Unearthly Neighbors

by Chad Oliver

  “Nothing. They go naked and they don’t carry anything with them. When they swing through the trees—”

  Monte almost dropped his pipe. “You’re kidding. Are you trying to tell me that these people brachiate—swing hand over hand through the trees?”

  “That’s what they do. Of course, they walk on the ground too—they’re fully erect in their posture and all that. But with those terrifically long arms of theirs…”

  Louise laughed with delight, as though someone had dumped a sack of diamonds into her lap. “Show us the pictures, Mark! We can’t take much more of this.”

  “Maybe that would be best.” Heidelman grinned, knowing that he had them thoroughly on the hook now. He stood up. “I have the photographs right over here in my briefcase.”

  Monte Stewart stared at the brown briefcase on his living-room table with an excitement he had never known before. He felt like Darwin must have felt when he first stepped ashore on that most important of all islands…

  “For God’s sake,” he said, “let’s see those pictures!”

  2

  There were five tri-di photographs in full color. Heidelman handed them over without comment. Monte shuffled through them rapidly, his quick gray eyes searching for general impressions, and then studied them one by one.

  “Yes and no,” he muttered to himself.

  The pictures—which were obviously stills blown up from a movie film—weren’t too clear. They were a bit fuzzy, and the subject matter was irritatingly noncommittal. It was as though a camera had been stuck out of a window and pictures snapped at random.

  Still, they were the most fascinating pictures that Monte had ever seen.

  “Look at those arms,” Louise breathed.

  Monte nodded, trying to get his thoughts in some kind of order. There was so much to see in five pictures, so much to see that was new and strange—and hauntingly familiar.

  The landscape was disturbing, which made it difficult to get the man-like figures into perspective. There was nothing about it that was downright grotesque, but the shapes of the trees and plants were subtly wrong. The colors, too, were unexpected. The trees had a blue cast to their bark, and their leaves were as much red as green. There were too many bright browns and blues, as though a painter’s brush had unaccountably slipped on a nightmare canvas.

  The Sun, which was visible in two of the pictures, was a brilliant white that filled too much of the sky.

  The whole effect, Monte thought, was curiously similar to the painted forests one sometimes saw in books for, children. The trees were not quite the trees you knew, and the pastel flowers grew only in dreams…

  “They are men,” Louise said. “They are, Monte.”

  Yes, yes, he thought. They are men. How easy it is to say! Only—what is a man? How will we know him when we meet him? Will we ever be sure?

  Superficially, yes—they were men. (And they were mammals too, unless females were radically different on Sirius Nine.) But Old Man Neanderthal, too, had been a man. And even Pithecanthropus erectus belonged in the crowded genus Homo.

  What is a man?

  Monte’s hands itched; he wished fervently that he had some solid bones to study instead of these fuzzy pictures. For instance, how did you go about estimating the cranial capacity from a bum photograph? The skulls might be solid bone for all he knew; the gorilla has a massive head, but its brain is almost a thousand cubic centimeters smaller than a man’s.

  Well, what did they look like?

  The general impression, for whatever that was worth, was one of what could only be called “mannishness.” The people—if that was indeed the word for them—were erect bipeds, and their general bodily outlines were not too different from a man’s. The legs, in fact, were very humanoid, although the feet seemed to have a big toe sticking out at a right angle to the other toes. (Monte couldn’t be sure of that, however.) The arms were immensely long, so that the hands almost touched the ground when the people stood up straight. But the people were fully erect; there was nothing of the stooped posture of the ape about them. The bodies were hairless and rather slender, and the skin color was a pale copper.

  Faces? Well, they probably would not make an earthly girl squeal with pleasure if they turned up on a blind date—but then the earthly girl might not look so hot to them either. The faces seemed human enough—long and narrow, with rather heavy jaws and deeply recessed eyes. Monte could not see the teeth, but it was obvious that the canines, at any rate, did not protrude. The hair was uniformly light in color and was very short—hardly more than a fuzz.

  The people wore no clothing, but two of the men had vertical strips painted on their bodies. The painting seemed to be confined to the chests, and was quite simple—a streak of red and one of blue on each side of the chest.

  None of the people carried any weapons.

  Monte saw no tools of any sort, and no houses. One of the men was standing in front of a large tree that appeared to have a hollow chamber in it, but it was hard to tell.

  There was a child in one of the pictures. He seemed to be five or six years old, if earthly analogies could be trusted, and he was hanging by one hand from a branch and grinning from ear to ear. A female was scolding him from the ground below, and the impression of mother and son was very strong—and very human.

  But then, of course, the mother-and-son relationship often seemed quite human, even in monkeys—

  Monte carefully put the photographs down on the table.

  “Brother,” he said, “I need a drink.”

  After the robot—which had been engaged in clearing away the dishes and washing them up-—had mixed the Scotch and soda according to Monte’s potent instructions and had wheeled the glasses in on a tray, Monte began pacing the floor. He even abandoned his pipe for a cigarette, which was a sure sign that he was worried.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “You say that they do no fanning—and yet they can’t hunt because they have no weapons. So how do they get their food?”

  “Couldn’t they live off wild fruits and roots and things like that?” Heidelman asked.

  “It’s possible, I suppose.”

  “Apes do it, don’t they?” Louise asked.

  “Sure, but these people aren’t apes—unless you want to call a man just a modified ape, which is one way of looking at it. Mark says that they have languages, and no other animal on Earth has a language except man. Offhand, you’d expect them to have cultures too; cultures and languages go together like ham and eggs. But I’ve never heard of any group of human beings without any tools at all. Even the simplest food-gathering peoples known use digging sticks and baskets and stuff like that. Either those people are the most primitive ever discovered, or else—”

  Louise laughed—an infectious, charming laugh that was utterly natural and unaffected. “Monte! I never thought I’d hear you say that. After all your remarks about stories about primitive supermen…”

  “The catch is,” Monte said seriously, “that primitive is a pretty slippery word. We think we know what it means on Earth—it refers to a non-literate culture without urban centers. The notion works fairly well here, but what does it mean when it is applied to people on another planet? We don’t really know a damned thing about them, and fitting them into a ready-made category derived from a total sample of one planet may be a gross mistake. As for supermen, I doubt whether the concept is a valid one at all—is man a super ape, or is he something else altogether? Those people could be different without being super, if you get what I mean.”

  Heidelman sipped his drink. “Of course,” he said, “the only way to find out the truth is to go and see.”

  “Yes, yes.” Monte ground out one cigarette and lit another. “Is that what you want us to do—or am I supposed to wait until I’m asked?”

  “You are being asked. Isn’t that obvious? We want you to lead a scientific expedition to Sirius Nine, and the sooner the better. And we want a trained anthropologist to make the first contact with those
people—I’d like to think that we’ve made at least enough progress to avoid some of the more glaring errors of the past. How about it?”

  “Just like that, huh?” Monte perched on the edge of a chair, feeling as though he had just been handed the gift of immortality. “Hell, of course I’ll go. Wild dinosaurs couldn’t drag me away. But look, Mr. Heidelman, there are a couple of things we should get straight right here and now—”

  Heidelman smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, and you can relax. We know how important this is, and we’re prepared to give you all the authority you need. You’ll be pretty much your own boss. You’ll be free to pursue any scientific work you want to undertake. All we ask is that you do your level best to establish a friendly contact with the people on Sirius Nine and make a full report to us when you get back. We’ll expect you to make any recommendations you see fit, and you’ll have a voice in seeing to it that they’re carried out. You can select the men you want to have work with you. We’ll supply a ship under Admiral York—he’s a good man—and he’ll get you there and be responsible for your safety. But in all relations with the natives you will be in charge. Your only superior will be the Secretary-General. The U.N. will pay your salary—which will be ample—and will arrange for you to take a leave from the University. Your wife can go with you; after meeting her, I certainly wouldn’t suggest that you go off and leave her for three years. We can hash out the details later, but how does that sound?”

  Monte was stunned. “It sounds too blasted good to be true. There must be a catch in it somewhere…”

  “There is. You put your finger smack on it awhile back. We don’t really know a damned thing about those people. It certainly won’t be an easy job, and it may very well be dangerous. I’m not going to try to minimize the danger, either. You’ll be risking your life out there.” Monte shrugged. It wasn’t that he did not have a high regard for his own skin, but staying at home now was unthinkable. He didn’t insult Louise by asking for her opinion; he knew his wife well enough so that words were superfluous.

  “I’ve never been in space before, not even to the Moon,” Louise said. “I’d hate to die without even leaving Earth.”

  “How long do we have?” Monte asked.

  “That’s up to you. With the new overdrive propulsion, it will take a ship a little better than eleven months to reach the Sirius system. If you spend a year on Sirius Nine, that will put you back on Earth in about three years if all goes well. We can stall things that long, I think. We want to get going as soon as we can—I don’t have to tell you that if word of this leaks out there’ll be the devil to pay.”

  “Pardon my ignorance, but why?”

  Mark Heidelman smiled. “You don’t know much about politics, Monte. This would be the news sensation of all time. Once the people got wind of it, every government that could throw a spaceship together would start a race for that planet. Any chance of a genuine scientific expedition would go out the window. Those people out there would be tried and convicted a million times over on tri-di-—either as subhuman savages or as dangerous monsters. There might be a blowup—you never know what’s going to happen when people start getting excited. We can’t afford that. We’ve got to have accurate information before this thing breaks.”

  “What happens after you get your accurate information, if you get it?”

  “That depends on what you find out, doesn’t it? After all, those people may be dangerous. We’ve picked you for the job because we think you’re hard-headed enough to stick to the facts.”

  “It’s a fantastic responsibility, you know.”

  “I told you that you were headed for some ulcers. They’re part of the job when you work with the U.N. It isn’t all cocktails and suave diplomacy, you know.” Quite suddenly, Heidelman looked very tired.

  Watching him, Monte had a flash of insight into the problems that faced the man. This Sirius business, crucial as it was, was only one of a vast series of interlocking and never-ending crises. It must have taken a ton of paperwork before the job could even have been offered to him, and at the same time there was the question of what to do about Brazil’s insistence on testing atomic weapons, and the border squabble between France and Germany, and the population explosions in China and India…

  Louise buzzed for another round of drinks and adroitly turned the conversation into quieter channels. She asked Mark about his football-playing days at Notre Dame, and Heidelman responded gratefully by rattling on for fifteen minutes about the virtues of the good old single wing.

  Monte discovered that Mark shared his passion for trout fishing, and they solemnly swore that they would try Beaver Creek together when Monte got back from Sirius Nine.

  By the time Heidelman reluctantly took his leave at two o’clock in the morning, they were all good friends—and that helps a lot in any enterprise.

  While the robot clicked and buzzed around cleaning up the room, Monte began to prowl around aimlessly, too keyed-up to sleep. He felt like a stranger in his own living room. He looked at the familiar books that lined the walls, studied the old early-period Tom Lea paintings he was so fond of, and tramped down the corners of the bright Navaho rugs scattered over the red tiles of the floor. This was his home. Only a few short hours ago his life had been comfortable, his future pleasant and predictable. And now, with the suddenness that was one of life’s most characteristic calling cards, it was all new and strange…

  Louise gently took his arm. “Let’s go look at it,” she said softly.

  At first, he didn’t understand her. Then he snapped his fingers.

  Side by side, they walked over to the picture window and pulled back the drapes.

  They looked out into a wintry blaze of stars beyond the black silhouettes of the Colorado mountains. Monte felt a brief, involuntary shiver run through his wife’s body.

  “There it is,” he said, pointing. “Funny—I even remember the name of the constellation: Canis Majoris.”

  “I wonder what constellation we’re in,” Louise said.

  “I never thought it would happen, really. After those completely alien things uncovered by the Centaurus and Procyon expeditions, the human critter seemed like a very unlikely accident. I was reading an article just the other day—remember, I told you about it—that estimated that there was less than one chance in a million for the independent evolution of man somewhere else. According to this joker’s theory—”

  “You know what you always say about theories.”

  “Yes. But it’s a strange feeling just the same.”

  Strange, and more than strange. The light that took the photograph I held in my hand an hour or so ago won’t reach the Earth for more than seven years. It is far, so far…

  He held his wife tightly in the circle of his arm. He was not afraid, but she suddenly seemed infinitely precious to him. She was all that was warm and alive in a universe vast and uncaring beyond belief.

  “Well, old girl,” he said quietly, “I’m glad you’re going with me.”

  She kissed him, hard. “You’ll have to go farther way than Sirius to get away from me,” she whispered.

  They stood for a long time before the window that opened on the night, watching and wondering and trying to believe.

  They could see Sirius plainly.

  It was the brightest star in the sky.

  3

  How do you go about setting up an expedition that is designed to make the first contact with an alien, extraterrestrial culture? Monte didn’t know, for the excellent reason that it had never been done before.

  Obviously, it was too big for a one-man job; he couldn’t just put on his boots and pith helmet and sally forth with notebook in hand. Nevertheless, the other extreme was equally impossible—he couldn’t take everybody who might have an interest in the problem. For one thing, it would have required a fleet of spaceships. For another, unleashing a horde of investigators upon what seemed to be a relatively simple culture would have been a sure way of guaranteeing that no one
would get any real work done.

  Quite early, he decided on a minimal expedition. He would take the men he needed for the basic spade-work, and leave the more specialized problems for later. He told himself that he was motivated by practical considerations, which he was to some extent, but the fact was that Monte had a deep-seated suspicion of all massive and grandiose research schemes. Multiplying the number of brains working on a given job, he knew from long experience, was far from a sure-fire way of improving the quality of the final product.

  Well, who did he need?

  Monte himself was something of a maverick in modem anthropology. He was primarily a social anthropologist, and his major research had been involved with a search for regularities in the culture process. Characteristically, however, Monte hadn’t stopped there. Impelled partly by a taste for the unconventional and partly by an admittedly egotistical faith in his own abilities, he had also made himself a leading authority on the most technical field of physical anthropology, population genetics. (The thought of getting blood samples from the natives of Sirius Nine made him as eager as any Transylvanian vampire would have been under the same circumstances.)

  Obviously, he needed a linguist. The whole shebang cried out for the best damned linguist available, and so Monte swallowed his personal feelings and chose Charlie Jenike. Charlie was a sour and faintly uncouth individual who somewhat resembled a dyspeptic penguin, and he had the quaint habit of wearing shirts for days on end until they virtually anesthetized unwary coworkers. Just the same, Charlie Jenike was a brilliant linguist. If anyone could crack one of the native languages in a hurry, Charlie could do it. Oddly enough, human animals being the strange critters that they are, Charlie’s wife, Helen, was a doll—tiny and dainty and singularly charming. Helen and Louise got on well together, which partly compensated for the sparks that flew when Monte and Charlie glared at one another over their cocktail glasses.