She showed and then offered each in turn to the alien, but elicited no response. Borrowing a laser hand weapon, she destroyed both samples. The alien ignored her. She offered it a piece of gold jewelry; it placed it to its lips, grimaced, and flung it back at her. She spent the next two days alternately trying to communicate with the alien and to get it to demonstrate that it could differentiate between raw and refined minerals. If the alien understood or cared, it kept it a secret.
On her fifth day on Beelzebub, Consuela had two crew members construct a miniaturized spaceship and tiny human figurines. She placed them on a board in front of the alien, put tiny pieces of refined material in their hands, and slowly moved them across the board into the ship. The alien looked bored. “Have you any inkling as to whether they are intelligent?” asked Tanayoka at dinner that night. “None whatsoever,” replied Consuela. “Nor do I have an answer to the more important problem of why they attacked the miners when they did.” “More important?” asked Tanayoka.
“Certainly. Even if they are not sentient, I don't wish to see them destroyed. If I can find out what precipitated their attack, perhaps we can avoid provoking them again.” On the sixth day, she had the crew members jerryrig a small smelting plant outside the ship. The alien was taken there, under heavy guard, and allowed to observe. It showed no interest at all. On the seventh day, the alien was escorted to a nearby mountain, one which had not been mined. Consuela, again borrowing a laser weapon, carved a hole three feet above the ground level, exposed some precious minerals in their raw form, and accompanied by the alien and its guards, took the minerals from the site to the ship. There she smelted them as the alien watched, and waited for a reaction. There was none.
After another day of trying to communicate with the alien, Consuela approached Tanayoka. “It's highly unlikely,” she said, “but there is always the possibility, however slight, that you've captured their equivalent of the town idiot. Let's turn it loose and get another one.”
Tanayoka gave the appropriate orders, and three hours later Consuela was attempting to make some
sense out of a new subject. By the dawn of her sixteenth day on Beelzebub, she had released the second alien as well.
“We can bring you a third one if you think it will do any good,” Tanayoka said gently. She shook her head. “If I've done nothing else, I think I've proved that no one is going to communicate with these fellows in the time remaining to me.” “Then you're giving up?”
“Not at all. I'm just going to have to attack the problem from a different angle. Either our two subjects were going out of their way to be uncooperative, or else they don't give a damn about what we do to their mineral wealth. Since the Republic finds the former conclusion untenable, I'm going to have to assume the latter.”
“I'm not quite sure if I follow you, Mrs. Orta,” said Tanayoka. “Since you're not going to stop mining anyway, and since the aliens don't seem to care about mining, I'll have to proceed as if something else precipitated their attack. Now, I'm not as versed in the physical sciences as I should be, but could any of our equipment have emitted a sound, possibly beyond our ability to hear, that could have driven them wild with pain or fury?” “No,” said Tanayoka. “We considered all possible physical causes before we contacted you. There were pungent odors, of course, but they had existed for weeks. There wasn't enough in the way of harmful radiation to have killed an insect. None of the miners went hunting aliens or anything else for sport or meat. We never used a megaphone or microphone in case the volume might startle them. We landed the ship in a totally deserted and desolate area to make sure we didn't damage any life forms.” “The men visited the ship during the first thirty weeks?” asked Consuela. “Yes.”
“Then what,” she said, more to herself than to him, “could they possibly have done differently?” “I wish I knew,'’ said Tanayoka.
“Let me take another look at the site,” said Consuela. They took the groundcar and arrived a few minutes later. She walked around, certain that the answer was staring her in the face if only she could rid herself of her preconceptions long enough to see it. “You seem distressed,” said Tanayoka gently, after some time had elapsed. “I'm just trying to clear my mind,” she said. “You see, there is an enormous tendency on the part of alien psychologists to anthropomorphize, to give human traits and values to aliens who simply don't possess them. I've got to force myself to stop wondering what would makeme want to attack the miners, and start attacking the problem of why an alien would do so.” “I see,” said Tanayoka.
“It could be something so odd or so tiny that a human would completely overlook it,” she continued.
“For example, did the miners build latrines or outhouses or anything else that might be considered a desecration of alien ground?”
“Quite possibly they did,” said Tanayoka. “But I couldn't begin to tell you where. We put everything back in order before we left. We even spent an extra day restoring the mountains.” “Is there anything else they could have done on the final day that they hadn't done before—hold a party, send a radio message to Deluros or Earth, anything?” “Nothing comes to mind,” said Tanayoka. “Then why were they attacked?” she said, more irritated at herself than her companion. “The aliens watched them mine the mountains for half a year. What did they do differently?” “I wish I could help you, Mrs. Orta.”
“So do I,” said Consuela.
She sighed, walked to the groundcar, took one last look at the terrain before returning to the ship— —And then it hit her.
“Curious,” she said.
“What is?”
She shook her head in wonderment. “Of course!” “You know, don't you?” said Tanayoka excitedly. “What was it we did?” “You know, too,” said Consuela. “It's that damned tendency to anthropomorphize again. I should have figured it out two weeks ago.”
“I haven't figured it outyet ,” said Tanayoka. “Won't you please tell me what you've found?” “Just use a simple process of elimination,” said Consuela “What did our miners do when they were ready to move on to the next site? Well, they tried to load the ore onto the ship, but we are forced by necessity to assume that didn't trigger the aliens off.” “Why forced by necessity?”
“Because you and I both know that if that's the reason, it's too damned bad for the aliens, because the Republic is going to keep on extracting what they need from Beelzebub. “Besides, our two sample aliens showed no interest whatever in refined ores. And we know it wasn't the knowledge that the ship would soon be taking off, because they could have had no such knowledge. And we know the miners didn't create any disturbance in their exuberance at completing the first phase of their jobs.”
“But thereis nothing else!” said Tanayoka.
“Yes, there is,” said Consuela. “Look around you, Mr. Tanayoka, and tell me what you see.”
“The mountains.”
“And what did the miners do to the mountains when they were through mining?” “Nothing,” said Tanayoka.
“You still don't see it, do you?” said Consuela with a smile."They restored them." “Of course they did,” said Tanayoka. “Surely you're not implying that...” “Indeed I am,” said Consuela. “It's the only other thing they did that they had not been doing for the thirty weeks that the aliens left them alone.” “But why should putting the land back the way we found it drive them into a frenzy? It doesn't make any sense.”