Contact

by Noel Keyes

  “Stop, Chur-chur,” I pleaded. “The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It’s hurting him.”

  Chur-chur said reassuringly: “Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation—probably a local thermo-electric effect. But even if his contact senses have started working again and he can’t switch them off, he won’t have to bear this very long.”

  Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkardly patted the stranger’s skin.

  “Easy there,” he said. “Cut out your senses if you can. If you can’t, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we’ll repower you, and you’ll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled.”

  I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favorite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects.

  My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie.

  During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables “burning me alive,” the stranger’s words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note—around E-fiat in the standard sonic scale.

  It was not like a voice at all.

  This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words, but without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself—this is the closest I can come phonetically: “Eeee ahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeer-jeee-sussunmuuutherrr!”

  The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing.

  Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break.

  And although the soft hiss of the stranger’s carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness still existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters: I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.

  Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger’s skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.

  A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur’s shoulder.

  The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening.

  “Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material,” Chur-chur explained.

  He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance.

  “It looks complex,” Chur-chur said, “but I expect the stranger will be able to tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute.”

  His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice.

  You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur’s discovery of the stranger’s double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum’s failure to analyze the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him.

  But this is my personal, non-scientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been advanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Chur-chur announced his initial findings that day.

  He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger’s body.

  When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said:

  “I have examined the ‘central brain’ in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of consciousness. And there is no other conceivable center of intelligence in the remainder of his body.”

  There is something I wish I could forget. I can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.

  There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.