the phone. “Just fine.”

  “All right. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “All right. Good-bye.”

  “‘Bye.”

  She hung up. He called a cab, was told one would be at the front of his apartment house in five minutes, and finished packing his bag.

  When he got downstairs and stepped out through the front door of his apartment, the cab—a yellow skimmer—was already waiting at the foot of old-fashioned granite steps. The air was still muggy with dampness and heat, but the street and sidewalks were drying back to their normal dullness. He maneuvered the pullman bag into the rear seat with him.

  “Four-twelve North Frontage Road,” he said.

  “Right,” said the driver. The cab whined more loudly and pulled away from the curb. They whined down the night-time street. From the back seat Jase could see hair in need of a haircut curling out from under the cap the driver wore, and he felt a moment’s distaste, as at the sight of some uncared-for and messy animal. He looked away, out the open window of the cab and watched the lights of Washington sliding by, instead.

  When they stopped at last before the wide, twin glass doors through which he could see the lobby of the resident hotel where Mele lived, he could see her standing inside. She was wearing a light blue summer dress that fitted closely on her tall, slim figure with its brown, hair. She had white gloves on her hands, and her gloved fingers held a slim purse of a lighter blue than the dress. She did not wait for him to get out of the cab and come in to get her but came directly out at the sight of the cab.

  He opened the door for her, looking up at her. And she stepped down and in to settle on the seat beside him. A faint scent of cologne—which he did not find distasteful but strange—entered the cab with her. She sat straight, her back barely touching the seat, and her eyes looked comfortingly into his.

  “Twelfth and Independence Avenue,” he told the driver, without turning to look at him. Mele kissed him. Her lips felt cool and strange, as the smell of cologne had seemed strange to him.

  The cab pulled away from the curb once more. She moved over to sit close to him, slipped an arm through his, and held his right hand with the hand of the arm she had slipped through his. They sat close together without talking. He felt strangely like a man who has been ill for a long time and is now recovered, but who continues to feel the habits of his sickness clinging to him. The memory of being Kator Secondcousin—from the moment when Kator picked up the earthworm body that infected him with the virus-sized mechanisms making contact between him and Jase possible—stayed wrapped around Jase like a sheet. Like a sheet of plastic, transparent, but through which all the world with which he was familiar seemed blurred and distorted.

  Mele was not only his observer in this experiment; she was the woman he intended to many. She loved him. But now, feeling her beside him, touching, close as she was, she was made somehow removed and strange.

  And there was nothing he could do about it. From here the experiment plunged into an unknown area. And there was no going back.

  Chapter Four

  They stopped before the wide steps and heavy bronze doors of the granite-fronted building that was the headquarters of the Foundation for the Association of Learned and Professional Societies. Jase paid off the cab, took his bag, and with Mele mounted the steps and rang the bell. The night janitor, Walt, let them in.

  “They’re all here already,” Walt told them. "They’re in the Library, waiting for you.”

  Jase and Mele went down the wide, green-carpeted hall, past the foot of the curving stairs with their wide polished balustrade of dark and on down a narrowed hallway to the point where it turned to the right. They turned and passed the first closed door to their left and entered the second. They stepped into a lighted room, walled in by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling and equipped with tracked ladders, one on each side of the room.

  In straight chairs that looked out of place near the over-stuffed furniture elsewhere around the room, the eight members of the Board sat about a polished table at the far end of the room. Beyond them the tall green drapes had been drawn across the high windows looking out on the walled garden of the Foundation.

  Jase and Mele went forward and took seats at the table.

  “Here you are,” said Thornybright.

  Jase looked around at them. He was coming out of it, he thought. Here, in this familiar room where the whole thing had been planned and decided on, the business with Kator was taking on proper perspective. The eight men he looked at—none younger than their mid-thirties, and at least one, Wilder, as old as the mid-sixties—had all the look of men who have climbed hastily out of bed in the middle of the night. Their hair stuck out over the ears. Most of them needed a shave, and not all had their ties straight or shirt buttons buttoned.

  They were all good men, top men in the sciences. Jase knew them all. James Mohn had taught him biology at Wisconsin as a sophomore—for a moment the sharply pitched streets and wooded campus at Madison rose in Jase’s mind’s eye, and then vanished. William Heller had aided him in getting his present position with the Department of the Interior. And so forth. But only two of the eight were important at this moment. One was Joe Dystra, and the other was Tim Thomybright. In his early fifties, heavy-bodied and powerful, Dystra dominated the table just by sitting at it. Across from him, the slim, forty-year-old, half-bald Thornybright looked frail and unimportant.

  But this was an illusion. Tim was hard as tool steel. As Secretary of the Board, he headed up most of its decisions: He and Joe Dystra complemented each other. Like everybody else in the room—with the exception of Mele, who was Librarian here at the Foundation—Tim and Joe were scientists. But
both bulged outside their fields, which was psychology for Tim and physics for Joe. Tim had a flair for politics, Joe a literal genius for business and organization. And they were both drivers.

  “You’re still in contact, Jase?” Dystra asked now, the hard fat of his face looking bunchy from lingering lines of sleep. Jase nodded.

  “I still feel… different,” he said. Thornybright held up his hand.

  “I’m going to turn on the recorder,” the thin psychologist said. “The sooner we get started the better.”

  He put his hand on the square, polished wood mount rising slightly from the table top in front of his chair, and everybody in the room heard the click as it was turned on.

  “All right,” said Thornybright, “this recording is being made on the third of June at—” He glanced at his watch. “Two-oh-eight A.M. It is the forty-sixth meeting of the Board for Independent Foundation Action, of the Foundation for the Association of Learned and Professional Societies. Present are Lester Wye, Joseph Dystra, William Heller…” he ran on to list everyone about the table.

  “…Miss Mele Worman, Foundation Librarian and Observer for our Subject connected with Bait Thirteen, Jason Lee Barchar,” he wound up. “The reasons behind the action of the Foundation in allowing members to volunteer for the founding of this Board and this project are a matter of record. However, now that we’ve come to a point of decision, I think it’d be wise to recap.” He glanced about the table. “Accordingly, I move that a rough outline of events leading us to this moment should be dictated to the recorder now by the Secretary, before this meeting proceeds any further.”

  He paused.

  “Second,” said Dystra.

  “All in favor?” Thornybright looked around the table and a chorus of ayes responded from all but Mele, who had no vote.

  “Motion carried unanimously,” said Thornybright. He reached into the inside pocket of ‘his snorts coat and took out several sheets of typed paper, which he unfolded. He began to read from them.

  “This Board,” he read, in a brisk, dry voice, “was founded a year ago by volunteer members of the Foundation to invite other volunteers to join in an independent effort financed by the Foundation to protect our world of earth against possible contact and destruction by one or more inimical alien races originating elsewhere in our galaxy. The basis for fearing such contact is to be found in the Report on the Likelihood of Alien Contact, issued five years ago after nearly ten years’ work by members of this Foundation and its constituent societies and organizations. This report, made at Foundation expense and published for public information, was compiled for the purpose of awakening the Government of the United States and all other concerned governments of this planet to a situation brought about by the construction of vessels capable of reaching the neighboring star systems at speeds in excess of the speed of light—utilizing the Collapsed Universe Theories of Joseph Dystra, a member of the Foundation and of this Board.”

  Thornybright paused and cleared a slight hoarseness from his voice with a dry rattle of his throat.

  “These vessels,” he went on, “were put into service and have been in service for nearly a dozen years now, in spite of strong warnings by this Foundation. The Foundation, it may be repeated at this point, was originally founded twenty-three years ago to coordinate the opinion of those in all countries of the world engaged in pure scientific research and development The purpose behind its founding was to bring to public, and particularly governmental, attention the fact that almost since the beginning of the twentieth century, technological development has been using up the reservoirs of pure, basic or disinterested research and the search for knowledge, faster than these reservoirs have been refilled.”

  He paused to clear his throat once more.

  "The reason for this situation, the Foundation has been pointing out for the twenty-three years since its founding, lies in the fact that economic competition and public interest have made available large sums of money for the application of scientifically trained people and scientific facilities to immediate technologically profitable problems. So that, while the public standard of technological living has been growing apace, the world fund of new knowledge out of which this technological advance was made possible has been dwindling.”

  He paused and turned to the second sheet of those in his hands.

  “The recommendation of this Foundation,” he read on, “from the first has been that the governments of this world counter this situation by making available a large fund and organization which can compete in facilities and salaries offered with private industry. So that those qualified to engage in pure research may be enabled to do so. In the past twenty-three years the Foundation has implemented this point of view with no less than six major reports, fully documenting the steadily worsening situation and setting forth those measures which must be taken to repair it. In spite of this—”

  Thornybright broke off and reached under the table for a glass of water. He sipped at it, put it back, cleared his throat, and continued to read.

  “In spite of this, and in spite of the fact there has been a great deal of public and even governmental support for such action in all of the major governments of the world, no such funds and organization have been provided.”

  Dystra grunted, grimly. Thornybright glanced at him and then went on.

  “With the putting into use of the Collapsed Field Theory Drive and the penetration of space vessels of human origin beyond the immediate star systems within a fifty-light-year radius from our Sun, the situation, in the opinion of this Foundation, has become critical. As the Report on the Likelihood of Alien Contact stated three years ago, such contact has become—in the light of present scientific knowledge—a statistical certainty within ten years from the publication of that Report. Also, as the Report states, we must face such contact while possessing a scientifically unbalanced civilization, far overdeveloped in the technology which provides creature comforts for our own people. And a civilization which is woefully inadequate in knowledge and science which would equip us for contact, understanding, coexistence, or conflict with another, intelligent space-going, and technological race. A race such as our Report of three years ago estimates we must encounter within a decade of space exploration such as was then, and is still, going on.”

  The lean psychologist paused to change sheets of paper again. Jase glanced to look at Mele, seated at his right, to see how she was reacting to this rehash of what they all knew. But her profile was as calm as the profile of the statue of an Egyptian princess of four thousand years ago. Jase looked back at Thornybright. Inside Jase these old facts were echoing now with a new effect. He felt chilled and lonely.

  “Accordingly,” Thornybright was reading, “this Board was set up to direct a project in which the Foundation would independently finance and put into space apparent sections of destroyed earth-constructed space-going vessels. And these sections were to be sent into yet unexplored areas of surrounding interstellar space where contact with other intelligent technological space-going races was considered to be a high probability. These sections, referred to as Baits, were sent out equipped with a recent discovery by an independent researchist financed by the Foundation. This discovery, utilizing the Collapsed Universe Theory together with recent developments in interpreting, transmitting, receiving, and associating the electrical activities that accompany activity of the brain, whether human or belonging to a postulated intelligent alien, would be embodied in virus-sized mechanisms. These mechanisms would seek out the circulatory system of any alien contacting them, travel by means of that circulatory system to his brain, and set up a transmission link, embodying no time-loss, between this alien and a volunteer subject responsible to this Board.”

  He changed sheets of paper for the last time.

  “These subjects, Foundation members and members of this Project who have volunteered and been chosen from among the volunteers as being those best suited for the duty, have been twelve in number. This morning, f
or the first time, one of them, Jason Lee Barchar, has reported making an alien contact.”

  He broke off and turned to Jase.

  “He will now describe that contact as fully as possible in this moment, although a more extensive report will be made by him later at a more convenient time. —Jase?”

  Jase leaned forward with his elbows on the table and began to talk. He began with the moment a few seconds after Kator had taken off his spacesuit and handled the dead earthworm he had brought back to his own scout ship. He confined himself only to Kator’s actions after that, keeping to himself all the strange half-understood emotions and desires that had also reached him at the time of the murder of Aton Maternaluncle and afterward as Kator was falling asleep.

  His conscience chewed at him for this holding back. But he told himself that what he did not tell now could go in his more extensive written report later. Right at the moment he was too exhausted, he was too hard hit by the contact with the alien mind of Kator, to judge what else he had felt or had not felt and understood.

  “That’s the story?” said Dystra finally when he had finished. The eyes sunk in the fleshy face across the table from him, were penetrating in their glance.

  “That’s all that happened,” said Jase.

  “All right,” said Dystra. He had slumped down in his chair, listening. Now he straightened up and looked across the table to Thornybright, beyond Mele on Jase’s right. “Now we vote on whether to turn this whole project over to the U.S. government or whether we want to wait a little longer. —Jase, you aren’t voting on this one, unless you have to break a tie. All right, I move the vote.”

  “Second,” said Heller, thinly, down the table. His bony face smiled at Jase.

  They voted. For waiting were Dystra, Heller, Mohn, and the single physician on the board, Dr. Alan Creel. For informing the government and turning over all information and equipment now were Thornybright and the three remaining board members.