Robert Sheckley - The Eryx

Gomez shrugged. “Don’t be too sure. Explorers have been disappointed before.”

“I got a feeling about this one,” I told him.

The steps led down a long ways, and into a big under-ground chamber. It was a spooky place: low, domed ceiling, protruding rocks casting weird shadows. There were some metal objects lying around on the ground. I picked up a couple of them and showed them to Gomez. He shook his head. “That stuff doesn’t look alien enough.”

That’s a problem in this line of work. People have pretty firm ideas about what they think alien ought to look like. Something alien ought to look like something you couldn’t find on Earth. Something that nobody ever thought of mak-ing. Something that gave off an air of mystery. And that’s asking a lot of a pot or a chair. Just about everything you found on an alien planet was alien only by definition. But the few pots and cups that had been found could just as easily have been made on Earth. Not even a letter stating where and when the object had been found would give them any real value. The stuff people paid cash money for had to look alien, not just be alien. It had to fit people’s idea of alien. It presented a challenge.

There was another chamber after the first one. We went into it, our floodlights sweeping the place with white light. And it was there we saw it. The object that came to be called the Eryx.

Now listen, Julie, don’t carry this beautiful but dumb act too far. Everyone on Earth has heard of the Eryx. You’ve got to have heard of it. Maybe in your circle they called it the alien gizmo. Does that ring a bell?

It rested on a piece of shiny cloth with marks on it. It was sitting on a low stone pillar with fluted sides. The object seemed to be shiny metal, though no one has ever discovered what it’s made of. It was about the size of a child’s head. It was carved or cast or worked into shapes I’d never seen before, nor had Gomez. The shapes looked random and chaotic at first, but when you sat down and studied them, you could see there was a logic at work there.

The thing glowed. It glistened. Its shapes and angles seemed to be curved. But it was difficult to say whether they were convex curves or concave ones. Sometimes it looked like one thing, sometimes another. Nor were all the planes identical. Optical effect, a triumph of the eye. Staring at it was like staring into a cubistic candle whose surfaces and facets were unfamiliar but fascinating, which held the eye, drawing it ever deeper.

“Man, we’ve got it,” Gomez said. “The big one. This has to be the art find of the century. And the hell of it is, I can’t tell if it was manufactured or grown, or if it’s a natural form.”

We didn’t speak for a long time, Gomez and me. But we were thinking the same thoughts. Or at least I think we were. I was thinking, this is it, the big one, the pot at the end of the rainbow. This is the mother of all alien objects. It doesn’t look like anything anyone has ever seen before, and it’s small enough to fit on the mantel of the richest man in the world. It was the ultimate desirable object. You couldn’t do better than that.

After gawking at it for a while, we went back to the ship and brought back equipment for carrying it to the ship. We didn’t touch it with our hands. We used a neutral-surface manipulator to lift it and place it, ever so gently, into a padded container. We didn’t know if this thing was fragile or what. We just knew it was important not to break our egg on the way to market. Gomez even made a joke about it.

“We’re putting all our egg into one basket,” he said, as we got it back to the ship and stowed it away in the cargo hold. It was going to be Gomez’s last joke for a while.

We decided to spend no more time on Alquemar. This one find was going to make our fortunes, and we decided to get right onto it. I cranked up the ship’s engine and that’s where we had our first indication that things weren’t going to be quite as simple as we’d expected.

The engine wouldn’t start.

Now, Julie, take my word for it, when your spaceship engine won’t turn over, it’s not a simple matter of changing spark plugs or adding gas. These engines aren’t meant to be fooled with by the likes of me or Gomez. It takes a full maintenance crew working in a factory facility to do anything with one of those things. All we could do was run the diagnostics. All they told us was that the thing wasn’t working. We knew that ourselves. What we didn’t know was why, or what to do about it.

We didn’t give up as easily as that. I went through the whole drill. Reran the diagnostics. Ran diagnostics on the diagnostics. Tried to get a signal to the home office back on Earth. That was futile, of course. Modern spaceship travel leaves you in the curious position of being able to reach a place faster than light can do it, and a hell of a lot faster than any form of signal transmission. It looked like we were stuck. And the hell of it was, there wasn’t anyone who might come out to see what had gone wrong with us. We were like the pioneers trekking across the Rockies to California. Or like Cortes and his conquistador-es slogging across unknown lands in search of Aztec riches. If a conquistador’s horse broke down, Spain didn’t send an expedition out to rescue him. They just wrote him off. And that’s what would happen with us. No one had asked us to come out here. Our Indonesian sponsors didn’t a give damn if we got back or not. Not as long as they kept the insurance paid up.

We didn’t panic. Gomez and I had always known this was one of the risks of this deal. We sat around and hoped maybe the engine would come back on line all by itself. It’s been known to happen. We played chess, we read books, we ate our supplies, and at last we decided to take the Eryx out of storage and take a look at it again. If we had to go, at least we could go in what Gomez called an aesthetic manner.

I guess I haven’t told you why we called it the Eryx. It was because of what we found on that piece of cloth the thing had been sitting on. That cloth was covered with marks and doodles. We thought it was just a design. But it turned out to be the first bit of alien writing anyone had discovered. And it was the only one until a year or so later. Clayton Ross came across the inscribed rock that they called the Space Age Rosetta Stone during his expedition to Ophiuchus II. One part was in an ancient variation of Sanskrit, the rest in three alien languages, one of which corresponded to the writing on the Eryx cloth. Gomez and I had come up with the first writing ever discovered in an alien language.

But we didn’t know that at the time. It took experts to point out that what we had thought was just a decorative pattern was in fact language. As for why we named the gizmo Eryx—follow me on this, Julie. At the top of the cloth, or what we figured was the top, there were four marks larger than the others in what turned out to be the text. We couldn’t read them, of course. But the four largest characters looked like the English letters E-R-Y-X. So we called our gizmo the Eryx. The name caught on. Every-body called it that, right from the start.

As you’ve doubt surmised, being the clever little lady you are, we didn’t die on Alquemar. We got off. What happened, you see, is that we brought the Eryx out of the hold and into the main cabin. So we could look at what might be costing us our lives. This put it not only close to us, but also to the engines. When we tried to start up again, something happened. We never did figure out what or why. But suddenly everything was in the green and our engine was working again.

Coincidence? We thought it might have been. But we weren’t so filled with the spirit of scientific experimenta-tion that we were ready to move the Eryx back to the hold just to see if the engine died again. That would be carrying the spirit of experimentation too far. We got the hell out of Alquemar while we could. Got back to Earth.