Then I saw the helmet on the newcomer’s head, and realized that he was no double. He was Alaree, and the other alien was the stranger!
“I see you’re here already,” the alien I knew as Alaree said to the other. They were standing about ten feet apart, staring coldly at each other. I glanced at both of them quickly. They might have been identical twins.
“We are here,” the stranger said. “We have come to get you.”
I took a step backward, sensing that some incomprehensible drama was being played out here among these aliens.”
“What’s going on, Alaree?” I asked.
“We are having difficulties,” both of them said, as one.
Both of them.
I turned to the second alien. “What’s your name?”
“Alaree,” he said.
“Are you all named’ that?” I demanded.
“We are Alaree,” Alaree Two said.
“They are Alaree,” Alaree One said. “And I am Alaree. I.”
At that moment there was a disturbance in the shrubbery, and half a dozen more aliens stepped through and confronted Alarees One and Two.
“We are Alaree,” Alaree Two repeated exasperatingly. He made a sweeping gesture that embraced all seven of the aliens to my left, but pointedly excluded Alaree One at my right.
“Are we—you coming with we—us?” Alaree Two demanded. I heard the six others say something in approximately the same tone of voice, but since they weren’t wearing converters, their words were only scrambled nonsense to me.
Alaree One looked at me in pain, then back at his seven fellows. I saw an expression of sheer terror in the small creature’s eyes. He turned to me.
“I must go with them,” he said softly. He was quivering with fear.
Without a further word, the eight marched silently away. I stood there, shaking my head in bewilderment.
We were scheduled to leave the next day. I said nothing to my crew about the bizarre incident of the evening before, but noted “in my log that the native life of the planet would require careful study at some future time.
Blast-off was slated for 1100. As the crew moved efficiently through the ship, securing things, packing, preparing for departure, I sensed a general feeling of jubilation. They were happy to be on their way again, and I didn’t blame them.
About half an hour before blast-off, Willendorf came to me. “Sir, Alaree’s down below,” he said. “He wants to come up and see you. He looks very troubled, sir.”
I frowned. Probably the alien still wanted to go back with us. Well, it was cruel to deny the request, but I wasn’t going to risk that fine. I intended to make that clear to him.
“Send him up,” I said.
A moment later Alaree came stumbling into my cabin. Before he could speak I said, “I told you before—I can’t take you off this planet, Alaree. I’m sorry about it.”
He looked up pitiably and said, “You mustn’t leave me!” He was trembling uncontrollably.
“What’s wrong, Alaree?” I asked.
He stared intensely at me for a long moment, mastering himself, trying to arrange what he wanted to tell me into a coherent argument. Finally he said, “They would not take me back. I am alone.”
“Who wouldn’t take you back, Alaree?”
“They. Last night, Alaree came for me, to take me back. They are a We—an entity, a oneness. You cannot understand. When they saw what I had become, they cast me out.”
I shook my head dizzily. “What do you mean?”
“You taught me… to become an I,” he said, moistening his lips. “Before, I was part of We—They. I learned your ways from you, and now there is no room for me here. They have cut me off. When the final break comes, I will not be able to stay on this world.”
Sweat was pouring down his pale face, and he was breathing harder. “It will come any minute. They are gathering strength for it. But I am I,” he said triumphantly. He shook violently and gasped for breath.
I understood now. They were all Alaree. It was one planet-wide, self-aware corporate entity, composed of any number of individual cells. He had been one of them—but he had learned independence.
Then he had returned to the group—but he carried with him the seeds of individualism, the deadly, contagious germ we Terrans spread everywhere. Individualism would be fatal to such a group mind; it was cutting him loose to save itself. Just as diseased cells must be excised for the good of the entire body. Alaree was inexorably being cut off from his fellows lest he destroy the bond that made them one.
I watched Him as he sobbed weakly on my acceleration cradle. “They… are… cutting… me… loose… now!”
He writhed horribly for a brief moment, and then relaxed and sat up on the edge of the cradle. “It is over,” he said calmly. “I am fully independent.”
I saw a stark aloneness reflected in his eyes, and behind that a gentle indictment of me for having done this to him. This world, I realized, was no place for Earthmen. What had happened was our fault—mine more than anyone else’s.
“Will you take me with you?” he asked again. “If I stay here, Alaree will kill me.”
I scowled wretchedly for a moment, fighting a brief battle within myself, and then I looked up. There was only one thing to do—and I was sure, once I explained on Earth, that I would not suffer for it.
I took his hand. It was cold and limp; whatever he had just been through, it must have been hell. “Yes,” I said softly. “You can come with us.”
And so Alaree joined the crew of the Aaron Burr. I told them about it just before blast-off, and they welcomed him aboard in traditional manner.
We gave the sad-eyed little alien a cabin near the cargo hold, and he established himself quite comfortably. He had no personal possessions—“It is not Their custom,” he said—and promised that he’d keep the cabin clean.
He had brought with him a rough-edged, violet fruit that he said was his staple food. I turned it over to Kechnie for synthesizing, and we blasted off.
Alaree was right at home aboard the Burr. He spent much time with me—asking questions.
“Tell me about Earth,” Alaree would ask. The alien wanted desperately to know what sort of a world he was going to.
He would listen gravely while I explained. I told him of cities and wars and spaceships, and he nodded sagely, trying to fit the concepts into a mind only newly liberated from the gestalt. I knew he could comprehend only a fraction of what I was saying, but I enjoyed telling him. It made me feel as if Earth were coming closer that much faster, simply to talk about it.
And he went around begging everyone, “Tell me about Earth.” They enjoyed telling him, too—for a while.
Then it began to get a little tiresome. We had grown accustomed to Alaree’s presence on the ship, flopping around the corridors doing whatever menial job he had been assigned to. But—although I had told the men why I had brought him with us, and though we all pitied the poor lonely creature and admired his struggle to survive as an individual entity—we were slowly coming to the realization that Alaree was something of a nuisance aboard ship.
Especially later, when he began to change.
Willendorf noticed it first, twelve days out from Alaree’s planet. “Alaree’s been acting pretty strange these days, sir,” he told me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Haven’t you spotted it, sir? He’s been moping around like a lost soul—very quiet and withdrawn, like.”