Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (160 page)

* * * *

He knew, as he caught sight of the two creatures outside the opened lock of the vessel that his guess had been wrong. The creatures were bifurcate, like himself, though massive and much larger, and that meant the third world. He hesitated, watching carefully as they stared about, apparently keenly enjoying the air around them. Then one spoke to the other, and his mind shook under a new shock.

The articulation and intonation were intelligent, but the sounds were a meaningless babble. Speech—that! It must be, though the words held no meaning. Wait—in the old records—Slha the Freethinker had touched on some such thought; he had written of remote days when the Lunarites had had no speech and postulated that they had invented the sounds and given them arbitrary meaning, and that only by slow ages of use had they become instinctive in the new-grown infants—had even dared to question that the Great Ones had ordered speech and sound meanings as the inevitable complement of intelligence. And now, it seemed, he was right. Lhin groped up through the fog of his discovery and tightened his thoughts into a beam.

Again, shock struck at him. Their minds were hard to reach, and once he did find the key and grope forward into their thoughts, it was apparent that they could not read his! Yet they were intelligent. But the one on whom his thoughts centered noticed him finally, and grabbed at the other. The words were still harsh and senseless, but the general meaning reached the moon man. “Fats, what’s that?”

The other turned and stared at Lhin’s approach. “Search me. Looks like a scrawny three-foot monkey. Reckon it’s harmless?”

“Probably, maybe even intelligent. It’s a cinch no band of political refugees built this place—nonhuman construction. Hi there!” The one who thought of himself as Slim—massive though he appeared—turned to the approaching Lunarite. “What and who are you?”

“Lhin,” he answered, noting surprised pleasure in Slim’s mind. “Lhin—me are Lhin.”

Fats grunted. “Guess you’re right, Slim. Seems to savvy you. Wonder who came here and taught him English.”

Lhin fumbled clumsily, trying to pin down the individual sounds to their meanings and remember them. “No sahffy Enlhis. No who came here. You—” He ran out of words and drew nearer, making motions toward Slim’s head, then his own. Surprisingly, Slim got it.

“He means he knows what we’re thinking, I guess. Telepathy.”

“Yeah? Marshies claim they can do it among themselves, but I never saw one read a human mind. They claim we don’t open up right. Maybe this Ream monkey’s lying to you.”

“I doubt it. Take another look at the radioactivity meter in the viability tester—men wouldn’t come here and go home without spreading the good word. Anyway, his name isn’t Ream. Lean comes closer to the sound he made, though we’ll never get it right.” He half sent a thought to Lhin. who dutifully pronounced his name again. “See? His liquid isn’t…it’s a glottal stop. And he makes the final consonant a labial, though it sounds something like our dental. We can’t make sounds like that. Wonder how intelligent he is.”

He turned back into the ship before Lhin could puzzle out some kind of answer, and was out a moment later with a small bundle under his arm. “Space English code book,” he explained to Fats. “Same as they used to teach the Martians English a century ago.”

Then to Lhin: “Here are the six hundred most useful words of our language, organized, so it’ll beat waiting for you to pick them up bit by bit. You look at the diagrammed pictures while I say and think the word. Now. One—w-uh-nn; two—tuh-ooo. Getting it?”

Fats watched them for a while, half-amused, then grew tired of it. “Okay, Slim, you mollycoddle the native a while and see what you learn. I’m going over to the walls and investigate that radioactive stuff until you’re readv to start repairs. Wish radios weren’t so darned limited in these freighters and we could get a call through.”

He wandered off, but Lhin and Slim were hardly aware of it. They were going through the difficult task of organizing a means of communication, with almost no common background, which should have been worse than impossible in terms of hours. Yet, strange as the word associations and sounds were, and odd as their organization into meaningful groups, they were still only speech, after all. And Lhin had grown into life with a highly complex speech as natural to him as breathing. He twisted his lips over the sounds and nailed the meanings down in his mind, one by one, indelibly.

* * * *

Fats finally found them in Lhin’s cave, tracing them by the sound of their voices, and sat down to watch, as an adult might watch a child playing with a dog. He bore Lhin no ill will, but neither could he regard the Moon man as anything but some clever animal, like the Martians or the primitives of Venus; if Slim enjoyed treating them as equals, let him have his way for the tune.

Lhin was vaguely conscious of those thoughts and others more disturbing, but he was too wrapped up in the new experience of having some living mind to communicate with, after nearly a century of being alone with himself. And there were more important things. He wriggled his tail, spread his arms, and fought over the Earth sounds, while Slim followed as best he could.

Finally the Earth man nodded. “I think I get it. All of them died off except you, and you don’t like the idea of coming to a dead end. Umm. I wouldn’t either. So now you hope these Great Ones of yours—we call ‘em God—have sent us down here to fix things up. How?”

Lhin beamed, his face contorting into a furrowed grimace of pleasure before he realized Slim misinterpreted the gesture. Slim meant well. Once he knew what was needed, perhaps he would even give the copper gladly, since the old records showed that the third world was richest of all in minerals.

“Nra is needed. Life comes from making many sun-pie things one not-simple thing—air, drink stuff, eat stuff, all that I have, so I live. But to begin the new life, Nra is needed. It makes things begin. The seed has no life—with Nra it lives. But I have no word.”

He waited impatiently while Slim digested that. “Sort of a vitamin or hormone, something like Vitamin E6, eh? Maybe we could make it, but—”

Lhin nodded. Surely the Great Ones were kind. His hearts were warm as he thought of the many seeds carefully wrapped and stored that could be made to grow with the needed copper. And now the Earth man was willing to help. A little longer and all would be well.

“No need to make,” he piped happily. “Simple stuff. The seed or I can make it, in us. But we need Nra to make it. See.” He pulped a handful of rock from the basket lying near, chewed it carefully, and indicated that it was being changed inside him.

Fats awoke to greater attention. “Do that again, monkey!”

Lhin obliged, curious to note that they apparently ate nothing other life had not prepared for them. “Darn. Rocks—just plain rocks—and he eats them. Has he got a craw like a bird, Slim?”

“He digests them. If you’ve read of those half-plant, half-animal things the Martians came from, you’ll know what his metabolism’s like. Look, Lhin, I take it you mean an element. Sodium, calcium, chlorine? No, I guess you’d have all those. Iodine, maybe? Hmmm.” He went over a couple of dozen he could imagine having anything to do with life, but copper was not among them, by accident, and a slow fear crept up into the Lunarite’s thoughts. This strange barrier to communication—would it ruin all?

He groped for the answer—and relaxed. Of course, though no common word existed, the element itself was common in structure. Hurriedly, he flipped the pages of the code book to a blank one and reached for the Earth man’s pencil. Then, as Slim and Fats stared curiously, he began sketching hi the atomic structure of copper, particle by particle, from the center out, as the master physicists of his race had discovered it to be.

It meant nothing to them. Slim handed the paper back, shaking his head. “Fella, if I’m right in thinking that’s a picture of some atom, we’ve got a lot to learn back on earth.
Wheeoo!”

Fats twisted his lips. “If that’s an atom, I’m a fried egg. Come on, Slim, it’s sleepy time and you’ve fooled away half a day. Anyhow, I want to talk that radioactive business over with you. It’s so strong it’d cook us in half an hour if we weren’t wearing these portable nullifiers—yet the monkey seems to thrive on it. I got an idea.”

Slim came back from his brown study and stared at his watch. “Darn it! Look, Lhin, don’t give up yet, we’ll talk all this over tomorrow again. But Fats is right; it’s time for us to sleep. So long, fella.”

Lhin nodded a temporary farewell in his own tongue and slumped back on his rough bed. Outside, he heard Fats extolling a scheme of some kind for getting out the radioactives with Lhin’s help, somehow, and Sum’s protesting voice. But he paid no attention. The atomic structure had been right, he knew, but they were only groping toward it in their science, and their minds knew too little of the subject to enable them to grasp his pictures.

Chemical formulae? Reactions that would eliminate others, one by one? If they were chemists, perhaps, but even Slim knew too little for that. Yet, obviously, unless there was no copper on Earth, there was an answer somewhere. Surely the Great Ones whom they called God would never answer generations of faithful prayer with a mockery! There was an answer, and while they slept, he would find it, though he had to search through every record roll for clues.

* * * *

Hours later he was trudging across the plain toward the ship, hope high again. The answer, once found, was simple. All elements formed themselves into families and classes. Slim had mentioned sodium, and copper was related in the more primitive tables, such as Earth might use. More important, its atomic number was twenty-nine by theory elementary enough for any race that could build rockets.

The locks were open, and he slipped through both, the wavering half-formed thoughts of the men leading him to them unerringly. Once in their presence, he stopped, wondering about their habits. Already he had learned that what held true for his people was not necessarily the rule with them, and they might not approve of his arousing a sleeper. Finally, torn between politeness and impatience, he squatted on the metal floor, clutching the record roll, his nostrils sampling the metals around him. Copper was not there; but he hadn’t expected so rare an element, though there were others here that he failed completely to recognize and guessed were among the heavy ones almost lacking on the moon.

Fats gurgled and scrimmaged around with his arms, yawned, sat up, still half asleep. His thoughts were full of some Earth person of the female element which Lhin had noted was missing in these two, and what he’d do “when he got rich.” Lhin was highly interested hi the thought pictures until he realized that it would be best not to intrude on these obviously secret things. He withdrew his mind just as the man noted him.

Fats was never at his best while waking up. He came to his feet with a bellow and grabbed for something. “Why, you sneaking little monkey! Trying to slip up and cut our—”

Lhin squealed and avoided the blow that would have left him a shapeless blob, uncertain of how he had offended, but warned by caution to leave. Physical fear was impossible to him—too many generations had grown and died with no need of it. But it came as a numbing shock that these beings would actually kill another intelligent person. Was life so cheap on Earth?

“Hey! Hey, Fats, stop it!” Sinn had awakened at the sound of the commotion, and a hasty glance showed Lhin that he was holding the other’s arms. “Lay off, will you? What’s going on?”

But now Fats was fully awake and calming down. He dropped the metal bar and grinned wryly. “I dunno. I guess he meant all right, but he was sitting there with that metal thing in his hands, staring at me, and I figured he meant to cut my throat or something. I’m all right now. Come on back, monkey; it’s all right.”

Slim let his partner go and nodded at Lhin. “Sure, come back, fella. Fats has some funny ideas about non-humans, but he’s a good-hearted egg, on the whole. Be a good doggie and he won’t kick you—he might even scratch your ears.”

“Nuts.” Fats was grinning, good nature restored. He knew Slim meant it as a crack, but it didn’t bother him; what was wrong with treating Marshies and monkeys like what they were? “Whatcha got there, monkey? More pictures that mean nothing?”

Lhin nodded in imitation of their assent gesture and held out the roll to Slim; Fats’ attitude was no longer unfriendly, but he was an unknown quantity, and Slim seemed the more interested. “Pictures that mean much, I hope. Here is Nra, twenty-nine, under sodium.”

“Eight column periodic table,” Slim told Fats. “At least, it looks like one. Get me the handbook, will you? Ummm. Under sodium, No. 29. Sodium, potassium, copper. And it’s No. 29, all right. That it, Lhin?”

Lhin’s eyes were blazing with triumph. Grace to the Great Ones. “Yes, it is copper. Perhaps you have some? Even a gram, perhaps?”

“Ten thousand grams, if you like. According to your notions, we’re lousy with the stuff. Help yourself.”

Fats cut in. “Sure, monkey, we got copper, if that’s the stuff you’ve been yelling about. What’ll you pay for it?”

“Pay?”

“Sure, give in return. We help you; you help us. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

It hadn’t occurred to Lhin, but it did seem fair. But what had he to give? And then he realized what was in the man’s mind. For the copper, he was to work, digging out and purifying the radioactives that gave warmth and light and life to the crater, so painfully brought into being when the place was first constructed, transmuted to meet the special needs of the people who were to live there. And after him, his sons and their sons, mining and sweating for Earth, and being paid in barely enough copper to keep Earth supplied with laborers. Fats’ mind filled again with dreams of the other Earth creature. For that, he would doom a race to life without pride or hope or accomplishment. Lhin found no understanding in it. There were so many of those creatures on Earth—why should his enslavement be necessary? Nor was enslavement all. Eventually, doom was as certain that way as the other, once Earth was glutted with the radioactives, or when the supply here dropped below the vital point, great as the reserve was. He shuddered under the decision forced upon him.

Slim’s hand fell on his shoulder. “Fats has things slightly wrong, Lhin. Haven’t you, Fats?”

There was something in Slim’s hand, something Lhin knew dimly was a weapon. The other man squirmed, but his grin remained.

“You’re touched, Slim, soft. Maybe you believe all this junk about other races’ equality, but you won’t kill me for it. I’m standing pat—I’m not giving away my copper.”