Unearthly Neighbors (2 page)

“Very much so. We’re going to try to put you on the spot, Dr. Stewart.”

Monte reached for his pipe, filled it, and puffed on it until it lit. He knew, of course, that Mark Heidelman was the confidential trouble-shooter for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which meant that he was a very big wheel indeed. Ever since the long-ago days of the near-legendary Dag Hammarskjold, when the U.N. was not yet as much a part of daily life as spaceships and taxes, the Secretary-General had been just about the most important man in the world. But what did he want with him?

“I take it that you need an anthropologist.”

Heidelman smiled. “We need you, if that’s what you mean.”

The servomec wheeled itself in, carrying a tray with two fresh glasses of Scotch and soda. It wasn’t much of a robot—just a wheeled cart with assorted detachable appendages—but Monte and Louise had not had it long, and they were inordinately proud of it.

Monte took his drink, raised it toward Heidelman, and proceeded to indulge in one of the great benefits of civilization. “Now then, Mark. What’s this all about?”

Heidelman shook his head. “Your wife told me that you hated to discuss anything before supper, and I’m taking her at her word. Anyhow, she’s invited me to share a steak with you and I’d hate to get booted out before I sampled her cooking.”

Monte chuckled, understanding more clearly why Heidelman was one of the world’s most successful diplomats. The man radiated charm, and there was nothing at all unctuous or phony about it.

“Give me a hint, can’t you? Mysteries make me nervous.”

“You may develop some dandy ulcers before this one is over with. You see, Monte, one of our ships has finally hit the jackpot.”

Monte felt a cold thrill of excitement run through him. He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Do you mean—”

At that moment, Louise came in from the kitchen. She looked fresh and attractive as always, with her lovely brown eyes shining and her black hair neatly coiled in the latest fashion. She had put on one of her sexiest dresses, Monte noted, which was a sure sign that she approved of Mark Heidelman. After eighteen years of marriage, Monte still found his wife delightful. She was one of the main reasons why he would have been the first to admit that he was a lucky man.

“The steaks are on, gentlemen,” she said. “Bring your drinks along with you.” She gave her husband a light kiss on the forehead. “Monte, I’m so curious I could die.”

“So am I,” Monte said.

They went into the dining room, which was in a separate wing of the house. It was too cold for the roof to be rolled back, but the stars were clearly visible through the glassite roof panels.

Being civilized people, they turned their full attention to one of life’s most underrated pleasures: genuine sirloin steak. It was cooked to perfection, with a delicate pink streak through the middle. There was also a crisp green salad with blue cheese dressing and a small mountain of whipped potatoes, but the steak—as was only fitting—was the main thing.

Heidelman did not insult the meal by talking shop, and Monte didn’t have the heart to detract from Louise’s superb cooking by trying to push the conversation. He waited until they were back in the living room and the servomec had supplied them all with coffee.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got a quorum, and I have been duly fed. Let’s hear about this jackpot you mentioned.”

Heidelman nodded. “I hope this doesn’t sound too melodramatic, but I have to say that what I am going to tell you is absolutely confidential. I know I can rely on your discretion.”

“Shoot, man,” Monte said. “Let’s just pretend we’ve run through all the preliminaries. What have you got?”

Mark Heidelman took a deep breath. “One of our survey ships has found a planet with human beings on it,” he said.

Monte tugged at his beard. “Human beings? What kind of human beings? Where?”

“Give me a chance, will you? I’ll spill it as fast as I can.”

“Fine, fine. But don’t skip the details, huh?”

Heidelman smiled. “We don’t
have
many details. As you know, the development of the interstellar drive has made it possible for us—”

Monte got to his feet impatiently. “Not
those
details, dammit. We know about the Centaurus and Procyon expeditions. What about these human beings? Where are they, and what are they like?”

Heidelman drained his coffee. “They were discovered on the ninth planet of the Sirius system—that’s about eight and a half light-years away, as I understand it. Maybe I was a little premature in calling them human beings, but they look pretty darned close.”

“Did you make contact with them?” Louise asked. “No. We didn’t expect to find any men out there, of course, but all the survey ships carry strict orders to keep their distance in a situation like this. We did get some pictures, and mikes were planted to pick up recordings of one of their languages—”

Monte pounced on the word like a cat going after a sparrow. “Language, you say? Careful, now—even chimpanzees make a lot of vocal racket, but they don’t have a language. How are you using the word?”

“Well, they seem to talk in about the same circumstances we do. And they are definitely not limited to a few set sounds or cries—they yak in a very human manner. We have some movies synchronized with the sounds, and several of them show what appear to be parents telling things to their children, for instance. That good enough?”

Monte dropped back into his chair and pulled out his pipe. “I’d say that settles it. They’re men in my book. How about the rest of their culture—things you could see from a distance, I mean?”

Heidelman frowned. “That’s the odd thing about it, Monte. The survey boys were pretty careful, but they couldn’t see any of the things I would have expected. No cities or anything of that sort. Not even any houses, unless you call a hollow tree a house. No visible farming or industry. The people don’t even wear clothing. In fact—unless the survey was cockeyed—they don’t seem to have any artifacts at all.”

“No tools? No weapons? Not even stone axes or wooden clubs?”

“Nothing. They go naked and they don’t carry anything with them. When they swing through the trees—”

Monte almost dropped his pipe. “You’re kidding. Are you trying to tell me that these people brachiate—swing hand over hand through the trees?”

“That’s what they do. Of course, they walk on the ground too—they’re fully erect in their posture and all that. But with those terrifically long arms of theirs…”

Louise laughed with delight, as though someone had dumped a sack of diamonds into her lap. “Show us the pictures, Mark! We can’t take much more of this.”

“Maybe that would be best.” Heidelman grinned, knowing that he had them thoroughly on the hook now. He stood up. “I have the photographs right over here in my briefcase.”

Monte Stewart stared at the brown briefcase on his living-room table with an excitement he had never known before. He felt like Darwin must have felt when he first stepped ashore on that most important of all islands…

“For God’s sake,” he said, “let’s see those pictures!”

There were five tri-di photographs in full color. Heidelman handed them over without comment. Monte shuffled through them rapidly, his quick gray eyes searching for general impressions, and then studied them one by one.

“Yes and no,” he muttered to himself.

The pictures—which were obviously stills blown up from a movie film—weren’t too clear. They were a bit fuzzy, and the subject matter was irritatingly noncommittal. It was as though a camera had been stuck out of a window and pictures snapped at random.

Still, they were the most fascinating pictures that Monte had ever seen.

“Look at those arms,” Louise breathed.

Monte nodded, trying to get his thoughts in some kind of order. There was so much to see in five pictures, so much to see that was new and strange—and hauntingly familiar.

The landscape was disturbing, which made it difficult to get the man-like figures into perspective. There was nothing about it that was downright grotesque, but the
shapes
of the trees and plants were subtly wrong. The colors, too, were unexpected. The trees had a blue cast to their bark, and their leaves were as much red as green. There were too many bright browns and blues, as though a painter’s brush had unaccountably slipped on a nightmare canvas.

The Sun, which was visible in two of the pictures, was a brilliant white that filled too much of the sky.

The whole effect, Monte thought, was curiously similar to the painted forests one sometimes saw in books for, children. The trees were not quite the trees you knew, and the pastel flowers grew only in dreams…

“They are men,” Louise said. “They
are,
Monte.”

Yes, yes,
he thought.
They are men. How easy it is to say! Only—what is a man? How will we know him when we meet him? Will we ever be sure?

Superficially, yes—they were men. (And they were mammals too, unless females were radically different on Sirius Nine.) But Old Man Neanderthal, too, had been a man. And even
Pithecanthropus erectus
belonged in the crowded genus
Homo.

What is a man?

Monte’s hands itched; he wished fervently that he had some solid bones to study instead of these fuzzy pictures. For instance, how did you go about estimating the cranial capacity from a bum photograph? The skulls might be solid bone for all he knew; the gorilla has a massive head, but its brain is almost a thousand cubic centimeters smaller than a man’s.

Well, what did they
look
like?

The general impression, for whatever that was worth, was one of what could only be called “mannishness.” The people—if that was indeed the word for them—were erect bipeds, and their general bodily outlines were not too different from a man’s. The legs, in fact, were very humanoid, although the feet seemed to have a big toe sticking out at a right angle to the other toes. (Monte couldn’t be sure of that, however.) The arms were immensely long, so that the hands almost touched the ground when the people stood up straight. But the people were fully erect; there was nothing of the stooped posture of the ape about them. The bodies were hairless and rather slender, and the skin color was a pale copper.

Faces? Well, they probably would not make an earthly girl squeal with pleasure if they turned up on a blind date—but then the earthly girl might not look so hot to them either. The faces seemed human enough—long and narrow, with rather heavy jaws and deeply recessed eyes. Monte could not see the teeth, but it was obvious that the canines, at any rate, did not protrude. The hair was uniformly light in color and was very short—hardly more than a fuzz.

The people wore no clothing, but two of the men had vertical strips painted on their bodies. The painting seemed to be confined to the chests, and was quite simple—a streak of red and one of blue on each side of the chest.

None of the people carried any weapons.

Monte saw no tools of any sort, and no houses. One of the men was standing in front of a large tree that appeared to have a hollow chamber in it, but it was hard to tell.

There was a child in one of the pictures. He seemed to be five or six years old, if earthly analogies could be trusted, and he was hanging by one hand from a branch and grinning from ear to ear. A female was scolding him from the ground below, and the impression of mother and son was very strong—and very human.

But then, of course, the mother-and-son relationship often seemed quite human, even in monkeys—

Monte carefully put the photographs down on the table.

“Brother,” he said, “I need a drink.”

After the robot—which had been engaged in clearing away the dishes and washing them up-—had mixed the Scotch and soda according to Monte’s potent instructions and had wheeled the glasses in on a tray, Monte began pacing the floor. He even abandoned his pipe for a cigarette, which was a sure sign that he was worried.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “You say that they do no fanning—and yet they can’t hunt because they have no weapons. So how do they get their food?”

“Couldn’t they live off wild fruits and roots and things like that?” Heidelman asked.

“It’s possible, I suppose.”

“Apes do it, don’t they?” Louise asked.

“Sure, but these people aren’t apes—unless you want to call a man just a modified ape, which
is
one way of looking at it. Mark says that they have languages, and no other animal on Earth has a language except man. Offhand, you’d expect them to have cultures too; cultures and languages go together like ham and eggs. But I’ve never heard of any group of human beings without any tools at all. Even the simplest food-gathering peoples known use digging sticks and baskets and stuff like that. Either those people are the most primitive ever discovered, or else—”

Louise laughed—an infectious, charming laugh that was utterly natural and unaffected. “Monte! I never thought I’d hear you say that. After all your remarks about stories about primitive supermen…”

“The catch is,” Monte said seriously, “that
primitive
is a pretty slippery word. We think we know what it means on Earth—it refers to a non-literate culture without urban centers. The notion works fairly well here, but what does it mean when it is applied to people on another planet? We don’t really know a damned thing about them, and fitting them into a ready-made category derived from a total sample of one planet may be a gross mistake. As for supermen, I doubt whether the concept is a valid one at all—is man a super ape, or is he something else altogether? Those people could be
different
without being super, if you get what I mean.”

Heidelman sipped his drink. “Of course,” he said, “the only way to find out the truth is to go and see.”

“Yes, yes.” Monte ground out one cigarette and lit another. “Is that what you want us to do—or am I supposed to wait until I’m asked?”

“You
are
being asked. Isn’t that obvious? We want you to lead a scientific expedition to Sirius Nine, and the sooner the better. And we want a trained anthropologist to make the first contact with those people—I’d like to think that we’ve made at least enough progress to avoid some of the more glaring errors of the past. How about it?”