Six Blind Men & an Alien (7 page)

    September 14, 1945 began like any other day. Nibolante arose and prepared breakfast for his family, then went outside. Sallassine was already out, and digging a hole at the base of a rocky outcropping.

    "What are you doing?" asked Nibolante.

    "Look!" said Sallassine excitedly. "In the dirt below the snow!"

    Nibolante leaned over to see what his son was pointing at. "Ants!" continued Sallassine. "Ants are insects! Now Cheenapo can have her pet!"

    "Yes," agreed Nibolante. "If you can keep uncovering insects, I suppose she can."

    "Shall we find one today?"

    "Why not?" agreed Nibolante.

    He waited for the children to finish eating, then led them down past the tree line. They spent almost two hours looking for a lizard without finding one.

    "Don’t worry," Nibolante told his daughter. "If we don’t find one soon, we’ll try again tomorrow."

    "Maybe we should split up and cover more ground," suggested Sallassine.

    "I don’t want you out of my sight," said Nibolante. "There are many predators on the mountain."

    "They don’t come this high."

    "They do if they’re hungry enough. Just stay within sight."

    "All right," said Sallassine, heading off to his left.

    Nibolante took his daughter by the hand and began looking for a lizard again, checking behind every rock and under every bush. Every few minutes he turned and made sure that Sallassine was still in his line of sight.

    They’d been looking almost half an hour when he heard the scream. He turned and saw something small and black tearing at his son’s torso with sharp claws, biting him on the neck and shoulder. He raced toward them, screaming as he ran, and the creature scurried off at a speed he knew he couldn’t match. Nor did he want to. Sallassine was torn and bleeding, barely conscious.

    "Don’t move, don’t try to talk," said Nibolante. "I have nothing with me that can stop the bleeding. We have medications in the ship. I’ll carry you there."

    "I was looking out for lions and leopards," whispered Sallassine.

    "Be quiet. Don’t waste your strength."

    "It was a honey badger," said Sallassine just before he lost consciousness.

    Nibolante carried Sallassine as fast as he dared, conscious of the fact that Cheenapo couldn’t keep up with him if he increased his speed. By the time he reached the ship his son’s breathing was barely discernable.

    "Marbovi!" he yelled as he reached the hatch. "There’s been an accident! Bring the medication kit!"

    She was waiting for him when he entered and laid Sallassine on a counter. She didn’t ask what had happened. She just took one look at the child and turned to Nibolante.

    "He’s dead," she said dully.

    "He moaned just a minute ago."

    "He’s
dead
," she repeated. "He’s not breathing."

    Nibolante tried to discern a heartbeat, and couldn’t.

    "Will he stay dead?" asked Cheenapo.

    "Yes," said Marbovi. "He is just the first. This planet will kill us all."

    "He never saw it," said Nibolante miserably. "It was such a
small
animal."

    "And
you
never saw it," said Marbovi. "The difference is that you were
supposed
to see it." She glared at him. "You and this planet have killed my child. Go outside until dinnertime. I don’t want to look at you."

    He was about to say something, thought better of it, and walked out onto the glacier, riddled with guilt. The moment he did so the hatch slammed shut behind him.

    "Why bother?" he muttered. "I’m not coming right back in."

    Even as the words left his mouth, he realized that she had activated the engine. He raced to the hatch, pounding on it.

    "What are you doing?" he yelled.

    Of course there was no answer. A moment later the ship took off, and somehow he knew it would never land again on Earth.

    He looked across the glacier. His weapons were on the ship. So was any protection against the elements, should it get any colder. So were all the medications.

    He considered walking down the mountain into one of the villages, but he was not prepared to die just yet, and his observations of the human race’s goodwill were not encouraging. Not that it would make any difference. He was alone on an alien world, the last of his species on this particular colony.

    Still, he wasn’t prepared to die just yet, if only because Marbovi had doubtless been sure he would. He began walking across the ice, looking for shelter from the wind that had just sprung up, and wondered how many days he could last before he became his race’s second victim on this alien mountain.

    

    

    "I’m feeling kind of useless," said Ray Glover. "I mean, it’s a fabulous discovery and we’ll probably all get rich and maybe even famous, but the fact remains that I’m the sound man for a video of a corpse."

    "You’ll have more than enough work soon," said Bonnie. "We’ll be interviewing everyone before we leave the mountain."

    "I know," said Ray. "In the meantime I’ll just concentrate on trying to catch my breath."

    Charles Njobo walked over to me. "When do you plan to contact your experts on your laptop?"

    "In a few minutes," I said. "The sooner I do it, the better."

    "Do not do so until after I contact my government," he said.

    I wasn’t happy about it, but it was his country, so I had no choice.

    Just then I noticed a snowflake floating down, then another and another. Within three minutes we were actually in a snowstorm. We could look down the mountain and see that it was raining two thousand feet below us. Then, almost as suddenly as it started, it stopped.

    "Well, now you know how he stayed hidden all this time," said Jim Donahue, gesturing toward the creature, which had a fine covering of snow.

    Muro approached Njobo and spoke to him in low tones. Finally Njobo nodded his head, and Muro walked away. He was back about five minutes later with a leafy branch he’d found. He walked over to the creature, squatted down next to it, and began carefully dusting the snow off the body and head.

    Njobo glared at me as if he expected me to object, but that was probably the best and safest way to brush away the snow.

    I saw one of the porters approaching the creature. He stopped and stared down at it for a moment, and then Muro saw him and ordered him to get back with the other porters.

    "What was that all about?" I asked.

    Gorman spoke to Muro in a language I didn’t understand, and then turned to me. "Muro doesn’t know that porter, and he doesn’t want him messing with the body."

    "How can he not know him?" asked Donahue. "Aren’t they all from the same village?"

    Gorman shook his head. "They’re from the same tribe, not the same village. Muro spends most of his time as a headman on climbing parties, so it’s not all that strange that he hasn’t seen him before."

    Ray Glover began swaying, and suddenly he sat down heavily on the snow.

    "Are you all right?" asked Bonnie solicitously.

    "Just a little dizzy and short of breath," he answered.

    "Just sit still and don’t exert yourself," said Gorman. "Altitude affects people differently."

    Glover stared at the creature. "I wonder how
he
handled it?" he mused.

    

    

    
More to the point, thought Glover, why did he subject himself to it? We’re all pretending that he might not be an alien, but clearly that’s exactly what he was. What was it that kept him on this mountain, with a whole world to explore? Was he hiding? Was he a refugee? Or was there something on this mountain, more than anyplace else, that attracted him? The locals have made great progress, but they’re still primitive by the rest of the world’s standards. Did he have some plan to elevate them? What about them could have so fascinated him that he chose to remain in this hostile environment?

    
Ray Glover was the fourth blind man.

    To be continued-

    

    

    His name was B’num B’narr, and he’d spent half his adult life in jails on his home world. He wasn’t a thief or a killer, a swindler or a sadist. He was, according to his government, a rabble-rouser and an insurrectionist. By his own definition, he was a moral being cast into a thoroughly immoral world. By the judge’s definition, he was incapable of modifying his behavior, and since the world of Grafipo did not believe in the death penalty, when he was arrested and convicted for the seventh time, he was given his choice: lifetime imprisonment without parole, or banishment to a new world.

    He chose the banishment.

    He rejected the first three worlds they chose. It then occurred to the authorities that he had no choice in the matter, but because he had made such a fuss they decided to send him to world with which they had never had any contact. It was a planet known to its inhabitants as Earth, and it would be very difficult for him to cause the kind of disturbances there that he had caused on Grafipo. Earth had no video. It had no computers. It had only discovered the principles of flight within the past dozen years. Still, his captors knew B’narr. The trick would be to put him down in an unpopulated (or at least underpopulated) area, where his capacity for mischief would be severely limited.

    A thorough survey by a trio of computerized drones concluded that there were a number of vast, empty deserts on the planet. The problem, they realized, is that sooner or later he could find his way to civilization, and based on their knowledge of him, civilization didn’t need the added problems he would bring.

    They studied the surveys further, and finally hit upon a solution, not an ideal one but as close as they could come. They would deposit him on the slopes of a mountain after planting an identifying chip in his body. Then they would create an invisible barrier entirely around the base of the mountain, one that would recognize the chip but would permit every other living creature to pass.

    It then became a matter of choosing the mountain. The most impressive was Everest, but the one that seemed farthest from any substantial center of population was Kilimanjaro, and they chose the latter for that reason.

    It was not much later that a small ship entered the atmosphere and approached the snow-capped mountain.

    "Remember," said one of the officers. "You can never leave the mountain."

    "I trust you don’t mind if I try," replied B’narr.

    "Not at all," said the officer. "It won’t hurt
me
."

    The ship hovered above a grass-covered ridge about halfway up the mountain.

    "This is where you leave us," said another officer, opening the hatch.

    "If you had just learned to keep your mouth shut-" said the first officer.

    "In twenty seconds I will have more freedom than you have ever known," said B’narr. "I would not trade places with you for anything."

    "It’s probably good that you feel that way," said the first office, "since you will live and die on this forsaken alien mountain."

    B’narr walked to the hatch, and was soon being lowered to the surface. A moment later he was standing on his new world, the hatch closed, and the ship began racing for the stratosphere.

    B’narr put his hands on his hips and took his first long look at the mountain where he would live and die. He knew that some of the fruits and animals would be edible; they wouldn’t have spent millions flying him here just to let him die of systemic poisoning or starvation in the first few weeks. He looked down and saw the footprints of an elephant. He had no idea what the beast looked like, but given its size he hoped that it wasn’t a carnivore.

    Avians sang in the trees. He studied them until he was convinced that they presented no threat. He could see a village perhaps a mile away, but he decided not to try to make contact until he knew more about the inhabitants. He couldn’t imagine that his captors had chosen a mechanized or sophisticated world for him-and there was no sense showing himself to a people who probably didn’t know any other sentient species existed, at least until he studied them further and felt confident of a non-violent reception.

    Suddenly he heard a roar. It wasn’t close, but it was loud enough to convince him that his first order of business was to find a sanctuary where he could sleep in safety.

    He began walking. As he did so he passed a number of caves, but he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t home to whatever had roared. He considered climbing a tree and sleeping on a broad branch, but he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t fall off, and besides there was every possibility that at least one carnivore was arboreal.

    He continued exploring his surroundings. After two more hours it began getting darker, and he realized that he didn’t know the planet’s rotation speed, and hence the length of its days and nights. He looked toward the top of the mountain. The dense vegetation thinned out the higher he went, and seemed to vanish entirely at the edge of the glacier.

    It was an easy decision. Until he knew the mountain and its residents-sentient and otherwise-better, he’d spend his time up near the ice cap, where there was less vegetation, because less vegetation meant less herbivores and less herbivores means less meat-eaters. They might even avoid the glacier entirely.

    He trudged up the mountain, alert to every sound and movement, and made it to his destination without seeing a single animal. He found the edge of the glacier cold, but not unbearably so, and he began looking for shelter. He found a cave, made sure that it bore no trace of any other resident, and entered it. He was aware that the air was much thinner up here, but his body adjusted to it and he paid it no further notice.