Unearthly Neighbors

by Chad Oliver

  Harvard’s Ralph Gottschalk was probably the best of the younger physical anthropologists, and he knew as much as any living man about the primates generally. In view of the rather gibbonoid appearance of the natives, Ralph had to go along—and anyhow Monte liked to have him around for company. Ralph—a giant of a man with the build of a gorilla and the most gentle disposition Monte had ever encountered—was an unfathomable poker player and an eminently sane individual. Ralph was also married, to an enigmatic female named Tina, and he always left Tina at home when he traveled. It was hard to say whether this was Ralph’s idea or Tina’s, but at any rate Ralph always seemed tickled to death to get away. In the field, Ralph tended to wear the secretive smile of a kid playing hooky from school.

  If everything worked out according to plan—not that Monte thought that it would—a certain amount of psychological testing would seem to be imperative. Tom Stein’s work in Micronesia had impressed Monte, and when he had met him for the first time at a meeting of the A.A.A. in San Francisco the impression had been strengthened. Tom was a tall, skinny guy, prematurely balding, with pale blue eyes that were almost hidden behind thick glasses. His shyness failed to conceal the fact that he had a razor-keen analytical mind; furthermore, although he was best known for his work in the culture and personality field, he had a genuine feel for social structure. He and his wife were inseparable. Janice Stein was a plain, rather dumpy woman with a radiantly pleasant personality. She was also a corking good cook, which might come in handy.

  Finally, Monte picked Don King. Don was an archeologist, something of a lone-wolf in his ideas, and a pretty sharp cookie. Monte didn’t actual like Don—few people did—but the man was stimulating. He was a valuable irritant because he never accepted anybody’s ideas at face value, and he loved an argument above all other things. Don, who was currently in his chronic state of being between wives, was almost offensively handsome—a tall, well-built sandy-haired man who habitually dressed as though he were about to pose for an ad in a fashion magazine. Mark Heidelman had questioned the inclusion of Don, since the natives of Sirius Nine did not make tools, but Monte was certain that Don would pull his share of the load. For one thing, a good reconnaissance ought to establish whether or not stone tools had been made in the past, and for another, the scanty pictures available were not a reliable guide.

  Five men, then, to breach a world.

  Presumptuous?

  Sure—but (as Monte was fond of remarking) nothing big was ever accomplished by little men who stuck timidly to little rules.

  The ship was a great metal fish of the deeps; it lived in space. Like the strange fish that live in the long silences and the eternal shadows, the ship had never known the land. It had been assembled in an orbit around the Earth, and it had never known any other home beyond the silent seas of space and stars.

  Monte and Louise and the others had been ferried up to the U.N. satellite and had boarded the ship there. The ship had flashed out past the Moon on conventional rockets, and had then gone into the overdrive field that permitted it—in one sense—to exceed the speed of light.

  By international agreement, all interstellar ships were named after men of peace. This one, officially, was the Ghandi. However, you just can’t think of a tremendous sphere of hurtling metal as the Ghandi. Since it was the second ship to make the long run to the Sirius system, the crew—with the strained logic that sometimes filters up out of bull sessions—had promptly dubbed it the Son of Sirius. After some three months in space, the happy thought had occurred to someone that Sirius was the Dog Star. From that point on, the evolutionary semantics were inevitable.

  From Admiral York on down, everyone referred to the ship as the S.O.B.—although the polite fiction was maintained between officers and crew that the initials stood for “Sirius or Bust.”

  Monte and Louise had found that packing for a trip to Sirius was annoyingly like packing for any trip anywhere. There were the same nagging problems about what to take and what to leave behind, the same soggy decisions about whether or not to rent the house, the same frayed nerves and perpetual irritations. The force of habit was so strong that they even planned it so that their departure took place between semesters.

  When they finally got away, it was a relief—and the jump up to the U.N. satellite had been all that they had imagined it would be. The stars were so close that you could almost touch them with your hand, and the dark abyss of space was a real and tangible thing. It was much the same feeling that a man had when he went to sea for the first time, and he stood on the deck with the wind in his face and looked out across the living green waves and the bowl of the sky and knew that the world was new and mysterious and anything could happen…

  Once they were inside the swollen steel bubble of the spaceship, however, it was all very different. It rapidly became evident that the trip to Sirius was going to be something less than a fury of excitement. Admiral York ran a tight ship, and he smothered the possibility of emergencies with a calm efficiency that took everything into account and corrected errors before they occurred. There was nothing to see and very little for a passenger to do.

  When you got right down to it, Monte supposed, an interstellar spaceship was the least interesting way to travel that there was. He made the discovery that millions of men had made before him: that riding in a big plane, for example, isn’t half as much fun as riding in a small plane—and that for sheer interest no plane can compete with a horseback ride through beautiful country or a canoe trip down a clear stream leaping with rapids. The more exotic the mode of travel—spaceship, submarine, what-have-you—the more man had to carry his own specialized environment with him. Further, the more specialized the artificial environment, the less direct contact he could have with the natural world outside.

  The hyperspace field surrounding the spaceship might have been fascinating beyond belief, but you couldn’t see it, feel it, hear it, or touch it. Your world was inside the ship, and that was a rather barren world of gray metallic walls and fragile catwalks and cool, dead air that whispered and hissed through damp gleaming vents and endlessly circulated and re-circulated in the vault that had become the universe.

  Eleven months in a vault can be a long, long time.

  Still, there was work to be done…

  Voices.

  Monte leaned against the cold wall of the little boxlike room that Charlie Jenike had rigged up for his recording equipment and absently stroked his beard. He listened to the sounds that came out of the speakers and perversely tried to make some sense out of them.

  It was impossible, of course. The voices sounded human enough; he could recognize what seemed to be words spoken by both men and women, together with utterances that sounded like the speech of children. But the sounds which had been picked up by the hidden mikes of the first Sirius expedition conveyed no meaning to him at all. They were voices that spoke from across the immense gulf that separated one kind of man from another, voices of people who were more remote from him than a Neanderthal from the last age of ice…

  “Doing any good, Charlie?”

  Charlie Jenike twisted his aromatic form around on his stool and shrugged. Monte had the distinct feeling that he was about to spit on the floor, but he was spared this indelicacy.

  “Good? I’ll tell you something, Stewart. I’m right where I was a week ago, and that is precisely nowhere. Let me show you something.”

  “Please do.”

  Jenike, moving with surprising grace and skill, set up a projector and fiddled with some buttons that controlled the sounds coming out of the speaker. “Got an action sequence here with a few sentences to go with it,” he muttered. “Show you what I’m up against.”

  A good clear picture formed in the air, sharp and three-dimensional. A male native of Sirius Nine dropped down out of the trees—there was a distinct thump when he landed—and walked up to another naked man who was standing in a clearing. The pickup was amazingly sensitive, and Monte could even hear the rapid breathing o
f the new arrival. The man who had descended from the trees said something to the other man. It was hard to catch exactly what he said, because the sounds of the language were utterly different from any language Monte knew. The man who had been there first hesitated a moment, then gave a peculiar whistle. The two men went off together and disappeared into the forest.

  Jenike cut the equipment off. “Neat, huh? That’s about the best we’ve got, too. I’ve worked out the phonemic system pretty well; I can repeat what that guy said without any trouble now. But what the hell does it mean?”

  “What you need is a dictionary.”

  “Yeah. You get me one first thing, will you?”

  Monte shifted his position carefully; the low artificial gravity field that Admiral York was so proud of was apt to send you smashing into a wall if you forgot what you were doing. He appreciated Charlie’s problem. It would have been a tough nut to crack even if he had been working with a known culture.

  Suppose, for instance, that two Americans meet each other in a hallway. Imagine that for some reason they speak in a private language that is quite unknown to a hidden observer. One of them looks at the other and says—something.

  What?

  It might be: “Joe! How are you?” (Health is a major concern of American culture, but you don’t have that clue on Sirius Nine.)

  It might be: “Joe! How’re the wife and kids?” (Same clue, plus knowledge of the typical family structure. Elsewhere, it might be wives and kids.)

  It might be: “Joe, you old horse thief! Howsa boy?” (Joking relationships are common in America, as in other places.)

  It might also be: “Joe, step outside. I’m gonna punch you one in the snoot.” (Occasionally, Americans mean what they say.)

  Without even the hints that might be given by a known cultural system, the voices from Sirius Nine were just that—voices. They were sounds without meaning. It would definitely not be possible to land on the planet in a blaze of glory, stroll up to the nearest native, and say, “Greetings, O Man-Who-Is-My-Brother! I come from beyond the sky, wallowing in good will, to bring you all the jazzy benefits of civilization. Come, let us go arm in arm to the jolly old Council of the Wise Ones…”

  “I’m going nuts,” Charlie said, lighting a cigarette. “Got any suggestions?”

  “Just, keep digging, that’s all. We’ll probably have to work out a nonverbal approach, but if you’re set up to learn the language in a hurry once you get the chance, that’s all we can expect. Anything I can do for you?”

  Jenike smiled, showing singularly yellow teeth. “Yeah, you can get out of here and let me work.”

  Monte stifled the reply that came all too readily to his lips; he was going to keep things running smoothly if it killed him. “See you around, then.”

  He started to duck out through the door.

  “Monte?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t mind me. Thanks for coming by.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Feeling a little better, he closed the door behind him.

  Already, the voices had started up again. He could hear them faintly in the cold silence of the ship: laughing, solemn, playful, querulous.

  He started gingerly along the catwalk, and the strange whispers followed him, filling his mind.

  Sounds from another world…

  Voices.

  The large, somewhat egg-shaped off-duty room was supplied with reasonably decent tables and chairs, and even had an impressively mammalian nude painting on one wall. It had a bar of sorts too, and the cool air was warmed a bit by the fog of smoke and voices that characterized all such rooms everywhere.

  There were two distinct groups in the room. Members of the crew formed a tight, noisy circle around the bar. The anthropologists, as usual, were in conference at the corner table. Monte had no doubt that the crew thought they were just as alien as anything likely to be found on Sirius Nine, and there were times when he agreed with them.

  “Garbage, old man,” Don King said, crossing his long legs without disturbing the crease in his trousers. “Absolute garbage.”

  Tom Stein blinked his pale blue eyes behind his thick glasses and pointed a skinny finger at the archeologist. “Everything is too simple for you. You’ve poked around with projectile points and potsherds so long that you think that’s all man is. I say it is a mistake to regard those people as simple until you know for sure what you are talking about.”

  Don finished off his drink with one long swallow. “You’re making problems where there aren’t any, just like old Monte here. Dammit, man, there are constants in culture. We’re long past the stage where you can seriously suggest that a culture is just a crazy collection of unrelated traits—a thing of shreds and patches, to use Lowie’s unhappy phrase. Cultures, as you guys are always insisting, are hooked together internally. A simple technology—and we don’t even know whether or not they’ve got any technology on Sirius Nine; I ain’t seen any evidence of it yet—means a low level of culture. You don’t invent algebra while you’re out digging up roots, my friend. We’re dealing with a rudimentary tribe of hunters and gatherers. Why make them more complicated than they are?”

  Monte puffed on his pipe, enjoying himself. “That’s what I’m worried about. How complicated are they?”

  Don ignored the bait and shifted his ground, which was a favorite stunt of his. “It’s complicated enough in one sense, I’ll tell you that. It may have sounded nice and simple to Heidelman back at the U.N., but what does he know about it? Did you read that official directive we’re supposed to be working under? It says we’re to make contact with the natives of Sirius Nine. That’s a laugh. How in the devil do you ‘contact’ a world like Sirius Nine? A world is one helluva big place. You’d think they would have found that out back at the U.N.” Ralph Gottschalk shifted his big body on his chair. He had a surprisingly soft voice, but everyone listened to him. “I think Don’s got a point there. So far as we know, there is no hypothetical uniform culture on Sirius Nine—there are thousands of isolated bands of food gatherers. If a spaceship had landed among the Bushmen of Africa fifteen thousand years ago, could it then make contact with Earth? It seems improbable.”

  Monte shrugged. “We all know that we’ll be doing well to make contact with just one group; Heidelman knows that too. But we still have to be careful. A lot depends on what we do on Sirius Nine.”

  Don King raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  Monte, who would have asked precisely the same question if he hadn’t been in charge of the expedition, took a stab at it. “Apart from the admittedly remote possibility that we may be biting off more than we can chew, it might be argued that we have made at least some progress in ethics and law since the time of Cortes and the rest of his merry crew. We can’t just sail into a new harbor, run up the flag, and line up at the hog trough.”

  “I wonder. Maybe I’m just cynical because I’m between wives at the moment, but I doubt that line of reasoning very much. We say we’re civilized, which means that we have enough surplus to afford luxuries like high-minded philosophies. But if things got tough I’ll bet we’d be right back where we started from quicker than you can say Cuthbert Pomeroy Gundelfinger; it’d be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a pancreas for a pancreas. That’s the way men are.”

  “Maybe we’ll get a chance to find out,” Monte said. “Maybe we will, at that. As I say, I’m between wives at the moment and that always makes me cynical.”

  “The difference,” Monte informed him, “is imperceptible.”

  Ralph Gottschalk stood up, looking more than ever like a gorilla. “I’m going back to work, gentlemen.”

  Monte joined him, leaving Don and Tom Stein to their interminable—and mutually enjoyed—arguments.

  Together, the two men walked through the cold metal ship to study the reports of the first expedition again.

  When Monte came into their tiny room after his umpteenth conference with Admiral York concerning procedures to be fol
lowed on Sirius Nine, he found Louise curled up in bed reading a novel. The book was entitled Lunar Flame, and Monte recognized it as the current bestseller that—to quote the dust jacket—“ripped the plastalloy lid off the seething passions that boiled inside the Moon Colony.”

  “Pretty hot stuff?”

  Louise slithered around in her shameless silk nightgown—which he had given to her for Christmas two years ago—and grinned at him. “Let’s go to the Moon, dear.”

  He laughed and sat down on the bed. “I thought you’d be down at the hydroponics tanks.”

  “I spent an hour down there,” she said, brushing back her long, uncoiled black hair. “But it’s not much like having a garden, is it? Too many chemicals—it’s like growing plants in a chemistry lab. I miss our roses, Monte. Isn’t that silly?”

  “I don’t think so, Lise.” He took her in his arms and nudged her cheek with his beard. “Three years is a big chunk out of anyone’s life—and you did do wonders with those flowers of ours. It’s funny, the things you miss out here.”

  “I know. I catch myself thinking about our picnics up in the mountains. Remember Beaver Creek, where you caught all those rainbows? And how quickly the clouds came up, and the way the rain sounded on the roof of the copter? I think the worst thing about a spaceship is that there’s no weather.”

  “It hasn’t been much fun for you, has it?”

  She changed the subject promptly; she did share his excitement about Sirius Nine, and she had no use at all for complaining wives. “What did Admiral York have to say?”

  Monte hesitated. “Nothing much. He’s a very levelheaded guy, I think. We were working out the details of rescue operations—just in case.”

  Quite suddenly, they became acutely aware of the ever-present cold steel of the ship around them, the cold steel and the great emptiness Outside…

  Monte thought of the children they had never had—Louise had lost two children in childbirth and the doctors had advised against trying again—and he knew that Louise was thinking of them too. It was a shared sadness between them.