Unearthly Neighbors (7 page)

Tired as he was, Monte was filled with a hard determination he hadn’t known he possessed.

One day, he’d know those names—or die trying.

Extract from the Notebook of Monte Stewart:

This is the fourteenth night I have spent on Sirius Nine. The camp is silent around me, and Louise is already asleep. God knows I’m tired, but I’m wide awake.

All my life I’ve heard that old one to the effect that when you know the right questions to ask the answers practically hit you in the face. I’ve even said as much to students in that other life of mine. (Space travel is a great cure for smugness. I feel pretty damned ignorant out here. I wonder if I wasn’t getting a mite cocky, back home?)

Well, I think I know some of the right questions. Here are the obvious ones:

What was that man we chased doing in the forest by himself? And, if he lives in that hollow tree, does he live there alone? Wherever you find him, man is a social animal—he lives in groups. Families, clans, bands, tribes, nations—the names don’t matter. But a man alone is a very strange thing. And he isn’t the only one, either; we’ve seen others. Where is the group he belongs to? And what kind of a group is it?

What are these people afraid of? The first expedition did nothing to alarm them. Presumably, they have never seen men like us before—we have given them no reason to believe that we’re dangerous. I’m sure that old man wanted to talk to us—but he just couldn’t make himself do it. Why not? Most primitive peoples, when they meet a new kind of men for the first time, either trot out the gals for a welcome or open up with spears and arrows. These natives don’t do anything at all. Am I missing something here? Or are they just shy? Or what?

Why don’t these people have any artifacts? I haven’t seen a single tool or weapon of any sort. Don King hasn’t been able to find any artifacts in archeological deposits. What’s the answer? Are they so simple that they don’t even know how to chip flint? If so, they are more technologically primitive than the men who lived on Earth a million years ago.

Why have they retained the long, ape-like arms of brachiators? Why do they swing through the trees when they can walk reasonably well on the ground? Is this connected in some way with their lack of tools? Are we really dealing here with a bright bunch of apes? And if we are, then how about the language? (Question: Is a bright ape with a language a man? Where do you draw the line? Or do we have to get metaphysical about it?

And if they are apes, how are we supposed to contact them for the United Nations?)

What’s the significance of that wolf-thing we saw? Charlie and I saw the man call Rover with a whistle. We saw Rover pick up the meat and carry it off. Later, we saw the meat inside the hollow tree. (Problem: Was the man going to eat it, or was Rover? Apes don’t eat meat under natural conditions.) The man certainly seemed to control Rover. So is Rover a domesticated animal, or what? On Earth, man didn’t domesticate the dog until after he’d used tools for close to a million years. Are there other animals they have domesticated?

How about that hollow tree? Is it natural, or do the natives shape the growth in some way? If they do, isn’t this an artifact? If they can do that, why don’t they have agriculture?

Those are some of the right questions.

I’m waiting for the answers to hit me in the face—but I’m not holding my breath.

Two days later, the watched pot began to boil.

First, the old man returned to the hollow tree and found the steel knife.

Then Ralph Gottschalk and Don King spotted a tree burial.

And, finally, Tom Stein—who was cruising around with Ace in the reconnaissance sphere—located an entire village that contained at least one hundred natives.

Monte didn’t know exactly what he had expected the man to do with the knife; he would hardly have been surprised if he had swallowed it. He and Louise stood by the scanner screen and watched intently as the man entered the hollow tree for the first time since Monte and Charlie had left.

The tree chamber was as Spartan as ever; nothing had changed. The knife was still on the ledge by the meat and the berries. Considering the probable condition of the meat by now, Monte was just as glad that the scanner did not transmit smells.

The old man stood in the center of the room, his dark eyes peering about cautiously in the half-light. His nose wrinkled in a very human way and he picked up the meat and threw it outside. Then he walked back to the shelf and looked at the knife. He stood there for a long time, a naked old man staring at a gift that must have seemed very strange to him, a gift that had been made light-years away.

Then he picked up the knife. He held it awkwardly, between his thumb and forefinger, as a man might hold a dead fish by the tail. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it. He got a better grip on the handle and gingerly touched the cutting edge with the fingers of his other hand. He muttered something to himself that the mike didn’t catch, then frowned.

He walked over to the curving wall and stuck the point of the knife into the wood. He yanked it out again, looked at it, and then shaved a sliver of wood from the wall with the cutting edge. His action left a single raw scar in the polished smoothness of the room.

“Merc kuprai,” he said distinctly. It was the first time Monte had ever heard the man speak; his voice was low and pleasant.

“Charlie said that
mere
was a kind of polysynthetic word,” he whispered to Louise. “It means something like:
It is a —
. So he’s saying that the knife is a
kuprai,
whatever that is.”

“Whatever it is,” Louise said, “it must not be very impressive.”

The naked man shook his head sadly and tossed the knife back up on the shelf. He did not look at it again. He yawned a little, stretched, and walked out of the chamber. The scanner still caught his back, just beyond the entrance to the tree. He sat down in a small patch of sunlight and promptly went to sleep.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Monte said.

Louise shrugged, her brown eyes twinkling. “Merc kuprai,” she said.

“You, dear, can go to the devil.”

She gave him a quick, warm kiss. “You seem to be oriented toward the nether regions today. Look up! Have faith! Remember that every day in every way—”

“Cut it out, Lise,” he grinned.

That was when Ralph Gottschalk came lumbering in like an amiable gorilla. His face was flushed and he was smiling from ear to ear. Since Ralph was hardly the type to get excited over nothing, Monte decided that he must have found not only the missing link but quite possibly the whole chain.

“Monte, we’ve got one!”

“Swell. One what?”

“Confound it, man, a burial! We’ve got us a skeleton.”

The man’s excitement was contagious, but Monte held a tight rein on himself. It wouldn’t do to go off half-cocked. “Where? You haven’t touched it, have you?”

“Of course not! Do I look like a sap? But you’ve got to see it! Don and I just found it about an hour ago—it’s not a quarter of a mile from camp. The son of a gun is up in a tree!”

“Are you sure of what it is?”

“Of course I’m sure—I climbed up and looked. The bones are in a kind of a nest up there—-a regular flexed tree burial. Man, you ought to see the ulna on that thing! And I’ll tell you this—that mandible may be heavy, but there’s plenty of room for a brain inside that skull. In fact—”

“Anything in that nest except bones?”

“Nothing at all. No pots, no pans, no spears, no nothing. Just bones. But you give me an hour with those bones where I can really see ’em and I’ll be able to tell you something for sure about these people!”

Louise touched his arm. “Come on, Monte! Let’s go.”

“I’d better have a look,” Monte agreed. “Lead the way, Ralph.”

Ralph charged off, stiff mumbling to himself. He ploughed through the scattered tents of the camp, crossed the clearing, and plunged into a stand of trees at an impatient trot. Monte was amazed at the big man’s agility; the tug of the gravity and the enervating effects of the damp heat did not combine to make a sprint through the forest his idea of a swell time. Louise seemed to be taking it well enough, however, so he couldn’t afford to say anything about it.

Don King was waiting for them at the base of a tall tree. Monte wiped the sweat out of his eyes and was annoyed to notice that Don looked as natty as ever.

“Hello, Don. Ralph tells me that you two have nosed out a burial.”

Don pointed. “Right up there, boss. See that thing that looks like a nest on that big limb? No—the other side, right close to the tree trunk.”

“I see it,” Louise said.

Monte examined it as well as he could from where he stood. It looked very much like a nest that might have been made by a large bird, although it seemed to be made mostly of bark. He chewed on his lower lip. If he could just get his hands on those bones…

“Well, Monte? What do you say?”

Monte sighed. “You know what I have to say, Ralph. It’s no go. We can’t move those bones.”

Don King swore under his breath. “It’s the first solid lead we’ve gotten! What’s the big idea?”

Monte put his hands on his hips and stuck out his bearded jaw. The accumulated frustrations of this job were beginning to get him on edge. “In case you haven’t heard,” he said evenly, “we are trying our feeble best to make friends with these people. It would seem to me that desecrating one of their graves would be a fine way of not going about it.”

“Oh Lord,” Don groaned. “Next you’ll be telling me that those bones were probably somebody’s mother.”

“Not necessarily. They might just be somebody’s old man. But I haven’t got the slightest doubt that we’re being watched all the time. I’d like to have those bones just as much as you would—maybe more. But we’re not going to steal them—not yet, anyway. It may come to that. But it hasn’t yet. Until I say otherwise, the bones stay there. Understand?”

Don King didn’t say anything. He looked disgusted.

“I guess he’s right,” Ralph said slowly. “Sometimes we have a tendency to forget what those bones mean to people. You remember that joker in Mexico in the old days who tried to buy a body right at the funeral? He almost wound up in a box himself.”

“Nuts,” Don said.

Even Louise looked disappointed.

“Let’s go on back to camp,” Monte said, none too happy himself. “Those bones won’t run away. They’ll still be there when the time is right.”

“When will that be?” Don asked, running a hand through his sandy hair.

“I’ll let you know,” Monte said grimly.

It was indeed fortunate, in view of the general morale, that the reconnaissance sphere landed when it did with the big news. The usually reserved Tom Stein popped out like a jack-in-the-box, just as excited as Ralph had been about die tree burial. His pale blue eyes flashed behind his thick glasses and he even forgot to be analytical.

“Ace and I found a whole bunch of ’em about ten miles north of here,” he said. “It must be the main local village or something—at least a hundred of them. They’re living in caves. We saw kids and everything. How about that?”

“That’s wonderful, Tom,” Monte said. “Maybe we can do some good with them. Maybe if we catch a lot of ’em in one place…” He thought for a moment. “Tomorrow we’re going to take that recon sphere and set it down right smack in the middle of those caves. We’re going to make those people talk if we have to give them the third degree.”

“Hey, Janice!” Tom yelled to his wife. “Did you hear what I found? There’s a whole bunch of ’em…”

Monte smiled.

Things
were
looking a little better.

An alien yellow moon rode high over the dark screen of the trees and the orange firelight threw leaping black shadows across the flat surfaces of the tents.

Monte, lying on his back on his cot, understood for the first time that the old saying about feeling invisible eyes staring at you was literally true. He knew that the camp was ringed with eyes, eyes that probed and stared and evaluated. It was not a pleasant feeling, but it was the way he had wanted it to be. Indeed, the main reason for establishing the camp in the clearing had been to give the natives a chance to size them up. He hoped they liked what they saw.

Ralph Gottschalk, his back propped up against a stump, was strumming the guitar he had insisted on bringing from Earth. He and Don King—who had a surprisingly good voice—were singing snatches of various old songs:
John Henry, When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again, San Antonio Rose, Wabash Cannonball.
As was usually the case, they didn’t quite know all the words, which made for a varied if somewhat incomplete repertoire.

It was good to hear the old songs; they were a link with home. And, somehow, the whole scene was oddly reassuring. It was all so familiar, and at the same time so forever new: the dance of the fire, the distant stars, the singing voices. How many men and women had gathered around how many fires to sing how many songs since man was first born? Perhaps, in the final analysis, it was moments like this that were the measure of man; no one, on such a night, could believe that man was wholly evil.

And the natives of Sirius Nine? Did they too have their songs, and of what did they sing?

“It’s beautiful,” Louise said, sharing his mood as always.

Monte left his cot and went to her. He held her in his arms and kissed her hair. They did not speak; they had said all the words in the long-ago years, and now there was no need for words. Their love was so much a part of their lives that it was a natural, unquestioned power. There was too little love on any world, in any universe. They treasured each other, and were unashamed.

Tomorrow, there would be the caves and the natives and the curious problems of men that filled the daylight hours.

For tonight, there was love—and that was enough.

The gray reconnaissance sphere floated through the sky like a strange metallic bubble in the depths of an alien sea. The white furnace of the sun burned away the morning mists, leaving the vault of the sky clean and blue as though it had been freshly created the night before.