The Alien Way

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “No,” said Jase.

  Swanson looked at him.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Jase. He backed up and sat down on the edge of the table, around which the board normally sat and where, with the exception of Mele and himself, they were sitting now. “You’re not going to move them, me, or anything else out of this building.”

  Swanson took off his spectacles.

  “Oh?”

  That’s right,” said Jase. “You must have missed hearing me when I was talking to Tim Thornybright, just now. I reminded him that I was the project. And I am-and you can’t force me to move from here, or do anything I don’t want to do. And I don’t want to be separated from the library in this building.”

  Swanson put his spectacles back on.

  “I think you’ll do what we want. And, after all,” he said, “we only want you to go on doing what you have been doing, contacting this Kator and reporting what you experience.”

  “What if I don’t?” said Jase. “Don’t report, I mean?”

  “We can make it uncomfortable for you,” said Goth, seriously. Jase looked over at the general.

  “What if I lie about what I experience?” he asked.

  “Oh,” Coth laughed, answering immediately, “we could tell, of course.”

  Jase stared at him for a moment. Then he too laughed—but not lightly, grimly.

  “You’re good,” said Jase. “For a second you sounded so certain of yourself to me, I was almost ready to believe you. No, you couldn’t tell. And you know you couldn’t tell.” He looked from Coth to Swanson and the other man. “I’m the only link you have with the Ruml, and you need my willing cooperation—you need it more than anything else, because without me, you’ve got nothing left but your nightmares about invading aliens.”

  He paused.

  “So,” he said, slowly, "I'll tell you how you’ll get that cooperation. You can stay with the project now you’ve joined it, but if you think you’re going to run it, you’re wrong. The board will go on acting like it always has. You three can sit on it, that’s all. And I’ll go on as I've been doing-without any interference from you, or the Board either.”

  There was dead silence in the library room. He and Swanson stood watching each other. After a moment Swanson took off his spectacles.

  “Temporarily,” he said, calmly, “all right.”

  Jase nodded slowly and turned around to Mele. He was about to say that now that the excitement was over, he wanted something to eat. He was about to ask her to join him in the dining room while the board sat down with its three new members to heal the smart of Jason’s declared independence with talk. But he did not ask her.

  Her eyes were gazing at him with as much shock as if he had made a Jekyll and Hyde switch before her eyes into the alien form of Kator. As if she did not know him.

  He went out of the library room toward the dining room, alone.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kator moved aboard the Expedition Ship immediately. The outfitting of such a ship could draw on past experience of the Examination Center, and the aim was to have the ship ready to leave the moment investigation of the artifact was completed. The selection of Kator as Keysman had taken place the morning of completion of the artifact Examination. And the Captain and crew of the ship were completed in the next few days.

  Jase, in Kator’s body, sat in on these later selections. In theory, he could veto any candidate. In practice, the selection boards knew their business, and it would have been impolitic for him to have interfered. So he sat silent on the board and watched his crew chosen. It did not, Jase learned from Kator’s thoughts, matter very much who were chosen to go on the ship as far as Kator’s private intentions were concerned. And Kator had his own plans to consider.

  So had Jase. In the Ruml’s body, he was swept along by Kator’s feelings and imagination. In his own body, surrounded now by the eyes of not only the board but Swanson, Coth, the man from the United Nations and their assistants, he tried to wall out everything else but his recording of what he experienced as Kator and his personal search for the meanings behind it.

  Secretly, he had lost part of his earlier confidence. It was one of the reasons he had blown up when he found the door of his room locked, and later when he found Swanson and the others attempting to take over upstairs. Swanson and the rest wore like open badges on their coat fronts the belief that Jase was falling—if he had not already fallen—under the domination of Kator’s alien personality. The unspoken implication roused Jase to fury. Such domination would e as fantastic as superstition.

  But, he was no longer sure it was impossible.

  This he kept to himself. From the beginning there had been a side of Kator he could not translate to the board members or any other earthly observer. This was the whole area of Kator’s feelings as a Ruml. It began with, Kator’s pride in himself as a member of the Ruml race—a pride that was comparable to the unconscious and unstated feeling of superiority in a human when he thought of himself in comparison to an animal. But it went on—far on—from there. Into an area of the Ruml racial personality for which there were no human equivalents. And it was all completely unconscious. The Rumls did not put it into words even among themselves. Why should they? It was a part of the unconscious knowledge of all of them.

  As a race, they assumed certain things. They took for granted certain things—things no human would imagine, let alone take for granted.

  Where the human mind and personality was duplicated by the Ruml, there was no danger that Jase might be disturbed by the contact. But in this other, this truly alien area… Jase had begun to feel the first stirrings of fear. For the first time he admitted to himself that Kator, without knowing even that Jase was there, might by simply existing be able to attack and destroy certain human elements in Jase. It might be that Kator’s personality could infect and conquer Jase’s personality unconsciously.

  It was the duel that had brought Jase finally to this conclusion. Up until then, he had been approaching the truth without seeing it, as a man might be going up a mountain without realizing he was already on its lower slopes. The essential difference between the human and the Ruml was something that Jase had appreciated from the beginning in a way no one else could do. But even he, he thought now, might have been led astray. He had realized how different were the Rumls—but even he had thought of that difference as the sort of difference that there is between—say—a man and an intelligent black bear.

  He had forgotten that where there was intelligence, there had to be a history—and a culture—even a soul.

  Both man and Ruml were such that they would fight and die for certain concepts. What if those concepts were not understandable by each other?

  What if they were diametrically opposed?

  Men and Ruml could rush at each other in mutual self-destruction. Both utterly convinced of their rightness, both committed to fighting to the death with no compromise—over a difference of unconscious opinion they could not verbalize to themselves, let alone to each other.

  And there was only one person on either side who could do anything to avert this Armageddon of two races. Jase. If only, somewhere in the books and technical and professional journals through which he searched, he could uncover some mutually understandable concept in this unconscious area. Something non-human, non-Ruml, but recognizable by both. Something in biology or zoology that both races could understand.

  Meanwhile, since the duel, the sneaking fear of infection in him by Kator’s personality stayed always in the back of his mind. There was no way of resolving it into concrete terms, any more than there seemed to be of getting rid of it. Once he could have used Mele for a touchstone. But now there was a wall between them. Since that day in the library room with Swanson and the others, she had carried what was almost a fear of him, a conviction of his unreasonableness. She seemed, thought Jase bitterly, to feel that he was being arbitrary out of sheer love of power.

  She did not, thank heaven, share the feeli
ng that Kator might be infecting him. But the fear rode Jase in spite of this. It was his fear and his secret. In the duel, for the first time, he had found himself sharing Kator’s point of view when that point of view was exactly opposite to his own.

  Kator had not disliked Horaag Adoptedson. But he had joyfully, pride fully, almost gleefully killed him when Horaag could have been defeated short of death. Doing so had made Kator feel noble in his own eyes, successful, and admirable. And for a moment there, Jason had felt so too.

  And that trace of an alien attitude had been part of what had been behind him in the library room where he had faced down Swanson and the rest, after breaking the door and bulling his way upstairs. That had not been the way Jase Barchar would normally act—he did not think so now, afterward.

  But it had been very like the way Kator Secondcousin would have acted, if he had woken to find himself locked against his will in a room. Was Jase becoming alien in the way he thought?

  Searching the stacks of the Foundation building late in the night, under the swinging, bare sixty-watt bulbs below their halo-like reflectors, Jase asked that question of himself as he caught sight of his face reflected in the night-black windows between the shelves.

  And his image had no answer to give him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The ship of the Expedition carried fifty-eight Expedition members, including Captain and Keysman. Shortly after they lifted from the Ruml Homeworld, Jase addressed all Expedition members over the intercom system of the ship. He stood in the controls room up in front of the ship, with the quarters of Captain and Keysman opening off from it The Captain stood beside him.

  “Expedition members,” he said, speaking into the intercom pickup screen. “You all know that we are engaged in an effort together to bring this Expedition successfully to the world of the Muffled People and Home again with information that will allow us to successfully settle that world. For all of us it is a great opportunity. As members of the expedition, once the world is open for settlement, all of us will be able to colonize there and Found Families of our own. Just so was each of our six worlds, other than Homeworld, colonized and its leading Families Founded.”

  He paused. He could imagine them, all about the ship, standing honorably erect and listening.

  “The success,” he went on, “of this expedition therefore must in Honor be more important to us than anything in our lives. I, your Keysman, dedicate myself to this importance. I promise you all the order of impartiality from me which you might expect from the Heads of your own Families. And I commit myself to return to Homeworld with the scouting report on the planet of the Muffled People that will justify this expedition. I pledge myself, in fact, to the accomplishment of a perfect operation—“

  He paused again. He was conscious of a singing in his veins, an upsurging of that power and confidence which had first come to him with the Random Factor in the discovery of the artifact and which had carried him successfully through the duel with Horaag.

  “—I direct you,” he said, more loudly, “to remember that word I’ve just used—the word perfect. I have dedicated myself to a perfect expedition. I refer you to the later writings of the Morahnpa, leader of the first Expedition ever sent out from our Homeworld. The statement written by the Morahnpa was: If all things are accomplished to perfection, how can failure find lodging place in that operation in which they are so accomplished? I will expect a like dedication from you all.”

  He turned away from the screen to see the ship’s Captain, standing, leaning a little more forward from the hips than was perhaps normal, his arms folded before him, his feet spread a little apart. The Captain’s eyes were on him.

  “Keysman,” said the Captain. “You haven’t ever been Keysman on a voyage before?”

  “As you know,” said Jase.

  “I have been Captain on thirteen voyages,” said the Captain, “and I have learned a few things about men in ships, whether that ship is on Expedition or not. You can command men and expect them to follow, in two different ways. You can command as a man, and they will obey you as a man—that is, not perfectly, but reliably. Or you can command as a Founder, and they will follow you blindly and to the death without question. But as a man, you can make mistakes. As a Founder, you can’t.”

  “I follow,” said Jase, “where the Random Factor leads me.”

  “If you lay claim to the Random Factor in your commands and actions,” said the Captain, “there is no alternative to failure. You know that yourself, Keysman. One who lays claim to the Random Factor in his actions and later fails must be destroyed so that what is apparently the Random Factor may only be experience, trying again and winning the second time. There can’t be a second time if the race is to evolve from the best of its stock.”

  ‘“I know that,” said Jase. "I've known it since I sighted the alien artifact.”

  The Captain inclined his head.

  “Then,” he said, “is it a man or a Founder we have for Keysman? I have a right to know-the crew will learn for itself in due time.”

  Jase looked the grizzled features of the older man squarely in the eye.

  “A Founder,” he said.

  The Captain’s face showed no expression. He inclined his head again.

  “Sir,” he said, “may I attend to my duties now?”

  “Yes,” said Jase.

  The Captain turned away toward the instruments of the control panels covering the walls of the room.

  Jase himself turned away and left the Controls Room. He went back through the corridors of the ship, inspecting everywhere. As Keysman it was part of his job to make sure that no locks at any time had been tampered with. There must be no acts not honorable aboard, no fights or crimes that remained mysteries because of clever tampering with the security of any man aboard. Those on this ship, of course, were men handpicked and of great previous honor, so crimes were all but unthinkable. As for acts not honorable, their possibility was also remote, though it was hard to believe anyone on such a crew would be interested in such petty things as personal advantage and gain. But as for fights—there could be no Honor in a Ruml man if he had no sense of himself. And where many men were cooped up together, such individual self-recognitions must conflict.

  The few crew members he encountered saluted him and kept on with their duties. The ship was fully manned with three men for each position, and only a third of them were therefore on duty now. Jase examined the gym, the cargo space in the bottom of the ship, the Construction Section, whose machine tools took up most of the middle section of the ship outside of the crew’s quarters. Finally, he went down the two corridors flanked by the crew’s staterooms and tested the lock on the door of each member.

  Every four or five doors, he unlocked one at random, to check the workings of his keys. It was not a violation of privacy and protection when the Keysman did this. The first half-dozen doors he opened had no one in the staterooms. Most of the crew were up in the gym, recreating themselves. But within the seventh door he opened he caught sight of a crew member curled up and reading on his sleeping pad.

  The crew member was on his feet and saluting instantly. Jase stared at him.

  “Bela!” he said. It was his Secondcousin among the Brutogasi.

  “I was an alternate,” said Bela. They looked at each other, and Jase felt a fierce surge of affection for this familiar member of his own Family sweep through him. But with the rank and regulations of shipboard between them, he could not express it.

  “Good to have you with us,” said Jase and went out, carefully locking and testing the doorlock behind him. Of all those aboard, Bela should not be attacked in his sleep as poor Aton Maternaluncle had been by his scoutpartner.

  Jase returned to his own quarters. There, on a small table, he had laid out the dirt worm in its plastic cube, and a model of the artifact. He added the ship’s keys to the two other objects and sank on his haunches before them. He felt the Random Factor illuminating him like a great light within him. In
the blaze of it, his dedication reached out and touched Bela, Aton that had been, this crew, his Family, and all the Ruml. Swept up and carried away in the ecstasy of his dream, Jase crouched on the floor and gave himself up to it.

  In the few days that followed, the ship leaped in one jump to the three light-year-wide area in which the planet of the Muffled People had been calculated to be. There were only two possible star systems in this area—both remarkably alike in that their suns were small, yellow stars, and they both had over half a dozen planetary bodies circling them—to judge by magnetic readings of their space area.

  Only one planet of the nearer system could possibly support the evolution of a race in any way similar to that of the Ruml, and at the orders of the Keysman, this was examined and found uninhabited and all but uninhabitable-being essentially waterless. It was sampled and recorded in case future scientific developments should discover a way to make it habitable for Ruml colonists, and the ship jumped to the near vicinity of the other sun with its possible system of habitable worlds.

  It was at the conclusion of this jump that the Captain’s signal rang. Jase, in his quarters at the time, answered the screen.

  “There’s been a fight between two of the men,” said the Captain’s face from the screen.

  “I'll come at once,” said Jase, jumping to his feet. “Assemble the Expedition’s members in the gym.”

  When he got to the gym, the men aboard were drawn up, standing, in two units, with a little space between them. Before these two units stood the two brawlers, and facing them was the Captain, with a portable table set up before him, holding those papers which would be records of the speedy investigation already held.

  Jase came up beside the Captain and glanced over the desk at the two men who had fought. His stomach tightened up inside him. One of the two was Bela.

  “The papers?” he asked, turning to the Captain.

  “Here, sir.” The Captain passed him the sheets of paper which had been obviously all this time before Jase on the desk. Jase took them and ran his eye over them. The two involved, he read, were Bela and one of the Antoniti. Neither had claimed any need to be reticent. Both had freely told their stories, and the stories agreed. The Antoniti had considered that Bela wished to discount the Antoniti’s work aboard the ship. Therefore, the Antoniti had attacked Bela without waiting to challenge the other. Bela had fought back.