Unearthly Neighbors

by Chad Oliver

  There.

  A tremendous tree to the right of the trail, a tree that looked curiously like a California redwood, a tree that had a black opening in it like a cave…

  And a frightened copper face staring out of the hollowness within; two dark eyes peering into the rain.

  Monte held up his hand. “There he is!” he hollered.

  Charlie came up beside him, his pudgy features almost obscured by countless trickles and rivulets of rain. “Let’s grab him and run for it. We can make friends later where it’s dry.”

  Monte smiled and shook his head. It might come to that eventually, but it would be a singularly poor beginning. He stood there with the storm howling around him and desperately tried to come up with something—anything—that would get across the idea that he meant no harm.

  He had never before felt quite so keenly the absolute necessity for language. He was hardly closer to the man in the tree than if he had stayed on Earth.

  Oh, Charlie had worked out a few phrases in one of the native languages and he thought he knew approximately what they meant. But none of the phrases—even assuming that they were correct—went with the situation. It wasn’t the fault of the first expedition; they had planted their mikes and cameras well. It was simply the fact that you just don’t say the right things in casual everyday conversations. A man can go through a lot of days without ever saying, “I am a friend.” He can go through several lifetimes very nicely without ever saying something as useful as: “I am a man from another planet, and I only want to talk to you.”

  The closest thing they had was a sentence that Charlie thought meant something like, “I see that you are awake, and now it is time to eat.”

  That didn’t seem too wildly promising.

  “Why doesn’t he ask us in?” Charlie hollered. “He’s looking right at us.”

  “I don’t need any engraved invitation. Let’s barge on in and see what happens.”

  Monte stepped toward the tree.

  The old man looked out at him with dark, staring eyes. Those eyes, Monte thought, reflected a lifetime of experiences, and all of those experiences were alien to a man from Earth. The man seemed somehow to be of another time as well as another world; a creature of the forests, shy and afraid, ready to panic…

  “Charlie! Give it a try!”

  Charlie Jenike cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed a strange series of sounds; it sounded a bit like singing, although his voice was distinctly unmusical. “I see that you are awake,” he hoped he said in the native tongue, “and now it is time to eat!”

  The old man shrank back into the hollow of the tree, his mouth falling open in astonishment.

  Monte took another step closer.

  Instantly, without any warning, the man bolted.

  He lunged out of his shelter, very fast despite his age, and ran awkwardly, his long arms pumping the air. He came so close that Monte actually touched him as he passed. He scrambled up a tree with amazing agility, wrapping his arms around the trunk and pushing with his feet on the wet bark. When he got up to where the limbs were strong, he threw one questioning glance back down at the two strangers and then leaped gracefully from one limb to another. He used his hands almost like hooks, swinging his body on his long arms in breath-taking arcs. The rain didn’t seem to bother him at all; he moved so fast that he was practically a blur.

  In seconds, he was gone—lost on the roof of the world.

  “Well, Tarzan?”

  Monte stood there in the pouring rain. He was beginning to get a trifle impatient with this interminable game of hide-and-seek.

  “I’m going inside,” he said, taking out his pocket flashlight.

  Charlie eyed the dark cave in the hollow tree. “That thing may not be empty, you know.”

  “I hope it isn’t.”

  “After you, my friend—and watch out for Rover.”

  Monte walked steadily over to the opening in the tree and stepped inside.

  5

  There was a heavy animal smell inside the chamber in the hollow tree, but Monte knew at once that the place was empty. He flashed the light around to make certain, but his eyes only confirmed the evidence of an older, subtler sense. The room—if that was the word for it—felt empty and was empty.

  In fact, it was the emptiest place Monte had ever seen.

  He moved on in, making room for Charlie, and the two men stood there in the welcome dryness, trying to understand what they saw—and what they didn’t see.

  The interior of the trunk of the great tree was hollow, forming a dry chamber some twelve feet in diameter. About ten feet above their heads, smooth wood plugged the tubular shaft, forming a ceiling that reflected their lights.

  The place was a featureless vault made entirely from the living wood of the tree. Even the floor was wood—a worn, brownish wood that was porous enough so that the water that dripped from their clothes seeped away before it had a chance to collect in puddles. The curving walls were a lighter color, almost that of yellow pine, and they were spotlessly clean.

  There was a kind of shelf set into one wall; it was little more than an indentation in the wood. The piece of raw meat that the wolf-thing had taken was on the shelf, and so was the cluster of red berries.

  That was all.

  There was no furniture of any kind. There were no beds, no chairs, no tables. There were no decorations on the walls, no art-work of any sort. There were no tools, no weapons. There were no pots, no bowls, no baskets.

  The place was absolutely barren. There were no clues as to what sort of a man might live there.

  It was just a big hole in a tree: simple, crude, unimpressive.

  And yet…

  Monte looked closely at the walls. “No sign of chopping or cutting.”

  “No. It’s smooth as glass. No trace of charring, either.”

  “How the devil did he make this place?”

  “Like Topsy,” Charlie said, “it just growed.”

  Monte shook his head. “I doubt that. I never saw a hollow tree that looked like this on the inside, did you?”

  “Nope—but then I haven’t been in just a whole hell of a lot of them.”

  Outside, the rain poured down around the tree and the wind moaned through a faraway sky. It was not unpleasant to be in the hollow tree; there was something secure and enduring about the place, as though it had weathered many seasons and many storms.

  But how could a man have lived here and left so few traces of his existence?

  “Maybe he doesn’t live here,” Monte said slowly. “Maybe this is just a sort of temporary camp—a shelter of some kind.”

  Charlie shrugged. There were dark circles around his eyes and he looked very tired. “I’d say that these people have no material culture at all—and that, my friend, doesn’t make sense. You know what this place looks like? It looks like an animal den.”

  “It would—but it feels wrong. Too clean, for one thing. No bones, no debris of any kind. And I’m not at all sure that this is a natural tree.”

  “Supernatural, maybe?”

  “I mean I think it has been shaped somehow.”

  Charlie sighed. “If they can make a tree grow the way they want it to, why can’t they chip out a hunk of flint? It’s crazy. This place gives me the creeps, Monte. Let’s get out of here before we poke our noses into something we really can’t handle.”

  Monte thought it over. It seemed obvious that the man would not return while they were in the tree. Nothing would be gained by parking here indefinitely. But he didn’t like the idea of just pulling out. He was beginning to feel a trifle futile, and it was a new experience for him. He didn’t like it.

  He reached into his pack and took out a good steel knife. He carried it over and placed it on the shelf with the meat and the berries.

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  Monte rubbed at his beard, which was beginning to itch again. “I don’t know. Do you?”

  Charlie didn’t say anything.
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  “We’ve got to do something. And I’d like to see what that guy will make of a real-for-sure tool. I’m going to get one of the boys in here and plant a scanner and a mike before he comes back. Then maybe we’ll see something. I’ll take the responsibility.”

  He cut in his radio and called the sphere. Ace sounded as though he were not exactly having the time of his life bucking the storm above the trees, but he wasn’t in any serious trouble. Monte carefully dictated a report of what had happened, and arranged a rendezvous point at the edge of the forest.

  “Come on,” he said, and stepped back into the rain.

  It was quite dark now, and the forest was hushed and gloomy. The rain had settled down into a gentle patter and the thunder seemed lonely and remote, as though it came from another world. They brushed their way through wet leaves and found the trail. The beams of their flashlights were small and lost in the wilderness of night.

  Monte walked wearily along the path, his damp clothes sticking to his body. He was bone-tired—not so much from physical exertion, he realized, as from the strain of failure. Still, the night air was fresh and cool after the muggy heat of the day, and that was something.

  All forests, he supposed, were pretty much the same at night. He knew that this one, at any rate, was less alien in the darkness. The trees were only trees, flat black shadows that dripped and stirred around him. Occasionally, he could even catch a glimpse of a cloud-streaked sky above him, and once he even saw a star. With only a slight effort of the imagination, he could feel that he was walking through the night-shrouded woods of Earth, perhaps coming home from a fishing trip, and soon he would walk into a village, where lights twinkled along the streets and magic music drifted out of a bar…

  He blinked his eyes and shifted the rifle on his shoulder.

  Steady boy. You’re a helluva long way from Earth.

  It was hard for him to get used to this world. Sirius Nine was just a name, and less than that; it seemed singularly inappropriate. He wondered what the natives called their world. He wished that he knew the names of things. A world was terribly alien, incredibly strange, until it was transformed with names. Names had the power of sorcery; they could change the unknown into the known.

  Tired as he was, Monte was filled with a hard determination he hadn’t known he possessed.

  One day, he’d know those names—or die trying.

  EXTRACT FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF MONTE STEWART:

  This is the fourteenth night I have spent on Sirius Nine. The camp is silent around me, and Louise is already asleep. God knows I’m tired, but I’m wide awake.

  All my life I’ve heard that old one to the effect that when you know the right questions to ask the answers practically hit you in the face. I’ve even said as much to students in that other life of mine. (Space travel is a great cure for smugness. I feel pretty damned ignorant out here. I wonder if I wasn’t getting a mite cocky, back home?)

  Well, I think I know some of the right questions. Here are the obvious ones:

  What was that man we chased doing in the forest by himself? And, if he lives in that hollow tree, does he live there alone? Wherever you find him, man is a social animal—he lives in groups. Families, clans, bands, tribes, nations—the names don’t matter. But a man alone is a very strange thing. And he isn’t the only one, either; we’ve seen others. Where is the group he belongs to? And what kind of a group is it?

  What are these people afraid of? The first expedition did nothing to alarm them. Presumably, they have never seen men like us before—we have given them no reason to believe that we’re dangerous. I’m sure that old man wanted to talk to us—but he just couldn’t make himself do it. Why not? Most primitive peoples, when they meet a new kind of men for the first time, either trot out the gals for a welcome or open up with spears and arrows. These natives don’t do anything at all. Am I missing something here? Or are they just shy? Or what?

  Why don’t these people have any artifacts? I haven’t seen a single tool or weapon of any sort. Don King hasn’t been able to find any artifacts in archeological deposits. What’s the answer? Are they so simple that they don’t even know how to chip flint? If so, they are more technologically primitive than the men who lived on Earth a million years ago.

  Why have they retained the long, ape-like arms of brachiators? Why do they swing through the trees when they can walk reasonably well on the ground? Is this connected in some way with their lack of tools? Are we really dealing here with a bright bunch of apes? And if we are, then how about the language? (Question: Is a bright ape with a language a man? Where do you draw the line? Or do we have to get metaphysical about it?

  And if they are apes, how are we supposed to contact them for the United Nations?)

  What’s the significance of that wolf-thing we saw? Charlie and I saw the man call Rover with a whistle. We saw Rover pick up the meat and carry it off. Later, we saw the meat inside the hollow tree. (Problem: Was the man going to eat it, or was Rover? Apes don’t eat meat under natural conditions.) The man certainly seemed to control Rover. So is Rover a domesticated animal, or what? On Earth, man didn’t domesticate the dog until after he’d used tools for close to a million years. Are there other animals they have domesticated?

  How about that hollow tree? Is it natural, or do the natives shape the growth in some way? If they do, isn’t this an artifact? If they can do that, why don’t they have agriculture?

  Those are some of the right questions.

  I’m waiting for the answers to hit me in the face—but I’m not holding my breath.

  Two days later, the watched pot began to boil.

  First, the old man returned to the hollow tree and found the steel knife.

  Then Ralph Gottschalk and Don King spotted a tree burial.

  And, finally, Tom Stein—who was cruising around with Ace in the reconnaissance sphere—located an entire village that contained at least one hundred natives.

  Monte didn’t know exactly what he had expected the man to do with the knife; he would hardly have been surprised if he had swallowed it. He and Louise stood by the scanner screen and watched intently as the man entered the hollow tree for the first time since Monte and Charlie had left.

  The tree chamber was as Spartan as ever; nothing had changed. The knife was still on the ledge by the meat and the berries. Considering the probable condition of the meat by now, Monte was just as glad that the scanner did not transmit smells.

  The old man stood in the center of the room, his dark eyes peering about cautiously in the half-light. His nose wrinkled in a very human way and he picked up the meat and threw it outside. Then he walked back to the shelf and looked at the knife. He stood there for a long time, a naked old man staring at a gift that must have seemed very strange to him, a gift that had been made light-years away.

  Then he picked up the knife. He held it awkwardly, between his thumb and forefinger, as a man might hold a dead fish by the tail. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it. He got a better grip on the handle and gingerly touched the cutting edge with the fingers of his other hand. He muttered something to himself that the mike didn’t catch, then frowned.

  He walked over to the curving wall and stuck the point of the knife into the wood. He yanked it out again, looked at it, and then shaved a sliver of wood from the wall with the cutting edge. His action left a single raw scar in the polished smoothness of the room.

  “Merc kuprai,” he said distinctly. It was the first time Monte had ever heard the man speak; his voice was low and pleasant.

  “Charlie said that mere was a kind of polysynthetic word,” he whispered to Louise. “It means something like: It is a —. So he’s saying that the knife is a kuprai, whatever that is.”

  “Whatever it is,” Louise said, “it must not be very impressive.”

  The naked man shook his head sadly and tossed the knife back up on the shelf. He did not look at it again. He yawned a little, stretched, and walked out of the chamber. The scanner still caught his b
ack, just beyond the entrance to the tree. He sat down in a small patch of sunlight and promptly went to sleep.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Monte said.

  Louise shrugged, her brown eyes twinkling. “Merc kuprai,” she said.

  “You, dear, can go to the devil.”

  She gave him a quick, warm kiss. “You seem to be oriented toward the nether regions today. Look up! Have faith! Remember that every day in every way—”

  “Cut it out, Lise,” he grinned.

  That was when Ralph Gottschalk came lumbering in like an amiable gorilla. His face was flushed and he was smiling from ear to ear. Since Ralph was hardly the type to get excited over nothing, Monte decided that he must have found not only the missing link but quite possibly the whole chain.

  “Monte, we’ve got one!”

  “Swell. One what?”

  “Confound it, man, a burial! We’ve got us a skeleton.”

  The man’s excitement was contagious, but Monte held a tight rein on himself. It wouldn’t do to go off half-cocked. “Where? You haven’t touched it, have you?”

  “Of course not! Do I look like a sap? But you’ve got to see it! Don and I just found it about an hour ago—it’s not a quarter of a mile from camp. The son of a gun is up in a tree!”

  “Are you sure of what it is?”

  “Of course I’m sure—I climbed up and looked. The bones are in a kind of a nest up there—-a regular flexed tree burial. Man, you ought to see the ulna on that thing! And I’ll tell you this—that mandible may be heavy, but there’s plenty of room for a brain inside that skull. In fact—”

  “Anything in that nest except bones?”

  “Nothing at all. No pots, no pans, no spears, no nothing. Just bones. But you give me an hour with those bones where I can really see ’em and I’ll be able to tell you something for sure about these people!”