The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  Talker squatted where he was, and thought. Learning a language was a new form of exercise to one who had never before dreamed of its necessity. He guessed, from the attitude of the native as he departed, that it would be necessary to reveal the presence of the aliens aboard if the man’s interest in the ship was to be maintained. Thinking the matter over, it suddenly occurred to Talker that the man himself must have some means of communicating with his kind; and there had been no antennae visible. If the method were different from that employed by Talker’s people, it might be more suited to present requirements. Yes, revealing their presence was definitely indicated, the more so since, finding himself unable to solve the ship’s mystery alone, the man might go off to obtain others of his kind. It was no part of Boss’ plan to reveal his presence to the main population of the planet in his present, nearly defenseless condition.

  It would be easy enough to induce the man to return. One of the crew, flying toward the ship, could “accidentally” pass over his camp. Whether on finding the vessel inhabited, he would be bold enough to venture near any of the aliens, was a matter that could be tested only by experiment; Talker believed he would, since he had shown sufficient courage to enter the ship in ignorance of what lay within.

  * * *

  The herald crept to the controls, and pressed the signal switch indicating that the commander’s presence was desired in the control room. Perhaps a minute later, Boss struggled up the spiral, air hissing from his breathing vents as his lungs tried to cope with the results of his haste. If he had had to rely on vocal speech, he probably couldn’t have spoken at all.

  “Careful,” warned Talker; “remember those broken legs among the crew.”

  “What is it now?” asked the captain. “Come to think of it, why do I always have to come to you? I’m in command here.”

  Talker did not bother to dispute the statement. The feeling of superiority ingrained in every member of his class was, through motives of prudence, kept very much under cover. He informed the captain of the results of his cogitation, and let him give the necessary orders—orders which had to be relayed through Talker, in any case.

  There were no communicating devices on the ship; the herald had to radiate all of Boss’ commands to the proper individuals. There was no machine known to these beings which was capable of receiving, analyzing, and transmitting through wires or by wave the delicate impulses radiated by their minds. They had the signal system already referred to, which was limited to a few standard commands; but in general, messages to be transmitted more than a few yards, or through the interference of metal walls, had to pass through the antennae of a herald. It is conceivable that the heralds themselves had subtly discouraged, for their own ends, research in mechanical communication.

  One of the fighters was ordered to the airlock. Talker and Boss met him there, and the former carefully explained the purpose of the flight. The soldier signified his understanding, made sure that his tiny case of accelerine tablets was securely fastened to his leg, and launched himself from the sill. He rose almost vertically, and disappeared over the trees. Talker, after a moment’s thought, rose also, and settled on the bank opposite the airlock door. Boss started to follow, but the other “advised” him not to.

  “Stay in the doorway,” said Talker, “but be sure you are in plain sight. I want him to concentrate his attention on me, but I don’t want to give him the impression that you are trying to hide. He might misinterpret the action. When he gets here, keep quiet. I’ll have other things to do than listen to you.”

  The wait, which Talker had expected to be a few minutes, grew into half an hour, without any sign from the decoy. Boss, true to his nature, fumed and fidgeted, providing his companion with a good deal of—well-concealed—amusement. His temper did not improve when the fighter, appearing with a rush of wings, settled in front of Talker, instead of the commander, to make his report.

  “He was still in the woods when I went out, sir,” said the flier. “I found a spot where I could watch an open place on the trail. I was sure he hadn’t come by yet, so I landed on a ridge—the place was near the cliffs—and waited. When he appeared at the edge of the clearing, I flew low, out of sight from the ground, to the other side of the hills; then I came back, quite high, toward here. I’m sure he saw me; I passed directly over him, and he stopped in the middle of the clearing with his whole head tipped up—I suppose he had to, in order to look up with those sunken-in little eyes.”

  “You have done well. Did you see the creature turn, as though to come back this way?”

  “He turned to watch me as I passed overhead; he was still standing motionless the last I saw of him. I don’t know what he was going to do. So far as I can tell, he doesn’t think at all.”

  “All right. You may return to your quarters, and eat if you wish. Tell the rest of the crew they are free to move about in the ship, but the ports must be left closed—no one but Boss and me must be visible from the outside.”

  The soldier vanished into the vessel, showing his near exhaustion in the clumsiness of his movements. Boss looked after him.

  “We can’t get away from this place too soon to suit me,” he commented finally. “A few more weeks and I won’t have a single soldier or engineer fit for action. Why did you pick this ghastly planet as a place to restock, anyway? There are eight others in this system.”

  “Yes,” replied Talker sarcastically, “eight others. One so far from the Sun we’d never have noticed it, if our course hadn’t taken us within half a million miles; four almost as cold, the smallest of them four times the size of this world; two with decent gravity, but without air enough to activate a lump of phosphorus—one of them near the Sun and continually facing it with one hemisphere; and one like this one, with air that would have mummified you at the first attempt to breathe. If you want to go to one of the others, all right—maybe it would be a better way to die, at that.”

  “All right, forget it—I was just wondering,” answered Boss. “I’m so full of this blasted dope we have to take that I can’t think straight, anyway. But when is that native coming back?”

  “I’m not sure he is, just yet. The soldier flew so as to make it appear that he was coming from the other side of the hills; possibly the creature went to make sure his camp had not been molested. In that case, he may not return today; it’s quite a trip for a ground animal, you know.”

  “Then what are we waiting here for? If he is very long coming, you won’t be able to stay awake to meet him. You should have told the soldier to stay out until he was sure what the creature was going to do.”

  “That would probably have cost us the soldier. You saw the condition he was in when he came back. If you feel energetic, you can send out watchers in relays; but on a day like this, I don’t see how they can keep out of sight—there’s not a cloud in the sky. I was planning to allow a reasonable time for the native to come back from the point where he saw our soldier. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll get a night’s sleep and expect him tomorrow morning.”

  “How do you know how long he’ll take? You don’t know the turns and twists in the trail, and you don’t know how fast he walks when he’s going somewhere.”

  “I know how long it took him to come from the pass this morning,” answered Talker. “He was near there when the soldier saw him.”

  “Well, it’s your idea, but I don’t mind waiting. This sunlight is comfortable.” Boss swung the airlock door wide open, letting the sun shine some distance into the lock chamber, and settled himself on the smooth metal floor. Any long period of inactivity had one inevitable result; for it was necessary to sleep some sixteen hours out of twenty-four to offset the enormous consumption of energy exacted by Earth’s gravity. Boss may have intended to watch, but he was asleep in two minutes.

  Talker remained awake longer. He had indulged in less physical activity than anyone else on the ship, and his mind was normally by far the most active. He squatted on the soft carpet of grass, legs spread spiderwise on
either side of his body, while the great topaz eyes took in the details of the surroundings.

  Numerous living creatures were visible or audible. Birds were everywhere, as were the insects upon which many of them fed; for in August even Alaska knows that summer has been present for quite a while. The insects, naturally, interested Talker. Some of them bore rather close resemblance to himself, except in the matter of size. A few butterflies fluttered near him in erratic circles; he radiated a thought to them, but got no answer. He had expected none; but he continued to think to them, as a man thinks aloud to a dog, until their intoxicated flight carried them away from the neighborhood.

  The flowers, too, caught his eye. They were “not much,” as a human florist might have told him, but all were strange to Talker—his home planet had flowers, but they grew in the wilder regions, where it was decidedly unsafe to venture at any time. The only plants allowed in the vicinity of the castlelike fortresses, in which all civilized beings dwelt, were those which were of use in sustaining life. The few vegetables of this variety which bore attractive blooms were too common to be appreciated.

  Talker himself was half asleep when he became aware of the man’s approach. Had the alien known more of Earthly conditions, he would have realized, from the fact that man was audible at all at fifty yards, that he was a city dweller.

  Talker folded his wings tight against his streamlined body and watched the opening of the trail. The native was even more cautious in his approach than he had been the first time; but in spite of this, the two saw each other almost simultaneously. The man had stepped from the forest with his eyes fixed on Boss, asleep in the airlock, and did not see Talker until the shelter of the trees was behind him.

  He stopped instantly, rifle halfway to his shoulder; but Talker carefully refrained from moving anything but his eyes until the weapon was lowered again. To his surprise, the gun was not merely lowered, but slung across the man’s back; the man himself took a step or two forward and stopped about fifteen feet away from the alien.

  Talker was wondering just how far he could go without alarming the other into flight. Allen Kirk was wondering exactly the same thing. The human being was on the less comfortable side of the exchange, for he was seeing for the first time a creature who had obviously not originated upon his own planet. He felt uncomfortable under the unwinking stare of two pairs of eyes—the optical organs of Talker’s kind are lidless, and Kirk had no means of knowing that Boss was asleep—and the uncanny stillness of the two strange beings got on his nerves. In spite of this, Talker was the first to break down the tension.

  His antennae had been folded back, unnoticeable against the silver-gray fur of his body. Now they swung forward, expanding into two iridescent plumes as their owner sought to interpret the mental radiations from the human brain.

  Kirk was at first startled, then interested. He knew that the antennae of terrestrial moths were strongly suspected of acting as organs of communication, in some cases at least. It was possible, then, that this mothlike entity was interested solely in conversing with him—a possibility made more probable by the fact that neither creature had as yet made a hostile move, as far as the Earthling could tell.

  Talker was fortunate in encountering Kirk, instead of a member of one of the several small tribes dwelling in the surrounding territory. Kirk was educated—he had just completed his third year of university study and was working during the summer recess at plotting the activities of a minor insect pest which was threatening to spread south and west into Canada. He had majored in sociology, and had taken courses in biology, astronomy and psychology—though the last subject had bored him excessively.

  He had realized from the first, of course, that the object in the gully was a flying machine of some sort; nothing else could have reached this spot without leaving traces in the surrounding forest. He had noticed the air-tight construction of the doorway, but subconsciously refused to consider its full implication until he was actually confronted by one of the vessel’s owners, and realized that neither ship nor navigators could possibly have originated on Earth.

  With the realization that the being before him wanted to communicate, Kirk bent his thoughts in that direction. He regretted the nearly wasted psychology course; it was practically certain that none of the languages he knew would be of use. Nevertheless, he uttered a few words, to see if they produced any effect; for all he knew, the alien might not be able to hear.

  Talker did hear, and showed the fact by a slight start; but the auditory impression he received was unimportant. As he had mentioned to Boss, he had managed to disentangle the cerebral radiations corresponding to a few simple line patterns, as received by the human eyes and symbolized in the brain; and he received, coincidentally with the vocal sounds, a thought-wave which he could translate easily into a series of just such patterns. Kirk, like many people, involuntarily visualized the written form of the words he uttered—not perfectly, but in sufficient detail for the keen mind of the listener to decipher.

  Kirk saw the start, though he misinterpreted it. The motion that caught his attention was the sudden stiffening of the antennae as he spoke, the two plumelike organs expanding sideways and pointing diagonally forward, as though to bring his head between their tips. For almost a minute the two creatures remained absolutely motionless, Talker hoping for and expecting further speech, and Allen Kirk watching for some understandable signal. Then the antennae relaxed, and Talker considered the possible meaning of the images he had received.

  His own race had a written language—or rather, a means for permanently recording events and ideas; since they had no vocal speech, their “writing” must have been utterly different in basis from that of any Earthly people, for the vast majority of terrestrial written languages are basically phonetic. At any rate, it is certain that Talker had severe difficulty in connecting with any, to him, normal means of communication the symbols he learned from Kirk; for a time, at least, he did not realize that they were arbitrary line arrangements.

  Kirk watched the nearly motionless insect for several minutes, without any idea of the true nature of the difficulty. Then, since speech had produced some effect the first time, he tried it again. The result caused him to doubt his own sanity.

  Talker knew that he needed further data; in an attempt to obtain it, he simply reached forward to a bare spot of earth and scratched with his odd “hand” the line pattern he had last seen in the human mind. Like Kirk’s speaking, it was purely an experiment.

  To the man, it was a miracle. He spoke; and the grotesque thing before him wrote—crudely and clumsily, to be sure, for Talker’s interpretation was still imperfect, and he was, to put it mildly, unpracticed in the art of penmanship—the last few words that the man had uttered. Kirk was momentarily dumbfounded, unable for an instant to think coherently; then he jumped to a natural, but erroneous, conclusion. The stranger, he decided, must lack vocal cords, but had learned written English from someone else. That implied previous friendly relationships with a human being, and for the first time Kirk felt fully at ease in the presence of the strange creatures.

  He drew his knife, and with the tip scratched, “Who are you?” on the ground beside Talker’s line. The meaning of the question lay in his mind; but it was couched in terms far too abstract for Talker to connect directly with the marks. A problem roughly similar would be faced by a three-year-old child, not yet literate, presented with a brick covered with cuneiform writing and told that it meant something. Talker saw the same letters in the man’s brain, but they were as utterly meaningless there as on the ground. The conference seemed to have reached an impasse.

  In spite of his relatively deep-set eyes, which should, in Talker’s opinion, have limited his range of vision to what lay before him, Kirk was the first to see Boss move. He turned his head to see more clearly, and Talker followed his gaze with one eye. Boss had awakened, and was standing as high as his legs would lift him in an effort to see the marks on the ground—the top of the bank was about o
n the same level as the airlock floor. He saw the attention of the other two directed his way, and spoke to Talker.

  “What is that? Have you got in touch with him? I can’t see what you have on the ground there.”

  Talker turned his antennae toward the air lock, not that it was necessary, but to assure the human being that Boss was being included in the conversation. “Come on over,” he said resignedly, “though it won’t do you much good to see. Don’t fly too close to the native, and don’t get nearer to him than I do at any time.”

  Kirk watched Boss spread his wings and launch himself toward Talker. The pinions moved too fast to be visible; it occurred to Kirk that these creatures were heavier than any Earthly bird, except for flightless forms like the ostrich, yet their wings spanned less than eight feet.

  Boss took a single glance at the letters on the ground, and turned his attention to the Earthman. This was the first time he had seen him in full daylight, and he made the most of the opportunity, mercifully remaining silent the while. Talker promptly forgot him, as nearly as such an individual can be forgotten, and brought himself back to the matter in hand.

  The “natural” method of learning a language consists of pointing out objects and having their names repeated until one can remember them. This is the first method that suggests itself to a human being, if no printed grammar is available. Talker hit upon it only after long and profound cogitation, when he suddenly realized that he had learned to interpret the human visual impressions in just that fashion—placing the subject in contact with simple objects, and examining the resulting mental radiations. He tried it.

  Normally, the teacher of a language, whatever method he uses, knows what is being done. Kirk did not, for some time. Talker pointed at the ship with one of his hands, watching the man’s mind intently for a series of marks such as had accompanied the sounds from his mouth. Kirk looked in the indicated direction, and then back at Talker. The latter pointed again; and a distinct picture, such as he had been seeking, appeared for an instant in the man’s mind, to be replaced almost at once by an indecipherable complex of abstract thoughts.