21
‘Twenty hours is rather a neutral time for an evening invitation,’ Anovel said deprecatingly. ‘An hour earlier, and one is certain that a meal is included in the invitation; an hour later, and one may assume the necessity of eating before one arrives. Lacking a truly exact knowledge of Earthly etiquette, and realizing that food suitable for my species may be difficult for you to obtain, I brought my own. I trust I don’t offend the code of good manners.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Though getting Regulan food isn’t any problem for me. I’d intended to call the Ark and have a meal sent over. That’s one of the advantages of being in the Bureau.’
‘Not one which most people envy you?’ Anovel suggested dryly, cocking his long head, and I had to chuckle.
I watched with interest as he set out his meal on my table: a number of sandwich-like objects made of a material resembling brown glass and textured like a cracknel biscuit, filled with a creamy substance as yellow as his mane; a globular fruit whose thick white skin was patched with black, which he broke tidily into quarters and dusted with sodium fluoride; and a dish containing a dark green liquid as sluggish as mercury.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is eating a social funtion among your people? I know it is among the Sags and the Ophiuchians.’
‘So far as I know, the sharing of food is characteristic of all advanced species. I remember talking to a member of one of your survey missions on my own world, who suggested it might be because food is such a valuable commodity in a primitive community. Once it’s established that it is for sharing rather than hoarding, the first stage has been passed on the way to a developed society – in which co-operation is indispensable.’
I nodded. ‘Sounds plausible. In our case, it would have been the hunter-family relationship which started the process; at Sigma Sagittarii, that between cultivating and breeding sexes.’
‘Presumably.’ Anovel trapped a thread of yellow as it oozed out of his first sandwich, with a curious sidewise movement of his lower lip. ‘I have occasionally speculated,’ he went on, ‘whether civilization could arise among a species whose nourishment is come by automatically – say, a race subsisting on solar energy and reactive gases. My impression is that it could not, any more than it has done among your plants – or if it did, it would be based on motives incomprehensible to us, and we wouldn’t recognize it as civilization.’
For a moment I was silent. I’d been inclined to regret my spur-of-the-moment invitation before Anovel arrived; then I began to enjoy myself when I discovered what pleasant company he was, and now we’d been chatting happily for an hour and a half. The mention of ‘incomprehensible motives’, however, had cast me back to my original intention: to try and determine an alien’s reaction to Scarlatti’s horrifying behaviour. While I was still pondering, he spoke again. He seemed to have no difficulty in talking with a full mouth.
‘Of course, it might not have to be food which was the essential symbol. It’s a common denominator we take for granted, but you have had – so I’m told – societies on this planet which maintained a fairly high cultural level despite minimal co-operation between the members.’
I thought back to my college sociology courses, and to the pioneering work of twentieth-century anthropologists. ‘Do you mean societies like the Dobu, where the members were insanely suspicious of one another’s intentions?’
‘Yes, I had that example in mind.’ He dipped his flexible lips into the green fluid and drank daintily. ‘Such attitudes are no longer socialized, of course – though I’m afraid they survive in individuals.One person this applies to is Aristide Scarlatti, whose acquaintance I made so briefly and was not unhappy to be deprived of.’
‘You – uh – you view him as atypical?’ I ventured hopefully.
‘If he weren’t, you couldn’t support this weight of technology, could you? I gather it’s a truism in your psychology that maniacs do not combine; their communication is too meagre. In a sense Scarlatti is mad, wouldn’t you agree? Racial loyalty is praiseworthy in itself, but when it’s distorted into talk of divine right and intrinsic superiority it’s – foolish!’
He sounded annoyed, yet at the same time clinically detached, like a doctor frustrated at the poor progress of a mental patient. And yet how could I know whether his tone and manner reflected his true feelings?
Not for the first time today I wondered why we weren’t the ones to travel in Regulan zoo ships. Anovel’s people appeared to have the mental attributes required for the invention of space travel: an interest in other planets and races, acute intelligence, excellent astronomy and astrophysics – not to mention their unique physical qualifications. In spite of which, they seemed content to take advantage of Earth’s starflight monopoly and to permit us to maintain survey missions on their planet.
The official excuse for our mystification at this state of affairs was that we ought not to anthropomorphize. Regulan goals and ideals might differ fundamentally from ours; we might have assigned definitions to them which owing to loss in translation were badly inaccurate. We took it for granted that cultures of a certain type aimed ultimately at interstellar travel – our own, or the Tau Cetians’. Regulans had to be an exception, however well they fitted most of the prime assumptions. Certainly one couldn’t say they hadn’t got to the right stage yet – their culture had a finished quality, being tremendously stable and simple.
Maybe they didn’t care one way or the other.
I finished my own main course and for dessert took a plum from the bowl in the centre of the table. Anovel had already eaten everything he’d brought, leaving neither crumbs nor dregs.
I was turning the egg-shaped yellow fruit round and round in my hand when Anovel pitched me headlong into the situation I’d been postponing ever since he arrived.
‘Forgive me for saying this, Roald, but we’re a direct species. It’s my impression that you are working up to something, and perhaps afraid of offending me if you broach the subject. I assure you any questions you care to ask will be treated quite impersonally.’
I gave him a sour grin. ‘You have a damned good insight into our psychology, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘I wish I had some insight into yours. Frankly, I’ve been wondering how you feel about what Scarlatti did to you.’
‘Contemptuous,’ he answered. His soft mouth quirked into a smile, perched oddly at the bottom of his long blue nose. ‘That is offensive; unfortunately it’s the truth. I don’t, however, bear any resentment against your species for what happened – you’re making a commendable effort to adjust to contact with other races, and an isolated incident is nothing to get annoyed about.’
He leaned dangerously forward on his stool, making a movement like a human stretching of cramped muscles. ‘When one is invulnerable, you know, one can afford to be detached about such things.’
I suggested we leave the table – that stretching indicated he found the stool imperfectly comfortable – and went to the player to select a music-tape. Half-way through the task, I decided I was merely stalling, and if he was in a direct mood I should take advantage of it.
I left the player alone and dropped into a chair facing him; he’d sat down on the floor.
‘This insight you have into the way our minds work … Is it because basically you think the same way as we do, or are you just magnificently good at empathizing with us?’
‘Well, well! I’ve been in and out of your research labs for several months since I came to Earth; before that I was under study at a survey mission at home – and this is the first time anyone asked me that question straight out.’ Again the smile touched his mouth. ‘Maybe your species prefers to form its own opinions. But I’ll give you mine for what it’s worth, though when you eventually reach a view of your own it’ll be more valid for your pattern of thinking.
‘Do our minds work like yours? Yes and no. There’s a difference, but it’s not so much qualitative as quantitative. Let me see if I can illustrate what I mean from your own history …??
? He hesitated: the first time I’d known him to do so.
‘I believe this is an apt parallel,’ he resumed. ‘What distinguishes yourself from a non-technical savage of ten thousand years ago? Mainly a change of viewpoint. When a genius arose in a primitive society, the order of his thinking produced the bow, the wheeled cart, the clay pot. Since then, though there’s been no substantial physical evolution, the perspectives have altered radically. Your savage observed that the arrow flew further than the spear; conclusion, it’s better for hunting. You, faced, with the same situation, might think about kinetics, the lever, the conservation of energy – abstracting to extremely wide general principles. Yet you’re both human beings, with the same mental endowment at birth. To use a metaphor, your mind has acquired a new dimension.
‘Add one further dimension, and you get something new again.’
‘You Regulans have that – extra dimension?’ I was on the edge of my chair with excitement; I was sure this was brand-new information, straightforward though it seemed.
Mane rippling, he shook his head. ‘I said the difference between our races was quantitative as yet. Only when we get to the next stage will we know what its nature is. We do, though, recognize that it exists.’
Groping, I said, ‘Like getting at chemistry from alchemy? You’ve had hints that show there’s an underlying general principle, but you haven’t figured out how to organise your experiments and define it precisely?’
‘Excellent! I wish I’d thought of that comparison myself. But before you ask me to explain what hints we’ve had, I’m afraid Anglic doesn’t contain the referents to convey them.’
I sat in silence for a long time. At last I said, ‘Why have you told me this, Anovel? I’m sure it’s something our survey mission have never picked up, and they’ve been at Regulus since before I was born.’
Anovel shrugged his massive main shoulders. ‘You avoid asking direct questions; you observe and interpret. This is because you are rightly afraid of knowledge you do not completely understand. But you carry that too far – you also refuse to accept directions as to how that knowledge may be safely dealt with. A precaution, over-extended, becomes a superstition – doesn’t it?’
He rose in a single fluid motion and went to retrieve his platter and dish from the table. I jumped up in disappointment – I’d wanted to ask a thousand further questions, including the crucial one about why his species had no star-ships.
‘Must you go?’ I demanded.
‘I’ve given you plenty of food for thought already,’ he said dryly. ‘But don’t worry – I’ve enjoyed our time together and I hope very much that I may return the invitation.’
‘Yes, that would be wonderful,’ I agreed, mind racing.
‘Then come and call on me at the Ark when you get the chance. I’ve promised Inspector Klabund to remain in this neighbourhood while he completes his inquiry into the rocket crash – very gladly, since it means I have more time to wander about and get to know the people of Earth at first hand. And the sponsors of my zoo ship are being paid handsomely for the loss of my time, so they have no complaints.’
He put out his lower right hand, the delicate one, and I shook it warmly. For the first time I was conscious of an alien as a real person, and the feeling was strong enough to make me really like him. I wished everyone could get the chance of meeting Regulans privately – more privately even than by making them the centre of attention at a party. That ought to put an end to aberrations like the Stars Are For Man League!
Directly he’d gone, I crossed to the recorder and taped a summary of what he’d said. I planned to take that tape to the Bureau in the morning and send it without comment to Tinescu. I rather expected it would explode on his desk like a firecracker.
22
The phone went. I reached for the switch and Tinescu’s face appeared in the screen, wearing a grim expression. Maintaining a casual air, I said, ‘Morning, chief. You got the tape I sent up to you?’
‘I just played it. Now we have another problem on our hands.’
‘Which is-?’
‘Who the blazes is Anovel?’
I completely missed the point. Puzzled at how Tinescu could fail to recognize the name, I said, ‘Why, he’s the Regulan who was involved in the rocket crash and —’
‘Roald, for pity’s sake! Do you take me for a moron?’ He shoved back his lank hair with an impatient gesture. ‘What I mean is – what standing does he have? What authority?’
‘I don’t know that he has any at all,’ I said blankly.
‘How I wish I’d done what I wanted to do, and given you the option of crossing to alien contact or getting to hell out of the Bureau … Roald, is it conceivable that you don’t know what you’ve turned up?’ And without giving me the chance to speak, he plunged on. ‘No, of course it’s not – you must have realized, or you wouldn’t have sounded so damned smug on that tape! Let’s take it by slow degrees, and maybe you’ll catch on.’
He took a deep breath. ‘To begin with: what Anovel said sounded pretty simple, hm? So simple, it perhaps crossed your tiny little mind that the survey missions on Regulus Four ought to have worked it out long ago?’
‘Well, yes, it did occur—’
‘But you took it for granted they’d fallen down the way the survey missions fell down at Starhome when they missed the design break-through in building the Algenib. Roald, you can’t equate the two. On the one hand you have a planet of inscrutable aliens, intellectually and physically our unquestionable superiors even if they haven’t any starships of their own, who’ve never squawked at any proposition we put to them but have always kept us politely at a distance. On the other, you have a policy decision to conceal information on a specific subject. We can break down the Star-homers’ secrecy bit by bit, but we’ve always accepted that the Regulans would let us know only what we could deduce from our own observations. And now suddenly, for the first time that I can discover, a Regulan lets his mane down and tells a human being – not even somebody in alien contact, but a casual acquaintance – their own view of the psychology, their racial goals, the lot. Now do you see what I mean when I ask: who the hell is Anovel?’
I did. I was furious with myself for not taking the point earlier. I said, ‘You think he may be more than just a tourist using zoo ship facilities to visit Earth?’
‘More than just a tourist!’ Tinescu went scarlet, and for a second he was speechless with the sheer pressure of words claiming utterance. ‘Roald, if you’d ever had anything to do with Regulans you’d know that those people do nothing without a reason. Nothing. I don’t mean they’re cold and emotionless; simply that they are the nearest thing to a totally rational being we’ve ever come across. I’ve sent your tape around to Indowegiatuk – don’t blame me if she’s in your hair shortly. I’d follow it up myself if Torres’s programme wasn’t claiming the whole of my time, because you may take it from me that if Anovel spoke to you so freely he wasn’t just a private individual airing a private theory. Regulans don’t operate like that! ’
He glared at me accusingly. I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t trying to pump him exactly. I’d decided, long before we got on to that subject, that he’d let me know what he thought fit and nothing more.’
‘Blazes, if that’s what you can turn up without trying I don’t know what you’ve been doing since you joined the Bureau!’
Hastily, I switched to another tack. ‘Ah – you said something about Micky’s programme. How’s it coming on?’
‘If you hadn’t been entertaining our blue friend, you’d have seen the first fruits of it last night. We put out a major documentary on the Algenib. I borrowed a team of top goverment semanticists to weight the commentary for us, and Port Director Rattray somehow conned one of the Starhomer engineer officers into appearing, though we couldn’t make him talk very much. It was a howling success, by all accounts. Seems to have left the audience with a fine glow of vicarious pioneering spirit – sort of half wanting to go and congratulate the Star
homers on their magnificent achievements, half glad that they had to do the job and not us. If we can keep up the standard, we ought to soften our audience into accepting the pill underneath the sugar well within Torres’s twelve-month limit.’
He gave me a final scowl and cut the connexion.
I sat pondering what he’d said for several minutes. What did he think Anovel was? The Regulan counterpart of a survey mission, perhaps? I was perfectly prepared to believe they could rely on a single individual to do work for which we needed a team of dozens of specialists. But at his age – one-sixth of Regulan life-expectancy – he couldn’t be more than a student, surely!
On the other hand … how about our own prodigies? Micky Torres was little older than one-fifth of human life-expectancy, and he’d been one of our chief authorities on Starhomer social evolution since he graduated. He’d published Stars Beckoned at twenty-one; now he was de facto in charge of the biggest mass-education campaign we’d ever launched.
I decided that it would be illuminating to get Anovel and Micky together if the opportunity arose.
The phone went again, and it was Patricia. My heart gave a great leap of delight. She looked so delectable I wanted to climb down the phone and hug her. Then I noticed she was in outdoor kit and her expression was apologetic. My heart sank again.
‘Roald, my sweet, I have bad news. I must cry off our date tonight.’
‘For goodness’ sake, why? You were away yesterday, and—’
‘Darling, I can’t help it. I have to go out and shoot some trouble. The director at the spaceport – what’s his name? Rattee?’
‘Rattray.’
‘That’s him. We were scheduling major precipitation for this area tonight at about twenty, and we have a beautiful fat airstream loading up with moisture over the Pacific algae grounds. Now he comes through and says we mustn’t have rain over the port during the night – he has an ore-freighter limping in from the asteroids and they have to put it down as soon as possible because there’s someone on board with a skull-fracture. So we’ve got to go and spill several million tons of water ahead of schedule. If you’re going outdoors today I’d suggest you take a waterproof in case the clouds are still dripping when they get here.’