Alien Archives, page 15
Framer muttered something under his breath. Kal, I knew, was a man of wide learning, and he had nothing but scorn for modern educational methods, which are highly specialized. Morro spoke.
“A gorgon, Curt, is a mythological beast. It killed by a glance; if you looked at its eyes, you were turned to stone. The thing outside is almost a living version of a gorgon, complete to those tentacles on its head. The original gorgon was supposed to have living snakes instead of hair.”
Holders said nothing, but his eyes widened.
Ramirez scratched his long nose with a thick finger. “Joel, how are we going to fight our friend outside?”
“The same way Perseus did,” I said.
***
AND SO OPERATION MEDUSA GOT under way. It took some preliminary discussion. For one thing, Holden, who held most of our technological information behind his freckled forehead, had not the slightest knowledge of the Perseus myth, and we had to bring him up to date.
Morro patiently did most of the explaining.
“A Greek hero named Perseus boasted he could kill Medusa, the gorgon,” the giant said, smothering a yawn. “With the help of the gods he got a pair of magic sandals which enabled him to fly, and a cap of invisibility. Then he polished his shield to mirror brightness and swooped down on the gorgon, watching her in his mirror-shield, and without ever looking her in the face he cut off her head.”
“I see,” Curt said. “We have to hunt down this gorgon too, and we can’t look at it either, or—” He nodded outside at the two brown mounds of earth.
“Right,” Framer said. “But we don’t have a mirror. And we can’t build one. What now?”
We racked our brains. Morro wondered if we could somehow polish the ship to the proper brightness, but we saw the scheme was impractical.
“Try radar,” Tavy offered.
“That’s it!” I whooped. “Hunt down the gorgon with radar and blast it without ever looking at the damned thing!”
From there on Medusa’s number was up. But she didn’t go down without a fight.
***
HOLDEN HAD THE RADAR SCREEN dismantled and set up for gorgon-hunting in no time at all. The boy’s horizons were limited, perhaps, but in the fields for which he had been educated he was tops. On a warm, summery day, we set out on our gorgon-hunt.
We always had difficulty adjusting to the red leaves on the trees and especially the carpet of red grass on the ground. Bellatrix IV, as far as we could see, was a huge plain, covered with what seemed to be a bloody carpet. Every time I looked down I felt a twinge, and thought of the two graves near the ship, and of the two explorers who would never get back for another lecture tour on Earth.
Steeger remained behind on ship, peering intently into the radar screen. The five of us fanned out slowly, armed to the teeth and scared stiff. I could see myself that evening being borne back to the ship, frozen, and sharing that impromptu graveyard with Janus and Flaherty.
Steeger had more to worry about than any of us. Hunched over the radar screen, his job was to relay instructions to us. We knew the gorgon was somewhere in the copse, because Framer had seen the great thing go thundering into the clump of trees the day before, and no one had seen or heard it since. But only a fool would go in there after a beast that killed by a glance.
Slowly, painfully, the five of us formed a wide circle around the copse, standing no closer than a hundred meters from the edge. Not one of us dared to look up, of course; our eyes remained fixed on the blood-red grass and Steeger directed us to our positions, step by painful step. It took half an hour to form the circle, as Doc would tell first one, then another of us, to move a couple of steps to right or left. Finally the circle was complete—five Perseuses, frightened green.
Then came the rough part, as we waited for the attack. When the call came over the phones from Steeger, I was going to hurl a Johnson flare into the copse, and, if all went right, the gorgon would come lumbering out. Without looking, we would fire.
As I look back, I see it was a pretty harebrained scheme. So many things could have gone wrong that it’s a wonder we ever went ahead with it.
Doc gave the signal, and I drew back my arm and flung the flare, automatically looking up as I did. For one horror-stricken second I feared the gorgon might approach just as I looked up, but there was no sign of it.
Then all hell broke loose in the copse.
A Johnson flare goes off like a lithium bomb—at least it creates enough light to simulate one. That copse lit up bright yellow, and I caught the odd contrast between the red of the leaves and the yellow of the light. And I saw something huge thrashing around in the heart of the copse before I jerked my head down. I stared at my feet.
Try blindfolding yourself some time and walking down a city street, an empty street, at dawn. The terror is something unimaginable, the unreasoning terror of the blind. That’s the way I felt, knowing that at any moment a monster might pop out of the clump of trees and leap at me while I stood studying my boots. An awful ten seconds passed, and seemed like days, and I grew progressively more numb with fear, until I passed the point of fright and seemed almost calm. Nothing happened, though the flare continued to kick up a powerful light. I heard rustling noises in the copse.
And then all at once I heard Steeger’s tinny yell in my phones.
“Joel!”
In the same instant I drew with my right hand and flung my left hand behind my neck, forcing my head down. I aimed the blaster up at a 45-degree angle and began sizzling away for all I was worth. Over to my left I could hear Morro doing the same.
There was the sound of thunder, as of a great beast lumbering around near me. I could hear Steeger screaming something in my phones, but I was unable to stop yelling myself. And I didn’t dare look up.
For all I knew the gorgon was standing right over me and bending to bite me in two. But I had passed the point of any coherent reasoning. I was still screaming and squeezing the trigger of the burned-out blaster five minutes later, when Morro and Framer came over to me and led me back to the ship.
***
We had killed it, then. And I, Lieut. (Spatial) Joel Kaftan, commander of EExP A-7 to Bellatrix IV, was Perseus.
“We thought we’d never get you up,” said Morro.
Steeger said, “I saw that gorgon come out, and I yelled to you. You started waving the blaster around, and Morro came over too. But by the time he reached you, you had blasted Medusa in the neck and pretty near cut that head right off.”
Ramirez took up the story. “You were still blasting away without looking, even though the gorgon had fallen on its face. Holden came up and cut its head off, but it’s still thrashing its wings out there.”
“You ruined about three trees with your blaster,” Morro added. “Damned careless of you, Joel.”
I looked up. The accumulated tension had built up to such a pitch while I was waiting for the thing to come out of its lair that I felt I had been through a wringer and had been squeezed flat. I looked around at the men ranging the couch on which I lay.
I saw great Morro standing at my feet, and old Steeger looking even older after his remote-control chess-game with the gorgon. And there was Holden, and Ramirez. Four. And I made five. Two dead made seven. It took me another second to realize we were not all together.
“Where’s Framer?”
“Out there,” Ramirez said. “The biologist in him got the upper hand, and he’s out there examining our defunct friend.”
“But you said the wings were still thrashing,” I yelled, leaping from the couch. “That means—”
But the others realized what it meant, too, and we raced through the airlock door in no time at all.
***
WE WERE TOO LATE, OF course. We found the biologist bent over the decapitated gorgon, examining the head with interest. And frozen stiff.
Averting our eyes, we carried Kal back to the ship and buried him next to Flaherty and Janus. More than any of us, Kal had been a scientist, and he couldn’t resist trying to solve the puzzle of the gorgon. Whether he had or not we would never know—but apparently the gorgon’s neural network had been of a low order, low enough to remain functioning for a while after the organism’s death. And there had been enough of a charge left in those deadly eyes to give Framer a freezing blast.
I directed operations from the door of the ship, trying hard not to stare at the upturned gorgon-head. Upton and Morro crept up blindfolded and slipped the gorgon’s head into a thick plasticanvas bag, and zipped up the top. We stuck a “danger—do not open” sign on it.
Medusa had cost us three men, but we had beaten her. We loaded her headless corpse into the deep freeze for Earth’s scientists to puzzle over. It took all five of us to lift the huge thing and stow it away, and we were glad to see the end of it. No more monsters, we thought; the expedition would be restful from here on.
Until the next day, when Ramirez found that Sphinx crouching near the ship—
THE SHADOW OF WINGS
I have often tried, as the stories in this book demonstrate again and again, to depict the alienness of alien beings. There doesn’t seem to be much point in writing stories in which the aliens are pretty much like the people you might meet next week in Chicago or Minneapolis (although Ray Bradbury did do just that, and brilliantly, in The Martian Chronicles—but that was a one-of-a-kind book).
One of my earlier attempts at such a portrayal is offered here, “The Shadow of Wings.” I wrote it in the summer of 1962 and Frederik Pohl published it in If, one of the three science-fiction magazines he was editing then, in his July 1963 issue.
THE CHILDREN CAME RUNNING TOWARDS him, laughing and shouting, up from the lakeside to the spot on the grassy hill where he lay reading; and as Dr. John Donaldson saw what was clutched in the hand of his youngest son, he felt an involuntary tremor of disgust.
“Look, John! Look what Paul caught!” That was his oldest, Joanne. She was nine, a brunette rapidly growing tan on this vacation trip. Behind her came David, eight, fair-haired and lobster-skinned, and in the rear was Paul, the six-year-old, out of breath and gripping in his still pudgy hand a small green frog.
Donaldson shoved his book—Haley, Studies in Morphological Linguistics—to one side and sat up. Paul thrust the frog almost into his face. “I saw it hop, John—and I caught it!” He pantomimed the catch with his free hand.
“I saw him do it,” affirmed David.
The frog’s head projected between thumb and first finger; two skinny webbed feet dangled free at the other end of Paul’s hand, while the middle of the unfortunate batrachian was no doubt being painfully compressed by the small clammy hand. Donaldson felt pleased by Paul’s display of coordination, unusual for a six-year-old. But at the same time he wished the boy would take the poor frog back to the lake and let it go.
“Paul,” he started to say, “you really ought to—”
The direct-wave phone at the far end of the blanket bleeped, indicating that Martha, back at the bungalow, was calling.
“It’s Mommy,” Joanne said. Somehow they had never cared to call her by her first name, as they did him. “See what she wants, John.”
Donaldson sprawled forward and activated the phone.
“Martha?”
“John, there’s a phone call for you from Washington. I told them you were down by the lake, but they say it’s important and they’ll hold on.”
Donaldson frowned. “Who from Washington?”
“Caldwell, he said. Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. Said it was urgent.”
Sighing, Donaldson said, “Okay, I’m corning.”
He looked at Joanne and said, as if she hadn’t heard the conversation at all, “There’s a call for me and I have to go to the cottage to take it. Make sure your brothers don’t go into the water while I’m gone. And see that Paul lets that confounded frog go.”
Picking up his book, he levered himself to his feet and set out for the phone in the bungalow at a brisk trot.
Caldwell’s voice was crisp and efficient and not at all apologetic as he said, “I’m sorry to have to interrupt you during your vacation, Dr. Donaldson. But it’s an urgent matter and they tell us you’re the man who can help us.”
“Perhaps I am. Just exactly what is it you want?”
“Check me if I’m wrong on the background. You’re professor of Linguistics at Columbia, a student of the Kethlani languages and author of a study of Kethlani linguistics published in 2087.”
“Yes, yes, that’s all correct. But—”
“Dr. Donaldson, we’ve captured a live Kethlan. He entered the System in a small ship and one of our patrol vessels grappled him in, ship and all. We’ve got him here in Washington and we want you to come talk to him.”
For an instant Donaldson was too stunned to react. A live Kethlan? That was like saying, We’ve found a live Sumerian, or, We’ve found a live Etruscan.
The Kethlani languages were precise, neat, and utterly dead. At one time in the immeasurable past the Kethlani had visited the Solar System. They had left records of their visit on Mars and Venus, in two languages. One of the languages was translatable, because the Martians had translated it into their own, and the Martian language was still spoken as it had been a hundred thousand years before.
Donaldson had obtained his doctorate with what was hailed as a brilliant Rosetta Stone type analysis of the Kethlani language. But a live Kethlan? Why—
After a moment he realized he was staring stupidly at his unevenly tanned face in the mirror above the phone cabinet, and that the man on the other end of the wire was making impatient noises.
Slowly he said, “I can be in Washington this afternoon, I guess. Give me some time to pack up my things. You won’t want me for long, will you?”
“Until we’re through talking to the Kethlan,” Caldwell said.
“All right,” Donaldson said. “I can take a vacation any time. Kethlani don’t come along that often.”
He hung up and peered at his face in the mirror. He had had curly reddish hair once, but fifteen years of the academic life had worn his forehead bare. His eyes were mild, his nose narrow and unemphatic, his lips thin and pale. As he studied himself, he did not think he looked very impressive. He looked professional. That was to be expected.
“Well?” Martha asked.
Donaldson shrugged. “They captured some kind of alien spaceship with a live one aboard. And it seems I’m the only person who can speak the language. They want me right away.”
“You’re going?”
“Of course. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. You can manage with the children by yourself, can’t you? I mean—”
She smiled faintly, walked around behind him and kneaded the muscle of his sun-reddened back in an affectionate gesture. “I know better than to argue,” she said. “We can take a vacation next year.”
He swivelled his left hand behind his back, caught her hand and squeezed it fondly. He knew she would never object. After all, his happiness was her happiness—and he was never happier than when working in his chosen field. The phone call today would probably lead to all sorts of unwanted and unneeded publicity for him. But it would also bring him academic success, and there was no denying the genuine thrill of finding out how accurate his guesses about Kethlani pronunciation were.
“You’d better go down to the lake and get the children,” he said. “I’ll want to say good-bye before I leave.”
***
THEY HAD THE SHIP LOCKED in a stasis field in the basement of the Bureau of ET Affairs Building, on Constitution Avenue just across from the National Academy of Sciences. The great room looked like nothing so much as a crypt, Donaldson thought as he entered. Beam projectors were mounted around the walls, focusing a golden glow on the ship. Caught in the field, the ship hovered in midair, a slim, strange-looking torpedolike object about forty feet long and ten feet across the thickest space. A tingle rippled up Donaldson’s spine as he saw the Kethlani cursives painted in blue along the hull. He translated them reflexively: Bringer of Friendship.
“That’s how we knew it was a Kethlani ship,” Caldwell said, at his side. He was a small, intense man who hardly reached Donaldson’s shoulder; he was Associate Director of the Bureau, and in his superior’s absence he was running the show.
Donaldson indicated the projectors. “How come the gadgetry? Couldn’t you just sit the ship on the floor instead of floating it that way?”
“That ship’s heavy,” Caldwell said. “Might crack the floor. Anyway, it’s easier to maneuver this way. We can raise or lower the ship, turn it, float it in or out of the door.”
“I see,” Donaldson said. “And you say there’s a live Kethlan in there?”
Caldwell nodded. He jerked a thumb toward a miniature broadcasting station at the far end of the big room. “We’ve been in contact with him. He talks to us and we talk to him. But we don’t understand a damned bit of it, of course. You want to try?”
Donaldson shook his head up and down in a tense affirmative. Caldwell led him down to the radio set, where an eager-looking young man in military uniform sat making adjustments.
Caldwell said, “This is Dr. Donaldson of Columbia. He wrote the definitive book on Kethlani languages. He wants to talk to our friend in there.”
A microphone was thrust into Donaldson’s hands. He looked at it blankly, then at the pink face of the uniformed man, then at the ship. The inscription was in Kethlani A language, for which Donaldson was grateful. There were two Kethlani languages, highly dissimilar, which he had labeled A and B. He knew his way around in A well enough, but his mastery of Kethlani B was still exceedingly imperfect.
“How do I use this thing?”
“You push the button on the handle, and talk. That’s all. The Kethlan can hear you. Anything he says will be picked up here.” He indicated a tape recorder and a speaker on the table.
Donaldson jabbed down on the button, and, feeling a strange sense of disorientation, uttered two words in greeting in Kethlani A.
