Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  He stopped to get his bearings, then shrugged and walked around a mound of rubble toward what he believed to be the proper building.

  Pretty sure this was it, he mused. Yes, shadows around that window arch look the same . . . same time of day—

  He halted, almost guiltily, and looked back to make sure no one was observing his futile return to the scene of his little adventure. After all, an inspector of colonial installations was not supposed to run around ghost hunting like a small boy.

  Finding himself alone, he stepped briskly through the crumbling arch—and froze in his tracks.

  “I am honored to know you,” said the Torang in a mild, rather buzzing voice. “We thought you possibly would return here.”

  Otis gaped. The black eyes projecting from the sides of the narrow head tracked him up and down, giving him the unpleasant sensation of being measured for an artillery salvo.

  “I am known as Jal-Ganyr,” said the Torang. “Unless I am given incorrect data, you are known as Jeff-Otis. That is so.”

  The last statement was made with almost no inflection, but some still-functioning corner of Otis’ mind interpreted it as a question. He sucked in a deep breath, suddenly conscious of having forgotten to breathe for a moment.

  “I didn’t know . . . yes, that is so . . . I didn’t know you Torangs could speak Terran. Or anything else. How—?”

  He hesitated as a million questions boiled up in his mind to be asked. Jal-Ganyr absently stroked the gray fur of his chest with his three-fingered left hand, squatting patiently on a flat rock. Otis felt somehow that he had been allowed to waste time mumbling only by grace of disciplined politeness.

  “I am not of the Torangs,” said Jal-Ganyr in his wheezing voice. “I am of the Myrbs. You would possibly say Myrbii. I have not been informed.”

  “You mean that is your name for yourselves?” asked Otis.

  Jal-Ganyr seemed to consider, his mobile eyes swiveling inward to scan the Terran’s face.

  “More than that,” he said at last, when he had thought it over. “I mean I am of the race originating at Myrb, not of this planet.”

  “Before we go any further,” insisted Otis, “tell me, at least, how you learned our language!”

  Jal-Ganyr made a fleeting gesture. His “face” was unreadable to the Terran, but Otis had the impression he had received the equivalent of a smile and a shrug.

  “As to that,” said the Myrb, “I possibly learned it before you did. We have observed you a very long time. You would unbelieve how long.”

  “But then—” Otis paused. That must mean before the colonists had landed on this planet. He was half-afraid it might mean before they had reached this sun system. He put aside the thought and asked, “But then, why do you live like this among the ruins? Why wait till now? If you had communicated, you could have had our help rebuilding . . .”

  He let his voice trail off, wondering what sounded wrong. Jal-Ganyr rolled his eyes about leisurely, as if disdaining the surrounding ruins. Again, he seemed to consider all the implications of Otis’ questions.

  “We picked up your message to your chief,” he answered at last. “We decided time is to communicate with one of you. We have no interest in rebuilding,” he added. “We have concealed quarters for ourselves.”

  Otis found that his lips were dry from his unconsciously having let his mouth hang open. He moistened them with the tip of his tongue, and relaxed enough to lean against the wall.

  “You mean my getting the ruling to proclaim you a protected species?” he asked. “You have instruments to intercept such signals?”

  “I do. We have,” said Jal-Ganyr simply. “It has been decided that you have expanded far enough into space to make necessary we contact a few of the thoughtful among you. It will possibly make easier in the future for our observers.”

  Otis wondered how much of that was irony. He felt himself flushing at the memory of the “stuffed specimen” at headquarters, and was peculiarly relieved that he had not gone to see it.

  I’ve had the luck, he told himself. I’m the one to discover the first known intelligent beings beyond Sol!

  Aloud, he said, “We expected to meet someone like you eventually. But why have you chosen me?”

  The question sounded vain, he realized, but it brought unexpected results.

  “Your message. You made in a little way the same decision we made in a big way. We deduce that you are one to understand our regret and shame at what happened between our races . . . long ago.”

  “Between—?”

  “Yes. For a long time, we thought you were all gone. We are pleased to see you returning to some of your old planets.”

  Otis stared blankly. Some instinct must have enabled the Myrb to interpret his bewildered expression. He apologized briefly. “I possibly forgot to explain the ruins.” Again, Jal-Ganyr’s eyes swiveled slowly about.

  “They are not ours,” he said mildly. “They are yours.”

  THE CAGE

  by A. Bertram Chandler

  The humans knew that they had made contact with rational aliens, but the aliens did not return the favor. For the humans, that was humiliating, exasperating—and deadly.

  ***

  Arthur Bertram Chandler (1912-1984) was a prolific writer, publishing over 40 books and 200 shorter works, for which he won four Ditmar Awards. He is best known for his long-running series about the exploits of Captain (among other ranks) John Grimes, who has often been called science fiction’s equivalent of Horatio Hornblower, but his writing started much earlier, with stories appearing in Astounding Science-Fiction, the leading SF magazine of the decade, during what has been called its Golden Age. His first story, “This Means War!”, appeared in the May 1944 issue. The following year, ASF published “Giant Killer” probably his most popular work of less than novel length. (Unfortunately, I can’t describe the story without ruining it for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.) A lifelong seaman in the English, Australian, and New Zealand merchant marine, Chandler often worked his nautical experience into his stories, particularly in the John Grimes saga. That’s something that’s not in evidence in “The Cage,” which Chandler once wrote was probably his second most popular short story. Deservedly so, I hope the reader will agree.

  Imprisonment is always a humiliating experience, no matter how philosophical the prisoner. Imprisonment by one’s own kind is bad enough—but one can, at least, talk to one’s captors, one can make one’s wants understood; one can, on occasion, appeal to them man to man.

  Imprisonment is doubly humiliating when one’s captors, in all honesty, treat one as a lower animal.

  The party from the survey ship could, perhaps, be excused for failing to recognize the survivors from the interstellar liner Lode Star as rational beings. At least two hundred days had passed since their landing on the planet without a name—an unintentional landing made when Lode Star’s Ehrenhaft generators, driven far in excess of their normal capacity by a breakdown of the electronic regulator, had flung her far from the regular shipping lanes to an unexplored region of Space. Lode Star had landed safely enough; but shortly thereafter (troubles never come singly) her Pile had got out of control and her Captain had ordered his first mate to evacuate the passengers and such crew members not needed to cope with the emergency, and to get them as far from the ship as possible.

  Hawkins and his charges were well clear when there was a flare of released energy, a not very violent explosion. The survivors wanted to turn to watch, but Hawkins drove them on with curses and, at times, blows. Luckily they were up wind from the ship and so escaped the fall-out.

  When the fireworks seemed to be over Hawkins, accompanied by Dr. Boyle, the ship’s surgeon, returned to the scene of the disaster. The two men, wary of radioactivity, were cautious and stayed a safe distance from the shallow, still-smoking crater that marked where the ship had been. It was all too obvious to them that the captain, together with his officers and technicians, were now no more than an infinitesimal part o
f the incandescent cloud that had mushroomed up into the low overcast.

  Thereafter, the fifty-odd men and women, the survivors of Lode Star, had degenerated. It hadn’t been a fast process—Hawkins and Boyle, aided by a committee of the more responsible passengers, had fought a stout rearguard action. But it had been a hopeless sort of fight. The climate was against them, for a start. Hot it was, always in the neighborhood of 85º Fahrenheit. And it was wet—a thin, warm drizzle falling all the time. The air seemed to abound with the spores of fungi—luckily these did not attack living skin but throve on dead organic matter, on clothing. They throve to an only slightly lesser degree on metals and on the synthetic fabrics that many of the castaways wore.

  Danger, outside danger, would have helped to maintain morale. But there were no dangerous animals. There were only little smooth-skinned things, not unlike frogs, that hopped through the sodden undergrowth, and, in the numerous rivers, fishlike creatures ranging in size from the shark to the tadpole, and all of them possessing the bellicosity of the latter.

  Food had been no problem after the first few hungry hours. Volunteers had tried a large, succulent fungus growing on the boles of the huge fernlike trees. They had pronounced it good. After a lapse of five hours they had neither died nor even complained of abdominal pains. That fungus was to become the staple diet of the castaways. In the weeks that followed other fungi had been found, and berries, and roots—all of them edible. They provided a welcome variety.

  Fire—in spite of the all-pervading heat—was the blessing most missed by the castaways. With it they could have supplemented their diet by catching and cooking the little frog-things of the rain forest, the fishes of the streams. Some of the hardier spirits did eat these animals raw, but they were frowned upon by most of the other members of the community. Too, fire would have helped to drive back the darkness of the long nights, would, by its real warmth and light, have dispelled the illusion of cold produced by the ceaseless dripping of water from every leaf and frond.

  When they fled from the ship, most of the survivors had possessed pocket lighters—but the lighters had been lost when the pockets, together with the clothing surrounding them, had disintegrated. In any case, all attempts to start a fire in the days when there were still pocket lighters had failed; there was not, Hawkins swore, a single dry spot on the whole accursed planet. Now the making of fire was quite impossible: even if there had been present an expert on the rubbing together of two dry sticks he could have found no material with which to work.

  They made their permanent settlement on the crest of a low hill. (There were, so far as they could discover, no mountains.) It was less thickly wooded there than the surrounding plains, and the ground was less marshy underfoot. They succeeded in wrenching fronds from the fernlike trees and built for themselves crude shelters—more for the sake of privacy than for any comfort that they afforded. They clung, with a certain desperation, to the governmental forms of the worlds that they had left, and elected themselves a council. Boyle, the ship’s surgeon, was their chief. Hawkins, rather to his surprise, was returned as a council member by a majority of only two votes—on thinking it over he realized that many of the passengers must still bear a grudge against the ship’s executive staff for their present predicament.

  The first council meeting was held in a hut—if so it could be called—especially constructed for the purpose. The council members squatted in a rough circle. Boyle, the president, got slowly to his feet. Hawkins grinned wryly as he compared the surgeon’s nudity with the pomposity that he seemed to have assumed with his elected rank, as he compared the man’s dignity with the unkempt appearance presented by his uncut, uncombed gray hair, his uncombed and straggling gray beard.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” began Boyle.

  Hawkins looked around him at the naked, pallid bodies, at the stringy, lusterless hair, the long, dirty fingernails of the men and the unpainted lips of the women. He thought, I don’t suppose I look much like an officer and a gentleman myself.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Boyle, “we have been, as you know, elected to represent the human community upon this planet. I suggest that at this, our first meeting, we discuss our chances of survival—not as individuals, but as a race—”

  “I’d like to ask Mr. Hawkins what our chances are of being picked up,” shouted one of the two women members, a dried-up, spinsterish creature with prominent ribs and vertebrae.

  “Slim,” said Hawkins. “As you know, no communication is possible with other ships, or with planet stations when the Interstellar Drive is operating. When we snapped out of the Drive and came in for our landing we sent out a distress call—but we couldn’t say where we were. Furthermore, we don’t know that the call was received—”

  “Miss Taylor,” said Boyle huffily, “Mr. Hawkins, I would remind you that I am the duly elected president of this council. There will be time for a general discussion later.

  “As most of you may already have assumed, the age of this planet, biologically speaking, corresponds roughly with that of Earth during the Carboniferous Era. As we already know, no species yet exists to challenge our supremacy. By the time such a species does emerge—something analogous to the giant lizards of Earth’s Triassic Era—we should be well established—”

  “We shall be dead!” called one of the men.

  “We shall be dead,” agreed the doctor, “but our descendants will be very much alive. We have to decide how to give them as good a start as possible. Language we shall bequeath to them—”

  “Never mind the language, Doc,” called the other woman member. She was a small blonde, slim, with a hard face. “It’s just this question of descendants that I’m here to look after. I represent the women of childbearing age—there are, as you must know, fifteen of us here. So far the girls have been very, very careful. We have reason to be. Can you, as a medical man, guarantee—bearing in mind that you have no drugs, no instruments—safe deliveries? Can you guarantee that our children will have a good chance of survival?”

  Boyle dropped his pomposity like a worn-out garment.

  “I’ll be frank,” he said. “I have not, as you, Miss Hart, have pointed out, either drugs or instruments. But I can assure you, Miss Hart, that your chances of a safe delivery are far better than they would have been on Earth during, say, the eighteenth century. And I’ll tell you why. On this planet, so far as we know (and we have been here long enough now to find out the hard way), there exist no microorganisms harmful to Man. Did such organisms exist, the bodies of those of us still surviving would be, by this time, mere masses of suppuration. Most of us, of course, would have died of septicemia long ago. And that, I think, answers both your questions.”

  “I haven’t finished yet,” she said. “Here’s another point. There are fifty-three of us here, men and women. There are ten married couples—so we’ll count them out. That leaves thirty-three people, of whom twenty are men. Twenty men to thirteen (aren’t we girls always unlucky?) women. All of us aren’t young—but we’re all of us women. What sort of marriage set-up do we have? Monogamy? Polyandry?”

  “Monogamy, of course,” said a tall, thin man sharply. He was the only one of those present who wore clothing—if so it could be called. The disintegrating fronds lashed around his waist with a strand of vine did little to serve any useful purpose.

  “All right, then,” said the girl. “Monogamy. I’d rather prefer it that way myself. But I warn you that if that’s the way we play it there’s going to be trouble. And in any murder involving passion and jealousy the woman is as liable to be a victim as either of the men—and I don’t want that.”

  “What do you propose, then, Miss Hart?” asked Boyle.

  “Just this, Doc. When it comes to our matings we leave love out of it. If two men want to marry the same woman, then let them fight it out. The best man gets the girl—and keeps her.”

  “Natural selection . . .” murmured the surgeon. “I’m in favor—but we must put it to the vote.”
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  At the crest of the low hill was a shallow depression, a natural arena. Round the rim sat the castaways—all but four of them. One of the four was Dr. Boyle. He had discovered that his duties as president embraced those of a referee; it had been held that he was best competent to judge when one of the contestants was liable to suffer permanent damage. Another of the four was the girl Mary Hart. She had found a serrated twig with which to comb her long hair, she had contrived a wreath of yellow flowers with which to crown the victor. Was it, wondered Hawkins as he sat with the other council members, a hankering after an Earthly wedding ceremony, or was it a harking back to something older and darker?

  “A pity that these blasted molds got our watches,” said the fat man on Hawkins’ right. “If we had any means of telling the time we could have rounds, make a proper prizefight of it.”

  Hawkins nodded. He looked at the four in the center of the arena—at the strutting, barbaric woman, at the pompous old man, at the two dark-bearded young men with their glistening white bodies. He knew them both—Fennet had been a senior cadet of the ill-fated Lode Star; Clemens, at least seven years Fennet’s senior, was a passenger, had been a prospector on the frontier worlds.

  “If we had anything to bet with,” said the fat man happily, “I’d lay it on Clemens. That cadet of yours hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell. He’s been brought up to fight clean—Clemens has been brought up to fight dirty.”

  “Fennet’s in better condition,” said Hawkins. “He’s been taking exercise, while Clemens has just been lying around sleeping and eating. Look at the paunch on him!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with good, healthy flesh and muscle,” said the fat man, patting his own paunch.

  “No gouging, no biting!” called the doctor. “And may the best man win!”

  He stepped back smartly away from the contestants, stood with the Hart woman.