The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (34 page)

“Not yet,” Lee answered.

Jabbing a stubby finger toward the screen, the Russian asked, “Are these the geniuses who built the machines on Titan? Fishing with bone spears? They don’t make much of an enemy.”

“They could have been our enemy,” Lee answered, forcing a thin smile. He was getting accustomed to Charnovsky’s needling, but not reconciled to it.

The geologist shook his head sadly. “Take the advice of an older man, dear friend, and disabuse yourself of this idea. Statistics are a powerful tool, Sid. The chances of this particular race being the one that built on Titan are fantastically high. And the chances—”

“What’re the chances that two intelligent races will both evolve along the same physical lines?” Lee snapped.

Charnovsky shrugged. “We have two known races. They are both human in form. The chances must be excellent.”

Lee turned back to watch the viewscreen, then asked Hatfield, “Aaron, the biochemistry here is very similar to Earth’s, isn’t it?”

“Very close.”

“I mean . . . I could eat local food and be nourished by it? I wouldn’t be poisoned or anything like that?”

“Well,” Hatfield said, visibly thinking it out as he spoke, “as far as the structure of the proteins and other foodstuffs are concerned . . . yes, I guess you could get away with eating it. The biochemistry is basically the same as ours, as nearly as I’ve been able to tell. But so are terrestrial shellfish, and they make me deathly ill. You see, there’re all sorts of enzymes, and microbial parasites, and viruses . . .”

“We’ve been living with the local bugs for months now,” Lee said. “We’re adapted to them, aren’t we?”

“You know what they say about visiting strange places: don’t drink the water.”

On the viewscreen, one of the natives struck into the water with his spear, and instantly the water began to boil with the thrashing of some sea creature. The other two men drove their spears home, and the thrashing died. They lifted a four-foot-long fish out of the water and started back for the beach, carrying it triumphantly over their heads. The camera’s autotracker kept the picture on them. The women on the beach were jumping and clapping with joy.

“Damn,” Lee said softly. “They’re as human as we are.”

“And obviously representative of a high technical civilization,” Charnovsky said.

“Survivors of one, maybe,” Lee answered. “Their culture might have been wiped out by the Pup’s explosion or by war.”

“Now it gets even more dramatic: two cultures destroyed, ours
and
theirs.”

“All right, go ahead and laugh,” Lee said. “I won’t be able to prove anything until I get to live with them.”

“Until what?” Hatfield said.

“Until I go out there and meet them face to face, learn their language, their culture, live with them.”

“Live with them?” Rasmussen looked startled; the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain’s monomolecular biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat.

They were sitting around a circular table in the conference room of the Sirius globe: the six “outsiders,” Grote, Chien, Captain Rasmussen, Pascual and Lehman.

“Aren’t you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?” Grote asked, grinning.

“I don’t think they have pots. Or fire, for that matter,” Lee countered.

The laugh turned on Grote.

Lee went on quietly, “I’ve checked it out with Aaron, here. There’s no biochemical reason why I couldn’t survive in the native environment. Doris and Marlene have agreed to gather the same types of food we’ve seen the humanoids carrying, and I’ll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them.”

Lehman hunched forward, from across the table, and asked Lee, “About the dynamics of having a representative of our relatively advanced culture step into their primitive—”

“I won’t be representing an advanced culture to them,” Lee said. “I intend to be just as naked and toolless as they are. And just as black. Aaron can inject me with the proper enzymes to turn my skin black.”

“That would be necessary in any event if you don’t want to be sunburned to death,” Pascual said.

Hatfield added, “You’ll also need contact lenses that’ll screen out the UV and protect your eyes.”

They spent an hour discussing all the physical precautions he would have to take. Lee kept glancing at Rasmussen.
The idea’s slipping out from under his control.
The captain watched each speaker in turn, squinting with concentration and sinking deeper and deeper into his Viking scowl. Then, when Lee was certain that the captain could no longer object, Rasmussen finally spoke up: “One more question. Are you willing to give up an eye for this mission of yours?”

“What do you mean?”

The captain’s hands seemed to wander loosely without a mug of beer to tie them down. “Well, you seem to be willing to run a good deal of personal risk to live with these . . . eh, people. From the expedition’s viewpoint, you will also be risking our only anthropologist, you know. I think the wise thing to do, in that case, would be to have a running record of everything you see and hear.”

Lee nodded.

“So we can swap one of your eyes for a TV camera and plant a transmitter somewhere in your skull. I’m sure there’s enough empty space in your head to accommodate it.” The captain chuckled toothily at his joke.

“We can’t do an eye procedure here,” Pascual argued. “It’s too risky.”

“I understand that Dr. Tanaka is quite expert in that field,” the captain said. “And naturally we would preserve the eye to restore it afterward. Unless, of course, Professor Lee—” He let the suggestion dangle.

Lee looked at them sitting around the big table: Rasmussen, trying to look noncommittal; Pascual, upset and nearly angry; Lehman, staring intently right back into Lee’s eyes.

You’re just trying to force me to back down,
Lee thought of Rasmussen. Then, of Lehman,
And if I don’t back down, you’ll be convinced that I’m crazy.

For a long moment there was no sound in the crowded conference room except the faint whir of the air blower.

“All right,” Lee said. “If Tanaka is willing to tackle the surgery, so am I.”

* VII *

When Lee returned to his cubicle,
the message light under the phone screen was blinking red. He flopped on the bunk, propped a pillow under his head, and asked the computer, “What’s the phone message?”

The screen lit up: PLS CALL DR. LEHMAN.
My son, the psychiatrist.
“Okay,” he said aloud, “get him.”

A moment later Lehman’s tanned face filled the screen.

“I was expecting you to call,” Lee said.

The psychiatrist nodded, “You agreed to pay a big price just to get loose among the natives.”

“Tanaka can handle the surgery,” he answered evenly.

“It’ll take a month before you are fit to leave the ship again.”

“You know what our Viking captain says . . . we’ll stay here as long as the beer holds out.”

Lehman smiled.
Professional technique,
Lee thought. “Sid, do you really think you can mingle with these people without causing any cultural impact? Without changing them?”

Shrugging, he answered, “I don’t know. I hope so. As far as we know, they’re the only humanoid group on the planet. They may have never seen a stranger before.”

“That’s what I mean,” Lehman said. “Don’t you feel that—”

“Let’s cut the circling, Rich. You know why I want to see them first-hand. If we had the time I’d study them remotely for a good long while before trying any contact. But it gets back to the beer supply. We’ve got to squeeze everything we can out of them in a little more than four years.”

“There will be other expeditions, after we return to Earth and tell them about these people.”

“Probably so. But they may be too late.”

“Too late for what?”

His neck was starting to hurt; Lee hunched up to a sitting position on the bunk. “Figure it out. There can’t be more than about fifty people in the group we’ve been watching. I’ve only seen a couple of children. And there aren’t any other humanoid groups on the planet. That means they’re dying out. This gang is the last of their kind. By the time another expedition gets here, there might not be any of them left.”

For once, Lehman looked surprised. “Do you really think so?”

“Yes. And before they die, we have to get some information out of them.”

“What do you mean
?

“They might not be natives of this planet,” Lee said, forcing himself to speak calmly, keeping his face a mask, freezing any emotion inside him. “They probably came from somewhere else. That elsewhere is the home of the people who built the Titan machine . . . their real home. We have got to find out where it
is.” Flawless logic.

Lehman tried to smile again. “That’s assuming your theory about an ancient war is right.”

“Yes. Assuming I’m right.”

“Assume you
are,”
Lehman said. “And assume you find what you’re looking for. Then what? Do you just take off and go back to Earth? What happens to the people here?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said, ice-cold inside. “The main problem will be how to deal with the home world of their people.”

“But the people here, do we just let them die out?”

“Maybe. I guess so.”

Lehman’s smile was completely gone now; his face didn’t look pleasant at all.

It took much more than a month. The surgery was difficult. And beneath all the pain was Lee’s rooted fear that he might never have his sight fully restored again. While he was recovering, before he was allowed out of his infirmary bed, Hatfield turned his skin black with a series of enzyme injections. He was also fitted for a single quartz contact lens.

Once he was up and around, Marlene followed him constantly. Finally she said, “You’re even better looking with black skin; it makes you more mysterious. And the prosthetic eye looks exactly like your own. It even moves like the natural one.”

Rasmussen still plodded. Long after Lee felt strong enough to get going again, he was still confined to the ship. When his complaints grew loud enough, they let him start on a diet of native foods. The medics and Hatfield hovered around him while he spent a miserable week with dysentery. Then it passed. But it took a while to build up his strength again; all he had to eat now were fish, insects, and pulpy greens.

After more tests, conferences, a two-week trial run out by the Glass Mountains, and then still more exhaustive physical exams, Rasmussen at last agreed to let Lee go.

Grote took him out in the skimmer, skirting the long way around the Glass Mountains, through the surf and out onto the gently billowing sea. They kept far enough out at sea for the beach to be constantly beyond their horizon.

When night fell, Grote nosed the skimmer landward. They came ashore around midnight, with the engines clamped down to near silence, a few kilometers up the beach from the humanoids’ site. Grote, encased in a powersuit, walked with him part way and buried a relay transceiver in the sand, to pick up the signals from the camera and radio imbedded in Lee’s skull.

“Good luck.” His voice was muffled by the helmet.

Lee watched him plod mechanically back into the darkness. He strained to hear the skimmer as it turned and slipped back into the sea, but he could neither see nor hear it.

He was alone on the beach.

Clouds were drifting landward, riding smoothly overhead. The breeze on the beach, though, was blowing warmly out of the desert, spilling over the bluffs and across the beach, out to sea. The sky was bright with the all-night twilight glow, even though the clouds blotted out most of the stars. Along the foot of the cliffs, though, it was deep black. Except for the wind, there wasn’t a sound: not a bird nor a nocturnal cat, not even an insect’s chirrup.

Lee stayed near the water’s edge. He wasn’t cold, even though naked. Still, he could feel himself trembling.

Grote’s out there,
he told himself.
If you need him, he can come rolling up the beach in ten minutes.

But he knew he was alone.

The clouds thickened and began to sprinkle rain, a warm, soft shower. Lee blinked the drops away from his eyes and walked slowly, a hundred paces one direction, then a hundred paces back again.

The rain stopped as the sea horizon started turning bright. The clouds wafted away. The sky lightened, first gray, then almost milky white. Lee looked toward the base of the cliffs. Dark shadows dotted the rugged cliff face. Caves. Some of them were ten feet or more above the sand.

Sirius edged a limb above the horizon, and Lee, squinting, turned away from its brilliance. He looked back at the caves again, feeling the warmth of the hot star’s might on his back.

The first ones out of the cave were two children. They tumbled out of the same cave, off to Lee’s left, giggling and running.

When they saw Lee, they stopped dead. As though someone had turned them off. Lee could feel his heart beating as they stared at him. He stood just as still as they did, perhaps a hundred meters from them. They looked about five and ten years old, he judged.
If their lifespans are the same as ours.

The taller of the two boys took a step toward Lee, then turned and ran back into the cave. The younger boy followed him.

For several minutes nothing happened. Then Lee heard voices echoing from inside the cave. Angry?  Frightened?
They’re not laughing.

Four men appeared at the mouth of the cave. Their hands were empty. They simply stood there and gaped at him, from the shadows of the cave’s mouth.

Now we’ll start learning their customs about strangers,
Lee said to himself.

Very deliberately, he turned away from them and took a few steps up the beach. Then he stopped, turned again, and walked back to his original spot.

Two of the men disappeared inside the cave. The other two stood there. Lee couldn’t tell what the expressions on their faces meant. Suddenly other people appeared at a few of the other cave entrances.
They’re interconnected.

Lee tried a smile and waved. There were women among the onlookers now, and a few children. One of the boys who saw him first—at least, it looked like him—started chattering to an adult. The man silenced him with a brusque gesture.