Six Blind Men & an Alien Read online

  "Well, Professor?" said Gorman. "I admit I’m stumped."

  "Jim, Bonnie," I said, "take all the pictures you can of it. Take it from every angle. Take close-ups of every feature. When you’re done, I want to transfer them to my computer and e-mail them to some of my colleagues."

  "Just what kind of animal is it?" asked Bonnie.

  "I don’t want to offer an opinion until I consult with the men I’m sending the photos to," I answered.

  "A missing link?" asked Ray.

  I shook my head. "We never evolved from that," I said. "Look at it. The eyes are set lower in the head than the nostrils. Its hips aren’t jointed like any human or ape I’ve ever seen. And it’s got opposing thumbs." I paused and considered that. "I’ve never seen anything with opposing thumbs." I kept cataloging the differences. "From the structure of the jaw and the few teeth I can see, I’d guess it’s an omnivore."

  "Intelligent?" asked Bonnie.

  "It’s possible," I replied. "It’s got a big enough brain pan."

  "But it’s not wearing any clothes or trinkets," said Ray.

  "Not all men wore clothes or trinkets," I said. "At least, not until they ran into other men who had better preachers or better weapons."

  Donahue let out a whoop, and we all turned to look at him.

  "A genuine Man from Mars!" he hollered happily. "We’re all going to be millionaires-the first expedition ever to discover one!"

  "We don’t know what it is yet," I pointed out. "This thing is going to require a lot of study. Tonight I’ll contact some of my colleagues and urge them to come over here to examine it. Then I have to find some people who know what they’re doing and have the proper equipment to move it to a secure cave."

  "You know," said Bonnie thoughtfully, "we’ve got a better mystery on our hands than Papa ever did. All he had to figure out was what a leopard was doing above the snow line. We have to figure out what this is as well as what it was doing here."

  They guessed at its origins and talked and took their pictures, but I could tell that each of them was thinking the same thing:

  Could it be, could it possibly be an alien? And if so, what was it doing on Earth. Why was nobody aware of it before today? And more to the point, why was it buried above the snow line on mighty Kilimanjaro?

  What the Photographer Saw

  Jim Donahue walked up to the body, bent over it, and began photographing it in small sections, taking more than one hundred photos before he’d captured every square inch of it. He photographed the foreface and took close-ups of the nostrils. He got on his knees, bent over, and photographed the hands and fingers. He was equally thorough on every part of the body. And then, when the party was getting a little bored and a little less attentive, he took four more quick photos of the almost imperceptible thing he had noticed on the left ankle.

  He would get rich from the photos, of course, but he might get even richer when he sold an exclusive article explaining what the alien was doing here. Even if someone else in the party saw the slight abrasions on that left leg, they hadn’t photographed men with similar abrasions. Men in custody.

  Men in chains.

  Convicts-

  Jim Donahue was the first blind man.

  ***

  Earth hadn’t been his first choice. The oxygen content was too high, the gravity too heavy, but his options had been limited. He had killed the guards as they were preparing to transport him to the high-security prison on Bareimus, where he would be one of only sixty-three living beings in the entire system. The prison was completely automated. The food was prepared by machines that had no motive power and never left the kitchen. There were no bars, just a trio of deadly force fields surrounding each cell, one always active and two in constant readiness in case the first ever failed. There would be no visitors, no exercise, no guards, no religious services, no medics-just sixty-three prisoners who would remain there until the last of them was dead.

  He knew he would never be able to escape from Bareimus. The prison had been in existence for 364 years and there had never been a single escape. Gangs, indeed armies, had tried to break in to free their compatriots; none had succeeded and precious few had survived the single landing field’s automatic and deadly defenses, programmed to destroy anything but the prison transport ship. So if he was ever to escape, it would have to be before he was delivered to the prison.

  He couldn’t wait until the ship to Bareimus took off. Even though there would be a pair of guards, there was no pilot. The ship was programmed to land at the prison, and even if he killed the guards there was no way to alter the ship’s programming. It cost him half of his accumulated and ill-gotten gains, but he had a confederate kill one guard while he disabled the other as they walked to their ship at the spaceport.

  His legs were still shackled, and the guards were past giving him the codes that would unlock them, so he took a pulse gun from one of them and blew the chains apart. He’d worry about removing what remained from his legs later; at least now he had freedom of movement again.

  His race disdained clothing, so he carried the pulse gun in his left hand and raced to the nearest small ship. There were shots from the command center. His confederate screamed and fell to the ground, spurting blood, but he made it to the ship unscathed. A figure stood in the hatch, telling him not to come any closer. He fired the gun before the ship’s owner finished his warning, stood aside as the body tumbled down to the ground, raced into the ship, and ordered the hatch to close and lock behind him.

  It took him less than thirty seconds to break the ship’s security code. (That was, after all, his specialty.) The ship asked for his name. He knew he couldn’t use his real name, that any ship on the planet would shut down all systems the instant he uttered it, so he thought back to his childhood and used the name of a youthful friend, one he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

  "My name," he said, "is Machti."

  "Destination?"

  He looked at the viewscreen and saw that the security guards would reach him in about thirty seconds.

  "What’s the nearest world with an oxygen content similar to ours?"

  "Define similar," said the ship.

  "Within ten percent."

  "The third planet in the Sol system."

  "Take off immediately."

  The ship made no verbal response, but he could feel the gravitational force as it shot up to the stratosphere and then beyond.

  "Do you have any of the planet’s languages in your data bank?" he asked as the ship began approaching light speeds.

  "No. I have never been there."

  "But you knew the oxygen content," said the being that was now Machti.

  "The atmospheric content is in my data bank; the native languages are not," said the ship. "It is entirely possible that no ship has ever landed there." While Machti was considering that answer, the ship announced that they were being pursued.

  "Wonderful," muttered Machti. "By how many ships?"

  "Two."

  "Can they overtake us?"

  "Eventually."

  "Before we reach Sol’s system?"

  "No."

  "All right," said Machti. "We’ll land there, and I’ll stay in hiding for as long as it takes for them to forget about me or at least decide I’m not worth the trouble, and then we’ll find a more hospitable world." He paused. "How long will it take to get there?"

  "Through normal space, seven years and-"

  "Not through normal space," he interrupted.

  "Via the Jaxtoplin Wormhole, three days."

  "Go that way."

  "That is three of our days," continued the ship. "Based on the destination world’s rotation speed, it will be 3.4983 of their days."

  "Just do it!" snapped Machti.

  The ship headed for the wormhole, and Machti spent the next hour experimenting with the remains of the shackles until he found the code that unlocked the right one. Try as he might, he couldn’t make the one on his left leg open; the chip had been damaged w
hen he’d destroyed the chain. He explored the small interior of the ship, found a laser pistol, and turned it on his shackle. The shackle became hotter and hotter still. He screamed in pain, but kept the laser trained on it, weakening its structure. He finally was able to pry it off with one of the galley’s eating tools.

  He limped to the ship’s medical stores, found some ointments to rub on his ankle, and spent the next fifteen hours sleeping. When he awoke he found out that the police ships were still in hot pursuit and had entered the wormhole only a minute or two after his own ship.

  "Go faster!" he ordered.

  "Speed is meaningless inside a wormhole, where the laws of the universe do not apply," responded the ship.

  "Can they catch us?"

  "Not unless the wormhole wishes them to."

  "Wormholes don’t think or wish," said Machti irritably.

  "My conceptual vocabulary is limited," replied the ship. "There is no reason to assume they can catch us within the wormhole. Similarly, there is no reason for them not to catch us in a timeless and spaceless area outside the universe."

  "Will you know if they are getting close to us?"

  "Define ‘close," said the ship.

  "Within firing range?"

  "If you will tell me what weapons you are theorizing, I can answer the question."

  "Your own weapons!" snapped Machti.

  "I am not equipped with any weaponry," said the ship.

  "What good are you?" growled Machti. Then: "Don’t answer that question."

  He spent the rest of the voyage studying what little was known of his destination’s geography, medicating his ankle, and catching up on his sleep.

  The ship woke him from his latest slumber with an announcement: "We have emerged from the wormhole, we are in Sol’s system, we are approaching the third planet, and I need landing coordinates."

  "How far behind are the two police ships?" demanded Machti. "In minutes, not distances."

  "Three and fourteen minutes."

  "I thought they went into the hole together."

  "Clearly I will again have to explain the absence of the known laws of the universe inside a wormhole," said the ship.

  "Don’t bother," said Machti.

  "The coordinates, please?" insisted the ship, producing a holographic display of Earth rotating slowly on its axis.

  "Longitude and latitude? I don’t know them." Machti pointed toward Africa. "This seems to be the least-populated continent, except for the ice- covered one. At least it has the fewest signs of civilization." Since he had neither asked a question nor issued a command, the ship remained silent. "Three minutes, you say?"

  "2.9376 minutes, to be exact."

  "Let me think," said Machti. "If you put me down in a city, there will be no way to keep my presence a secret, and the subsequent excitement will alert my pursuers to where I am. And if you set me down on a flat plain, they’ll pinpoint your location, scan the limits of where I could get to in three minutes, spot me with their sensors, and that will be the end of it." He studied the globe again, and suddenly his eyes narrowed. "I’m getting an idea. Where is the tallest mountain on the continent?"

  "Right here," said the ship, and Kilimanjaro began flashing brightly on the holographic globe.

  "All right," said Machti. "If I were to jump out of the hatch while you flew directly over it, have we anything aboard that could break or ease my fall?"

  "Yes."

  "All right, here’s what we’ll do. Enter the atmosphere almost directly over the mountain, swoop down toward it, open your hatch, and I’ll jump out. The odds are that they won’t see me, and if you don’t slow down they’ll have no reason to assume I’m not still aboard you. Then go to the southern end of the continent, land in a barren field for thirty seconds, and then take off and fly back to your point of origin. They’ll assume I got off there, and will spend their time searching the area for me. When they realize it’s fruitless, they’ll return home as well." He looked around the small ship. "Where is it?"

  "Where is what?"

  "Whatever I’m going to use to break my fall." The top of a bulkhead slid open, revealing a small parachute. "You’re sure this will work? It doesn’t look very substantial."

  "It has been field-tested."

  "All right. I’m in no position to argue. How far behind is the nearer ship now-rounded off to seconds?"

  "Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds."

  "Just make sure you stay ahead of it."

  "It cannot catch me unless I malfunction," replied the ship.

  Machti said nothing more until they entered Earth’s atmosphere. Then he walked to the hatch.

  "How soon do we reach the mountain?" he asked.

  "Approximately four minutes," answered the ship.

  "Get as low over it as you can and then open the hatch."

  Machti waited impatiently until the ship made its approach and leveled out. After what seemed an eternity to him the hatch slid open and he dove out through it. The parachute computed his weight, sensed the approach of the mountain, and opened just in time to prevent him from suffering any serious injury.

  He touched down on an icy slope, rolled over twice, and began sliding down the slope until his descent was blocked by large icy ledge. He looked up, but could see neither his ship nor the two pursuers.

  He climbed out of the chute and buried it in the snow, then surveyed his surroundings. He was within a thousand feet of the mountaintop, and perhaps eighteen thousand feet above the savanna. Down the sides of the mountain he could see heavily-forested slopes, and below that a river and even a village of mud-and-straw huts.

  And then he saw it: the police ship, hovering just above Kilimanjaro. He couldn’t spot its companion. Possibly he’d fooled one of them, possibly it simply hadn’t arrived yet. But at least one of them hadn’t fallen for his ruse.

  He hid in the shadow of a large rock, hoping that the ship would decide it had been mistaken and take up pursuit of his empty ship, but instead it just stayed there, and he realized its scanners were seeking out life forms from his planet. They were looking for him, and his readings would be like no other.

  He knew the ship couldn’t stay there long without being noticed, and since this planet hadn’t yet developed spaceflight, they wouldn’t want to be spotted and either questioned or, more likely, fired upon. All he had to do was stay hidden for another hour at most, probably just a few minutes-

  He heard the growl before he spotted the source of it: a lone leopard about fifty yards away. It approached him slowly, and he stood up and faced it. Another growl from the leopard was matched by his own growl. That seemed to startle and unnerve the leopard; its prey wasn’t supposed to growl back.

  They stared at each other for a long minute, alien and leopard, and finally the leopard turned and began slinking back down the mountain, off the snow cap and toward the lush forest below.

  Machti breathed a sigh of relief and looked up. The ship was still there. It obviously hadn’t pinpointed him yet, because it possessed weapons that could take off the top thousand feet of the mountain or home in on a tiny target a mile away. He remained sheltered and hidden by the outcropping, certain that the ship would be leaving soon-but it didn’t, and suddenly he realized the true situation. This was a primitive planet, and he was, by choice, on the most primitive part of it. Not only didn’t they have spaceflight, they didn’t have sensors-or if they did, they had them in the cities, not on this mountain that seemed to house only wild animals and a few people living in huts. And that meant the ship could hover there for weeks, maybe months, before anyone spotted it.

  He spent the night under the outcropping, hopeful that the furry pelt that covered him would protect him from the cold-and for a few hours it did. But by morning he was freezing, and he decided that he would have to descend below the snow line if he was to survive.

  He began walking gingerly, careful of the ice and the hidden rocks beneath the snow-and suddenly the energy pulse from the ship�
�s cannon missed him by less than ten feet. He began racing toward safety-a huge mound of snow that probably covered an equally large rock-but another burst of energy demolished the mound before he could reach it.

  Machti looked down the mountain. The snow and ice were too steep. He knew he could never race down the slope at any speed; he’d surely slip and fall first, and if he fell hard enough, or fell the wrong way and broke something, he’d be a perfect target for the police ship. He turned and began retracing his steps. The higher he went, the more outcroppings there were to afford him cover, and soon he was back as high as when the ship had first seen him.

  The firing stopped. Primitive as this world’s inhabitants were, the officers clearly thought that if they fired their weapons enough, somebody would see it and report it. The ship hovered some two hundred feet above the snowy surface, its crew content to wait until Machti was compelled to leave to find food.

  Machti stayed under the outcropping until three hours after the sun had set. Then he ventured forth again, only to be shot at instantly. He cursed himself for not realizing that the officers didn’t have to see him, that their weapons could home in on his motion or even his body heat. He took up his position under the outcrop again and decided he had no choice but to outwait the ship.

  By midmorning he decided to take a quick look and see if it was still hovering-and found that his feet and joints had frozen, that he was almost incapable of motion.

  Now he began panicking. He’d been almost two days without food, he was on a freezing mountaintop, and he couldn’t move. He forced himself to stand up, then painfully moved one foot ahead of the other. The outcrop was almost twenty feet long, so he had room to take a few steps while still protected, then turn and walk back, and continue doing it until some of his range of motion returned.

  He took a step, leaning a hand against the outcrop for support, then another, then a third-and then his foot slipped on the ice, he fell heavily, and began sliding down the snow. He expected the ship to fire on him at any second, but either they hadn’t noticed, or more likely had decided he was never going to get up under his own power again.