by Algis Budrys
He frowned thoughtfully. Than he nodded. ‘No. You’re not.’ He frowned. ‘You’re not,’ he repeated. He looked at me. ‘That’s all right, then. What’s his name?’
‘My name’s Jack Mullica,’ I said. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Olchuck.’ I stuck out my hand.
He ignored it. ‘Are you? Pleased to meet Margery’s drunk of a father? I wouldn’t be.’ He drank from the glass. ‘Go on about whatever business you have here. Don’t bother being friendly. I don’t really take to it.’ He took another sip. ‘On the other hand, I’m not nasty. Count your blessings.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Yes. All in all, I’d say count your blessings.’
‘Come on, Jack,’ Margery said, and tugged at my arm. And I went. What, pray tell, else would I do?
The bathroom was crowded – a sink, the John, and a bathtub with a shower attachment competed for space that left very little bare floor – but it was no worse than the analogous facility on the ship. In fact, it was a little more spacious. In any case, I didn’t complain. Earlier that evening, I’d been forced out of the barn long enough to crouch down behind some bushes, and then wipe myself with leaves; that experience makes you appreciate indoor comforts very quickly.
She looked me up and down. ‘I think some jeans and a shirt of my father’s will fit you. And underwear. That’ll have to do. All right, I’ll leave you now.’ And she did, with a little flirt of her head that might have meant anything,
But when I was through in the shower – and, oh, it was a good shower, once I figured out what it was, and how to work it – there are things you can’t learn adequately from television; not even the television of today, and in those days it was much worse – she opened the door a crack and passed through a small heap of clothing which turned out to be as described, with a pair of white cotton socks thrown in. ‘Pass me your old clothes,’ she said. ‘I’ll wash them the next time I do laundry.’
I did, after taking my iron rations and first-aid kit out of the pockets, and passed my clothes to her. Which left me with the first-aid kit exposed, because it wouldn’t fit in any of the jeans pockets. It didn’t really matter, I supposed, but I found myself staring at it, and wondering if it was doing her leg any good, and then realizing that it was the only thing, now, that was still mine to control from before the crash. It was an old friend, suddenly. And its content was waning. I stood there with the kit in my hand, looking at the lettering, and the lettering that wasn’t lettering, and suddenly I realized I had been down on this planet less than a day, and already I was more Earthman than not. Which was exactly what the people back on my home planet wanted, under these special circumstances. Everything was going well. Everything. I stood there in a bathroom in a marginal farmhouse in borrowed clothes, dependent on a very marginal girl and to some extent on an over-the-edge father; I had no job, no real place to sleep, no money, and everything was going well.
I spent another day in the barn, coming into the house only for a little bit of time at night. The father ignored me. Margery looked at me warily; she seemed, in what few glimpses I had of it, to be setting her leg a little differently, experimentally. But I couldn’t be sure, and she seemed to be almost hiding it. After dinner she went back out to the barn with me. ‘If you want to work on my leg some more, it’s all right,’ she said casually.
‘That’s right, it is twenty-four hours since the last time, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’ She opened her pants, dropped them, and sat down on the bags. I got out the first-aid kit, and the container of muscle ointment out of the kit, and went over to her. The leg was measurably better. It was less wasted, felt more like a normal leg, and seemed more responsive to stimuli. I did not comment on any of this. I simply applied the ointment, and she simply stared over my shoulder at the wall, her expression completely neutral. The only way you could tell, really, that there was something going on was the fact that she wept, silently and not very hard, but steadily, so that her cheeks were wet when we were finished and she got up and put her pants back on.
‘Your hands are warm,’ she said. ‘Your whole body’s warm. I noticed that from the first. You sick?’
I shook my head, getting it right. I had noticed that she was cold; not much colder than normal, but still … ‘No. It just is that way.’
She looked at me for a long time. Then she shrugged and left the barn.
The next day, after work, she came out to the barn, looking at me narrow-eyed, swinging her leg. She walked a lot closer to normal. We neither one of us said anything. It was either working or it wasn’t. It appeared to be working. What could you say beyond that, really? Finally she said ‘Come on’ and jerked her head toward something outside the barn. She stood with a hand on the door, and I went over to her.
‘What’s happening?’ I said, and she said, ‘Get in the car.’ I looked in the yard, and there was a car there.
– Mullica’s recollections, reconstructed
INTERPOLATION, DWUORD ARYAN
It took me a while to get used to the animals – the cats, the dogs, the chickens, and whatnot. They fit their ecological niches in understandable ways, but they weren’t the same as the animals we had at home. And it isn’t the same to see them on TV and then have them actually rub up against you. It is, as a matter of fact, horrifying at first. Particularly the cats.
But it doesn’t take long to acclimate to them; to realize that a cat is profoundly innocent. A chicken has no brain to speak of. A dog seems to have some concept that he is doing something bad, or good, depending on the action. But a cat does everything the same – kills and purrs, plays with a ball of string or a moribund mouse, the same in either case. We have no such thing on my home world; it is unsettling to think too much about cats, and thank your stars they are not larger. But one grows accustomed to them, particularly if one realizes they live pretty much without reference to human beings … or us.
What persisted in strangeness was the smells.
That is something for which radio and TV do not prepare you. And it is pervasive; there is nowhere on Earth you can go to escape the smell of Earth.
When we first landed, there was the rich smell of the bog, and then the scent of pines. The one was thick, and clogged the nostrils, and was deceptively familiar, for it was largely the smell of decay. The pines were more difficult: astringent, so that the mucus membranes dried up and tingled, and the throat felt peculiar. But the smell of her, thick with human sweat, cigarette smoke, and liquor, was exotic and oddly titillating, whereas the smell of the farm, with its dog, cat, and chicken feces, its odor of mold and dust in the barn, was hard to take at first.
But it was the cars that really struck me as exotic. They were so different from what we had: different fuel, odd cooling systems, pervasive lubricants. I loved it. I purely loved it. Cars seemed to me to speak more clearly of Earth than any single thing else, and I was going to be of the Earth. I was. It was the only course of action that made sense. Soon enough, I promised myself, no one would be able to tell me from an Earthman … at least on the inside.
COURTNEY MASON DOWRIGHT
It is a riverfront home in Maryland. It is not a large home, and the grounds are not extensive. Nevertheless, it is a riverfront home in Maryland.
It is the retirement home of Commander Dowright, who is not yet so frozen by old age that he cannot get up at dawn and, with a gun under his arm and a dog coursing along before him, go for long walks-cum-casual-shootings. But Commander Dowright does not actually do that very often. Most of the time, he sits out on his back porch and broods, bitterly. When I found him, he was glad to talk. He raised the tape recorder to his lips and said:
My name is Courtney Mason Dowright, and I was, at the time of my assignment to determine exactly what was going on at NAS Atlantic City, a commander in the United States Navy. I am now retired, of course.
There were several peculiarities about the call to Philadelphia Naval District Headquarters. Minor in themselves, they led to the inevitable conclusion that, once again, Fred
Andrews was doing nothing to disprove the grading that had made him graduate almost dead last in his year at the Academy. (Frederick Mayhew Andrews was a captain in the U.S. Navy at the time, and commanding officer of NAS Atlantic City, not a plum job. He was scheduled to retire later that year, still a captain, and would have been retired earlier if the opening at Atlantic City had not needed a man for a short while, until his successor had completed certain courses. For that matter, it is problematical that he would have been a captain in the first place if so many other better men hadn’t been killed or invalided out in the war.)
But a three A.M. telephone call from a commanding officer to a district headquarters – any commanding officer, any district headquarters – leaves the district headquarters with few options. So I in turn was knocked out of bed and told that something worth my time was going on down at NAS Atlantic City, though no one at Philadelphia was sure what. That was the first thing I was to find out for sure. And in due course after that I was helicoptered down to NAS Atlantic City, where in due course after that I learned that a congressman had somehow gotten involved.
Upon learning that he was a Navy veteran, I at first took this for an encouraging sign. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Upon landing, I was taken to Fred Andrews. In his office, alone with him, I learned that the base might have a visitor from another planet. It might almost equally well have a convincing madman, or some third possibility, but whoever or whatever he was, he was wearing badges that could not be read, and he had brought with him a similarly attired corpse who was not the world’s prettiest sight.
I sat back and looked at Captain Andrews for a while, making up my mind tentatively. This was after the first big rash of reported flying saucer sightings – we had not yet learned to call them UFOs – in 1947 and ’48, including quite a few by Navy personnel. And I was as aware as he that there were persistent rumors the Navy, or somebody, actually had some corpses, possibly even some live crewmen. But nothing solid; only reports of rumors, and I, of course, no more actually knowledgeable than anyone else in the Navy as far as I knew.
Well, that was what you would expect. If some base somewhere had solid evidence, that base was now buttoned up pretty good. In fact, that base was leading two lives: one, that nothing had ever happened there, and two, that for the few personnel that knew different, life was very complicated indeed.
Because anybody who thought the United States was going to make off-world visitors – we had not yet learned to call them extraterrestrials – public, or even private, didn’t have his head screwed on right. And the same for every other government on Earth.
Why? Because if it was a small government, it knew perfectly well the big governments would take an immediate, intense, and personal interest, which could not possibly be good for the small government. And if it was a big government, then it knew it was at the top of the technological heap on Earth, the visitors were bound to be advanced beyond that, so, ipso facto, the big government could do nothing real to protect its citizens, or say it was protecting them, from whatever. And that inevitably leads to anarchy, which is the thing governments like least of all.
So, inasmuch as the visitors, if any, had somehow chosen not to announce themselves to Earthpeople so far, the best course was to hunker down and pray they would turn out to be an illusion, would at the very least continue to play coy, or we would, in the fullness of time, surpass them technologically. I suppose. Frankly, the last possibility struck me as unlikely in the extreme, since presumably the visitors weren’t obligingly standing still developmentally, either. On the first two choices, I had at that time an opinion divided exactly fifty-fifty.
But be that as it may, the immediate question was, what was Captain Andrews going to do? So I quickly pointed out that Captain Andrews was only an inch or two away from safe retirement, and Captain Andrews huffed and grunted that of course he knew that and he was of course turning the entire matter over to me as the representative of the Philadelphia Naval District and I said no other thought had crossed my mind for even a moment, and that was that. Then I said let’s go look at the corpse and then let me interview this man you’ve got, and that was when I learned about the congressman.
The congressman was young, junior in rank, and many miles from his home district. But he was indefatigable, in the sense that he was rapidly developing a reputation for going anywhere and doing anything that would inch him up the ladder, and heavyweights in the system had cautiously marked him as a comer.
He was at the base on a visit with some servicemen from his home state, having brought one of them a medal for heroism in a fire, said heroism having been performed while the serviceman in question was home on liberty. An innocuous errand having nothing to do with the congressman’s being a junior member of the House Armed Services Committee, and I looked at Captain Andrews with almost open incredulity when I heard that. But then I remembered that the congressman was ex-Navy, and I almost relaxed for a moment. After all, too, this was not the first congressman to think up some excuse for enjoying the free perks of a service installation instead of paying for a hotel room.
So I let that one go by. And apparently that was the congressman’s motive – or else whatever his motive actually was, it was derailed in favor of the one he had been presented with this morning. Because I never heard of any other trouble at the base as a result of the congressman’s visit. Not that – ah, hell with it; I never heard of any other trouble, there is no reason to think there ever was any other trouble brewing, and what I’m saying is that life’s too short for some people to keep up with all the possibilities the congressman presented over the years. But now I’m getting beyond myself, and certainly beyond the point you’re interested in, right?
So. We went down to where the corpse was, in among the gray narrow corridors, the captain and I, and found him in the morgue. We dismissed the morgue attendant, and I pulled out the drawer.
I did not learn much. He did not look any different from a man to me, he was dressed in coveralls which were slightly different from those one normally saw, but not outlandishly so, and they were marked with badges I could not read and did not look like they were in any language I had ever seen – and I have seen quite a few, as have most people who have served in the Navy for any length of time. But there were several explanations for my not recognizing the language, and most of them did not require that the lettering be part of a coherent system in use on some other world.
The man had died hard; the middle of his body was not a pretty sight. There remained enough, however, to assure us he was a man. Frankly, it was difficult to believe in him being off-world after seeing his genitals; blackened and burned, of a good size, rather they cried out pitifully that a man like ourselves lay there, in worse case than we fervently prayed we would ever be. I turned away. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back for him later,’ and we left.
We moved up one flight to where the prisoner was. And on the way we were joined by the congressman.
It was my first meeting with him, and I was immediately struck by his intensity, and by the fact that it was not in particular directed at me. Rather, he seemed to have an invisible opponent in play, and I – and everyone else – was not as important. Other than that, he was pleasant and polite. I got the distinct feeling that he would always be pleasant and polite as long as he did not feel compelled to study you closely. I wondered what I could do to keep him that way.
Fat chance.
Anyway, there we were, in the corridor outside the prisoner’s room, with an armed guard at the door, and the congressman seemed to have materialized out of thin air, although actually he had simply stepped out of an adjacent room. How he knew it was us, and not more casual traffic, was easy – he had kept one eye to the crack in the slightly open door. But until you realized that, there was something just a bit disconcerting about it.
‘You’re going to speak to him now?’ the congressman asked, and when I allowed that yes, indeed, that wa
s what I was there for, he nodded. ‘Of course. Well, you’ll speak to me afterward. Correct?’
Well, not correct, exactly. There was no reason in the world for me to speak to him – or the commanding officer, for that matter – afterward. My report was technically for the admiral commanding the naval district. But I could see now that this would lead to a confrontation with the congressman, and one thing the admiral did not want was a confrontation with any congressman. And certainly not this one, on brief acquaintance. The fact was that the Navy was, as usual in peacetime, fighting to keep every friend it had in the House and Senate. So I smiled frankly and openly, and said ‘Of course, sir,’ and he did his best to smile openly and frankly, too. ‘Very good,’ he said, and I went in to the Martian or whatever he was with a definite feeling of unease.
He was behind his table and yawning into his hand when I came in, and gesturing in embarrassment with his other arm as his jaws gaped wider and wider and his eyes screwed themselves shut. ‘Sorry,’ he said a moment later, collecting himself. ‘It’s been a while since I slept. And your name is …?’
‘Court Dowright. And yours is what?’
He grinned. ‘Well, so far I’ve been claiming it’s Ditlo Ravashan, and I say I am a member of a civilization that takes in more than just your Sun.’
‘Ah.’ I pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him. ‘And is this true?’
‘Which? That I claim it, or that my claim is true, or both?’
I looked at him. If we were going to play that sort of verbal game, we could be here a long time. On the other hand, the longer we played it, the likelier it was that the man was, simply, a man. Frankly, looking at him, I found it quite difficult to believe he had come out of a flying saucer. ‘Both,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said with a faint twinkle in his eye, ‘I have claimed it. And it might be true.’
