Six Blind Men & an Alien Read online

  The first was the mountain Kirinyaga, known to most settlers and tourists as Mount Kenya. But he wasn’t interested in the tourists and settlers, most of whom worshiped the God of the Christians and the Jews, a God Who had already repulsed his attempts to communicate. No, Kirinyaga was the holy mountain of the Kikuyu people, and the reason it was holy was because their God, Ngai, lived atop it.

  He found a flat, empty strip of ground at eleven thousand feet, set his ship down, and cloaked it. A bongo and her foal watched him curiously as he climbed down from the hatch. He looked up the mountain and saw the ice-covered peak about six thousand feet above him. It would not be a straight or an easy climb, especially in the dark-he was still making sure that nobody saw him, as this world wouldn’t be ready for interstellar contact for a very long time-but he was resigned to it. Earlier in his travels, he would have made it in a single night, or at most two. But that was thirty-five years ago. This time it would take the better part of six days, climbing by night, hiding by day. At fourteen thousand feet the vegetation thinned out and would soon cease, but he was so tired, so short of breath, that he actually slowed his pace.

  He reached the summit on the eighth day, and looked around for signs that God lived atop the mountain.

  "Ngai, are you here?" he asked. "I must speak with you, and I haven’t got much time left."

  But if Ngai was there, He chose not to answer.

  Quachama remained near the summit for another day, partially to regain some of his strength, partially to give Ngai a chance to reconsider if He was there but in hiding.

  Finally he began his descent. When he reached the ship he collapsed and slept for two days and two nights. When he awoke, he knew that his next attempt would be his last, and that he must choose his venue very carefully.

  The computer thought the God of the Zulus was his best remaining chance, but before he laid in a course for Natal, he saw that there was a similar religion to the Kikuyu, from a tribe that had gone to war with the Kikuyu many times and never lost. They were the Maasai, and their God, named En-Kai, lived atop the greatest mountain on the continent, a mountain known as Kilimanjaro.

  He studied further, but his mind was racing ahead of the computer. Ngai and En-kai. Kirinyaga and Kilimanjaro. The more he thought about it, the more he thought that, at least in terms of religion, the Kikuyu were a pale imitation of the Maasai. He asked the computer to give him a breakdown of the Kikuyu’s religious beliefs. Twenty-one percent believed in the traditional religion; seventy-nine percent had converted to some form of Christianity. He asked for the same breakdown of the Maasai. Ninety-three percent believe in En-kai, seven percent were Christians.

  Now he knew why he had received no response atop Kirinyaga. Just as the Maasai had conquered the Kikuyu, En-kai had conquered the false god Ngai, who had even tried to steal His name. He would go to Kilimanjaro, and after a lifetime of searching, he would finally find God and get his answers.

  He landed his ship on one of the lower slopes and activated the cloaking mechanism, then began climbing. An elephant charged him as he crossed a clearing, and he was barely able to clamber up a tree before it reached the spot he had been. It stood beneath the tree for four hours, but eventually it lost interest and wandered away, and he climbed down and began ascending the mountain again.

  He saw a leopard depositing its kill in the fork of a tree, but it paid him no attention, and he continued walking. His energy was ebbing, he was in constant pain, and he no longer cared whether he was seen or not. He would climb night and day, stopping only when he was so exhausted or in such pain that he could not continue without resting, and as soon as he was able he would begin again.

  He reached the tree line in three days and, taking one last look down the mountain, he strode onto the glacier.

  At one point he could go no farther without resting, and he sat down, hunched over, and looked down the mountain, then out across the savanna. This must be God’s home, he thought. Who else could create such an awesome mountain, or such a magnificent vista? And all of His creatures share Kilimanjaro with men. I have finally reached the place I was searching for all these years.

  He decided it was time to continue his climb, and he prepared to get up-and found that he couldn’t. He tried again, and his legs simply wouldn’t work.

  I am dying, he thought. It seems fitting, somehow, that I should die on God’s mountain, now that I have finally found it.

  And as his vision became blurry, he thought he saw an incredible brightness approaching him.

  I have been waiting for you, said the brightness silently, the words echoing inside his head. Now we shall finally have our talk.

  He still couldn’t rise, but he reached out a hand toward En-kai.

  2038 A.D.

  Jim Donahue had finished taking his pictures, and put his camera back in its case. Not so Bonnie Herrington. She and Ray Glover were going around to each member of the party, interviewing them, asking not only for their reactions to what we’d found but their speculations as to what it might be.

  I could tell that Charles Njobo was torn about what to say. He wanted to claim that it was an extraterrestrial visitor, but he was painfully aware that, as he kept reminding us, he represented the Tanzanian government, and he didn’t want to make a statement that could embarrass the government if it turned out to be wrong.

  While they were doing their interviews, I walked over to the body again, and tried to figure out what the hell it was doing above the tree line on the tallest mountain on the continent.

  An interstellar sportsman, climbing Kilimanjaro for the challenge of it? But he had no climbing gear, at least none that I could see, and if he could make it all the way to this mountain from some other star system, he could have gone a few thousand miles farther to the Himalayas. Everest had to be two miles higher.

  A hunter, perhaps? If he’d arrived more than seventy-five years ago, Tanzania was so thick with game that it must have seemed like it would go on forever. The wildebeest herds numbered in the millions, the zebras were almost as numerous, and the Big Five-elephant, rhino, lion, buffalo, and leopard-were abundant on both the ground and the mountain.

  But he had no weapons, there was no trace of a camp, and if he’d stockpiled any trophies they’d been appropriated by some resident of the mountain or perhaps a climber-but if they’d found his trophies, they’d almost certainly have found him as well.

  All my training, all my experience, told me that he wasn’t a freak born of Earth. No human, no ape, nothing of this world ever gave birth to the being that lay before me. He must have come from a relatively similar world. If the gravity were much heavier he’d have thicker limbs and would probably walk on all fours; any lighter and he’d be thinner and more elongated. It had to be an oxygen world; he couldn’t have gone two steps, let alone up the mountain, if he couldn’t breathe the air. I assumed he could metabolize some of the vegetation or meat animals, since there was no indication he’d come with a sufficient supply of his own food-though I wouldn’t know for sure until we thawed him out and examined his teeth and the contents of his stomach. The ears weren’t much bigger than ours; the eyes were closed, but also seemed about the same size as ours. The elongated foreface implied that scent was more important to him, but even that was just a guess until we began examining him in a lab.

  I was suddenly aware that Bonnie and Ray were approaching me.

  "Your turn, Professor," she said cheerfully.

  "Call me Doctor," I said. "Or better still, Anthony or Tony."

  "How about Doc?"

  I shrugged. "That’ll be fine."

  Ray reached over and attached a tiny microphone to the collar of my coat.

  "Don’t worry about it," said Bonnie. "It won’t show up in the video."

  Why would I give a damn? I thought, but I merely smiled at her.

  "Well, let’s get right to it, Doc," she said. "What do you think of our discovery?"

  "I think it could be very important," I said c
arefully. "Of course, we’ll have to examine it under laboratory conditions before we can draw any firm conclusions."

  "Jim Donahue keeps calling it a man from Mars," said Bonnie. "Would you care to comment on that?"

  I smiled. "Jim has a fine imagination. It didn’t come from Mars."

  "Where did it come from?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Would you care to suggest what it’s doing here?"

  "Waiting to be discovered and evaluated," I said.

  "Besides that," she said, a note of irritation creeping into her voice. "Why would this creature, whatever it is, climb the tallest mountain in Africa?"

  Because it’s there, I wanted to say. "I really don’t know, Bonnie," I said aloud. "Scientists don’t jump to conclusions."

  She ended the interview in another minute, clearly disappointed, and wandered off to interview Njobo.

  As for me, I looked down at the alien, and the phrase kept running through my mind again and again: Because it’s there.

  ***

  I was the sixth blind man.

  To be continued-

  What the Scientist Saw

  His name was Mavorine, and he felt like the King of the Universe, standing atop the highest mountain on Neffertine VI, staring out across the craggy surface of the planet. This one would put him in the record books. No member of his race had ever climbed a mountain on a chlorine world before.

  It had been a long, hard month. The mountain offered very little shelter from the fierce winds, and handholds and footholds were difficult to find on the final ascent. He stood at the summit, hands on hips, reporting everything he saw into the tiny recorder that was built into his helmet, activating the camera atop the helmet, turning his head slowly from side to side to capture the view.

  He spent a day and a night at the mountaintop, then began the precarious descent. By the time he was halfway down he was already planning his next adventure, his next pursuit of the immortality afforded him by the record of his accomplishments. He wasn’t limited to mountain climbing; that was simply his most recent passion. His first major triumph had come nine years earlier when he circumnavigated Balinoppe II’s murky ocean, not in a vessel but on foot, on the ocean floor, emerging only eight times to replenish his oxygen supply.

  He had been back from Balinoppe for only three days when he was off again, this time to far Perradorn, home to the galaxy’s largest known carnivore species. They presented no serious problem to anyone armed with a modern weapon-an energy pulse rifle, or something similar-but no one had ever hunted one armed only with a poison-tipped spear. He spent four months in hospital recovering from his wounds-but the carnivore would spend an eternity stuffed and mounted in the Great Museum on his home world of Thandor IV.

  After that had come the conquests of more mountains and oceans, more entries in the record books. He had mapped and captured holographs of worlds no one else had ever set foot on, and had become a hero to his people, idolized by most of them.

  And while adults created entertainments about him, and children worshipped him, and grown males envied him, and females adored him, he spent a few days in his private dwelling. It had actually become unfamiliar to him, so infrequently did he spend more than a single night there. His computer kept going through its database, suggesting possibilities for his next adventure. Mavorine rejected them all.

  "It is just another mountain," he would say. "Bigger than the last, but just a mountain."

  Or: "I have walked across the floor of an ocean. I don’t have to do it again."

  After an hour had passed, he gave the computer a new order: "Just show me a series of worlds and their most dangerous or challenging features. Let us see if we can find one that is sufficiently interesting."

  For the next two hours the computer showed him methane worlds, chlorine worlds, ammonia worlds, oxygen worlds, and airless worlds.

  "Stop," he said at last. He sighed deeply. "I would not have believed it possible, but I have run out of challenges. These worlds are not without their interest and their challenges, but in truth it is just more of the same."

  "Perhaps you should set yourself a different task," suggested the computer.

  "What else is there?" he asked. "I have climbed, and swum, and mapped, and killed, and explored."

  "The difference is in the matter of approach," answered the computer.

  "Explain," said Mavorine.

  "In every endeavor, it has been your goal to triumph, to succeed, to accomplish."

  "What else is there?"

  "Survival."

  "I do not understand," said Mavorine.

  "Ignore the record books," replied the computer. "Set yourself a task where merely surviving will be the ultimate triumph. Do not publicize it until you have survived and returned here to Thandor IV."

  "Why not?"

  "Because if you do, some other member of your race will doubtless try to emulate you, and he will surely die."

  "Why does a machine care if a sentient being dies?"

  "There is a chance that they will blame you, and if you are made to suffer for your competitor’s shortcomings, then there is a strong possibility that I will be deactivated."

  "Since when do you have a sense of self-preservation?"

  "It is at least as strong as yours," said the computer reasonably. "I do not constantly put my existence at risk."

  "This has been a most interesting discussion," said Mavorine. "I will consider it."

  Which he did, and by the next morning he had become totally committed to the idea. Then it was just a matter of selecting the world that could offer him not the most awesome single challenge, but the greatest variety of challenges. Within a day he had narrowed his choice down to three worlds, and by the next evening he knew that his destination would be the planet known as Earth.

  He would go there naked and unarmed, with no food supplies, no medical kit, absolutely nothing to help him. Then it became a matter of selecting the challenges.

  He would climb the mountains known as Fujiyama, Everest, and Kilimanjaro. He would swim the width of the Indian Ocean. He would, with weapons he manufactured from the materials at hand, kill a tiger on one continent, a lion on another, and a jaguar on a third. He would swim down a piranha-invested river. He would walk across the Sahara Desert. He had the computer order his itinerary, so he could go from one challenge to another with a minimum of time between them.

  He told no one of his plans. When the itinerary was completed, he went to his ship, had the navigational computer lay in a course for Earth, and took off in the dead of night.

  He realized that he couldn’t possibly complete his quest if he were to move from challenge to challenge, alone and naked, not on an alien world that did not know of his world’s existence. So he decided that he would activate the ship’s cloaking device before it entered the stratosphere, and leave it on, flying unseen from one starting point to the next.

  He began with Everest. He’d climbed taller, more formidable mountains elsewhere in the galaxy, while this was merely his first step. While he was in Asia, he crafted a bow and arrow and had very little difficulty killing a tiger in India.

  He returned to his ship, flew to an uninhabited shore of the Indian Ocean, instructed it to land south of Mombasa in the Shimba Hills-he pinpointed the exact location since he wouldn’t be able to see it-and then, as it took off, he plunged into the water. He spent most of his time in the midst of a pod of whales, which seemed not to mind his presence, and served to shield him from the interest of the sharks that patrolled the waters searching for prey. He learned that his system could tolerate raw fish, and he lived on them for the twenty-three days it took him to reach the African shore. He found himself halfway between Malindi and Mombasa, and he spent another day swimming south to where he could rejoin his ship.

  He decided that he could accomplish his next two tasks at the same location. There would be lions on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. He would kill one, and then proceed to climb the mo
untain. He ordered the ship to take off and fly south and west until the snow-capped peak came into view. He landed at the foot of the mountain, waited until dark, and then emerged.

  He carried the bow and arrows he had used to kill the tiger, and wondered if that was fair. Not that there were any rules that weren’t of his own making, but he had a feeling that he should craft a fresh set of weapons to kill on a new continent. He ascended two thousand feet while he considered his moral dilemma, and decided that as long as he was still considering it, he should indeed create fresh weapons. It took him the next two nights-he remained in hiding in the thick bush during the day-but then he was ready to proceed.

  His problem was that lions had no natural predators. They slept during the day, almost always in the open, but he could not chance being seen by the sentient residents of the mountain. And at night, along with the very poor visibility even when the moon was out, they were in hiding, preparing to attack unsuspecting prey.

  He finally decided that if he were hunting prey on the forested and uneven surface of the mountain, he would hide near a waterhole and wait for his victim, so he chose a small one that seemed to attract a fair amount of game, took up his position behind a Wait-a-bit thorn tree, and settled down to wait for his prey as they hunted their prey.

  An hour later a lone bushbuck cautiously approached the waterhole. Clearly it was nervous, and Mavorine decided that this was very unusual behavior, that usually the herbivores slaked their thirst in the light so they could see the approach of predators, but that this particular animal was simply too thirsty to wait for sunrise.