Aliens for Neighbors

by Clifford D. Simak

  Doc hesitated for a moment. "All right. Tell the rest of them to pull back a way."

  I spoke to Hutch over my shoulder. "Get out of here. Take the others with you."

  "He's crazy drunk," said Hutch. "No telling what he'll do."

  "I can handle him," I said, sounding surer than I felt.

  Doc let loose another bullet off to one side of us.

  "Get moving, Hutch." I didn't dare look back. I had to keep an eye on Doc.

  "All right," Doc finally yelled at me. "They're back. Throw away your gun."

  Moving slow so he wouldn't think I was trying to draw on him, I unfastened the buckle of the gun belt and let it fall to the ground. I walked forward, keeping my eyes on Doc, and all the time my skin kept trying to crawl up my back.

  "That's far enough," Doc said when I'd almost reached the ship. "We can talk from here."

  "You're drunk," I told him. "I don't know what this is all about, but I know you're drunk."

  "Not nearly drunk enough. Not drunk enough by half. If I were drunk enough, I simply wouldn't care."

  "What's eating you?"

  "Decency," said Doc, in that hammy way of his. "I've told you many times that I can stomach looting when it involves no more than uranium and gems and other trash like that. I can even shut my eyes when you gut a culture, because you can't steal a culture—even when you get through looting it, the culture still is there and can build back again. But I balk at robbing knowledge. I will not let you do it, Captain."

  "I still say you're drunk."

  "You don't even know what you've found. You are so blind and greedy that you don't recognize it."

  "Okay, Doc," I said, trying to smooth his feathers, "tell me what we've found."

  "A library. Perhaps the greatest, most comprehensive library in all the Galaxy. Some race spent untold years compiling the knowledge that is in that building and you plan to take it and sell it and scatter it. If that happens, in time it will be lost and what little of it may be left will be so out of context that half its meaning will be lost. It doesn't belong to us. It doesn't even belong to the human race alone. A library like that can belong only to all the peoples of the Galaxy."

  "Look, Doc," I pleaded, "we've worked for years, you and I and all the rest of them. We've bled and sweated and been disappointed time and time again. This is our chance to make a killing. And that means you as well as the rest of us. Think of it, Doc—more money than you can ever spend—enough to keep you drunk the rest of your life!"

  Doc swung the rifle around at me and I thought my goose was cooked. But I never moved a muscle. I stood and bluffed it out.

  At last he lowered the gun. "We're barbarians. History is full of the likes of us. Back on Earth, the barbarians stalled human progress for a thousand years when they burned and scattered the libraries and the learning of the Greeks and Romans. To them, books were just something to start a fire with or wipe their weapons on. To you, this great cache of accumulated knowledge means nothing more than something to make a quick buck on. You'll take a scholarly study of a vital social problem and retail it as a year's vacation that can be experienced in six hours' time and you'll take…"

  "Spare me the lecture, Doc," I said wearily. "Tell me what you want."

  "Go back and report this find to the Galactic Commission. It will help wipe out a lot of things we've done."

  "So help me, Doc, you've gone religious on us."

  "Not religious. Just decent."

  "And if we don't?"

  "I've got the ship," said Doe. "I have the food and water."

  "You'll have to sleep."

  "I'll close the port. Just try getting in."

  He had us and he knew he did. Unless we could figure out a way to grab him, he had us good and proper.

  I was scared, but mostly I was burned. For years, we'd listened to him run off at the mouth and never for a moment had any of us thought he meant a word of it. And now suddenly he did—he meant every word of it.

  I knew there was no way to talk him out of it. And there was no compromise. When it came right down to it, there was no agreement possible, for any agreement or compromise would have to be based on honour and we had no honour—not a one of us, not even among ourselves. It was stalemate, but Doc didn't know that yet. He'd realize it once he got a little sober and thought about it some. What he had done had been done on alcoholic impulse, but that didn't mean he wouldn't see it through.

  One thing was certain: As it stood, he could outlast us.

  "Let me go back," I said. "I'11 have to talk this over with the others."

  I think that Doc right then began to suspect how deeply he had become committed—began to see for the first time the impossibility of us trusting one another.

  "When you come back," he told me, "have it all thought out. I'll want some guarantees."

  "Sure, Doc," I said.

  "I mean this, Captain. I'm in deadly earnest. I'm not just fooling."

  "I know you aren't, Doc."

  I went back to where the others were clustered just a short distance from the building. I explained what was up.

  "We'll have to spread out and charge him," Hutch decided.

  "He may get one or two of us, but we can pick him off."

  "He'll simply close the port," I said. "He can starve us out. In a pinch, he could try to take the ship up. If he ever managed to get sober, he could probably do it."

  "He's crazy," said Pancake. "Just plain drunken crazy."

  "Sure he is," I said, "and that makes him twice as deadly. He's been brooding on this business for a long, long time. He built up a guilt complex that's three miles high. And worst of all, he's got himself out on a limb and he can't back down."

  "We haven't got much time," said Frost. "We've got to think of something. A man can die of thirst. You can get awfully hungry in just a little while."

  The three of them got to squabbling about what was best to do and I sat down on the sand and leaned back against one of the machines and tried to figure Doc.

  Doc was a failure as a medic; otherwise he'd not have tied up with us. More than likely, he had joined us as a gesture of defiance or despair—perhaps a bit of both. And besides being a failure, he was an idealist. He was out of place with us, but there'd been nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. For years, it had eaten at him and his values got all warped and there's no place better than deep space to get your values warped.

  He was crazy as a coot, of course, but a special kind of crazy. If it hadn't been so ghastly, you might have called it glorious crazy.

  You wanted to laugh him off or brush him to one side, for that was the kind of jerk he was, but he wouldn't laugh or brush.

  I don't know if I heard a sound—a footstep, maybe—or if I just sensed another presence, but all at once I knew we'd been joined by someone.

  I half got up and swung around toward the building and there, just outside the entrance, stood what looked at first to be a kind of moth made up in human size.

  I don't mean it was an insect—it just had the look of one. Its face was muffled up in a cloak it wore and it was not a human face and there was a ruff rising from its head like those crests you see on the helmets in the ancient plays.

  Then I saw that the cloak was not a cloak at all, but a part of the creature and it looked like it might be folded wings, but it wasn't wings.

  "Gentlemen," I said as quietly as I could, "we have a visitor."

  I walked toward the creature soft and easy and alert, not wanting to frighten it, but all set to take evasive action if it tried to put the finger on me.

  "Be ready, Hutch," I said.

  "I'm covering you," Hutch assured me and it was a comfort to know that he was there. A man couldn't get into too much trouble with Hutch backing him.

  I stopped about six feet from the creature and he didn't look as bad close up as he did at a distance. His eyes seemed to be kind and gentle and his funny face, alien as it was, had a sort of peacefulness about it. But even so, you can't a
lways tell with aliens.

  We stood there looking at one another. The both of us understood there was no use in talking. We just stood and sized one another up.

  Then the creature took a couple of steps and reached out a hand that was more like a claw than hand. He took my hand in his and tugged for me to come. There were just two things to do—either snatch my hand away or go. I went.

  I didn't stop to get it figured out, but there were several factors that helped make up my mind. First off, the creature seemed to be friendly and intelligent. And Hutch and all the others were there, just behind me. And over and above all, you don't get too far with aliens if you act stand-offish. So I went.

  We walked into the silo and behind me I heard the tramping feet of the others and it was a sound that was good to hear.

  I didn't waste any time wondering where the creature might have come from. I admitted to myself, as I walked along, that I had been half-expecting something just like this. The silo was so big that it could hold many things, even people or creatures we could not know about. After all, we'd explored only one small corner of the first floor of it. The creature, I figured, must have come from somewhere on the upper floors as soon as he learned about us. It might have taken quite a while, one way or another, for the news to reach him.

  He led me up three ramps to the fourth floor of the building and went down a corridor for a little way, then went into a room.

  It was not a large room. It held just one machine, but this one was a double model; it had two bucket seats and two helmets.

  There was another creature in the room.

  The first one led me over to the machine and motioned for me to take one of the seats.

  I stood there for a while, watching Hutch and Pancake and Frost and all the others crowd into the place and line up against the wall. Frost said: "A couple of you boys better stay outside and watch the corridor."

  Hutch asked me: "You going to sit down in that contraption, Captain?"

  "Why not?" I said. "They seem to be all right. There's more of us than them. They don't mean us any harm."

  "It's taking a chance," said Hutch.

  "Since when have we stopped taking chances?"

  The creature I had met outside had sat down in one of the seats, so I made a few adjustments in the other. While I was doing this, the second creature went to a file and got out two sticks, but these sticks were transparent instead of being black.

  He lifted off the helmets and inserted the two sticks. Then he fitted one of the helmets on his fellow-creature's head and held out the other to me.

  I sat down and let him put it on and suddenly I was squatting on the floor across a sort of big coffee-table from the gent I had met outside.

  "Now we can talk," said the creature, "which we couldn't do before."

  I wasn't scared or flustered. It seemed just as natural as if it had been Hutch across the table.

  "There will be a record made of everything we say," said the creature. "When we are finished, you will get one copy and I will get the other for our files. You might call it a pact or a contract or whatever term seems to be most applicable."

  "I'm not much at contracts," I told him. "There's too much legal flypaper tied up with most of them."

  "An agreement, then," the creature suggested. "A gentlemen's agreement."

  "Good enough," I said. Agreements are convenient things. You can break them any time you want. Especially gentlemen's agreements.

  "I suppose you have figured out what this place is," he said.

  "Well, not for sure," I replied. "Library is the closest that we have come."

  "It's a university, a galactic university. We specialize in extension or home-study courses."

  I'm afraid I gulped a bit. "Why, that's just fine."

  "Our courses are open to all who wish to take them. There are no entrance fees and there is no tuition. Neither are there any scholastic requirements for enrollment. You yourself can see how difficult it would be to set up such requirements in a galaxy where there are many races of varying viewpoints and abilities."

  "You bet I can."

  "The courses are free to all who can make use of them," he said. "We do expect, of course, that they make proper use of them and that they display some diligence in study."

  "You mean anyone at all can enroll?" I asked. "And it don't cost anything?"

  After the first disappointment, I was beginning to see the possibilities. With bona fide university educations for the taking, it would be possible to set up one of the sweetest rackets that anyone could ask for.

  "There's one restriction," the creature explained. "We cannot, obviously, concern ourselves with individuals. The paperwork would get completely out of hand. We enroll cultures. You, as a representative of your culture—what is it you call yourselves?"

  "The human race, originally of the planet Earth, now covering some half million cubic light-years. I'd have to see your chart…"

  "That's not necessary at the moment. We would be quite happy to accept your application for the entrance of the human race."

  It took the wind out of me for a minute. I wasn't any representative of the human race. And if I could be, I wouldn't. This was my deal, not the human race's. But I couldn't let him know that, of course. He wouldn't have done business with me.

  "Now not so fast," I pleaded. "There's a question or two I'd like to have you answer. What kind of courses do you offer? What kind of electives do you have?"

  "First there is the basic course," the creature said. "It is more or less a familiarization course, a sort of orientation. It includes those subjects which we believe can be of the most use to the race in question. It is, quite naturally, tailored specifically for each student culture. After that, there is a wide field of electives, hundreds of thousands of them."

  "How about final exams and tests and things like that?" I wanted to know.

  "Oh, surely," said the creature. "Such tests are conducted every—tell me about your time system."

  I told him the best I could and he seemed to understand.

  "I'd say", he finally said, "that about every thousand years of your time would come fairly close. It is a long-range programme and to conduct tests any oftener would put some strain upon our resources and might be of little value."

  That decided me. What happened a thousand years from now was no concern of mine.

  I asked a few more questions to throw him off the track—just in case he might have been suspicious—about the history of the university and such.

  I still can't believe it. It's hard to conceive of any race working a million years to set up a university aimed at the eventual education of an entire galaxy, travelling to all the planets to assemble data, compiling the records of countless cultures, correlating and classifying and sorting out that mass of information to set up the study courses. It was just too big for a man to grasp. For a while, he had me reeling on the ropes and faintly starry-eyed about the whole affair. But then I managed to snap back to normal.

  "All right, Professor," I said, "you can sign us up. What am I supposed to do?"

  "Not a thing," he said. "The recording of our discussion will supply the data. We'll outline the course of basic study and you then may take such electives as you wish."

  "If we can't haul it all in one trip, we can come back again?" I asked.

  "Oh, definitely. I anticipate you may wish to send a fleet to carry all you need. We'll supply sufficient machines and as many copies of the study recordings as you think you will need."

  "It'll take a lot," I said bluntly, figuring I'd start high and haggle my way down. "An awful lot."

  "I am aware of that," he told me. "Education for an entire culture is no simple matter. But we are geared for it."

  So there we had it—all legal and airtight. We could get anything we wanted and as much as we wanted and we'd have a right to it. No one could say we stole it. Not even Doc could say that.

  The creature explained to me the system of notat
ion they used on the recording cylinders and how the courses would be boxed and numbered so they could be used in context. He promised to supply me with recordings of the electives so I could pick out what we wanted.

  He was real happy about finding another customer and he proudly told me of all the others that they had and he held forth at length on the satisfaction that an educator feels at the opportunity to pass on the torch of knowledge. He had me feeling like a heel.

  Then we were through and I was sitting in the seat again and the second creature was taking the helmet off my head. I got up and the first creature rose to his feet and faced me.

  We couldn't talk any more than we could to start with. It was a weird feeling, to face a being you've just made a deal with and not be able to say a single word that he can understand. But he held out both his hands and I took them in mine and he gave my hands a friendly squeeze.

  "Why don't you go ahead and kiss him?" asked Hutch. "Me and the boys will look the other way."

  Ordinarily, I'd have slugged Hutch for a crack like that, but I didn't even get sore.

  The second creature took the two sticks out of the machine and handed one to me. They'd gone in transparent, but they came out black.

  "Let's get out of here," I said.

  We got out as fast as we could and still keep our dignity—if you could call it that.

  Outside the silo, I got Hutch and Pancake and Frost together and told them what had happened. "We got the universe by the tail," I said, "with a downhill pull."

  "What about Doc?" asked Frost.

  "Don't you see? It's just the kind of deal that would appeal to him. We can let on we're noble and big-hearted and acting in good faith. All I need to do is get close enough to grab him."

  "He won't even listen to you," said Pancake. "He won't believe a word you say."

  "You guys stay right here," I said. "I'll handle Doc."

  I walked back across the stretch of ground between the building and the ship. There was no sign of Doc. I was all set to holler for him, then thought better of it. I took a chance and started up the ladder. I reached the port and there was still no sign of him.

  I moved warily into the ship. I thought I knew what had become of him, but there was no need to take more chances than I had to.