Unearthly Neighbors (8 page)

“There it is,” Tom Stein said, pointing. “See? They’re starting to come out now.”

Ace Reid, unbidden, began to take the sphere down.

Far below them, Monte could see a panorama that might have been transmitted from the dawn of time. There was a sun-washed canyon that trenched its way through eroded walls of brown rock, and a stream of silver-streaked water that snaked its way across the canyon floor. Reddish-green brush lined the banks of the stream, and it looked cool and inviting. (Old habits and patterns of thought died hard; Monte caught himself wondering whether or not the fishing was any good down there.) At the head of the canyon, not far from the
leaping white spray of a waterfall, there was a jumbled escarpment of gray and brown rock. The face of the rock was pockmarked with the dark cave-eyes of tunnels and rock shelters. There was even a curl of blue smoke rising from the mouth of one of the caves, which was the first real evidence of fire that Monte had seen among the natives.

He could see the people clearly, like toy soldiers deployed in a miniature world. There were men and women in front of the caves and on the steep paths that wound down to the canyon floor. Three or four kids were already down by the stream, splashing in the water. The people must have seen the sphere, which was plainly visible in the blue morning sky, but they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to it.

“Look good, Charlie?”

The linguist smiled. “If they’ll only
say
something.”

Monte turned to Ace. “Set her down.”

“Where?”

“Just as close to that cliff as you can get. Try not to squash anybody, but let ’em feel the breeze. I’m a mite tired of being ignored.”

Ace grinned. “I’ll park this crate right on their outhouse.”

The gray sphere started down.

They shaved the canyon walls and landed directly below the cave entrances. Monte unfastened the hatch and climbed out. The brown rock walls of the canyon seemed higher than they had looked from above, rearing up over his head like mountains. The blue sky seemed far away. He could hear the chuckling gurgle of the stream and feel the gentle stir of the wind on his face. He stood there by the metal sphere and the others joined him.

Suddenly, he was almost overpowered by a feeling of strangeness. It wasn’t this world that was strange, nor was it the natives who were all around him. It was himself, and it was Tom and Charlie and Ace, with their stubby arms and their layers of clothing. And it was the gray metal sphere they stood beside, a monstrous artificial thing in this valley of stone and water and living plants…

The people did not react to their presence. They seemed to freeze, neither coming closer nor attempting to get away. They just stood where they were, watching.

What was the matter with them? Didn’t they have any curiosity at all? Monte began to doubt his own knowledge; he wondered whether all of his training and all of his experience had been any good at all.

Me, the expert on man! I might as well be a caterpillar.

Then, at last, a child moved a little way down the trail from one of the caves. He pointed at the sphere and laughed—a high, delighted giggle. The people began to move again, going on about their business—whatever that may have been. They were so close that Monte could practically reach out and touch them, and yet he felt as though he were watching them from across some stupendous, uncrossable gulf. He simply didn’t
get
them, didn’t understand what he was seeing. The natives had nothing; they lived in caves and hollow trees. Their activities seemed aimless to him; they didn’t seem to do anything that had any purpose to it. They appeared unperturbed, and worse, incurious.

Yet somehow, they did not give him an impression of
primitiveness.
(He recognized that that was a weasel word, but he could only think in terms of the words and concepts he knew.) It was rather that they were remote, detached, alien. They lived in a world that was perceived differently, where things had different values…

An old man, considerably older than the one they had tracked to the hollow tree, walked with difficulty down the trail and stood there just above the sphere. He blinked at them with cloudy eyes and hunched down so that he supported part of his weight on his long arms. The wrinkled skin hung from his face in loose folds, almost like flaps. He was definitely looking at them, not at the sphere. Two young women drifted over and joined him. The child giggled again and nudged one of the wide-eyed girls.

Monte took a deep breath. He felt like a ham actor who had come bouncing out of the wings, waving his straw hat and doing an earnest soft-shoe routine, only to discover belatedly that the theater was empty…

Still, these people did not seem to be afraid. They were not so timid as the man in the tree had been. Perhaps,

Monte thought, the people here did share one human attribute: they were braver in bunches.

Monte took a step up toward the old man, who frowned at him and blinked his faded eyes. Monte raised his hands, showing him that they were empty. “Monte,” he said, and pointed to himself.

The old man muttered something and stood his ground.

Monte tried again, feeling as though he were caught up in a cyclical nightmare. “Monte,” he said.

The old man nodded slowly and pulled at his ear. “Larst,” he said distinctly.

By God! He said something!

Charlie whipped out his notebook and recorded the single precious word in phonetic symbols. Monte smiled broadly, trying to look like the answer to an old man’s prayers. “Charlie,” he said, pointing. “Tom. Ace.”

The old man nodded again. “Larst,” he repeated. He sighed. Then, incredibly, he began to point to other things: the caves, the stream, the sky, the kids, the women. For each, he gave the native term—slowly, patiently, as though instructing a backward child. His voice was weak and quavering, but his words were clear. Monte matched him with English, then eased himself to one side and let Charlie Jenike take over.

Charlie worked fast, determined to grab his opportunity and hold on tight. He tested phrases and sentences, scribbling as fast as his pen would write. He built up a systematic vocabulary, building on the words he had already learned from the tapes. The old man seemed vaguely surprised at his fluency, and patiently went on talking.

Tom Stein maneuvered two of the kids, both boys, down the trail that led to the stream. He took a length of cord from his pocket and made a skillful cat’s cradle on his fingers. The boys were intrigued, and watched him closely. Tom went through his whole bag of string tricks—the anthropologist’s ace in the hole—and tried his level best to make friends.

Monte was as excited as though he had just tripped over the Rosetta Stone—which, in a manner of speaking, he had. He stuck to the rules of the game; they were all he had to go on.
Begin with the person in authority.
How many times had he told his students that?
Find out what the power structure is, and work from the top down.
Okay. Swell. Only who
was
the person in authority?

Looking around him, he couldn’t be sure. It could hardly be Larst, who was close to senility. It certainly wouldn’t be one of the children. The women backed away from him whenever he tried to approach—one of them actually blushed—and they didn’t seem to be very likely candidates. One difficulty was that many of the natives were not paying any attention to them at all; they simply went on doing whatever they were doing, and he was unable to get any clear impression of how they ranked. It was very hard, he realized, to size up people who wore no clothing; there were no status symbols to give you a clue. Except, perhaps, for the chest stripes…

He compromised by wandering around with his notebook and trying to map the cave village. The people did not hinder him, but he considered it best not to try to enter the caves themselves. He plotted the distribution of the caves and jotted down brief descriptions of the people he found in front of each one. He took some photographs, which didn’t seem to bother the natives at all.

But they had made contact!

That was what counted; the rest would follow in time.

His one thought was to get as much done as possible. He lost himself in his work, forgetting everything else.

The great white sun moved across the arc of the sky and the black shadows lengthened on the floor of the brown-walled canyon…

Monte never knew what it was that warned him. It was nothing specific, nothing dramatic. It certainly wasn’t a premonition. It was rather a thread of uneasiness that wormed its way into his brain, a subtle wrongness that grew from the very data he collected.

Long afterward, he told himself a thousand times that he should have seen it before he did. He of all people, moving through the cave village with his notebook and camera, should have caught on. But the plain truth was that he was so excited at actually
working
with the natives that he wasn’t thinking clearly; his brain was dulled by the flood of impressions pouring into it.

And, of course, there had been no real cause for alarm in the weeks they had spent on Sirius Nine. Somehow, the human mind continues its age-old habit of fooling itself by moronic extrapolation: because there has been peace there will always be peace, or because there has been war there will always be war…

The thing that triggered Monte’s brain back into awareness, oddly enough, was not a man—it was an animal. He spotted the creature sitting in front of one of the caves, apparently warming itself in the late afternoon sun. (If you habitually lived in a furnace, he supposed, it took a good bellows to heat you up a little.) Monte snapped a picture of the thing, then studied it carefully from a short distance away. It certainly was not related to Rover, the powerful wolf-like animal they had seen in the forest. In fact, unless he was very much mistaken, the animal was a primitive type of primate.

It was a small creature, no bigger than a large squirrel. It had a hairless tail like a rat, and its rather chunky body was covered with a reddish-brown fur. (It would have been practically invisible in the branches of the forest trees.) Its head, nodding in the sun, was large and flat-faced, with sharply pointed ears like a fox. The animal had perfectly enormous eyes; they were like saucers. When it looked casually at Monte, the animal resembled two huge eyeballs with a body attached.

Many features about the animal were suggestive of the tarsier. To be sure, the tarsier was nocturnal, and there was no sign that this animal was equipped for hopping. Still, the tarsier was the closest analogy that Monte could find.

It was the first animal that Monte had seen in the cave village and it prodded his thoughts toward the wolf-thing they had encountered in the forest. It was odd, he reflected, that they had encountered nothing like Rover in the village. As a matter of fact, now that he happened to think about it, it was odd too that…

He stood up straight, a sudden chill lancing through his body.

That
was it. That was what was wrong about this canyon village. That was what had been bothering him, nagging at him. How could it be?

Monte walked as quickly as he dared over to the trail and scrambled down it. He had to fight to keep himself from running. He hurried over to where Charlie and Larst were still yakking at each other. The old man—he looked positively ancient now—was plainly weary, but he was still answering Charlie’s questions.

Monte touched the linguist’s shoulder. “Charlie.” Charlie didn’t even look around. “Not now, dammit.”

“Charlie, this is important.”

“Go away. Another hour with this guy—”

“Charlie! We may not have another hour.”

That did it. Slowly, reluctantly, Charlie Jenike got to his feet, stretched his sore muscles, and turned around. There were shadows under his eyes and his shirt was soaked with sweat. He was controlling his temper with a visible effort.

“Well?”

“Think carefully. Have you seen any men here today?” Charlie gave a sigh of exasperation. “Are you blind? What do you think I’m talking to, a horse?”

“I mean young men—or even middle-aged men. Have you seen any?”

Charlie shook his head, puzzled now. “No, I don’t think I have. But—”

“But nothing. We’ve been idiots.
There’s no one here except women and kids and old men!”

Charlie’s face went white. “You don’t think—”

Monte didn’t waste any more time. “Ace,” he snapped. “Walk over and get inside the sphere. Call the camp at once. Hurry, man!”

While Ace started for the sphere, Monte eased his way over to where Tom was holding a group of kids enthralled with his string games. He squatted down beside him. “Tom. Try not to look alarmed, but I think we’re in trouble. There’s not a single solitary man of fighting age in this village. Ace is calling the camp now.”

Tom stared at him, the cord forgotten in his hands.

“Janice,” he whispered. “She’s back there—”

Ace stuck his head out of the sphere and hollered: “I’m sorry, sir. The camp doesn’t answer.”

The three men forgot field technique, forgot everything. As one man, they sprinted for the sphere.

As he ran, Monte’s brain shouted at him with a single word, repeated over and over again:

Fool, fool, fool!

Ace had the sphere airborne almost before they were all inside.

They flew at top speed into the gathering shadows of a night that was suddenly dark with menace.

There was no fire; that was the first thing that Monte noticed. The camp clearing was gray and still in the early starlight. Nothing moved. The place was as lifeless as some forgotten jungle ruin, and the tents—there was something wrong with the tents…

Monte kept his voice steady. “Circle the camp, Ace. Let’s have the lights now.”

The sphere went down low and hovered in a slow circle. The battery of landing lights flashed on.

“Oh God,” Tom Stein whispered. “Oh God.”

Monte felt his stomach wrench itself into a tight knot. His mouth opened but no sounds came out. His hands began to tremble violently.

The tents were ripped to pieces; they were little more than sagging frames. The clearing was littered with debris—pots and pans and clothing and chairs and bright cans of food. And there were crumpled, motionless heaps on the ground. They were very dark and very still.