Unearthly Neighbors (17 page)

When he had eaten, he found a hard rock to use as a hammerstone and chipped out a reasonably good hand axe. He put a sharp edge on it, leaving the core of the original stone for a grip. He looked at it and grinned. He was making progress. Hell, he was in the Lower Paleolithic already! Another week or two and he could invent pressure flaking…

He went to work on what left of the meat. He cut it into long narrow strips and put it in the sun to dry. He walked down into the grasslands and found some of the red berries. He pounded the berries into the meat, melted some fat and poured it over the dry meat. He smiled with satisfaction. It probably wasn’t the best pemmican in the world, but it would last him for a couple of days.

That was all he needed.

He sat cross-legged in front of his cave, looking down on the land below. The time had come. It was now or never.

He closed his mind to everything except the problem before him. He had all the facts he needed, all the facts he could possibly expect. He had all the pieces of his puzzle. All he had to do was to put them together.

Only—where did you start?

Well, take it from the beginning. Go over it step by step. Think it through.

There must be a key.

There
had
to be a key.

Start with Mark Heidelman who had first told him about Sirius Nine. Was that the beginning? No—go back still further. Go back to the dawn of man on the planet Earth. Go back…

Suddenly, he got to his feet. He looked around him, his eyes staring.

I’ve been blind. Blind. Here it is, right in front of me!

Yes.

A cave.

A fire.

And a chipped-stone tool.

He picked up the chunk of flaked rock that had become a hand axe. He held it in his hand, held it so tightly that his knuckles whitened.

A chipped stone tool.

The beginning.

The key.

Extract from the Notebook of Monte Stewart:

This journal looks like something dug up out of a tomb. It’s a miracle that it still hangs together.

I suppose that no one will ever read what I write here, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter very much. Or does it? Maybe a man always needs to try to communicate—with himself, if necessary.

Communication.

In a way, that’s what this whole thing is all about.

I’m excited now. I think I see the answer. I must try to get it down. And then perhaps…

Once you see this thing in perspective, it’s not difficult. The trick is to back off; take a long look down the corridors of time. Lord! Isn’t it odd how a man can teach an idea for half of his life and then not apply it when the chips are down? I tossed it off every semester in my introductory lecture: “If you want to understand the human animal, you must go back to the beginning. Written records are very recent in the story of man—they only take you back a few thousand years. Man himself has been around for close to a million years. In order to get an insight into what he is like today, you must look back down that long road and see where he has been. You must go back to the beginning…”

The beginning?

After all, how do we know the story of man on Earth? How did we unravel the past?

We did it by digging up tools. Stone tools.

Paleolithic: Old Stone Age.

Mesolithic: Middle Stone Age.

Neolithic: New Stone Age.

We’re so used to it we don’t even think about it. It’s a part of us. Of course! Who questions the basic dictates of his culture? It always seems so natural, so inevitable.

From the very first, as soon as man became man, he made tools. He chipped artifacts out of stone. This was how he lived. This was how he hunted, how he defended himself, even how he expressed himself. (Who can look at a Solutrean blade and not know that it is a work of art?)

Obvious?

Maybe. But consider this. When man on Earth first started down that trail, there was no turning back. When he chipped his first tool, he determined his destiny. All the rest flowed from that one creative act: spears, harpoons, bows and arrows, the plow, wheels, writing, cities, planes, bombs, spaceships…

It was a way of life, a way of thinking.

It was man’s path on Earth.

(It is not for me to say whether that path was good or bad. I don’t know whether or not the terms have meaning in this context. But it is a fact, surely, that man saddled himself with a heavy load when he chipped that first stone tool. Only a moron can fail to read the lesson that is written in our story. An emphasis on external power carries a built-in penalty. Read our novels, listen to our music, look at our art. Visit an insane asylum. Count the suicides. Count the graves of all the wars. Weigh the boredom, if you can—the emptiness, the frustration, the weariness, the desperate search for diversions. We have power over things: we can build bridges, houses, ships, planes. But have we been fulfilled as a people? Have we even found a measure of happiness? Why do we need pills to ease the knot in our guts? Is our yearning for the stars only an expression of inner poverty? Was there a toll bridge on the path we walked? Was there a hidden joker in the deck we opened?)

A way of life, yes.

But was it the only way?

What if man on Earth had never taken that first step?

What if he had turned down another trail, a different trail?

What if he had never chipped that first stone tool?

What other path had been open to him?

Consider the Merdosi, back in the mists of dawn on Sirius Nine. See them with their long ape-like arms, their naked bodies, their dark and intelligent eyes. See them with the word-magic in their mouths, huddled together under a great white sun…

They had taken a different turning. They had started down a different trail.

What had it been?

Well, what were the key facts about the Merdosi now? How had they behaved? What techniques had they used?

Item: They had little or no visible material culture; they didn’t make
things.

Item: They had a close and pivotal relationship with some of the animals of their world, the Merdosini and the saucer-eyed creatures that looked like tarsiers. They seemed to control them.

Item: It was possible that they could influence growth patterns to some extent. For example, those hollow trees did not seem to be completely natural. And perhaps they could grow other things…

Item: They had been completely baffled by the men from Earth. They had not been able to adjust to a contact situation. They had been confused, upset, afraid. They had attacked, first with the Merdosini and then…

Item: They had attacked their minds. They had driven Charlie mad. While the men from Earth slept, they had induced a sickness into their brains. They had worked through their dreams…

Item: The baffling thing about their culture was the fact that there was nothing to
see.
All the visible clues were lacking.

Item: What had the old man said? What had Volmay told him? “We will do what we must, all of us. We cannot trust one another. My dreams told me that we might have a beginning-again, but the dreams are so strange since you have come…”

Dreams.

Yes, and was there not a parallel among many of the primitive peoples of Earth, the peoples who had not yet been smothered by the mechanical monster? Did not all of them place great faith in dreams? Did they not use dreams to see into the future, to give meaning to their lives, to touch the unknowable? Did they not trust their dreams as sources of deep wisdom? Did not some of them, like the Iroquois, develop the idea of the subconscious long before Freud, and recognize that illness might be caused by a conflict between the inner man and supposedly rational thought?

(And how about our own dreams? Did we not speak of dreams as symbols of hope and ideals? And were not our attitudes toward them very much like those of the Merdosi toward artifacts? Weren’t we great ones for giving lip-service to dreams? “Never lose your illusions, my boy! Always keep your dreams before you! But of course we must be practical, take a good course in Business Administration…”)

What did it all add up to?

Clearly, the Merdosi had developed a different aspect of the human personality. Their culture had centered on a different cluster of human possibilities. They had turned inward. They had tapped the hidden resources of the human mind. They worked in symbols, dreams, visions.

Telepathy? No, not quite. Rather, they seemed to have perfected a technique of projecting emotional states. That would account for their control over animals. That would account for what happened to Charlie—and to me.

But it must be more than that, far more. It must permeate every aspect of their lives. They must live in a world of symbolic richness, they must
see
the world in vivid colors, tones, shadings. They must be able to open their minds, share them. They must have techniques that we have never imagined—they must understand the growth of trees, the unfolding of life.

Yes, but the Merdosi were people too. They were not supermen. They were not idealized figments of the imagination. They were only different.

Wasn’t there a hidden price-tag on their way of life too? What would the characteristics of such a culture have to be?

Obviously, there were certain advantages. There would be a closeness with other people, a harmony with life. Above all, there would be a kind of inner security, a peace. But the technique of dream interpretation depended in the final analysis on a static, unchanging society. Dreams did not come out of nowhere. As long as nothing changed, the old ways would work—you could understand the dreams, rely on them, trust the ancient commands they gave you.

But if you started to dream about a spaceship?

Or strange men with rifles?

Or men and women with alien customs?

Wouldn’t the single basic fear of a secure society be the threat of insecurity, of change? What could you do when your dreams held no answers?

You would fear the coming of strangers with a dark, cold terror. They would strike at the very roots of your existence. How could you possibly trust them when all they offered were
words
?

Words were not enough.

Contact was not enough—indeed, it might be fatal.

Protestations of friendliness were not enough.

I know what I must do.

The way is plain.

But can I trust myself, and all the things that have made me what I am? Is the bridge strong enough to hold us both?

It was no good trying to put it off. It had to be done. The next move was up to him.

Monte spent one last night in his cave, resting. Then he walked out into another of the glorious mornings of Sirius Nine, ate some of the pemmican he had prepared, and drank some water. He was ready.

He felt a certain affection for the little cave, and the symbolism of the place was not lost on him. Apart from that, he had always loved the high places. He was convinced that there were two basically different kinds of people—those who were drawn to the lowlands and those who found rest only in the mountains. If he could have his life to live over again, he decided, he would live more of it in the mountains where the air was clear and a man could touch the sky.

He looked down upon the green grasslands that rolled away to the darker green and yellow that lined the river. It
was
peaceful here, despite everything that had happened. Even the air seemed less irritating, and the rawness had left his throat. Could he not just once live up to the best that was in him, no matter what the cost?

Man had met man for the first time. The patterns of future history might well be determined by what happened here. And the universe was huge, swimming with islands of life. There was more at stake here than even the destinies of Earth and Walonka. There were other worlds, other men. Man had need of all the friends he could find, and one day he too would be judged.

Monte shrugged. It was a lot to ask of any one man. But perhaps it always came down to just one man, one decision, in the end…

He grinned at the crumpled pieces of the spacesuit, still heaped on the rocky ledge. He wouldn’t be needing them any longer.

He started down the trail.

He was amused at his self-styled role as a man of destiny. He was well aware that he was not the ideal man for the part. It was too bad, he thought wryly, that he could not have walked naked from the cave. That would have been a dandy symbol, a real corker, the very stuff of legends.

Unhappily, he couldn’t risk the sunburn; he needed his clothes.

A parboiled hero! There was one for the books.

He walked on through the tall grasses, stroking his beard, smiling to himself.

Monte crossed the river without incident. He retraced his steps to the clearing where he and Charlie had pitched their camp and was surprised to find it just as they had left it. Somehow, he had expected it to show the same changes he sensed in himself. That terrible day in the rain—surely that had been a million years ago, in another time, another age…

He stopped only long enough to pick up his pipe and tobacco. He clamped the pipe between his teeth and savored the delicious smoke. If they ever stood him against a wall before a firing squad, he thought, he would ask for a last pipe.

It was all very strange, just as life itself was strange. It hadn’t been very long ago that he had given up his pipe for fear of frightening the natives. Now, when he was about to walk the same path he had walked before, the pipe no longer mattered.

He had learned something, at least.

The externals didn’t count.

He moved into the forest. The great trees closed in around him, whispering with activity, but he ignored them. He went on to the field where he had first glimpsed Volmay so long ago—where he had offered him food and seen the first of the Merdosini. He found the path which led into the woods, the dark path that for him would always hold the echoes of blackness and rain and the wind that swept the roof of the world.

He located the hollow tree.

Volmay was sitting in front of it, his naked body gleaming in a fugitive patch of sunlight. His old head had fallen forward on his striped chest. He was asleep.