In the warmth he felt sleepy. Why not? he thought, snapping off the tape. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and was just drifting off when he heard his name called.
“Dalehouse! Krivitin! DiPaolo! Front and center, everybody.”
He shook himself awake, wished for a cup of coffee, and pulled himself toward the workspace. Alex Woodring said, “You’d better all see this. The Peeps have filed another report, and Harriet’s taped it for us.”
Dalehouse wriggled closer for a better view of the video screen just as it blinked and lighted up. There was a plant on the screen, rust-red and fernlike, with raspberrylike fruits hanging from its fronds. “Roll the tape, Harriet,” Woodring said impatiently. The images on the screen leaped and flickered, then stopped.
At first Dalehouse thought the picture was of another Klongan flower, possibly some desert succulent: red and yellow blobs oozing what he supposed was some sort of sap — Then it moved.
“Dear God,” whispered somebody. Dalehouse felt something rise in his throat. “What is it?”
“I think it used to be a white mouse,” said Morrissey, the biologist.
“What happened?”
“That,” said the biologist grimly, but with a trace of professional satisfaction, “is what I don’t know yet. The Peeps are transmitting their voice reports in code.”
“They’re supposed to share information!” snapped Dalehouse.
“Well, maybe they will. I assume Heir-of-Mao will have his UNESCO delegation deliver a report. And when it’s released in New York, Houston will no doubt send us a copy. But not very soon, I think. The picture was clear. When you come right down to it, that’s all we need to know: Klong is not as hospitable as we would like. I—” He hesitated, then went on. “I don’t think it’s an infectious disease. It looks more like an allergic reaction. I can’t really imagine an alien microorganism adapting that quickly to our body chemistry, anyway. I suspect we’re as poisonous to them as they are to us, so for openers, we don’t eat anything, we don’t drink anything but our own sealed supplies and distilled water.”
“You mean we’re landing anyhow?” the Canadian electronicist said incredulously.
Captain Kappelyushnikov snarled, “Da!” He nodded vigorously, then muttered to the translator, who said smoothly:
“He says that that is why we came here. He says we will take all precautions. He says on the next orbit, we go.”
Dalehouse played the strange songs from the mosquito probe a few times, but the equipment he needed to do any serious analysis had been stowed away and it made little sense to set it up again. Time to kill. Drowsily he peered out at the planet, and drifted off to sleep wondering what to call it. Kungson, Child of Kung, Son of Kung — “Klong, Son of Kung” was what one of the Americans had christened it — by any name, it was worrisome. When he woke he was given a tube of thick petroleum jelly to smear on himself — “Shuck your clothes and cover your whole body; maybe it will protect you from some kind of poison ivy or whatever that is until we get straightened out.” Then he dressed again and waited. The electronicist had patched herself in to monitor any further ground transmissions and was pinpointing sources on a likris map of the sunward surface of Klong.
“There seem to be two stations broadcasting,” Dalehouse commented.
“Yeah. Must be the base camp and, I suppose, somebody off on an expedition. There’s the Peep base” — she touched a dot on the purplish sea, on one side of a hundred-kilometer bay — “and there’s the other station.” That was across the bay. “We know that’s their base; we photographed it last time around. Nothing much. They aren’t really set up yet, I’d say. That signal’s pulse-coded, probably basic science data on its way to their orbiter for tachyon transmission back home.”
“What’s over on the other side of the bay?”
“Nothing much. There’s a sort of nest of some of the arthropods there, but they don’t have radio.” She pulled the earpiece away from her temple and handed it to Dalehouse. “Listen to that signal.”
Dalehouse put the phone in his ear. The sound was a staccato two-tone beep, plaintively repeated over and over.
“Sounds sad,” he said.
The woman nodded. “I think it’s a distress signal,” she said, frowning. “Only they don’t seem to be answering it.”
FIVE
WHAT CAN BE SAID about a being like Sharn-igon that will make him come clear and real? Perhaps it can be approached in a roundabout way. Like this.
Suppose there is a kind and jolly man, the sort of person who takes children fishing, dances the polka, reads Elizabethan verse, and knows why Tebaldi was the greatest Mimi who ever lived.
Is this Sharn-igon?
No. This is only an analogy. Suppose we then go on to ask you if you have ever met this man. You hesitate, riffling through the chance encounters of a life. No, you say, a finger against your nose, I don’t think so. I never met anybody like that.
And suppose we then say to you, But you did! It was a week ago Thursday. He was driving the A-37 bus you took from the station to the Federal Building, and you were late for your appointment with the tax examiner because this man would not change a five-dollar bill.
What do you say then? Perhaps you say, Christ, fellow! I remember the incident well! But that was no amiable folk dancer. That was a bus driver!
That’s how it would be with Sharn-igon. It’s easy enough to imagine you meeting him (provided we don’t worry about how you get there). Let’s make the mind-experiment to see what would happen. Suppose you are standing outside of time and space somehow, like an H. G. Wells god looking down from a cloud. You poke your finger into the infinitesimal. You touch Sharn-igon’s planet, and you uncover him. You look him over.
What do you see?
One might try to describe him to you by saying that Sharn-igon was politically conservative, deeply moral, and fundamentally honest. One might try to elicit your sympathy by saying that he (like who that you know?) was screaming inside with unhealed pain.
But would you see that?
Or would you glance and gasp and pull back your finger in loathing and say:
Christ, fellow! That’s no person. It’s an alien creature! It lives (lived? will live?) a thousand light-years away, on a planet that circles a star I have never even seen! And besides, it looks creepy. If I had to say what it looked like, giving it the best break I could, I would have to say that it looked like half of a partly squashed crab.
And, of course, you would be right…
The way Sharn-igon looked to himself was something else again.
For one thing, he is not an instant invention for your eye to see. He is a person. He has relationships. He lives (will live?) in a society. He moves (moved?) around and through a dense web of laws and folkways. He wasn’t like every other Krinpit (as his people called themselves), no matter how indistinguishable they might look to your eyes. He was Sharn-igon.
For example, although it was Ring-Greeting time, Sharn-igon hated Ring-Greeting. To him it was the loneliest and worst part of the cycle. He disliked the bustle, he resented the false and hypocritical sentiment. All the shops and brothels were busy as everyone tried to get gifts and to become pregnant, but it was an empty mockery in Sharn-igon’s life, because he was alone.
If you had asked him, Sharn-igon would have told you that he had always hated Ring-Greeting, at least ever since his final molting. (When he was a young seed just beginning to wave on his male-mother’s grate he loved it, naturally enough. All seeds did. Ring-Greeting was for kids.) That wasn t quite true. The cycle before, he and his he-wife, Cheee-pruitt, had had a very cheerful Greeting.