The Alien Way

  That had been phase one of the scoutwork to be done by the Expedition. Marking it up in his Keysman’s private log, Jase had written against its final entry, Completed to perfection.

  The next stage had been the sending down of the secondary type of collectors. These were almost identical lumps of nickel iron, but somewhat larger, and with cargo-carrying space inside them. After four more weeks spent in this and careful study by the xenobiologists among the Expedition’s members, the xenobiologists had recommended three types of small native, alien life be used as tertiary collectors. And, after consultation with the Captain, Jase had agreed to go ahead using them.

  Against the phase two section of his private log, Jase wrote, Completed to perfection.

  The three types of native life chosen were a small, flying, blood-sucking insect known to the natives as the mosquito; a crawling, six-legged pseudo-insect, one of the arthopoda in the Muffled People’s classification, an arachnid or “spider”; and a small, sharp-nosed, long-tailed gnawing and scavenging animal which evidently lived largely off the discarded foods and what it could steal in the warehouses and pipings of the Muffled People’s cities. It was the duplication of these living creatures that the Expedition was busy on at the moment.

  The duplications the crew were making now were far from ideal imitations-they could hardly be so when constructed under such cramped and hurried conditions as those aboard the ship. But, like the earlier collectors, they could be destroyed before they were investigated or captured by the natives, and so it was not necessary that they stand up to close examination.

  These duplications were already beginning to be sent down into the cities of Earth. Jase stopped by the monitoring screen of one of the crewmen to examine a filmed report sent back by a collector already in one of the native hospitals. Jase stared at the interior of a room with two sleeping platforms, each set up on four high legs, in fascination.

  The natives were most amazing, most incomprehensible. They certainly possessed locks and keys. But those among them most resembling Keysmen operated only at night and usually in areas where other natives were absent. It was almost as if the Muffled People regarded property rather than life as something to be guarded. It suggested that the concept of Honor here on this planet was markedly different from that of the worlds of men. The women did not carry their children in pouches in normal fashion—but the young were born very tiny and crippled, and a good section of the mother’s lifetime seemed devoted to nursing them into health and size to face their responsibilities as individuals.

  It was all a little disgusting. But, Jase reminded himself, to the Muffled People it was perfectly normal. The Expedition members had all been briefed before leaving Homeworld, and the xenobiologists there had been emphatic about cautioning them not to adopt a provincial attitude toward the native life. Such things confused and biased the reporting and observing faculties.

  “—You can expect them to be different,” in sum, was how the xenobiologists had advised the Expedition, pointing out that the Ruml had encountered alien creatures before this on the six earlier conquered worlds they had now colonized.

  Of course, this was only right. Still, thought Jase, it was one thing to view an alien animal without emotional reaction. Another to view an alien who was an intelligent being like yourself. You tended to expect him-or it-to measure up to proper and intellectual standards of cleanliness, morals, ethics, and so on.

  It was fortunate, he went on thinking as he turned away from the screen, that the Ruml had not encountered this planet of the Muffled People first before landing on the other planets with alien, semi-intelligent creatures on them. The first, unsophisticated reaction of a race of men unused to the sight of alien Me would have stimulated them to exterminate the Muffled People out of sheer revulsion. And that would have been other than honorable action.

  Looking ahead now to the time when he would be the supreme authority on the planet below, after its conquest, Jase made a strong mental note to the effect that he would allow no killing of the natives except to reduce their numbers to regular conservation levels. It was criminal, if not outright dishonorable, the way whole, remarkable, alien species had been wiped out on the first few planets colonized by the Ruml.

  In fact—Jase’s thoughts ranged ahead—the matter might go merely beyond the conservation of the species. The Muffled People were truly intelligent, with an amazing technology. Moreover, they were—judging by their indifference to proper privacy and individual security—evidently a generally gentle, friendly species. The collectors had sent back out of there millions of filmed scenes and actions, but almost no instances of fighting at all. And the only possible approach to a duel had been a glimpse, by one collector, of two of the natives fighting without weapons. For surely handmufflings could not be considered weapons—in fact, undoubtedly just the opposite. They were probably designed to keep the duelists from, hurting each other. And judging by the number of spectators, this had been an unusual occurrence.

  It might even be possible that the natives-provided they could be trained to do so and did not smell too badly, or anything like that-could be eventually used as assistants and workers in the Ruml culture. Perhaps—

  “Sir!” The voice of the Captain interrupted Jase's thoughts.

  “Yes, Captain?” he said, turning about.

  “I wanted to speak to you, Keysman.” The Captain drew him aside where none of the others could hear, into the corridor without. “It’s amazing, and I can hardly bring myself to believe it, Keysman. But outside of what seemed to be a few ornamental surface and atmosphere devices, the collectors haven’t turned up any weapons at all. Oh, they have hand weapons, which they used for hunting the local game—*

  “It is amazing,” said Jase. “But perhaps we shouldn’t be too upset by it. We knew they were bound to be different.”

  “But it’s unbelievable. An intelligent race. A technology like this—“

  “Oh, I don’t doubt you’ll turn up their war-making potential eventually,” said Jase. “Have you tried underground?”

  “Not intensively, sir.”

  “Try it intensively. Divert—say—fifteen per cent of the imitation live collectors to search for underground installations. As I say, there’s no doubt we’ll find war potential eventually. They could hardly exist without some concept of Honor.”

  “Yes sir,” said the Captain, inclining his head. “I'll go see about diverting those collectors right now.”

  Jase watched him go. It was true, in spite of what he had said. The lack of fighting instinct apparent in the aliens of the world below him gave him a creepy, uncanny feeling.

  It was not natural. How could the Muffled People have emerged as dominant over the other native species of their world without an honorable instinct to begin with? And how could they have survived after that to build this civilization of theirs without building a system of Honor upon that instinct?

  Perhaps, thought Jase, pacing in the direction of his own quarters, there was something here that neither the xenobiologists back on Homeworld nor he himself had suspected. Best, undoubtedly, if he kept the sudden suspicion that had flashed into his mind just now—the suspicion of a completely honorless society, unimaginable as that was—entirely to himself.

  If that was the case with the Muffled People-that they were a species without Honor, like the beasts that were born and lived out their lives and died unpurposefully—then there could be no conserving their species. In that case they would be worse than the beasts—for the beasts knew no better. But a people who had intelligence and yet had no Honor would be an abomination. In Honor the Ruml themselves could not endure that such should exist. It would be a duty, all other considerations aside, to cleanse the universe of such.

  The skin of Jase’s face stiffened.

  This was something he had better quietly look into on his own at the first opportunity.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In one corner of the library stacks, in one of a dusty pile
of cardboard-bound old magazines, Jase found at last what he had been looking for all this time. His legs gave way with relief and exhaustion, and he sank down crosslegged on the dusty floor of the stacks.

  He had been living with the shelves of publications containing abstracts of scientific articles in the zoological and biological fields. Just a few days before he had given up on these and begun searching through the periodical indexes, such as the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, for the past fifty years. What Kator had thought less than a week before about the possibility that the human ‘race did not possess the concept of Honor, had finally sparked in Jase’s mind. It illuminated for the first time the answer toward which he had been groping ever since he had felt the first shock of being in contact with Kator’s alien mind.

  It was a half-forgotten memory of something he had read years ago. An article by someone authoritative in the zoological or biological fields. What the name of its author was, he could not remember. He could not even remember the shape and message of the article itself—but the intricate, innate computer of his mind had made the connection between the Ruml and this piece of writing from a time long before contact with anything like the Ruml had ever been imagined by man.

  The thinking process of his brain insisted that in the article lay the key to the mutual understanding between human and Ruml that he was after. It was like a voice continually nagging at him. Like most men who have lived long years with books, and the process of research, he trusted such a voice. If he felt it, it was there, just as the memory of a tune that will not return to the tongue to be sung still clings to and haunts the back of the mind, which knows that the tune is there—if only it could be pinned down.

  The day before yesterday, on sudden impulse, he had given up the abstracts of past published scientific articles and turned to the periodical indexes. For two days he had drawn blanks. Then, just an hour or so since, a sudden hunch had sent him to checking titles rather than subject indexes. He had been thinking of what he sought as the key to his solution, and the word key had stuck in the forefront of his brain. For a long time he had paid no attention to it. He had thought that Kator’s concern with Keys and the position of Keysman was making the word intrude on his search.

  Then, yielding a little before the pounding of his search, the mists of his memory seemed to thin for a moment, and he was ready to swear the article he had been after had the word key either as part or whole of its title.

  He turned to title, searching through the back indexes, hunting through the one he had in his hand at the moment, which was dated away back in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Fuzzily, he ran his fingers down a list of titles beginning with the letter K.

  A title jumped at him.

  He turned, scrambled through the stacks to this area of storage of ancient magazines—and found the issue he sought. The minute he saw the cover the mists of his memory rolled back and he remembered where he had read the magazine. It had been in college, before he went that summer to the Rockies to observe the spring gatherings of the black bear. He opened the cover and turned to the page indicated for the article he sought. It was there before him.

  “A Key to Ferocity in Bears,” by Peter Krott. And it was in Natural History Magazine, the January, 1962, issue. Now that it was before him, he remembered clearly and without any difficulty that the January 15th issue of Newsweek magazine for that year had also dealt with the Krott notion.

  Hands shaking a little under the glaring, reflectored, overhead bulb, Jase skimmed through the article. It all came back to him as if he had read it only a day or so before. Krott, with his wife and two children, had spent a couple of years in the Italian Alps. While they were there he had raised two young bears and observed them. What he had observed was that the young bears were gentle, even shy or timid in their play with his own children, but that they did not play a good deal simply because they were too busy searching for food—an activity that took up most of their time, since the Krotts left them to forage for themselves.

  The only interruption to this perfectly amicable partnership was one day when Mrs. Krott was carrying some test tubes of alcohol in the pocket of a leather jacket. One of the bears attacked her, clawed the jacket off, tore open the pocket, pulled the corks from the test tubes, and swallowed the alcohol in them.

  This first set Peter Krott, a Finnish zoologist of repute, to thinking. And his conclusions, after a good deal more observation of the same two bears and relating this to past accounts of people who had associated with bears under wilderness conditions without trouble, was given toward the end of the article. Jase flipped over to it.

  …To summarize: he read, a herbivore can be fed because its body is not in any way adapted to the movements necessary for seizing prey. Many carnivores, in turn, acquire the ability to be fed as a result of parental attention… . Jase paused, checking through his memory for something else that intruded. What was the book-oh, yes. Born Free, about a lion named Elsa, raised by a woman and her husband under similar conditions in the African bush… . What was the authoress’ name? Jase’s foggy mind retreated from the effort of producing it. Anyway, it only corroborated what was here-he turned back to Krott’s summary.

  …The bear lacks this ability and evidently cannot acquire it. That, I believe, is the deciding factor in the danger of bears living in contact with men. The way to the bear’s heart is not through its stomach; that is what is hard for us to understand, since we ourselves are capable of being fed as are others among the true predators…

  Clutching the magazine, Jase clambered groggily to his feet and set off through the stacks down to the door that entered one side of Mele’s small office between the stacks and the library room. He and Mele had not been close since the day that Swanson, Goth, and the rest had taken over the project, but now success, compounded by his state of exhaustion, burned that fact from his mind and sent him to her. He blundered down the stairs and burst in through the small door.

  She was seated at her desk, transcribing on her typewriter from a tape recording. The sound of her fingers on the keys broke off as she stopped, staring up at his sudden appearance. In the little silence, he could hear from beyond the farther door the voices of Swanson and the rest in conversation that could not be resolved into words through the door’s thickness.

  “Mele!” he shouted. “I’ve found it.”

  He discovered his knees suddenly ready to give way beneath him. There was no place in the little office to sit down. He pulled the door to the stacks closed behind him, recklessly seized the wastebasket in the corner behind Mele, dumped its contents on the floor, and turned it upside down. He sat on that, dropping the opened magazine on the typewriter before her.

  “Look—,” he said, eagerly.

  “Jase…” She put her hand up to move the magazine away. “I’ve got a lot to do.”

  “Listen!” he said fiercely, catching her hand. “You’ve got to listen!”

  She looked at him then, and her face changed. She shook her head a little, and her eyes grew dark with unhappiness.

  “You’re covered with dust,” she said. “And you’re ready to drop. Jase, why don’t you go and lie down? Then later, after you’ve had some rest, we can talk about whatever it is…”

  “Mele!” he leaned forward toward her, tapping the surface of the open page before her with a grimy forefinger, “This is it! Can’t you understand? Now we can do something!”

  She stared at him, her eyes very wide and brown.

  “About what?” she asked.

  “About the Ruml—the Ruml and us!” He stared at her. “What I’ve been driving at from the beginning. A bridge between their basic character and ours. It’s here—in this article.”

  “This article?” She stared at it. “But that was written…” She turned back the cover to look at the date of issue of the magazine. “Years ago.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Jase. He grinned a little lightheadedly with his fatigue and having a chance to explain to her, f
inally. “It’s a bit of honest basic research—the kind those people in there—” He nodded at the library room door, from beyond which the voices muttered. “Never saw the use for. Who cares what the reason is for ferocity in bears?”’ he mimicked savagely. “Can’t you hear them saying it? 'Who wants to go to the moon?' What difference does it make whether there’s anything smaller than the atom—the atom’s so small now we can’t see it anyway?’ You’ve heard them talk like that all their lives. So’ve I. Well, for once a piece of basic research is going to save their lives—all their lives!”

  “Jase…” she said, pityingly.

  “No, listen,” he said. “Let me tell you what Krott found out. There’s always been a problem with bears—wild ones—sometimes attacking humans, at other times just ignoring them. Take Yellowstone Park. Every year tourists feeding the bears would get clawed, and other tourists would get away with it Well, Krott found an explanation.”

  “Jase…”

  “No, listen.” He went on in a rush. “You see, just a matter of a handful of years before this article, they were beginning to get interested in what they called feeding patterns. A barracuda, for example, will strike at a flashing, shiny object, whether he’s hungry or not. A shark in a feeding frenzy will slash at anything and try to feed—even on his own entrails if he’s been slashed by the blind frenzy of the other sharks around him. He’ll try to feed even when he’s dying.”

  Jase paused to take a breath. The words had been tumbling out of him.