The Robot Who Looked Like Me

by Robert Sheckley

  There was a knock on the door, and Colonel Kettelman entered without bothering to be asked, “Looks good down there, hah?” he said.

  “The planetary profile is quite favorable,” Macmillan said stiffly.

  “That’s fine,” Kettelman said, looking uncomprehendingly at the computer tape. “Anything interesting down there?”

  “A great deal,” Macmillan said. “Even a long-distance survey has shown what might well be some unique vegetative structures. Additionally, our bacteria scan shows some anomalies which—”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of stuff,” Kettelman said, evincing the natural indifference a career soldier sometimes feels for bugs and plants. “I meant important stuff like alien armies and space fleets and like that.”

  “There is no sign of any civilization down there,” Macmillan said. “I doubt if we will even find traces of intelligent life.”

  “Well, you can never tell,” Kettelman said hopefully. He was a stocky, barrel-chested ramrod of a man. He was a veteran of the American Assistance Aid Campaigns of ‘34, and had fought as a major in the jungles of western Honduras in the so-called United Fruit War, emerging as a lieutenant colonel. He had received his full colonelcy during the ill-fated New York Insurrection, at which time he had personally led his men in storming the Subtreasury Building, and then had held down the 42nd Street Line against the crack Gay Battalion.

  Utterly fearless, known as a soldier’s soldier, possessing an impeccable combat record, wealthy in his own right, a friend of many U.S. Senators and Texas oilmen, and not unintelligent, he had won the coveted appointment of Commandant of Alien Military Operations aboard the Jenny Lind.

  Now he awaited the long-desired moment when he would lead his combat team of twenty Marines onto the surface of the fifth planet. And, despite the instruments readings, Kettelman knew that anything might be down there waiting to strike and maim and kill, unless he did so first, as he planned to do.

  “There is one thing,” Macmillan said. “We have detected a spacecraft on the surface of the planet.”

  “Ah!” Kettelman said. “I knew there’d be something! You spotted only one ship?”

  “Yes. A small one, displacing less than a twentieth the volume of our craft, and apparently unarmed.”

  “That’s what they’d like you to believe, of course,” said Kettelman. “I wonder where the others are.”

  “What others?”

  “The other alien spaceships and crews and ground-to-space weapon-systems and all the rest of it, of course.”

  “The presence of one alien spacecraft does not logically imply any other alien spacecraft,” Captain Macmillan said.

  “No? Listen, Mac, I learned my logic in the jungles of Honduras,” Kettelman said. “The logic there was, if you found one runt with a machete you could be sure of finding another fifty or so hiding in the bushes waiting to cut your ears off if you gave them a chance. You could get killed if you waited around for logical inferences.”

  “The circumstances were somewhat different,” Captain Macmillan pointed out.

  “So what does that matter?”

  Macmillan winced and turned away. Talking with Kettelman was painful for him, and he avoided it as much as he could. The Colonel was a disputatious individual, stubborn, easily driven to wrath, and possessed of many positive opinions, most of which were founded upon a bedrock of nearly invincible ignorance. The Captain knew that the antipathy between them was mutual. He was well aware that Kettelman considered him an indecisive and ineffective person except perhaps in his special scientific areas.

  Luckily, their areas of command were sharply defined and delineated. Or they had been to date.

  4

  Detringer and Ichor stood in a clump of trees and watched as the large alien spacecraft settled down to a faultless landing.

  “Whoever is piloting that ship,” Detringer said, “is a master pilot beyond compare. I would like to meet such a being.”

  “Doubtless you will get your chance,” Ichor said. “It is surely no accident that, given the entire surface of this planet to choose from, they have elected to put down almost beside us.”

  “They must have detected us, of course,” Detringer said. “And they must have decided to take a bold line; exactly as I would do, given their position.”

  “That makes sense,” Ichor said. “But what will you do, given your position?”

  “Why, I’ll take a bold line, of course.”

  “This is an historic moment,” Ichor said. “A representative of the Ferlang People will soon meet the first intelligent aliens our race has ever encountered. How ironic that this opportunity should be vouchsafed to a criminal!”

  “The opportunity, as you call it, was forced upon me, I assure you that I did not seek it. And by the way: I think we will say nothing about my little differences with the Ferlang authorities.”

  “Do you mean that you are going to lie about who you are and what you are doing here?”

  “That is a harsh way of putting it,” Detringer said. “Let us say that I am going to spare my people the embarrassment of having a criminal as their first emissary to an alien race.”

  “Well...I suppose that will be all right,” Ichor said.

  Detringer looked hard at his mechanical servant. “It seems to me, Ichor, that you do not entirely approve of my expediencies. “

  “No, sir, I do not. But please understand: I am faithful to you without cavil. I would sacrifice myself for your welfare without hesitation. I will serve you unto death, and beyond, if that is possible. But loyalty to a person does not affect one’s religious, social, and ethical beliefs. I love you, sir; but I cannot approve of you.”

  “Well, then, I am warned,” Detringer said. “And now back to our alien friends. A port is opening. They are coming out.”

  “Soldiers are coming out,” Ichor said.

  5

  The new arrivals were bipedal, and also had two upper limbs. Each individual had only one head, one mouth and one nose, like Detringer himself. They had no visible tails or antennae. They were obviously soldiers, to judge by the equipment they carried. Each individual was heavily laden with what could be deduced as projectile weapons, gas and explosive grenades, beam projectors, short-range atomics, and much else besides. They wore personal armor and their heads were encased in clear plastic bubbles. There were twenty of them so equipped, and one, obviously their leader, who had no visible weaponry but carried a sort of whippy stick—probably a badge of office—with which he tapped himself on the upper left pedal appendage as he marched at the head of his soldiers.

  The soldiers advanced, well spread out, taking momentary concealment behind natural objects, and posturally demonstrating an attitude of extreme suspicion and wariness. The officer walked directly forward without taking cover, his posture evidently portraying nonchalance, bravado, or stupidity.

  “I don’t think we should skulk around these bushes any longer,” Detringer said. “It is time for us to go forward and meet them with the dignity that befits an emissary of the Ferlang people.”

  He stepped forward immediately and strode toward the soldiers, followed by Ichor. Detringer was magnificent at that moment. Amazingly enough, he looked just like the Lithuanian Ambassador Prokolchuff being presented for the first time at the court of Louis XIV.

  6

  Everybody on the Jenny Lind knew about the alien spacecraft only a mile away. So it should have proven no surprise when the alien ship turned out to have an alien aboard who was at that moment advancing boldly to meet Kettelman’s Marines.

  But it did prove a surprise. No one was prepared to meet a genuine, honest-to-god, weird-looking, live-and-kicking alien. It opened up too many imponderables. To name just one what do you say when you finally meet an alien? How do you live up to the awesome historicity of the moment? Whatever you come up with is going to sound like, “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” People are going to laugh at you and your words—pompous or banal—for centuries. Meeting
an alien has enormous potential for embarrassment.

  Both Captain Macmillan and Colonel Kettelman were feverishly rehearsing opening lines and rejecting them, and half-hoping that the C31 Translating Computer would blow a transistor. The Marines were praying, “Jesus, I hope he don’t try to talk to me.” Even the ship’s cook was thinking, “Christ, I suppose first thing out he’ll want to know all about what we eat.”

  But Kettelman was in the lead. He thought, “To hell with this, I’m sure as hell not going to be the first to talk to him.” He slowed down to let his men go ahead of him. But his men stopped in their tracks, waiting for the Colonel, because they save as hell weren’t going to be the first to talk to him. Captain Macmillan, standing just behind the Marines, also stopped, and wished that he hadn’t worn his full-dress uniform complete with decorations. He was the most resplendent man on the field and he just knew that the alien was going to walk straight over to him and begin talking.

  All of the Terrans stood stock-still. The alien continued to advance. Embarrassment gave way to panic in the Terran ranks. The Marines looked at the alien and thought, ‘‘Jesus, what’s happening?” They wavered, obviously on the verge of flight. Kettelman saw this and thought, “They are going to disgrace the Corps and me!”

  The realization sobered him. Suddenly he remembered the newsmen. Yes, the newsmen! Let the newsmen do it, that’s what they were paid for!

  “Platoon, halt!” he called, then set his men at port arms. The alien stopped, perhaps to see what was going on.

  “Captain!” he called, “I suggest that for this historic moment we unleash—I mean bring forth—the newsmen!”

  “An excellent suggestion!” Captain Macmillan said, and gave the order to take the newsmen out of Stasis Freeze and bring them forth immediately.

  Then everybody waited until the newsmen came.

  7

  The newsmen were laid out in a special room. A sign on the door read: “STASIS FREEZE. No Admittance Except to Authorized

  Personnel.” Hand-lettered beneath that were the words: “Not to be Awakened Except for Top Story.”

  Within the room, each stretched out on his own cot, were four newsmen and one newswoman. They had all agreed that it would be a waste of subjective time to live through the uneventful years required for the Jenny Lind to reach any destination at all. So they had all agreed to go into Stasis Freeze, with the understanding that they would be resuscitated immediately if anything newsworthy occurred. They left the decision as to what constituted news to Captain Macmillan, who had worked as a reporter on the Phoenix Sun during his junior and sophomore years at the University of Taos.

  Ramon Delgado, the Scots engineer with the strange life story, received the order to wake up the newspeople. He made the necessary adjustments in their individual life-support systems. In fifteen minutes they were all somewhat groggily conscious and demanding to know what was going on.

  “We’ve landed on a planet,” Delgado said. “It’s an Earth-type place, but seems to have no civilizations, nor any indigenous intelligent beings.”

  “You woke us up for that?” asked Quebrada of the Southeastern News Syndicate.

  “There’s more,” Delgado said. “There is also an alien spaceship on this planet, and we have contacted an intelligent alien.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Millicent Lopez of Women’s Wear Daily and others. “Did you happen to notice what this alien is wearing?”

  “Could you ascertain how intelligent he is?” asked Mateos Upmann of the N. Y. Times and the L. A. Times.

  “What has he said so far?” asked Angel Potemkin of NBC-CBS-ABC.

  “He hasn’t said anything,” Engineer Delgado said. “Nobody has spoken to him yet.”

  “Do you mean to say,” said E.K. Quetzala of the Western News Syndicate, “that the first alien ever encountered by the people of Earth is standing out there like a dope and nobody is interviewing him?”

  The newspeople rushed out of the Stasis Freeze room, many of them still trailing tubes and wires, paused only to pick up their cassette recorders in the Reporters’ Ready Room and hurried outside.

  Once outside, blinking in strong sunlight, three of them picked up the C31 Translating Computer. They all rushed forward, brushing Marines aside, and surrounded the alien.

  Upmann turned the C31 on, took one of its microphones and handed another to the alien, who hesitated a moment, then took it.

  “Testing, one, two, three,” Upmann said. “Did you understand what I said?”

  “You said, ‘Testing, one, two, three,’“ Detringer said, and everyone gave a sigh of relief for the first words had finally been said to Earth’s first alien, and Upmann was going to look like a real idiot in the history books. But Upmann didn’t care what he looked like as long as he was in the history books, so he went right on interviewing, and so did the others.

  Detringer had to tell what he ate, how long and how often he slept, his sex life and its deviations from the Ferlang norm, his first impressions of Earthmen, his personal philosophy, how many wives he had and how he got along with them, how many children he had, how it felt to be him, his occupation, his hobbies, his interest or lack of interest in gardening, his recreations, whether he ever got intoxicated, and in what manner, his extramarital sexual practices, if any, what sort of sports he engaged in, his views on interstellar amity between intelligent races, the advantages or disadvantages of having a tail, and much more.

  Captain Macmillan, now feeling a little ashamed of himself for neglecting his official duties, came forward and rescued the alien, who was bravely trying to explain the inexplicable and making heavy work of it.

  Colonel Kettelman came, too, for he was after all in charge of security and it was his duty to penetrate deeply into the nature and intentions of the alien.

  There was a short clash of wills between these two officials concerning who should have the first meeting with Detringer, or whether it should be held jointly. It was finally decided that Macmillan, as symbolic representative of the Earth peoples, should meet first with the alien. But it was understood that this would be a purely ceremonial meeting. Kettelman would meet later, but it was understood that that meeting would be action-oriented.

  That solved matters nicely, and Detringer went off with Macmillan. The Marines returned to the ship, stacked their arms and went back to polishing their boots.

  Ichor stayed behind. The news representative from Midwest News Briefs had grabbed him for an interview. This representative,

  Melchior Carrerra, was also commissioned to do articles for Popular Mechanics, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Automation Engineers’ Digest. It was an interesting interview.

  8

  Detringer’s talk with Captain Macmillan went very well. They shared relativistic outlooks on most things, both possessed natural tact, and each was willing to attempt the sympathetic understanding of a viewpoint not his own. They liked each other, and Captain Macmillan felt with some astonishment that Detringer was less alien to him than was Colonel Kettelman.

  The interview with Kettelman, which followed immediately afterward, was a different matter. Kettelman, after brief courtesies, got right down to business.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Detringer had been prepared for the necessity of explaining his situation. He said, “I am an Advance Scout for the spatial forces of Ferlang. I was blown far off my course by a storm, and put down here when my fuel ran out.”

  “So you’re marooned,” Kettelman said.

  “I am indeed. Temporarily, of course. As soon as my people can spare the necessary equipment and personnel, they will send a relief ship out to pick me up. But that would take quite a while. So if you wouldn’t mind letting me have a little fuel, I would be deeply grateful.”

  “Hmmm,” said Colonel Kettelman.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hmmm,” said the C31 Translating Computer, “is a polite sound made by Terrans to denote a short period of si
lent cogitation.”

  “That’s a lot of double-talk,” Kettelman said. “‘Hmmm’ doesn’t mean anything at all. You say that you need fuel?”

  “Yes, Colonel, I do,” Detringer said. “From various external signs I believe that our propulsion systems are comparable.”

  “The propulsion system of the Jenny Lind—” began the C31.

  “Wait a minute, that’s classified,” Kettelman said.

  “No, it’s not,” said the C31. “Everyone on Earth has been using the system for the last twenty years, and it was officially declassified last year.”

  “Hmmm,” said the Colonel, and looked unhappy as the C31 explained the ship’s propulsion system.

  “Just as I thought,” Detringer said. “I won’t even have to modify the formula. I can use your fuel just as it is. If you can spare any, that is.”

  “Oh, there’s no difficulty there,” Kettelman said. “We’ve got plenty. But I think we have a few things to talk over first.”

  “Like what?” Detringer asked.

  “Like whether it would serve the interests of our security to give you the fuel.”

  “I fail to see any problem,” Detringer said.

  “It should be obvious. Ferlang is obviously a highly advanced technological civilization. As such, you pose a potential threat to us.”

  “My dear Colonel, our planets are in different galaxies.”

  “So what’ We Americans have always fought our wars as far from home as possible. Maybe you Ferlangs do the same. What does distance matter, as long as you can get there at all?”

  Detringer controlled his temper and said, “We are peaceful people, defense-minded, and deeply interested in interstellar amity and cooperation.”

  “So you say,” Kettelman said. “But how can I be sure?”

  “Colonel,” Detringer said, “aren’t you being a little bit...” He fumbled for the word, then supplied it in his own language. “Ur-muguahtt.”