Robert Silverberg - Invaders From Earth

“Clear,” Kennedy said. He resented the brusqueness of Gunther’s manner, but perhaps that was what six months or a year of life on a frozen waste of a world did to a man.

“Do you know how to use a spacesuit?”

“No.”

“As expected. You’ll receive instruction starting at 0900 tomorrow. You’ll undergo a daily drill in spacesuit technique until you’ve mastered its functions. We never know when the dome’s going to crack.”

He said it flatly and quietly, as if he might be saying, We never know when it may start to rain. Kennedy nodded without commenting.

“You’ll be taken on a tour of the area as soon as you request it, provided there’s a man free to accompany you. Under no circumstances are you to leave the dome alone. This is definite.”

“When will I get a chance to meet some of the aliens?” Kennedy asked.

Gunther seemed to look away. “You’ll be allowed to meet the Gannys at such time as we see fit, Mr. Kennedy. Are there any further questions?”

There were, but Kennedy didn’t feel like asking them. He shook his head instead, and Gunther signaled to another member of the outpost to show him to his room.

It turned out to be a crude little box with a window opening out onto the little courtyard between the three buildings of the dome; it had a hard cot covered with a single sheet, a washstand, a baggage rack. It looked like nothing so much as a cheap hotel room in a rundown section of an old city. It was very Earthlike, and there was nothing alien about it except the view that could be had by peering around the facing barracks-building at the bleak snowfields.

The three outpost buildings had been prefabricated, of course; building materials did not lie around on Ganymede waiting for visiting spacemen to shape them into neat cottages. A central ventilator system kept the dome and all the rooms within it reasonably fresh. A central power system supplied light and heat; the plumbing in the dome was crude but effective.

The entire project now attained reality for the first time for Kennedy. Despite the movies, despite research, despite everything, Ganymede had just been a name. Now it was a real place. The campaign acquired an extra dimension. This was a little planet, inhabited by intelligent beings, rich in radioactive ores, desired by a vast Corporation. He could grasp each concrete clause firmly now.

This was the place he had been selling to the world. Up here lived Lester Brookman and David Hornsfall and all his other imaginary colonists. They were myths; but Ganymede was real.

A spaceman named Jaeckel drilled him in the use of a spacesuit, showed him how to manipulate the controls that blew his nose and wiped his forehead and ventilated the suit. At the end of the first hour he had a fair idea of how to run the suit, though he was still vague on what to do when the powerpak ran dry, and how to send long-distance SOS signals through his helmet amplifier.

Once he had mastered the suit, they let him go outside, the dome, always in the company of an off-duty outpost man. The snow was thick and firmly packed into ice; bare patches of rock thrust snouts up here and there. A paraffin lake was located half a mile west of the dome—a broad, dull-looking body of dark liquid. Kennedy stood at its shore and peered downward.

“Does anything live in it?”

“Snails and toads and things. The Ganymedean equivalent, of course. Methane breathers, you know. We see them come hopping up on shore during the big storms.”

“How about fish equivalents?” Kennedy asked.

“We don’t know. We don’t have any boats and we don’t have any fishing tackle. Radar says there’s a few shapes moving down at the bottom but we haven’t had time to find them yet.”

Kennedy leaned forward, hoping to catch sight of a methane-breathing fish snouting through the depths, but all he saw was his own reflected image, shown dimly by the faint light, a bulky, grotesque, spacesuited figure with a domed head.

He was taken out to see the vegetation, too: the “forests” of scraggly waxen bushes, geared to the ammonia-methane respiratory cycle. They were inches high, with thick rigid leaves spread flat to catch as much of the sunlight as they could, and even the strongest winds failed to disturb them where they grew along a snow-banked hillside.

Inside the dome, Kennedy had little to do. After he had seen the compact turbines that powered the outpost, after he had inspected the kitchen and the game room and the little library, there was not much else for him to see. On the third day he asked Gunther when he’d be allowed to see the inhabitants of Ganymede, and Gunther had irritably responded, “Soon!”

Kennedy became suspicious. He wondered whether the Ganymedeans were not hoaxes too, along with Dr. Hornsfall and Director Brookman.

He spoke with an angular, faded-looking man named Engel, who was a linguist in Corporation employ. Engel was working on the Ganymedean language.

“It’s fairly simple,” he told Kennedy. “The Gannys haven’t ever developed a written culture, and a language limited to oral transmission doesn’t usually get to be very complex. It starts off as a series of agreed-upon grunts and it generally stays that way. The Gannys we’ve met have a vocabulary of perhaps a thousand active words and a residual vocabulary no bigger than three or four thousand. The language agglutinates—that is, the words pile up. There’s one word for man; but instead of having a separate word, like warrior, for the concept man-with-spear, their word for warrior is simply manwithspear. And the grammar’s ridiculously simple too—no inflections or declensions, no variation in terms of gender or case. The Gannys are lucky; they aren’t saddled with the confused remnants of the old Indo-Aryan protolanguage the way we are. It’s a terribly simple language.”

“Meaning that they’re terribly simple people?” Kennedy asked.

Engel laughed. “It’s not quite a one-to-one correlation. Matter of fact, they’re damned quick thinkers, and they get along pretty well despite the handicap of such a limited language. It’s a limited world. You don’t need many words on a planet where there’s hardly any seasonal change and where living conditions remain uniform century after century. Uniformly miserable, I mean.”

Kennedy nodded. Engel showed him a mimeographed pamphlet he had prepared, labelled Notes Toward A Ganny Etymology and Philology.

“Mind if I look this over?” Kennedy asked.

Engel shrugged and said, “I guess it’s all right. It can’t do any harm to let you read it.”

Kennedy studied the pamphlet alone in his room that night, for lack of any better recreation. He fell asleep with the light on and the book still open, after a couple of hours of mumbling disjointed Ganny phrases which he hoped followed Engel’s phonetic system; he didn’t even notice it when the room-light cut off, as it did every night at 0100 camp-time.

On the fourth day a tremendous storm swept in and engulfed the area. Kennedy stood in the yard near the arching curve of the dome, staring out in awe at the fierce torrent of precipitated ammonia that poured down on the plain, giving way finally to feathery clouds of ammonia-crystal snow and then, at last, to silence. The plain was covered with a fresh fall, now, and after it came the irascible wind, sculpturing the new fall into fantastic spires and eddies. Snow dunes heaped high against the side of the dome, and a trio of men in spacesuits went outside to clear them away. In the distance he saw the spaceship still upright, its landing vanes concealed by fresh snow, its dark prow tipped with mounds of white.

And on the fifth day he was again alone in his room when a tattoo of knocks sounded. He slipped Engel’s linguistics pamphlet under his soggy pillow and opened the door.