* * * * *
[Illustration]
The sun warmed Mark Howell's back pleasantly. Underfoot, the
mosslike stuff was soft and yielding, and there was a fragrance
in the air unlike anything he had ever smelled. He was going to
like this planet; he knew it. The question was, how would it,
and its people, like him? He watched the little figures advancing
across the fields from the mound, with the village out of sight
on the other end of it and the combat-car circling lazily on
contragravity above.
Major Luis Gofredo, the Marine officer, spoke without lowering
his binoculars:
"They have a tubular thing about twelve feet long; six of them
are carrying it on poles, three to a side, and a couple more are
walking behind it. Mark, do you think it could be a cannon?"
So far, he didn't know enough to have an opinion, and said so,
adding:
"What I saw of the village in the screen from the car, it looked
pretty primitive. Of course, gunpowder's one of those things a
primitive people could discover by accident, if the ingredients
were available."
"We won't take any chances, then."
"You think they're hostile? I was hoping they were coming out to
parley with us."
That was Paul Meillard. He had a right to be anxious; his whole
future in the Colonial Office would be made or ruined by what was
going to happen here.
The joint Space Navy-Colonial Office expedition was looking for
new planets suitable for colonization; they had been out, now,
for four years, which was close to maximum for an exploring
expedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landings
on eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type.
There had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terra
during the Cretaceous Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would
have been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there had
been Imhotep; in twenty or thirty thousand years, it would be
a fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensive
glaciation. And Irminsul, covered with forests of gigantic trees;
it would have been fine except for the fauna, which was nasty,
especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had just
gotten as far as clubs and _coup-de-poing_ axes. Contact with
them had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and
a woman killed and a dozen injured. He'd had a limp, himself,
for a while as a result.
As for the other five, one had been an all-out hell-planet, and
the rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilable
minority-groups who want to get away from everybody else. The
Colonial Office wouldn't even consider any of them.
Then they had found this one, third of a G0-star, eighty million
miles from primary, less axial inclination than Terra, which would
mean a more uniform year-round temperature, and about half land
surface. On the evidence of a couple of sneak landings for
specimens, the biochemistry was identical with Terra's and the
organic matter was edible. It was the sort of planet every explorer
dreams of finding, except for one thing.
It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them were
civilized enough to put it in Class V, and Colonial Office doctrine
on Class V planets was rigid. Friendly relations with the natives
had to be established, and permission to settle had to be guaranteed
in a treaty of some sort with somebody more or less authorized to
make one.
If Paul Meillard could accomplish that, he had it made. He would
stay on with forty or fifty of the ship's company to make
preparations. In a year a couple of ships would come out from Terra,
with a thousand colonists, and a battalion or so of Federation
troops, to protect them from the natives and vice versa. Meillard
would automatically be appointed governor-general.
But if he failed, he was through. Not out--just through. When he
got back to Terra, he would be promoted to some home office position
at slightly higher base pay but without the three hundred per cent
extraterrestrial bonus, and he would vegetate there till he retired.
Every time his name came up, somebody would say, "Oh, yes; he
flubbed the contact on Whatzit."
It wouldn't do the rest of them any good, either. There would
always be the suspicion that they had contributed to the failure.
* * * * *
_Bwaaa-waaa-waaanh!_
The wavering sound hung for an instant in the air. A few seconds
later, it was repeated, then repeated again.
"Our cannon's a horn," Gofredo said. "I can't see how they're
blowing it, though."
There was a stir to right and left, among the Marines deployed
in a crescent line on either side of the contact team; a metallic
clatter as weapons were checked. A shadow fell in front of them
as a combat-car moved into position above.
"What do you suppose it means?" Meillard wondered.
"Terrans, go home." He drew a frown from Meillard with the
suggestion. "Maybe it's supposed to intimidate us."
"They're probably doing it to encourage themselves," Anna de Jong,
the psychologist, said. "I'll bet they're really scared stiff."
"I see how they're blowing it," Gofredo said. "The man who's walking
behind it has a hand-bellows." He raised his voice. "Fix bayonets!
These people don't know anything about rifles, but they know what
spears are. They have some of their own."
So they had. The six who walked in the lead were unarmed, unless
the thing one of them carried was a spear. So, it seemed, were the
horn-bearers. Behind them, however, in an open-order skirmish-line,
came fifty-odd with weapons. Most of them had spears, the points
glinting redly. Bronze, with a high copper content. A few had bows.
They came slowly; details became more plainly visible.
The leader wore a long yellow robe; the thing in his hand was a
bronze-headed staff. Three of his companions also wore robes; the
other two were bare-legged in short tunics. The horn-bearers wore
either robes or tunics; the spearmen and bowmen behind either wore
tunics or were naked except for breechclouts. All wore sandals. They
were red-brown in color, completely hairless; they had long necks,
almost chinless lower jaws, and fleshy, beaklike noses that gave
them an avian appearance which was heightened by red crests, like
roosters' combs, on the tops of their heads.
"Well, aren't they something to see?" Lillian Ransby, the linguist asked.
"I wonder how we look to them," Paul Meillard said.
That was something to wonder about, too. The differences between
one and another of the Terrans must puzzle them. Paul Meillard, as
close to being a pure Negro as anybody in the Seventh Century of
the Atomic Era was to being pure anything. Lillian Ransby, almost
ash-blond. Major Gofredo, barely over the minimum Service height
requirement; his name was Old Terran Spanish, but his ancestry
must have been Polynesian, Amerind and Mongolian. Karl Dorver,
the sociographer, six feet six, with red hair. Bennet Fayon,
the biologist and physiologist, plump, pink-faced and balding.
Willi Schallenmacher, with a bushy black beard....
They didn't have any ears, he noticed, and then he was taking stock
of the things they wore and carried. Belts, with pouches, and knives
with flat bronze blades and riveted handles. Three of the delegation
had small flutes hung by cords around their necks, and a fourth had
a reed Pan-pipe. No shields, and no swords; that was good. Swords
and shields mean organized warfare, possibly a warrior-caste. This
crowd weren't warriors. The spearmen and bowmen weren't arrayed for
battle, but for a drive-hunt, with the bows behind the spears to
stop anything that broke through the line.
"All right; let's go meet them." The querulous, uncertain note was
gone from Meillard's voice; he knew what to do and how to do it.
* * * * *
Gofredo called to the Marines to stand fast. Then they were
advancing to meet the natives, and when they were twenty feet apart,
both groups halted. The horn stopped blowing. The one in the yellow
robe lifted his staff and said something that sounded like,
"_Tweedle-eedle-oodly-eenk_."
The horn, he saw, was made of strips of leather, wound spirally
and coated with some kind of varnish. Everything these people had
was carefully and finely made. An old culture, but a static one.
Probably tradition-bound as all get-out.
Meillard was raising his hands; solemnly he addressed the natives:
"'Twas brillig and the slithy toves were whooping it up in the
Malemute Saloon, and the kid that handled the music box did gyre
and gimble in the wabe, and back of the bar in a solo game all
mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgabe the lady
that's known as Lou."
That was supposed to show them that we, too, have a spoken language,
to prove that their language and ours were mutually incomprehensible,
and to demonstrate the need for devising a means of communication.
At least that was what the book said. It demonstrated nothing of
the sort to this crowd. It scared them. The dignitary with the staff
twittered excitedly. One of his companions agreed with him at length.
Another started to reach for his knife, then remembered his manners.
The bellowsman pumped a few blasts on the horn.
"What do you think of the language?" he asked Lillian.
"They all sound that bad, when you first hear them. Give them a few
seconds, and then we'll have Phase Two."
When the gibbering and skreeking began to fall off, she stepped
forward. Lillian was, herself, a good test of how human aliens were;
this gang weren't human enough to whistle at her. She touched
herself on the breast. "Me," she said.
The natives seemed shocked. She repeated the gesture and the word,
then turned and addressed Paul Meillard. "You."
"Me," Meillard said, pointing to himself. Then he said, "You," to
Luis Gofredo. It went around the contact team; when it came to him,
he returned it to point of origin.
"I don't think they get it at all," he added in a whisper.
"They ought to," Lillian said. "Every language has a word for self
and a word for person-addressed."
"Well, look at them," Karl Dorver invited. "Six different opinions
about what we mean, and now the band's starting an argument of their
own."
"Phase Two-A," Lillian said firmly, stepping forward. She pointed
to herself. "Me--Lillian Ransby. Lillian Ransby--me _name_.
You--_name_?
"_Bwoooo!_" the spokesman screamed in horror, clutching his staff
as though to shield it from profanation. The others howled like
a hound-pack at a full moon, except one of the short-tunic boys,
who was slapping himself on the head with both hands and yodeling.
The horn-crew hastily swung their piece around at the Terrans,
pumping frantically.
"What do you suppose I said?" Lillian asked.
"Oh, something like, 'Curse your gods, death to your king, and
spit in your mother's face,' I suppose."
"Let me try it," Gofredo said.
The little Marine major went through the same routine. At his first
word, the uproar stopped; before he was through, the natives' faces
were sagging and crumbling into expressions of utter and
heartbroken grief.
"It's not as bad as all that, is it?" he said. "You try it, Mark."
"Me ... Mark ... Howell...." They looked bewildered.
"Let's try objects, and play-acting," Lillian suggested. "They're
farmers; they ought to have a word for water."
* * * * *
They spent almost an hour at it. They poured out two gallons of
water, pretended to be thirsty, gave each other drinks. The natives
simply couldn't agree on the word, in their own language, for water.
That or else they missed the point of the whole act. They tried
fire, next. The efficiency of a steel hatchet was impressive, and
so was the sudden flame of a pocket-lighter, but no word for fire
emerged, either.
"Ah, to Niflheim with it!" Luis Gofredo cried in exasperation.
"We're getting nowhere at five times light speed. Give them their
presents and send them home, Paul."
"Sheath-knives; they'll have to be shown how sharp they are,"
he suggested. "Red bandannas. And costume jewelry."
"How about something to eat, Bennet?" Meillard asked Fayon.
"Extee Three, and C-H trade candy," Fayon said. Field Ration,
Extraterrestrial Service, Type Three, could be eaten by anything
with a carbon-hydrogen metabolism, and so could the trade candy.
"Nothing else, though, till we have some idea what goes on inside
them."
Dorver thought the six members of the delegation would be persons
of special consequence, and should have something extra. That was
probably so. Dorver was as quick to pick up clues to an alien social
order as he was, himself, to deduce a culture pattern from a few
artifacts. He and Lillian went back to the landing craft to collect
the presents.
Everybody, horn-detail, armed guard and all, got one ten-inch bowie
knife and sheath, a red bandanna neckcloth, and a piece of flashy
junk jewelry. The (town council? prominent citizens? or what?) also
received a colored table-spread apiece; these were draped over their
shoulders and fastened with two-inch plastic pins advertising the
candidacy of somebody for President of the Federation Member Republic
of Venus a couple of elections ago. They all looked woebegone about
it; that would be their expression of joy. Different type nerves and
different facial musculature, Fayon thought. As soon as they sampled
the Extee Three and candy, they looked crushed under all the sorrows
of the galaxy.
By pantomime and pointing to the sun, Meillard managed to inform
them that the next day, when the sun was in the same position, the
Terrans would visit their village, bringing more gifts. The natives
were quite agreeable, but Meillard was disgruntled that he had to
use sign-talk. The natives started off toward the village on the
mound, munching Extee Three and trying out their new knives. This
time tomorrow, half of them would have bandaged thumbs.
* * * * *
The Marine riflemen and submachine-gunners were coming in, slinging
their weapons and lighting cigarettes. A couple of Navy technicians
were getting a snooper--a thing shaped like a short-tailed tadpole,
six feet long by three at the widest, fitted with visible-light
and infra-red screen pickups and crammed with detection
instruments--ready to relieve the combat car over the village.
The contact team crowded into the Number One landing craft, which
had been fitted out as a temporary headquarters. Prefab-hut elements
were already being unloaded from the other craft.
Everybody felt that a drink was in order, even if it was two hours
short of cocktail time. They carried bottles and glasses and ice to
the front of the landing craft and sat down in front of the battery
of view and communication screens. The central screen was a two-way,
tuned to one in the officers' lounge aboard the _Hubert Penrose_,
two hundred miles above. In it, also provided with drinks, were
Captain Guy Vindinho and two other Navy officers, and a Marine
captain in shipboard blues. Like Gofredo, Vindinho must have gotten
into the Service on tiptoe; he had a bald dome and a red beard, and
he always looked as though he were gloating because nobody knew
that his name was really Rumplestiltskin. He had been watching
the contact by screen. He lifted his glass toward Meillard.
"Over the hump, Paul?"
Meillard raised his drink to Vindinho. "Over the first one.
There's a whole string of them ahead. At least, we sent them away
happy. I hope."
"You're going to make permanent camp where you are now?" one of
the other officers asked. Lieutenant-Commander Dave Questell;
ground engineering and construction officer. "What do you need?"
There were two viewscreens from pickups aboard the 2500-foot battle
cruiser. One, at ten-power magnification, gave a maplike view of the
broad valley and the uplands and mountain foothills to the south. It
was only by tracing the course of the main river and its tributaries
that they could find the tiny spot of the native village, and they
couldn't see the landing craft at all. The other, at a hundred
power, showed the oblong mound, with the village on its flat top,
little dots around a circular central plaza. They could see the two
turtle-shaped landing-craft, and the combat car, that had been
circling over the mound, landing beside them, and, sometimes,
a glint of sunlight from the snooper that had taken its place.
The snooper was also transmitting in, to another screen, from
two hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came an
incessant gibber of native voices. There were over a hundred houses,
all small and square, with pyramidal roofs. On the end of the mound
toward the Terran camp, animals of at least four different species
were crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows at
the first alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village was
crowded, and more natives lined the low palisade along the edge
of the mound.
"Well, we're going to stay here till we learn the language,"
Meillard was saying. "This is the best place for it. It's completely
isolated, forests on both sides, and seventy miles to the nearest
other village. If we're careful, we can stay here as long as we want
to and nobody'll find out about us. Then, after we can talk with
these people, we'll go to the big town."
* * * * *
The big town was two hundred and fifty miles down the valley,
at the forks of the main river, a veritable metropolis of almost
three thousand people. That was where the treaty would have to
be negotiated.
[Illustration: "... But no two of them speak the same language!"]
"You'll want more huts. You'll want a water tank, and a pipeline
to that stream below you, and a pump," Questell said. "You think
a month?"