Six Blind Men & an Alien (3 page)

    "Just do it!" snapped Machti.

    The ship headed for the wormhole, and Machti spent the next hour experimenting with the remains of the shackles until he found the code that unlocked the right one. Try as he might, he couldn’t make the one on his left leg open; the chip had been damaged when he’d destroyed the chain. He explored the small interior of the ship, found a laser pistol, and turned it on his shackle. The shackle became hotter and hotter still. He screamed in pain, but kept the laser trained on it, weakening its structure. He finally was able to pry it off with one of the galley’s eating tools.

    He limped to the ship’s medical stores, found some ointments to rub on his ankle, and spent the next fifteen hours sleeping. When he awoke he found out that the police ships were still in hot pursuit and had entered the wormhole only a minute or two after his own ship.

    "Go faster!" he ordered.

    "Speed is meaningless inside a wormhole, where the laws of the universe do not apply," responded the ship.

    "Can they catch us?"

    "Not unless the wormhole wishes them to."

    "Wormholes don’t think or wish," said Machti irritably.

    "My conceptual vocabulary is limited," replied the ship. "There is no reason to assume they can catch us within the wormhole. Similarly, there is no reason for them
not
to catch us in a timeless and spaceless area outside the universe."

    "Will you know if they are getting close to us?"

    "Define ‘close," said the ship.

    "Within firing range?"

    "If you will tell me what weapons you are theorizing, I can answer the question."

    "Your own weapons!" snapped Machti.

    "I am not equipped with any weaponry," said the ship.

    "What good are you?" growled Machti. Then: "Don’t answer that question."

    He spent the rest of the voyage studying what little was known of his destination’s geography, medicating his ankle, and catching up on his sleep.

    The ship woke him from his latest slumber with an announcement: "We have emerged from the wormhole, we are in Sol’s system, we are approaching the third planet, and I need landing coordinates."

    "How far behind are the two police ships?" demanded Machti. "In minutes, not distances."

    "Three and fourteen minutes."

    "I thought they went into the hole together."

    "Clearly I will again have to explain the absence of the known laws of the universe inside a wormhole," said the ship.

    "Don’t bother," said Machti.

    "The coordinates, please?" insisted the ship, producing a holographic display of Earth rotating slowly on its axis.

    "Longitude and latitude? I don’t know them." Machti pointed toward Africa. "This seems to be the least-populated continent, except for the ice- covered one. At least it has the fewest signs of civilization." Since he had neither asked a question nor issued a command, the ship remained silent. "Three minutes, you say?"

    "2.9376 minutes, to be exact."

    "Let me think," said Machti. "If you put me down in a city, there will be no way to keep my presence a secret, and the subsequent excitement will alert my pursuers to where I am. And if you set me down on a flat plain, they’ll pinpoint your location, scan the limits of where I could get to in three minutes, spot me with their sensors, and that will be the end of it." He studied the globe again, and suddenly his eyes narrowed. "I’m getting an idea. Where is the tallest mountain on the continent?"

    "Right here," said the ship, and Kilimanjaro began flashing brightly on the holographic globe.

    "All right," said Machti. "If I were to jump out of the hatch while you flew directly over it, have we anything aboard that could break or ease my fall?"

    "Yes."

    "All right, here’s what we’ll do. Enter the atmosphere almost directly over the mountain, swoop down toward it, open your hatch, and I’ll jump out. The odds are that they won’t see me, and if you don’t slow down they’ll have no reason to assume I’m not still aboard you. Then go to the southern end of the continent, land in a barren field for thirty seconds, and then take off and fly back to your point of origin. They’ll assume I got off there, and will spend their time searching the area for me. When they realize it’s fruitless, they’ll return home as well." He looked around the small ship. "Where is it?"

    "Where is what?"

    "Whatever I’m going to use to break my fall." The top of a bulkhead slid open, revealing a small parachute. "You’re sure this will work? It doesn’t look very substantial."

    "It has been field-tested."

    "All right. I’m in no position to argue. How far behind is the nearer ship now-rounded off to seconds?"

    "Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds."

    "Just make sure you stay ahead of it."

    "It cannot catch me unless I malfunction," replied the ship.

    Machti said nothing more until they entered Earth’s atmosphere. Then he walked to the hatch.

    "How soon do we reach the mountain?" he asked.

    "Approximately four minutes," answered the ship.

    "Get as low over it as you can and then open the hatch."

    Machti waited impatiently until the ship made its approach and leveled out. After what seemed an eternity to him the hatch slid open and he dove out through it. The parachute computed his weight, sensed the approach of the mountain, and opened just in time to prevent him from suffering any serious injury.

    He touched down on an icy slope, rolled over twice, and began sliding down the slope until his descent was blocked by large icy ledge. He looked up, but could see neither his ship nor the two pursuers.

    He climbed out of the chute and buried it in the snow, then surveyed his surroundings. He was within a thousand feet of the mountaintop, and perhaps eighteen thousand feet above the savanna. Down the sides of the mountain he could see heavily-forested slopes, and below that a river and even a village of mud-and-straw huts.

    And then he saw it: the police ship, hovering just above Kilimanjaro. He couldn’t spot its companion. Possibly he’d fooled one of them, possibly it simply hadn’t arrived yet. But at least one of them hadn’t fallen for his ruse.

    He hid in the shadow of a large rock, hoping that the ship would decide it had been mistaken and take up pursuit of his empty ship, but instead it just stayed there, and he realized its scanners were seeking out life forms from his planet. They were looking for him, and his readings would be like no other.

    He knew the ship couldn’t stay there long without being noticed, and since this planet hadn’t yet developed spaceflight, they wouldn’t want to be spotted and either questioned or, more likely, fired upon. All he had to do was stay hidden for another hour at most, probably just a few minutes-

    He heard the growl before he spotted the source of it: a lone leopard about fifty yards away. It approached him slowly, and he stood up and faced it. Another growl from the leopard was matched by his own growl. That seemed to startle and unnerve the leopard; its prey wasn’t supposed to growl back.

    They stared at each other for a long minute, alien and leopard, and finally the leopard turned and began slinking back down the mountain, off the snow cap and toward the lush forest below.

    Machti breathed a sigh of relief and looked up. The ship was still there. It obviously hadn’t pinpointed him yet, because it possessed weapons that could take off the top thousand feet of the mountain or home in on a tiny target a mile away. He remained sheltered and hidden by the outcropping, certain that the ship would be leaving soon-but it didn’t, and suddenly he realized the true situation. This was a primitive planet, and he was, by choice, on the most primitive part of it. Not only didn’t they have spaceflight, they didn’t have sensors-or if they did, they had them in the cities, not on this mountain that seemed to house only wild animals and a few people living in huts. And that meant the ship could hover there for weeks, maybe months, before anyone spotted it.

    He spent the night under the outcropping, hopeful that the furry pelt that covered him would protect him from the cold-and for a few hours it did. But by morning he was freezing, and he decided that he would have to descend below the snow line if he was to survive.

    He began walking gingerly, careful of the ice and the hidden rocks beneath the snow-and suddenly the energy pulse from the ship’s cannon missed him by less than ten feet. He began racing toward safety-a huge mound of snow that probably covered an equally large rock-but another burst of energy demolished the mound before he could reach it.

    Machti looked down the mountain. The snow and ice were too steep. He knew he could never race down the slope at any speed; he’d surely slip and fall first, and if he fell hard enough, or fell the wrong way and broke something, he’d be a perfect target for the police ship. He turned and began retracing his steps. The higher he went, the more outcroppings there were to afford him cover, and soon he was back as high as when the ship had first seen him.

    The firing stopped. Primitive as this world’s inhabitants were, the officers clearly thought that if they fired their weapons enough,
somebody
would see it and report it. The ship hovered some two hundred feet above the snowy surface, its crew content to wait until Machti was compelled to leave to find food.

    Machti stayed under the outcropping until three hours after the sun had set. Then he ventured forth again, only to be shot at instantly. He cursed himself for not realizing that the officers didn’t have to see him, that their weapons could home in on his motion or even his body heat. He took up his position under the outcrop again and decided he had no choice but to outwait the ship.

    By midmorning he decided to take a quick look and see if it was still hovering-and found that his feet and joints had frozen, that he was almost incapable of motion.

    Now he began panicking. He’d been almost two days without food, he was on a freezing mountaintop, and he couldn’t move. He forced himself to stand up, then painfully moved one foot ahead of the other. The outcrop was almost twenty feet long, so he had room to take a few steps while still protected, then turn and walk back, and continue doing it until some of his range of motion returned.

    He took a step, leaning a hand against the outcrop for support, then another, then a third-and then his foot slipped on the ice, he fell heavily, and began sliding down the snow. He expected the ship to fire on him at any second, but either they hadn’t noticed, or more likely had decided he was never going to get up under his own power again.

    Fifty feet he slid, then eighty, then a hundred and forty. Finally the ground-or at least the snow-leveled out, and he came to rest. He tried to get up and found that he couldn’t. He tried to crawl toward another outcrop, and couldn’t manage that either. He became vaguely aware that it was starting to snow again. He lay on his back, staring up at the alien sun, wishing he could feel its life-giving warmth, and suddenly a smile crossed his face.

    
At least
, he thought,
you won’t be taking me to Bareimus. The snow will cover me completely in another few minutes, and I will lay here on this strange world and this inhospitable mountain for all eternity. Or perhaps some day in the far future one of the hut dwellers’ descendants will find what’s left of me, and try to convince his friends that this planet had been visited by an alien-and they will laugh and tease and humiliate him so much that he’ll cover me back up and never mention me again.

    

    

    Bonnie stared down at the body. "Was he a meat-eater, do you think?"

    "I’ll have to examine his teeth," I said. "And one of my colleagues will examine the contents of his stomach."

    "Provided he didn’t starve to death," said Ray Glover.

    "Even if he did, there will be traces," I said.

    "He doesn’t look particularly shaggy," continued Ray. "And if he’s been up here any length of time, he’d have been in the middle of the glacier, not the lower edge of it. If he wasn’t hunting, what the hell was he doing here? I mean, this couldn’t have been his natural habitat, could it?"

    Gorman chuckled at that. "Men have been climbing Kilimanjaro for hundreds of years," he said. "Maybe thousands. No one’s ever seen one of these before, so I think you’re safe in saying it’s not his natural habitat. I think the main questions are: what is he, and what was he doing up here?"

    "That’s what we hope to find out," I said.

    Jim Donahue patted his camera lovingly. "Whatever it is, we’re the first to find it, and I’m the first to photograph it."

    "Probably," I agreed.

    "What do you mean
probably
?" he repeated. "The damned thing’s been buried in the ice since it died. No one’s ever seen it before."

    

    

    
Charles Njobo stared at the body of the creature. He knew this party was not the first to discover it, because there were no weapons to be found anywhere in the vicinity of the body. He could believe that the creature’s clothes had rotted away over the years despite the snow and ice, but not its weapons. Someone had taken them,

    
Why was he so certain? Because he was a Zanake, and because he was a Tanzanian. Before there was a Tanzania, there were just tribes-and the Zanake had been exploited by the Arabs and then the Germans and the British, and been conquered by the Maasai, and the Nandi and half a dozen other tribes. Then they became Tanzanians, and the Kenyans had dominated them economically, and Idi Amin’s Uganda had invaded them, and the great powers in Europe still held their purse strings. So of course the creature was an alien, here to conquer his people. Wasn’t that what everyone came here for?