When they were ten feet from the aliens, Laurance halted.
“Go ahead,” he muttered to Bernard. “Communicate with them. Tell them we want to be friends.”
The sociologist took a deep breath. He was ironically conscious that nearly a thousand years of folklore spiraled down to reach the level of reality here and now: this was the moment, first in all recorded history, when Earthman walked up to non-Earthman and offered greeting.
He felt limp. His mind spun. What to say? We are friends. Take us to your leader. Greetings, men of another world!
There was no help for it, he thought. The old cliches had become cliches precisely because they were so damnably valid; what else were you supposed to say when making first contact with nonterrestrials? But Bernard felt self-conscious all the same, at this moment when cliche became history.
He touched his breast and pointed to the sky.
“We are Earthmen,” he said, enunciating each syllable with painstaking crispness. “We come from the sky. We wish to be friends.”
The words, of course, would mean nothing to the aliens, would be no more than meaningless noises. But that was no excuse for not saying the right words, all the same.
He pointed to himself once more, and to the sky. Then, tapping his chest, he said, “I.” He pointed to the aliens, slowly, not wanting to alarm them. “You. I—you. I—you— friends.”
He smiled, wondering as he did so if perhaps the display of bared teeth might be a symbol of fierce challenge to these people. This was far more delicate than the meeting of two hitherto-separate cultures on ancient Earth. At least the same sort of blood flowed in English sea captains and Polynesian chieftain; there was the chance of a common biological ground. Not here. No previously accepted value was worth anything here.
Bernard waited, and behind him eight other earthmen waited, sharing his tension. He stared levelly into the bulging eyes of the foremost blueskin. The aliens had a faintly musty smell; not unpleasant, but intense. Bernard wondered how Earthmen smelled to them.
Cautiously he extended his hand. “Friend,” he said.
There was a long silence. Then, hesitantly, the nearest blueskin lifted his hand, swiveling it upward in that startlingly fluid motion. The alien stared at his hand as if it were not part of him. Bernard glanced quickly at the hand too: it had seven or eight fingers, with a sharply curved thumb. Each finger sprouted an inch-long blue nail.
The alien reached out, and for a fraction of an instant the calloused blue palm touched Bernard’s. Then, quickly, the hand dropped away.
The alien made a sound. It might have been a guttural grunt of defiance—but to Bernard it sounded something like “Vvvrennddt!” and he took the sound at face value. Smiling, he nodded at the alien and repeated: “Friend. I—you. You— I. Friend.”
The repetition came, and this time it was unmistakable. ” Vvvrennddt!” The alien seized Bernard’s outstretched hand and gripped it tightly. Bernard grinned in triumph and satisfaction.
For better or for worse, the first contact had been made.
SEVEN
Within a week, there was communication, of a rough, uncertain sort.
The aliens caught the idea at once. They saw, without any coaxing necessary, that one or the other group was going to have to learn the other’s language, and that the sooner the better. There was never any question of who was to learn whose language. The aliens spoke a vastly inflected tongue that involved variations in pitch, timbre, and intensity; aside from the mere matter of grammatical complexity, it was obvious to both sides that Earthmen would be dislocating their jaws in any attempt to reproduce the click, grunts, whistles, and growls of the alien language. On physiological grounds it was impossible for the Earthmen to learn the alien language; so the aliens would have to learn Terran.
They took to it readily enough. Havig, as the team’s linguist, had charge of the project, and for long hours each day the eight other Earthmen acted out charades to demonstrate Terran verbs. It was sometimes maddening work, especially in heat that hovered at the ninety-degree mark most of the day, but Havig spared no one, least of all himself.
“Get the verbs across and all the rest comes easy,” he said over and over. “Nouns are no trouble—just point to a thing and name it. It’s the verbs we have to teach them first. Especially the abstract verbs.”
The first session lasted nearly six hours. The three blue-skins who seemed to be in charge of the colony squatted in a peculiarly uncomfortable-looking position, heels digging into the backs of their thighs, while Havig jostled the sweating Earthmen around, shouting instructions at them.
“Bend! Bend!” The linguist turned to the aliens, indicated the frantically bending Earthmen, and said, “To bend.”
“Dhu benddh,” repeated the aliens in turn.
It seemed impossible that a language could be learned this way—but the aliens had retentive memories, and Havig approached the job of teaching them as if it were his sacred duty in the cosmos. By the time the sun began to dip toward the low hills behind the colony, several key concepts had been established: to be, to build, to travel. At least, Havig hoped they had been established. It certainly seemed that way; but there was no certainty.
The aliens seemed pleased with their new knowledge. They tapped their bony chests and exclaimed, “I—Norglan. You— Terran.”
“Terran. We—Terrans.”
“Terrans come. Sky. Star.”
Bernard nodded to himself. Much as he disagreed with Havig’s fundamental ideas about ancient cultures—and with his weird Neopuritan ideas about today—he had to admit that the stringbean linguist had done a superb job in his first few hours.
Night was falling, though; and the day’s heat was dwindling rapidly. Evidently this was a zone of dynamic temperature contrasts, with the mercury cycling through a range of fifty or sixty degrees a day.
“Tell them we’ve got to leave,” Laurance said to Havig. “Find out if they have vehicles and can give us a ride back to our ship.”
It took Havig fifteen minutes to get the idea across, with the aid of much body-moving and frustrated arm-gesticulation. The blueskins squatted calmly as Havig performed, repeating words now and then as it suited their fancy. Bernard looked forward dismally to another ten-mile jaunt shipward in cold and darkness. But, finally, a spark of understanding glimmered; one of the blueskins rose to his feet in a quick, anatomically improbable motion, and barked stern orders to a waiting greenie.
Moments later three small vehicles that looked much like landsleds came trundling forward, each driven by a greenskin. The cars were little oval beetles sheathed with what looked like copper, rolling along on three wheels. The blueskin whose command of Terran was most secure pointed to the cars and said, “You. Terrans. Travel.”
The cars were driven by some sort of turboelectric generator, and they seemed to have a top speed of about forty miles an hour. The greenskins drove impassively, never saying a word, simply following in the direction Laurance pointed out to them. When they came to streams, they simply rolled on through like miniature tanks. The trip back to the XV-ftl took less than an hour, even figuring in detours round impassable wooded areas. When the Earthmen stepped out of the little cars, night had fallen. It was terribly quiet, the clamor of daytime life in the forest stilled for now. Bright, unfamiliar constellations speckled the sky with their strange configurations. And a moon was rising—a tiny reddish sliver of rock, probably no more than a hundred miles in diameter, arching up slantwise through the night. It was rising rapidly, almost at a dizzying pace for men accustomed to the more sedate behavior of Earth’s own satellite.