Hal Clement: Natives of Space

He settled himself more solidly as the ground slid smoothly away from him. There was no take-off run; the vessel rose straight for two thousand feet, turned the streamlined bow southward, and followed its nose. Boss relaxed at his post as soon as they were on course, and merely kept his eyes on a row of dials supposed to indicate the behavior of the generators. An engineer was watching a duplicate set below, and it made little difference whether or not Boss stuck to his job — though he would not have admitted that fact to Kirk had he been able to speak to him.

The human being and the herald watched and commented upon the terrain below, as it drifted sternward. Talker drew attention to the deserted appearance of the forest, and compared it to the similar vast, uninhabited regions of his own planet. This, as intended, drew from Kirk a description of the more densely populated countries, of the different peoples who inhabited them, and the various relationships existing between them. On this last point he was a fair lecturer, for he had spent a good deal of time on sociology. The herald kept him talking, asking questions whenever the man seemed to be running down, and in general doing everything which was likely to result in the production of any information that might be of use.

Their pace was only moderately rapid. The sound of the ship’s passage through the air could not have been heard on the ground, and was inaudible through the double hulls; whatever power drove and supported them was efficient enough to be soundless, as well.

They came in sight of the sea and a small settlement at almost the same instant. The town was not large, but possessed several docks and a fair-sized fleet of fishing boats. Kirk recognized it — it was the town where he had landed upon his arrival at the beginning of the summer, and where he had recently turned in his report of the season’s progress. It was now late afternoon, and a glance at his watch and a moment’s calculation informed Kirk that the ship could not have been traveling more than thirty miles an hour, for they had left the base of his operations only slightly after noon. Five hours in the low control chamber had left the man rather cramped; he flung a query at Talker, and was informed that the main corridor was probably the only room on the ship spacious enough to permit him to stretch, even lying down. Kirk’s memory of the gun rooms suggested that the herald was right, so he sent his pack sliding down the ramp, followed it, detached a blanket and stretched out on the corridor floor, to the no small astonishment of a pair of soldiers who emerged from their rooms at that moment. He had brought no food, but did not feel particularly hungry. After a few minutes, he propped himself up with the pack as a pillow, and stared off down the hallway. The door at the far end was now open, and faint sounds came from below. Kirk considered investigating, but thought better of it and relaxed on his blanket.

A very faint trembling of the floor roused him a few minutes later. He stood up — too suddenly, for his head impinged sharply on the metal ceiling — and turned toward the control-room ramp once more. Something appeared to be happening. He started up the incline, but did not reach the top, for as his head attained the level of the floor above he saw Talker starting down, and retreated before him.

Boss followed the herald into the main corridor, and Kirk walked behind the pair to the air lock.

Evidently the ship had landed. The man brushed Talker’s wing tip with a finger to get his attention, and asked, “What is the matter? Why have you come down so soon? I know of none around here who could give you help.”

“Your words do not agree with your thoughts of a few moments ago,” returned Talker, who still carried the paper and pencil. “I hoped, when I asked you aboard after your avowal of enmity toward us, that your mind would betray some knowledge of value. It has done that; you are not accustomed to having your thoughts read, and have surprisingly little control over them. Had I not been delayed through having to learn your system of mental symbology, we would have had long ago the information we needed, without the necessity of asking your consent. When the settlement near which we are now landed came into view, your mind gave out word patterns of all sorts — the name of the place, which means nothing to us, the fact that the individual who directs your work resides therein, and — the fact that there is stored somewhere in that town a supply of a chemical to be used for poisoning insects. Your master is an expert on such matters; he must be, to hold the position. It is possible that the chemical will prove to be what we require; if not, I have learned to read human minds from you, and I can pry the knowledge from the one who directs you.”

“Then you asked me aboard solely in the hope of tricking me?” asked Kirk. “There was no friendship, as I had believed? No sincere attempt to understand my point of view, as you claimed?”

“It would indeed be interesting to understand your peculiar ways of thought,” replied the herald,

“but I have spent all too much time in satisfying idle curiosity; and I see no practical value to be derived from the understanding you mentioned. You are like the others on this ship — easily swayed by stereotyped patterns of thought; I can see no other possible reason for your refusal to aid us. I bear you no enmity, since I have almost achieved my goal in spite of you; but it would be truly idiotic to expect me to feel friendly toward you. None the less, it would be interesting to know — “ the strangely shaped hand abruptly ceased writing, and its owner turned toward the air lock, where Boss was waiting impatiently.

That last, unfinished sentence did much to check the cold anger that was starting to rise in Kirk.

In silence, he watched the air-lock doors swing open. Through a screen of tangled deadwood, a few ‘houses were visible; but no people appeared to be interested in the ship. How Boss had been able to bring the vessel down unseen so near the town will forever remain unknown.

The two aliens flew over the brush, choosing a moment when no human beings were in sight, and concealed themselves behind bushes fairly close to the nearest houses. Kirk, sitting on the sill of the outer door, could imagine the herald’s sensitive antennae picking up the thought waves of one after another of the unsuspecting townspeople. He would have trouble with some of them, thought Kirk with a grin, as he recalled the three-quarters Indian population of the place and the illiteracy of a large percentage of this group, but how would it be possible to prevent the alien’s looting the minds of Faxon, the poison specialist, or old MacArthur, the storekeeper? Warning them would be easy enough, but useless; the more they tried not to think of what was wanted, the more certain most of them were to do so. If they tried to attack and drive away the aliens, the latter could simply retreat into the ship and study the attackers at will. It looked as though Talker would win after all; or did it?

A thought struck the man, hazy and ill-defined at first. It had something to do with Indians and illiterates; something he couldn’t quite place, dimly remembered from his psychology study — and then he had it. A grin spread over his face; he leaned back against his pack, and watched the herald as men, women, and children, both white and red, passed within a hundred yards of his hiding place. Once again Kirk pictured the mind-reading “danger”; but it was markedly different from the former picture. He tried to control his thoughts, to make the joke last as long as possible — he wasn’t sure that the herald could read his mind at this range, but why take chances? He tried to think about the subject in French, since he had to think about it; the results were not exactly what he had intended, but the mental pictures were undoubtedly tangled enough to baffle any mind reader. And then the mothmen were winging their way back to the ship.