“I wonder if he’s the crazy one,” I muttered. The fourth consecutive MP was checking our passes.
Doc shrugged. “I suppose you’d welcome him with a brass band and the keys to the city—after he murdered three unarmed citizens up in Maine, including one ten-year-old child, and tore the throat out of a psychiatrist here who was only trying to get an encephalogram.”
“Mmmm—yeah,” I said. “There is that.”
We were shepherded by a tense-looking young lieutenant of Intelligence, through high, oak-paneled hallways to the room which was the main office of Project Wizard. That name, together with other misleading hints, had been chosen with malice aforethought: in case there was some leak, it was hoped “they” would assume we’d taken over the institute merely to study something in the ESP line which might have military value. I overheard snatches of conversation between men. It had nothing to do with the stars or a science a thousand years ahead of our own or the fate of our race; it was mostly plain human bellyaching at being penned in here indefinitely without so much as a female face around. Nobody but the top brass was going to leave the Institute till something had been accomplished with Butch.
Brigadier General Harmon J. Leslie was about forty years old, a bulky, harassed-looking man with stiff gray-shot hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He was actually just an administrator; the real boss of Project Wizard was Dr. Hamilton Moran. Both of them greeted us as we entered, said they were pleased to meet me, and asked us to sit down.
“I haven’t been told many details,” I said. “I’m not even sure just what I can do to help.”
“The whole business is unprecedented,” said Moran. “We’ve had to make up our own rules as we went along. Dr. Urquhart said you had the kind of mind which could come up with new approaches, fresh slants—that’s enough for us. If nothing else, you may be able to guess just how far advanced the technology of Butch’s people is.”
He was a slim, dark, sharp-featured man, whose gentle voice didn’t quite fit with the almost Puritanical features. Doc said he’d been picked to run the project because of his prominence as a research psychiatrist. He’d had a lot to do with developing shock. techniques and lobotomy, as well as fundamental work in encephalography and neurology. Actually, there were not too many men working on the problem itself. A large number would only have gotten in each other’s way. Moran and his assistants were handling the psychiatric end, while Doc Urquhart’s staff was still considering Butch’s anatomy and biochemistry. I was a kind of last resort; maybe Butch was his people’s equivalent of an engineer, and I would think enough like him to understand what was going on in that unhuman skull.
“Suppose you begin from the beginning,” I suggested. “I gather that the Nova Scotia Meteor was really a spaceship which crashed in the sea. It hasn’t been recovered, has it?” “With some thousands of square miles in which it might have struck, and some hundreds or thousands of feet of Water on top of it—hardly.” The general’s voice was dry. “We’re still trying, but it’s hopeless. Apparently it went out of control, and Butch was the only survivor. He bailed out—” “How?”
“How should I know? He was found in Maine, three or four hundred miles away, practically naked. Maybe he’s, what’s the word, telekinetic.”
“Then he wouldn’t stay here,” said Moran crisply. “He wouldn’t have been captured at all. No, I imagine he had a —oh, call it an antigravity parachute—which carried him about to Bangor. Then it probably ran out of fuel, and he buried it and set off on foot. He wandered around for a week or so, presumably hiding by day and traveling by night.” “Sounds like he was scared of us,” I suggested.
“Well,” said Doc, “wouldn’t you be if you landed on an alien planet? He’d have no idea what we were like. Maybe, on the basis of other planets he’s seen, the chances were that we’d be hostile. He buried his parachute so as not to give us any information we don’t have, and began skulking about trying to learn what sort of world he was marooned on.” “That’s a nice hypothesis,” snapped Moran, “but it just doesn’t fit the facts. Which are that he killed people and animals without provocation.”
“The cows he must have killed for food,” said Doc. “They had been partially eaten. The dogs probably barked at him, and he didn’t dare have that noise.”
“But the people? He must have known they were the dominant species here and that his killing them could only antagonize us.”
“I can’t explain that,’1-admitted Doc in a small voice.
“Nor has he been the least bit co-operative since we caught him,” said-Moran. His soft tones had suddenly turned cold. “He should have been able to see where his only advantage lies. But he’s done nothing that makes sense. Most of the time he’s quite passive, refusing to communicate in any way. Occasionally, for no reason at all, he' flies into murderous Ages. We’ve had one man killed and several badly injured.” “So what’s your theory?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
“He’s insane, of course. Probably he sustained some injury in the crash and it’s driven him out of his mind.”
Leslie smiled with a certain bleakness. “You see the problem,” he said. “Butch represents a civilization so far beyond ours that we probably can’t imagine half of what they’ve got. Atomic energy, gravity control, probably faster-than-light travel—just write your own list. We’ve got to have his knowledge, both for the sake of this nation and for the whole damn human race. His civilization could probably squash us like beetles if they wanted to. But will they want to? We’ve got to know!”
He spread his hands. “Only Butch is insane. First we’ve got to cure him. How do you cure a nonhuman member of a civilization that never was on Earth?”
Doc Urquhart cocked a sardonic brow at Moran. “I think there’s a more fundamental question,” he replied. “How do you know when he is cured? What, for Butch, constitutes sanity?”
The padded cell was upstairs, at the end of a corridor whose doors opened on labs crammed with more testing equipment than I could put a “name to. A pair of sentries stood at the landing, and another pair, flanking the outer door of the cell, snapped to attention as we four approached.
The room beyond was- a large one. It had been cut in half by a hastily erected but husky wall. The farther end was the cell. Moran gestured at a peephole, and I put my eye to it. There was a wide-angle lens which/Covered nearly the whole space, but I looked only at Butch.
He was standing in the middle of the room, arms hanging, the long cat-like tail drooping, but his posture was defiant. My first impression was that he was gigantic. Then I recognized the illusion common to six-footers, that anyone their own height is taller. According to the measurements, Butch was six one and a half and weighed some two hundred pounds. His torso looked almost human, broad-shouldered and smoothly muscled; his legs were not quite so manlike, he was digitigrade and walked with a crouched gait on three clawed toes. There were homy spurs on his heels, and when the four stubby fingers of his hand closed together, retractable claws came out between them. Sleek bluish-gray fur covered the whole form; otherwise he wore only a kind of sporran of some soft, metallic-looking, seemingly indestructible fabric. The pouch had been empty when he was captured.
His head was the most unearthly thing about him. It was of good size, round, with a high bulging forehead and large pointed ears. The eyes were oblique and yellow, with narrow horizontal pupils. The mouth was wide, full-lipped, with two small tusks projecting over the chin. Instead of a nose, he had two fleshy organs that looked rather like branched coral growths, though they were soft and movable.
He sensed us and turned around. For a moment he hissed, and the claws came out. Then he went back to his aloofness.
I looked up from the peephole, shivering. It 'must have taken real guts for the state police to track down that monster and then catch him in nets instead of filling him with lead. After that, of course, the FBI and the Secret Service had taken over. Those outfits work fast when they want to.
�
�He takes a little getting used to,” said Doc quietly. “But he’s really beautiful, in his own way. We must look just as weird to him.”
“Or it,” muttered Leslie.
“It?” I asked, bristling a trifle. “Look, just because he’s from outside—”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to sound—prejudiced,” said the general. “Fact is, Butch is *he’ only by. courtesy. He’s really, a, uh, hermaphrodite.”
“No kidding!” I took another look.
Doc nodded. “We’re not too well up on his anatomy yet,” he said. “But he’s submitted to a number of examinations. He’s a warm-blooded, hairy animal with both male and female reproductive organs—though neither looks much like ours. He could reproduce by himself or in partnership. But he’s oviparous, I’m convinced, and there are no organs of lactation.” He smiled wryly. “Neither mammal, reptile, nor good red herring. You name it.”
“How about those—antennae?”
“Spongy growths, used for both breathing and smelling as far as we can gather,” said Moran. Doc frowned a bit; after all, those results were due to his team. “Tests with minute traces of perfumes and so on indicate that his sense of smell is far superior to ours. While we can’t be certain, we’ve reason to think that his other senses are about as good as the human, maybe his hearing is not quite equal to our norm. He probably smells us at the peephole.”
I looked in again. There were washing and sanitary facilities in the cell, also padded and rubber-covered. Doc told me that Butch used them without having needed instruction. “How about food?” I asked.
“Now there’s a real problem,” said Doc. “His metabolism is obviously pretty similar to ours. Blood and cell samples, analysis of body wastes, and so 'on, indicate that, though there are some interesting anomalies. No adrenalin, for instance—another phenol derivative instead; and the chromosome pattern— Well, anyway, we’ve just given him a wide variety of stuff and let him choose what he wants. Which turns out to be mostly meat, though he won’t touch it if it’s bloody. Some fruits and vegetables, too. So far his health has remained tolerably good, as far as I can judge. Only—what vitamins and trace elements that he needs are lacking in that diet? It’d be strange if he could eat nothing but ordinary Earth food for a long time without developing some kind of deficiency. We’ve added a Supplement containing almost everything we could think of, in minute doses, so if he needs tantalum or calcium pentothenate he’s getting it. But—’’ Doc shrugged. “No telling.”
“He can’t be from this solar system,” I said, very quietly.
“There are no planets here he could have come from.” “Yeah,” said Leslie. “Interstellar spaceships. I know. And if the galactic overlords don’t like the way we’ve treated Butch—”
“They may never find us again,” I said. “Space is too huge. This may be only one of a million explorers, of whom a certain percentage never come back and are just written off.” “There are ten thousand possibilities,” said Moran impatiently, “and we’ll never know which is right until Butch tells us. But he won’t communicate.”
The institute was pretty crowded, but Doc and I had a fair sized room to ourselves.'That evening we broke open a case of beer and settled down to some serious talking.
“You’re an idea man,” said Doo-. There was a new harshness on his round ruddy face. “We’ve tried just about every standard, professional approach there is. At my insistence, we’ve now co-opted you for the amateur approach. Deliver, boy.”
“Well,” I said, tilting my chair back against the wall, “just what have you tried? Let’s see. Let’s make a list.” I ticked the points off on my fingers. “From the physiological angle, you’ve studied samples of blood, skin, hair, and so on. You’ve taken Butch’s temperature, which turns out to be around one hundred two—”
“Not necessarily his racial norm,” said Doc. “A lot of humans have chronic hyper- or hypothermia. Moran thinks the temperature is a sign of hysteria.”
“Well, you’ve tried to test his senses by seeing how he reacts,” I went on. “Not too successfully, because most of the time he just refuses to react. You’ve let him decide his own diet, but don’t know if you’re slowly poisoning him or not. You’ve taken cardiograms, X-rays, encephalograms—”
“Ah, yes, those encephalograms,” said Doc. “They’re not human patterns, you know. But Moran thinks they indicate mental abnormality. He says one of those frequencies is found in humans with a bruised cortex, and Butch is nearly enough human—”
“How can you find out? That wave may be perfectly all right for his race.”
“How do you think Moran means to find out? Open the skull and see.”
“But—good Lord! Butch’s brain probably doesn’t even look like ours!”
“I know. Such hints as the X-rays give us suggest that. Still—what else is there to do? Moran may be right. Me, I’m wondering what anesthetic to use.”
“Well, let’s go. on to the technological angle,” I said. “Pretty nil, you told me. When you showed him stellar maps, he didn’t do a thing. When you took him outside and showed him the stars and asked him in sign language to point out where he came from—he didn’t.”
“Moran says he’s nuts, and that’s part of the evidence,” nodded Doc.
“I think Butch is just being cagy,” I said. “How' does he know we don’t have spaceships and designs on his home star if we can find it?”
“Well, such suspicions do look pretty paranoid, don’t they?” asked Doc. “I’ve always thought the whole idea of galactic conquest was ridiculous. Logistics and economics both speak against it.”
“Could be,” I said reluctantly.
“At any rate,” said Doc, “we tried to draw diagrams for him, simple things like a Coolidge tube or the fission of a U-235 atom. Dammit, Bob, he couldn’t have been crewman on a spaceship without knowing a lot of applied science! We wanted him to draw similar pictures. It needn’t have been anything he wanted to hide, it could only have been—oh, a -picture of thorium fission. A schematic radio circuit. Anything, just to give us some common basis of symbols. But he kind of stared at the pictures, and then -handed the pencil back.”
“So that’s proof he suffers from amnesia?” I asked.
“Well, it’s indicative,” said Doc mildly.
“Yeah. Unless—could it be that his science and its symbols are really different from ours? Maybe they don’t use radios, they might have something we’ve never dreamed of. Maybe they don’t think of the atom as a particle made up of other particles. It could be regarded just as a singularity in a universal potential field, if Butch’s race is good enough at mathematics ... In other words, our whole symbology may be so alien to his that he saw it was hopeless to try drawing us any pictures.”
“It’s possible,” said Doc. “I’d like to believe it, Bob. But his whole behavior pattern is so irrational that— Well, look. He has almost the- same vocal equipment as we do. Vocal cords, hard and soft palate, tongue—all of it. He’d speak English with a funny whistling accent, but he could talk. His race must communicate by speech, they wouldn’t have such organs so well-developed if they didn’t.”
“And he won’t talk,” I said.
“Not a damn word,” said Doc. We’ve tried by the hour, pointing out objects, naming them, acting out verbs, drawing pictures, every goddam thing you can imagine. We’ve had educational psychologists from here to California working on the problem. Butch watches us. But he never says a word. When he gets mad, he may hiss, but never a word.” “Look,” I said, “there’s no such thing as human nature. It’s a matter of cultural patterns. There’s no biological difference between us and the late lamented Nazis, but you could cross the universe, Fm sure, without finding thought and behavior patterns more incompatible. So—what kind of society does Butch come from?”
“We’ve had anthropologists here,” said Doc. “All they could do was make profound and meaningless remarks. Hell, Butch doesn’t give us anything to go on! If he is a norm
al member of his culture, then that culture must be something horrible. Look at his record—” The' old voice shook just a little. .“Murder, complete unco-operativeness, passivity breaking into violence for no reason at all—”
“Maybe we break one of his taboos every now and then, without knowing it,” I suggested.
“If Butch could cross space, he’d have sense enough not to expect us to behave just the way he thinks proper,” said Doc. “Unless Moran’s right.”
“My wife has a degree in anthropology,” I said, “and she’s a smart girl too. Can’t you get her here?”
“I’ll try if you insist,” said Doc, “but there isn’t much chance of it. Anyway, by the time she got her clearance, this business would be over—one way or the other.”
I sat forward so-*my chair’s legs crashed on the floor. “How’s that?"
Doc smiled grimly. “You don’t think this deadlock can go on forever, do you? Butch has knowledge we’ve got to have. Moran already has an okay to—cure him. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, he’ll start trying.”
“And if Moran fails?”
“Then,” said Doc, “we forget that this "ever happened. We bury it deeper than that spaceship is buried. We lock Project Wizard up and throw away the key. Until the possible day when Butch’s friends come looking for him.”
I wanted to watch some of the studies, and that was granted me the next morning. After breakfast, Doc was going to make some allergy and reaction tests. “Dr. Moran’s orders,” he explained. “You have to know a good deal about biochemistry before you can try shock treatment”
“Why shock?” I asked through a mouthful of ham and eggs. They fed us well, at least. The dining room was full of uniforms and the good clean smell of coffee. “If concussion is responsible—”
“We’ll have a look at his brain first,” said "Moran, “but I wonder if shock may not be our only hope. If it fails, there’s always lobotomy.”
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