The Alien Way

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The rest of his disguise would have to be taken care of by the mufflings he would be wearing, after the native fashion. These complicated body coverings therefore turned out to be a blessing instead of the unmitigated, hampering curse he had expected them to be. Without them it would have been almost impossible to conceal the Ruml body differences from the shape of one of the Muffled People.

  As it was, foot coverings with built-up undersurfaces helped to disguise the relative shortness of the Ruml legs, as the loose-hanging skirt of the sleeved, outside upper garment hid the unnatural-by native standards of physique-narrowness of his hips. Not a great deal could be done about the fact that the Ruml spine was so connected to the Ruml pelvis that he appeared to walk with his upper body at an angle leaning forward. But heavy padding widened the narrow Ruml shoulders, and the wide sleeves hid the fact that the Ruml arms, like the Ruml legs, were normally designed to be kept bent at knee and elbow joint.

  When it was done, he was a passable imitation of a Muffled Person. But these changes were only the beginning. It was now necessary for him to learn to move about in these hampering garments with some appearance of native naturalness.

  The mufflings were hideously uncomfortable—like the clinging but lifeless skin of some loathsome creature. But Jase was as unyielding with himself as he was with the other Expedition Members. Shift after shift, as the rest of the Expedition made their burrowing scanners, sent them down, and collected the film strips from them back on the moon, Jase tramped up and down his own quarters, muffled and whisker-less—while the Captain and the two specialists compared his actions with tapes of the natives in comparable movement and action. And criticized.

  Intelligent life, they all knew, is inconceivably adaptable, and Jase was working for great stakes. There came a shift, finally, when the three watchers could offer no more criticism, and Jase himself no longer felt the touch of the mufflings about his body for the unnatural thing it was.

  He announced himself satisfied with himself. He went to the recordings room for a final briefing on the information the burrowing mechanisms had gathered about the Muffled People’s underground and secret place. He stood—a weird-looking Ruml in his wrappings—while the Recorder informed him that the mechanism had charted the underground area completely and found it to be immense. A tenth of a native mile in depth, nearly five miles in extent, and half a mile wide. And the whole underground area was walled in by an extremely thick casing of native concrete stiffened by steel rods.

  The mechanisms had been unable to record through the thickness of that casing and since they had been programmed strictly to make no attempt to burrow through it for fear of alarming the natives, nothing was known about the area’s interior.

  What lay inside the concrete shell, therefore, was still a complete mystery. If Jase was to invade the secret place, therefore, he would have to do so blind—not knowing what in the way of internal defenses he might encounter. The only open way in the mechanisms had discovered was down an elevator shaft through which supplies were sent down into the area.

  Jase stood a moment in thought, while the Captain and the officers of the Expedition waited.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “I consider it most likely that this place has been set up to protect against invasion by others of the natives themselves—rather than by someone like myself. At any rate, I’m going to go ahead with it, on that assumption.”

  And he turned to the Captain and the officers to give them his final orders to cover the period while he would be gone. He did not bother to tell them what to do in case he did not come back. Such commands would be unnecessary to the point of dishonorable insult.

  The face of the planet, hidden on beyond the body of the moon, was still in night when Jase breached the moon surface just over the site of the buried ship. Behind him, the hole in the dust-covered rock filled itself in again as if with a smooth magic.

  His small ship lifted from the surface around the horizon of the moon and dropped toward the night darkness of the planet below him.

  He came to the planet’s surface just as the sun was beginning to break over the eastern horizon and the fresh chill of the post-dawn drop in native temperature was in the air. He camouflaged his ship, giving it the appearance of some native sumac bushes, and stepped from it for the first time on to the alien soil.

  The strange, tasteless atmosphere of the planet filled his nostrils. He looked toward the rising sun and saw a line of trees and a ramshackle building blackly outlined against the redness of its half-disk. He turned a quarter-circle and began to walk toward the deserted native factory, which covered and hid the underground area.

  Not far from his ship, he hit the dirt road running past the scattered farms leading to the isolated, abandoned factory complex that loomed ahead of him on the horizon like some monstrous jumble of enormous boxes. The Muffled People’s habit of building to dizzying heights (even small dwelling places often reached to the full three stories above ground of a Family Palace, back home) made his destination visible from the time he left his ship. He continued along it with the sun rising strongly on his left, large and reddish-yellow; and after a while he came to a wooden bridge over a small creek. The creek was tangled with wild vegetation. No attempt had been made to border or beautify it in Honor to the life—giving fluid it carried. The bridge itself was a crude affair on which, as he crossed it, his foot covering fell with a hollow sound. In the stillness of the native dawn these sounds seemed to echo through the whole sleeping world around him. He hurried .to get off the planks back on to dirt road again. And it was with an internal relaxing of tension that he stepped finally off the far end of the bridge.

  “Up early, aren’t you?” said a native voice, from only a few feet away alongside below the bridge.

  Jase whirled like a swordsman. And saw—himself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kator stood facing the native who had spoken. He stared at a figure seated on the sloping bank of the creek just a few feet below the end of the bridge.

  Jase stared at himself.

  Himself stared at himself. A container of burning vegetation was in his mouth, and smoke trickled from his small mouth. He was muffled in blue leg coverings, and his upper body was encased in a worn, sleeved muffling of native leather. His furless hands held a long stick of native vegetation out over the waters of the creek, with the line at the end of it dropping down below the water’s surface. His lips in a furless face twisted upward in a native fashion that meant not excitement or rage, but friendliness.

  But himself stood above at the end of the bridge. There was something both brave and pitiful about the small figure he looked at from his seated position. No human being could have been deluded for a second by the appearance of him at the end of the bridge. The clothes he wore were clumsy and fastened wrong. And the figure in them crouched like Groucho Marx in the old film comedies of the early nineteen thirties. The shaved face looked childlike without its fur and whiskers, and it was barely five feet tall.

  It was fantastic for Jase to be at once five feet tall and a head taller. To crouch and sit erect at the same time. To be alarmed at the sight of himself and moved to pity at the sight of himself… The point of view in Jase’s mind jumped from his human body to his Kator body, from his Kator body to his Jase body—to his Kator body and mind—to his Jase body and mind—to his Kator mind—to his Jase mind—He was Jase. He was Kator. He was Jase-Kator—or Kator-Jase-Kase-Jator-Jaskatore…

  He was both. The personalities blurred. Blended. Matched. He swayed.

  “Are you ill?” he asked himself. Perhaps it was a native infected with a disease to which his race was prone.

  “No,” he said, catching himself. “What’re you doing here? Out for a hike?”

  “Yes,” he said, wondering if the native noticed any accent to his words. “You are fishing?”

  “Bass,” he answered, waggling his pole. A small, colored object bobbed on the water where the line entered the liquid. />
  “I see,” he said, not knowing what bass were. “There are some in this water?”

  “Well,” he answered, “never know what you’ll catch. Might as well fish for bass as anything else. You from around here?”

  “No,” he said.

  “City?” he asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He thought of the planet-wide city of the Homeworld. Yes, he was from a city.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Oh,” he answered—he had rehearsed this speech—“I thought I would go around the buildings here and search for a large road and transportation to the nearest city.”

  “Keep going then,” he told his small, crouching self. I'd show you the way, but I’ve got fish to catch. You can’t miss it anyway. Ahead or back from here both brings you out on the same road.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Good luck then with your hunting in the water, here.”

  “Thank you, friend.” The impulse came from deep inside him. He had been right—he had been right. But he had to come face to face with Kator as himself to put the two personalities one on top of the other, like cardboard cutouts. Now he had done it, and the overlappings on each part were finally plain and distinct. He spoke to the small, crouching, shaved-face figure. “We’re a good deal alike—more than you’d think.”

  He stared at himself, unable to make sense of the words. They seemed to make sense, but they did not. It seemed that the native was referring to something taken for granted, something that he had not mentioned earlier in their conversation.

  “Yes,” he said, deciding to simply ignore the incomprehensible statement. “I must say so long, now.” About to turn away, a strange feeling moved him. Perhaps it was an impulse of the Random Factor. The native had baffled him—it would not hurt to baffle the native a little. If the other became alarmed, he was carrying handweapons that could kill him silently and quickly. “Perhaps,” he said, on the wings of this strange impulse, “you can tell me—I am among friends, here?”

  “Yes,” said the native, “here you are among friends.”

  His stomach contracted. Surely it was the Random Factor that had caused him to speak—and the native to answer in polite, Honorable Ruml fashion. Possibly it was the Random Factor showing him that these natives of his Kingdom-to-be were not without Honor, as he had earlier feared when the reports from the collectors began to show their lack of weapons and duelings. Gratefulness rose inside him. He raised his hand in farewell, native fashion, as he turned away—but silently, inside him, he spoke the Blessing to this strange, native figure who could never have understood it, even if it had been spoken aloud-so many thousand years of Ruml history were behind it.

  “Water be with you, shade be with you, peace be with you…”

  His attention back now on the creek waters, the native raised his own hand unseeingly-almost as if he had somehow heard.

  Turning, in the clumsy mufflings of his disguise, Jase in the Ruml body of Kator went on toward the factory.

  Only a little way down the dirt road, around a bend and through some trees, he came to the wide wire gate where the road disappeared into the grounds about the factory buildings. The gate was closed and locked. Jase in Kator’s body glanced around him, saw no one, and took a small silver cone from his pocket. He touched the point of the cone to the lock. There was a small, upward puff of smoke, and the gate sagged open. He pushed through, closed the gate behind him, and headed for the building with the elevator shaft to the hidden area underground.

  The door to that building also was locked. Once more Jase felt himself glance around, but the watchmen of the deserted factory gave no sign or sound of their presence. Jase used the cone-shaped object on the lock of a small door set in the larger door that was wide enough for trucks to enter the building. He slipped inside.

  Beyond the open space where trucks evidently parked when unloading supplies and material to be sent underground was the end of a conveyor belt wide enough to take large crates. It stretched off through a jungle of dark and idle machinery under the dim light of windows set several stories high in the corrugated iron walls of the building’s skin.

  Jase listened, standing in the shadow of the door. He heard nothing. He put away the cone and drew his handgun. Lightly, he crouched and then leaped up in one bound onto the belt of the conveyor, five feet above the floor. Handgun ready, he began to follow along the belt back into the maze of machinery.

  It was a strange, mechanical wilderness through which he found himself stealing. The conveyor belt was not a short one. After he had gone some distance on it, his listening ears caught a sound from up ahead. He stopped and listened.

  The sound was the sound of native voices talking.

  He went on cautiously. Gradually he approached the voices, which did not seem to be on the belt, but off it to the right a little distance. Finally, he drew level with them. Kneeling down and peering through the shapes of the machinery, he made out a clear area in the building about thirty feet off the belt where he stood. Behind the cleared area was a glassed-in cage in which five humans wearing blue mufflings and weapons harnesses supporting handguns could be seen, sitting at desks or standing about, talking.

  Jase lowered his head and crept past like a shadow on the belt. The voices faded behind him, and in a little distance he came to the elevator shaft and the platform within it onto which the conveyor belt was designed to discharge its cargo.

  Jase examined the platform with an eye already briefed on its probable construction. It was evidently controlled from below, but there should be some kind of controls on the platform itself—if only for emergency use.

  Jase searched around the edge of the shaft and discovered some switches set in a line on a plate at the far end of the platform. Using a small magnetic power tool, he removed the plate and spent a moment or two studying the wiring going to the switches. Again, it was what he had been briefed to expect by experts among the Expedition crew. Amazingly—by sensible, normal Ruml standards—there was no lock on the controls at all.

  He replaced the plate, reached out, and took hold of the switch that according to his briefing, should send the platform downward. For a second he hesitated. From this point on, it was a matter of calculated risk. There was no way of telling what in the shape of guards or protective devices waited for him at the bottom of the shaft. He had had his choice of trying to send the collectors in to get that information earlier, at the risk of alerting the natives, or of taking his chances now. And he had chosen to take his chances now.

  He pressed the switch. The platform dropped beneath him, and the darkness of the upper shaft closed above his head.

  The platform fell with a rapidity that made the claws extend instinctively from the ends of his fingers to keep a grasp on it. He had a momentarily alarming image of a device designed only for nonliving cargo beneath him. Then the thought of the damageable fruits and vegetables that would be transported down on this platform at times came to reassure him. Sure enough—after what seemed like a much longer drop than the burrowing scanners had reported likely—the platform slowed quickly but evenly to a gentle halt and emerged into light from an opening on one side of the shaft.

  Jase was off the platform the second it stopped, and racing for the nearest cover—behind the door of the small room where the shaft had ended. And no sooner than necessary. A lacework of blue beams lanced across the space where he had been standing on the platform a moment before.

  The beams winked out. The smell of ozone filled the room. For a moment Jase stood frozen and poised, handgun in fist. But no Living creature showed itself. The beams had evidently been fired automatically as a defense against animal intruders. It would be part of the normal self-protecting machinery of the elevator shaft. However, he noted with a contracting of his stomach, the spot he had chosen to duck into was about the only place in the room the beams had not covered.

  He came out from behind the door, slipped t
hrough the entrance to which it belonged—and checked suddenly. He had found it.

  He stood in an underground area of enormous dimensions, his own figure shrunk by contrast to that of one of the small collectors. Here he was a pygmy. No, less than a pygmy. An ant among giants, dimly lit from an almost invisible ceiling, five hundred feet overhead.

  He was at one end of what was no less than an underground spacefield. Towering close to him, too huge to take in without moving his eyes, were the Brobdingnagian shapes of great space warships. He had found it—the secret gathering place of the battle strength of the Muffled People; and inside himself some hidden corner of his spirit poured forth thanksgiving that they were now proved beyond any doubt to be not without Honor after all.

  From between the titanic shapes up ahead came the sound of metal ringing against other metal and concrete. And the sound of feet and voices. Like a hunting animal of the Ruml Homeworld, Jase slipped from shadow to shadow between the great ships until he came to a spot from which he could see what was going on without exposing himself.

  He peered out from behind the roundness of a great, barrel-thick supporting jack and saw that he was unexpectedly at the edge of the parked ships. The discovery came as an abrupt shock. —Was that all there were of them?

  There could be no more than a dozen at most in this space, which could have parked many more.

  He looked ahead. Beyond stretched immense emptiness of floor, and only some fifty feet from where he stood hidden a crew of five natives in green one-piece mufflings were dismounting the governor of a collapsed-universe drive unit from one of the ships closest to them. A single native in blue with a weapons harness and handgun stood by them, watching—no doubt on guard.

  As Jase watched, another native hi blue with weapons harness appeared from between the ships closest to the working natives. Jase shrank back behind the supporting jack that shielded him. The second guard came up to the first who had been standing observing.