The Alien Way

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Right downstairs!” shouted back a voice from the clattering, steam-bright kitchen entrance to his right. No one stepped out to look at him. He went briskly forward, so that his footfalls would sound natural. But as he clattered down the narrow, unbanistered wooden stairs, his knees gave suddenly and he almost fell.

  But he kept on, and a second later the soles of his shoes slapped against the unyielding concrete of the basement floor. He was walking down a hallway “in which the doors of storage and other rooms were set like green oblongs pasted against the white-painted walls.

  His will power almost failed him as he approached the slightly larger, varnished-wood door among the green ones on his left. Behind that was the room and the bed that had been floating in his mind for hours now, as seductively as a dream of a fountain to a man lost in the desert.

  However, he kept going, on down the hall and in through the narrow door leading into the bottom of the library stacks. Here, on this basement level, the windows that had been pierced in the outer walls of the stack higher up were not able to filter down enough light to see by. The artificial lights were off. He reached up, found the hanging cord of the first sixty-watt bulb inside the entrance and jerked downward. Yellow light revealed the shelves of books and magazines stretching away from him and the narrow, circular metal staircase to the levels above.

  He climbed with great effort, turning on lights as he went. On the third level he left the stair and stumped heavily down aisles between bookcases until he came to the polished hardwood door that opened from the stacks into Mele’s office.

  Putting his ear to the panel of that door, gratefully for a moment leaning against it, he heard the faint, polite clicking of her typewriter-recorder. He sighed—it was almost an explosion of air in relief and exhaustion from his lungs. He put his hand on the doorknob, opened it, and tottered in and down the two small steps to her desk.

  His hand pawed out in search of the wastebasket, to turn it up and sit on it as he had before. But the effort was too complex and too much for his strength. His knees gave way, and he dropped down heavily on a large tape video-audio portable recorder beside her desk. For a moment his head swam with the relief of being off his feet, and he had to catch the edge of her desk with both hands to keep from falling over.

  He was aware of her face staring at him from behind the now silent typewriter. He stared back. He had—some uncertain, semidelirious time ago—figured out what he would say to her, how he would explain that the situation justified his involving her by asking her for help. But now, now that he was face to face with her, neither the strength nor the words would come. He simply sat, still dripping with the rain, leaning on the edge of her desk, staring at her with eyes burned dry with sleeplessness—silent.

  Then the room began to tilt slowly on end. He was barely conscious of his falling, sliding off the tape recorder, and his feeble efforts to stop himself. Then… nothing.

  When he woke, he was back in the stacks. He was not far from the doorway that opened on Mele’s office, but he was back in a corner, and the light in the adjoining aisle threw shadows that would hide him from anyone underneath it. He was propped up in an angle of the comer and a heavy, gray wool blanket was covering him, wrapped around his shoulders.

  Mele was kneeling before him, pouring something from a thermos bottle into a large coffee cup. He blinked at her uncertainly, collecting his scattered senses. How she had managed to lift or drag his hundred-and-seventy-five pound body up the two small stairs and back into the stacks here—to say nothing of getting him wrapped in the blanket and propped up in this corner—was more than his fatigue-drugged brain could imagine.

  “Drink this, now,” she said, holding the full cup to his lips. He started to swallow, then checked himself so abruptly that some of the liquid spilled on his chin. He had suddenly realized that what she was giving him might be coffee, and he had drunk so many innumerable cups of this in hamburger joints and from coffee machines in the last twenty-four hours that the thought of swallowing more of it gagged him.

  But then the taste of what had touched his lips and the scent rising from the liquid reassured him. It was hot vegetable beef soup, and he. tasted it in his mouth like some strange and wonderful dish from a foreign land. He was thirsty as well as hungry, and shivering now with a chill that seemed to be fast friends with the fever in his head. And he gulped eagerly at the soup, indifferent to the fact that it was scalding his tongue and the inside of his mouth and sore throat.

  He swallowed a cup and a half of the soup—and was abruptly full. He found that he could not drink another drop from the cup, and he closed his lips against it, trying meanwhile to get his hand out from under the blanket to push it away. But Mele understood and took the cup away. She wiped his chin with a paper napkin, and the paper caught and snagged on the bristles of his unshaven beard.

  “. . . Better go now …” he said. "I'll be all right.” He hugged the blanket around him in a new access of shivering. But she did not move. She continued to kneel there, staring at him.

  “Swallow these now,” she said, producing some capsules and another cup filled with water. “They’re antibiotics, achrocidin.” He took the capsules in his mouth and swallowed the cool water. “Jase,” she said, putting the cup down. “Did you do it—what they said you did?"

  “What?” he asked. “What—they say?”

  “Did you add a film strip to the recording Kator made, telling the Ruml all about our knowing about them, and the Baits, and showing them a picture of our warships in space?”

  “Yes,” he said, huskily through his sore throat, which was now beginning to hurt steadily and fiercely, “I had to. You see—“

  “You don’t have to tell me.” She was still staring at him, on her knees. “I don’t care why you did it. When Swanson first came to see if I knew you’d been planning something like that, I first tried to think why you’d do something like that. Give away the only advantage we had to aliens that outnumber us ten to one. But then, when they didn’t find you, and I began to see how everybody else felt about it—what they wanted to do if they could capture you—I woke up to the fact that it didn’t matter.”

  He blinked at her. In his feverish head her words buzzed and sang without making sense.

  “Jase—,” she said. She took hold of his upper arms through the blanket. “Don’t you understand me? You’ve got to understand. I don’t care what you did! I was so proud of myself—I thought I believed in things being either right or wrong, no matter how I felt inside—but I don’t!”

  She leaned forward and flung her arms around his blanket-wrapped body, hugging him, pressing her head and the side of her face against the rough blanket over his chest.

  "It’s only you I care about! You!” Her arms tightened around him as if she would absorb and drown his shivering in her own body. “And they’re not going to get you! I won’t let them!”

  He could see the dark hair of her head just below his chin. He opened his mouth to say something, but his lips trembled loosely and he could force no sound from his throat. Behind her he saw a black shadow move and obscure the light in the neighboring aisle. For a moment it passed away, and then it appeared again, like an occulting shape of darkness, at the end of the aisle they were in.

  It came bobbing toward them and revealed itself into the shape of a man, then of several men, one behind the other. They stole up on them as Mele still clung to him and he sat, unable to speak.

  She was not conscious of their presence until their hands reached down and seized her. Only then she awoke to the fact that they were upon her and Jase and began to fight.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “… Why did you do it?” asked Swanson.

  It was the same question they had been drumming at Jase ever since they had taken him and Mele from the Foundation building to this place—wherever it was. What they had done with Mele he did not know. What they had done with him was to bring him to this bare room with a few straightbacked chairs
, where men he had not seen before kept asking him that one question.

  The reason they could ask and expect an answer from him was that chemical miracles had been worked on his sick and exhausted body. Some capsules and two injections, one in each arm, had broken his fever, cleared his head, and pushed tiredness back as if behind some wall—so that he still knew it was there, but somehow it did not bother him. His heart pumped strongly, perhaps a little too rapidly, and there was a slight singing in his ears. Outside of these symptoms, and the fact that perspiration sprang constantly from him, so that he was continually mopping his face and feeding a raging thirst with paper cups of water, he felt almost normal.

  But not quite. There was something unnatural about his alertness and lack of shivering and chills that made him feel as if he was made of delicate china, that any sudden move or emotion would shatter him into irreparable junk. He held himself tightly erect in his chair as if he was invisibly gripping himself together with will power, and their questions seemed to come from some place so remote and disconnected with him that they were not as threatening as they tried to be. He answered monotonously, unvaryingly, as he answered the new questioner, Swanson, who had come and gone from the room several times already and had just now once more returned to it.

  “I can’t explain so you’d understand,” Jase said. “You’d have to have been inside Kator to understand, and none of you were. Only me. I can’t explain.”

  “Try us,” said Swanson. “If we don’t understand, nothing’s been lost, has it?”

  “There’re no words,” said Jase. “Not until after you’ve experienced it. You see we’re intelligent, and so are the Ruml.” It was the same explanation he had gone over many times before since he had come into this room. “We’ve both got highly developed forebrains. But we aren’t reacting with our forebrains, either race of us, in this matter. We’re reacting primitively—” He stopped. It was no use.

  “Go on,” said Swanson, grimly.

  “—Primitively,” repeated Jase. “Emotionally. Instinctively. We’re reacting against them as strangers, and they against us. Because the reaction’s on that emotional level, we’re not being reasonable. Reasonableness, understanding—these are intellectual things. Things we learn in the process of growing up in a civilized culture. A young animal—a young child—is not reasonable. He’s not naturally understanding. His concentration is all on surviving, and growing. He takes any advantage that’s offered, without considering abstract moral values or invisible differences. If we’d kept the avenue of basic research open—”

  “Aren’t you getting off from the subject?” said Swanson. “We’re in a race against time, here.”

  “It’s all connected. But never mind,” said Jase. “I told you you wouldn’t understand. Understanding’s blocked out in your minds, just as it is in the Rumls, by primitive emotional reactions to the stranger. Basic research would have pointed out that this would happen before it did, before we contacted some race like the Ruml. We would have been forewarned and ready to keep from being crippled by the primitive reaction when we met our first intelligent alien. But we weren’t. And now it’s a case of one set of closed minds coming head on against another set of closed minds.”

  “Point out,” said Swanson, “where our minds are closed. Maybe we can open them.”

  “You think you mean that,” answered Jase. “But you don’t. You have to start out by understanding Kator. Start out by thinking of him as a man with a strict moral code—“

  “Moral code!” said somebody in the room. Jase did not even look to see who said it.

  “You see?” he said to Swanson. “You didn’t say that, but you might as well have. That’s the way you feel.”

  “We don’t even have to consider how he’s acted and thought, where we’re concerned,” said Swanson. “Against his own people he’s shown us everything but a moral code. Hasn’t he just finished lying to fifty-seven of his own kind, deliberately tricking them into committing suicide? What’s moral about that?”

  “The greatest morality there is,” said Jase. “The morality of survival, both individual and race. They died so that he could not only live but succeed. If there was one person of his own race and family he cared for it was Bela, and he arbitrarily had Bela killed to increase his prestige in the eyes of the Expedition—“

  “When all the time he knew he was going to kill them off too,” said Swanson. “I think you can see it’s pretty hard for us to swallow that this was a noble thing to do.”

  “But he hadn’t reached the point where he could safely kill them off, yet!” said Jase, stung at last out of his fragile, china-like detachment. “You think of his authority in human terms! You think of his obligations in human terms! You think of his goals in human terms—“

  The door to the room opened. A man stuck his head in, and Jase broke off abruptly at the sight of the expression on his face, which was the expression of a man who has seen evidence of his own doom.

  “It’s starting,” the man said to Swanson. “You said to tell you. If you want to come, you’d all better come now.”

  “Be right there,” said Swanson. “Come along, Jase. Come on with us and see what you’ve done.”

  Jase got awkwardly and uncertainly to his feet. With men surrounding him and Swanson ahead of him, he walked out of the room, down several turns of corridor, and finally into a room with a large, three-dimensional viewing screen at one end and seats sloping toward it as in a theater.

  In the row two back from the front, with a tall woman and two business-suited men, was Mele. They brought Jase down to the same row and moved him in. He sat down in the empty seat at Mele’s right.

  “Mele,” he said. “How—“

  “I’m all right.” She smiled at him and took hold of his hand, squeezing it. She continued to hold on to his hand, and neither her attendants nor Jase’s objected. Swanson sat down on the other side of Jase.

  “Ready,” said Swanson, turning his head to speak to one of the men behind him. The rows behind were filling in with as many as thirty or forty people.

  A moment later the overhead lights in the room dimmed down to a deep twilight of gloom, and the cube before them lighted up with a scene. Instantly, Jase recognized it, although even Kator had never been in it before. But every Ruml knew what it looked like. It was the Gathering Room of the currently presiding Family Heads of the Ruml. Normally these consisted of fifty-one Family Heads chosen by rotation from among the more than five hundred thousand Heads of Families on all the Ruml worlds. Disability, disinclination to serve, or pressing business normally removed half of the list of available men from possible service. The rest took the turn of their Family when it came up and were members of the presiding group for ten days of a season.

  The chance to serve came therefore never more than once in the lifetime of an eligible Family Head, if at all. And the responsibilities of the fifty-one members were two, as Jase knew. First, to order any necessary actions for the Honor of the Ruml as a race. And, second, to certify a Founder—whether only of a Family or of a Family and Kingdom.

  It was for the last purpose the fifty-one were gathered here this day. The Brutogas was an invited member, without a voice in the gathering, making fifty-two in all. Just now, as Jase had sat down, the heavy-bodied, long-whiskered Rumls of honorable age were filing in to take their seats in a rising half-circle looking down on a small, circular amphitheater. When they were all seated, out by a low door into the amphitheater came Kator to stand and salute his elders with his right hand over his chest and the claws extended.

  At the sight of him, Jase’s brain, dreamy with exhaustion, sickness, and the stimulants that had been pumped into him, jumped the gap. Dreaming awake, he found himself as suddenly inside the body of the image of Kator before him as he had been when he had been asleep. The mental link between them was still operating—and in that second he left the room of the unknown building in Washington and leaped to the Gathering Room on the Ruml Homeworld.r />
  His body continued to sit upright and open-eyed, watching the cube in the room on earth. But only those around him were watching. Jase was living the scene they saw. For a last time—he was Kator.

  Jase looked up at the Heads of Families looking down at him, and when he saw the gray visage of the Brutogas among them, an instinctive thrill of pride ran through him-to be washed away almost immediately by a wave of shame and sorrow. He stiffened and spoke to the assembled Family Heads.

  “Sirs,” he said. “I am Kator Secondcousin Brutogas. I trust that here I am among friends.”

  “Keysman,” replied the most honorable member, “here you are among friends. You have a report to make to us?”

  “Sir,” said Jase, “I have. The log of my voyage with the ship of the Expedition to the world of the Muffled People is already in your hands. You already know what is set down there. I have an additional recording to show you, but first I would like to put before this gathering a claim of a special nature.”

  “Your claim concerns yourself?” said the most honorable member, in the words which were always used to those who had stood where he stood now, under such circumstances.

  “Yes sir. It is a claim for special consideration, of the fact that I am become unlike any other man, and therefore necessary and valuable to the honorable race of men.”

  “What,” asked the most honorable member, “is the basis for your claim?”

  “The basis for my claim,” said Jase, “is that the Muffled People are unlike any other race encountered by men since the beginning of time. They have developed a civilization almost as great as our own, and it may be that their intelligence and Honor approaches equality with our own. In the face of such a departure from anything known in history, I claim a special consideration.” He paused.

  “What is this special consideration?” The question came down from the seat of the most honorable member above him among the ranked elders.

  “Sirs,” Jase said. “Of the Expedition that was sent to the world of the Muffled People, I alone have returned with the knowledge that would make any attempt to Found Families upon that world successful. Because of my unique and special value to the race of men, therefore, I petition this gathering to take special actions in my case.”