by Chad Oliver
Again, the thought came: If this is an alien, all that I have worked for is finished. The dream is ended. And a further thought: Unless they never find out, back on Earth.
Those thoughts. They drummed so insistently through his mind. Were they his, really? Or were they, too, part of the conditioning? He shook his head. He could not think clearly; his mind was clogged. He would have to feel his way along.
He was desperately aware that he was not reacting rationally to the situation in which he found himself. None of it made sense; there was too much trickery. But how could he cut through to the truth?
He didn’t know.
He did know that there was danger with him in the house, danger that was beyond comprehension.
He tried to be calm. He walked back into the living room to face the three people who were less than human and the strange man who had walked in out of infinity.
Gordon Collier entered the room and stopped. He forced his mind to accept the scene in matter-of-fact terms. He reached out for reality and held on tight.
There was the bridge table, and there were Helen and Mary and Bart, their cards in their hands, caught between action and non-action. There was the homey furniture, and the knickknacks on the mantelpiece over the non-functional fireplace. Out in the kitchen, the frigidaire wheezed. There was the line of poetry: Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. There was the portrait of old Grandfather Walters.
There sat the man named John, who was Grandfather Walters, down to the last precise hair in his white moustache, the last wrinkle in his dreary gray business suit.
Outside, in a night alive with shadows, there was no sound at all.
“You have returned, as time will allow,” John said. “No doubt you have your questions ready.” He lit a cigarette, and the brand he smoked had not existed for twenty years. He dropped ashes on the rug.
“I can ask you questions, then,” Gordon Collier said hesitantly.
“Certainly, my man. Please do. Valuable prizes.”
Gordon frowned, not caring for the phrase “my man.” And the oddly misplaced tri-di jargon was disconcerting, vaguely horrible. He fought to clear his mind.
“Are you our friend?”
“No.”
“Our enemy?”
‘No.”
The three people at the bridge table watched, unmoving.
“Are you trying to—ummm—conquer the Earth?”
“My good man, what on Earth for?”
Gordon Collier tried to ignore the pun. It didn’t fit. Nothing fitted. That was why he could not force his mind to see it all objectively, then. It was completely outside his experience, all of it.
Somewhere there is a pattern—
“What is this all about? What is going on?”
John’s blue eyes twinkled. He lit another cigarette, dropping the other one on the rug and grinding it out with his neatly polished black shoe. He said: “I have already told you that I am not a man. It follows that I am, from your point of view, an alien. I have nothing to hide. My actions are irrational to you, just as yours are to me. You are, in a way, a preliminary to food. There, is that clear?”
Gordon Collier stared at the man who looked like Grandfather Walters. If this is an alien—
His mind rebelled at the thought. It was absurd, fantastic. He tried to find another explanation, ignoring the shrieking danger signals in his mind. Suppose, now, that this was all a trick, a monstrous trick. John was not an alien at all—of course he wasn’t—but a clever agent from Earth, out to wreck the dream.
“You say that you are an alien,” he told John. “Prove it.”
John shrugged, dropping ashes into the little pile on the rug. “The best proof would be highly unpleasant for you,” he said. “But I can—the words are difficult, we’re a little late, folks—take a story out of your mind and—the words are very hard—project it back to you again. Will that be good enough?”
“Prove it,” Gordon Collier repeated, trying to be sure of himself. “Prove it.”
John nodded agreeably. He looked around him, smiling.
The clock in the hall struck two.
Gordon Collier sat down. He leaned forward. …
He saw a ship. It was very cold and dark. He saw—shadows—in the ship. He followed the ship. It had no home. It was nomadic. It fed on energy that it—absorbed—from other cultures. He saw one of the—shadows—more clearly. There were many shadows. They were watching him. He strained forward, could almost see them—
“I beg your pardon,” John said loudly. “How clumsy of me.”
The room was taut with fear.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” John said languidly, “try, try again. Let’s see, my man—where shall we start?”
The question was rhetorical. Gordon Collier felt a jolt hit his mind. He felt himself slipping, tried to hold on. He failed. It began to come, out of the past.
Disjointed, at first. Jerky headlines, and then more …
MAN CONQUERS SPACE!
YANK SHIP LANDS ON MOON!
NEXT STOP MARS, SCIENTIST SAYS!
There had been more, under the headlines. Articles about how the space stations were going to end war by a very logical alchemy. Articles about rockets and jets and atomics. Articles about how to build a nice steel base on the moon.
Gordon Collier laughed aloud and then stopped, suddenly. The three people at the bridge table stared at him mindlessly. John stabbed in his brain….
They had chattered away quite glibly about weightlessness and gravity strains. They had built a perfect machine.
But there had been an imperfect machine inside it.
His name was man.
There were imperfect machines outside it, too. Villages and towns and cities filled to overflowing with them. Once the initial steps had been taken, once man was really in space at last, the reaction came. The true enormity of the task became all too obvious.
Space stations didn’t cure wars, of course, any more than spears or rifles or atomic bombs had cured wars. Wars were culturally determined patterns of response to conflict situations; to get rid of wars, you had to change the pattern, not further implement it.
Space killed men. It sent them shrieking into the unknown in coffins of steel. It ripped them out of their familiar, protective cultures and hurled them a million miles into Nothing.
Space wasn’t profitable. It gobbled up millions and billions into its gaping craw and it was never satiated. It didn’t care about returning a profit. There was no profit to return.
Space was for the few. It was expensive. It took technical skills and training as its only passport. It was well to speak of dreams, but this dream had to be paid for. It took controls and taxes. Who paid the taxes? Who wanted the controls?
I work eight hours a day in a factory, the chorus chanted into the great emptiness. I got a wife and kids and when I come home at night I’m too tired to dream. I work hard. I earn my money. Why should I foot the bill for a four-eyed Glory Joe?
Space was disturbing. Sermons were spoken against it. Editorials were written against it. Laws were enacted against it—subtle laws, for controls were not wanted.
The rockets reached Luna and beyond—Mars and Venus and the far satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Equipment was set up, the trail was blazed at last.
But who would follow the trail? Where did it go? What did it get you when you got there?
Starburn leaves scars on the soul. Some men could not give up. Some men knew that man could not turn back.
Starburned men knew that dreams never really die.
They dwelt in fantastic loneliness, many of them, waiting. They waited for a few of their fellows on Earth to win over a hostile planet with advertising and lectures and closed-door sessions with industrialists. They fought to lay the long-neglected foundations for a skyscraper that already teetered precariously up into the sky and beyond.
Far out in space, the fragile network of men and ships
held on tight and hoped.
“Let us revert to verbal communication again,” John said with startling suddenness. “Projection is quite tiring.”
Gordon Collier jerked back to the present and tried to adjust. He was aware, dimly, that he was being played with consummate skill. He thought of a fish that knew it had a hook in its mouth. What could he do about it? He tried to think. …
“Of course,” John went on—quite smoothly now—and lighting yet another cigarette, “your scientists, if I may apply the word to them, belatedly discovered that they could not simply isolate a man, or a man and a woman, in a steel hut on an alien world and go off and leave him for six months or a year, to employ your ethnocentric time scale. A man is so constituted that he is naked and defenseless without his culture, something he can live by and believe in.”
Gordon Collier gripped his empty glass until he thought the glass would shatter. Could this man be reading his thoughts? A word came to him: hypnosis. It sounded nice. He tried to believe in it.
“In the long run, you see,” John continued, “it is the totality of little things that goes to make up a culture. A man such as yourself does not simply sit in a room; he sits in a room of a familiar type, with pictures on the walls and dust in the corners and lamps on the tables. A man does not just eat; he eats special kinds of food that he has been conditioned to want, served as he has been trained to want them to be served, in containers he is accustomed to, in a social setting that he is familiar with, that he fits into, that he belongs in. All intelligent life is like that, you see.”
Gordon waited, trying to think. He had almost had something there, but it was slipping away….
“Someone had to stay in space, of course,” John said, dropping more ashes on the rug. “Someone had to man the stations and look after the equipment, and there was a more subtle reason; it was a distinct psychological advantage to have men already in space, to prove that it could be done. The machines couldn’t do everything, unfortunately for you, and so someone had to stay out here, and he had to stay sane—sane by your standards, of course.”
Gordon Collier looked across at the three people who sat as though frozen around the forgotten bridge table, staring at him with blank deadfish eyes. Helen, his wife. Bart and Mary. Sane? What did that mean? What was the price of sanity?
“And so,” John continued in a bored voice, “man took his culture with him—the more provincial and reassuring and fixed the better. He took little white cottages and neighborly customs, rooted them up out of their native soil, sealed them in cylinders of steel, and rocketed them off to barren little worlds of ice and darkness. I must say, Collier, that your mind has a frightfully melodramatic way of looking at things. Perhaps that was why the little white cottages and the neighbors were not enough; in any event, conditioning was also necessary. No person operating at his full level of perception could possibly enact this farce you are living out here. And yet, without the farce you go mad. It is difficult to imagine a people less suited to space travel, don’t you agree?”
Gordon Collier shrugged, feeling the cold sweat gathering in the palms of his hands.
“And there you are,” John said, lighting another cigarette. “They are much milder. I have tried to demonstrate projection to you, on several different levels. I hope you will excuse the scattered editorial comments?”
Gordon Collier defensively reached out for a single line of reasoning and clung to it. If this were an alien, and the news got back to Earth, then the dream of space travel was finished. An advanced race already in space, added to all the other perils, would be the last straw. He, Gordon Collier, had dedicated his life to the dream. Therefore, it could not end. Therefore, John was human. It was all a trick.
His mind screamed its warning, but he thrust it aside.
He leaned forward, breathing hard. “I’ll excuse them,” he said slowly, “but I’ll also call you a liar.”
Outside, the night was still.
The sound had been turned off.
There was no storm now—no rain, nor thunder, nor lightning. There was no wind, not even whispers of a summer breeze. There were no crickets, and no night rustlings in the stuff that looked like grass.
Bart and Mary and Helen sat uncertainly at their bridge table, trying to somehow adapt themselves to a situation that they were in no way prepared to face. It wasn’t their fault, Gordon knew. They had not been conditioned to handle new elements. That was his job. That was what he had been chosen for. He was the change factor, the mind that had been left free enough to function.
But not wholly free. He felt that keenly, here in the room with the man called John. He was fuzzy and approximate. He needed to be clear and exact. He tried to believe he had figured it all out. Hypnosis. That was a good word.
He hoped that it was good enough.
“A liar?” The man who looked like Grandfather Walters laughed in protest and blew smoke in Collier’s eyes. “The projection was incorrect?”
Collier shook his head, ignoring the smoke, trying not to be distracted. “The information was correct. That proves nothing.”
John arched his bushy eyebrows. “Oh? Come now, my man.”
“Look here,” Gordon Collier said decisively, believing it now. “You look like a man to me. All I have to contradict my impression is your unsupported statement and some funny tricks that can be explained in terms of conditioning and hypnosis. If you came from Earth, as you obviously did, then you would know the story as well as I do. The rest is tricks. The real question is: who sent you here, and why?”
It was cold in the room. Why was it so cold?
John deftly added more ashes to the small mountain at his feet. “Your logic is excellent, if primitive,” he said. “The trouble with logic is that its relationship with reality is usually obscure. It is logical that I am from Earth. It is not, however, true.”
“I don’t believe you,” Gordon Collier said.
John smiled patiently. “The trouble is,” he said, “that you have a word, ‘alien,’ and no concept to go with it. You persist in reducing me to non-alien terms, and I assure you that I will not reduce. I am, by definition, not human.”
The doubt carne again, gnawing at him. He fought himself. He felt an icy chill trip along his spine. He tried to convince himself and he said: “There is a reason for the storms and the build-up and the screams. I think it is a human reason. I think you have been sent here by the interests on Earth who are fighting space expansion, to try to scare us off. I think you’re a good actor, but I don’t think you’re good enough.”
The thought came again: If this is an alien …
Nonsense.
Helen, at the bridge table, suddenly stirred. She said, “My, but it’s late.” That was all.
John ignored her. “I assure you,” he said, “that I have not the slightest interest in whether your little planet gets into space or not. Your ethnocentrism is fantastic. Can’t you see, man? I don’t care, not at all, not in any particular. It just isn’t part of my value system.”
“Go back and tell them it didn’t work,” Gordon Collier said.
“Oh, no,” John said, shocked. “I’m spending the night.”
The silence tautened.
Mary moved at the bridge table. The button had been punched, and she tried to respond. “Bart,” she said, “set up the spare bed for the nice man.”
Bart didn’t move.
“You’re not staying,” Gordon Collier said flatly. He shook his head. He was so confused. If only—
John smiled and lit another cigarette from his endless supply. “I really must, you know,” he said cheerfully. “Look at it this way. The star cluster to which you refer as the galaxy—quaint of you—is inhabited by a multitude of diverse cultural groups. A moment’s reflection should show you that uniformity of organization over so vast a territory is impossible. The problem of communications alone would defeat such a plan, even were it desirable, which it isn’t.
“One of these cul
tures, of which I happen to be a member, has no territorial identification, except with space itself. Our ship is our home. We are, in a manner of speaking, nomads. Our economy, since we produce nothing, is based upon what we are able to extract from others.”
Gordon Collier listened to his heart. It drummed liquidly in his ears.
“The closest similarity I can find in your mind is that of the ancient Plains Indians in the area you can think of as North America,” John continued, his blue eyes sparkling. “How charming that you should regard them as primitive! Sedentary economies are so dull, you know. We have become rather highly skilled, if I do say so myself, at imitating dominant life forms. Contacting aliens for preliminary ‘typing’ is a prestige mechanism with us, just as counting coup served an analogous purpose among your Plains Indians, when a brave would sneak into an enemy camp at night and touch a sleeping warrior or cut loose a picketed horse. This gave him prestige in his tribe, and without it he was nothing; he had no status. With us there is a further motive. Suppose, to extrapolate down to your level, you wish to pick apples. It will be to your advantage, then, to try to look and act like the farmer who owns them, will it not? Our culture has found it expedient to ‘type’ members of an alien culture in a controlled situation, before setting out to, so to speak, pick apples in earnest. The individual who does the ‘typing’ gains prestige in proportion to the danger involved. Am I getting through to you?”
Gordon Collier got to his feet, slowly. He could not think, not really. In a way, he realized this. He tried to go ahead regardless, to do what he could. His brain supplied a thought: What would the ship from Earth pick up five months from tonight in this silent cottage? Would it be human beings—or something else?
Of course, John was a human being.
A hypnotist, perhaps.
Why was it so cold in the house?
He started for the man called John, slowly, step by step. He did not know why he did it; he only knew that he had to act, act now, act before it was too late, act despite the cost. The impulse came from down deep, beyond the conditioning.
“You’re a liar,” he said again, biting the words out thickly, believing in them. “You’re a liar. We don’t believe in you. Get out, get out, get out—”