Foolproof, he told himself. As foolproof as it could be made.
He wondered briefly what had been the matter with him the night before. It had been that young fool, Jackson, of course—a capable biochemist, possibly, but certainly the wrong kind of man for a job like this. Something had slipped up; the screening board should have stopped a man like Jackson, should have spotted his emotional instability. Not that he could do any actual harm, of course, but he could be upsetting. An irritant, thought Decker, that is what he is. Just an irritant.
Decker laid an armload of paraphernalia on the long table underneath the gay pavilion. From it he selected a rolled-up sheet of map paper, unrolled it, spread it flat and thumb-tacked it at four corners. On it a portion of the river and the mountains to the west had been roughly penciled in. The base was represented by an X’ed-through square—but the rest of it was blank.
But it would be filled in; as the days went by it would take on shape and form.
From the field to the south a jet whooshed into the sky, made a lazy turn and straightened out to streak toward the west. Decker walked to the edge of the pavilion’s shade and watched it as it dwindled out of sight. That would be Jarvis and Donnelly, assigned to the preliminary survey of the southwest sector between the base and the western mountains.
Another jet rose lazily, trailing its column of exhaust, gathered speed and sprang into the sky. Freeman and Johns, he thought.
Decker went back to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it idly on the almost-blank map paper. Behind his back he heard another jet whoom upward from the field.
He let his eyes take in the base. Already it was losing its raw, burned-over look. Already it had something of the look of Earth about it, of the efficiency and common sense and get-the-job-done attitude of the men of Earth.
Small groups of men stood around talking. One of them, he saw, was squatted on the ground, talking something over with three squatting robots. Others walked around, sizing up the situation.
Decker grunted with satisfaction. A capable gang of men, he thought. Most of them would have to wait around to really get down to work until the first surveys came in, but even while they waited they would not be idle.
They’d take soil samples and test them. The life that swarmed in the soil would be captured and brought in by grinning robots, and the squirming, vicious things would be pinned down and investigated—photographed, X-rayed, dissected, analyzed, observed, put through reaction tests. Trees and plants and grasses would be catalogued and attempts made to classify them. Test pits would be dug for a look at soil strata. The river’s water would be analyzed. Seines would dredge up some of the life they held. Wells would be driven to establish water tables.
All of this here, at the moment, while they waited for the first preliminary flights to bring back data that would pin-point other areas worthy of investigation.
Once those reports were in, the work would be started in dead earnest. Geologists and mineral men would probe into the planet’s hide. Weather observation points would be set up. Botanists would take far-ranging check samples. Each man would do the work for which he had been trained. Field reports would pour back to the base, there to be correlated and fit into the picture.
Work then, work in plenty. Work by day and night. And all the time the base would be a bit of Earth, a few square yards held inviolate against all another world might muster.
Decker sat easily in his chair and felt the breeze that came beneath the canvas, a gentle breeze that ruffled through his hair, rattled the papers on the table and twitched the tacked-down map. It was pleasant here, he thought. But it wouldn’t stay pleasant long. It almost never did.
Someday, he thought, I’ll find a pleasant planet, a paradise planet where the weather’s always perfect and there is food for the picking of it and natives that are intelligent to talk with and companionable in other ways, and I will never leave it. I’ll refuse to leave when the ship is ready to blast off. I’ll live out my days in a fascinating corner of a lousy galaxy—a galaxy that is gaunt with hunger and mad with savagery and lonely beyond all that may be said of loneliness.
He looked up from his reverie and saw Jackson standing at the pavilion’s edge, watching him.
“What’s the matter, Jackson?” Decker asked with sudden bitterness. “Why aren’t you—”
“They’re bringing in a native, sir,” said Jackson, breathlessly. “One of the things Waldron and Dickson saw.”
The native was humanoid, but he was not human.
As Waldron and Dickson had said, he was a matchstick man, a flesh and blood extension of a drawing a four-year-old might make. He was black as the ace of spades, and he wore no clothing, but the eyes that looked out of the pumpkin-shaped head at Decker were bright with a light that might have been intelligence.
Decker tensed as he looked into those eyes. Then he looked away and saw the men standing silently around the pavilion’s edge, silent and waiting, tense as he was.
Slowly Decker reached out his hand to one of the two headsets of the mentograph. His fingers closed over it and for a moment he felt a vague, but forceful, reluctance to put it on his head. It was disturbing to contact, or attempt to contact, an alien mind. It gave one a queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach. It was a thing, he thought, that Man never had been intended to do—an experience that was utterly foreign to any human background.
He lifted the headset slowly, fitted it over his skull, made a sign toward the second set.
For a long moment the alien eyes watched him, the creature standing erect and motionless.
Courage, thought Decker. Raw and naked courage, to stand there in this suddenly unfamiliar environment that had blossomed almost overnight on familiar ground, to stand there motionless and erect, surrounded by creatures that must look as if they had dropped from some horrible nightmare.
The humanoid took one step closer to the table, reached out a hand and took the headset. Fumbling with its unfamiliarity, he clamped it on his head. And never for a moment did the eyes waver from Decker’s eyes, always alert and watchful.
Decker forced himself to relax, tried to force his mind into an attitude of peace and calm. That was a thing you had to be careful of. You couldn’t scare these creatures—you had to lull them, quiet them down, make them feel your friendliness. They would be upset, and a sudden thought, even a suggestion of human brusqueness would wind them up tighter than a drum.
There was intelligence here, he told himself, being careful to keep his mind unruffled, a greater intelligence than one would think, looking at the creature. Intelligence enough to know that he should put on the headset, and guts enough to do it.
He caught the first faint mental whiff of the matchstick man, and the pit of his stomach contracted suddenly and there was an ache around his chest. There was nothing in the thing he caught, nothing that could be put into words, but there was an alienness, as a smell is alien. There was a non-human connotation that set one’s teeth on edge. He fought back the gagging blackness of repulsive disgust that sought to break the smooth friendliness he held within his mind.
“We are friendly,” Decker forced himself to think. “We are friendly. We will not harm you. We will not harm—”
“You will never leave,” said the humanoid.
“Let us be friends,” thought Decker. “Let us be friends. We have gifts. We will help you. We will—”
“You should not have come,” said the matchstick thought. “But since you are here, you can never leave.”
Humor him, thought Decker to himself. Humor him.
“All right, then,” he thought. “We will stay. We will stay and we will be friendly. We will stay and teach you. We will give you the things we have brought for you and we will stay with you.”
“You will not leave,” said the matchstick man’s thought, and there was somethi
ng so cold and logical and matter-of-fact about the way the thought was delivered that Decker suddenly was cold.
The humanoid meant it—meant every word he said. He was not being dramatic, nor was he blustering—but neither was he bluffing. He actually thought that the humans would not leave, that they would not live to leave the planet.
Decker smiled softly to himself.
“You will die here,” said the humanoid thought.
“Die?” asked Decker. “What is die?”
The matchstick man’s thought was pure disgust. Deliberately, he reached up, took off the headset and laid it carefully back upon the table.
Then he turned and walked away, and not a man made a move to stop him.
Decker took off his headset and slammed it on the table top.
“Jackson,” he said, “pick up that phone and tell the Legion to let him through. Let him leave. Don’t try to stop him.”
He sat limply in his chair and looked at the ring of faces that were watching him.
Waldron asked, “What is it, Decker?”
“He sentenced us to death,” said Decker. “He said that we would not leave the planet. He said that we would die here.”
“Strong words,” said Waldron.
“He meant them,” Decker said.
He lifted a hand, flipped it wearily. “He doesn’t know, of course,” he said. “He really thinks that he can stop us from leaving. He thinks that we will die.”
It was an amusing situation, really. That a naked humanoid should walk out of the jungle and threaten to do away with a human survey party, that he should really think that he could do it. That he should be so positive about it.
But there was not a single smile on any of the faces that looked at Decker.
“We can’t let it get us,” Decker said.
“Nevertheless,” Waldron declared, “we should take all precautions.”
Decker nodded. “We’ll go on emergency alert immediately,” he said. “We’ll stay that way until we’re sure … until we’re …”
His voice trailed off. Sure of what? Sure that an alien savage who wore no clothing, who had not a sign of culture about him, could wipe out a group of humans protected by a ring of steel, held within a guard of machines and robots and a group of fighting men who knew all there was to know concerning the refinements of dealing out swift and merciless extermination to anything that moved against them?
Ridiculous!
Of course it was ridiculous!
And yet the eyes had held intelligence. The being had not only intelligence, but courage. He had stood within a circle of—to him—alien beings, and he had not flinched. He had faced the unknown and said what there was to say, and then had walked away with a dignity any human would have been proud to wear. He must have guessed that the alien beings within the confines of the base were not of his own planet, for he had said that they should not have come, and his thought had implied that he was aware they were not of this world of his. He had understood that he was supposed to put on the headset, but whether that was an act more of courage than of intelligence one would never know—for you could not know if he had realized what the headset had been for. Not knowing, the naked courage of clamping it to his head was of an order that could not be measured.
“What do you think?” Decker asked Waldron.
“We’ll have to be careful,” Waldron told him evenly. “We’ll have to watch our step. Take all precautions, now that we are warned. But there’s nothing to be scared of, nothing we can’t handle.”
“He was bluffing,” Dickson said. “Trying to scare us into leaving.”
Decker shook his head. “I don’t think he was,” he said. “I tried to bluff him and it didn’t work. He’s just as sure as we are.”
The work went on. There was no attack.
The jets roared out and thrummed away, mapping the land. Field parties went out cautiously. They were flanked by robots and by legionnaires and preceded by lumbering machines that knifed and tore and burned a roadway through even the most stubborn of the terrain they went up against. Radio weather stations were set up at distant points, and at the base the weather tabulators clicked off on tape the data that the stations sent back.
Other field parties were flown into the special areas pinpointed for more extensive exploration and investigation.
And nothing happened.
The days went past.
The weeks went past.
The machines and robots watched and the legionnaires stood ready, and the men hurried with their work so they could get off the planet.
A bed of coal was found and mapped. An iron range was discovered. One area in the mountains to the west crawled with radioactive ores. The botanists found twenty-seven species of edible fruit. The base swarmed with animals that had been trapped as specimens and remained as pets.
And a village of the matchstick men was found.
It wasn’t much of a place. Its huts were primitive. Its sanitation was nonexistent. Its people were peaceful.
Decker left his chair under the striped pavilion to lead a party to the village.
The party entered cautiously, weapons ready but being very careful not to move too fast, not to speak too quickly, not to make a motion that might be construed as hostile.
The natives sat in their doorways and watched them. They did not speak and they scarcely moved a muscle. They simply watched the humans as they marched to the center of the village.
There the robots set up a table and placed a mentograph upon it. Decker sat down in a chair and put one of the headsets on his skull. The rest of the party waited off to one side. Decker waited at the table.
They waited for an hour and not a native stirred. None came forward to put on the other headset.
Decker took off the headset wearily and placed it on the table.
“It’s no use,” he said. “It won’t work. Go ahead and take your pictures. Do anything you wish. But don’t disturb the natives. Don’t touch a single thing.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his steaming face.
Waldron came and leaned on the table. “What do you make of it?” he asked.
Decker shook his head. “It haunts me,” he said. “There’s just one thing that I am thinking. It must be wrong. It can’t be right. But the thought came to me, and I can’t get rid of it.”
“Sometimes that happens,” Waldron said. “No matter how illogical a thing may be, it sticks with a man, like a burr inside his brain.”
“The thought is this,” said Decker. “That they have told us all they have to tell us. That they have nothing more they wish to say to us.”
“That’s what you thought,” said Waldron.
Decker nodded. “A funny thing to think,” he said. “Out of a clear sky. And it can’t be right.”
“I don’t know,” said Waldron. “Nothing’s right here. Notice that they haven’t got a single iron tool. Not a scrap of metal in evidence at all. Their cooking utensils are stone, a sort of funny stuff like soapstone. What few tools they have are stone. And yet they have a culture. And they have it without metal.”
“They’re intelligent,” said Decker. “Look at them watching us. Not afraid. Just waiting. Calm and sure of themselves. And that fellow who came into the base. He knew what to do with the headset.”
Waldron sucked thoughtfully at a tooth. “We’d better be getting back to base,” he said. “It’s getting late.” He held his wrist in front of him. “My watch has stopped. What time do you have, Decker?”
Decker lifted his arm and Waldron heard the sharp gasp of his indrawn breath. Slowly Decker raised his head and looked at the other man.
“My watch has stopped, too,” he said, and his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.
For a moment they were graven images, shocked into immobility
by a thing that should have been no more than an inconvenience. Then Waldron sprang erect from the table, whirled to face the men and robots.
“Assemble!” he shouted. “Back to the base. Quick!”
The men came running. The robots fell into place. The column marched away. The natives sat quietly in their doorways and watched them as they left.
Decker sat in his camp chair and listened to the canvas of the pavilion snapping softly in the wind, alive in the wind, talking and laughing to itself. A lantern, hung on a ring above his head, swayed gently, casting fleeting shadows that seemed at times to be the shadows of living, moving things. A robot stood stiffly and quietly beside one of the pavilion poles.
Stolidly, Decker reached out a finger and stirred the little pile of wheels and springs that lay upon the table.
Sinister, he thought. Sinister and queer.
The guts of watches, lying on the table. Not of two watches alone, not only his and Waldron’s watches, but many other watches from the wrists of other men. All of them silent, stilled in their task of marking time.
Night had fallen hours before, but the base still was astir with activity that was at once feverish and furtive. Men moved about in the shadows and crossed the glaring patches of brilliance shed by the batteries of lights set up by the robots many weeks before. Watching the men, one would have sensed that they moved with a haunting sense of doom, would have known as well that they knew, deep in their inmost hearts, that there was no doom to fear. No definite thing that one could put a finger on and say, this is the thing to fear. No direction that one might point toward and say, doom lies here, waiting to spring upon us.
Just one small thing.
Watches had stopped running. And that was a simple thing for which there must be some simple explanation.
Except, thought Decker, on an alien planet no occurrence, no accident or incident, can be regarded as a simple things for which a simple explanation must necessarily be anticipated. For the matrix of cause and effect, the mathematics of chance, may not hold true on an alien planet as they hold true on Earth.
New Folks' Home: And Other Stories Page 24