Unearthly Neighbors

by Chad Oliver

  Louise touched his arm. “Come on, Monte! Let’s go.”

  “I’d better have a look,” Monte agreed. “Lead the way, Ralph.”

  Ralph charged off, stiff mumbling to himself. He ploughed through the scattered tents of the camp, crossed the clearing, and plunged into a stand of trees at an impatient trot. Monte was amazed at the big man’s agility; the tug of the gravity and the enervating effects of the damp heat did not combine to make a sprint through the forest his idea of a swell time. Louise seemed to be taking it well enough, however, so he couldn’t afford to say anything about it.

  Don King was waiting for them at the base of a tall tree. Monte wiped the sweat out of his eyes and was annoyed to notice that Don looked as natty as ever.

  “Hello, Don. Ralph tells me that you two have nosed out a burial.”

  Don pointed. “Right up there, boss. See that thing that looks like a nest on that big limb? No—the other side, right close to the tree trunk.”

  “I see it,” Louise said.

  Monte examined it as well as he could from where he stood. It looked very much like a nest that might have been made by a large bird, although it seemed to be made mostly of bark. He chewed on his lower lip. If he could just get his hands on those bones…

  “Well, Monte? What do you say?”

  Monte sighed. “You know what I have to say, Ralph. It’s no go. We can’t move those bones.”

  Don King swore under his breath. “It’s the first solid lead we’ve gotten! What’s the big idea?”

  Monte put his hands on his hips and stuck out his bearded jaw. The accumulated frustrations of this job were beginning to get him on edge. “In case you haven’t heard,” he said evenly, “we are trying our feeble best to make friends with these people. It would seem to me that desecrating one of their graves would be a fine way of not going about it.”

  “Oh Lord,” Don groaned. “Next you’ll be telling me that those bones were probably somebody’s mother.”

  “Not necessarily. They might just be somebody’s old man. But I haven’t got the slightest doubt that we’re being watched all the time. I’d like to have those bones just as much as you would—maybe more. But we’re not going to steal them—not yet, anyway. It may come to that. But it hasn’t yet. Until I say otherwise, the bones stay there. Understand?”

  Don King didn’t say anything. He looked disgusted.

  “I guess he’s right,” Ralph said slowly. “Sometimes we have a tendency to forget what those bones mean to people. You remember that joker in Mexico in the old days who tried to buy a body right at the funeral? He almost wound up in a box himself.”

  “Nuts,” Don said.

  Even Louise looked disappointed.

  “Let’s go on back to camp,” Monte said, none too happy himself. “Those bones won’t run away. They’ll still be there when the time is right.”

  “When will that be?” Don asked, running a hand through his sandy hair.

  “I’ll let you know,” Monte said grimly.

  It was indeed fortunate, in view of the general morale, that the reconnaissance sphere landed when it did with the big news. The usually reserved Tom Stein popped out like a jack-in-the-box, just as excited as Ralph had been about die tree burial. His pale blue eyes flashed behind his thick glasses and he even forgot to be analytical.

  “Ace and I found a whole bunch of ’em about ten miles north of here,” he said. “It must be the main local village or something—at least a hundred of them. They’re living in caves. We saw kids and everything. How about that?”

  “That’s wonderful, Tom,” Monte said. “Maybe we can do some good with them. Maybe if we catch a lot of ’em in one place…” He thought for a moment. “Tomorrow we’re going to take that recon sphere and set it down right smack in the middle of those caves. We’re going to make those people talk if we have to give them the third degree.”

  “Hey, Janice!” Tom yelled to his wife. “Did you hear what I found? There’s a whole bunch of ’em…”

  Monte smiled.

  Things were looking a little better.

  An alien yellow moon rode high over the dark screen of the trees and the orange firelight threw leaping black shadows across the flat surfaces of the tents.

  Monte, lying on his back on his cot, understood for the first time that the old saying about feeling invisible eyes staring at you was literally true. He knew that the camp was ringed with eyes, eyes that probed and stared and evaluated. It was not a pleasant feeling, but it was the way he had wanted it to be. Indeed, the main reason for establishing the camp in the clearing had been to give the natives a chance to size them up. He hoped they liked what they saw.

  Ralph Gottschalk, his back propped up against a stump, was strumming the guitar he had insisted on bringing from Earth. He and Don King—who had a surprisingly good voice—were singing snatches of various old songs: John Henry, When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again, San Antonio Rose, Wabash Cannonball. As was usually the case, they didn’t quite know all the words, which made for a varied if somewhat incomplete repertoire.

  It was good to hear the old songs; they were a link with home. And, somehow, the whole scene was oddly reassuring. It was all so familiar, and at the same time so forever new: the dance of the fire, the distant stars, the singing voices. How many men and women had gathered around how many fires to sing how many songs since man was first born? Perhaps, in the final analysis, it was moments like this that were the measure of man; no one, on such a night, could believe that man was wholly evil.

  And the natives of Sirius Nine? Did they too have their songs, and of what did they sing?

  “It’s beautiful,” Louise said, sharing his mood as always.

  Monte left his cot and went to her. He held her in his arms and kissed her hair. They did not speak; they had said all the words in the long-ago years, and now there was no need for words. Their love was so much a part of their lives that it was a natural, unquestioned power. There was too little love on any world, in any universe. They treasured each other, and were unashamed.

  Tomorrow, there would be the caves and the natives and the curious problems of men that filled the daylight hours.

  For tonight, there was love—and that was enough.

  6

  The gray reconnaissance sphere floated through the sky like a strange metallic bubble in the depths of an alien sea. The white furnace of the sun burned away the morning mists, leaving the vault of the sky clean and blue as though it had been freshly created the night before.

  “There it is,” Tom Stein said, pointing. “See? They’re starting to come out now.”

  Ace Reid, unbidden, began to take the sphere down.

  Far below them, Monte could see a panorama that might have been transmitted from the dawn of time. There was a sun-washed canyon that trenched its way through eroded walls of brown rock, and a stream of silver-streaked water that snaked its way across the canyon floor. Reddish-green brush lined the banks of the stream, and it looked cool and inviting. (Old habits and patterns of thought died hard; Monte caught himself wondering whether or not the fishing was any good down there.) At the head of the canyon, not far from the leaping white spray of a waterfall, there was a jumbled escarpment of gray and brown rock. The face of the rock was pockmarked with the dark cave-eyes of tunnels and rock shelters. There was even a curl of blue smoke rising from the mouth of one of the caves, which was the first real evidence of fire that Monte had seen among the natives.

  He could see the people clearly, like toy soldiers deployed in a miniature world. There were men and women in front of the caves and on the steep paths that wound down to the canyon floor. Three or four kids were already down by the stream, splashing in the water. The people must have seen the sphere, which was plainly visible in the blue morning sky, but they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to it.

  “Look good, Charlie?”

  The linguist smiled. “If they’ll only say something.”

  Monte turned to A
ce. “Set her down.”

  “Where?”

  “Just as close to that cliff as you can get. Try not to squash anybody, but let ’em feel the breeze. I’m a mite tired of being ignored.”

  Ace grinned. “I’ll park this crate right on their outhouse.”

  The gray sphere started down.

  They shaved the canyon walls and landed directly below the cave entrances. Monte unfastened the hatch and climbed out. The brown rock walls of the canyon seemed higher than they had looked from above, rearing up over his head like mountains. The blue sky seemed far away. He could hear the chuckling gurgle of the stream and feel the gentle stir of the wind on his face. He stood there by the metal sphere and the others joined him.

  Suddenly, he was almost overpowered by a feeling of strangeness. It wasn’t this world that was strange, nor was it the natives who were all around him. It was himself, and it was Tom and Charlie and Ace, with their stubby arms and their layers of clothing. And it was the gray metal sphere they stood beside, a monstrous artificial thing in this valley of stone and water and living plants…

  The people did not react to their presence. They seemed to freeze, neither coming closer nor attempting to get away. They just stood where they were, watching.

  What was the matter with them? Didn’t they have any curiosity at all? Monte began to doubt his own knowledge; he wondered whether all of his training and all of his experience had been any good at all.

  Me, the expert on man! I might as well be a caterpillar.

  Then, at last, a child moved a little way down the trail from one of the caves. He pointed at the sphere and laughed—a high, delighted giggle. The people began to move again, going on about their business—whatever that may have been. They were so close that Monte could practically reach out and touch them, and yet he felt as though he were watching them from across some stupendous, uncrossable gulf. He simply didn’t get them, didn’t understand what he was seeing. The natives had nothing; they lived in caves and hollow trees. Their activities seemed aimless to him; they didn’t seem to do anything that had any purpose to it. They appeared unperturbed, and worse, incurious.

  Yet somehow, they did not give him an impression of primitiveness. (He recognized that that was a weasel word, but he could only think in terms of the words and concepts he knew.) It was rather that they were remote, detached, alien. They lived in a world that was perceived differently, where things had different values…

  An old man, considerably older than the one they had tracked to the hollow tree, walked with difficulty down the trail and stood there just above the sphere. He blinked at them with cloudy eyes and hunched down so that he supported part of his weight on his long arms. The wrinkled skin hung from his face in loose folds, almost like flaps. He was definitely looking at them, not at the sphere. Two young women drifted over and joined him. The child giggled again and nudged one of the wide-eyed girls.

  Monte took a deep breath. He felt like a ham actor who had come bouncing out of the wings, waving his straw hat and doing an earnest soft-shoe routine, only to discover belatedly that the theater was empty…

  Still, these people did not seem to be afraid. They were not so timid as the man in the tree had been. Perhaps,

  Monte thought, the people here did share one human attribute: they were braver in bunches.

  Monte took a step up toward the old man, who frowned at him and blinked his faded eyes. Monte raised his hands, showing him that they were empty. “Monte,” he said, and pointed to himself.

  The old man muttered something and stood his ground.

  Monte tried again, feeling as though he were caught up in a cyclical nightmare. “Monte,” he said.

  The old man nodded slowly and pulled at his ear. “Larst,” he said distinctly.

  By God! He said something!

  Charlie whipped out his notebook and recorded the single precious word in phonetic symbols. Monte smiled broadly, trying to look like the answer to an old man’s prayers. “Charlie,” he said, pointing. “Tom. Ace.”

  The old man nodded again. “Larst,” he repeated. He sighed. Then, incredibly, he began to point to other things: the caves, the stream, the sky, the kids, the women. For each, he gave the native term—slowly, patiently, as though instructing a backward child. His voice was weak and quavering, but his words were clear. Monte matched him with English, then eased himself to one side and let Charlie Jenike take over.

  Charlie worked fast, determined to grab his opportunity and hold on tight. He tested phrases and sentences, scribbling as fast as his pen would write. He built up a systematic vocabulary, building on the words he had already learned from the tapes. The old man seemed vaguely surprised at his fluency, and patiently went on talking.

  Tom Stein maneuvered two of the kids, both boys, down the trail that led to the stream. He took a length of cord from his pocket and made a skillful cat’s cradle on his fingers. The boys were intrigued, and watched him closely. Tom went through his whole bag of string tricks—the anthropologist’s ace in the hole—and tried his level best to make friends.

  Monte was as excited as though he had just tripped over the Rosetta Stone—which, in a manner of speaking, he had. He stuck to the rules of the game; they were all he had to go on. Begin with the person in authority. How many times had he told his students that? Find out what the power structure is, and work from the top down. Okay. Swell. Only who was the person in authority?

  Looking around him, he couldn’t be sure. It could hardly be Larst, who was close to senility. It certainly wouldn’t be one of the children. The women backed away from him whenever he tried to approach—one of them actually blushed—and they didn’t seem to be very likely candidates. One difficulty was that many of the natives were not paying any attention to them at all; they simply went on doing whatever they were doing, and he was unable to get any clear impression of how they ranked. It was very hard, he realized, to size up people who wore no clothing; there were no status symbols to give you a clue. Except, perhaps, for the chest stripes…

  He compromised by wandering around with his notebook and trying to map the cave village. The people did not hinder him, but he considered it best not to try to enter the caves themselves. He plotted the distribution of the caves and jotted down brief descriptions of the people he found in front of each one. He took some photographs, which didn’t seem to bother the natives at all.

  But they had made contact!

  That was what counted; the rest would follow in time.

  His one thought was to get as much done as possible. He lost himself in his work, forgetting everything else.

  The great white sun moved across the arc of the sky and the black shadows lengthened on the floor of the brown-walled canyon…

  Monte never knew what it was that warned him. It was nothing specific, nothing dramatic. It certainly wasn’t a premonition. It was rather a thread of uneasiness that wormed its way into his brain, a subtle wrongness that grew from the very data he collected.

  Long afterward, he told himself a thousand times that he should have seen it before he did. He of all people, moving through the cave village with his notebook and camera, should have caught on. But the plain truth was that he was so excited at actually working with the natives that he wasn’t thinking clearly; his brain was dulled by the flood of impressions pouring into it.

  And, of course, there had been no real cause for alarm in the weeks they had spent on Sirius Nine. Somehow, the human mind continues its age-old habit of fooling itself by moronic extrapolation: because there has been peace there will always be peace, or because there has been war there will always be war…

  The thing that triggered Monte’s brain back into awareness, oddly enough, was not a man—it was an animal. He spotted the creature sitting in front of one of the caves, apparently warming itself in the late afternoon sun. (If you habitually lived in a furnace, he supposed, it took a good bellows to heat you up a little.) Monte snapped a picture of the thing, then studied it caref
ully from a short distance away. It certainly was not related to Rover, the powerful wolf-like animal they had seen in the forest. In fact, unless he was very much mistaken, the animal was a primitive type of primate.

  It was a small creature, no bigger than a large squirrel. It had a hairless tail like a rat, and its rather chunky body was covered with a reddish-brown fur. (It would have been practically invisible in the branches of the forest trees.) Its head, nodding in the sun, was large and flat-faced, with sharply pointed ears like a fox. The animal had perfectly enormous eyes; they were like saucers. When it looked casually at Monte, the animal resembled two huge eyeballs with a body attached.

  Many features about the animal were suggestive of the tarsier. To be sure, the tarsier was nocturnal, and there was no sign that this animal was equipped for hopping. Still, the tarsier was the closest analogy that Monte could find.

  It was the first animal that Monte had seen in the cave village and it prodded his thoughts toward the wolf-thing they had encountered in the forest. It was odd, he reflected, that they had encountered nothing like Rover in the village. As a matter of fact, now that he happened to think about it, it was odd too that…

  He stood up straight, a sudden chill lancing through his body.

  That was it. That was what was wrong about this canyon village. That was what had been bothering him, nagging at him. How could it be?

  Monte walked as quickly as he dared over to the trail and scrambled down it. He had to fight to keep himself from running. He hurried over to where Charlie and Larst were still yakking at each other. The old man—he looked positively ancient now—was plainly weary, but he was still answering Charlie’s questions.

  Monte touched the linguist’s shoulder. “Charlie.” Charlie didn’t even look around. “Not now, dammit.”

  “Charlie, this is important.”

  “Go away. Another hour with this guy—”