Fletcher Pratt

by Alien Planet

  "He's probably suffering more from fatigue and shock than anything else, and has some lake water inside him, too. Suppose we give him another dose of brandy and later on we'll try to feed him."

  "O.K.," said Merrick, "and if he's not better by morning, one of us can run in to Fort Ann and dig up a doctor." Our patient was better in the morning, however; he sat up in the bunk and accepted a cup of coffee with languid gratitude, drinking the liquid with relish. Toast, on the other hand, he first nibbled and then refused. When we offered him one of the small fish we were breakfasting on, he dug away at it with his coffee spoon and then crammed a goodsized portion, bones and all, into his mouth. I imagine the bones surprised and hurt him; he made an inarticulate sound of displeasure and spat them out, looking at us with some indignation, which changed to obvious astonishment as we separated the bones from our portions before eating.

  After breakfast, the stranger (whom Merrick forthwith christened "Friday") went to sleep again, and Merrick and I strolled to the beach to have another look at what must have been his vehicle. There was not much of it visible; his exit had evidently been made under water. Below the clear surface, a double ring, not more than a couple of yards in diameter, indicated where the top had come off. It was a wonder he had not been drowned in escaping, and at the time, more of a wonder that he had not been burned to death.

  At one side of the main mass of the thing, where the hole made by its arrival rose sharply to the beach, lay the lid, half in and half out of the water—a huge thing that it took both of us to pull up on the sand. We marveled that Friday, faint and weary as he was, had been able to move it at all.

  The outer coating was as we had seen—some extremely hard material, pitted and scarred by the heat of its contact with the atmosphere. The inner surface was a light gray in color, soft to the touch, but firm and rubbery. When Merrick jabbed it with his knife, the material closed over the wound without leaving a visible scar. At the edges a white layer of some third composition, about an inch in thickness, lay between the lining and the outer hard shell. It was as unfamiliar as the other two and Merrick's knife would not even scratch it. Clearly, for one who was neither a chemist nor a metallurgist, there was little information to be gathered from the composition of this singular vehicle; leaving it where it lay, we returned to the shack.

  On the way up the path my foot struck the flashlight the stranger had dropped the night before. I bent to pick it up, noted that it was of the ordinary cylindrical type but furnished with a frosted glass cover, and pointing it off to one side, idly snapped it on. Immediately there was a low buzz and a beam like a lightning flash leaped from the ground glass into the trees. We heard a vicious whup! saw a gleam of flame, and when I snapped the flashlight off again, we could easily perceive the circular hole—all burned round the edges, where the beam had struck a foot-thick maple.

  "Heavens!" I said, gooseflesh creeping on my back, "Lucky I wasn't looking into that thing when I turned it on. What is it?"

  "Don't know," said Merrick. "Never saw anything like it. Golly, this beats a gun if it's real. Let's try it on the lake and see how much range it has."

  We stepped back to the shore, and holding the dangerous flashlight carefully, I pointed it far down the lake and pressed the key. The buzz and flash were repeated, and perhaps a mile away a silver plume of steam sprang from the water.

  "A heat-ray," pronounced Merrick. "Just like H. G. Wells'. This johnny knows his stuff, whoever he is. He's got a nice adjunct to the gentle trade of murder there. Better put it away. He might get peeved and try to use it on us."

  For the next three or four days Friday did not seem inclined to try to do anything. He rested in the bunk, watched us at our daily tasks and enjoyments with a friendly but detached interest, and slept. Though he accepted food with a certain graceful courtesy, he seemed curiously uneducated as to table manners. From the first he refused to use a fork, testing its sharp points with an inquisitive finger and laying it aside. The iron knives we used in lieu of silver at the camp, he examined with interest, but did not attempt to use. Spoons alone he seemed perfectly familiar with, and pressed into service for all his eating. Indeed, he acted surprised when he failed to cut the steak we gave him one evening with the edge of his spoon, and after several ineffective attempts at dividing the meat by this means, finally picked up the whole piece and worried a mouthful loose with his teeth.

  He made no attempt to speak in any language, and as the days passed we noted a further peculiarity. Although he did nothing but lie in the bunk, he was no more in need of a shave than when he had arrived, and there was not a trace of hair on his bald but singularly youthful head.

  The days since his arrival had grown into nearly a week in this state of burning curiosity on the one side and polite suspended animation on the other, when one evening, when rain pattered on the roof and the wind rattled the window frames, Merrick and I sat before the fire in the larger of our two rooms, reading. Friday had risen from his bunk and was ensconced in one of our chairs at one side of the fire, watching us with silent interest.

  As it happened, Merrick was reading one of those one-volume editions of Shakespeare.

  "Do you know," he remarked, "I have always thought 'King John' the most underrated of Shakespeare's plays. There is some of the most gorgeous rhetoric he ever wrote in it—better than anything that has been done since, even Yeats's 'Wanderings of Oisinn.' Listen to this—" and he began to read the last lines of the play, the speech of the Bastard which ends with:

  "Come the three corners of the world in arms

  And we shall shock them; nought shall make us rue

  If England to herself do rest but true."

  Merrick reads poetry very well, and I heard him as I always do, with a little thrill of pleasure. But it was upon our guest that the greatest effect was produced. He rose from his chair, staring at Merrick, and then pointing to the book, began to move his hands vigorously.

  "For the love of Mike," said Merrick, "what do you suppose he wants now?"

  "Wants you to read some more, of course," said I. "Try it." He ruffled the pages a minute and then began again. The stranger smiled and bowed, with a scraped-back foot, in approval. After a moment, when Merrick came to a pause, Friday rose, went to his bunk, and returned with the curious radio helmet he had worn when we first saw him. After fiddling with some keys inside it for a moment he put it on, lay down on the floor beside the fire, and closed his eyes.

  "I've got it," said Merrick after a moment. "He wants me to read to him while he's asleep. But what for?"

  I cogitated. "It might be some system of learning while you're asleep. Didn't they try something like that with sailors at Pensacola? Seems to me I read somewhere they learned radio with head-sets on while they were in bed." *

  * He is again perfectly right. The experiment of teaching navy men radio while asleep was tried at Pensacola, and with complete success. The sailors were unable to remember what, they had heard while asleep, but on waking were able to send and receive radio messages with remarkable skill, though they had had almost no previous training.

  "And you think he wants to learn English that way? All right, let's try it."

  Turning the pages and clearing his throat, Merrick began:

  "Antonio: in sooth I know not why I am so sad—" the opening lines of "The Merchant of Venice." Friday settled himself down with a contented smile.

  II

  IN THE morning came fresh airs that shook the rain from the sky and presently cleared it for the languid warmth of an August day. We were early afoot, and as I busied myself about the kitchen, Friday emerged from the bunk room to which he had evidently retired after we went to bed. His helmet was off, and I thought I saw a new light in his face as he advanced across the room.

  When he was a few feet away, he suddenly bent his knees in a gesture of greeting, and without the slightest hesitation, began to speak:

  "Though even yet I know not your strange tongue,

  (I pra
y you pardon my indigencies);

  I wish you well and would hold nomination .

  Upon him matters. Speak your noble friend."

  I fear I did him the discourtesy of staring, open-mouthed. Both grammar and accent left something to be desired—he rolled his r's furiously and his s's were slurred into the indescribable French j—but that a man who had been unable to speak or understand English one day before should suddenly burst into Shakespearean blank verse —well, it seemed impossible. As I stared, he was off again:

  "Have I not made you read my tongue aright?

  Oh, hell! What costly post—"

  But I had recovered the use of my voice. "Oh, Merrick, come here quickly!" I called.

  As my friend entered, Friday again bent his knees in a little curtsy, and flinging out his arms to include both of us in a gesture, began once more:

  "Kingomi, friends! Ashembe is my name.

  Before the stormy shipwreck of my fortunes

  Upon your most inhospitable shore

  (I was a little taken aback by this—but remembered that it was his maiden effort in the English language.)

  I left a ruddy moon deeper in space Than all your candles. I would gabo.

  Tell me, do you possess it in this deed?"

  It was all so grotesquely intelligible-unintelligible that both of us laughed. "What is he trying to say?" asked Merrick. "And what is gabo?"

  "Haven't the slightest idea," I answered, thinking of the last question first. "But I think he's trying to tell us that he came from another planet."

  "Another planet!" cried Merrick. "Why ... still, that would explain ... there's that heat-ray—"

  I turned to the man who had described himself as Ashembe. "Am I not right?" I asked.

  He stared for a moment, his brows wrinkling with concentration. Then:

  "Ah, who will now unriddle me this tongue?

  Right? Planet? What are these? I only know

  I left a deed—"

  It was as bad as the first effort, but at all events communication of a kind had been established. Ashembe continued to speak in blank verse; you could see him winding up for the effort as it were, before each speech, his Ups moving silently, his brows wearing an expression of intense concentration. He used his newly acquired English with a terrible accent and with so many misplaced words that we only understood a third of what he was saying; but with patience and interest to aid us we managed to make out the general drift.

  As I recall that first day's conversation, it turned upon quite unimportant matters. The Shakespearean vocabulary is no doubt extensive, but so much of it is given to the expression of the abstract passions of love, grief and hate that there is little left with which to carry on an ordinary conversation. And in this technical age one would find amazing gaps if he were to try to discuss things, using only the words found in "The Merchant of Venice."

  Even worse than his paucity of English words was the. wealth of metaphor with which Ashembe found it necessary to clothe the most simple statements, and the archaic character of Elizabethan English as a medium for expressing just what he wanted. "Leaden casket" was the best phrase he could find to describe his vehicle (whatever it was) and he kept referring to the place from which he had come as a "moon" or a "deed," doubtless remembering the "so shines a good deed in a naughty world" line in the play.

  Unraveling these difficulties consumed the greater part-of the day. What we finally made out of it all was that he had come from another planet; and that he wished to exchange valuable formulae for "gabo." What "gabo" was, neither of us had any idea, except that it was apparently some metal, judging from Ashembe's description of it as "glittering more than gold."

  He confirmed that his radio helmet in some mysterious way enabled him to learn things while asleep, helping him' appraise ideas as well as words, and thus enabling him to learn a new language in remarkably quick time. He was particularly anxious to have us read more to him on scientific and technical subjects.

  Fortunately, there was, among the few books we maintained at Joyous Gard, an old set of the International Encyclopedia that Merrick had once purchased in a moment of aberration, and had brought up here to help us identify various plants and insects. When we managed to communicate to Ashembe that we had a compendium of worldly knowledge, he was off on the instant for his helmet, explaining in a good many splurges of oratorical blank verse that he wanted to begin absorbing it at once.

  That evening Merrick took up the task of reading to him, while I set about the obtruding necessity of food, and from then far into the night we kept at is ceaselessly, skipping all the articles that were historical, literary or merely of interest to the curious, and confining ourselves to technical and scientific matters—which, it must be admitted, we understood very badly ourselves. In the morning Ashembe put us at it again, this time discarding his helmet and trying to learn to read by the ordinary method.

  "My father's people have for long and long unable been to extract attainments (knowledge?) by images of the glittering eye. So thoroughly have we become imbued with the use of the Tensal (his helmet, apparently) that the method of the printed page to us is lost. But in reading from your book, the children of your thought creep feebly on their hands and knees, and I would even follow the book myself, gramercy."

  "The children of your thought?" repeated Merrick. "The image of the mind whereof you speak," said Ashembe. "You read to me, 'the brontosaurusis a sauropod' but in my mind I see you have in yours no picture of the brontosaurus, nor of sauropods. All, all is words, beyond the ken of vacant heads."

  "I like that," murmured Merrick. "Vacant heads!" "Have I unwitting wrought your senses harm?" queried Ashembe, with anxious courtesy. "I crave forgiveness. Read me further." And that evening, like the previous one, saw us alternating at the International Encyclopedia while our guest from another planet slumbered before the fireplace.

  "Your information-book is faithless," Ashembe told us the next morning. "It halteth always at the verge—I would dig deeper in your mines of knowledge. Do you sense more?"

  "Not much more than the encyclopedia, I'm afraid," I-said. "Neither of us is well posted on science, except for a little corner of knowledge. I have looked into the fungi some, and Merrick understands birds."

  A light seemed to dawn on our visitor. "My friends, I have not asked you of your argosies," he said. "What they are? It is improbable that you are to sciences of me unknown?"

  "Argosies?" I asked, not quite comprehending. "An argosy is a ship—something that moves on water."

  "Forgive the halting utterance of my tongue," said Ashembe. "Argosies—I would inquire your arts, your merchandise." He moved his hands, helplessly.

  "Oh, he means what do we do," Merrick broke in. "I am a lawyer"—there was no comprehension on Ashembe's face—"that is, I ... well, see here. The relations between men are governed by rules. I am one of those who interpret the rules. Suppose there are two men. Each of them says, 'This is mine.' One of them comes to me and I try to find out if it really belongs to him. If it does, I present proof and they give it to him."

  "Oh, hell," said Ashembe (for some reason he had acquired the idea that this was a particularly fine way to begin a sentence) "you are an arbiter of destiny. I comprehend. May you be happy." He touched his forehead and bent his knees in the formal gesture of congratulation we had seen him use but once or twice before. "In my world such are high art men and are held in great honor. To you they bring their arguments; you say to one 'You are right. It is yours.' Like Portia. Tell me, is this the meaning in your tongue?"

  "No, not quite." said Merrick patiently. "The man who decides is the judge. In this country he is assisted by twelve other men who are called the jury. All I do is bring the truth out for the judge and jury. I represent only one side of the argument."

  "The other man of the argument, he does also have a lawyer?" queried Ashembe, in some astonishment. "Improbable! Twelve—fifteen men for one dispute. But you are great in art to thus give your ti
me to others. By what art do all these earn their gold and good? They are workers with hands?"

  "No," Merrick went on, patiently. "The man I am representing pays me, and the man on the other side pays his lawyer. The judge is paid by the State, but the costs of the action are supposed to be paid by whoever loses the case. Judges don't have anything else to do."

  "Important!" declared our guest. "You gain gold by coming to judgment. But how do you decide aright? The man you represent might be wrongdoing, but have great lawyer. In my world it would be crime to give any man of justice money. It would make man with best brains always serve those with most gold. Your men in argument why not tell stories immediately to the judge and the jury? Else judge and jury make mistakes."

  "They do that all right," said Merrick, "but how do you make sure that a man knows all the law in your courts?" "We have the arbiter of destiny, like a judge," said Ashembe. "The men of the argument tell their ownership to him. If they disagree he names a—a pollave, who around him gathers all the facts. All men are made to leave their arts and come at the pollave's call. But only high art men are made arbiters of destinies. The laws, the rules, we teach them to children. So many they are in this country you need interpreters and representatives?"

  Merrick nodded.

  "Important! Such would be crime in my world. Like crime of giving money to justice men.... Blit hold! I recollection. Long many years ago we decided arguments like you, save for one word. The lawyer on the wrong side from him they took gold equal in direct proportion to that gained by the right side of the argument. Thus all lawyer was sure to be on the right side. But that was long many years ago. Your judge and jury is very behind." He dismissed the subject, and, turning to where I stood grinning at Merrick's discomfiture, asked me, "Your art, what is he?"