Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “We can fly over there now,” answered Finchley. “We have tentative boundaries laid out below those pre-colony ruins we saw from the ’copter.”

  “Oh, yes. You know, I meant to remark as we flew over that they looked a good deal like similar remnants on some of the other planets.”

  He caught himself as Finchley’s thin lips tightened a trifle more. The coordinator was obviously trying to be patient and polite to an official from whom he hoped to get a good report, but Otis could see he would much rather be going about his business of building up the colony.

  He could hardly blame Finchley, he decided. It was the fifth planetary system Terrans had found in their expansion into space, and there would be bigger jobs ahead for a man with a record of successful accomplishments. Civilization was reaching out to the stars at last. Otis supposed that he, too, was some sort of pioneer, although he usually was too busy to feel like one.

  “Well, I’ll show you some photos later,” he said. “Right now, we—Say, why all that jet-burning down there?”

  In the gorge below, men had dropped their tools and seemed to be charging toward a common focal point. Excited yells carried thinly up the cliffs.

  “Ape hunt, probably,” guessed one of Finchley’s engineers.

  “Ape?” asked Otis, surprised.

  “Not exactly,” corrected Finchley patiently. “That’s common slang for what we mention in reports as Torangs. They look a little like big, skinny, gray apes, but they’re the only life large enough to name after the planet.”

  Otis stared down into the gorge. Most of the running men had given up and were straggling back to their work. Two or three, brandishing pistols, continued running and disappeared around a bend.

  “Never catch him now,” commented Finchley’s pilot.

  “Do you just let them go running off whenever they feel like it?” Otis inquired.

  Finchley met his curious gaze stolidly. “I’m in favor of anything that will break the monotony, Mr. Otis. We have a problem of morale, you know. This planet is a key colony, and I like to keep the work going smoothly.”

  “Yes, I suppose there isn’t much for recreation yet.”

  “Exactly. I don’t see the sport in it myself but I let them. We’re up to schedule.”

  “Ahead, if anything,” Otis placated him. “Well, now, about the city?”

  Finchley led the way to the helicopter. The pilot and Otis waited while he had a final word with his engineers, then they all climbed in and were off.

  Later, hovering over the network of crude roads being leveled by Finchley’s bulldozers, Otis admitted aloud that the location was well chosen. It lay along a long, narrow bay that thrust in from the distant ocean to gather the waters of the same river that was being dammed some miles upstream.

  “Those cliffs over there,” Finchley pointed out, “were raised up since the end of whatever civilization used to be here—so my geologist tells me. We can fly back that way, and you can see how the ancient city was once at the head of the bay.”

  The pilot climbed and headed over the cliffs. Otis saw that these formed the edge of a plateau. At one point, their continuity was marred by a deep gouge.

  “Where the river ran thousands of years ago,” Finchley explained.

  They reached a point from which the outlines of the ruined city were easily discerned. From the air, Otis knew, they were undoubtedly plainer than if he had been among them.

  “Must have been a pretty large place,” he remarked. “Any idea what sort of beings built it or what happened to them?”

  “Haven’t had time for that yet,” Finchley said. “Some boys from the exploration staff poke around in there every so often. Best current theory seems to be that it belonged to the Torangs.”

  “The animals they were hunting before?” asked Otis.

  “Might be. Can’t say for sure, but the diggers found signs the city took more of a punch than just an earthquake. Claim they found too much evidence of fires, exploded missiles, and warfare in general—other places as well as here. So . . . we’ve been guessing the Torangs are degenerated descendants of the survivors of some interplanetary brawl.”

  Otis considered that. “Sounds plausible,” he admitted, “but you ought to do something to make sure you are right.”

  “Why?”

  “If it is the case, you’ll have to stop your men from hunting them; degenerated or not, the Colonial Commission has regulations about contact with any local inhabitants.”

  Finchley turned his head to scowl at Otis, and controlled himself with an obvious effort. “Those apes,” he demanded.

  “Well, how can you tell”? Ever try to contact them?”

  “Yes! At first, that is; before we figured them for animals.”

  “And?”

  “Couldn’t get near one.” Finchley declared heatedly. “If they had any sort of half-intelligent culture, wouldn’t they let us make some sort of contact?”

  “Offhand,” admitted Otis, “I should think so. How about setting down a few minutes? I’d like a look at the ruins.”

  Finchley glared at his wristwatch, but directed the pilot to land at a cleared spot. The young man brought them down neatly and the two officials alighted.

  Otis, glancing around, saw where the archaeologists had been digging. They had left their implements stacked casually at the site—the air was dry up here and who was there to steal a shovel?

  He left Finchley and strolled around a mound of dirt that had been cleared away from an entrance to one of the buildings. The latter had been built of stone, or at least faced with it. A peep into the dim excavation led him to believe there had been a steel framework, but the whole affair had been collapsed as if by an explosion.

  He walked a little way further and reached a section of presumably taller buildings where the stone ruins thrust above the sandy surface. After he had wandered through one or two arched openings that seemed to have been windows, he understood why the explorers had chosen to dig for their information. If any covering or decoration had ever graced the walls, it had long since been weathered off. As for ceiling or roof, nothing remained.

  “Must have been a highly developed civilization just the same,” he muttered.

  A movement at one of the shadowed openings to his right caught his eye. He did not remember noticing Finchley leave the helicopter to follow him, but he was glad of a guide.

  “Don’t you think so?” he added.

  He turned his head, but Finchley was not there. In fact, now that Otis was aware of his surroundings, he could hear the voices of the other two mumbling distantly back by the aircraft.

  “Seeing things!” he grumbled, and started through the ancient window.

  Some instinct stopped him half a foot outside.

  Come on, Jeff, he told himself, don’t be silly! What could be there? Ghosts?

  On the other hand, he realized, there were times when it was just as well to rely upon instinct—at least until you figured out the origin of the strange feeling. Any spaceman would agree to that. The man who developed an animal sixth sense was the man who lived longest on alien planets.

  He thought he must have paused a full minute or more, during which he had heard not the slightest sound except the mutter of voices to the rear. He peered into the chamber, which was about twenty feet square and well if not brightly lit by reflected light.

  Nothing was to be seen, but when he found himself turning his head stealthily to peer over his shoulder, he decided that the queer sensation along the back of his neck meant something.

  Wait, now, he thought swiftly. I didn’t see quite the whole room.

  The flooring was heaped with wind-bared rubble that would not show footprints. He felt much more comfortable to notice himself thinking in that vein.

  At least, I’m not imagining ghosts, he thought.

  Bending forward the necessary foot, he thrust his head through the opening and darted a quick look to left, then to the right along the wall. As he turned
right, his glance was met directly by a pair of very wide-set black eyes which shifted inward slightly as they got his range.

  The Torang about matched his own six-foot-two height, mainly because of elongated, gibbonlike limbs and a similarly crouching stance. Arms and legs, covered with short, curly, gray fur, had the same general proportions as human limbs, but looked half-again too long for a trunk that seemed to be ribbed all the way down. Shoulder and hip joints were compactly lean, rather as if the Torang had developed on a world of lesser gravity than that of the human.

  It was the face that made Otis stare. The mouth was toothless and probably constructed more for sucking than for chewing. But the eyes! They projected like ends of a dumbbell from each side of the narrow skull where the ears should have been, and focused with obvious mobility. Peering closer, Otis saw tiny ears below the eyes, almost hidden in the curling fur of the neck.

  He realized abruptly that his own eyes felt as if they were bulging out, although he could not remember having changed his expression of casual curiosity. His back was getting stiff also. He straightened up carefully.

  “Uh . . . hello,” he murmured, feeling unutterably silly but conscious of some impulse to compromise between a tone of greeting for another human being and one of pacification to an animal.

  The Torang moved then, swiftly but unhurriedly. In fact, Otis later decided, deliberately. One of the long arms swept downward to the rubble-strewn ground.

  The next instant, Otis jerked his head back out of the opening as a stone whizzed past in front of his nose.

  “Hey!” he protested involuntarily.

  There was a scrabbling sound from within, as of animal claws churning to a fast start among the pebbles. Recovering his balance, Otis charged recklessly through the entrance.

  “I don’t know why,” he admitted to Finchley a few minutes later. “If I stopped to think how I might have had my skull bashed in coming through, I guess I’d have just backed off and yelled for you.”

  Finchley nodded, but his narrow gaze seemed faintly approving for the first time since they had met.

  “He was gone, of course,” Otis continued. “I barely caught a glimpse of his rump vanishing through another window.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty fast,” put in Finchley’s pilot. “In the time we’ve been here, the boys haven’t taken more than half a dozen. Got a stuffed one over at headquarters though.”

  “Hm-m-m,” murmured Otis thoughtfully.

  From their other remarks, he learned that he had not noticed everything, even though face to face with the creature. Finchley’s mentioning the three digits of the hands or feet, for instance, came as a surprise.

  Otis was silent most of the flight back to headquarters. Once there, he disappeared with a perfunctory excuse toward the rooms assigned him.

  That evening, at a dinner which Finchley had made as attractive as was possible in a comparatively raw and new colony, Otis was noticeably sociable. The coordinator was gratified.

  “Looks as if they finally sent us a regular guy,” he remarked behind his hand to one of his assistants. “Round up a couple of the prettier secretaries to keep him happy.”

  “I understand he nearly laid hands on a Torang up at the diggings,” said the other.

  “Yep, ran right at it barehanded. Came as close to bagging it as anybody could, I suppose.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well he didn’t,” commented the assistant. “They’re big enough to mess up an unarmed man some.”

  Otis, meanwhile and for the rest of the evening, was assiduously busy making acquaintances. So engrossed was he in turning every new conversation to the Torangs and asking seemingly casual questions about the little known of their habits and possible past, that he hardly noticed receiving any special attentions. As a visiting inspector, he was used to attempts to entertain and distract him.

  The next morning, he caught Finchley at his office in the sprawling one-story structure of concrete and glass that was colonial headquarters.

  After accepting a chair across the desk from the coordinator, Otis told him his conclusions. Finchley’s narrow eyes opened a trifle when he heard the details. His wide, hard-muscled face became slightly pink.

  “Oh, for—! I mean, Otis, why must you make something big out of it? The men very seldom bag one anyway!”

  “Perhaps because they’re so rare,” answered Otis calmly. “How do we know they’re not intelligent life? Maybe if you were hanging on in the ruins of your ancestors’ civilization, reduced to a primitive state, you’d be just as wary of a bunch of loud Terrans moving in!”

  Finchley shrugged. He looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if debating whether Otis or some disgruntled sportsman from his husky construction crews would be easier to handle.

  “Think of the overall picture a minute,” Otis urged. “We’re pushing out into space at last, after centuries of dreams and struggles. With all the misery we’ve seen in various colonial systems at home, we’ve tried to plan these ventures so as to avoid old mistakes.”

  Finchley nodded grudgingly. Otis could see that his mind was on the progress charts of his many projects.

  “It stands to reason,” the inspector went on, “that someday we’ll find a planet with intelligent life. We’re still new in space, but as we probe farther out, it’s bound to happen. That’s why the Commission drew up rules about native life forms. Or have you read that part of the code lately?”

  Finchley shifted from side to side in his chair.

  “Now, look!” he protested. “Don’t go making me out a hardboiled vandal with nothing in mind but exterminating everything that moves on all Torang. I don’t go out hunting the apes!”

  “I know, I know,” Otis soothed him. “But before the Colonial Commission will sanction any destruction of indigenous life, we’ll have to show—besides that it’s not intelligent—that it exists in sufficient numbers to avoid extinction.”

  “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  Otis regarded him with some sympathy. Finchley was the hard-bitten type that the Commission needed to oversee the first breaking-in of a colony on a strange planet, but he was not unreasonable. He merely wanted to be left alone to handle the tough job facing him.

  “Announce a ban on hunting Torangs,” Otis said. “There must be something else they can go after.”

  “Oh, yes,” admitted Finchley. “There are swarms of little rabbit-things and other vermin running through the brush. But, I don’t know—”

  “It’s standard practice,” Otis reminded him. “We have many a protected species even back on Terra that would be extinct by now, only for the game laws.”

  In the end, they agreed that Finchley would do his honest best to enforce a ban provided Otis obtained a formal order from the headquarters of the system. The inspector went from the office straight to the communications center, where he filed a long report for the chief coordinator’s office in the other part of the binary system.

  It took some hours for the reply to reach Torang. When it came that afternoon, he went looking for Finchley.

  He found the coordinator inspecting a newly finished canning factory on the coast, elated at the completion of one more link in making the colony self-sustaining.

  “Here it is,” said Otis, waving the message copy. “Signed by the chief himself. ‘As of this date, the apelike beings known as Torangs, indigenous to planet number and so forth, are to be considered a rare and protected species under regulations and so forth et cetera.’ ”

  “Good enough,” answered Finchley with an amiable shrug. “Give it here, and I’ll have it put on the public address system and the bulletin boards.”

  Otis returned satisfied to the helicopter that had brought him out from headquarters.

  “Back, sir?” asked the pilot.

  “Yes . . . no! Just for fun, take me out to the old city. I never did get a good look the other day, and I’d like to before I leave.”

  They flew over the plains between the sea an
d the upjutting cliffs. In the distance, Otis caught a glimpse of the rising dam he had been shown the day before. This colony would go well, he reflected, as long as he checked up on details like preserving native life forms.

  Eventually, the pilot landed at the same spot he had been taken on his previous visit to the ancient ruins. Someone else was on the scene today. Otis saw a pair of men he took to be archaeologists.

  “I’ll just wander around a bit,” he told the pilot.

  He noticed the two men looking at him from where they stood by the shovels and other equipment, so he paused to say hello. As he thought, they had been digging in the ruins.

  “Taking some measurements in fact,” said the sunburned blond introduced as Hoffman. “Trying to get a line on what sort of things built the place.”

  “Oh?” said Otis, interested. “What’s the latest theory?”

  “Not so much different from us,” Hoffman told the inspector while his partner left them to pick up another load of artifacts.

  “Judging from the size of the rooms, height of doorways, and such stuff as stairways,” he went on, “they were pretty much our size. So far, of course, it’s only a rough estimate.”

  “Could be ancestors of the Torangs, eh?” asked Otis.

  “Very possible, sir,” answered Hoffman, with a promptness that suggested it was his own view. “But we haven’t dug up enough to guess at the type of culture they had, or draw any conclusions as to their psychology or social customs.”

  Otis nodded, thinking that he ought to mention the young fellow’s name to Finchley before he left Torang. He excused himself as the other man returned with a box of some sort of scraps the pair had unearthed, and strolled between the outlines of the untouched buildings.

  In a few minutes, he came to the section of higher structures where he had encountered the Torang the previous day.

  “Wonder if I should look in the same spot?” he muttered aloud. “No . . . that would be the last place the thing would return to . . . unless it had a lair thereabouts—”