Aliens from Analog

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  Jerry eBooks

  No copyright 2012 by Jerry eBooks

  No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.

  Copyright © 1983 by Davis Publications, Inc.

  FIRST PRINTING

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

  80-69078

  Printed in the U. S. A.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Murray Leinster

  FIRST CONTACT

  Alison Tellure

  GREEN-EYED LADY

  Lawrence O'Donnell

  THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

  Stanley Schmidt

  ...AND COMFORT TO THE ENEMY

  Erick Frank Russell

  NOW INHALE

  Katherine Maclean

  UNHUMAN SACRIFICE

  Paul Ash

  BIG SWORD

  Poul Anderson

  WINGS OF VICTORY

  Fredic Brown

  THE WAVERIES

  Eric Frank Russell

  "HOBBYIST"

  Marc Steigler

  PETALS OF ROSE

  About the Editor

  Last year a movie called E.T. did something new for a large segment of the American public: it got their sympathies and emotions thoroughly wrapped up in the fate of a nonhuman being from a distant world. Moviegoers had met aliens before, in such films as War of the Worlds, but seldom as fellow creatures with wants and motivations with which humans could empathize. To science fiction readers, on the other hand, the new element in E.T. was not new at all, for the science fiction published in magazines like Analog (formerly called Astounding) has long explored a broad spectrum of possibilities for alien life and intelligence. In the best of these explorations it was taken for granted that aliens, like us, would have thoughts and feelings that made no less sense than ours—though it’s important to realize that they might make a very different kind of sense. As former editor John W. Campbell used to challenge his writers, “Show me a creature that thinks as well as a man—but not like a man.”

  Until recently, hardly anybody except science fiction writers spent serious thought on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Since human beings have begun venturing beyond the planet of their birth, and recognizing that other planets might well have given birth to other forms with comparable capabilities, interest in the subject has spread considerably. It has even become a matter of some practical importance, since our space probes—or somebody else’s—could very well lead to direct contact between us and Someone Else.

  Many of the stories in this small sampling of “aliens from Analog” are, in one way or another, about contact. The first stories about aliens were contact stories, but they tended pretty uniformly to show contact on one race or the other’s home world, ending in a fight for survival and supremacy; Murray Leinster’s tale of a meeting in space, with a bloodless and mutually beneficial solution to the resulting problems, was a real first. The nocturnal beings in. And Comfort to the Enemy” grew out of John W. Campbell’s and my efforts to imagine a civilization founded on such different principles from our own that we would not even recognize it as a civilization until too late; ironically, it now appears, just a few years later, that we may be starting down a similar road ourselves. Katherine MacLean shows how perfectly logical customs of one species may seem shocking and cruel to another whose customs have a different biological basis—and how failure to understand that fact can lead to great harm through the best of intentions. Marc Stiegler uncovers another aspect of such contrasts in his haunting story of urgent cooperation between species radically different not only in the character but in the lengths of their lives.

  But contact and its impact on us are not the sole interest in these stories; the aliens themselves are as varied and intriguing as their interactions with others. Alison Tel- lure’s entry here (one of an ongoing series of consistently high quality) tackles the daring challenge of telling a story entirely of interaction among truly alien aliens, admitting no human participants or even observers. Some of the beings you’ll meet here are as truly foreign as Wink and her God, while others are as kindred spirits as those in “First Contact.” Physically, they’re as diverse as Paul Ash’s “Big Sword” (whose name may be a bit misleading); Fredric Brown’s immaterial but hardly ignorable “waveries”; and the Ythrians, Poul Anderson’s answer (about which you can read more in his novel The People of the Wind) to the challenge of how to make an intelligent winged being that could really exist.

  Science fiction writers (and, more recently, scientists) sometimes like to argue about whether alien intelligences, if they exist at all, might not operate in such utterly unexpected ways that we would find them totally incomprehensible. My strong suspicion is that an alien intelligence, like any other process in nature, can be incomprehensible only as long as you don’t know the premises and logical principles upon which it is based. Once you understand those, all else follows—if you are willing to make the effort to follow the alien logic carefully to its conclusions. Alien as even Alison Tellure’s creations are, for example, they make sense when we look at them through their own eyes. (Who knows? With enough such effort, we humans might even learn to understand each other!)

  In very recent times, something new has crept into scientific debate about extraterrestrials. Since a good deal of evidence suggests that life and intelligence should arise fairly often, and contact and even travel seem easier than we used to think, why haven’t we heard from anybody yet? Could it be that we really are alone in the universe, after all? Well, it could be—but the case is far from closed, and those scientists who have already assumed that “The Great Silence” means nobody is out there may be jumping the gun. It may very well be that their imaginations have simply been too limited in considering alternative explanations. For a thorough and imaginative discussion of how the possibilities look today, you might be interested in David Brin’s article on “Xenology,” in the May 1983 Analog. Brin is both a science fiction writer and an astrophysicist; Analog, I can’t resist mentioning, is a monthly source of such thought-provoking articles, as well as new stories like these.

  My own hunch, even as scientists puzzle over “The Great Silence,” is that it would still be most surprising if we were really unique. It will be a long time before we’re sure, and as long as there’s still evidence to be collected, the possibilities are still out there—and even more diverse than we’ve yet imagined. Since at least some of them will likely turn out to approximate reality, maybe we’d better keep devoting some of our thought to this kind of speculation. It may be good practice—and it’s certainly fun.

  Stanley Schmidt

  I

  Tommy Dort went into the captain’s room with his last pair of stereophotos and said:

  “I’m through, sir. These are the last two pictures I can take.”

  He handed over the photographs and looked with professional interest at the visiplates which showed all space outside the ship. Subdued, deep-red lighting indicated the controls and such instruments as the quartermaster on duty needed for navigation of the spaceship Lianvabon. There was a deeply cushioned control chair. There was the little gadget of oddly angled mirrors-remote descendant of the back-view mirrors of twentieth-century motorists-which allowed a view of all the visiplates without turning the head. And there were the huge plates which were so much more satisfactory for a direct view of space.

  The Lianvabon was a long way from home. The plates, which showed every star of visual magnitude and could be stepped up to any desired magnification, portrayed stars of every imaginable degree of brilliance, in the startlingly different c
olors they show outside of atmosphere. But every one was unfamiliar. Only two constellations could be recognized as seen from Earth, and they were shrunken and distorted. The Milky Way seemed vaguely out of place. But even such oddities were minor compared to a sight in the forward plates.

  There was a vast, vast mistiness ahead. A luminous mist. It seemed motionless. It took a long time for any appreciable nearing to appear in the vision plates, though the spaceship’s velocity indicator showed an incredible speed. The mist was the Crab Nebula, six light-years long, three and a half light-years thick, with outward-reaching members that in the telescopes of Earth gave it some resemblance to the creature for which it was named. It was a cloud of gas, infinitely tenuous, reaching half again as far as from Sol to its nearest neighbor-sun. Deep within it burned two stars; a double star; one component the familiar yellow of the sun of Earth, the other an unholy white.

  Tommy Dort said meditatively:

  “We’re heading into a deep, sir?”

  The skipper studied the last two plates of Tommy’s taking, and put them aside. He went back to his uneasy contemplation of the vision plates ahead. The Lianvabon was decelerating at full force. She was a bare half light-year from the nebula. Tommy’s work was guiding the ship’s course, now, but the work was done. During all the stay of the exploring ship in the nebula, Tommy Dort would loaf. But he’d more than paid his way so far.

  He had just completed a quite unique first-a complete photographic record of the movement of a nebula during a period of four thousand years, taken by one individual with the same apparatus and with control exposures to detect and record any systematic errors. It was an achievement in itself worth the journey from Earth. But in addition, he had also recorded four thousand years of the history of a double star, and four thousand years of the history of a star in the act of degenerating into a white dwarf.

  It was not that Tommy Dort was four thousand years old. He was, actually, in his twenties. But the Crab Nebula is four thousand light-years from Earth, and the last two pictures had been taken by light which would not reach Earth until the sixth millennium A.D. On the way here-at speeds incredible multiples of the speed of light-Tommy Dort had recorded each aspect of the nebula by the light which had left it from forty centuries since to a bare six months ago.

  The Lianvabon bored on through space. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the incredible luminosity crept across the vision plates. It blotted out half the universe from view. Before was glowing mist, and behind was a star-studded emptiness. The mist shut off three-fourths of all the stars. Some few of the brightest shone dimly through it near its edge, but only a few. Then there was only an irregularly shaped patch of darkness astern against which stars shone unwinking. The Lianvabon dived into the nebula, and it seemed as if it bored into a tunnel of darkness with walls of shining fog.

  Which was exactly what the spaceship was doing. The most distant photographs of all had disclosed structural features in the nebula. It was not amorphous. It had form. As the Lianvabon drew nearer, indications of structure grew more distinct, and Tommy Dort had argued for a curved approach for photographic reasons. So the spaceship had come up to the nebula on a vast logarithmic curve, and Tommy had been able to take successive photographs from slightly different angles and get stereopairs which showed the nebula in three dimensions; which disclosed billowings and hollows and an actually complicated shape. In places, the nebula displayed convolutions like those of a human brain. It was into one of those hollows that the spaceship now plunged. They had been called “deeps” by analogy with crevasses in the ocean floor. And they promised to be useful.

  The skipper relaxed. One of a skipper’s functions, nowadays, is to think of things to worry about, and then to worry about them. The skipper of the Lianvabon was conscientious. Only after a certain instrument remained definitely nonregistering did he ease himself back in his seat.

  “It was just hardly possible,” he said heavily, “that those deeps might be nonluminous gas. But they’re empty. So we’ll be able to use overdrive as long as we’re in them.”

  It was a light-year-and-a-half from the edge of the nebula to the neighborhood of the double star which was its heart. That was the problem. A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a comet’s tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive-above the speed of light does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. It needs pure emptiness, such as exists between the stars. But the Lianvabon could not do much in this expanse of mist if it was limited to speeds a merely hard vacuum would permit.

  The luminosity seemed to close in behind the spaceship, which slowed and slowed and slowed. The overdrive went off with the sudden pinging sensation which goes all over a person when the overdrive field is released.

  Then, almost instantly, bells burst into clanging, strident uproar all through the ship. Tommy was almost deafened by the alarm bell which rang in the captain’s room before the quarter master shut it off with a flip of his hand. But other bells could be heard ringing throughout the rest of the ship, to be cut off as automatic doors closed one by one.

  Tommy Dort stared at the skipper. The skipper’s hands clenched. He was up and staring over the quartermaster’s shoulder. One indicator was apparently having convulsions. Others strained to record their findings. A spot on the diffusedly bright mistiness of a bowquartering visiplate grew brighter as the automatic scanner focused on it. That was the direction of the object which had sounded collision-alarm. But the object locator itself-according to its reading, there was one solid object some eighty thousand miles away-an object of no great size. But there was another object whose distance varied from extreme range to zero, and whose size shared its impossible advance and retreat.

  “Step up the scanner,” snapped the skipper.

  The extra-bright spot on the scanner rolled outward, obliterating the undifferentiated image behind it. Magnification increased. But nothing appeared. Absolutely nothing. Yet the radio locator insisted that something. monstrous and invisible made lunatic dashes toward the Lianvabon, at speeds which inevitably implied collision, and then fled coyly away at the same rate.

  The visiplate went up to maximum magnification. Still nothing. The skipper ground his teeth. Tommy Dort said meditatively:

  “D’you know, sir, I saw something like this on a liner of the Earth-Mars run once, when we were being located by another ship. Their locator beam was the same frequency as ours, and every time it hit, it registered like something monstrous, and solid.”

  “That,” said the skipper savagely, “is just what’s happening now. There’s something like a locator beam on us. We’re getting that beam and our, own echo besides. But the other ship’s invisible! Who is out here in an invisible ship with locator devices? Not men, certainly!”

  He pressed the button in his sleeve communicator and snapped:

  “Action stations! Man all weapons! Condition of extreme alert in all departments immediately!”

  His hands closed and unclosed. He stared again at the visiplate, which showed nothing but a formless brightness.

  “Not men?” Tommy Dort straightened sharply. “You mean-“

  “How many solar systems in our galaxy?” demanded the skipper bitterly. “How many planets fit for life? And how many kinds of life could there be? If this ship isn’t from Earth-and it isn’t-it has a crew that isn’t human. And things that aren’t human but are up to the level of deep-space travel in their civilization could mean anything!”

  The skipper’s hands were actually shaking. He would not have talked so freely before a member of his own crew, but Tommy Dort was of the observation staff. And even a skipper whose duties include worrying may sometimes need desperately to unload his worries. Sometimes, too, it helps to think aloud.

  “Something like this has been talked about and speculated about for years,” he said softly. “Mathematically, it’s been an odds-on bet that somewhere in our galaxy there’d be another race with, a civilization equal to or further advanced than ours. Nobod
y could ever guess where or when we’d meet them. But it looks like we’ve done it now!”

  Tommy’s eyes were very bright.

  “D’you suppose they’ll be friendly, sir?”

  The skipper glanced at the distance indicator. The phantom object still made its insane, nonexistent swoops toward and away from the Lianvabon. The secondary indication of an object at eighty thousand miles stirred ever so slightly.

  “It’s moving,” he said curtly. “Heading for us. Just what we’d do if a strange spaceship appeared in our hunting grounds! Friendly? Maybe! We’re going to try to contact them. We have to. But I suspect this is the end of this expedition. Thank God for the blasters!”

  The blasters are those beams of ravening destruction which take care of recalcitrant meteorites in a spaceship’s course when the deflectors can’t handle them. They are not designed as weapons, but they can serve as pretty good ones. They can go into action at five thousand miles, and draw on the entire power output of a whole ship. With automatic aim and a traverse of five degrees, a ship like the Lianvabon can come very close to blasting a hole through a small-sized asteroid which gets in its way. But not on overdrive, of course.

  Tommy Dort had approached the bow-quartering visiplate. Now he jerked his head around.

  “Blasters, sir? What for?”

  The skipper grimaced at the empty visiplate.

  “Because we don’t know what they’re like and can’t take a chance! I know!” he added bitterly. “We’re going to make contacts and try to find out all we can about them-especially where they come from. I suppose we’ll try to make friends-but we haven’t much chance. We can’t trust them a fraction of an inch. We’ daren’t! They’ve locators. Maybe they’ve tracers better than any we have. Maybe they could trace us all the way home without our knowing it! We can’t risk a nonhuman race knowing where Earth is unless we’re sure of them! And how can we be sure? They could come to trade, of course-or they could swoop down on overdrive with a battle fleet, that could wipe us out before we knew what happened. We wouldn’t know which to expect, or when!”