Gordon Dickson: The Human Edge

True life showed differences—Hank, barrel-chested in a pair of khaki shorts, seated at the somewhat rubbed-down controls of the Andnowyoudont. Utilitarianly untidy, the little cabin surrounded him, from the anchored down and unmade bunk to the former arms rack, with well-oiled spade, ax, posthole digger, wire-clippers, et cetera, hanging from the hooks. (In the ammunition locker were five sticks of non-issue dynamite. Hank, when talking shop on his infrequent trips back home, was capable of waxing lyrical over dynamite. “A tool,” he would call it—“a weapon. It’ll dig for you, fight for you, run a bluff for you. The only thing it won’t do for you is cook the meals and make the bunk.”)

A battered guitar leaned in one corner.

On the ninth time around, Hank had complete surface maps of the world below. He ran them back through the ship’s library and punched for that spot on one of the world’s three continents where landing conditions were optimum. Then he turned everything over to the automatic pilot and took a little nap.

When instinct woke him up, Andnowyoudont was just balancing herself in for a landing in a little meadow surrounded by trees and pleasant-looking enough to be parklike. What hint of warning it was that reached him in the midst of his slumber he was never to know; but one moment he was asleep—and the next he was halfway to the control panel.

Then concussion slammed the ship like a giant’s hand. He tripped, caught one glimpse of the near wall of the cabin tilting at him, and consciousness dissolved in one of the prettiest displays of shooting stars he had seen in some time.

He woke again—this time to a throbbing headache and a lump on his forehead. He sat up groggily, hoisted himself the rest of the way to his feet and stumped over to the medicine chest, absently noting that the ship was, at least, still upright. The outside screen was on, showing a view of the meadow. Five years before he would have looked out of it immediately. Now he was more interested in aspirin.

When he had the aspirin inside him and had checked to make sure the bump on his head was not bleeding and the guitar had not been damaged he turned at last to the screen, sat down in the pilot chair and swept the outside scanner about the meadow. The meadow turned before him, stopped, and the screen steadied on a tall, gray shape.

At the far end of the meadow was another ship. It was half again as big as the Andnowyoudont, it resembled no ship of human manufacture that Hank had ever seen; and it had a sort of metal bubble or turret where its nose should be. From this turret projected a pair of short, blunt wide-mouthed tubes bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to the muzzles of guns. They were pointed directly at the Andnowyoudont.

Hank whistled the first three notes of “There’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town, Tonight”—and broke off rather abruptly. He sat staring out the screen at the alien spaceship.

“Now,” he said, after a while to the room around him, “against this—the odds against this happening, both of us here at the same time, in the same place, must be something like ten billion to one.”

Which was possibly true. But which also, the saying of it didn’t help a bit.

Hank got up rather heavily, went over to the coffee maker, and drew himself a cup of coffee. He sat down in his chair before the controls and examined a bank of tell-tale gauges. Not too much to his surprise, these mechanical watchdogs informed him that the Andnowyoudont was being sniffed at by various kinds of radiation. He was careful not to touch anything just yet. The thought of the five sticks of dynamite popped into his head and popped out again. The human race’s expansion to the stars had brought them before this into contact with some life forms which might reasonably be called intelligent—but no one before that Hank knew of, in his line of work or out of it, had actually run across what you might call a comparable, space-going intelligent race.

“Except now Mrs. Shallo’s little boy,” said Hank to himself. “Naturally. Of course.”

No, it was clearly not a dynamite-solution type problem. The stranger yonder was obviously armed and touchy. The Andnowyoudont packed five sticks of dynamite, a lot of useful, peaceful sorts of tools, and Hank. Hank leaned back in his chair, sipped on his coffee and turned the situation over to the one device on the ship that had a tinker’s chance of handling it—some fifty ounces of gray matter just abaft his eyebrows and between his ears.

He was working this device rather hard, when the hull of the Andnowyoudont began to vibrate at short intervals. The vibration resulted in a series of short hums or buzzes. Hank plugged in to the ship’s library and asked it what it thought of this new development.

“The alien ship appears to be trying to communicate with you,” the library informed him.

“Well, see if you can make any sense out of its code,” Hanks directed. “But don’t answer—not yet, anyway.”

He went back to his thinking.

One of the less glamorous aspects of Hank’s profession—and one that had been hardly mentioned in the publicity release containing the picture he had modeled for, aforesaid—was a heavy schedule for classes, lectures, and briefing sections he was obligated to attend every time he returned to Headquarters, back on Earth. The purpose of these home chores was to keep him, and others like him, abreast of the latest developments and discoveries that might prove useful to him.

It was unfortunate that this would have meant informing him about practically everything that had happened since his last visit, if the intent had been followed literally. Ideally, a world scout should know everything from aardvark psychology to the Zyrian language. Practically, since such overall coverage was impossible, an effort was made to hit hard only the obviously relevant new information and merely survey other areas of new knowledge.

All new information, of course, was incorporated into the memory crystals of the library; but the trick from Hank’s point of view was to remember what to ask for and how to ask for it. Covered in one of the surveys when he had been back last trip had been a rather controversial theory by somebody or other to the effect that an alien space-going race interested in the same sort of planets as humans were, would not only look a lot like, but act a lot like, humans. Hank closed his eyes.

“Bandits,” he recited to himself. “Bayberry, barberry, burberry, buckle—May Sixteenth, Sinuses, shamuses, cyclical, sops—milk-and-bread… Library, Walter M. Breadon’s ‘Speculations on Alien Responses.’”

There was an almost perceptible delay, and then a screen in front of Hank lit up with a pictured text.

“…Let us amuse ourselves now, (commenced the pictured text) with a few speculations about the personality and nature of a space-going alien such as one of you might encounter…”

Hank snorted and settled down to read.

Twenty minutes later he had confirmed his remembrance of the fact that Breadon thought that an alien, such as must be in the ship opposite Hank right now, would react necessarily very similarly to a human. Because, Breadon’s theory ran, of necessarily parallel environments and past stages of development.

At this moment, the call bell on Hank’s deep-space receiver rang loudly.

“What’s up?” he asked the library, keying it in.

“The alien ship has evidently concluded that it can speak to you over normal communication equipment. It is calling the Andnowyoudont. ”

“Fine,” said Hank. “I wonder what the name of Breadon’s opposite number is among the aliens.”