Alien from Arcturus

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Snowshoes!” yelped Dirk unexpectedly Every eye in the place turned on him. The tall young Archaist glowed with self-satisfaction.

  “Merely one of the little things we who interest ourselves in the past know about,” he said. “A device used by the Western Indian of former times to enable him to cover ground buried under soft snow.”

  “What are they like?” asked Mal.

  “Oh, there’s nothing much to them,” said Dirk. “Just some strips of polished hardwood bent around for frames and with a network of leather thongs made from deer hide lashed across them.” A heavy silence descended on the room.

  “Nothing to them, eh?” said Sorrel gloomily.

  “No,” said Dirk, somewhat puzzled. “Simple, really.”

  “I imagine,” went on Sorrel, “we should be able to whip some up without any trouble at all.”

  “I don’t see why not—”

  “And just where,” inquired Sorrel, “are we going to get any hardwood on this planet of sponge plants? And where in hell—” his voice rose to an exasperated roar—“did you figure we would have some leather thongs made from deerhide stored away?”

  Dirk’s face fell. Margie bristled.

  “You don’t have to shout at him!” she snapped. “It was a good suggestion, anyway.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Sorrel, “brilliant.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Mal, before Margie could speak again. “We haven’t the materials for orthodox gimmicks of that kind, of course, but we certainly should be able to throw together something on that order. Let me see…”

  They adjourned to the basement of the station. Here, among odds and ends of replacement parts, was the inevitable pressure molder with a small pile of metal and plastic stock.

  “The thing is,” said Mal, as he frowned over the molder, “if Peep is going to use mudshoes—”

  “Snowshoes,” corrected Dirk.

  “—They’re going to have to be collapsible so that he can take them through the ventilator with him.” Mal fingered some long strips of metal. “Now, if we had something that would fold or hinge in the middle…”

  He went to work. The first try produced two boat-shaped objects consisting of flat wings attached to a central shoe. These promptly folded up around Peep’s ankles when he put his weight on them. The next attempt was a sort of latticework of metal strips woven together, which Peep could unweave down the middle and separate. These were perfectly effective; but a trial run brought a general veto on the basis of the time it took to unweave and reweave them when the job was done.

  “If you could make something,” suggested Margie, “in three or four pieces that just clicked together—”

  “And what if one of the parts jammed?” inquired Mal. “No, too complicated.”

  “No, it isn’t!” cried Margie. “You forget how strong Peep is. He could just force the parts together.”

  “I suppose—” began Mal doubtfully. Then suddenly, his face lit up. “Of course!” he cried. “There’s nothing to it!”

  Ignoring the excited questions of the others, Mal snatched up a quantity of tough elastic plastic, and began to feed it into the molder. What emerged was an elliptical sheet of plastic which graduated from a good four inches of thickness at the center to half an inch at the edges. He made another and attached foot fastenings.

  “There,” he said to Peep. “Take those outside and try them.”

  The whole party adjourned to the moss outside. Somewhat clumsily, Peep attached the shoes to his feet and stepped out on the moss. It yielded beneath the plastic; but did not break.

  “Fine,” said Mal in a tone of self-satisfaction. “Come on back, Peep.”

  Peep returned and removed the shoes.

  “All right!” said Sorrel. “You’ve got him a pair of shoes. But how about the collapsible angle?”

  “Oh, that,” said Mal. “Peep, would you mind taking one of those shoes and rolling it up into a tube.”

  “Indeed,” said Peep.

  He gravely picked up the nearest mudshoe and rolled it across into a tube of about five feet in length and four inches in diameter. He did it with no more effort than a human being might have used in rolling up a piece of heavy paper.

  “I don’t know why it is,” said Sorrel, turning a slight shade of green, “but it bothers me when you do things like that.”

  “Young friend,” said Peep, turning his brilliant brown eyes on the Underground man, “strength is a curse.”

  “You think so?” asked Sorrel, somewhat relieved.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Peep's expedition with the mudshoes and a power belt was made one dark night and turned out to be successful—although the little Atakit modestly refused to go into details about it. And with the gallimeter, the tension box, and the cold box all installed, Mal got down to work. Time began to hang heavy on the hands of all the others at the funnel spot—with the single exception of Sorrel, who had his own duties in the regular work of the station. They had been, and still were, partners in the crusade to get Mal’s drive built. But the others had ceased to be working partners.

  With the exception of a few small tasks now and then that required several hands at once, Mal had little for his three friends to do. As he himself said, this part of the job was “all theory and no practice.” He spent long hours in the Betsy’s laboratory-workshop and emerged red-eyed and fatigued but with nothing more tangible to show for his effort than heaps of discarded paper covered with endless calculations. Occasionally, he would run some incomprehensible test, using the equipment he had ordered. But the results were not spectacular and obviously meant nothing to anyone besides himself.

  His drive, of course, was no drive. The speed of light was the ultimate limiting factor where motion was concerned, and that was that. Mal’s idea, however, like all the other serious ones which had been investigated since first contact with the Alien Federation, was concerned not with the problem of conquering distance, but of disregarding it. He was attacking the problem from the other end, posing instead of the question, “How can I get from here to there?” the question, “What factor or factors cause me to be here rather than there?” If he could isolate these factors, or this factor, then it might be possible to manipulate them at will, so that instead of being here, it was possible to be—instantaneously— there.

  This much, Mal was willing to tell anyone. What he did not wish to disclose, and which he avoided disclosing by falling back on the perfectly true excuse that it could not be explained properly without a background comparable to his own in physics, mathematics, and spatial logics, was his theory of attack on the problem. Mal had become convinced that the key to the factors of positioning lay in a precise definition of the electron. By what amounted to a reverse process of reasoning he was starting with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and backing up to the question.

  All this, of course, was so much juggling with moonbeams. You built a ramp off into nothingness, walked off it and started climbing from nowhere to somewhere impossible; but an inner feeling of certainly kept Mal doggedly on the trail. It was scientific faith in its purest form; and while it enabled Mal to spend long hours in the laboratory it was not calculated to help him endure the well-meaning visits of his four companions, who, having little else to do, were often tempted to drop by the Betsy, “to see how he was coming along.”

  Dirk was the worst. Peep could take his boredom out in philosophical contemplation; and Margie was perceptive enough to see that while her visiting relieved her ennui it also transferred the strain in a different form to Mal’s shoulders. But Dirk was unappeasable—so much so, that, eventually to choose the lesser of two evils, Mal found him small tasks to do around the lab for a regular portion of the working day, rather than have him dropping in with jarring questions at unspecified moments.

  To Mal’s surprise, his action produced amazingly good results. Dirk brightened up, became a much more healthy companion to the rest of the company at the station; and with w
hat must have been superhuman restraint, for him, refrained from bothering Mal during the time he was in the lab.

  One day, while Dirk was running some quite meaningless and unnecessary tests on the cold box, Mal happened to reach the end of one long train of hopeful calculation, finishing, as usual, in a dead end. He slowly became conscious of Dirk, painfully and methodically running his checks on the box, running them again, and comparing the results for mean error. It struck him suddenly that Dirk nowadays had become different from the way he had been when Mal had first met him. Different in some way that could not at first be pinned down. Mal frowned, considering him. What exactly had been changed? Dirk was as tall as ever, as lean, as—of course!

  “Hey, you’ve shaved off your mustache!” said Mal suddenly.

  Dirk started, made an error in his calculations, and swore.

  “Just a minute,” he said irritably and went back to his work.

  Mal waited, feeling a certain sense of humbleness that was wholly new to him where Dirk was concerned. He knew that the work Dirk was doing was completely worthless; but it was impossible to shake off a feeling that he had interrupted something important. This being on the other end of such an exchange, so to speak, was new and a little startling. Mal even found himself wondering if perhaps he had not been a little selfish in his curtness the past days where others in the station were concerned.

  Finally Dirk finished. He brought the calculations over to Mal’s desk and laid them down.

  “What was it you said?” he asked.

  “I just noticed you’d shaved off your mustache,” answered Mal.

  Dirk ran his fingers automatically over his smooth upper lip.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, not without a touch of embarrassment. “Stupid sort of a thing to wear, anyway.”

  “And,” said Mal, noticing this, too, for the first time, “you’re not wearing your Archaist costume any more.”

  “Oh, well, what we’re doing right now really isn’t Archaist business,” said Dirk. He sat down on the edge of a bench.

  “Changed your mind?” said Mal.

  Dirk nodded.

  “Not quite as suddenly as Peep changed his about Neo-Taylorism,” he said. “But I finally got around to it.”

  “Good,” said Mal.

  There was a moment’s awkward silence.

  “How do you feel about things, then?” asked Mal.

  Dirk paused, and then shrugged.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” he answered. He looked at Mal and grinned a little. “I’m certainly in no hurry to hook up with any new trend of thought. I’d just as soon sit out the next ideological dance.” He hesitated, “Mal—”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me,” said Dirk, looking at Mal seriously. “To be frank with you I’ve been doing more thinking about myself lately than I have about anything else—tell me, do you think I’d ever make a physicist?”

  Mal rubbed his jaw in perplexity and some embarrassment.

  “To be frank right back at you,” he said finally, “no. It takes a sort of—well, almost a call to it, if you’re really going to make a life’s work out of it. ”

  “I was kind of afraid you’d say something like that,” Dirk said. “Well, I’ve got to do something, I know that. It never used to bother me before, but lately, I’ve started having nightmares that I might live my round of years and not do one damn thing in all that time that I considered was worth it. It’s a funny feeling—sort of awful.” He peered at Mal. “Did you ever have it?”

  “Not exactly that way,” replied Mal. “I’ve had it where I didn’t know for sure if I was doing the right thing—with physics or whatever I was at at the time. It amounts to the same thing. I guess it hits everybody at some time or another.”

  “I suppose so,” said Dirk. “Part of the standard trip toward maturity, maybe. You kick over the traces for a while and then you want to settle down. I suppose I’ve matured. Do you think so?”

  “I think so,” said Mal. “You’re bound to as time goes on—if you’ve got anything to mature with. I’ve changed a lot lately, too. I don’t know whether you’d call it maturing or not.”

  “You were always more mature than I was, I think,” said Dirk.

  “Oh well—” said Mal, somewhat embarrassed, but flattered. A new thought occurred to him.

  “You know, I wonder if the whole concept of maturing isn’t twisted.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “This idea of becoming mature in your thinking—as if it was something you did all at once at one particular point in your life and that before that time you weren’t mature; and after it you are and don’t have to worry about it any more. Take Peep for instance. Would you call him mature—or wouldn’t you?”

  “Well—” Dirk paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “After all, how can you tell? He’s an Alien.”

  “I know,” said Mal. “That’s my point. But try and answer it, anyway.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Dirk. “I don’t think he is so damn mature. Some of the things he does seem pretty childish. I’ll tell you, I’ve certainly changed my ideas about Aliens since I’ve seen him. Of course, I’ve got to be fair about it, Sometimes, too, he does seem to be looking down on us from a long ways off.”

  “All right, then,” said Mal. “Now, here’s my point. If maturing was something you passed, and only that—like a fixed point on the road of growth—then Peep should certainly have passed it long ago, considering he evidently lives several times as long as we do and because his race had already passed the entrance requirements for the Federation. But to you and me, he looks as if he’s still trying to grow up in ways. Now, as you said, he’s an Alien, and we’ve got no sure way of knowing, but suppose that maturing is something you go on doing all your life and all down the process of race development. Then you and I and Peep and everybody else fit right into our niches right on down the line.”

  Mal stopped. Dirk looked thoughtful.

  “You mean,” he said at last, “Peep’s immature in his own way, but that same immaturity is a couple of notches above our maturity?”

  “That’s it,” said Mal. “More or less. You have , to assume a terrific difference in background and education between him and us. We don’t even know how the universe looks to him. For all we know, he may be in possession of some simple little facts that would completely upset our own picture of things. For instance, this struggle of his to love everything and everybody looks ridiculous to us. You would say and I would say that it just can’t be done. Maybe, from Peep’s point of view, it can be done. Maybe he knows some thinking beings that do. Maybe that’s the way all life in the galaxy is heading. Of course, maybe he’s just a crackpot, too.”

  Dirk—surprisingly—took up Peep’s defense. “I wouldn’t call him a crackpot,” he said.

  Mal shrugged.

  “How can you tell?” he asked.

  “He shows too much common sense where practical matters are concerned,” replied Dirk.

  “Hmm.” This aspect of the matter had not occurred to Mal before. For a moment he was tempted to make Dirk prove his point; arid then he realized that to ask it would be carping. Peep’s common sense had indeed displayed itself more than once.

  “You know,” said Dirk, “you may have something with this relative-maturity-level notion. At any rate, it gives me an idea. Do you suppose you can spare me for a few days around here?”

  “I think so,” replied Mal, conscious of a sharp twinge of conscience at the thought of the deception he had been practicing to keep Dirk quiet. The old Dirk might have deserved it—this new Dirk quite obviously didn’t. “I’m just about at a stage where I’m going to have to work by myself, anyway. What do you have in mind, though?”

  Dirk stood up.

  “It strikes me,” he said, “that Peep might really have something to say. I’m going to look him up and see if I can get him to talk. Then I’ll just listen.” He looked at Mal. “If you don’t need me,
I’ll go looking for him now.”

  “Go ahead,” said Mal.

  “Right!” said Dirk. And with a friendly wave of his hand, he turned and disappeared through the door of the lab, his enormously tall figure erect and jaunty.

  Mal continued to stare after him for a long moment. Then, a ping of expanding metal from the cold box, returning to normal room temperature, reminded him of his surroundings. Sighing deeply, he reached for his stylus and a fresh sheet of paper.

  Wave phase differentiation 402, he wrote in small neat letters at the top of the page, Venus, December 12, 13:45, Sheet Number 1.

  He began to calculate. After a little while the subject engrossed him. Dirk faded from his mind and he became lost in his task.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Look,” said Sorrel, cornering him after dinner a few days later. “They’ve passed the special police powers bill for the Company and the Company Police are cracking down. We’ve several hundred of our people on Earth picked up already. It’s only a matter of time now until they locate this spot. How close are you?”

  “Sorrel,” he said. “I’ve got a sort of mental jigsaw puzzle and I’m trying the loose pieces one by one. I may be one piece away from the one I want and I may be a thousand. I don’t know. Look—if you want to duck, the rest of you go ahead. Leave me here to work on it and I’ll take my chances.”

  “We can’t,” said Sorrel. “We can’t take a chance of letting you get into the Company’s hands.”

  “Why?” asked Mal. “I’ll give you copies of my notes and an outline of my theory. Forget what I said in the beginning. Take them and find someone else with my sort of training and put him to work on it.”

  “We can’t,” said Sorrel. “We’ve got no time.”

  “What if it takes a few years longer?” Mal countered. “You’ll get it eventually.”

  “No—” Sorrel’s voice cracked. He lowered it to a whisper, glancing around to see if any of the others were within hearing. “I’ve got something I want you to hear. Meet me outside in twenty minutes.”