He brushed aside the apology, shook hands, and said: “Anything new on your little green men?”
“I’m on the night shift now,” I said. “I’ve been away all day. Maybe you can tell me.”
He waved some papers in his hand. “The usual deadly dull government releases. Interviews with people who saw ‘the flash in the sky.’ They don’t stretch very far.”
“Getting tired of it?”
He shook his head. “No. They’re easy to cover and the way it looks, they’re going to be good copy for a long time. Like when the quintuplets were born—I think there was a story about them every day for a couple of years.”
“Bigger stories will probably come along.”
“The only stories that will be any bigger,” he said pointedly, “are those that you probably won’t be around to read about and I won’t be around to cover.”
“Sam,” I said suddenly, “if you were going to ask them questions, what would you ask?”
A gleam came into his eyes. “They elected you for the job, eh?”
“Uh huh.”
He closed his eyes in thought. “If they’re so far ahead of us,” he said after a moment, “then they must be a lot older race than we are, granted?”
I nodded.
“Then maybe it’s just possible that they learned how to live with each other. I think if I were putting the questions to them, I would give them a briefing on the history of the human race and then ask them how we could live in peace for a change.”
I had underestimated Sam, I thought, a little embarrassed, “I’ll buy that,” I said.
He smiled. “But there are a few little items on fissionable isotopes that will probably come first, aren’t there?” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve just got time for a short one for your brave new world, Dr. Fenton.” For a moment he looked as wistful as a big man ever can. “Maybe this time it’s the sure enough real McCoy. Maybe tomorrow starts a brand-new page.”
I had just picked up my hat when the phone rang on the receptionist’s desk. She was out at the moment and Sam answered it. I watched his face gray.
“For you?” I asked, when he had hung up.
He shook his head. “No, for you.”
“Bad news?”
“I think we better walk over to Chemistry Hall right away. That was your secretary.”
I felt a knot growing in my stomach. “Did she say what was wrong?”
“Yes,” Sam said slowly. “I’m afraid your specimens are sick.”
The university midway was a blaze of lights, the beams picking out the soldiers in wet raincoats and the hastily erected tents, glistening in the downpour, guarding the Chemistry Building. I doubted that anything had been released yet but you could sense something was wrong. There was a new tenseness and the checks and double checks before Sam and I were allowed to go in were more thorough and time-consuming than usual.
Miss Chandler, my secretary, was waiting in my office. She fingered some papers gingerly and held them out to me. “The latest reports.”
I read through them hastily, then dropped them on my desk, “What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Probably a pathogenic allergy of some kind, we don’t know what.”
“Like what wiped out the Martians in the Welles’ story.”
“What? Oh, yes. I suppose you could make a comparison.”
“Think it will be fatal?”
I shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing. Probably not. The number of people who die compared to those who get sick is always small. I know that’s an analogy, of course, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t apply.”
I was trying to be reassuring but I could see in his face that I wasn’t succeeding,
“Would you like to see them? They’ve been declassified to that extent.” He started to fumble for his camera but I stopped him. “Sorry, no cameras. The flash bulbs annoy them.
The halls were busier now than they had been when we first came in. Security guards lined the corridors while grim-looking army officers and harried technicians in laboratory smocks hurried past them.”
The room where the aliens were kept was a glassed-in, reconverted laboratory with only a dim, frosted bulb for illumination. We could make out a cluster of people in front of the glassed-in enclosure and soldiers at military ease along the wall. When our eyes had adjusted to the gloom, we joined the small crowd in front of the glass.
Sam had seen the few photographs that had been released but I knew that hadn’t prepared him for the real thing. The room behind the glass had a sand floor with little cots of foam rubber spotted about and, in one comer, a small pool of water. The creatures standing by the pool were small and anthropomorphic in shape, a light emerald green in color, and with the same scales that I had mentioned to Jimmy. What the photographs never showed very clearly was their finely developed hands and the intelligent cast to their vaguely human faces.
“They’re not as lively as they once were,” I said, keeping my voice low. “They’re listless and they won’t take nourishment. The water doesn’t interest them as much as it did either.”
He couldn’t tear his eyes away. “Does anybody know where they come from?”
“As far as we can figure out, from some system in the general direction of Canopus—but how far, we don’t know.”
He stared through the glass a moment longer. “Nobody knows for sure just how long they’ll last, do they?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s too serious,” I said, without conviction. “A reaction like this is almost to be expected. It could take a turn for the worst, of course, but I don’t think that will happen.” I wished that I could disguise my feelings better; he could probably tell from the tone of my voice that I was whistling in the dark.
“How’s the problem of communication going?”
“It may be a few hours, it may be a few days, but it won’t be much longer before we have the key to their language. It’s much simpler than trying to decipher a dead language, by the way.” I paused. “You know,” I mused, “I sometimes get the impression that they’re trying just as desperately hard to communicate with us as we are with them.”
We withdrew to an anteroom and Sam made himself comfortable on a peeling, leather upholstered couch. I kept a weather eye on the worried looking visitors to the room beyond.
“Supposing,” Sam started, trying to frame what he had in mind, “just supposing that they died. Would that make their trip here a total loss as far as we’re concerned? Couldn’t you get something of value from going over their ship?”
I shook my head. “I doubt it, newspaper stories to the contrary. Their machinery is a thousand years too advanced for us. It would be like Galileo trying to find out what makes a modern motor generator tick. We’ll have to learn to talk to them before we find out much.”
“And there’s a possibility you’ll never get that chance, isn’t there?” he asked reluctantly.
“Don’t needle me for news, Sam,” I said in a tired voice. “I’ve told you all I can. The worst it could come to would be a race between our solving the riddle of their language and the disease, or whatever it is, killing them off. It’s a race I think we could win in plenty of time.” •
He changed the subject., “Are you the only one that’s going to ask them questions?”
“I’m the only one who will talk to them initially, and it’s been left to my discretion exactly what we ask them at first However, there’s a committee working on a list of potential questions. I’ll probably draw the ones I ask from it”
“Did you have anything specific in mind?”
I hesitated a moment. “You understand that the exact line of questioning is classified but I can give you a general hint There axe some questions we’d like to ask about the fissioning of light elements and there are some about radioactivity and fuels and fuel consumption figures for rockets. That type of knowledge is probably elementary to them. There are a few I’d like to ask myself about cryst
al structure and atomic theory, but it’ll be a while before I get in my innings.”
“How about the social sciences?”
I gave him a thoughtful look. “I think I know what you’re driving at,” I said dryly. “We’d like to ask a lot about government and psychology and medicine. We’re not just thinking of the next one after the H-bomb.”
“I wasn’t worried about it,” he said quietly. “But I’m glad you told me just the same.”
Miss Chandler came in with another set of reports and I skimmed through them with a sinking heart Dot wanted to ask the aliens about a cure for cancer.
Sam wanted a formula for peace.
My own committee, I knew, was primarily interested in the answers to questions that would take researchers years to find on their own.
But somebody was going to be left out; the potential list of questions had just grown suddenly shorter.
I looked up at Sam’s questioning face and tried to keep my voice from shaking.
“The aliens are dying.”
There wasn’t much to do the next few hours. Sam telephoned in a few leads and then both of us spent the later hours chain-smoking in the anteroom and watching a dream slowly crumble. The dream grew a little more tattered, a little more tenuous with every worried face that disappeared into the room beyond and came out looking even more worried. Their expressions were more accurate than the calibrations on a fever thermometer.
“Just how bad off are they?” Sam finally asked.
I ran my hand across the faint stubble on my chin. “They’ll be gone by morning.”
I was too tired to even feel a reaction to my own admission. The dream was almost ended. The millennium would take a millennium and utopia was still something you wrote books about. People would die of cancer and there would be wars and scientists would still spend agonizing years tracking down elementary facts.
“You know,” Sam said, “when I was small, I used to ask my folks a lot of questions. And when I had stumped them, I hoped that some day I would run into somebody that knew all the answers. I think, in a way, all of us are like that. We all hope that some day we’ll run into somebody who can tell us anything we want to know.”
“We almost did,” I said.
“It’s going to be a big disappointment to everybody,” he continued. “I think almost everybody was toping for something from this. Something that would make life a little easier, a little better for them.”
I knew what he meant.
“There isn’t any hope of getting anything from them, huh?”
I ground my cigarette butt out against my heel and dropped the slight wad of paper on the floor. “Well, maybe, but it would be a mighty long chance. If we could crack their language within the next few hours, we still might have some time. But the odds against it are high. We have no Rosetta stone, so to speak, for their spoken language. And in any case we wouldn’t pass from ignorance to complete understanding just like that.” I paused. “Even if it happened, our time would be extremely limited. A lot of important questions would have to be lopped off the list.”
“The ones you wanted to ask on crystal structure, I suppose.”
I smiled a little weakly. “Those, and a lot of more important ones. We’ve already dropped questions concerning atomic fission.”
He looked surprised. “You’re really narrowing the list, aren’t you?”
“We haven’t much time,” I said, “There are a lot of things we’d like to know about, a lot of things that are quite important. Sociological questions, questions about disease, items of that nature.”
“Considering how different they are,” he asked, curious, “what good would it do to ask them questions about government, let’s say, or something like cancer cures?”
“It’s not the differences that are important,” I said, “it’s the similarities. They got here in a rocket, which implies a technology, which in turn implies a government of some sort. You have to extrapolate from there. Since their science is more advanced than ours, you assume it’s older and that, in turn, their experience with governmental systems is older and greater than our own. As for diseases, they’re oxygen breathing animals a great deal like ourselves; it’s not too farfetched that there may be some diseases or organic failure common to both of us.”
“I get you.”
I stood up and walked over to the window that opened out on the midway. A crowd had started to gather some hours ago and the midway and the streets were black with them now.
I ran my finger around the inside of my collar, separating the damp cloth from my sweaty neck.
If it came to where I only had a chance to ask a few questions, I thought, what would they be? What would they ask, down there?
How to cure disease?
How to live to be a hundred?
How to be happy?
I wished I knew.
It was five in the morning when Harry Weber, city editor at the Press, came in. T had met him once before; a grim, efficient man whose sole interest in Armageddon would be its proper story coverage.
“You shouldn’t have bothered coming,” I said. “There isn’t going to be anything worth writing about.”
He threw his raincoat on the couch, where the water ran off and formed puddles on the leather.
“I always cover disasters,” he said.
“Disasters?”
“That’s what this is, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, “I guess it is.”
“Are they gone?”
“No. Not yet.”
“They’ll be dead shortly,” Sam said. “Utopia’s going up in smoke.”
I was tired and edgy. “So far,” I said deliberately, “we’ve been pretty selfish about this, haven’t we? Did you ever wonder what it’s like for them, what they’re thinking of for a change?” Weber stared at me blankly and then Sam said: “It must be hell to die so far away from home.”
We settled back into a gloomy silence and I lost myself watching the drops slowly run off Weber’s raincoat. Another half hour had gone by when a lab man looked in and said: “We’ve broken the language, Dr. Fenton.”
I didn’t even look up. “Does it matter any more?”
“Dr. Crooks says the aliens are still alive, sir.”
I stood up, my tiredness dropping away like a discarded shirt. We had won, I thought. Just how much remained to be seen. But we had won—at least a little.
I walked into the room where the aliens were waiting.
Sam and Weber were at the window watching the sun come up when I came back in. They didn’t hear me.
“Our big worry now is how we’re going to fake a story so the wind-up won’t sound as bad as it is,” Weber-was saying. “After all, you just don’t shoot Santa Claus.”
“Oh, we’ll find a way,” Sam said brutally.
I made a noise and they turned and saw me.
Sam glanced at me soberly and said: “I can read it in your face. They died before you could even ask them their names.”
“No,” I said, “no, they didn’t. We had time to talk to them.” My eyes were having difficulty focusing after the gloom of the nest room.
“There were only two left,” I continued.
Weber had his notebook out. “What did you ask them?”
“You know,” I mused, “it was wonderful to be able to lean on somebody for a while. To think that there were beings who could answer all our questions.” I stopped a minute and fumbled for my glasses, “And maybe that’s what they were thinking, too.”
“The questions?” Sam repeated.
I felt like I wanted to be quietly sick.
“We winnowed the questions out pretty well. We discarded most of the scientific questions—we’ll find the answers to them eventually. The same with the sociological. What we wanted to ask was something—something fundamental.”
I felt myself wandering again. “I think we made the wrong assumption. How do you tell whether a civilization is inferior or superior? Becau
se they had the means to get here didn’t mean that the aliens considered themselves superior to us. Would another race judge superiority the same way we do?”
They couldn’t see what I was driving at. “What did you ask?” Weber repeated.
I made a conscious effort to get a grip on myself. “I thought I had winnowed the questions down pretty well. Maybe somebody else would have thought of different questions, I don’t know. But the questions I was going to ask actually don’t matter.”
Both of them caught it at the same time. “Going to?” Sam asked stupidly.
“Oh, don’t you see!” I shouted. “What do you think they landed here for, why do you think they tried so hard to communicate with us, trying to make themselves understood? Can’t you guess what happened in the short time we had before they died?
“We didn’t get a chance to ask them anything? They asked us!”
There will no doubt be many ways in which Man and Alien will learn at long last to communicate with one another. It is to be hoped though that this will happen, if not in our time, perhaps in our children’s time, and not this late in the story of the race . . .
DEAR DEVIL
by
ERIC FRANK RUSSELL
The first Martian vessel descended upon Earth with the slow, stately fall of a grounded balloon. It did resemble a large balloon in that it was spherical and had a strange buoyancy out of keeping with its metallic construction. Beyond this superficial appearance all similarity to anything Terrestrial ceased.
There were no rockets, no crimson venturis, no external projections other than several solaradiant distorting grids which boosted the ship in any desired direction through the cosmic field. There were no observation ports. All viewing was done through a transparent band running right around the fat belly of the sphere. The bluish, nightmarish crew were assembled behind that band, surveying the world with great multi-faceted eyes.
They gazed through the band in utter silence as they examined this world which was Terra. Even if they had been capable of speech they would have said nothing. But none among them had a talkative faculty in any sonic sense. At this quiet moment none needed it.
Gentle Invaders Page 14