Worlds of IF
February 1965
Vol 15, No.2
Issue 67
p.36-57
50c
Editor Frederik Pohl
February 1965
Vol 15, No.2
Issue 67
p.36-57
50c
Novelette
The creature from space was tiny but dangerous.
In fact, it was a Man!
He had taken refuge deep in a cavern when the fiery object sped across the horizon and dropped straight toward the center of his praying circle. He had watched it settle, its flames fusing rock and clay, watched the cherry red surface of the object turn gray as it cooled.
Until then he had not thought of it as some kind of vehicle bearing a living being. Even when an opening appeared and a creature climbed to the ground his sensation was one of shocked inability to accept the picture his eyes held. He had never seen a living thing so small. The creature was hardly larger than a branch from one of the desert shruhs that surrounded the praying circle.
He lay in the cavern’s darkness, frozen in breathless rigidity, watching with hypnotic fascination as the creature began to move about. He tried to still the excited quivering of his muscles, lest some emanation from them might turn the visitor’s attention toward him; he had no way of knowing what senses the creature possessed. He was known among his Ceremonial Family as The Small One — not yet quite adolescent, and tiny for his age. He blinked hard and suppressed a whimper, fearful that he faced a problem much larger than he could he expected to handle alone.
He could lie hidden in the cave’s darkness and yet see clearly every inch of the fantastic, arid landscape around his prayer circle through a narrow slit in the wall. This gradually helped to quiet his racing blood. It was then that Small One began to sense waves of emotion flowing from the stranger. He thought, “This thing has a mind,” and found some of his fears draining away.
He could begin to think, without too much apprehension, of trying to establish some means of communicating, with the alien being. But suddenly tension returned. The stranger had discovered his cave mouth and was moving toward it.
Frantically Small One concentrated upon learning why the creature seemed bent upon entering that black hole. But the alien mind was murky. Its thoughts took only vague shapes. Small One probed for signs of intended violence, but he found only curiosity, mingled with a confusion of half-formed ideas, among which was a primitive sort of wariness and cautious distrust of dark places.
The stranger crept into the cave. Small One could hear the intruder stumbling about in the gloom.
From the ledge upon which he lay, Small One could watch a rather incomplete exploration back about a hundred feet into the tunnel. By the manner of the visitor’s movement Small One realized that possibly the creature possessed eyes that became_blinded by darkness. He seemed to have no secondary senses to compensate. The stranger came forward toward the light again, and Small One could see that wariness had slipped from him and could sense dimly that a feeling of shelter and safety had taken its place. He thought of letting the stranger know that his probing hands had passed near a Wist, but caution kept Small One lying hidden upon his ledge. He memorized carefully, however, the crevice in which the Wist lay, for when night’s cold swept away day’s blazing desert heat that Wist would lose its torpor. Then it would crawl about in search of flesh it might sting into a living-death paralysis and use as an incubator to receive and nourish its eggs. Before that time older members of The Small 0ne’s Family must come and destroy the Wist.
The stranger was moving again. He started to explore an area of the desert within sight of his ship, examining sparse plant life, stopping at intervals to survey at some length far-away features of landscape through an object he held up before his eyes. Small One guessed it to be some mechanical means for increasing the creature’s powers of vision. On one circle back to his ship the visitor’s feet kicked into A pile of crystals. They were bright bits that The Small One found on occasions shining from stream beds or lying in the rubble of erosion on mesas beyond the great pine forests. The Small One had brought them with him to his vigil, for he was still very young. Even though he had embarked upon the first of the five ceremonial stages of Thinking Alone, which were the steps from childhood to the wisdom of an adult, The Small One had felt afraid to sit in the loneliness of his prayer circle without companionship of his toys. He was ashamed now that this strange being had discovered his secret and would know how much of the baby still lurked within him.
But the stranger seemed wildly excited by the discovery. He laid down a tube-like object which he had carried with great care all this time, scooped up a handful of crystals and rushed with them to relatively cooler air just inside the cave to examine them. He turned them over and over in his hands — ruby red ones, clear glass-like ones which scintillated with sparkling brightness deep in their hearts even in the filtered light of the cavern mouth.
Small One caught from the creature’s mind sensations of tremendous satisfaction. There were vague images of richness, of yellow hair, of a pale throat around which a string of the crystals sparkled — pictures piling up kaleidoscopically, so fast that the patterns became confused and unrecognizable. But that evident joy over some silly toys caused The Small One to feel suddenly a strong bond of kinship. The warmth of desiring understanding and friendliness crept into his mind. Impulsively he moved from his ledge.
Small One was not prepared for such an explosion of terror as that which thundered from the stranger’s mind. The Creature whirled, froze for an instant with face a twisted mask, then sprang backward toward the cavern’s darkness.
Terror lashed at The Small One like uncontrollable whips of energy. He sensed a fearsome image of himself — a gigantic head with blazing green eyes and saber-like teeth — flooding the stranger's mind. He caught impressions of a desire to flee, of a wish for that metal tube which the stranger had laid upon the sands and forgotten in the excitement of finding his crystals, of a hopeless resignation to death.
The ledge upon which The Small One had hidden was directly over the cave’s entrance. He sensed that the mere act of suddenly appearing between the stranger and that doorway enlarged the creature’s fright. To allay this fear The Small One stepped to one side and left the tunnel opening free. Yet the stranger continued to back farther into the cavern depths, wedging himself finally in a crevice where he seemed to feel himself hidden by darkness.
The Small One spent some moments wishing he could have advanced through even one or two more of the stages of Thinking Alone, for he felt very young in the face of this problem. He had never known of a living thing on his world that experienced the terrible fear he saw in this creature huddled in the dark crevice. Perhaps the Wise Ones might have some understanding of it, but such insight would not belong to Small One until the fifth stage.
He felt intuitively that this visitor from the skies possessed a degree of intelligence. He caught vague and completely alien impressions from that mind: the tube lying out on the sands would be used to kill Small One if opportunity presented itself to possess it; much of the fear lying like a mist over the creature’s mind centered in certainty that only moments stood between it and death under the fangs of a wild beast hungering for food.
The idea was so preposterous! The Small One would have laughed aloud if his thoughts had not been flooded with pity for the cowering creature. In his young way he hoped the stranger possessed intelligence of a degree high enough to allow some means of communication to be established between them. He built images of friendship, of peace- ful intention, of helpfulness, of frank curiosity... but faced finally a realization that the pathways through the creature’s mind were clouded. Any pictures that might find their way along them would be dim and possibly unrecognized. He tried then a visual presentation, holding his arms wide in the gesture of welcoming a brother from another Ceremonial Family. When no response followed, he stood tall, in the aloof posture of a strange one waiting politely to be noticed and invited to confer.
He went closer and repeated a these rhythmic signs, but got no response. He began to feel completely helpless and childish in the face of this problem. He thought for a l while of calling for his Family’s Tutor, but he was ashamed to confess that he might still be too young to have been sent out to his first stage of Thinking Alone.
It occurred to Small One that the stranger’s eyes might be of a relatively primitive type that could not receive impressions through darkness, and so he willed light to come into the cave.
The creature’s wild scream at first clear sight of The Small One hurled itself far down passages, deep into the cavern in repeated waves of echoes. Small One had to close his own mind a moment to bring his senses back into harmony, for that cry sliced like a spear into his wide-open ears. He backed away from the crevice so that the stranger might not feel himself imprisoned there. Then he repeated again, for eyes that could now see, the ceremonial greetings he had used in darkness — the aloofness of one wishing to be noticed, the wide-opened arms of welcoming a brother from another Family. But each movement seemed to drive the visitor into a wilder frenzy of fear emotions.
The Small One probed and found that his movements were being misinterpreted as threats. He held himself still for a time, hoping to calm the stranger’s terror. He searched his own mind for some means by which he might establish communication and reassure the creature.
He wished with the self-pity of the very young, for that close, secure contact, that only yesterday had hound his mind in complete unity with his Tutor’s. He wept inside, for he knew that his first step over the threshold toward the Coming of Age had severed that tie forever.
The Small One labored hard at his problem, but the only possibility he could think of was to perform a ritual of ultimate friendship rarely used outside one’s Ceremonial Family, the Ritual of Trust — to lie on his back and wave his feet helplessly in the air, exposing his vulnerable belly.
This he did, over and over, crawling a little closer each time until he could almost feel the creature’s panting breath stir the air between them. He lay quiet then, hoping this being might eventually conquer fear and perform his own proper part of the ritual.
It occurred to The Small One that an alien culture might not have instructed its members in proper responses to the ritual. So he invited the creature in pantomime, showing the routine of making a stabbing motion with empty hands to complete acknowledgement and acceptance of proffered trust. He lay there patiently, repeating the pantomime at intervals. In time The Small 0ne sensed a lessening of the pounding force of fear waves between them and an alert wariness gradually taking their place.
The stranger began making noises — modulated sound which must be a language. Small One concentrated upon storing every syllable in the memory area of his mind. There was a tune and a pattern: “You’re an ugly monster. You could tear me out of this crack Without half trying. Why don’t you? What’s stopping you? What’s with this rolling over on your back like that? When my dog does that he’s either done something he knows I’ll whip him for, or he wants his tummy scratched. Is that what you’re trying? Or do you figure on tricking me into coming out from behind this rock so you can snap me up without having to dig me out? I wouldn’t make a good-sized bite for you. You couldn’t even feel me go down that gullet of yours. If you weren’t so damned big I’d swear you were trying to make friends. Well, nothing doing, Pal; you won’t get me that way. I'm staying right here. It’s your move, Big Boy. What do you intend to do next?”
Small One lay almost breathlessly still, fearful that any further approach might destroy the tentative calm that had settled between them. Time’s pulse beat out the slow, monotonous rhythm of the first sun’s climb to its zenith and into the dawning of the red sun. Small One found his concentration weakening. It became increasingly difficult to hold light within the cavern.
And then a suffusion of joy poured from Small One’s neck glands, for the stranger stretched an arm out from his hiding place.
Modulated sound again came from the creature’s mouth: “Wish I knew what was going around in that great big head of yours, Pal. I can’t stand much more in this crevice; my feet won’t take it. You could get me anyhow. Might as well take a chance and come out. Get it over with. If you were as small as my dog I know what I’d do to that big tummy of yours. All right, Comrade, I’m coming out. Will that start your saliva glands working, or will it make your heart beat in anticipation of a kind word — like Shep’s? Your eyes just don’t look as liquid and loving as his. Wish I knew!”
Then a foot edged from the crevice _ and in a moment the creature stood outside.
Small One did not dare turn his eyes to see better. He feared the thing might dart back into hiding at a movement even that imperceptible. The thing took one more step — and another, until it stood close to The Small One. From the corners of his eyes Small One saw the creature stretch on tip-toe, saw it reach upward toward his belly. But then, instead of an empty-handed stabbing motion which he expected as completion of the offer of Ultimate Friendship, Small One felt the stranger’s fingers scratching and patting. Modulated sound accompanied the action: “There now, what do you say to that, old fellow? You’re a whale of a lot bigger than Shep, but I guess you must be somebody’s pet. How does that feel” Old Boy? Are we friends now?"
But The Small One did not indulge himself too long in surprise reactions to any change this visitor had made in the ceremony. .It was clear that the stranger had not been bred in a society which lived in accordance with civilized customs of The Ceremonial Families. Failure to complete the prescribed ritual properly meant, then, not boorishness but inheritance of a culture different from that of The Families.
The miracle of it struck Small One with such impact that he rose to his full height, assumed the ceremonial pose and began to sing the song of Joyful Brotherhood. He sang for some moments before he realized the mistake he had made.
The stranger had sprung back into the rock crevice and clung there desperately, his body seemingly shaken by the waves of sound as ululations reverberated like a roaring wind through the cavern.
Contrite and worried, Small One ceased his song in the middle of a phrase and dropped quickly to his former position. Exhaustion grasped him with painfully probing fingers, tearing at muscles and mind. He felt helpless and sorry for himself. Abruptly he surrendered to the child that was still within him. He no longer could command enough concentration to keep light in the cave. As darkness drained back into the area Small One could sense the heightening of that pitiful stranger’s fears. And he was too tired and too inexperienced — and still too young — to alleviate them.
It was not until almost time for the setting of the red sun that the stranger ventured again from his refuge. Small One had found in those tedious hours enough rest so that his power of concentration had been renewed, and he was able to will light back into the cavern. The alien seemed to possess no understanding of why light had reappeared. The phenomenon sent the being on a series of movements about the cave. Small One was able to catch enough from the mist of that mind to know the creature’s movements were motivated by a search to find some explanation for the light source.
Small One tried to project pictures of understanding but saw that these only seemed to cause disturbance within the visitor’s mind rather than clarity. He sensed that these pictures seemed like hallucinations to the creature, attributed to some mental aberration brought about by the strangeness of environment.
So Small One ceased temporarily his attempts to communicate and contended himself with following the visitor about. But this was also a source of uneasiness. At frequent intervals the creature would stop and look at Small One and make modulated sound: “Are you stalking me, Monster? Are you waiting for the right moment to pounce?"
And Small One would lie on his back, repeating his offer of the Ritual of Trust, accepting graciously some rather timid scratchings and pats in lieu of the ceremonial stab with empty hands. And the stranger formed vocal sounds almost continuously, while he scratched Small One’s belly, while he searched for the light source — evidently a method of generating within himself courage and a will to carry on. The sounds followed a pattern: “You act like you’re tame, but maybe you just aren’t hungry yet. Is that it, Monster? Are you keeping me in sight until the next meal time? If you’re somebody’s lap dog I’d hate to meet the master. He’d need a whole city lot just to do an about-face.”
Small One stored these sounds in his memory so that later they might be given to the Wise One of his Family and perhaps deciphered. Possibly it might need a conference of the Wise Ones from all the Ceremonial Families before meanings could be found. Small One knew now that this alien thing produced brain pulses much like his own; he knew also that he was the first of his race ever to contact a living intelligence from another planet, a being developed out of a totally different culture. Thoughts of the honor and glory that would come to his Family set his heart to pounding wild rhythms of excitement.
The stranger’s random searching for the light source had now turned into a repeated figure that was gradually leading them along one wall toward the cave’s entrance. Syllables coming from the creature’s mouth were changing character, seemingly more organized and less like incoherent responses to panic. “Look Shep — or Rover — or whatever they call you — don’t follow so close. I don’t like that big mouth of your hanging over my shoulder. If you’ll just not entertain any thoughts about making a meal out of me until I can maneuver around toward that entrance and get outside to my blaster we won’t be on such unequal terms with each other.”
A picture was formed. It came about probably because this creature’s mind focused upon a material object which he visualized imaginatively, but it produced a picture whose pulses passed into Small One’s mind — a dimly lit, flickering thing more shadow than photographic, but clear enough for Small One to understand. The creature’s mind held an image of the little tube he had dropped by the heap of crystals, and desire for it played in ghost-like impressions across the picture.
With no thought of possible consequences, and with child-like generosity of the very young, Small One thought the tube into the stranger’s hands.
“Well, I’ll be damned! I’ll be damned!” The syllables were symbolic of a dumfounded and completely incredulous state of mind; that much Small One could make out.
The creature sat, because surprise seemed to have drawn strength from him. He stared at the tube. He turned it over and over. He repeated the syllables of astonishment and shook his head and stared hard at Small One. Then his shoulders straightened, and he rose with confident manner utterly changed from the frightened watchfulness of just the moment before.
The eyes looked directly at Small One, and sound came with a strong vocal quality. “Well, Comrade, the shoe’s on the other foot now. Can you comprehend that? Watch.”
Small One saw the tube raised and pointed. A huge boulder acros the cave suddenly disintegrated into a puff of pungent vapor. The voice rang triumphantly: “This puts the balance of power back in my hands Do you understand that, Big Boy? There was almost insolent ease in the Way the stranger leaned against the rock wall; grim amusement in the new sounds coming from him.
“Don’t know how this happened Pal, but there’s evidently intelligence on this planet that’s solved the problem of teleportation. Looks like they’ve been keeping track of me. Looks like they just don’t want me to become a meal for you. So Big Boy, watch your step! If you’re capable of understanding what you saw this blaster do to that boulder you saw what will happen to you if you make one move I don’t like Savvy, fellow?”
Small One could sense glee in the stranger’s tones, and so in his childlike way was happy for the creature glad that relief from fear had come to it. The visitor pushed boldly past and headed directly for the cave’s entrance and the late afternoon sunshine outside.
Small One followed to the vehicle which had brought the visitor, and sat patiently on the sand while the creature entered and made vocal sounds to an instrument Small One judged to be some device for communicating with others of the same kind. He caught snatches of the excited inflections: “...looks like we’re on the point of finding a mee with minds like our own, maybe more advanced... haven’t made themselves known yet... obviously friendly... rescued me from some kind of monster that’s sitting outside the scouter right now... put my blaster right smack into my hand... won’t believe this, but they evidently did it by teleportation... safe now to bring the ship in... got us another Earth here, looks like!”
Small One saw the visitor return to the open hatch. He watched him lean against the doorway and listened to lazily confident sounds coming from the creature. “Still here, friend? You must have a lump of curiosity that’s as big as you are. Why don’t you trot off to the folks that own you and bring them back here to talk to me? How about that, feIlow?”
There was pleasant satisfaction in the visitor’s voice, and so Small One spent some moments trying to establish the bond of Sharing of Happiness with the creature. It was a failure. He realized that as yet he could not seem to span the gulf that separated their minds. But a determination was growing within himself to bridge that gap.
First he concentrated upon creating within himself that Silent Moment. He wanted to examine this urge to be the first of his world to establish satisfactory communication with beings from an unknown ball, whirling in its own tight orbit far out across the galaxy. He felt justly proud that the shadowed hand of Chance had chosen him out of his Family — and through him his Family, out of all the Families — to become the first one to receive this gift from space.
He faced the alternatives: relinquish this task to the Old Ones of the Families, or withhold knowledge of visitors from space until he, by himself, could appear before their councils and accept the plaudits from his world for the glory of his Family. He examined critically the impulses which were driving him toward handling the affair by himself, fearful that the decision might be prompted by pride rationalized as usefulness to his Family and to his race. He prayed a moment for humility and truth. Then he settled down with a reasonably clear conscience to the tedious task of setting up communication channels between the alien and himself.
Like the child that he was, he now felt confident enough to move the universes. He began with simple things, projecting into the stranger’s mind images of his Family, their homes, their artifacts, then alternated with more abstract pictures of friendly Knowledge-seeking. He could see, from certain physical responses, that these visions were touching the edges of the stranger’s consciousness, but without meaning. Fragments of unrelated thoughts were intermingled like jackstraws. There was no order of memory storage. Small One’s probing discovered at moments logically arranged sequences of thought and followed their lines gleefully - to find each time their tails drifting off into a limbo of jumbled impressions.
Like the child that he was, Small One became discouraged and fretful.
But those faint shadows of coming maturity, which had caused the Family Tutor to think him ready for the first step of Thinking Alone, held him tenaciously to his purpose. And so they faced each other through the twilight and the darkening purple of dusk, the stranger sitting in the open door of his vehicle, Small One squatting upon the fused sands of his ruined prayer circle. Brooding peace grew with the dimming of the three suns’ afterglow. Cooling desert air carried the sound of the distant songs of the Lhronos. The fluttering of their wings and scratching from their claws made the desert noisy with preparations for bedding down in the burrows in the giant cacti.
Presently the stranger reached for a pouch of dried forage material. He poured some of the chopped bits into a carved wooden receptacle, then struck a small fire, brought these bits to a glow and alternately inhaled and exhaled smoke from them. Small One sensed a relaxing of tensions in the mind he faced and increased the force with which he projected his pictures.
Rewards came slowly at first, in the form of puzzled frowns upon the alien’s forehead. Conceivably they were unrecognized sensations caused by slow awakening of that dormant area of brain Small One was trying to reach. Small One could tell that his thought images were forming there now, fuzzy and distorted, but with increasing clarity and rapidity — almost as well-formed as those in the new-born ones reflected from the Mothers of the Ceremonial Families. Exactly when these pictures drew recognition from the stranger as attempts communicate was not clear to Small One. His first inkling of it came with a repeated sound phrase that must signify incredulous astonishment: “I’ll be damned!”
The creature sat frozen in the doorway of his vehicle and said it many times. The absorption of smoke into the respiratory system was forgotten, and the fire went out in the carved receptacle in his hand.
Small One then began patiently to teach the stranger to form answering pictures, as he had seen nurses do with infants of his Family. He recognised quickly that this being could not yet learn to reach into the minds of others for thought images lying there, nor project those of his own mind. This communication, at least for some time would leave the creature’s mind entirely passive, like the page upon which one wrote. Ideas with even a minimum of the abstract in them could not pass from one mind to the other unless some way were found to picture the abstraction in terms of a concrete, physical object. There was reason to doubt that this being would ever grasp the imagery of the abstract.
But Small One did learn a great deal: This visitor was of a race called by themselves mankind; the home planet was in a solar system possessing only one yellow sun — which struck Small One as a dreary environment with a lack of variety which might account for the unused portions of this man’s brain; he was one of a ship’s crew of ten involved in exploration of planets for possible colonization.
Small One eventually managed to transmit a superficial understanding of the Ceremonial Family, some of its rituals, and the dedication of one’s self to the five stages of exploration of the mind as preparation for maturity. This last Small One could find no way to explain clearly — since he had only just embarked upon his first stage and was, consequently, in the position of a child who can hear the words of his elders but cannot understand them. Yet Small One found the skepticism and ridicule in the man’s mind gradually giving way to wonder.
It was becoming less labor now to converse with this man. Relaxation and peaceful thinking flowed between them, free and bright as star reflections in water. Excitement of discovery had brought the visitor down from his perch in the doorway of his vehicle. Caution was tossed aside. He dropped upon the sands beside Small One and lost himself in tracing figures and outlines to enhance the fuzzy images he was able to form in his mind. Small 0ne wanted to sing for the joy of it.
He remembered the effect his voice had produced upon the visitor during that first meeting in the cave and suppressed the impulse.
Night time’s chill became biting, but the pair were too absorbed to be aware of it. Not until after repeated warnings from Small One’s exploratory sense did he awaken to imminent danger.
It was the Wist, held in a harmless stupor by day’s heat, released when cold followed the vanishing suns across the land. Small One remembered he had seen it in the depths of the cavern when the man’s exploring hands had passed near it, remembered his intention to call an adult of his Family to destroy it before nightfall.
He sprang to his feet, feeling again the helplessness and insecurity of a child lost from his protecting home circle. He had never killed a Wist No one of his age — from any of the Families — had ever dared attempt the feat. But now he knew he must try. There was no escape for the Wist moved faster than any living thing upon his world.
The man sensed desperation in Small One’s sudden leap and was on his feet... and then he saw the spider-like legs of the great predator, scrambling over a hillock into the prayer circle. He reached for his blaster — and realized he had left it lying in the doorway of his scouter. He could never make it. Small One was no longer aware of the man, not even of himself. He felt only the tearing pain of trying to force a concentration of energy greater than he had ever achieved. The Wist came at them across the circle, then slowed... and was suddenly miraculously crumpled upon the sand with the spasms of death contorting its legs.
Many long, slow moments passed before either one moved, the man held in a rigid grip of dumfounded reaction, Small One weak to the point of faintness from the tremendous channeling and focusing through his mind of every bit of energy his chiId’s body possessed. Finally the man stirred, first to recover the blaster from his scouter, and then to approach the dead Wist warily, blaster tube held ready. At length he turned toward Small One. “You — did this? You killed the thing?”
Small One could catch the stranger’s meanings only from his incredulous tones. There were no images forming in the man’s mind — just emotional responses throughout the brain cells, flashing like the wild sparking of a multiple short circuit. Small One tried to reproduce a picture of assent and explanation there, but all the connections laboriously built between them had broken down temporarily. “What weapon did you use? I couldn’t see it. What was it? Where is it?”
Small One attempted again to project an answer into the man’s mind, and found its agitation was still too great. Hoping to calm the man, he sat deliberately with his back to the dead predator. After a time the man joined him, careful, however, to face the Wist. Small One then formed repeated patterns, trying in many ways to explain that he had thought death into the Wist.
And finally, long after the last convulsive jerking had left those great spider-like legs, the man was able to tear his attention from that black heap of death. Night’s heaviness pressed upon the turbulence within him and leveled his mind gradually to quiet where pictures might again take shape, and he understood Small One dimly. “You mean you did nothing to kill that horror lying over there except just the power of thought waves?”
Small One misunderstood the skepticism he found in the stranger’s mind. He felt humble and inadequate because youth had allowed him to do no more than barely blot out the carnivore’s life.
He tried constructing images through which the man could understand that adults of the Families would have performed the task more efficiently... since they could separate the atoms of any structure from each other, and cause them to lose all bonds which held them together and to dart off as free particles. He explained that they could also cause the atoms to travel in a group, as a flock of birds might, and be drawn together into their tightly organized form in some other place.
At this point Small One found pictures in the other’s mind beginning to give way to disjointed worry patterns. The man rose and edged toward his citadel of steel. He resorted to modulated sound again, forgetting that Small One could not clearly catch ideas from it. “You mean just with the power of thought your race can cause the atoms which make up my body, or any other thing, to fly apart? And that I would cease to exist?”
When he finally was able to probe the meanings of these syllables Small One, with pride for which he was immediately ashamed, projected an affirmative answer.
He detected increasing wariness in the alien’s mind, and the next syllables were delivered slowly, with a cautious sound in their inflections. “You mean that any time someone rubs you the wrong way he’s gone —just like that! Kaput! On just a whim! It’s beginning to look to me like a fellow would be much safer playing Russian roulette than having you around.”
Small One, after finding the man’s meanings, shaped images of his Family to show that only after passing through the fifth stage of Thinking Alone did such power come to his people — and that the fifth stage also brought control. He felt the man grasp this idea in a shadowy sort of way. Fear lessened, but a Worried watchfulness remained.
The man climbed to the doorway of his ship and turned to wave. “I’m just a little too shook up to talk any more tonight, Pal. Let’s get some sleep and finish it in daylight... And I hope that mind power of yours can’t penetrate steel.” The scouter’s door clanged shut.
The first moment was one of disappointment for Small One. But the astounding fact remained: he had met a being from an alien world, and they had talked.
A great weariness was settling upon him. It was time to rest, for excitement alone could not have overcome the tremendous energy drain the killing of the Wist had demanded. He stretched himself upon the sand and blissfully opened his ears to the hiss and roar and bursts of noise that constantly passed through the universes from star to far off star. It was his music. Presently he slept like a tired, happy, child.
Morning touched two beings whose minds were refreshed. Communication between them was easier, pictures sharper in the man’s mind.
Much information flowed between them, but as the red sun rose to follow its more brilliant companion across the sky Small One found the man scanning the heavens with increasing frequency. Blank moments came into the visitor’s concentration, and with them a tendency to lapse into his modulated sounds. “We’ll be seeing the big ship pretty soon, Pal. It ought to be just about ready to hit the outer atmosphere by now. Then you’ll be in the middle of a crowd, my friend!”
The man made frequent trips to the instruments through which he kept contact with his kind. And then there was a moment when he jumped from his scouter shouting: “Five minutes more, Big Boy! Look, Pal, I almost forgot. I’ve got kind of used to your looks, but I don’t know what those buzzards will do when they first step out of that ship and see you looming up like a blasted nightmare. Let’s get you back into that cave until I can figure out a way to make them acquainted with you a little more gradually than I had to.”
The meanings were caught with difficulty, for in excitement over imminent arrival of his comrades the man was again not using that area of his brain through which the two had achieved communication. Small One agreeably retired into the cave and found his ledge from Where he could peer through the small crack and watch.
In a few moments the ship appeared, sat on its tail of fire a second, touched down and cooled. Then its company was out and crowding about Small 0ne’s man, with much exchange of their modulated sounds and exploring about the prayer cincle. Finally Small One saw his man gesture toward the cave and start for it with his companions following.
He knew they were coming to see him. He stepped out into the sunshine, sending the newcomers thoughts of welcome.
The entire group stopped as if moved by a common control. Small One saw their hands go unconsciously to blasters at their belts, felt shock pour from their minds. He looked, bewildered, at his man who was still advancing.
“Don’t mind them,” the man was saying. “They’ll get used to you.” And he turned back to his comrades; “Come on, you bums! He won’t hurt you. He just looks like something out of a bad dream. He’s tame as a kitten. Tickle his tummy and he’s your friend for life. Roll over, fellow. Make believe you’re a nice doggie for the people — before they take out for tall timber.”
Small One could catch the man’s meaning only from gestures accompanying his words, but he graciously complied, lying as still as possible while all the newcomers approached one by one to pat and scratch apprehensively, their vocal mechanisms producing syllables: “That’s a nice fellow! Good boy! There, there now, pal!” And Small One’s man laughed all the while, mocking their timidity.
The next few hours proved rather disconsolate for Small One. A bustling activity began among the visitors as soon as introductions had been completed. Small One found communion with his man reduced to an extremely few fuzzy pictures, for constant vocal communication with his own kind seemed to cause the man to use only the more primitive areas of his brain. The man was involved in physical activity, helping his companions to unload materials from their ship.
All the men made wide detours to avoid passing close to Small One, except one they called Doc. He stopped his work frequently to stare intently at Small One. Several times a certain pattern of modulated sound came from Doc. “I’m going to need a specimen for dissection.”
Small One’s man was quick to answer each time. “Take it slow, Doc. This is evidently the intelligent race on the planet. They communicate by projecting images into your mind. I don’t know how far this telepathy thing goes, whether it involves an ability to read thoughts or not, but quit blabbing everything that comes into your mind until we know a little more about these creatures. It just might cause us to face a bad survival situation.”
Later Small One’s man returned and they sat aside to attempt more exchange of knowledge. It became clear gradually that the man wished to see others from this planet, and Small One gleefully sent out the image of happy discovery toward the far-away minds of his Ceremonial Family.
They came a little before the setting of the third sun.
Small One, dreaming with youthful excitement about his part in this memorable event, was made aware of their arrival by sudden action on the part of the nine newcomers from the big ship, who dropped burdens and gathered into a tight group to stand uneasily with hands on blaster butts. Small One’s man came toward him and said, “Get us acquainted with your friends quick and easy, old fellow. Let them know we won’t hurt them unless they try something out of line. Hop to it, Boy!”
Small One understood from inflections what was wanted. He went and sat before the Wise One. Their minds locked, and Small One laid in the Elder’s mind a complete account of the man’s arrival by a flaming vehicle, of the struggle to communicate, of mankind’s susceptibility to fear, of its curious weakness which forced dependence upon material aids for most of its adjustments to life.
Small One became aware of his man’s voice: “Look, fellow! My outfit’s getting pretty nervous with all that mob of nightmares sitting there staring — doing nothing. Let’s get these introductions on the road. Some of those tinhorn buddies of mine have itchy trigger fingers. This silence just doesn’t look good. Are you talking to your friends? We’d better have some action and noise right quick, before something happens. Tell your pals to play doggie and roll over and make like they’re tame so we can all get acquainted. Tell them We won’t hurt them... if they act like good boys.”
Understanding more from inflection and pantomime than he could extract from the man’s mind, Small One tried to project a reassuring picture to the representative of mankind. Then he opened his own mind to the Old One and explained the need for performing the Ritual of Trust with these strangers. He felt immediately the strong pulses of disapproval that surged from every member of his Family. From the Old One came sharp images of rebuke: “You are still a child and can, therefore, be excused for straying from the proper use of Family Ritual. But as a child you must be bound again to your Tutor. You must learn among other things that the Ritual of Trust is not lightly offered outside your own Family. These strangers are welcome. Perhaps we can learn from them; perhaps they can also learn from us. We shall make them welcome.”
Small One tried to place pictures of these thoughts in his man’s mind and found the paths difficult to traverse. Interference was there, both from a partial closing of that section of brain Small One had labored so long to stimulate, and from a confused self-pity the scolding had let loose in Small On~e’s own mind.
Then the Family were rising to their full heights and advancing... and they began to sing the song of Joyful Brotherhood.
The thing happened suddenly, like an explosion. Small One heard his man shouting. He understood enough to recognize it as a warning: “Don’t do it! It’s their welcome! Don’t do it!”
But the hiss of blasters was already cutting through the cries, and members of the Family were dying. Small One knew what would come next. He sprang upon his man and bore him to the ground, sheltering him with his own body and the shield of his own mind.
He tried at the same time to project his knowledge of this alien race to the bewildered survivors of his Family. “They are afraid! The brotherhood song frightens them. Don’t hurt them — let my man explain to them.”
But the Old One had thought death for them.
The nine from the Earth ship existed only as particles lost among the multiple billions of such matter loose in the universe. Only the one man, crushed nearly to suffocation under the tremendous bulk of Small One, was left, gasping to inflate lungs pressed almost to collapse. Crying with helplessness, Small One lifted himself from the prostrate body. He felt the Old One’s mind touch his. The image it carried was compelling. “This man must go with the others.”
Small One cried out in his mind against it. “This man is not evil like his brothers!” He tried to form pictures of the moments of sentiment that he had discovered in his man’s mind. He begged in the name of the Families’ reluctance to destroy intelligence. He pleaded in the name of the mercy which was so strongly imbedded in traditions of the Ceremonial Family, and for himself and the affection which he had developed for this alien thing. His man had taken no part in killing! His man had called out to prevent it!
Adults of the Family had now gathered, and they shut their minds to his while they consulted. Small One’s Tutor was there among them and impressions of great sadness and pity reached Small One from his mind.
And finally the Old One left the circle to convey its decisions. “The man may live. He will be your charge so long as you desire his company. Your Tutor will instruct you in the powers you must have to restrict his movements. And whenever darkness covers our homes he must be caged.”
Small One bowed in the Ritual of Gratefulness and Obedience, but shame clung heavily to his body and spread a mist before his eyes. This was the manner in which a favor was given to a child. He read in the compassionate eyes of his Tutor the story of his failure to be ready for the Five Steps into companionship with adults of the Families.
He turned to the man and presented the council’s decisions, but the creature was dazed, numbed by seeing his companions so suddenly become nothing. Small One cradled the man in his arms and followed with him after the Family to the valley of their homes.
There was no wild grief in the valley that night, for in this civilization of The Families members possessed the patience to soften sorrow into acceptance of inevitability. When Small One laid his man in the cage designated by the Old One and locked its door the volatile child’s part of his mind already visioned the coming days of companionship.
Clang of the door brought the man from his dazed stupor. He screamed at Small One, “What’s this all about? Why are you doing this? I killed nobody! I tried to stop them.”
Small One sat beside the cage and throughout the slow pacing of twilight across the world thought quietness into the man’s resisting mind. And then he projected to the man thoughts of gladness for the reprieve of life that the Family Council had seen fit to grant.
The man seemed inconsolable. Over and over he said, “What’s to become of me? I can’t take that ship back to Earth alone. What am I going to do?”
Small One caught hopelessness in words he could not understand. He thrust bright pictures into that dim area of his man’s brain, fighting to arouse it once more. He built visions of the two of them playing together in the gay abandonment of children. He recognized now that, besides grief for dead companions, the man worried about his own future. And so Small One explained the Old One’s decision minutely, projecting images of toys, of the pet Vakrun frisking and nuzzling around them, then a picture of the Vakrun and the man together, sheltered one in each arm of Small One. Then he made pictures of safety, security and the fun of playing together — the Small One and his two pets.
And then the man was pounding the bars of his cage with fists that quickly became bloody, screaming, “I am not an animal! Let me out of this! I am not an animal!”
The tumult brought the Old One. He thought the man into calmness and to oblivion of sleep, and then he stood looking down at Small One, shaking his shaggy head sadly. Small One felt shame. Apprehension for his man’s future swirled like a black fog through his mind.
Morning found the man dead. He was hanging from a noose of his own fashioning from the bars of his cage.
Adults of the Ceremonial Family came to stand beside Small One and look with him at the pitiful thing, and their minds drew together into council. The Wise One read the patterns of that dead brain and spread their meanings out for the council to see: “This creature belongs to a race which cannot accept inferiority. It must either feel superior or perish. If it cannot achieve superiority through the mind it invents instruments of power to hold others in subjection to it. This is a race like the one which devasted our galaxy in the days of the passing of the Dark Star through our suns. And now that this man has found his way into space there will be more to follow. There will come another time of blackness — unless we can seek them out and destroy them before they infect the galaxy.”
Involuntarily Small One exclaimed aloud against this, for it did not fit into what he had been taught about the Ceremonial Families. Nowhere did it reflect the tolerance and peace and hatred of violence which showed through every ritual he had been taught to perform. At a nod from the Old One the Tutor led Small One away to a quiet place and tried to show him by analogy with the Wist that evil forces must be eliminated before the bright sun of kindness could shine without clouds to mar it.
Eventually Small One was left alone with his grief, the contradictions of adult thinking still unresolved in him. He knew that his people would go out to the empty ship, and that an examination of maps therein and of memory force impressed upon the atoms of their steel hulls would betray Earth’s location.
Impulse said those ships must be destroyed before they were made to give up their secret, so that death would not rain down upon the innocent and unsuspecting world of his man. And the child in Small One leaped to the impulse.
Driven by a love for mankind, transferred through the love for his man, he hurried over the mountain pass and out on the desert toward his praying circle. And the child in him cried because he was not yet old enough to be able to separate those ships into their particles and lose their identities among the whirling motes of matter.
In his mind there was only the pit of the fire death to serve. Like a festering sore in the valley of volcanic cones which lay at the desert’s edge was a pit filled with a yellow stuff belched from the depths of Small One’s world. Powdery after it cooled, it was violently corrosive, reducing most substances to dust, reproducing itself like a virus as long as a bit was left to feed upon.
Small One had nothing adequate to carry the powder except some abandoned shells of the desert crawler which had a temporary resistance to its action. The crying was still in him as he carried two shells of the powder to the big ship and its little scouting brother. He leaned as far inside both hatchways as he could force his body and threw the powder, scattering it as widely over both interiors as he could, throwing the shells after the floating stuff.
Then he sat in his prayer circle to watch through the hours, while the bright metal ships turned to piles of dust.
And he cried with his child’s heart because these ships belonged to his man and would soon become, with their once proud passenger, an unrecognizable part of the soil of his world and a hurt-filled memory.
And then he cried because insight told him that he had made it possible for brothers of his man to find their way to this world some day, perhaps with the power to destroy his Family and his world.
Then the first sharp stings on his hands told him that some of the yellow powder had touched his own flesh in spite of the care used in scattering it.
He sat through the long twilight, through the evening songs of the Lhronos winging to safety of their night-time burrows, wi.th the corrosion slowly turning his own flesh to pulp, and he cried his child’s heart out over the inadequacy of his mind that chance had forced into monumental decisions too soon. He cried over the foolishness of all life which must by its nature spend so many of its brief moments of consciousness in the destruction of life — until some time in the star-burst of a glorious night the fiery disintegration creeping slowly through his body finally touched the center of his own life, and the young voice fell silent forever.