Collision Course

SIX

It became purely mechanical after a while, and he stopped feeling sorry for himself and concentrated all his physical and mental energy on dragging one leg after another after another. And the yards lengthened into miles, and the distance between the spaceship and the alien encampment shrank. Nothing like a ten-mile hike in seventy- or eighty-degree heat to teach a transmat person what the concept of distance means, Bernard thought. He was finding out. Distance meant sweat pouring down your face and trickling into your eyes; distance meant the back of your boot gradually rubbing one of your heels raw; distance meant that bunchy, cramped feeling in the fleshy part of your leg, the bitter aching of your foot’s small bones, the steady pain in the forepart of your thigh. And this was only a ten-mile hike.

“I wonder how good a hiker the Technarch is?” Dominici asked irreverently.

“A damned good one, more likely than not,” Bernard muttered. “That’s why he’s a Technarch. He’s got to be able to outdo everyone in everything, whether it’s hiking or quantum mechanics.”

“Still, I’d like to see him out here sweating under this blasted sun, with…” The biophysicist paused. “They’re stopping, up ahead. Maybe we’ve arrived.”

“I hope so. We’ve been marching close to three hours.”

Up ahead, the procession had indeed come to a halt. Laurance and his men had stopped at the summit of a gently rising hill. Peterszoon was pointing into the valley, and Laurance was nodding.

As Bernard caught up to them, he saw what they were pointing at in the valley. It was the alien settlement.

The colony had been built on the west bank of a fast-flowing river about a hundred yards wide. It nestled in a broad green valley that was bordered on one side by the group of hills in which the Earthmen now stood, and on the other by a wide, gently upcurving thrust that rose into snub-nosed mountains several miles away.

In the colony, furious activity seemed to be the order of business. The aliens scurried like energetic insects.

They had built six rows of domed huts, radiating outward from a larger central building. Work was proceeding—no, boiling ahead—on other huts that would extend the radii of the colony’s spokes. In the distance, gouts of dirt sprang high as the aliens, using what seemed to be a hand-gripped excavating device of force-field nature, dug out the foundations for yet more of the six-sided, stiff little huts. Others were working on a well on the landward side of the colony, while still others clustered around curious machinery, unpacking crates and dragging bulky devices (generators? dynamos?) across the clearing.

Some thousand yards to the north of the main scene of activity stood a massive blue spaceship—adhering in the main to the cylindrical form, but strangely fluted and scalloped in superficial design to provide an unmistakably alien effect. The spaceship stood open, and aliens streamed to and fro, bearing material out of the big ship.

After he had taken in the first surprising sight of the furiously energetic colonizers, Bernard turned his attention to the aliens themselves, not without a chill. At this distance, better than five hundred yards, it was hard to see the creatures in great detail. But they bore themselves upright, like human beings, and only their skin coloration and the odd free-swinging motion of their double-elbowed arms bore witness to their unearthliness.

He could see that they came in two sorts: the green ones, which were overwhelmingly in the majority, and the blue-skinned ones. These seemed to be overseers; color-supremacy, he wondered? It would be interesting sociologically to run into a species that still practiced color-dominance. Perhaps these aliens would be surprised or revolted to learn of the presence of two black men and a yellow one on the Archonate that ruled Terra, he thought.

Be that as it may, the blue aliens were definitely in charge, shouting orders that could just barely be heard on the hillside. And the green ones obeyed. The colony was being assembled in almost obscene haste.

“We’re going to march down the hillside and right into that colony,” Laurance said quietly. “Dr. Bernard, you’re nominally in charge of the negotiations, and I won’t question that—but remember that I’m responsible for the safety of all of us, and my instructions will have to be final, no questions asked.”

It seemed to Bernard that Laurance was arrogating altogether too much responsibility to himself in this expedition. The Technarch had never openly stated that Laurance was to be absolute boss. But the sociologist was not minded to raise questions of leadership at this point; Laurance seemed to know what was best, and Bernard was content to leave matters at that. He moistened his lips and looked down into the bustling valley.

“The important thing to remember is not to show any sign of fear. Dr. Bernard, you’ll march in front with me. Dominici, Nakamura, Peterszoon, follow right behind us. Then Stone, Havig, Clive, Hernandez. It’ll be a kind of blunt-tipped triangle. Stay in formation, walk slowly and calmly, and whatever you do don’t show any sign of tension or fear.” Laurance glanced quickly around the group, as if checking on their resources of courage. “If they look menacing, just smile at them. Don’t break and bolt unless there’s an out-and-out attack on us. Stay calm, level-headed, and remember that you’re Earthmen, the first earthmen ever to walk up to an alien being and say ‘hello.’ Let’s do it the right way. Dr. Bernard, up front with me, please.”

Bernard joined Laurance and they began the descent of the hill, with the others following in assigned order. As he walked, Bernard tried to relax. Shoulders back, legs loose. Get that stiffness out of your neck, Bernard! Inner tension shows up on the outside. Look at your ease!

But it was easier said than done. He was bone-weary from the long hike, and the sodium-chloride tablet he had swallowed not long ago was taking its time in replenishing the salt he had sweated out during the morning. There was the physical tension of fatigue; and there was the far greater mental tension of knowing that he was walking down a hillside into a settlement built by intelligent beings who were not in the slightest “human.”

For a long moment it seemed as though the aliens would never notice the nine Earthmen filing toward them. The non-terrestrials were so busy with their construction tasks that they did not look up. Laurance and Bernard advanced at a steady pace, saying nothing, and they had covered perhaps a hundred paces before any of the aliens reacted to their arrival.

The first reaction came when a worker stripping felled logs happened to glance up and see the Earthmen. The alien seemed to freeze, peering uncomprehendingly at the advancing group. Then he nudged his fellow-worker in an amusingly human gesture.

“They see us now,” Bernard whispered.

“I know,” Laurance answered. “Let’s just keep on going toward them.”

Consternation appeared to be spreading among the green-skinned workers. They had virtually halted all construction now to stare at the newcomers. Closer, Bernard could make out their features; their eyes were immense goggling things, which gave them a look of astonishment which perhaps they did not feel inwardly.

The attention of one of the blue-skinned overseers had been attracted. He came over to see why work had stopped; then, spying the Earthmen, he recoiled visibly, double-elbowed arms flapping at his sides in what was probably a genuine reaction of surprise.

He called across the construction area to another blueskin, who came on a jogtrot after hearing the hoarse cry. With cautious tread the two aliens moved toward the Earthmen, taking each step with care and obviously remaining poised for a quick retreat.

“They’re just as scared of us as we are of them,” Bernard heard Dominici mutter behind him. “We must look like nightmare horrors coming down out of the hills.”

Only a hundred feet separated the two aliens from Bernard and Laurance. The remaining nonterrestrials had ceased work entirely; dropping their tools, they were bunching together behind the two blueskins, staring with what seemed to be apprehension at the Earthmen.

The sun was merciless; Bernard’s shirt plastered itself to his skin. He murmured to Laurance, “We ought to show some gesture of friendliness. Otherwise they may get scared and gun us down just to be on the safe side.”

“All right,” Laurance whispered. In a louder voice he said, without turning his head, “Attention, everyone: slowly bring your hands up and hold them forward, palms outward. Slowly! That might convince ’em that we’re coming with peaceful intentions.”

Heart pounding, Bernard slowly lifted his arms and turned his palms forward. Only fifty feet separated him from the aliens, now. They had stopped moving. He and Laurance still led the slow, deliberate advance across the clearing under the blazing sun.

He studied the two blueskins. They seemed to be about the average height of a man, possibly a little taller—as much as six feet two or three. They wore only a loose, coarsely woven, baggy yellow garment round their waists. Their dark blue skins were shiny with sweat, which argued that the aliens were metabolically pretty much like Earthmen, and their huge, saucer-like eyes flicked back and forth from one Terran face to the next, demonstrating not only curiosity but a probable stereoscopic vision-pattern.

The aliens had no noses as such, merely nostril-slits covered with filter-flaps. Their mouths were lipless; their faces in general had little fat, and it seemed as if their skin were stretched drum-tight over their bones. When they spoke to each other, Bernard caught glimpses of red teeth and a tongue so purple it was practically black. So they differed from Earthmen in pigmentation and in most of the minor details—but the overall design was roughly the same, as if only one pattern could serve for intelligent life. Again a lack of choice, Bernard thought with a philosophical detachment that surprised him as his trembling legs continued to move him forward. The universe gives us the impression of free will, but in the really big things there’s only one possible way that things can be.

The aliens’ arms fascinated him. The double elbows seemed to be universal joints that swiveled in any direction, making the aliens capable of doing fantastic and improbable things with their arms. Chalk one up for alien engineering, Bernard thought. That arm combines all the advantages of a boneless tentacle and a rigid limb.

The greenskins seemed to be very much like their blue overseers, except that they were shorter and thicker of body. It seemed fairly obvious that the greens were designed for working, the blues for directing.

A third blue appeared, crossing diagonally from the side of the settlement to join his two colleagues. The three aliens waited stonily, their strange faces appearing to register determination in the teeth of this unforeseen invasion.

When they were ten feet from the aliens, Laurance halted.

“Go ahead,” he muttered to Bernard. “Communicate with them. Tell them we want to be friends.”

The sociologist took a deep breath. He was ironically conscious that nearly a thousand years of folklore spiraled down to reach the level of reality here and now: this was the moment, first in all recorded history, when Earthman walked up to non-Earthman and offered greeting.

He felt limp. His mind spun. What to say? We are friends. Take us to your leader. Greetings, men of another world!

There was no help for it, he thought. The old cliches had become cliches precisely because they were so damnably valid; what else were you supposed to say when making first contact with nonterrestrials? But Bernard felt self-conscious all the same, at this moment when cliche became history.

He touched his breast and pointed to the sky.

“We are Earthmen,” he said, enunciating each syllable with painstaking crispness. “We come from the sky. We wish to be friends.”

The words, of course, would mean nothing to the aliens, would be no more than meaningless noises. But that was no excuse for not saying the right words, all the same.

He pointed to himself once more, and to the sky. Then, tapping his chest, he said, “I.” He pointed to the aliens, slowly, not wanting to alarm them. “You. I—you. I—you— friends.”

He smiled, wondering as he did so if perhaps the display of bared teeth might be a symbol of fierce challenge to these people. This was far more delicate than the meeting of two hitherto-separate cultures on ancient Earth. At least the same sort of blood flowed in English sea captains and Polynesian chieftain; there was the chance of a common biological ground. Not here. No previously accepted value was worth anything here.

Bernard waited, and behind him eight other earthmen waited, sharing his tension. He stared levelly into the bulging eyes of the foremost blueskin. The aliens had a faintly musty smell; not unpleasant, but intense. Bernard wondered how Earthmen smelled to them.

Cautiously he extended his hand. “Friend,” he said.

There was a long silence. Then, hesitantly, the nearest blueskin lifted his hand, swiveling it upward in that startlingly fluid motion. The alien stared at his hand as if it were not part of him. Bernard glanced quickly at the hand too: it had seven or eight fingers, with a sharply curved thumb. Each finger sprouted an inch-long blue nail.

The alien reached out, and for a fraction of an instant the calloused blue palm touched Bernard’s. Then, quickly, the hand dropped away.

The alien made a sound. It might have been a guttural grunt of defiance—but to Bernard it sounded something like “Vvvrennddt!” and he took the sound at face value. Smiling, he nodded at the alien and repeated: “Friend. I—you. You— I. Friend.”

The repetition came, and this time it was unmistakable. ” Vvvrennddt!” The alien seized Bernard’s outstretched hand and gripped it tightly. Bernard grinned in triumph and satisfaction.

For better or for worse, the first contact had been made.