Collected Short Fiction, page 348
He ate. Ship food, packaged synthetics, nourishing and healthfully balanced—and about as tasty as straw briquettes. He ate silently and alone, serving himself; the rest of the men had already had their midday meal.
Four of them were playing cards in the fore cubicle that looked out onto the stars. Kennedy was shocked and amused all at once when he stepped through the unlocked door and saw the four of them, grimy and bearded in their filthy fatigue uniforms, squatting around an empty full-drum playing poker with savage intensity, while five feet away from them all the splendor of the skies lay unveiled.
He had no desire to break into the game, and they ignored him so thoroughly that it was clear he was not invited, so he turned away, smiling. No doubt after you made enough trips, he thought, the naked wonder of space turned dull on you, and poker remained eternally fascinating. The sight of an infinity of blazing suns was finite in its appeal, Kennedy decided. But he himself stared long and eye-strainingly at the sharp blackness outside, broken by the stream of stars and by the distant redness of what he supposed was Mars.
MARS RECEDED. Kennedy thought he caught sight of ringed Saturn later in the day. Hours passed. He had brought a book with him, “The Brothers Karamazov”.
Two days went by, maybe three. He read several hundred pages of Dostievski. He let his beard grow, until stubbly shoots began to itch fiercely; then he shaved it off. Once he started to write a letter to Marge, but didn’t finish it.
Finally, he grew tired of the splendor of the skies. The stars were glorious, but sheer glory palled, at length. He could meditate only so long on the magnitude of space, on the multiplicity of suns, on the strange races that might circle red Antares or bright Capella.
Finally great Jupiter blotted out the sky, and Sizer came by to tell him that the icy crescent shyer he saw faintly against the mighty planet’s bulk was their destination, Ganymede.
Again he strapped into the cradle. A second time Sizer jabbed his arm, and a second time he slept. When he woke, some time later, there was whiteness outside the port—the endless eve-numbing whiteness of the snowfields of Ganymede.
It was day—“day” being a ghostly sort of half-dusk. Ted Kennedy knew enough about the mechanics of Ganymede to be aware that Ganymedean day lasted slightly more than seven Earth days, the length of time it took Ganymede to revolve once about Jupiter—for Ganymede, like Earth’s Moon, kept the same face toward its primary at all times, its day equalling its month.
Jupiter now was a gibbous splinter from dayside, a vast chip of a planet that seemed to be falling toward Ganymede’s bleak surface like a celestial spear. Visible against the big planet’s bulk was the lesser splinter of one of the other Galilean moons—Io, most likely, Kennedy thought.
From his port, nothing was visible but the ugly teeth of broken mountains, bare, tufted with layers of frozen ammonia, misted by swirling methane clouds.
THE SHIP’S audio system barked.
“All hands in suits! Mr. Kennedy, come forward, on the double. We’ve arrived on Ganymede.”
Sizer and one of the crewmen came toward him, swinging the hollow bulk of a spacesuit between them like an eviscerated corpse.
They helped him into it, clamped down the helmet, and switched on his breathing unit and his audio.
Sizer said, “You won’t be in this thing long. Don’t touch any of the gadgets, and try not to sneeze. If you feel your breathing supply going bad, yell and yell fast. Everything clear?”
“Yes,” Kennedy said. He felt warm and humid in the suit; they hadn’t bothered to switch on his air conditioners, or perhaps there weren’t any. He saw men starting down the catwalk in their suits, and he advanced toward the yawning airlock, moving in a stiff, awkward robot-shuffle until he discovered the suit was flexible enough to allow him to walk normally.
He lowered himself through the lock and, with great care, descended the catwalk. He saw a sprawling low dome to his right, housing several slipshod prefabricated buildings. A truck had popped through an airlock in the side of the dome and was heading toward them.
A sharp wind whistled about him; paradoxically, he was sweating stickily inside his suit, but he also sensed the numbing cold that was just a fraction of an inch away from his skin. In the wan daylight, he could see the cold outlines of stars bridging the blue-black sky.
It was a hard, bitter place where the wind mumbled obscenities in your spacesuit’s audio pickup, and the stars glimmered in the daylight. He looked into the distance, wondering if any of the natives were on hand to witness the new arrival, but as far as he could see the landscape was barren and empty.
The truck arrived. Within its sealed, pressurized cab rode, a redbearded man who signalled for them to climb into the back.
The truck turned and headed toward the opening airlock of the Ganymede dome.
10
HE FELT penned in, in the dome. He met the sixteen men who lived there ever since Corporation money and Corporation skill and Corporation spaceships had let man reach Ganymede. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, breathing the sharp, faintly-acrid synthetic atmosphere of the dome, feeling mildly queasy-stomached at the lessened pull of gravity. Ganymede exerted only 81% of Earth’s pull on him; he weighed just about 142 pounds here.
He half-expected to see the big figure of Colony Director Lester Brookman come striding out of the dimness to shake his hand and welcome him to Ganymede, but Brookman was just a myth he had invented one rainy May afternoon. The real head of the Ganymede Outpost was a stubby little man with a bushy gray-flecked beard. His name was Gunther.
Gunther eyed Ted Kennedy stolidly after Kennedy had disencumbered himself of the spacesuit—a small, beady-eyed man with blue shouting-veins standing out on his neck.
He said, “You’re Kennedy?”
“That’s right.”
“Papers say you’ll be here until the ship returns to Earth. That’s three Gannydays from now, a little over three weeks. You’ll be living in Barracks B on the second level; one of the men will show you where your bunk is. There’s to be no smoking anywhere in the dome, at any time. If you have any questions concerning operations here, you’re to ask me. If you’re told by any member of this base that a given area is restricted, you’re not to enter it under any circumstance. Clear?”
“Clear,” Kennedy said. He resented the brusqueness of Gunther’s manner, but perhaps that was what six months or a year of life on a frozen waste of a world did to a man.
“Do you know how to use a spacesuit?”
“No.”
“As expected. You’ll receive instruction starting at 0900 tomorrow. You’ll undergo a daily drill in spacesuit technique, until you’ve mastered its functions. We never know when the dome’s going to crack.”
He said it flatly and quietly, as if he might be saying, We never know when it may start to rain. Kennedy nodded without commenting.
“You’ll be taken on a tour of the area, as soon as you request it, provided there’s a man free to accompany you. Under no circumstances are you to leave the dome alone.”
“When will I get a chance to meet some of the aliens?”
Gunther seemed to look away. “You’ll be allowed to meet the Gannys at such time as we see fit, Mr. Kennedy. Are there any further questions?”
There were, but Kennedy didn’t feel like asking them. He shook his head instead, and Gunther signalled to another member of the Outpost to show him to his room.
It had a hard cot covered with a single sheet, a washstand, a baggage rack. It looked like nothing so much as a cheap hotel room in a rundown section of an old city. It was very Earthlike; there was nothing alien about it, except the view that could be had by peering around the facing barracks-building at the bleak snowfields.
The three Outpost buildings had been prefabricated, of course. A central ventilator system kept the dome and all the rooms within it reasonably fresh. A central power system supplied light and heat; the plumbing in the dome was crude but effective.
A SPACEMAN named Jaeckel drilled him in the use of a spacesuit, showed him how to manipulate the controls that blew his nose and wiped his forehead and ventilated the suit.
Once Ted Kennedy had mastered the suit, they let him go outside the dome, always in the company of an off-duty Outpost man. The snow was thick and firmly packed into ice; bare patches of rock thrust snouts up here and there. A paraffin lake was located half a mile west of the dome—a broad, dull-looking dark body of liquid. Kennedy stood at its shore and peered downward.
“Does anything live in it?”
“Snails and toads and things; the Ganymedean equivalent, of course. Methane-breathers, you know. We see them come hopping up on shore during the big storms.”
“How about fish-equivalents?” Kennedy asked.
“We don’t know. We don’t have any boats and we don’t have any fishing-tackle. Radar says there’s a few shapes moving down at the bottom, but we haven’t had time to find them yet.”
He was taken out to see the vegetation, too: the “forests” of scraggly little waxen bushes, geared to the ammonia-methane respiratory cycle. They were inches high, with thick rigid leaves spread flat to catch as much of the sunlight as they could; even the strongest winds failed to disturb them where they grew along a snow-banked hillside.
After he had seen the compact turbines that powered the outpost, after he had inspected the kitchen and the game room and the little library, there was not much else for Kennedy to see. On the third day he asked Gunther when he’d be allowed to meet the inhabitants of Ganymede; Gunther said irritably, “Soon!”
He spoke with an angular faded-looking man named Engel, a linguist in Corporation employ. Engel was working on the Ganymedean language.
“It’s fairly simple,” he told Kennedy. “The Gannys haven’t developed a written culture, and a language limited to oral transmission doesn’t usually get to be very complex. It starts off as a series of agreed-upon grunts and it generally stays that way. The Gannys we’ve met have a vocabulary of perhaps a thousand active words and a residual vocabulary no bigger than three or four thousand. The language agglutinates—that is, the words pile up. There’s one word for man but instead of having a separate word, like warrior, for the concept man-with-spear their word for warrior is simply man with spear. And the grammar’s ridiculously simple, too—no inflections or declensions, no variation in terms of gender or case. The Gannys are lucky; they aren’t saddled with the confused remnants of the old Indo-Aryan protolanguage the way we are. It’s a terribly simple language.”
“Meaning that they’re terribly simple people?”
ENGEL LAUGHED. “It’s not quite a one-to-one correlation. Matter of fact, they’re damned quick thinkers, and they get along pretty well despite the handicap of such a limited language. It’s a limited world. You don’t need many words on a planet where there’s hardly any seasonal change, and where living conditions remain uniform century in and century out. Uniformly miserable, I mean.”
Kennedy nodded. Engel showed him a mimeographed pamphlet he had prepared, labelled “Notes Toward A Ganymede Etymology and Philology.”
“Mind if I look this over?” Kennedy asked.
Engel shrugged and said, “I guess it’s all right; it can’t do any harm to let you read it.”
Kennedy studied the pamphlet alone in his room that “night,” for lack of any better recreation. He fell asleep with the light on and the book still open, mumbling disjointed Ganny phrases which he hoped followed Engel’s phonetic system; he didn’t even notice it when the room-light cut off, as it did every night at 0100 camptime.
On the fourth day, a tremendous storm swept in and engulfed the area.
Kennedy stood in the yard near the arching curve of the dome, staring out in awe at the fierce torrent of precipitated ammonia that poured down on the plain, giving way finally to feathery clouds of ammonia-crystal snow and then, at last, to silence. The plain was covered with a fresh fall, now, and after it came the irascible wind, sculpturing the new fall into fantastic spires and eddies. In the distance he saw the spaceship still upright, its landing vanes concealed by fresh snow, its dark prow tipped with mounds of white.
And on the fifth day he was again alone in his room when a tattoo of knocks sounded. He slipped Engel’s linguistics-pamphlet under his soggy pillow and opened the door.
Jaeckel stood there. “Gunther sent me to get you. Some aliens are here. They’re waiting outside the dome.”
FOUR OF them went through the lock—Gunther, Engel, Kennedy, and a spaceman named Palmer. Kennedy felt a strange tingle of excitement. These were the beings the Steward & Dinoli agency was training mankind to hate; these were the beings Alf Haugen was gradually building up as enemies of humanity, and he was going to meet them now.
There were three of them, standing in a little group ten feet from the airlock entrance. Naked except for their cloth girdle, noseless, eyes hooded, they looked to Kennedy like aborigines of some bizarre South Sea Island as seen through the eyes of a dream. Their skin, pale white, had a waxy sheen to it. Their mouths were glum sagging semicircles, lipless. At first, Ted Kennedy was surprised that they could bear the murderous cold, standing in calm nudity with no sign of discomfort.
But why the hell shouldn’t they, he thought. This is their world. They breathe its foul, corrosive air and they brush their teeth—if they have teeth—with the high-octane stuff that flows in their lakes and rivers. They probably can’t understand how we can possibly survive in the blazing heat of Earth, and drink that poisonous hydro gen-and-oxygen compound we’re so fond of,
“These three are from the closest tribe,” Gunther said. “They live eleven miles to the east, and come here every seventh Earth-day to talk to us.”
And indeed they were talking; one of them began speaking in a low monotone, addressing his words to Gunther.
Ted Kennedy could only pick out a word here and there; his few hours spent with Engel’s booklet had not made him a master of the language. But the words he picked out interested him greatly.
For the alien seemed to be saying: “. . . once again . . . leave us . . . hatecarryingbeings . . . interfere . . . when . . . you go . . . soon . . .”
Gunther replied with a rapid-fire string of syllables, spoken with such machine-gun intensity that Kennedy could scarcely catch the meaning of a single word. He did pick up ones though; it was the Ganny word for total negation, absolute refusal.
The alien replied: “sadness . . . pain . . . until go . . . sacrilege . . . (forceful but untranslatable verb)”
“Mind if I ask what the conversation’s all about?” Kennedy asked.
Engel blinked. Gunther tightened his lips, then said, “We’re arranging for transportation of supplies to the alien village in exchange for a bit of negotiation for mining rights with the village chief. He’s telling us when the best time of day to make the delivery is.”
Kennedy tried to hide his surprise. Either Gunther had just reeled off a flat lie, or else Kennedy had been completely wrong in his translation of the conversation. It had seemed to him that the aliens had been demanding an Earth evacuation, and that Gunther had been refusing. But perhaps he had been wrong; not even the simplest of languages could be learned in a matter of days.
THE ALIENS were stirring restlessly. The spokesman repeated his original statement twice, then tipped his head back in a kind of ceremonial gesture, leaned forward, and exhaled a white cloud. Ammonia crystals formed briefly on the face-plate of Gunther’s breathing-helmet. The Corporation man replied with a sentence too terse for Kennedy to be able to translate.
Then the aliens nodded their heads and uttered the short disyllable that meant “Farewell”; Kennedy caught it clearly. Automatically the response-word floated up from his memory, and he said it: “Ah-yah.” The other three Earthmen spoke the word at the same time. The aliens turned and gravely stalked away into the whirling wind.
A moment later Gunther whirled and seized Kennedy’s arm tightly with his spacegloved hand. He glared at Kennedy.
“What did you say?” he demanded. “Did I just hear you say a word to that Ganny in his own language? Where did you learn it? Who authorized you to learn Ganny? I could have you shot for this, Kennedy—Agency pull or no Agency pull!”
11
FOR A MOMENT, Ted Kennedy stood frozen, listening to the fierce wind swirl around him, not knowing what to say. By revealing his knowledge of Ganymedean he had committed a major blunder.
“Well?” Gunther demanded. “How come you speak Ganny?”
Engel came to his rescue.
“That’s the only word he knows,” the tall linguist said. “Couple of days ago he was visiting me and when he left I said goodbye to him in Ganny. He wanted to know what I had just said, and I told him. There’s no harm in that, Gunther.”
Uncertainly the outpost chief released his grip on Kennedy’s arm. Kennedy realized Engel was saving his own skin as well as his by the lie; evidently it was out of bounds for him to speak the native tongue.
But he saw his advantage. “Look here, Gunther—I’m not a Corporation man, and I’m only technically under your command. Where do you come off threatening to shoot me for saying goodbye to a Ganny in his own language? I could let Bullard know and he’d bounce you down to tenth level for a stunt like that.”
In a short sharp sentence, Gunther expressed his opinion of Corporation Executive Bullard. Then he said: “Let’s go back into the dome. This is no place to stand around having a chat.”
Without waiting for further discussion he signalled inside to open the lock. Kennedy was more than happy to turn his back on the bleakness of the open Ganymedean field.
They stripped off their spacesuits in silence, and racked them. Gunther said, “Suppose we go to my quarters, Kennedy. We can talk about things there.”
“Should I come too?” Engel asked. “No, you get about your business. And watch out how much classified info you teach to visitors next time, Mr. Engel.”
