Aliens for Neighbors

by Clifford D. Simak

  And inside the fence, there were so many guards, they almost walked on one another.

  I was a little scared when I got back from the walk, because from what I saw, this thing I'd been pitchforked into was bigger and more important than I had ever dreamed. Up until then, I'd figured it was just a matter of the colonel having his neck stuck out so far he could never pull it back. All along, I had been feeling sorry for him because that general looked like the kind of gent who would stand for just so much tomfoolery before he lowered the boom.

  It was about this time that they began to dig a big pit out in the centre of one of the runways. I went over one day to watch it and it didn't make no sense at all. Here they had a nice, smooth runway they'd spent a lot of money to construct and now they were digging it up to make what looked like a swimming pool. I asked around about it, but the people that I talked to either didn't know or they weren't talking.

  Me and Stinky kept on sitting in the planes. We were on our sixth one now. And there wasn't any change. I sat, bored stiff, while Stinky took it easy.

  One evening the colonel sent a sergeant over to say he'd like to see me.

  I went in and sat down and put Stinky on the desk. He lay down on top of it and looked from one to the other of us.

  "Asa," said the colonel, "I think we got it made."

  "You mean you been getting stuff?"

  "We've got enough we actually understand to give us unquestioned air superiority. We're a good ten years, if not a hundred, depending on how much we can use, ahead of the rest of them. They'll never catch us now."

  "But all Stinky did was sleep!"

  "All he did," the colonel said, "was to redesign each ship. In some instances, there were principles involved that don't make a bit of sense, but I'll bet they will later. And in other cases, what he did was so simple and so basic that we're wondering why we never thought of it ourselves."

  "Colonel, what is Stinky?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "You got an idea, though."

  "Sure, an idea. But that's all it is. It embarrasses me even to think of it."

  "I don't embarrass easy."

  "Okay, then—Stinky is like nothing on Earth. My guess is that he's from some other solar system. I think he crossed space to us. How or why, I have no notion. His ship might have been wrecked and he got into a lifeboat and made it here." "But if there was a lifeboat…"

  "We've combed every foot of ground for miles around."

  "And no lifeboat?"

  "No lifeboat," said the colonel.

  Getting that idea down took a little doing, but I did it. Then I got to wondering about something else.

  "Colonel," I said, "you claim Stinky fixed up the ships, made them even better. Now how could he have done that with no hands and just sleeping and never touching a thing?"

  "You tell me," said the colonel. "I've heard a bunch of guesses. The only one that makes any kind of sense—and cockeyed sense at that—is telekinesis."

  I sat there and admired that word. "What's it mean, Colonel?" I wanted to use it on the boys at the tavern, if I ever got back there, and I wanted to get it right.

  "Moving things by the power of thought," he said.

  "But there wasn't nothing moved," I objected. "All the improvements in Betsy and the planes came from right inside them, not stuff moved in."

  "That could be done by telekinesis, too."

  I shook my head, thoughtful-like. "Ain't the way I see it."

  "Go ahead," he sighed. "Let's hear your theory. No reason you should be an exception."

  "I think Stinky's got a kind of mental green thumb for machines," I said. "Like some people got green thumbs for plants, only he's got…"

  The colonel took a long, hard frown at me. Then he nodded very slowly. "I see what you mean. Those new parts weren't moved in or around. They were grown."

  "Something like that. Maybe he can make a machine come kind of alive and improve itself, grow parts that'll make it a better and happier and more efficient machine."

  "Sounds silly when you say it," the colonel said, "but it makes a lot more sense than any of the other ideas. Man's been working with machines—real machines, that is—only a century or two. Make that ten thousand or a million years and it might not seem so silly."

  We sat in silence while the twilight crept into the room and I think the both of us must have been thinking the same thing.

  Thinking of the black night that lay out beyond Earth and of how Stinky must have crossed it. And wondering, too, about what kind of world he came from and why he might have left it and what happened to him out in the long dark that forced him to look for asylum on Earth.

  Thinking, too, I guess, about the ironic circumstance that had cast him on a planet where his nearest counterpart was a little animal that no one cared to have much to do with.

  "What I can't understand," the colonel said, "is why he does it. Why does he do it for us?"

  "He doesn't do it for us," I answered. "He does it for the planes. He feels sorry for them."

  The door burst open and the general came tramping in. He was triumphant. Dusk had crept into the room and I don't think he saw me.

  "We got an okay!" he gloated. "The ship will be in tomorrow. The Pentagon agrees!"

  "General," said the colonel, "we're pushing this too hard. It's time for us to begin to lay some sort of grounds for basic understanding. We've grabbed what we can grab the quickest. We've exploited this little cuss right up to the hilt. We have a lot of data…"

  "Not all we need!" the general bellowed. "What we have been doing has been just sort of practice. We have no data on the A-ship. That is where we need it."

  "What we need as well is an understanding of this creature. An understanding of how he does it. If we could talk to him…"

  "Talk!" the general shouted.

  "Yes, talk!" the colonel shouted back. "He keeps purring all the time. That may be his means of communication. The men who found him simply whistled and he came. That was communication. If we had a little patience…"

  "We have no time for patience, Colonel."

  "General, we can't simply wring him dry. He's done a lot for us. Let's give the little guy a break. He's the one who has had the patience—waiting for us to communicate with him, hoping that someday we'll recognize him for what he is!"

  They were yelling at one another and the colonel must have forgotten I was there. It was embarrassing. I held out my arms to Stinky and he jumped into them. I tiptoed across the room and went out as quietly as I could.

  That night, I lay in bed with Stinky curled up on the covers at my feet. The four guards sat in the room, quiet as watchful mice.

  I thought about what the colonel had said to the general and my heart went out to Stinky. I thought how awful it would be if a man suddenly was dumped into a world of skunks who didn't care a rap about him except that he could dig the deepest and slickest burrows that skunks had ever seen and that he could dig them quick. And there were so many burrows to be dug that not one of the skunks would take the time to understand this man, to try to talk with him or to help him out.

  I lay there feeling sorry and wishing there was something I could do. Then Stinky came walking up the covers and crawled in under them with me and I put out my hand and held him tight against me while he purred softly at me. And that is how we went to sleep.

  The next afternoon, the A-ship arrived. The last of three that had been built, it was still experimental. It was a monster and we stood far back behind a line of guards and watched it come mushing down, settling base-first into the water-filled rocket pit they'd dug out on the runway. Finally it was down and it stood there, a bleak, squat thing that somehow touched one with awe just to look at it.

  The crew came down the ladder and the launch went out to get them. They were a bunch of cocky youngsters and you could sense the pride in them.

  Next morning, we went out to the ship. I rode in the launch with the general and the colonel, and while the boat
bobbed against the ladder, they had another difference of opinion.

  "I still think it's too risky, General," said the colonel. "It's all right to fool around with jets, but an atomic ship is a different matter. If Stinky goes fooling with that pile…"

  The general said, tight-lipped: "We have to take the chance."

  The colonel shrugged and went up the ladder. The general motioned to me and I went up with Stinky perched on my shoulder. The general followed.

  Whereas Stinky and I before this had been in a ship alone, this time a picked crew of technicians came aboard as well.

  There was plenty of room and it was the only way they could study what Stinky might be doing. And I imagined that, with an A-ship, they'd want to keep close check.

  I sat down in the pilot's chair and Stinky settled himself in my lap. The colonel stayed with us for a while, but after a time he left and we were alone.

  I was nervous. What the colonel had said made good sense to me. But the day wore on and nothing happened and I began to feel that perhaps the colonel had been wrong.

  It went on for four days like that and I settled into routine. I wasn't nervous any longer. We could depend on Stinky, I told myself. He wouldn't do anything to harm us.

  By the way the technicians were behaving and the grin the general wore, I knew that Stinky must he performing up to expectations.

  On the fifth day, as we were going out, the colonel said: "This should wind it up." I was glad to hear it.

  We were almost ready to knock off for noon when it happened. I can't tell you exactly how it was, for it was a bit confusing. It was almost as if someone had shouted, although no one had. I half rose out of the chair, then sat back again.

  And someone shouted once more.

  I knew that something was about to happen. I could feel it in my bones. I knew I had to get out of the A-ship and get out fast. It was fear—unreasoning fear. And over and above the fear, I knew I could not leave. It was my job to stay. I had to stick it out. I grabbed the chair arms and hung on and tried my best to stay.

  Then the panic hit me and there was nothing I could do.

  There was no way to fight it. I leaped out of the chair, dumping Stinky from my lap. I reached the door and fought it open, then turned back.

  "Stinky!" I shouted.

  I started across the room to reach him, but half-way across the panic hit me again and I turned and bolted in blind flight.

  I went clattering down the catwalk and from below me came the sound of running and the yells of frightened men. I knew then that I had been right, that I had not been cowardly altogether—there was something wrong.

  Men were pouring out of the port of the big A-ship when I got there and scrambling down the ladder. The launch was coming out to pick them up. One man fell off the ladder into the water and began to swim.

  Out on the field, ambulances and fire rigs were racing toward the water pit and the siren atop the operations building was wailing like a stepped-on tomcat.

  I looked at the faces around me. They were set and white and I knew that all the men were just as scared as I was and somehow, instead of getting scareder, I got a lot of comfort from it.

  They went on tumbling down the ladder and more men fell in the drink, and I have no doubt at all that if someone had held a stopwatch on them, there'd have been swimming records falling.

  I got in line to wait my turn and I thought again of Stinky and stepped out of line and started back to save him. But half-way up the catwalk, my courage ran plumb out and I was too scared to go on. The funny thing about it was that I didn't have the least idea what there was to scare me.

  I went down the ladder among the last of them and piled into the launch, which was loaded so heavily that it barely crept back to solid ground.

  The medical officer was running around and shouting to get the swimmers into decontamination and men were running everywhere and shouting and the fire rigs stood there racing their motors while the siren went on shrieking.

  "Get back!" someone was shouting. "Run! Everybody back!"

  So, of course, we ran like a flock of spooked sheep.

  Then a wordless yell went up and we turned around. The atomic ship was rising slowly from the pit. Beneath it, the water seethed and boiled. The ship rose steadily, gracefully, without a single shudder or shake. It went straight up into the sky, up and out of sight.

  Suddenly I realized that I was standing in dead silence. No one was stirring. No one was making any noise. Everybody just stood and stared into the sky. The siren had shut off.

  I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. It was the general.

  "Stinky?" he asked.

  "He wouldn't come," I answered, feeling low. "I was too scared to go and get him."

  The general wheeled and headed off across the field. For no reason I can think of, I turned and followed him. He broke into a run and I loped along beside him.

  We stormed into operations and went piling up the stairs to the tracking room.

  The general bellowed: "You got a fix on it?"

  "Yes, sir, we're tracking it right now."

  "Good," the general said, breathing heavily. "Fine. We'll have to run it down. Tell me where it's headed."

  "Straight out, sir. It still is heading out."

  "How far?"

  "About five thousand miles, sir."

  "But it can't do that!" the general roared. "It can't navigate in space!"

  He turned around and bumped into me.

  "Get out of my way!" He went thumping down the stairs.

  I followed him down, but outside the building I went another way. I passed administration and there was the colonel standing outside. I wasn't going to stop, but he called to me. I went over.

  "He made it," said the colonel.

  "I tried to take him off," I said, "but he wouldn't come."

  "Of course not. What do you think it was that drove us from the ship?"

  I thought back and there was only one answer. "Stinky?"

  "Sure. It wasn't only machines, Asa, though he did wait till he got hold of something like the A-ship that he could make go out into space. But he had to get us off it first, so he threw us off."

  I did some thinking about that, too. "Then he was kind of like a skunk."

  "How do you mean?" asked the colonel, squinting at me.

  "I never did get used to calling him Stinky. Never seemed right somehow, him not having a smell and still having that name. But he did have a smell—a mental one, I guess you'd say—enough to drive us right out of the ship."

  The colonel nodded. "All the same, I'm glad he made it." He stared up at the sky.

  "So am I," I said.

  Although I was a little sore at Stinky as well. He could have said good-bye at least to me. I was the best friend he had on Earth and driving me out along with the other men seemed plain rude.

  But now I'm not so sure.

  I still don't know which end of a wrench to take hold of, but I have a new car now—bought it with the money I earned at the air base—and it can run all by itself. On quiet country roads, that is. It gets jittery in traffic. It's not half as good as Betsy.

  I could fix that, all right. I found out when the car rose right over a fallen tree in the road. With what rubbed off on me from being with Stinky all the time, I could make it fly. But I won't. I ain't aiming to get treated the way Stinky was.

  Jackpot

  I found Doc in the dispensary. He had on quite a load. I worked him over some to bring him half awake.

  "Get sobered up," I ordered curtly. "We made planet-fall. We've got work to do." I took the bottle and corked it and set it high up on the shelf, where it wasn't right at hand.

  Doc managed to achieve some dignity. "You needn't worry, Captain. As medic of this tub…"

  "I want all hands up and moving. We may have something out there."

  "I know," Doc said mournfully. "When you talk like that, it's bound to be a tough one. An off-beat climate and atmosphere pure poison."r />
  "It's Earth-type, oxygen, and the climate's fine so far. Nothing to be afraid of. The analysers gave it almost perfect rating."

  Doc groaned and held his head between his hands. "Those analysers of ours do very well if they tell us whether it is hot or cold or if the air is fit to breathe. We're a haywire outfit, Captain."

  "We do all right," I said.

  "We're scavengers and sometimes birds of prey. We scour the Galaxy for anything that's loose."

  I paid no attention to him. That was the way he always talked when he had a skin full.

  "You get up to the galley," I told him, "and let Pancake pour some coffee into you. I want you on your feet and able to do your fumbling best."

  But Doc wasn't ready to go just yet. "What is it this time?"

  "A silo. The biggest thing you ever saw. It's ten or fifteen miles across and goes up clear out of sight."

  "A silo is a building to store winter forage. Is this a farming planet?"

  "No," I said, "it's desert. And it isn't a silo. It just looks like one."

  "Warehouse?" asked Doc. "City? Fortress? Temple—but that doesn't make any difference to us, does it, Captain? We loot temples, too."

  "Get up!" I yelled at him. "Get going."

  He made it to his feet. "I imagine the populace has come out to greet us. Appropriately, I hope."

  "There's no populace," I said. "The silo's just standing there alone."

  "Well, well," said Doc. "A second-storey job."

  He started staggering up the catwalk and I knew he'd be all right. Pancake knew exactly how to get him sobered up.

  I went back to the port and found that Frost had everything all set. He had the guns ready and the axes and the sledges, the coils of rope and the canteens of water and all the stuff we'd need. As second in command, Frost was invaluable. He knew what to do and did it. I don't know what I'd have done without him.

  I stood in the port and looked out at the silo. We were a mile or so away from it, but it was so big that it seemed to be much closer. This near to it, it seemed to be a wall. It was just Godawful big.

  "A place like that", said Frost, "could hold a lot of loot."