Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (41 page)

The cloud cover broke up at two thousand feet. Jackson was able to confirm his earlier sighting: there was a city down there, just as sure as sure.

He was in one of the world's loneliest jobs; but his line of work, paradoxically enough, required an extremely gregarious man. Because of this built-in contradiction, Jackson was in the habit of talking to himself. Most of the men in his line of work did. Jackson would talk to anyone, human or alien, no matter what their size or shape or color.

It was what he was paid to do, and what he had to do anyhow. He talked when he was alone on the long interstellar runs, and he talked even more when he was with someone or something that would talk back. He figured he was lucky to be paid for his compulsions.

“And not just paid, either,” he reminded himself. “
Well
paid, and with a bonus arrangement on top of that. And furthermore, this feels like my lucky planet. I feel like I could get rich on this one—unless they kill me down there, of course.”

The lonely flights between the planets and the imminence of death were the only disadvantages of this job; but if the work weren't hazardous and difficult, the pay wouldn't be so good.

Would they kill him? You could never tell. Alien life forms were unpredictable—just like humans, only more so.

“But I don't think they'll kill me,” Jackson said. “I just feel downright lucky today.”

This simple philosophy had sustained him for years, across the endless lonely miles of space, and in and out of ten, twelve, twenty planets. He saw no reason to change his outlook now.

The ship landed. Jackson switched the status controls to standby.

He checked the analyzer for oxygen and trace-element content in the atmosphere, and took a quick survey of the local micro-organisms. The place was viable. He leaned back in his chair and waited. It didn't take long, of course, They—the locals, indigenes, autochthons, whatever you wanted to call them—came out of their city to look at the spaceship. And Jackson looked through the port at them.

“Well now,” he said. “Seems like the alien life forms in this neck of the woods are honest-to-Joe humanoids. That means a five-thousand-dollar bonus for old Uncle Jackson.”

The inhabitants of the city were bipedal monocephaloids. They had the appropriate number of fingers, noses, eyes, ears, and mouths. Their skin was a flesh-colored beige, their lips were a faded red, their hair was black, brown, or red.

“Shucks, they're just like home folks!” Jackson said. “Hell, I ought to get an extra bonus for that. Humanoidissimus, eh?”

The aliens wore clothes. Some of them carried elaborately carved lengths of wood like swagger sticks. The women decorated themselves with carved and enameled ornaments. At a flying guess, Jackson ranked them about equivalent to Late Bronze Age on Earth.

The talked and gestured among themselves. Their language was, of course, incomprehensible to Jackson; but that didn't matter. The important thing was that they
had
a language and that their speech sounds could be produced by his vocal apparatus.

“Not like on that heavy planet last year,” Jackson said. “Those supersonic sons of bitches! I had to wear special earphones and mike, and it was a hundred and ten in the shade.”

The aliens were waiting for him, and Jackson knew it. That first moment of actual contact—it always was a nervous business.

That's when they were most apt to let you have it.

Reluctantly he moved to the hatch, undogged it, rubbed his eyes, and cleared his throat. He managed to produce a smile. He told himself, “Don't get sweaty; 'member, you're just a little old interstellar wanderer—kind of galactic vagabond—to extend the hand of friendship and all that jazz. You've just dropped in for a little talk, nothing more. Keep on believing that, sweety, and the extraterrestrial Johns will believe right along with you. Remember Jackson's Law: all intelligent life forms share the divine faculty of gullibility; which means that the triple-tongued Thung of Orangus V can be conned out of his skin just as Joe Doakes of St. Paul.”

And so, wearing a brave, artificial little smile, Jackson swung the port open and stepped out to have a little talk.

“Well now, how y'all?” Jackson asked at once, just to hear the sound of his own voice.

The nearest aliens shrank away from him. Nearly all of them were frowning. Several of the younger ones carried bronze knives in a forearm scabbard. These were clumsy weapons, but as effective as anything ever invented. The aliens started to draw.

“Now take it easy,” Jackson said, keeping his voice light and unalarmed.

They drew their knives and began to edge forward. Jackson stood his ground, waiting, ready to bolt through the hatch like a jet-propelled jackrabbit, hoping he could make it.

Then a third man (might as well call them “men,” Jackson decided) stepped in front of the belligerent two. This one was older. He spoke rapidly. He gestured. The two with the knives looked.

“That's right,” Jackson said encouragingly. “Take a good look. Heap big spaceship. Plenty strong medicine. Vehicle of great power, fabricated by a real advanced technology. Sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?”

It did.

The aliens had stopped; and if not thinking, they were at least doing a great deal of talking. They pointed at the ship, then back at their city.

“You're getting the idea,” Jackson told them. “Power speaks a universal language, eh, cousins?”

He had been witness to many of these scenes on many different planets. He could nearly write their dialogue for them. It usually went like this:

Intruder lands in outlandish space vehicle, thereby eliciting (1) curiosity, (2) fear, and (3) hostility. After some minutes of awed contemplation, one autochthon usually says to his friend: “Hey, that damned metal thing packs one hell of a lot of power.”

“You're right, Herbie,” his friend Fred, the second autochthon, replies.

“You bet I'm right,” Herbie says. “And, hell, with that much power and technology and stuff, this son-of-a-gun could like
enslave
us. I mean he really could.”

“You've hit it, Herbie, that's just exactly what could happen.”

“So what I say,” Herbie continues, “I say, let's not take any risks. I mean,
sure
, he
looks
friendly enough, but he's just got too damned much
power
, and that's not right. And right now is the best chance we'll ever get to take him on account of he's just standing there waiting for like an ovation or something. So let's put this bastard out of his misery, and then we can talk the whole thing over and see how it stacks up situationwise.”

“By Jesus, I'm with you!” cries Fred. Others signify their assent.

“Good for you, lads,” cries Herbie. “Let's wade in and take this alien joker like
now
!”

So they start to make their move; but suddenly, at the last second, Old Doc (the third autochthon) intervenes, saying, “Hold it a minute, boys, we can't do it like that. For one thing, we got laws around here—”

“To hell with that,” says Fred (a born troublemaker and somewhat simple to boot).

“—and aside from the laws, it would be just too damned dangerous for
us
.”

“Me 'n' Fred here ain't scared,” says valiant Herb. “Maybe you better go take in a movie or something, Doc. Us guys'll handle this.”

“I was not referring to a short-range personal danger,” Old Doc says scornfully. “What I fear is the destruction of our city, the slaughter of our loved ones, and the annihilation of our culture.”

Herb and Fred stop. “What you talking about. Doc? He's just one stinking alien; you push a knife in his guts, he'll bleed like anyone else.”

“Fools!
Schlemiels!
” thunders wise Old Doc. “Of course, you can kill him! But what happens after that?”

“Huh?” says Fred, squinting his china-blue pop eyes.

“Idiots!
Cochons!
You think this is the only spaceship these aliens got? You think they don't even know whereabouts this guy has gone? Man, you gotta assume they got
plenty
more ships where this one came from, and you gotta also assume that they'll be damned mad if this ship doesn't show up when it's supposed to, and you gotta assume that when these aliens learn the score, they're gonna be damned sore and buzz back here and stomp on everything and everybody.”

“How come I gotta assume that?” asks feeble-witted Fred.

“'Cause it's what
you'd
do in a deal like that, right?”

“I guess maybe I would at that,” says Fred with a sheepish grin. “Yeah, I just might do that little thing. But look, maybe
they
wouldn't.”

“Maybe, maybe,” mimics wise Old Doc. “Well, baby, we can't risk the whole ball game on a goddamned
maybe
. We can't afford to kill this alien joker on the chance that
maybe
his people wouldn't do what any reasonable-minded guy would do, which is, namely, to blow us all to hell.”

“Well, I suppose we maybe can't,” Herbie says. “But Doc, what
can
we do?”

“Just wait and see what he wants.”

A scene very much like that, according to reliable reconstruction, had been enacted at least thirty or forty times. It usually resulted in a policy of wait and see. Occasionally, the contactor from Earth was killed before wise counsel could prevail; but Jackson was paid to take risks like that.

Whenever the contactor was killed, retribution followed with swift and terrible inevitability. Also with regret, of course, because Earth was an extremely civilized place and accustomed to living within the law. No civilized, law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don't like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished; everybody knows that. But it still doesn't feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man's entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote.

Fortunately, there was never much occasion for that sort of mess. Aliens usually caught on pretty fast. Despite the language barrier, aliens learned that you simply
don't
kill Earthmen.

And then, later, bit by bit, they learned all the rest.

The hotheads had sheathed their knives. Everybody was smiling except Jackson, who was grinning like a hyena. The aliens were making graceful arm and leg motions, probably of welcome.

“Well, that's real nice,” Jackson said, making a few graceful gestures of his own. “Makes me feel real to-home. And now, suppose you take me to your leader, show me the town, and all that jazz. Then I'll set myself down and figure out that lingo of yours, and we'll have a little talk. And after that, everything will proceed splendidly.
En avant!
”

So saying, Jackson stepped out at a brisk pace in the direction of the city. After a brief hesitation, his newfound friends fell into step behind him.

Everything was moving according to plan.

Jackson, like all the other contactors, was a polyglot of singular capabilities. As basic equipment, he had an eidetic memory and an extremely discriminating ear. More important, he possessed a startling aptitude for language and an uncanny intuition for meaning. When Jackson came up against an incomprehensible tongue, he picked out, quickly and unerringly, the significant units, the fundamental building blocks of the language. Quite without effort he sorted vocalizations into cognitive, volitional, and emotional aspects of speech. Grammatical elements presented themselves at once to his practiced ear. Prefixes and suffixes were no trouble; word sequence, pitch, and reduplication were no sweat. He didn't know much about the science of linguistics, but he didn't need to know. Jackson was a natural. Linguistics had been developed to describe and explain things which he knew intuitively.

He had not yet encountered the language which he could not learn. He never really expected to find one. As he often told his friends in the Forked Tongue Club in New York, “Waal, shukins, there just really ain't nuthin'
tough
about them alien tongues. Leastwise, not the ones I've run across. I mean that sincerely. I mean to tell you, boys, that the man who can express himself in Sioux or Khmer ain't going to encounter too much trouble out there amongst the stars.”

And so it had been, to date ...

Once in the city, there were many tedious ceremonies which Jackson had to endure. They stretched on for three days—about par for the course; it wasn't every day that a traveler from space came in for a visit. So naturally enough every mayor, governor, president, and alderman,
and
their wives, wanted to shake his hand. It was all very understandable, but Jackson resented the waste of his time. He had work to do, some of it not very pleasant, and the sooner he got started, the quicker it would be over.

On the fourth day he was able to reduce the official nonsense to a minimum. That was the day on which he began in earnest to learn the local language.

A language, as any linguist will tell you, is undoubtedly the most beautiful creation one is ever likely to encounter. But with that beauty goes a certain element of danger.

Language might aptly be compared to the sparkling, ever-changing face of the sea. Like the sea, you never know what reefs may be concealed in its pellucid depths. The brightest water hides the most treacherous shoals.

Jackson, well prepared for trouble, encountered none at first. The main language (Hon) of this planet (Na) was spoken by the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants (En-a-To-Na—literally, men of the Na, or Naians, as Jackson preferred to think of them). Hon seemed quite a straightforward affair. It used one term for one concept, and allowed no fusions, juxtapositions, or agglutinations. Concepts were built up by sequences of simple words (“spaceship” was
ho-pa-aie-an
—boat-flying-outer-sky). Thus, Hon was very much like Chinese and Annamite on Earth. Pitch differences were employed not only intentionally to differentiate between homonyns, but also positionally, to denote gradations of “perceived realism,” bodily discomfort, and three classes of pleasurable expectation. All of which was mildly interesting but of no particular difficulty to a competent linguist.