But there were no human eyes in the forest shadows. Neither were there human ears to hear it say: “The play is over, Chica Maca. You are inflicting upon yourself quite unnecessary torment.”
The creature paused, then went on: “You gave a magnificent performance! You lived the part as it was meant to be lived!”
Chica Maca awoke, to reality then, completely: He detached himself from the many manipulative props controlling the eyes, lips, vocal organs and limbs of the artificial man body, and crawled swiftly forth. For a moment he lay motionless in the shadows, his many-faceted eyes acknowledging with pleasure the admiration of his teaching associate Raca Clacan. Then he moved with a dignity and a grace peculiarly masculine to the edge of the stage, and stared down over the bright lights at his student audience.The students were just beginning to stir, to-awaken as he had done, from the bright compelling magic of the stage to prosaic reality. They lay motionless in their classroom tunnels, a glistening sea of upturned heads, and supine bodies, packed so closely into the vast hall they, seemed almost to be one great crawling organism.
Chica Maca stared down with a deep satisfaction. The drama reconstruction had taken many days, of patient research, but certainly it had been worth the effort. In education there could be no substitute for the archaeological drama. Act it out! When the characters were those of a long-vanished intelligent species, debating great issues of survival, the historical lesson could not fail to be spectacularly high-lighted.
A Masterpiece of reconstruction, truly a masterpiece! He thought of the sound recordings of man speech excavated from caverns in the earth sealed from within by a heat so terrific it had melted the surface rocks. He remembered how difficult it was to preserve all of the semantic overtones and fine shadings when such recordings were revamped as passages of dramatic dialogue couched in the infinitely more subtle speech idioms of a more advanced species.
He looked about the immense revolving stage, and in his mind’s eye saw the schoolhouse once more turned toward the audience and himself emerging in the artificial man body, the smaller bodies with their child actors skipping away before him into the woods.
He had lived the man part so completely he had actually believed in the village all through the play. The village had existed as a richly experienced reality in his own mind, and in that way he had made the village seem real to the audience, had saved the extra cost of an actual stage reconstruction.
Even without the village, the school-house and the stretch of woodland had made the production a costly one. But surely, surely, it had been worth the cost! His students now knew more about the last days of man than they could have learned from twenty or thirty carefully prepared lectures.
Chica Maca’s eyes quivered, and he half-arose on his twentieth pair of legs, assuming an almost manlike posture on the stage. It seemed only fitting to him that, at the end of such a play, a species that had conquered should thus pay its respects to a species that had passed.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD, by Chad Oliver
Originally published in Science-Fiction Plus, August 1953.
The first step in the scientific method involves the observation of facts and the formulation of The Problem…
The man named Reda Dani did not, of course, think of himself as an alien.
There was no doubt in his mind that he was a human being, a moderately dubious distinction that he shared with all his fellow citizens on Capella IV.
The only aliens mixed up in the affair were from Earth.
Naturally enough, considering the circumstances, Reda Dani was nobody’s fool. He was quite well aware of the meaning of ethnocentrism, to say nothing of plain old-fashioned egotism. He knew that what you chose to define as “alien” varied with where you happened to be sitting.
That didn’t make his problem any easier, however.
Unhappily, he turned his attention to his pipe. The damned thing had gone out again. Somewhat fatalistically, he knocked out a soggy lump of unburned tobacco into a desk vaporizer, refilled his pipe and lit it. He blew a cloud of smoke in the general direction of the air purifier and felt a little better.
He walked over to the viewscreen and took a look. The system of Sol was close. Too close.
He felt worse again; the palms of his hands began to sweat.
“I wish the whole planet would drop dead,” Reda Dani said, not without bitterness.
“Take it easy,” advised Hago Vere, the semantics man. “If you blow your top, we might as well all pick up our marbles and go home. Anyhow, you’re mixing your metaphors, or something.”
“I wish you would drop dead also,” Reda Dani informed him, puffing on his pipe.
“Civil war,” said Hago Vere. “A great beginning. You’re supposed to be a coordinator, or don’t you read your own propaganda? You could be shot at sunrise, except that there isn’t any sunrise.”
“A great pity,” Reda Dani conceded, smiling. “I’m okay, really, as far as I know. Just blowing off steam. It’s just that it’s getting close—you know.”
“I know, Reda.”
Both men fell silent. The ship throbbed around them with the high, taut power of the overdrive. Reda Dani smoked his pipe carefully, nursing it along. His hands were still sweating.
It was a nasty problem.
Nasty because it had never been faced before.
Nasty because there was no known solution.
Nasty because it had to be solved.
He went over it again, step by step.
* * * *
The world of Capella IV—his world—was quite similar to Earth. It was, in fact, almost identical. This was largely a coincidence, since the Aurigae system, of which Capella was a part, happened to be a binary. Capella was a good sixteen times as big as Sol, though of the same general type.
It was a coincidence that had consequences, however.
Life had evolved on Capella IV in much the same way it had on Earth. All of the details were not precisely the same, but there was a part-for-part correspondence of general stages. Capella IV had its aquatic forms, its amphibians, its reptiles, its mammals. It had its own primate chain, culminating finally in Homo sapiens—an erect biped, pleased with its brain, clever with its hands, variable in its color.
The people of Capella IV had gone out into space. They wanted to find out what kind of universe they were living in. They wanted to find out whether or not they had neighbors.
They had.
The galaxy teemed with life.
But not with “neighbors,” unless mere physical proximity were the only criterion of neighborliness. They found that life could take many forms. They discovered how absolutely different life might be. There was no basis at all for getting together; they had nothing in common.
It wasn’t that the life-forms were hostile. Hardly. They didn’t even have a concept of hostility, or of friendliness. They were different.
Alien. Isolated. Eventually, they had contacted the Earth. They had found a life-form physically indistinguishable from themselves, and one with a fairly similar civilization.
The people of Earth had cobalt bombs and interplanetary travel.
The people of Capella IV had force fields and interstellar overdrive.
It was a neat situation.
For twenty-five years, the two peoples surveyed each other, discussed each other, sparred with each other. They exchanged telephotos and information. They staged demonstrations of strength. They probed and speculated, wondered and guessed.
For twenty-five years.
They were, of course, scared to death of each other. The people from Capella IV were afraid of the bomb, which they didn’t have. The people from Earth were afraid of the overdrive, which they didn’t have—for the overdrive meant that the Capella ships could attack and then retreat to the stars where they could not be followed.
Neither side could
be sure it understood the other.
They had never dared to meet face to face. Until now.
* * * *
Reda Dani frowned glumly at his cold pipe, which had gone out again. He tapped the refuse into the vaporizer and put the pipe away. He stared into the viewscreen, hypnotically.
He could see Earth now, far away and lonely.
He closed his eyes.
Who would Earth send?
They had finally decided to take a chance, these two peoples separated by forty-two light-years and a sea of emptiness. They had agreed to meet—one man from each planet, unarmed.
It had to be in the system of Sol, for there was no way for a man from Earth to get to Capella. They had chosen a tiny chamber on Mars for the meeting. Each group had built exactly half of it, and each group had inspected it one hundred times. They had taken turns to make certain that the workers never met.
That little compromise had taken ten years to work out.
Who would Earth send?
One man from each culture, meeting in a little room on a planet without life of its own. One man, carrying a responsibility almost too fantastic to be real.
If the meeting failed, if someone made a mistake—
It might hinge on a little thing, a nothing-thing. How could you tell? “John Smith” was a common name on Earth, but to a man from Capella IV it was unbearably funny, as well as illogical. On Capella IV, they had systematic names, given in adulthood, which placed each person according to status and role by the pattern of alternating morphemes—Reda Dani, Hago Vere, Hada Nire. This seemed funny to the men of Earth, who, in turn, named a baby practically anything that suited their fancy, within the limits of their values and their prejudices.
Even assuming good intentions on both sides, the little things could be dangerous.
If you had to pick one individual to represent your entire species in a game of life and death, who would you pick?
Who could you pick?
The man named Reda Dani looked into the viewscreen, staring at the stars and the planets and the darkness.
That was his problem. That was the problem, too, that had to be faced by a man on Earth, a man like himself. A man who even now must be wondering, watching, trying to decide—
Who would Earth send?
There was no answer.
He could only wait.
* * * *
After the formulation of the problem, the next step, in strict chronology, involves the working out of the hypothesis, or trial solution. Passing this by for the moment, however, we turn to what is actually the third step, the testing of the hypothesis in experience, or The Experiment…
* * * *
Svend Graves walked steadily through the sand canyon and listened to his breathing in the oxygen mask. It was slow and even, neither excited nor lethargic, and he smiled with satisfaction. He had been worried, but now he knew he was not going to be afraid.
He was ready.
The cold wind moaned and whispered through the sand tunnels and twisted valleys, whining out on the cold desert beyond, losing itself in fine clouds of gray, driven sand. It wrapped icy fingers around Svend Graves as he walked, plucking at his sleeves, singing songs that were sad with the ice of despair…
Mars.
It had never known a life of its own. It was barren, sterile, its only meaning given to it by the dreams and thoughts of a people over forty-eight million miles away.
Svend Graves felt a curious, warm pride. His people.
Mars.
First, perhaps, it had been a campfire in the sky. It had been a cold fire that gave no warmth, a miracle to be watched and feared by some early man who scarcely knew fire of any kind. He had listened to the night talking around him, and he had wondered what manner of man would build his sky-fire so far away, and what songs he might sing around it.
Then it had become Mars, the god of war.
Finally, it had become a planet, one of several, orbited around the sun. The planet, with time, had become a symbol, a lure, an invitation. It had challenged the men of Earth to travel into the sea of night that washed their shores.
And they had come.
And this was the reality, at least for now. A cold desert of shifting sands and sculptured canyons, forever silent save for the sigh of the winds.
Neutral ground. A meeting place. Svend Graves came out of the sand canyon and into the desert, his feet slipping slightly on the uncertain floor of the planet. Ahead of him, waiting all alone in the middle of a great plain, was the tiny building that housed a room for two.
It was time.
Coming out of the desert from the other side, half hidden by the drifting curtains of reddish sand, he saw a dark figure moving slowly toward the building.
* * * *
The two men from different star-systems stood in the cubicle and stared at each other.
They were close enough to touch, but they did not touch.
The room was antiseptically plain. It had dull gray walls and a single overhead light. It had a small gray table in the exact center of the room, and two hard gray chairs, one at each end of the table. There was an air-conditioning unit in one corner, and no other machinery of any kind within a two-hundred mile radius.
No one was taking any chances.
The room was just what it seemed to be—a room, and nothing more.
Svend Graves kept a smile on his face. It had first been determined, of course, that smiles meant the same thing in both cultures. His job was three fold: he had to make a good impression, he had to protect the secrets of his people, and he had to evaluate the other man.
He examined the man from Capella IV courteously but thoroughly. The man from Capella IV examined him the same way.
Svend Graves couldn’t see very much. The other man was dressed in what appeared to be a light spacesuit, complete with helmet. He was definitely humanoid in construction—he had two arms and two legs and one head. Behind the glass in his helmet, he seemed to have a rather pleasant face.
There was a long, awkward silence.
Svend Graves shrugged. He reached up and took off his oxygen mask. He sniffed the air and it was good. No tricks so far, then. He noticed that the other man was smiling, but he made no attempt to remove his helmet. He just stood there.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” asked Svend Graves. It seemed to him as though his voice went off in the silence like a bomb.
“Not at all,” replied the other man instantly. His voice was low and well-modulated, crystal-clear through his helmet speaker.
Svend Graves fished out a cigarette and lit it. He blew smoke through his nose, being careful to keep it away from the alien.
“My name is Svend Graves,” he said.
“My name is Hada Nire,” the other said.
Neither laughed.
Neither volunteered any more information.
The silence filled the room.
Evidently he’s just going to respond to my cues, Svend Graves thought. It’s up to me to direct the interview.
He sat down in one of the chairs. The other man did not hesitate but lowered himself into the other one, still not making any move to take off either his helmet or his spacesuit.
They eyed each other across the table.
“Well, Mr. Nire, where do we go from here?” asked Svend Graves, reflecting that it was really quite decent of the aliens to agree to the use of English during the first meeting.
Hada Nire chuckled pleasantly. “An excellent question, Svend Graves,” he said. “I must apologize for my seeming reticence. The circumstances under which we meet—”
He waved a space-suited arm, vaguely.
Careful, thought Svend Graves. Could that be a psychological probe? He said: “Not at all, my friend. It is as much my fault as it is yours. I hope I may express the wi
sh that we can meet again one of these days, and speak as man to man.”
“That is also my wish,” the other man said. “This is a difficult situation for both of us. I feel as though I were under a microscope.”
“Me too,” agreed Svend Graves.
They indulged in some highly tentative exploratory conversation, and they laughed rather too much over the mutual clumsiness of the situation. Their talk was, if not friendly, at least cordial.
Then the silence came again.
They sat across the table from each other in the little gray room, wondering.
When the agreed-upon termination time arrived, neither of them had said much of consequence.
They both stood up, Hada Nire still in his spacesuit and helmet. There was tension in the room. It wasn’t exactly fear, nor was it hope, and yet it included both of these.
They both felt it.
“I know we’re both thinking the same thing,” Svend Graves said slowly. “I can’t speak with much authority, but just as a man. I hope that this is a beginning, not an ending.”
The other man nodded. “I hope that both of our peoples will be blessed with understanding. Understanding. That is a good word. Next to a sense of humor, it is what we need the most.”
They walked to the door together. Svend Graves stopped and put on his oxygen mask, and then they went outside. They paused, and Svend Graves put out his hand. Hada Nire took it gently in his spacesuit glove, and they shook hands, Earth-style. Then the other man waved briefly and set out across the desert for the rendezvous with his ship.
Svend Graves watched him go, trying to register all the data, no matter how unimportant. Then he turned and walked through the sands that were old when Earth was young, back into the wind-blasted canyons, his hands in his pockets.
He did not look back.
* * * *
As previously indicated, we have left out a step in our scientific method, a step between the problem and the experiment. The step did occur, of course, and we go back for it now. Between the problem and the experiment comes the trial solution, or The Hypothesis…
* * * *
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 17