Six Blind Men & an Alien Page 5

  He spent a few more moments walking around what he thought of as his new homesite, then re-entered the ship.

  "You’ll like it," he announced to his mate. "The air is delicious."

  "Air has no taste," replied Marbovi.

  "This air does," he said enthusiastically. "And it’s not as cold. I doubt that we’ll need any protective coverings at all."

  "You can stop promoting it," she said. "We’re here, for better or worse."

  "For better," he said. "You’ll see."

  "I’ll tell you what I won’t see," said Marbovi. "I won’t see any other Pharachi except for you and the children." She frowned. "Now or ever."

  "You’re looking at this all wrong," said Nibolante. "We lived. We survived. We will become the parents of a new race on a new world."

  "We are four Pharachi on a world where the inhabitants spend their time killing each other. Why do you think they’ll accept us-and if they don’t, how long do you think we can stay hidden on this mountain?"

  "Look," he said. "I wish the mother ship hadn’t been destroyed. I wish all our friends were here with us. I wish the inhabitants welcomed us with open arms. But we’re here, we’re alive, and we have to make the best of it."

  "This is not what I wanted for my children."

  "You can’t always have everything you want," he said irritably.

  They exchanged hostile glares, then went to opposite ends of the ship to sleep.

  Nibolante was up early in the morning, and took Sallassine and Cheenapo outside to see their new surroundings. Marbovi remained in the ship.

  "I have been studying the fauna on the computer," said Sallassine. "I can identify any that we see."

  "Try that," said Nibolante, pointing to an avian that was riding the warm thermals a few hundred yards out from the mountain.

  "That is a fish eagle," said the youngster proudly.

  Suddenly Nibolante smiled.

  "What is so funny?" asked Sallassine.

  "I have to believe you," he replied. "I haven’t studied them."

  Sallassine identified two more avians, then stared down the mountain. "How far down may we go?"

  "Until we explore it further and see exactly where the villages are, I don’t want you going more than two hundred feet below the tree line," answered Nibolante. The youngster looked his disappointment, and Nibolante laid a hand on his shoulder. "When you are a little bigger, and we know the mountain a little better, you can accompany me some nights when I am hunting for food."

  "Really?" asked Sallassine, his face glowing with excitement.

  "Really."

  "Can we go down to the tree line now?"

  "Yes, as long as you both stay very near me."

  They made their way down the glacier to the tree line, then stopped and observed their surroundings. Suddenly Cheenapo pounced on something, and held it up a moment later.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "It is called a lizard," said Sallassine. "It eats insects, whatever they are." He stared at it. "They can’t be very big, these insects." He stared at it more closely, then frowned. "It is a gecko lizard or a ugama lizard, but I cannot remember which."

  Cheenapo turned to her father. "Can I keep it?"

  Nibolante frowned. "Conditionally."

  "What does that mean?"

  "We must find out what insects are, and if they live on the glacier. If they don’t, the lizard will starve if you take it back to the ship."

  "Can we walk a little farther?" asked Sallassine.

  "Just a little," said Nibolante.

  They walked another few hundred yards, which put them only sixty feet lower in altitude. They couldn’t see any wildlife, but they could hear the trumpeting of an elephant, the squawks of birds, even the bellow of a buffalo.

  "I am going to like it here," said Sallassine.

  "I’m glad someone does," said Nibolante.

  They remained where they were for almost an hour, then retraced their steps and made it back to the ship by midafternoon.

  Cheenapo played with her lizard while Sallassine found out from the computer that they would find no insects for it to eat on the glacier. She announced that she still wanted a pet, but she would find one that lived on the glacier, one that wouldn’t suffer from a change in environments.

  "She will be disappointed," Sallassine told his father when they were alone. "Nothing lives up here. Except us."

  "Nothing lives up here," agreed Nibolante, "but perhaps I can get something to visit us."

  "I do not understand."

  "Every time I make a kill, I will leave a piece of meat out at the very same spot. It may go unnoticed the first few times, but eventually something will discover the meat, and once it does I think it will come back again and again for a free meal. It will be bigger than a lizard-it may be one of those eagles-so it will not be a pet, but at least she’ll be able to see it."

  "And when it comes, I will identify it," said Sallassine.

  Nibolante went hunting that night, gently placing the lizard under a bush where it would be safe at least until morning. Using a silent weapon he killed a young bush pig at thirteen thousand feet, then spent the rest of the night carrying the carcass back up to the ship.

  "What am I supposed to do with this?" said Marbovi when she awoke and found the pig.

  "We will cut off the portions we want to eat," said Nibolante, "and I will put the rest in the disintegrator."

  "All right," she said. "What parts do you want to eat?"

  He stared at it. "I guess we’ll have to figure it out by trial and error."

  "You chose it. You killed it. You figure it out."

  "What is the matter with you?" he demanded.

  "I hate this place."

  He sighed deeply. "I suppose we can look in South America."

  "‘This place’ is Earth, not the mountain!" she snapped, walking away.

  He found a cutting instrument, sliced off the haunches, cut off the visible fat, and put the rest of it in the disintegrator. He realized that he could freeze it just by putting it outside, but he didn’t want to attract any predators. He knew they rarely came up onto the glacier, but he didn’t know what kind of delicacy a bush pig might be.

  When he was done he was covered with blood, as was the area in which he’d been working, and he made a mental note to bleed his prey in the future before cutting it into pieces.

  That was their routine for the next twenty days. Nibolante went down the mountain at nights whenever they needed more food. He and the children spent the days exploring the glacier and the area just below the tree line. Once they saw a rhino, and another time a buffalo. Marbovi remained in the ship, unhappy and uncommunicative.

  September 14, 1945 began like any other day. Nibolante arose and prepared breakfast for his family, then went outside. Sallassine was already out, and digging a hole at the base of a rocky outcropping.

  "What are you doing?" asked Nibolante.

  "Look!" said Sallassine excitedly. "In the dirt below the snow!"

  Nibolante leaned over to see what his son was pointing at. "Ants!" continued Sallassine. "Ants are insects! Now Cheenapo can have her pet!"

  "Yes," agreed Nibolante. "If you can keep uncovering insects, I suppose she can."

  "Shall we find one today?"

  "Why not?" agreed Nibolante.

  He waited for the children to finish eating, then led them down past the tree line. They spent almost two hours looking for a lizard without finding one.

  "Don’t worry," Nibolante told his daughter. "If we don’t find one soon, we’ll try again tomorrow."

  "Maybe we should split up and cover more ground," suggested Sallassine.

  "I don’t want you out of my sight," said Nibolante. "There are many predators on the mountain."

  "They don’t come this high."

  "They do if they’re hungry enough. Just stay within sight."

  "All right," said Sallassine, heading off to his left.

  Nibolante to
ok his daughter by the hand and began looking for a lizard again, checking behind every rock and under every bush. Every few minutes he turned and made sure that Sallassine was still in his line of sight.

  They’d been looking almost half an hour when he heard the scream. He turned and saw something small and black tearing at his son’s torso with sharp claws, biting him on the neck and shoulder. He raced toward them, screaming as he ran, and the creature scurried off at a speed he knew he couldn’t match. Nor did he want to. Sallassine was torn and bleeding, barely conscious.

  "Don’t move, don’t try to talk," said Nibolante. "I have nothing with me that can stop the bleeding. We have medications in the ship. I’ll carry you there."

  "I was looking out for lions and leopards," whispered Sallassine.

  "Be quiet. Don’t waste your strength."

  "It was a honey badger," said Sallassine just before he lost consciousness.

  Nibolante carried Sallassine as fast as he dared, conscious of the fact that Cheenapo couldn’t keep up with him if he increased his speed. By the time he reached the ship his son’s breathing was barely discernable.

  "Marbovi!" he yelled as he reached the hatch. "There’s been an accident! Bring the medication kit!"

  She was waiting for him when he entered and laid Sallassine on a counter. She didn’t ask what had happened. She just took one look at the child and turned to Nibolante.

  "He’s dead," she said dully.

  "He moaned just a minute ago."

  "He’s dead," she repeated. "He’s not breathing."

  Nibolante tried to discern a heartbeat, and couldn’t.

  "Will he stay dead?" asked Cheenapo.

  "Yes," said Marbovi. "He is just the first. This planet will kill us all."

  "He never saw it," said Nibolante miserably. "It was such a small animal."

  "And you never saw it," said Marbovi. "The difference is that you were supposed to see it." She glared at him. "You and this planet have killed my child. Go outside until dinnertime. I don’t want to look at you."

  He was about to say something, thought better of it, and walked out onto the glacier, riddled with guilt. The moment he did so the hatch slammed shut behind him.

  "Why bother?" he muttered. "I’m not coming right back in."

  Even as the words left his mouth, he realized that she had activated the engine. He raced to the hatch, pounding on it.

  "What are you doing?" he yelled.

  Of course there was no answer. A moment later the ship took off, and somehow he knew it would never land again on Earth.

  He looked across the glacier. His weapons were on the ship. So was any protection against the elements, should it get any colder. So were all the medications.

  He considered walking down the mountain into one of the villages, but he was not prepared to die just yet, and his observations of the human race’s goodwill were not encouraging. Not that it would make any difference. He was alone on an alien world, the last of his species on this particular colony.

  Still, he wasn’t prepared to die just yet, if only because Marbovi had doubtless been sure he would. He began walking across the ice, looking for shelter from the wind that had just sprung up, and wondered how many days he could last before he became his race’s second victim on this alien mountain.

  2038 A.D.

  "I’m feeling kind of useless," said Ray Glover. "I mean, it’s a fabulous discovery and we’ll probably all get rich and maybe even famous, but the fact remains that I’m the sound man for a video of a corpse."

  "You’ll have more than enough work soon," said Bonnie. "We’ll be interviewing everyone before we leave the mountain."

  "I know," said Ray. "In the meantime I’ll just concentrate on trying to catch my breath."

  Charles Njobo walked over to me. "When do you plan to contact your experts on your laptop?"

  "In a few minutes," I said. "The sooner I do it, the better."

  "Do not do so until after I contact my government," he said.

  I wasn’t happy about it, but it was his country, so I had no choice.

  Just then I noticed a snowflake floating down, then another and another. Within three minutes we were actually in a snowstorm. We could look down the mountain and see that it was raining two thousand feet below us. Then, almost as suddenly as it started, it stopped.

  "Well, now you know how he stayed hidden all this time," said Jim Donahue, gesturing toward the creature, which had a fine covering of snow.

  Muro approached Njobo and spoke to him in low tones. Finally Njobo nodded his head, and Muro walked away. He was back about five minutes later with a leafy branch he’d found. He walked over to the creature, squatted down next to it, and began carefully dusting the snow off the body and head.

  Njobo glared at me as if he expected me to object, but that was probably the best and safest way to brush away the snow.

  I saw one of the porters approaching the creature. He stopped and stared down at it for a moment, and then Muro saw him and ordered him to get back with the other porters.

  "What was that all about?" I asked.

  Gorman spoke to Muro in a language I didn’t understand, and then turned to me. "Muro doesn’t know that porter, and he doesn’t want him messing with the body."

  "How can he not know him?" asked Donahue. "Aren’t they all from the same village?"

  Gorman shook his head. "They’re from the same tribe, not the same village. Muro spends most of his time as a headman on climbing parties, so it’s not all that strange that he hasn’t seen him before."

  Ray Glover began swaying, and suddenly he sat down heavily on the snow.

  "Are you all right?" asked Bonnie solicitously.

  "Just a little dizzy and short of breath," he answered.

  "Just sit still and don’t exert yourself," said Gorman. "Altitude affects people differently."

  Glover stared at the creature. "I wonder how he handled it?" he mused.

  ***

  More to the point, thought Glover, why did he subject himself to it? We’re all pretending that he might not be an alien, but clearly that’s exactly what he was. What was it that kept him on this mountain, with a whole world to explore? Was he hiding? Was he a refugee? Or was there something on this mountain, more than anyplace else, that attracted him? The locals have made great progress, but they’re still primitive by the rest of the world’s standards. Did he have some plan to elevate them? What about them could have so fascinated him that he chose to remain in this hostile environment?

  Ray Glover was the fourth blind man.

  To be continued-

  What the Sound Man Saw

  His name was B’num B’narr, and he’d spent half his adult life in jails on his home world. He wasn’t a thief or a killer, a swindler or a sadist. He was, according to his government, a rabble-rouser and an insurrectionist. By his own definition, he was a moral being cast into a thoroughly immoral world. By the judge’s definition, he was incapable of modifying his behavior, and since the world of Grafipo did not believe in the death penalty, when he was arrested and convicted for the seventh time, he was given his choice: lifetime imprisonment without parole, or banishment to a new world.

  He chose the banishment.

  He rejected the first three worlds they chose. It then occurred to the authorities that he had no choice in the matter, but because he had made such a fuss they decided to send him to world with which they had never had any contact. It was a planet known to its inhabitants as Earth, and it would be very difficult for him to cause the kind of disturbances there that he had caused on Grafipo. Earth had no video. It had no computers. It had only discovered the principles of flight within the past dozen years. Still, his captors knew B’narr. The trick would be to put him down in an unpopulated (or at least underpopulated) area, where his capacity for mischief would be severely limited.

  A thorough survey by a trio of computerized drones concluded that there were a number of vast, empty deserts on the planet. The pro
blem, they realized, is that sooner or later he could find his way to civilization, and based on their knowledge of him, civilization didn’t need the added problems he would bring.

  They studied the surveys further, and finally hit upon a solution, not an ideal one but as close as they could come. They would deposit him on the slopes of a mountain after planting an identifying chip in his body. Then they would create an invisible barrier entirely around the base of the mountain, one that would recognize the chip but would permit every other living creature to pass.

  It then became a matter of choosing the mountain. The most impressive was Everest, but the one that seemed farthest from any substantial center of population was Kilimanjaro, and they chose the latter for that reason.

  It was not much later that a small ship entered the atmosphere and approached the snow-capped mountain.

  "Remember," said one of the officers. "You can never leave the mountain."

  "I trust you don’t mind if I try," replied B’narr.

  "Not at all," said the officer. "It won’t hurt me."

  The ship hovered above a grass-covered ridge about halfway up the mountain.

  "This is where you leave us," said another officer, opening the hatch.

  "If you had just learned to keep your mouth shut-" said the first officer.

  "In twenty seconds I will have more freedom than you have ever known," said B’narr. "I would not trade places with you for anything."

  "It’s probably good that you feel that way," said the first office, "since you will live and die on this forsaken alien mountain."

  B’narr walked to the hatch, and was soon being lowered to the surface. A moment later he was standing on his new world, the hatch closed, and the ship began racing for the stratosphere.