Unearthly Neighbors (3 page)

“Just like that, huh?” Monte perched on the edge of a chair, feeling as though he had just been handed the gift of immortality. “Hell, of course I’ll go. Wild dinosaurs couldn’t drag me away. But look, Mr. Heidelman, there are a couple of things we should get straight right here and now—”

Heidelman smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, and you can relax. We know how important this is, and we’re prepared to give you all the authority you need. You’ll be pretty much your own boss. You’ll be free to pursue any scientific work you want to undertake. All we ask is that you do your level best to establish a friendly contact with the people on Sirius Nine and make a full report to us when you get back. We’ll expect you to make any recommendations you see fit, and you’ll have a voice in seeing to it that they’re carried out. You can select the men you want to have work with you. We’ll supply a ship under Admiral York—he’s a good man—and he’ll get you there and be responsible for your safety. But in all relations with the natives you will be in charge. Your only superior will be the Secretary-General. The U.N. will pay your salary—which will be ample—and will arrange for you to take a leave from the University. Your wife can go with you; after meeting her, I certainly wouldn’t suggest that you go off and leave her for three years. We can hash out the details later, but how does that sound?”

Monte was stunned. “It sounds too blasted good to be true. There must be a catch in it somewhere…”

“There is. You put your finger smack on it awhile back. We don’t really know a damned thing about those people. It certainly won’t be an easy job, and it may very well be dangerous. I’m not going to try to minimize the danger, either. You’ll be risking your life out there.” Monte shrugged. It wasn’t that he did not have a high regard for his own skin, but staying at home now was unthinkable. He didn’t insult Louise by asking for her opinion; he knew his wife well enough so that words were superfluous.

“I’ve never been in space before, not even to the Moon,” Louise said. “I’d hate to die without even leaving Earth.”

“How long do we have?” Monte asked.

“That’s up to you. With the new overdrive propulsion, it will take a ship a little better than eleven months to reach the Sirius system. If you spend a year on Sirius Nine, that will put you back on Earth in about three years if all goes well. We can stall things that long, I think. We want to get going as soon as we can—I don’t have to tell you that if word of this leaks out there’ll be the devil to pay.”

“Pardon my ignorance, but why?”

Mark Heidelman smiled. “You don’t know much about politics, Monte. This would be the news sensation of all time. Once the people got wind of it, every government that could throw a spaceship together would start a race for that planet. Any chance of a genuine scientific expedition would go out the window. Those people out there would be tried and convicted a million times over on tri-di-—either as subhuman savages or as dangerous monsters. There might be a blowup—you never know what’s going to happen when people start getting excited. We can’t afford that. We’ve
got
to have accurate information before this thing breaks.”

“What happens after you get your accurate information, if you get it?”

“That depends on what you find out, doesn’t it? After all, those people may
be
dangerous. We’ve picked you for the job because we think you’re hard-headed enough to stick to the facts.”

“It’s a fantastic responsibility, you know.”

“I told you that you were headed for some ulcers. They’re part of the job when you work with the U.N. It isn’t all cocktails and suave diplomacy, you know.” Quite suddenly, Heidelman looked very tired.

Watching him, Monte had a flash of insight into the problems that faced the man. This Sirius business, crucial as it was, was only one of a vast series of interlocking and never-ending crises. It must have taken a ton of paperwork before the job could even have been offered to him, and at the same time there was the question of what to do about Brazil’s insistence on testing atomic weapons, and the border squabble between France and Germany, and the population explosions in China and India…

Louise buzzed for another round of drinks and adroitly turned the conversation into quieter channels. She asked Mark about his football-playing days at Notre Dame, and Heidelman responded gratefully by rattling on for fifteen minutes about the virtues of the good old single wing.

Monte discovered that Mark shared his passion for trout fishing, and they solemnly swore that they would try Beaver Creek together when Monte got back from Sirius Nine.

By the time Heidelman reluctantly took his leave at two o’clock in the morning, they were all good friends—and that helps a lot in any enterprise.

While the robot clicked and buzzed around cleaning up the room, Monte began to prowl around aimlessly, too keyed-up to sleep. He felt like a stranger in his own living room. He looked at the familiar books that lined the walls, studied the old early-period Tom Lea paintings he was so fond of, and tramped down the corners of the bright Navaho rugs scattered over the red tiles of the floor. This was his home. Only a few short hours ago his life had been comfortable, his future pleasant and predictable. And now, with the suddenness that was one of life’s most characteristic calling cards, it was all new and strange…

Louise gently took his arm. “Let’s go look at it,” she said softly.

At first, he didn’t understand her. Then he snapped his fingers.

Side by side, they walked over to the picture window and pulled back the drapes.

They looked out into a wintry blaze of stars beyond the black silhouettes of the Colorado mountains. Monte felt a brief, involuntary shiver run through his wife’s body.

“There it is,” he said, pointing. “Funny—I even remember the name of the constellation: Canis Majoris.”

“I wonder what constellation we’re in,” Louise said.

“I never thought it would happen, really. After those completely alien things uncovered by the Centaurus and Procyon expeditions, the human critter seemed like a very unlikely accident. I was reading an article just the other day—remember, I told you about it—that estimated that there was less than one chance in a million for the independent evolution of man somewhere else. According to this joker’s theory—”

“You know what you always say about theories.”

“Yes. But it’s a strange feeling just the same.”

Strange, and more than strange. The light that took the photograph I held in my hand an hour or so ago won’t reach the Earth for more than seven years. It is far, so far…

He held his wife tightly in the circle of his arm. He was not afraid, but she suddenly seemed infinitely precious to him. She was all that was warm and alive in a universe vast and uncaring beyond belief.

“Well, old girl,” he said quietly, “I’m glad you’re going with me.”

She kissed him, hard. “You’ll have to go farther way than Sirius to get away from me,” she whispered.

They stood for a long time before the window that opened on the night, watching and wondering and trying to believe.

They could see Sirius plainly.

It was the brightest star in the sky.

How do you go about setting up an expedition that is designed to make the first contact with an alien, extraterrestrial culture? Monte didn’t know, for the excellent reason that it had never been done before.

Obviously, it was too big for a one-man job; he couldn’t just put on his boots and pith helmet and sally forth with notebook in hand. Nevertheless, the other extreme was equally impossible—he couldn’t take everybody who might have an interest in the problem. For one thing, it would have required a fleet of spaceships. For another, unleashing a horde of investigators upon what seemed to be a relatively simple culture would have been a sure way of guaranteeing that no one would get any real work done.

Quite early, he decided on a minimal expedition. He would take the men he needed for the basic spade-work, and leave the more specialized problems for later. He told himself that he was motivated by practical considerations, which he was to some extent, but the fact was that Monte had a deep-seated suspicion of all massive and grandiose research schemes. Multiplying the number of brains working on a given job, he knew from long experience, was far from a sure-fire way of improving the quality of the final product.

Well, who did he need?

Monte himself was something of a maverick in modem anthropology. He was primarily a social anthropologist, and his major research had been involved with a search for regularities in the culture process. Characteristically, however, Monte hadn’t stopped there. Impelled partly by a taste for the unconventional and partly by an admittedly egotistical faith in his own abilities, he had also made himself a leading authority on the most technical field of physical anthropology, population genetics. (The thought of getting blood samples from the natives of Sirius Nine made him as eager as any Transylvanian vampire would have been under the same circumstances.)

Obviously, he needed a linguist. The whole shebang cried out for the best damned linguist available, and so Monte swallowed his personal feelings and chose Charlie Jenike. Charlie was a sour and faintly uncouth individual who somewhat resembled a dyspeptic penguin, and he had the quaint habit of wearing shirts for days on end until they virtually anesthetized unwary coworkers. Just the same, Charlie Jenike was a brilliant linguist. If anyone could crack one of the native languages in a hurry, Charlie could do it. Oddly enough, human animals being the strange critters that they are, Charlie’s wife, Helen, was a doll—tiny and dainty and singularly charming. Helen and Louise got on well together, which partly compensated for the sparks that flew when Monte and Charlie glared at one another over their cocktail glasses.

Harvard’s Ralph Gottschalk was probably the best of the younger physical anthropologists, and he knew as much as any living man about the primates generally. In view of the rather gibbonoid appearance of the natives, Ralph had to go along—and anyhow Monte liked to have him around for company. Ralph—a giant of a man with the build of a gorilla and the most gentle disposition Monte had ever encountered—was an unfathomable poker player and an eminently sane individual. Ralph was also married, to an enigmatic female named Tina, and he always left Tina at home when he traveled. It was hard to say whether this was Ralph’s idea or Tina’s, but at any rate Ralph always seemed tickled to death to get away. In the field, Ralph tended to wear the secretive smile of a kid playing hooky from school.

If everything worked out according to plan—not that Monte thought that it would—a certain amount of psychological testing would seem to be imperative. Tom Stein’s work in Micronesia had impressed Monte, and when he had met him for the first time at a meeting of the A.A.A. in San Francisco the impression had been strengthened. Tom was a tall, skinny guy, prematurely balding, with pale blue eyes that were almost hidden behind thick glasses. His shyness failed to conceal the fact that he had a razor-keen analytical mind; furthermore, although he was best known for his work in the culture and personality field, he had a genuine feel for social structure. He and his wife were inseparable. Janice Stein was a plain, rather dumpy woman with a radiantly pleasant personality. She was also a corking good cook, which might come in handy.

Finally, Monte picked Don King. Don was an archeologist, something of a lone-wolf in his ideas, and a pretty sharp cookie. Monte didn’t actual
like
Don—few people did—but the man was stimulating. He was a valuable irritant because he never accepted anybody’s ideas at face value, and he loved an argument above all other things. Don, who was currently in his chronic state of being between wives, was almost offensively handsome—a tall, well-built sandy-haired man who habitually dressed as though he were about to pose for an ad in a fashion magazine. Mark Heidelman had questioned the inclusion of Don, since the natives of Sirius Nine did not make tools, but Monte was certain that Don would pull his share of the load. For one thing, a good reconnaissance ought to establish whether or not stone tools had been made in the past, and for another, the scanty pictures available were not a reliable guide.

Five men, then, to breach a world.

Presumptuous?

Sure—but (as Monte was fond of remarking) nothing big was ever accomplished by little men who stuck timidly to little rules.

The ship was a great metal fish of the deeps; it lived in space. Like the strange fish that live in the long silences and the eternal shadows, the ship had never known the land. It had been assembled in an orbit around the Earth, and it had never known any other home beyond the silent seas of space and stars.

Monte and Louise and the others had been ferried up to the U.N. satellite and had boarded the ship there. The ship had flashed out past the Moon on conventional rockets, and had then gone into the overdrive field that permitted it—in one sense—to exceed the speed of light.

By international agreement, all interstellar ships were named after men of peace. This one, officially, was the
Ghandi.
However, you just
can’t
think of a tremendous sphere of hurtling metal as the
Ghandi.
Since it was the second ship to make the long run to the Sirius system, the crew—with the strained logic that sometimes filters up out of bull sessions—had promptly dubbed it the
Son of Sirius.
After some three months in space, the happy thought had occurred to someone that Sirius was the Dog Star. From that point on, the evolutionary semantics were inevitable.

From Admiral York on down, everyone referred to the ship as the
S.O.B
.—although the polite fiction was maintained between officers and crew that the initials stood for “Sirius or Bust.”

Monte and Louise had found that packing for a trip to Sirius was annoyingly like packing for any trip anywhere. There were the same nagging problems about what to take and what to leave behind, the same soggy decisions about whether or not to rent the house, the same frayed nerves and perpetual irritations. The force of habit was so strong that they even planned it so that their departure took place between semesters.