Apes and Angels

by Ben Bova

  “Good morning, sir,” said Brad.

  Kosoff seemed almost startled. He looked up at Brad, frowning slightly. Then, “Ahh, MacDaniels, isn’t it? Anthropology.”

  Implanted communicator, Brad figured. Instant link with the ship’s master computer.

  “Yes, sir,” he answered. “I’ve been assigned to sit in on the planetology team’s meeting this morning.”

  Kosoff broke into a slightly malicious grin. “Studying the tribe in its native habitat, eh?”

  “That’s what anthropologists do, sir.”

  “Fine. Fine,” Kosoff said airily. “I’ve decided to attend their meeting myself.”

  For two months the scientific staff had been studying the planet and its inhabitants—remotely. Surveillance satellites had been established in orbit around both Mithra Alpha and Gamma. The satellites were loaded with sensors that measured the alien worlds’ atmospheres, Alpha’s all-encompassing ocean, Gamma’s globe-spanning forests, and particularly the primitive villages that dotted Gamma’s landscape.

  The life forms in the planet-wide ocean of Mithra Alpha showed no obvious signs of intelligence, although they seemed to communicate among themselves, like the whales of Earth. Odysseus’s scientists concentrated their attention on Mithra Gamma.

  Only the leaders of the planetology team were present for this meeting, yet there were more than two dozen men and women filing into the conference room. Brad watched them from the door as they took their seats at the long, polished conference table. They assembled themselves in what seemed like a random, unhierarchical pattern, except for the department chief, who sat himself at the head of the table, of course.

  What are the relationships among these people? Brad asked himself. What’s their pecking order?

  He saw that Kosoff casually pulled out a chair for himself halfway down the table, next to an attractive blonde. But all eyes shifted from the department head to Kosoff as he sat down.

  There was one nonhuman member of the conference: the ship’s master computer. It contained all the data that had been amassed so far. The holographic displays along the walls of the room all bore the same computer-generated human face, bland-looking and inoffensive. It had been drawn by the ship’s psychologists to be as attractive as possible to the multiracial staff: golden tawny skin, slightly almond cast to the eyes, high cheekbones, downy hair of sandy brown. And smiling, always smiling, so that the humans it worked with and for would find it friendly no matter what it reported.

  Brad almost smiled back at it as he took a chair near the foot of the table.

  The chairman—Dr. Olav Pedersen, a dour-looking lean and pale Scandinavian—called the meeting to order. Then he said, in his slightly nasal voice:

  “The master computer has analyzed the orbital data we have obtained so far, and has some very interesting—even disturbing—conclusions to share with us.”

  Without preamble, the synthesized face of the master computer said flatly, “This planetary system is unstable.”

  One of the women halfway down the table challenged, “How could an intelligent species arise on a planet that has an unstable orbit? It takes billions of years for intelligence to develop.” Brad noticed that she looked at Kosoff as she spoke.

  The master computer’s avatar replied blandly, “The system was not always unstable. Some incident altered the orbits of the planets Beta and Gamma into unstable elliptical paths and pushed Mithra Alpha into its current star-hugging orbit. Very likely there were other planets in the system that were either ejected into interstellar space by the incident, or perhaps pushed into the star itself.”

  “An incident, you say,” Kosoff said to the face on the wall screen. “How did it happen? And when?”

  The computer’s avatar replied, “Insufficient data. It is clear that something has disrupted the planets’ orbits, probably slightly more than a hundred thousand Earth years ago. But what that something was is unknown at this time.”

  One of the younger men asked, “Will the system break up, Emcee?”

  “Emcee?” Kosoff asked.

  Looking slightly embarrassed, the young man said, “Master Computer: Emcee. It sort of humanizes it, a little.”

  Kosoff smiled at him. “Yes, I suppose it does.”

  Brad nodded to himself and thought, He’s trying to go a step farther. The psychologists drew a human face for the computer; he’s given it a name. Makes it easier to work with the machine, apparently.

  Fodder for his notes and, eventually, the report he would write.

  Emcee resumed, “Planet Gamma is now approaching its perihelion—”

  “The closest it gets to its star,” Kosoff interjected.

  Unperturbed, Emcee continued, “Once it passes its perihelion it will begin its long swing away from Mithra. Conditions on the planet’s surface will become colder, even frigid.”

  “Will the aliens be able to survive their winter?” the department chief asked.

  “They apparently have, in the past.”

  But Kosoff said, “We’d better get our work done quickly, before conditions on the planet’s surface become too difficult for us.”

  “That would be a wise course to take,” said the master computer.

  Dr. Pedersen asked, “Is it really necessary to make contact with the natives? Why can’t we plant the energy screen devices in uninhabited locations around the planet and leave the aliens undisturbed?”

  Kosoff shook his head vigorously. “To come two hundred light-years to a planet inhabited by intelligent aliens and not make contact with them? Unthinkable!”

  A woman with thickly curled brick-red hair, sitting across the table from Kosoff, objected, “But the shock of contact could harm them. That’s what the psych team believes.”

  “That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Kosoff replied, his eyes fixed on her. “We are not going to throw away this opportunity.”

  A man sitting at Pedersen’s right said, “Besides, suppose we plant the energy screen generators and leave without contacting them. And they discover the equipment. And try to tinker with it. They could blow up half a continent, for god’s sake.”

  “Not very likely,” said the man next to him.

  “But possible.”

  “We could put the generators in orbit around the planet, instead of on its surface.”

  “That’s possible,” Pedersen agreed.

  Kosoff said, “Anthropologists have built up protocols about contacting isolated tribes on Earth, like the hunter-gatherers discovered back in the twentieth century.”

  “That was nearly two hundred years before we left Earth,” Pedersen objected.

  “Yes, but the protocols make sense, even today,” Kosoff responded. “They found that, in some cases, contact is less harmful to a primitive society than leaving those people isolated.”

  “In any event,” the redhead said, “contact is a very delicate matter.”

  “Agreed,” said Kosoff. “But we are going to make contact.”

  BIOLOGY

  Brad sat alone in the main cafeteria, as usual, munching on a slightly overdone soyburger.

  Something disrupted this planetary system, he repeated to himself for about the fortieth time. Planet Gamma is heading for a deep freeze. According to Emcee the planet’s been following this orbit for at least a hundred thousand years, so the aliens must be able to survive their long winter.

  But, based on the orbital data they had calculated, Gamma’s glacial winter lasts almost forty Earth years. How can the aliens survive that, with the primitive technology they’ve shown?

  Then a new thought struck him: Maybe they have only a primitive technology because every time they get started developing a higher one, the damned winter closes in on them and everything freezes.

  Interesting, he thought. Let’s see what the biologists have to say about that.

  The biology team meeting that afternoon was superficially like the planetology meeting: same conference room, same shuffling, seemingly random
seating selection. Once again Kosoff sat in on the meeting and, again, he chose a chair halfway down the table, next to an attractive young woman.

  And again everyone’s attention focused on Kosoff, rather than the department head.

  There was one other difference, Brad saw. Felicia Portman was at this meeting, looking petite and altogether lovely among the other biologists. She recognized Brad down at the end of the table and smiled brightly at him. He grinned back at her.

  He had seen Felicia, of course, now and then during the two months since they’d first met. But always with other people around: a casual group, usually biologists. Although they had shared a few meals together with her teammates, Brad had not asked her for a date.

  Abruptly, Kosoff got up from the chair in which he’d seated himself and went around the table to take the chair next to her.

  Before Brad could even think of what to do, the department’s chairwoman called the meeting to order. Dr. Ursula Steiner was a handsome woman, regally tall, with splendid yellow hair coiled atop her head like a crown of gold. Do you have to be blond to be a department head? Brad wondered.

  Again, Emcee began the meeting with a summary of what the remote sensors had learned of the intelligent natives of planet Gamma.

  The sensors—palm-sized and disguised to resemble ordinary rocks—had been strewn near several of the villages that dotted the green fields and rolling hills of the planet. Since the natives appeared to be diurnal creatures, the “rocks” had been delivered by nearly silent helium-filled airships at night. None of the aliens seemed to have noticed them.

  The three-dimensional wall display showed one of the aliens: bipedal, tall, and willowy slim. Its skin was pale, blotched with irregular blue spots. No clothing at all. No obvious sexual organs.

  Its head rose above its shoulders like a bullet-shaped protuberance. No discernable mouth. Large staring eyes on the sides of the head; they moved with a persistent back-and-forth twisting of the head, apparently scanning their surroundings constantly. A vertical slit between the eyes appeared to be a nostril.

  “Predators?” asked one of the biologists.

  “None identified, as yet,” answered Emcee’s voice.

  Apparently they were warm-blooded, apparently hermaphroditic. Two arms, consisting of intertwined muscular tentacles that could separate or wrap themselves together, at will. The ends of the writhing, twisting strands served much like fingers when they were brought together.

  “While various noninvasive scans have produced a rough picture of the creatures’ innards, further details can only be obtained by direct examination of several individuals,” said the computer’s synthesized face from the wall screens.

  “We’ll have to go down to the surface and pick up a few of them,” the chairwoman said, looking at Kosoff.

  “Eventually,” Kosoff replied.

  “They are omnivorous,” Emcee reported.

  “I don’t see a mouth in its head.”

  “It has a mouth in its abdomen. Observe.”

  The image on the screen flickered as it jumped ahead; now it showed one of the aliens crouching near a flowering shrub at the base of a tall tree. It froze into immobility.

  “Hunting behavior,” said Emcee. “Note the fingerlike extremities.”

  The alien’s arm flexed the ends of its muscular strands, which twitched like boneless fingers. In its other arm it gripped a short, pointed stick.

  Faster than the humans’ eyes could follow, the alien’s arm flashed into the shrubbery and spitted a writhing, screeching animal the size of a small reptile. A mouth in the lower section of its torso opened wide, showing wet red tissue inside, fringed with writhing, coiling, wormlike appendages. The alien stuffed its shrieking prey inside and the mouth snapped shut, cutting off the screams of the doomed animal.

  “Yuck!” said a disgusted woman across the table from Kosoff. Brad felt his own stomach turn uneasily while moans and gagging gasps filled the conference room.

  Dr. Steiner rapped her knuckles on the table. “Come on, now. We’re professional biologists, not children at a freak show.”

  “It looks pretty freakish,” one of the younger men said—weakly.

  They spent the next hour discussing what data the remote sensors had amassed about the natives’ physiology.

  “What about their social organization?” Brad heard himself ask.

  Dr. Steiner looked surprised, but quickly answered, “We’ve concentrated on their physical structure and basic biochemistry. Studies of their social behavior are scheduled for later.”

  Kosoff said, “They seem to have established villages for themselves.”

  “Yes, built of dried mud bricks,” said the chairwoman.

  “Like adobe.”

  “And they have farms on the outskirts of their villages.”

  Kosoff asked, “Any signs of conflict between villages?”

  “None that we’ve detected,” replied Steiner. “They seem comparatively peaceful, noncompetitive. Of course, the villages are fairly well separated. Contacts between them must be comparatively rare.”

  “They’re hermaphroditic,” said Felicia Portman. “That removes a major source of conflict.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to go down and take a few of them up here to the ship for detailed physical examination.”

  Brad asked, “Do we have the means to do that without letting them know that we’re here?”

  Dr. Steiner scowled down the table at him. “If we want them to remain ignorant of our presence, I suppose we’ll have to sacrifice any specimens we bring up here for examination.”

  “Can’t be helped,” said one of the men halfway down the table.

  “But that would be murder,” Felicia objected. “I mean, after all, they’re intelligent creatures.”

  “Can’t be helped,” the department head echoed, looking squarely at Kosoff.

  Kosoff shrugged his heavy shoulders. “This is a decision we don’t have to make today. Perhaps not for several weeks.”

  “I agree,” said Steiner. Shifting her gaze to Brad, she went on, “No need for further discussion. Meeting adjourned.”

  Brad saw the hostility in her face. I should keep my big mouth shut, he told himself as all the others pushed themselves up from their chairs and headed for the door. I’m an observer here, a guest. They resent my sticking my nose into their business.

  But Felicia came up to him, a questioning smile on her lips.

  “Are you going to join the bio team?” she asked teasingly.

  Brad got up from his chair like a carpenter’s ruler unfolding. Embarrassed, he muttered, “I didn’t mean to interfere—”

  Kosoff came up to them as the department head swept by and shot an annoyed glare at Brad.

  “For an anthropologist,” Kosoff said, “you don’t seem to be able to sit back and observe without interfering with the subject of your study.”

  Brad felt his cheeks redden. “I just thought that—”

  But Kosoff had already turned his attention to Felicia. “I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight, Dr. Portman?”

  And he reached for her hand.

  A look halfway between surprise and alarm flashed across Felicia’s face.

  Before she could reply to Kosoff, Brad said, “Um, I’ve already invited Felicia to dinner.”

  Looking relieved, she said to Kosoff, “Perhaps some other time, Professor.”

  Brad gripped her arm lightly and the two of them headed for the door, leaving Kosoff standing there. Brad could feel the heat of the older man’s anger, like the glow of red-hot lava spilling from a volcano.

  “Thanks,” Felicia whispered to him as they reached the door.

  Brad nodded. Terrific afternoon, he thought. I’ve made enemies of the head of the biology department and the director of the scientific staff. Great.

  Yet he asked, half afraid of the answer, “You’ll have dinner with me?”

  Grinning, Felicia replied, “I’ll have to. Other
wise the professor will know you lied about it.”

  Brad suddenly felt buoyant, realizing that he was going to have dinner with the best-looking biologist on the ship.

  DINNER

  The starship Odysseus had been designed to make life as agreeable as possible for the voyagers who would travel two hundred light-years from Earth. Each living compartment was furnished comfortably—within the constraints of budget and the psychotechnicians’ estimation of the difference between comfort and extravagance.

  There were three dining areas on the ship, plus a cafeteria big enough to handle roughly half the ship’s complement at a sitting. Robot servers were unfailingly polite and efficient. Hydroponics farms provided fresh vegetables and fruits, biovats produced high-quality meats from cell samples that were cultured and grown continuously, and seafood was bred in the artificial stream that meandered through the ship’s middle.

  The most lavish of the dining rooms had been dubbed the Crystal Palace in a naming contest carried out before the ship’s human travelers entered cryonic sleep.

  Now, as Brad escorted Felicia into the dining room, he saw how appropriate the name was. Crystal chandeliers—donated by a consortium of European jewelers—hung from the high ceiling, and crystal candlestick holders decorated every one of the damask-covered tables. Even the stubby flat-topped robots that buzzed between the tables each bore a fresh flower in a crystal vase.

  “It’s all so beautiful,” Felicia said as the human maitre d’ led them to a table for two along the far bulkhead. She was wearing a V-necked golden blouse and a knee-length skirt of deep brown. Brad felt distinctly shabby in his usual slacks and turtleneck.

  He admitted, “It’s a lot fancier than any restaurant I could afford back Earthside.”

  As they took the chairs the robots proffered, Felicia said, “I thought you’ve never been to Earth.”

  Brad felt a pulse of alarm. She’s read my dossier!

  “Only for the final stage of our training,” he replied. “In Kazakhstan.”

  “It must have been difficult for you,” Felicia said, her face etched with concern, “with the higher gravity and all.”