Methuselah's Children (19 page)

Lazarus returned to his stateroom, came back and gravely delivered to King one blaster. He neglected to mention the one still strapped to his leg under his kilt.

As King was about to tell them to man the boat and carry out their orders they were interrupted by Janice Schmidt, chief nurse to the Families' congenital defectives. She pushed her way past and demanded the Captain's attention.

Only a nurse could have obtained it at that moment; she had professional stubbornness to match his and half a century more practice at being balky. He glared at her. "What's the meaning of this interruption?"

"Captain, I must speak with you about one of my children."

"Nurse, you are decidedly out of order. Get out. See me in my office-after taking it up with the Chief Surgeon."

She put her hands on her hips. "You'll see me now. This is the landing party, isn't it? I've got something you have to hear before they leave."

King started to speak, changed his mind, merely said, "Make it brief."

She did so. Hans Weatheral, a youth of some ninety years and still adolescent in appearance through a hyper-active thymus gland, was one of her charges. He had inferior but not moronic mentality, a chronic apathy, and a neuro-muscular deficiency which made him too weak to feed himself-and an acute sensitivity to telepathy.

He had told Janice that he knew all about the planet around which they orbited. His friends on the planet had told him about it . . . and they were expecting him.

The departure of the landing boat was delayed while King and Lazarus investigated. Hans was matter of fact about his information and what little they could check of what he said was correct. But he was not too helpful about his "friends."

"Oh, just people," he said, shrugging at their stupidity. "Much like back home. Nice people. Go to work, go to school, go to church. Have kids and enjoy themselves. You'll like them."

But he was quite clear about one point: his friends were expecting him; therefore he must go along.

Against his wishes and his better judgment Lazarus saw added to his party Hans Weatheral, Janice Schmidt, and a stretcher for Hans.

When the party returned three days later Lazarus made a long private report to King while the specialist reports were being analyzed and combined. "It's amazingly like Earth, Skipper, enough to make you homesick. But it's also different enough to give you the willies-like looking at your own face in the mirror and having it turn out to have three eyes and no nose. Unsettling."

"But how about the natives?"

"Let me tell it. We made a quick swing of the day side, for a bare eyes look. Nothing you haven't seen through the 'scopes. Then I put her down where Hans told me to, in a clearing near the center of one of their cities. I wouldn't have picked the place myself; I would have preferred to land in the bush and reconnoitre. But you told me to play Hans' hunches."

"You were free to use your judgment," King reminded him.

"Yes, yes. Anyhow we did it. By the time the techs had sampled the air and checked for hazards there was quite a crowd around us. They-well, you've seen the stereographs."

"Yes. Incredibly android."

"Android, hell! They're
men.
Not humans, but men just the same." Lazarus looked puzzled. "I don't like it."

King did not argue. The pictures had shown bipeds seven to eight feet tall, bilaterally symmetric, possessed of internal skeletal framework, distinct heads, lens-and-camera eyes. Those eyes were their most human and appealing features; they were large, limpid, and tragic, like those of a Saint Bernard dog.

It was well to concentrate on the eyes; their other features were not as tolerable. King looked away from the loose, toothless mouths, the bifurcated upper lips. He decided that it might take a long, long time to learn to be fond of these creatures. "Go ahead," he told Lazarus.

"We opened up and I stepped out alone, with my hands empty and trying to look friendly and peaceable. Three of them stepped forward-eagerly, I would say. But they lost interest in me at once; they seemed to be waiting for somebody else to come out. So I gave orders to carry Hans out.

"Skipper, you wouldn't believe it. They fawned over Hans like a long lost brother. No, that doesn't describe it. More like a king returning home in triumph. They were polite enough with the rest of us, in an offhand way, but they fairly slobbered over Hans." Lazarus hesitated. "Skipper? Do you believe in reincarnation?"

"Not exactly. I'm open-minded about it. I've read the report of the Prawling Committee, of course."

"I've never had any use for the notion myself. But how else could you account for the reception they gave Hans?"

"I don't account for it. Get on with your report. Do you think it is going to be possible for us to colonize here?"

"Oh," said Lazarus, "they left no doubt on that point. You see, Hans really can talk to them, telepathically. Hans tells us that their gods have authorized us to live here and the natives have already made plans to receive us."

"Eh?"

"That's right. They want us."

"Well! That's a relief."

"Is it?"

King studied Lazarus' glum features. "You've made a report favorable on every point. Why the sour look?"

"I don't know. I'd just rather we found a planet of our own. Skipper, anything this easy has a hitch in it."

2

The Jockaira (or Zhacheira, as some prefer) turned an entire city over to the colonists. Such astounding cooperation, plus the sudden discovery by almost every member of the Howard Families that he was sick for the feel of dirt under foot and free air in his lungs, greatly speeded the removal from ship to ground. It had been anticipated that at least an Earth year would be needed for such transition and that somnolents would be waked only as fast as they could be accommodated dirtside. But the limiting factor now was the scanty ability of the ship's boats to transfer a hundred thousand people as they were roused.

The Jockaira city was not designed to fit the needs of human beings. The Jockaira were not human beings, their physical requirements were somewhat different and their cultural needs as expressed in engineering were vastly different. But a city, any city, is a machine to accomplish certain practical ends: shelter, food supply, sanitation, communication; the internal logic of these prime requirements, as applied by different creatures to different environments, will produce an unlimited number of answers. But, as applied by any race of warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing androidal creatures to a particular environment the results, although strange, are necessarily such that Terran humans can use them. In some ways the Jockaira city looked as wild as a pararealist painting, but humans have lived in igloos, grass shacks, and even in the cybernautomated burrow under Antarctica; these humans could and did move into the Jockaira city-and of course at once set about reshaping it to suit them better.

It was not difficult even though there much to be done. There were buildings already standing-shelters with roofs on them, the artificial cave basic to all human shelter requirements. It did not matter what the Jockaira had used such a structure for; humans could use it for almost anything: sleeping, recreation, eating, storage, production. There were actual "caves" as well, for the Jockaira dig in more than we do. But humans easily turn troglodyte on occasion, in New York as readily as in Antarctica.

There was fresh potable water piped in for drinking and for limited washing. A major lack lay in plumbing; the city had no over-all drainage system. The "Jocks" did not water-bathe and their personal sanitation requirements differed from ours and were taken care of differently. A major effort had to be made to jury-rig equivalents of shipboard refreshers and adapt them to hook in with Jockaira disposal arrangements. Minimum necessity ruled; baths would remain a rationed luxury until water supply and disposal could be increased at least tenfold. But baths are not a necessity.

But such efforts at modification were minor compared with the crash program to set up hydroponic fanning, since most of the somnolents could not be waked until a food supply was assured. The do-it-now crowd wanted to tear out every bit of hydroponic equipment in the
New Frontiers
at once, ship it down dirtside, set it up and get going, while depending on stored supplies during the change-over; a more cautious minority wanted to move only a pilot plant while continuing to grow food in the ship; they pointed out that unsuspected fungus or virus on the strange planet could result in disaster . . . starvation.

The minority, strongly led by Ford and Barstow and supported by Captain King, prevailed; one of the ship's hydroponic farms was drained and put out of service. Its machinery was broken down into parts small enough to load into ship's boats.

But even this never reached dirtside. The planet's native farm products turned out to be suitable for human food and the Jockaira seemed almost pantingly anxious to give them away. Instead, efforts were turned to establishing Earth crops in native soil in order to supplement Jockaira foodstuffs with sorts the humans were used to. The Jockaira moved in and almost took over that effort; they were superb "natural" farmers (they had no need for synthetics on their undepleted planet) and seemed delighted to attempt to raise anything their guests wanted.

Ford transferred his civil headquarters to the city as soon as a food supply for more than a pioneer group was assured, while King remained in the ship. Sleepers were awakened and ferried to the ground as fast as facilities were made ready for them and their services could be used. Despite assured food, shelter, and drinking water, much needed to be done to provide minimum comfort and decency. The two cultures were basically different. The Jockaira seemed always anxious to be endlessly helpful but they were often obviously baffled at what the humans tried to do. The Jockaira culture did not seem to include the idea of privacy; the buildings of the city had no partitions in them which were not loadbearing-and few that were; they tended to use columns or posts. They could not understand why the humans would break up these lovely open spaces into cubicles and passageways; they simply could not comprehend why any individual would ever wish to be alone for any purpose whatsoever.

Apparently (this is not certain for abstract communication with them never reached a subtle level) they decided eventually that being alone held a religious significance for Earth people. In any case they were again helpful; they provided thin sheets of material which could be shaped into partitions-with their tools and only with their tools. The stuff frustrated human engineers almost to nervous collapse. No corrosive known to our technology affected it; even the reactions that would break down the rugged fluorine plastics used in handling uranium compounds had no effect on it. Diamond saws went to pieces on it, heat did not melt it, cold did not make it brittle. It stopped light, sound, and all radiation they were equipped to try on it. Its tensile strength could not be defined because they could not break it. Yet Jockaira tools, even when handled by humans, could cut it, shape it, reweld it.

The human engineers simply had to get used to such frustrations. From the criterion of control over environment through technology the Jockaira were as civilized as humans. But their developments had been along other lines.

The important differences between the two cultures went much deeper than engineering technology. Although ubiquitously friendly and helpful the Jockaira were
not
human. They thought differently, they evaluated differently; their social structure and language structure reflected their unhuman quality and both were incomprehensible to human beings.

Oliver Johnson, the semantician who had charge of developing a common language, found his immediate task made absurdly easy by the channel of communication through Hans Weatheral. "Of course," he explained to Slayton Ford and to Lazarus, "Hans isn't exactly a genius; he just misses being a moron. That limits the words I can translate through him to ideas he can understand. But it does give me a basic vocabulary to build on."

"Isn't that enough?" asked Ford. "It seems to me that I have heard that eight hundred words will do to convey any idea."

"There's some truth in that," admitted Johnson. "Less than a thousand words will cover all ordinary situations. I have selected not quite seven hundred of their terms, operationals and substantives, to give us a working
lingua franca.
But subtle distinctions and fine discriminations will have to wait until we know them better and understand them. A short vocabulary cannot handle high abstractions."

"Shucks," said Lazarus, "seven hundred words ought to be enough. Me, I don't intend to make love to 'em, or try to discuss poetry."

This opinion seemed to be justified; most of the members picked up basic Jockairan in two weeks to a month after being ferried down and chattered in it with their hosts as if they had talked it all their lives. All of the Earthmen had had the usual sound grounding in mnemonics and semantics; a short-vocabulary auxiliary language was quickly learned under the stimulus of need and the circumstance of plenty of chance to practice-except, of course, by the usual percentage of unshakable provincials who felt that it was up to "the natives" to learn English.

The Jockaira did not learn English. In the first place not one of them showed the slightest interest. Nor was it reasonable to expect their millions to learn the language of a few thousand. But in any case the split upper lip of a Jockaira could not cope with "m," "p," and "b," whereas the gutturals, sibilants, dentals, and clicks they did use could be approximated by the human throat.

Lazarus was forced to revise his early bad impression of the Jockaira. It was impossible not to like them once the strangeness of their appearance had worn off. They were so hospitable, so generous, so friendly, so anxious to please. He became particularly attached to Kreel Sarloo, who acted as a sort of liaison officer between the Families and the Jockaira. Sarloo held a position among his own people which could be translated roughly as "chief," "father," "priest," or "leader" of the Kreel family or tribe. He invited Lazarus to visit him in the Jockaira city nearest the colony. "My people will like to see you and smell your skin," he said. "It will be a happy-making thing. The gods will be pleased."