Once he got going, however, his speech was impressive.
“I have come to a New World,” he began in English, pausing to permit accurate translation of his words. “I have come across the greatest sea of them all. I have come not at the head of an armed flotilla, but alone and defenseless. I have come in peace and in friendship, to extend the hand of welcome from one civilization to another.”
There was spontaneous applause from the assembled diplomats.
“It is time,” he went on with greater confidence, “that you put your differences aside and take your rightful place in the family of the worlds. War must be a thing of the past, so that we may all march forward side by side down the long corridors of Destiny. On all the planets of a million suns, there is no stronger might than friendship, no finer aspiration than the harmony of strong men.”
More applause.
He talked for over an hour in the same vein, and finally concluded: “Be proud of your great world, and yet know humility too. I have come to say something good about the human race, and to hold out to you the torch of confidence and faith. Remember my visit well in the years that are to come, and I pray that you are today all my friends, even as I am yours.”
He brought the house down.
Everyone seemed satisfied.
Several days passed before a few people began to wonder about the speech they had heard. What, they asked themselves, had Keith really said, beyond glittering generalities and vague sentiments about friendship?
Most people, having never heard any other kind of speech, continued to accept it as a masterpiece.
Keith was troubled and nervous, and locked himself up in his suite. He worked with almost desperate haste on his notebooks, going over even the most trivial phrase again and again. He refused to see anyone, pleading that he had an urgent report to prepare for his government.
When he did leave, much to the consternation of the secret service, he simply disappeared. The last person to see him was a paper boy at a busy intersection. He swore to investigators that Keith had paused at his stand and bought a paper, muttering to himself what sounded like, “God, I just can’t go through with this any longer.”
There the matter rested.
* * * *
Keith reappeared somewhat furtively several days later on the third floor of the Social Sciences Building of Western University in Los Angeles. He had dyed his hair black, and he walked quickly down the hall past the Anthropology Museum and stopped at a closed office door. A white card on the door had a name and title typed on it: Dr. George Alan Coles, Professor of Linguistics. He took a deep breath and knocked.
“Come in!”
Keith walked inside and shut the door behind him.
“Are you Dr. Coles?”
“I have that dubious distinction, yes.” The man behind the desk was slightly built and his rimless glasses were almost hidden behind the fumes from a virulent black cigar. “What can I do for you?”
Keith took the plunge. He had tried to follow his instructions to the letter, but the strain had told on him. There came a time when a man had to act for himself. “Dr. Coles, I’m in terrible trouble.”
Coles lowered the cigar and looked more closely at the young man before him. He arched his rather bushy eyebrows. “Dyed your hair didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it was that obvious.”
Coles shrugged. “Keith, I’ve seen your picture in my morning paper every day for what seems to be a lifetime. I can’t claim to be any Sherlock Holmes, but I’ve patterned my existence on the assumption that I’m not feebleminded.”
Keith sank into a chair. “I was going to tell you anyway, sir.”
“Look here, young man.” Coles waved his cigar. “You really can’t stay here. About half a billion people are looking for you, at last count, and if the Board of Regents stumbles over you in my office—”
Keith lit a cigarette and wiped his hands on his trousers. The circles under his eyes were more pronounced than usual, and he was in need of a shave. “Sir, I’m desperate. I’ve come to you as one man to another. You’re my last hope. Won’t you listen to me?”
Coles chewed on his cigar. He took off his rimless glasses and polished them on a Kleenex. “Lock the door,” he said finally. “I’ll hear you out, but I’ll hate myself in the morning.”
A ray of what might have been hope touched Keith’s face. He hurriedly locked the office door.
“Cards on the table now, young man. What the hell is going on here?”
“Believe me, sir, this is all damnably embarrassing.”
“As the actress said to the Bishop,” Coles said, knocking off the ash from his cigar.
Keith took a deep drag on his cigarette. “My people will be coming for me very soon,” he said. “I got a message off to them when I crashed. If they could have only got here sooner, this whole mess would never have happened.”
“That’s Greek to me, son. I had hoped you might be able to make more sense in person than you did at the United Nations.”
Keith flushed. “Look,” he said. “There’s nothing complicated about it, really. You just don’t have the picture yet. You’ll have to toss out all your preconceived notions to begin with.”
“Haven’t got any,” Coles assured him.
“Here’s the first thing, then. There is no galactic civilization. I’m not the representative of anything.”
Coles blew a small cloud of smoke at the ceiling and said nothing.
Keith talked fast, anxious to get it all out. “I landed in Los Angeles by accident; you know that. I’d hoped to come down in the Arizona desert, where no one would see me and I could go about my business in peace. But, dammit, I was spotted right away, and from then on I never had a chance. I had strict instructions about what to do if I was discovered by the natives—that is, by the citizens of Earth—”
“Just a second.” Coles crushed out his cigar. “I thought you said there wasn’t any galactic civilization.”
“There is a civilization out there, sure, if you want to call it that,” Keith said impatiently. “But not that kind of a civilization. There are hundreds of thousands of inhabited worlds in this galaxy alone. Don’t you see what that means, just in terms of your own science?”
“Well, the notion did pop into my cerebrum that the communications problem would be a tough nut to crack. I admit I did wonder a little about this mammoth civilization of yours. I couldn’t quite figure how it could work.”
“It doesn’t work. There’s some contact between us, but not a lot. Why, one whole planet couldn’t hold the government officials for a set-up like that! There isn’t any uniform government. War isn’t very popular except for would-be suicides, so each of us goes pretty much our own way. The plain fact is—excuse me, Dr. Coles—that we don’t really give a hoot in hell about the planet Earth. The last time one of us visited you, so far as I know, was in 974 A.D., and I expect it’ll be a few more centuries before anyone comes again.”
“Ummm,” Dr. Coles prepared another cigar and stuck it in his mouth. “I believe your speech mentioned the hand of friendship clasping ours across the great sea of space—”
“I’m sorry.” Keith flushed again. “I did have to say all that hokum, but it wasn’t my idea.”
“I’m glad to hear it, frankly. I’d hate to think that our friends out in the stars would be as tedious as all that.”
“All I did was to be agreeable!” Keith shifted on his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Our instructions are very explicit on that point: if you get found out in a primitive culture, play along with them and stay out of trouble. If they think you’re a god, be a god. If they think you’re a fraud, be a fraud. You know—when in Rome, and all that. I tried to be what I was expected to be, that’s all.”
Coles smiled a little. “Once we found out you were a spaceman you were cooked, hey?”
“Exactly! I not only was a spaceman but I had to be their kind of a spaceman. They couldn’t even consider any other kind
. I never had a chance—it got to the point where I was either the emissary from a benevolent super-civilization peopled by fatherly geniuses or I was some kind of monster come to destroy the Earth! What could I do? I didn’t want to cause any trouble, and I didn’t want to go to jail. What would you have done?”
Coles shrugged and lit his cigar.
“I haven’t handled things very well,” Keith said nervously. “I’ve botched it all. It was rough learning English from radio broadcasts—you can imagine—and now everything is ruined.”
“Let’s start at the beginning, young man. What the devil are you anyhow? An anthropologist from the stars doing an ethnological study of poor, primitive Earth?”
“No.” Keith got to his feet and paced the floor. “I mentioned a previous visit by a student in 974? Well, I wanted to follow it up. I’m studying the vowel-shift from Old English to the present. We’d predicted a shift of the long vowels upward and into dipthongal types. I’m happy to say I’ve been able to confirm this, at least roughly.”
Coles put down his cigar. “You’re a linguist, then?”
Keith looked at the floor. “I had hoped to be. I’ll be honest with you, sir. I’m still a graduate student. I’m working on what you’d call a Ph.D. I came here to do a field study, but my notes are hopelessly incomplete. I’ll never be able to get another research grant—”
Dr. George Alan Coles put his head in his hands and began to laugh. He had a big laugh for such a small man. He laughed so hard the tears streaked his glasses and he had to take them off. He had the best laugh he had had in years.
“I guess this is all very amusing to you, sir,” Keith said. “But I’ve come to you for help. If you just want to laugh at me –”
“Sorry, Keith.” Coles blew his nose, loudly. “I was laughing at us, not at you. We’ve built ourselves up for a huge anticlimax, and I must say it’s typical.”
Keith sat down, somewhat mollified. “Can you help me? Will you help me? I’m ashamed to ask, but my whole lifework may depend on this thing. You just don’t know.”
Coles smiled. “I do know, I’m afraid. I was a graduate student once myself. How much time do we have?”
“Three days. If you can help me, just give me a hand this once—”
“Easy does it.” Coles got to his feet and went over to a section of the metal bookcases that lined his walls. “Let’s see, Keith. I’ve got Bloomfield’s Language here; that’s got a lot of the data you’ll need in it. We’ll start with that. And I’ve got some more stuff at home that should come in handy.”
Keith wiped his forehead, his eyes shining.
He had learned many words in English, but somehow none of them seemed adequate to express his thanks.
* * * *
Three nights later it was clear and unseasonally warm. The two men drove up Bel-Air Road in Coles’s Chevrolet, turned out the lights, and parked on the bluff.
Silently, they unloaded a crate of books and journals and started down the winding asphalt trail to the house where Frank Evans lived.
“We’ll have to sneak along the back of their house,” Keith whispered. “If we can just get out past that patio we’ll be okay.”
“Shouldn’t be difficult,” Coles panted, shifting the crate. “I don’t think they could hear a cobalt bomb with all that racket.”
The hi-fi set was going full blast, as usual. Keith winced.
They made it undetected, and proceeded along the dark path under the orange trees. They went fifty yards, until they could see the brush scar where Keith’s ship had crashed.
Coles looked at his watch. “Five minutes, I figure,” he said.
They sat on the crate, breathing hard.
“Dr. Coles, I don’t know how to thank you,” Keith said quietly.
“I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Keith. It isn’t every professor who can draw students from so far away.”
Keith laughed. “Well, if they ever figure out how that ship of mine works maybe you can send a student to me sometime.”
“We’ll both be long dead by then, but it’s an intriguing idea anyhow.”
Exactly on schedule, a large sphere, almost invisible in the night, settled into the hillside next to them. A panel hissed open and yellow light spilled out.
“Good-by, sir.”
“So long, Keith. Good luck to you.”
The two men shook hands.
Keith lifted the crate into the sphere and climbed in after it. He waved and the panel closed behind him. Soundlessly, the sphere lifted from the Earth, toward the ship that waited far above.
Coles worked his way silently back along the path to the house, and up the asphalt trail to his car. He paused a moment, catching his breath. As Keith had done before him, he looked down on the great city glittering in the distance. Then he looked up. A blaze of stars burned in the sky, and they seemed closer now, and warmer.
He smiled a little and drove back down the hill, into his city.
<
* * * *
JACK VANCE
A first-rate science-fiction story is sometimes a quagmire. You venture out on its attractive and solid-looking surface and, at a point of no return, you find the ground dissolving under you. An alien planet is NOT merely a more distant Earth. To say more would be to say much too much; so, with no more warning than that, now set boldly forth to meet—
The Devil on Salvation Bluff
A few minutes before noon the sun took a lurch south and set.
Sister Mary tore the solar helmet from her fair head and threw it at the settee—a display that surprised and troubled her husband, Brother Raymond.
He clasped her quivering shoulders. “Now, dear, easy does it. A blow-up can’t help us at all.”
Tears were rolling down Sister Mary’s cheeks. “As soon as we start from the house the sun drops out of sight! It happens every time!”
“Well—we know what patience is. There’ll be another soon.”
“It may be an hour! Or ten hours! And we’ve got our jobs to do!”
Brother Raymond went to the window, pulled aside the starched lace curtains, peered into the dusk. “We could start now, and get up the hill before night.”
“ ‘Night?’ “ cried Sister Mary. “What do you call this?”
Brother Raymond said stiffly, “I mean night by the Clock. Real night.”
“The Clock. . . .” Sister Mary sighed, sank into a chair. “If it weren’t for the Clock we’d all be lunatics.”
Brother Raymond, at the window, looked up toward Salvation Bluff, where the great clock bulked unseen. Mary joined him; they stood gazing through the dark. Presently Mary sighed. “I’m sorry, dear. But I get so upset.”
Raymond patted her shoulder. “It’s no joke living on Glory.”
Mary shook her head decisively. “I shouldn’t let myself go. There’s the Colony to think of. Pioneers can’t be weaklings.”
They stood close, drawing comfort from each other.
“Look!” said Raymond. He pointed. “A fire, and up in Old Fleetville!”
In perplexity they watched the far spark.
“They’re all supposed to be down in New Town,” muttered Sister Mary. “Unless it’s some kind of ceremony.... The salt we gave them . . .”
Raymond, smiling sourly, spoke a fundamental postulate of life on Glory. “You can’t tell anything about the Flits. They’re liable to do most anything.”
Mary uttered a truth even more fundamental. “Anything is liable to do anything.”
“The Flits most liable of all. . . . They’ve even taken to dying without our comfort and help!”
“We’ve done our best,” said Mary. “It’s not our fault!” —almost as if she feared that it was.
“No one could possibly blame us.”
“Except the Inspector. . . . The Flits were thriving before the Colony came.”
“We haven’t bothered them; we haven’t encroached, or molested, or interfered. In fact we’ve knocked ourselves out to he
lp them. And for thanks they tear down our fences and break open the canal and throw mud on our fresh paint!”
Sister Mary said in a low voice, “Sometimes I hate the Flits. . . . Sometimes I hate Glory. Sometimes I hate the whole Colony.”
Brother Raymond drew her close, patted the fair hair that she kept in a neat bun. “You’ll feel better when one of the suns comes up. Shall we start?”
“It’s dark,” said Mary dubiously. “Glory is bad enough in the daytime.”
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