Aliens from Analog

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  “Generation after generation?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Each player contributing to the end of his days without hope of seeing the result?”

  “Yes.” ‘

  Palamin fumed a bit. “Then why do they play it?”

  “It’s part of their religious faith. They believe that the moment the last disk is placed the entire universe will go bang.”

  “Are they crazy?”

  “No more so than people who have played alizik for equally as long and to just as little purpose.”

  “We have played alizik as a series of separate games and not as one never-ending game. A rigmarole without possible end cannot be called a game by any stretch of the imagination.”

  “Arky-malarkey is not endless. It has a conclusive finish.” Taylor appealed to Mamikot as the undisputed authority. “Hasn’t it?”

  “It is definitely finite,” pronounced Mamikot, unable to deny the fact.

  “So!” exclaimed Palamin, going a note higher. “You think you are very clever, don’t you?”

  “I get by,” said Taylor, seriously doubting it.

  “But we are cleverer,” insisted Palamin, using his nastiest manner. “You have tricked us and now we shall trick you. The game is finite. It can be concluded. Therefore it will continue until it reaches its natural end. You will go on playing it days, weeks, months, years until eventually you expire of old age and chronic frustration. There will be times when the very sight of these disks will drive you crazy and you will beg for merciful death. But we shall not grant that favor—and you will continue to play.” He waved a hand in triumphant dismissal. “Take him away.”

  Taylor returned to his cell.

  When supper came the warder offered, “I am told that play will go on regularly as from tomorrow morning. I don’t understand why they messed it up today.”

  “They’ve decided that I’m to suffer a fate worse than death,” Taylor informed.

  The warder stared at him.

  “I have been very naughty,” said Taylor.

  Rat-eyes evidently had been advised of the new setup because he donned the armor of philosophical acceptance and played steadily but without interest. All the same, long sessions of repetitive motions ate corrosively into the armor and gradually found its way through.

  In the early afternoon of the fifty-second day Rat-eyes found himself faced with the prospect of returning most of the disks to the first peg, one by one. He took off the clompers he used for boots. Then he ran barefooted four times around the room, bleating like a sheep. Potbelly got a crick in the neck watching him. Two guards led Rat-eyes away still bleating. They forgot to take his clompers with them.

  By the table Taylor sat gazing at the disks while he strove to suppress his inward alarm. What would happen now? If Rat-eyes had given up for keeps it could be argued that he had lost, the game had concluded and the time had come to play okey-chokey with a piece of cord. It could be said with equal truth that an unfinished game remains an unfinished game even though one of the players is in a mental home giving his hair a molasses shampoo.

  If the authorities took the former view his only defense was to assert the latter one. He’d have to maintain with all the energy at his command that since he had not won or lost his time could not possibly have come. It wouldn’t be easy if he had to make his protest while being dragged by the heels to his doom. His chief hope lay in Gombarian unwillingness to outrage an ancient convention. Millions of video viewers would take a poor look at officialdom mauling a pet superstition. Yes, man, there were times when the Idiot’s Lantern had its uses.

  He need not have worried. Having decided that to keep the game going would be a highly refined form of hell, the Gombarians had already prepared a roster of relief players drawn from the ranks of minor offenders whose ambitions never rose high enough to earn a strangling. So after a short time another opponent appeared.

  The newcomer was a shifty character with a long face and hanging dewlaps. He resembled an especially dopey bloodhound and looked barely capable of articulating three words, to wit, “Ain’t talking, copper.” It must have taken at least a month to teach him that he must move only one disk at a time and never, never, never place it upon a smaller one. But somehow he had learned. The game went on.

  Dopey lasted a week. He played slowly and doggedly as if in fear of punishment for making a mistake. Often he was irritated by the video cabinet, which emitted ticking noises at brief but regular intervals. These sounds indicated the short times they were on the air.

  For reasons best known to himself Dopey detested having his face broadcasted all over the planet and near the end of the seventh day he’d had enough. Without warning he left his seat, faced the cabinet and made a number of swift and peculiar gestures at the lenses. The signs meant nothing to the onlooking Taylor. But Potbelly almost fell off his chair. The guards sprang forward, grabbed Dopey, and frogmarched him through the door.

  He was replaced by a huge-jowled, truculent character who dumped himself into the chair, glared at Taylor and wiggled his hairy ears. Taylor, who regarded this feat as one of his own accomplishments, promptly wiggled his own ears back. The other then looked fit to burst a blood vessel.

  “This Terran sneak,” he roared at Potbelly, “is throwing dirt at me. Do I have to put up with that?”

  “You will cease to throw dirt,” ordered Potbelly.

  “I only wiggled my ears,” said Taylor.

  “That is the same thing as throwing dirt,” Potbelly said mysteriously. “You will refrain from doing it and you will concentrate upon the game.”

  And so it went on with disks being moved from peg to peg hour after hour, day after day, while a steady parade of opponents arrived and departed. Around the two- hundredth day Potbelly himself started to pull his chair apart with the apparent intention of building a camp fire in the middle of the floor. The guards led him out. A new referee appeared. He had an even bigger paunch and Taylor promptly named him Potbelly Two.

  How Taylor himself stood the soul-deadening pace he never knew. But he kept going while the others cracked. He was playing for a big stake while they were not. All the same, there were times when he awoke from horrid dreams in which he was sinking through the black depths of an alien sea with a monster disk like a millstone around his neck. He lost count of the days and once in a while his hands developed the shakes. The strain was not made any easier by several nighttime uproars that took place during this time. He asked the warder about one of them.

  “Yasko refused to go. They had to beat him into submission.”

  “His game had ended?”

  “Yes. The stupid fool matched a five of anchors with a five of stars. Immediately he realized what he’d done he tried to kill his opponent.” He wagged his head in sorrowful reproof. “Such behavior never does them any good. They go to the post cut and bruised. And if the guards are angry with them they ask the executioner to twist slowly.”

  “Ugh!” Taylor didn’t like to think of it. “Surprises me that none have chosen my game. Everybody must know of it by now.”

  “They are not permitted to,” said the warder. “There is now a law that only a recognized Gombarian game may be selected.”

  He ambled away. Taylor lay full length on his bench and hoped for a silent, undisturbed night. What was the Earth-date? How long had he been here? How much longer would he remain? How soon would he lose control of himself and go nuts? What would they do with him if and when he became too crazy to play?

  Often in the thought-period preceding sleep he concocted wild plans of escape. None of them were of any use whatever. Conceivably he could break out of this prison despite its grilles, armored doors, locks, bolts, bars and armed guards. It was a matter of waiting for a rare opportunity and seizing it with both hands. But suppose he got out, what then? Any place on the planet he would be as conspicuous as a kangaroo on the sidewalks of New York. If it were possible to look remotely like a Gombarian, he’d have a sl
ight chance. It was not possible. He could do nothing save play for time.

  This he continued to do. On and on and on without cease except for meals and sleep. By the three-hundredth day he had to admit to himself that he was feeling somewhat moth-eaten. By the four-hundredth he was under the delusion that he had been playing for at least five years and was doomed to play forever, come what may. The four-twentieth day was no different from the rest except in one respect of which he was completely unaware—it was the last.

  At dawn of day four twenty-one no call came for him to play. Perforce he waited a couple of hours and still no summons. Maybe they’d decided to break him with a cat-and-mouse technique, calling him when he didn’t expect it and not calling him when he did. A sort of psychological water torture. When the warder passed along the corridor Taylor went to the bars and questioned him. The fellow knew nothing and was as puzzled as himself.

  The midday meal arrived. Taylor had just finished it when the squad of guards arrived accompanied by an officer. They entered the cell and removed his irons. Ye gods, this was something! He stretched his limbs luxuriously, fired questions at the officer and his plug-uglies. They took no notice, behaved as if he had stolen the green eye of the little yellow god. Then they marched him out of the cell, along the corridors and past the games room.

  Finally they passed through a large doorway and into an open yard. In the middle of this area stood six short steel posts each with a hole near its top and a coarse kneeling-mat at its base. Stolidly the squad tramped straight towards the posts. Taylor’s stomach turned over. The squad pounded on past the posts and toward a pair of gates. Taylor’s stomach turned thankfully back and settled itself.

  Outside the gates they climbed aboard a troop-carrier which at once drove off. It took him around the outskirts of the city to a spaceport. They all piled out, marched past the control tower and onto the concrete. There they halted.

  Across the spaceport, about half a mile away, Taylor could see a Terran vessel sitting on its fins. It was far too small for a warship, too short and fat for a scoutship. After staring at it with incredulous delight he decided that it was a battleship’s lifeboat. He wanted to do a wild dance and yell silly things. He wanted to run like mad toward it but the guards stood close around and would not let him move.

  They waited there for four long, tedious hours, at the end of which another lifeboat screamed down from the sky and landed alongside its fellow. A bunch of figures came out of it, mostly Gombarians. The guards urged him forward.

  He was dimly conscious of some sort of exchange ceremony at the halfway mark. A line of surly Gombarians passed him, going the opposite way. Many of them were ornamented with plenty of brass and had the angry faces of colonels come fresh from a general demotion. He recognized one civilian, Borkot, and wiggled his ears at him as he went by.

  Then willing hands helped him through an air lock and he found himself sitting in the cabin of a ship going up. A young and eager lieutenant was talking to him but he heard only half of it.

  . Landed, snatched twenty and beat it into space. We cross-examined them by signs…bit surprised to learn you were still alive…released one with an offer to exchange prisoners. Nineteen Gombarian bums for one Terran is a fair swap, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Taylor, looking around and absorbing every mark upon the walls.

  “We’ll have you aboard the Thunderer pretty soon…Macklin couldn’t make it with that trouble near Cygni…got here as soon as we could.” The lieutenant eyed him sympathetically. “You’ll be heading for home within a few hours. Hungry?”

  “No, not at all. The one thing they didn’t do was starve me.”

  “Like a drink?”

  “Thanks, I don’t drink.”

  Fidgeting around embarrassedly, the lieutenant asked, “Well, how about a nice, quiet game of draughts?”

  Taylor ran a finger around the inside of his collar and said, “Sorry, I don’t know how to play and don’t want to learn. I am allergic to games.”

  “You’ll change.”

  “I’ll be hanged if I do,” said Taylor.

  “Damn! He’s actually doing it. Do you hear that?”

  A ray of sunlight and a distant voice filtered down from the open arch in the control room above. The distant voice talked and paused, talked and paused. The words were blurred, but the tone was recognizable.

  “He’s outside preaching to the natives.”

  The two engineers were overhauling the engines, but paused to look up toward the voice.

  “Maybe not,” said Charlie, the junior engineer. “After all, he doesn’t know their language.”

  “He’d preach anyway,” said Henderson, senior engineer and navigator. He heaved with a wrench on a tight bolt, the wrench slipped, and Henderson released some words that made Charlie shudder.

  On the trip, Charlie had often dreamed apprehensively that Henderson had strangled the passenger. And once he had dreamed that he himself had strangled the passenger and Henderson too.

  When awake the engineers carefully avoided irritating words or gestures, remained cordial toward each other and the passenger no matter what the temptation to snarl, and tried to keep themselves in a tolerant good humor.

  It had not been easy.

  Charlie said, “How do you account for the missionary society giving him a ship of his own? A guy like that, who just gets in your hair when he’s trying to give you advice, a guy with a natural-born talent for antagonizing people?”

  “Easy,” Henderson grunted, spinning the bolt. He was a stocky, square-built man with a brusque manner and a practiced tolerance of other people’s oddities. “The missionary society was trying to get rid of him. You can’t get any farther away than where they sent us!”

  The distant voice filtered into the control room from the unseen sunlit landscape outside the ship. It sounded resonant and confident. “The poor jerk thinks it was an honor,” Henderson added. He pulled out the bolt and dropped it on the padded floor with a faint thump.

  “Anyhow,” Charlie said, loosening bolt heads in a circle as the manual instructed, “he can’t use the translator machine. It’s not ready yet, not until we get the rest of their language. He won’t talk to them if they can’t understand.”

  “Won’t he?” Henderson fitted his wrench to another bolt and spun it angrily. “Then what is he doing?” Without waiting for an answer he replied to his own question. “Preaching, that’s what he is doing!”

  It seemed hot and close in the engine room, and the sunlight from outside beckoned. Charlie paused and wiped the back of his arm against his forehead. “Preaching won’t do him any good. If they can’t understand him, they won’t listen.”

  “We didn’t listen, and that didn’t stop him from preaching to us!” Henderson snapped. “He’s lucky we found a landing planet so soon, he’s lucky he didn’t drive us insane first. A man like that is a danger to a ship.” Henderson, like Charlie, knew the stories of ships which had left with small crews and returned with a smaller crew of one or two red-eyed maniacs and a collection of corpses. Henderson was a conservative. He preferred the regular shipping runs, and ships with a regular-sized crew and a good number of passengers. Only an offer of triple pay and triple insurance indemnity had lured him from the big ships to be co-engineer on this odd three-man trip.

  “…I didn’t mind being preached at.” Charlie’s tone was mild, but he stared upward in the direction of the echoing voice with a certain intensity in his stance.

  “Come off it, you twerp. We only have to be sweet to each other on a trip when we’re cabinbound. Don’t kid old Harry, you didn’t like it.”

  “No,” said Charlie dreamily, staring upward with a steady intensity. “Can’t say that I did. He’s not such a good preacher. I’ve met better in bars.” The echoing voice from outside seemed to be developing a deeper echo. “He’s got the translator going, Harry. I think we ought to stop him.”

  Charlie was a lanky redhead with a mild manner, about
the same age as the preacher, but Henderson, who had experience, laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll do it,” said Henderson, and scrambled up the ladder to the control room. The control room was a pleasant shading of grays, brightly lit by the sunlight that streamed in through the open archway. The opening to the outside was screened only by a billowing curtain of transparent Saran-type plastic film, ion-coated to allow air to pass freely, but making a perfect and aseptic filter against germs and small insects. The stocky engineer hung a clear respirator box over a shoulder, brought the tube up to his mouth, and walked through the plastic film. It folded over him and wrapped him in an intimate tacky embrace, and gripped to its own surface behind him, sealing itself around him like a loose skin. Just past the arch he walked through a frame of metal like a man-sized croquet wicket and stopped while it tightened a noose around the trailing films of plastic behind him, cutting him free of the doorway curtain and sealing the break with heat.

  Without waiting for the plastic to finish wrapping and tightening itself around him, the engineer went down the ramp, trailing plastic film in gossamer veils, like ghostly battle flags.

  They could use this simple wrapping of thin plastic as an airsuit air lock, for the air of the new world was rich and good, and the wrapping was needed only to repel strange germs or infections. They were not even sure that there were any such germs; but the plastic was a routine precaution for ports in quarantine, and the two engineers were accustomed to wearing it. It allowed air to filter by freely, so that Henderson could feel the wind on his skin, only slightly diminished. He was wearing uniform shorts, and the wind felt cool and pleasant.

  Around the spaceship stretched grassy meadow and thin forest, and beyond that in one direction lay the blue line of the sea, and in another the hazy blue-green of distant low mountains. It was so like the southern United States of Charlie’s boyhood that the young engineer had wept with excitement when he first looked out of the ship. Harry Henderson did not weep, but he paused in his determined stride and looked around, and understood again how incredibly lucky they had been to find an Earth- type planet of such perfection. He was a firm believer in the hand of fate, and he wondered what fate planned for the living things of this green planet, and why it had chosen him as its agent.