Collision Course

by Robert Silverberg

  The aliens had no noses as such, merely nostril-slits covered with filter-flaps. Their mouths were lipless; their faces in general had little fat, and it seemed as if their skin were stretched drum-tight over their bones. When they spoke to each other, Bernard caught glimpses of red teeth and a tongue so purple it was practically black. So they differed from Earthmen in pigmentation and in most of the minor details—but the overall design was roughly the same, as if only one pattern could serve for intelligent life. Again a lack of choice, Bernard thought with a philosophical detachment that surprised him as his trembling legs continued to move him forward. The universe gives us the impression of free will, but in the really big things there’s only one possible way that things can be.

  The aliens’ arms fascinated him. The double elbows seemed to be universal joints that swiveled in any direction, making the aliens capable of doing fantastic and improbable things with their arms. Chalk one up for alien engineering, Bernard thought. That arm combines all the advantages of a boneless tentacle and a rigid limb.

  The greenskins seemed to be very much like their blue overseers, except that they were shorter and thicker of body. It seemed fairly obvious that the greens were designed for working, the blues for directing.

  A third blue appeared, crossing diagonally from the side of the settlement to join his two colleagues. The three aliens waited stonily, their strange faces appearing to register determination in the teeth of this unforeseen invasion.

  When they were ten feet from the aliens, Laurance halted.

  “Go ahead,” he muttered to Bernard. “Communicate with them. Tell them we want to be friends.”

  The sociologist took a deep breath. He was ironically conscious that nearly a thousand years of folklore spiraled down to reach the level of reality here and now: this was the moment, first in all recorded history, when Earthman walked up to non-Earthman and offered greeting.

  He felt limp. His mind spun. What to say? We are friends. Take us to your leader. Greetings, men of another world!

  There was no help for it, he thought. The old cliches had become cliches precisely because they were so damnably valid; what else were you supposed to say when making first contact with nonterrestrials? But Bernard felt self-conscious all the same, at this moment when cliche became history.

  He touched his breast and pointed to the sky.

  “We are Earthmen,” he said, enunciating each syllable with painstaking crispness. “We come from the sky. We wish to be friends.”

  The words, of course, would mean nothing to the aliens, would be no more than meaningless noises. But that was no excuse for not saying the right words, all the same.

  He pointed to himself once more, and to the sky. Then, tapping his chest, he said, “I.” He pointed to the aliens, slowly, not wanting to alarm them. “You. I—you. I—you— friends.”

  He smiled, wondering as he did so if perhaps the display of bared teeth might be a symbol of fierce challenge to these people. This was far more delicate than the meeting of two hitherto-separate cultures on ancient Earth. At least the same sort of blood flowed in English sea captains and Polynesian chieftain; there was the chance of a common biological ground. Not here. No previously accepted value was worth anything here.

  Bernard waited, and behind him eight other earthmen waited, sharing his tension. He stared levelly into the bulging eyes of the foremost blueskin. The aliens had a faintly musty smell; not unpleasant, but intense. Bernard wondered how Earthmen smelled to them.

  Cautiously he extended his hand. “Friend,” he said.

  There was a long silence. Then, hesitantly, the nearest blueskin lifted his hand, swiveling it upward in that startlingly fluid motion. The alien stared at his hand as if it were not part of him. Bernard glanced quickly at the hand too: it had seven or eight fingers, with a sharply curved thumb. Each finger sprouted an inch-long blue nail.

  The alien reached out, and for a fraction of an instant the calloused blue palm touched Bernard’s. Then, quickly, the hand dropped away.

  The alien made a sound. It might have been a guttural grunt of defiance—but to Bernard it sounded something like “Vvvrennddt!” and he took the sound at face value. Smiling, he nodded at the alien and repeated: “Friend. I—you. You— I. Friend.”

  The repetition came, and this time it was unmistakable. ” Vvvrennddt!” The alien seized Bernard’s outstretched hand and gripped it tightly. Bernard grinned in triumph and satisfaction.

  For better or for worse, the first contact had been made.

  SEVEN

  Within a week, there was communication, of a rough, uncertain sort.

  The aliens caught the idea at once. They saw, without any coaxing necessary, that one or the other group was going to have to learn the other’s language, and that the sooner the better. There was never any question of who was to learn whose language. The aliens spoke a vastly inflected tongue that involved variations in pitch, timbre, and intensity; aside from the mere matter of grammatical complexity, it was obvious to both sides that Earthmen would be dislocating their jaws in any attempt to reproduce the click, grunts, whistles, and growls of the alien language. On physiological grounds it was impossible for the Earthmen to learn the alien language; so the aliens would have to learn Terran.

  They took to it readily enough. Havig, as the team’s linguist, had charge of the project, and for long hours each day the eight other Earthmen acted out charades to demonstrate Terran verbs. It was sometimes maddening work, especially in heat that hovered at the ninety-degree mark most of the day, but Havig spared no one, least of all himself.

  “Get the verbs across and all the rest comes easy,” he said over and over. “Nouns are no trouble—just point to a thing and name it. It’s the verbs we have to teach them first. Especially the abstract verbs.”

  The first session lasted nearly six hours. The three blue-skins who seemed to be in charge of the colony squatted in a peculiarly uncomfortable-looking position, heels digging into the backs of their thighs, while Havig jostled the sweating Earthmen around, shouting instructions at them.

  “Bend! Bend!” The linguist turned to the aliens, indicated the frantically bending Earthmen, and said, “To bend.”

  “Dhu benddh,” repeated the aliens in turn.

  It seemed impossible that a language could be learned this way—but the aliens had retentive memories, and Havig approached the job of teaching them as if it were his sacred duty in the cosmos. By the time the sun began to dip toward the low hills behind the colony, several key concepts had been established: to be, to build, to travel. At least, Havig hoped they had been established. It certainly seemed that way; but there was no certainty.

  The aliens seemed pleased with their new knowledge. They tapped their bony chests and exclaimed, “I—Norglan. You— Terran.”

  “Terran. We—Terrans.”

  “Terrans come. Sky. Star.”

  Bernard nodded to himself. Much as he disagreed with Havig’s fundamental ideas about ancient cultures—and with his weird Neopuritan ideas about today—he had to admit that the stringbean linguist had done a superb job in his first few hours.

  Night was falling, though; and the day’s heat was dwindling rapidly. Evidently this was a zone of dynamic temperature contrasts, with the mercury cycling through a range of fifty or sixty degrees a day.

  “Tell them we’ve got to leave,” Laurance said to Havig. “Find out if they have vehicles and can give us a ride back to our ship.”

  It took Havig fifteen minutes to get the idea across, with the aid of much body-moving and frustrated arm-gesticulation. The blueskins squatted calmly as Havig performed, repeating words now and then as it suited their fancy. Bernard looked forward dismally to another ten-mile jaunt shipward in cold and darkness. But, finally, a spark of understanding glimmered; one of the blueskins rose to his feet in a quick, anatomically improbable motion, and barked stern orders to a waiting greenie.

  Moments later three small vehicles that looked much like lan
dsleds came trundling forward, each driven by a greenskin. The cars were little oval beetles sheathed with what looked like copper, rolling along on three wheels. The blueskin whose command of Terran was most secure pointed to the cars and said, “You. Terrans. Travel.”

  The cars were driven by some sort of turboelectric generator, and they seemed to have a top speed of about forty miles an hour. The greenskins drove impassively, never saying a word, simply following in the direction Laurance pointed out to them. When they came to streams, they simply rolled on through like miniature tanks. The trip back to the XV-ftl took less than an hour, even figuring in detours round impassable wooded areas. When the Earthmen stepped out of the little cars, night had fallen. It was terribly quiet, the clamor of daytime life in the forest stilled for now. Bright, unfamiliar constellations speckled the sky with their strange configurations. And a moon was rising—a tiny reddish sliver of rock, probably no more than a hundred miles in diameter, arching up slantwise through the night. It was rising rapidly, almost at a dizzying pace for men accustomed to the more sedate behavior of Earth’s own satellite.

  The greenskins left without a word.

  The Earthmen were equally silent, as they clambered into their ship. It had been a long, exhausting day; Bernard could not remember when he had ever felt wearier. No academic responsibility had been this grueling. No personal tribulation had exhausted him this much.

  But even with the heavy weight of fatigue numbing them all, it was impossible not to feel a deep, inspiring sense of pride and accomplishment. Earth had come into contact with another race today, an alien people, and there had been communication across the gulf that separated them.

  Inside the ship, Martin Bernard sought out Havig—reluctantly, but out of inner need that seemed imperative. The Neopuritan had not loosened his tight black surplice with its starched collar, but had simply sprawled out on his bunk fully dressed.

  Bernard stood above him. Havig’s eyes were open, but he did not seem to take notice of the sociologist.

  “Havig?”

  Havig’s glance flickered upward. “What is it?”

  Bernard hesitated, fighting back the lingering compulsion to argue with the other man. “I—I just wanted to tell you that I thought you did a splendid job today,” he said, getting the words out haltingly and with difficulty. “We’ve had our differences in the past, Havig, but that doesn’t keep me from offering you congratulations on the way you handled the session today. I can recognize good work when I see it.”

  The Neopuritan rose to a sitting position. His unyielding gray eyes bored into Bernard’s milder blue ones. In a firm, emotionless voice Havig said, “I seek no congratulations for my work, Dr. Bernard. Whatever I may have accomplished, I have done it only by virtue of God’s working through me, and so there is little credit for me to claim.”

  “But—well, all right, so God worked through you,” Bernard sputtered in surprise. “But I still think you did a hell of—you did a swell job, and…”

  “I do not deserve your praise, Dr. Bernard. But I recognize the growth of spirit that enables you to offer it.” There was just the flicker of a smile. “Good night, Dr. Bernard.” Havig lowered himself to his berth once again.

  Bernard blinked in bewilderment. He had been pleased to find the strength in himself necessary to offer the congratulations; he had considered it a steep sacrifice of pride. And, though his gesture had not met with utter rejection, it had certainly been received indifferently by Havig. Bernard felt angered. He started to say something.

  Dominici broke in gently, “Let him alone, Bernard. You’ve both made a step in the right direction. Don’t press things now. What do you expect him to do—smile and say thanks? He doesn’t think he deserves them.”

  “I could have saved my breath, then,” Bernard muttered.

  He turned away and readied himself for sleep. Havig, eyes closed, seemed already soundly slumbering. Stone was making notes in a memorandum pad, and Dominici was scrubbing himself under the vibroshower.

  Bernard stripped and joined the biophysicist beneath the invigorating molecular field; a stream of ions peeled the day’s grime and sweat from him.

  Dominici said, “Don’t fly off the handle because he didn’t beam at your congratulations. You did the right thing in offering them. He was damned good out there today.”

  “Yes, he was,” Bernard agreed. “But the man’s a congenital sourpuss. He didn’t have to give me the stone-wall treatment. He…”

  “He honestly feels he’s just the tool through which God worked today,” Dominici said. “Save your breath and don’t try to get him to think differently. Just be grateful he was as good as he was out there, and take the rest in stride.”

  Bernard slipped into his bunk and wearily tried to relax. He attempted to put himself behind Havig’s forehead, wondering what manner of man it was who could so renounce all the joy of life, all the pleasure of accomplishment, and so dourly go through all his days garbed unsmilingly in black. No doubt that Havig had done a superb job today, absolutely first-rate; but was there really any moral harm in accepting congratulations for what he had done? Maybe, Bernard thought, Havig was one of those men who are unable to accept face-to-face praise without acute embarrassment—and thus he took refuge behind the convenient mask of selflessness that his creed provided him.

  Bernard closed his eyes, thumbing the throbbing eyeballs. He thought for a moment of his own cozy life, the life he had left behind, the life that was as different from Havig’s as could be imagined. No doubt Havig would deem it scandalous, maybe even blasphemous, to spend an evening listening to music, reading poetry, and sipping brandy, when those hours could have been spent in prayer, contemplation, or the performance Of charitable deeds.

  Yet for all Havig’s staunch discipline, he was no better in his specialty than Bernard in his—and for all Bernard’s self-indulgence, he was no worse in his field than Havig in linguistics. I’m easy-going and hedonistic, maybe even a bit selfish, but I’m a good man in my field. As Havig is in his, except when he starts mixing propaganda with his conclusions. It took a whole spectrum of personality types to make up a culture, Bernard thought. He pondered Havig a while, wishing he knew what motivated the man, whether he was really just a dull fanatic or if there were more to him.

  After a while, Bernard slept.

  When he woke, it was only reluctantly. Nakamura was standing over his bunk shaking him roughly.

  “Time to get up, Dr. Bernard.” The sociologist stared blearily up at the grinning face. “Commander Laurance says you’ve done enough sleeping,” Nakamura said.

  Commander Laurance was certainly right about that, Bernard had to admit; a glance at the clock told him that he had slept just over eleven hours. But his head still felt full of cobwebs, and he growled complainingly as he knuckle-eyed himself into wakefulness.

  It was an hour past sunrise. The day on this planet was twenty-eight Terran Absolute Hours and twenty minutes long. Still fettered by sleep, Bernard ambled up front to join the others for breakfast.

  Laurance had already broken out the ship’s two landsleds. When they had finished breakfast, the Commander said, “We’ll split up as follows. Clive, you’re going to pilot Sled One. Havig and Stone will go with you, also myself. Hernandez, you take the other sled. You’ll be driving Bernard, Dominici, Peterszoon, and Nakamura.”

  The sled-ride took a little more than an hour. When the Earthmen had reached the Norglan settlement, they saw that the scene was much the same as it had been the day before: the builders were at work, their fierce energy undiminished. The three blueskins who were involved in the language lessons came to greet the band of Earthmen, offering a vocabulary display by way of salutation:

  “I—you. Travel. Come. Here. We—Norglans. You—Terrans.”

  Bernard smiled. Right now, the conversation had an almost comic tinge; but he knew that even the attainment of these halting, disjointed syllables was a staggering achievement. And it was only the beginning. />
  After three hours of instruction a pair of greenskins hesitantly approached bearing trays of food—flat, coarsely glazed yellow plates on which were arranged slabs of some sweet-smelling pale meat, and thick earthenware flasks of a pungent black wine. Havig looked doubtfully at Laurance, who said, “Refuse, as politely as you can. We don’t want to touch anything until Dominici’s had a chance to do some analysis.”

  The food was politely declined. The Earthmen produced their own supplies, and Havig explained haltingly that it might not be safe for Earthmen to eat Norglan food. The aliens seemed to comprehend.

  During that day, and the next, and the next, Havig labored tirelessly while the other Earthmen sat by, more or less useless except to serve in verb-dramatizing charades. Bernard found the lengthy sessions tremendously draining on his patience. There was little he could do but sit in the broiling sun and watch Havig perform.

  And the performance was incredible. On the fifth day, the Norglans were putting together plausible sentences out of a fund of nearly five hundred words. And though they fumbled and forgot and became confused some of the time, it was evident that they were fantastically quick learners. Five words out of six seemed to stick the first time. And, of course, the broader their linguistic base became, the simpler it was to teach them new words.

  By the seventh day, enough of a mutual understanding had been reached to begin negotiations in earnest. The first order of business was setting up a place to meet; squatting in the open while colony-building went on all around was not ideal. At Havig’s suggestion, the Norglans erected a tent in the middle of the colony area where further discussion could take place.

  As the tent went up, the Earthmen smiled in relief. A week on this planet had left them parboiled and blistered by the sun. The aliens did not seem to mind; they sweated, but their pigmentation evidently protected them from any tissue damage. Bernard, on the other hand, looked more than a bit lobsterish. Dominici had begun to tan, but most of the other Earthmen still experienced discomfort.