“What’s the trouble, Vance?” Napier’s eyes were watchful and sympathetic. “Arachnid reaction?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t worry — I can feel it too.”
“Arachnid reaction?” Mason leaned forward eagerly. “What’s that?”
“Ask us some other time.”
“No, it’s all right,” Garamond said, glad of the opportunity to talk. “Do you like spiders?”
“I can’t stand them,” Mason replied.
“That’s fairly universal. The revulsion that most people get when they see spiders — arachnids — is so strong and widespread it has led to the theory that arachnids are not native to Earth. We have a sense of kinship, no matter how slight, with all creatures which originated on our own world, and this makes them acceptable to us even when they’re as ugly as sin. But if the arachnid reaction is what some people think it is — loathing for something instinctively identified as of extraterrestrial origin — then we might be in trouble when we make the first contact with an alien race.
“The worry is that they might be intelligent and friendly, even beautiful, and yet might trigger off hate-and-kill reactions in us simply because their shape isn’t already registered in a kind of checklist we inherit with our genes.”
“It’s just an idea, of course.”
“Just an idea,” Garamond agreed.
“What’s the probability of it being right?”
“Virtually zero, in my estimation. I wouldn’t…” Garamond stopped speaking as the car lifted over a slight rise and he saw two bright-hued beings only a few hundred paces ahead. The aliens were a long way out from the perimeter of their city, isolated. He brought the car to a gradual halt.
“I guess… I have a feeling we ought to get out and walk the rest of the way.”
Napier nodded and swung open his door. They got out, paused for a moment in the heat of Orbitsville’s constant noon, and began walking towards the two man-sized but unearthly figures. Mason followed with his scene recorder.
As the distance between them narrowed, Garamond began to discern the shape of the aliens and was relieved to discover he was not afraid of them in spite of the fact that they were unlike anything he had ever imagined. The creatures seemed, at first, to be humanoids wrapped in garments which were covered with large patches of pink, yellow and brown. At closer range, however, the garments proved to be varicoloured fronds which partly concealed complex, asymmetrical bodies. The aliens did not have clearly defined heads — merely regions of greater complexity at the tops of their blunt, forward-leaning trunks. From a wealth of tendrils, cavities and protuberances, the only organs Garamond was able to identify with any certainty were the eyes, which resembled twin cabochons of green bloodstone.
“What are they like?” Napier whispered.
“I don’t know.” Garamond felt a similar need to relate the aliens to something from his past experience. “Painted shrimps?”
He became aware that the reporter had fallen behind, and that he and Napier were now only a few paces from the aliens. Both men stopped walking and stood facing the fantastic creatures, which had not moved nor given any indication of being aware of their approach. Silence descended over the tableau like liquid glass, solidifying around them. The plain became a sun-filled lens and they were at the centre of it, immobilized and voiceless. Psychic pressures built up and became intolerable, and yet there was nothing to do or say.
Garamond’s mind escaped into irrelevancy. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t able to think of anything to say for the benefit of posterity — there’s no way to communicate. No way.
A minute endured like an age, and then another.
“We’ve done our bit,” Napier announced finally. “Let’s go, Vance.”
Garamond turned thankfully and they walked towards Mason, who backed away from them, still holorecording all that was happening. Not until he had reached the car did Garamond look in the direction of the aliens. One of them was moving away towards its city with a complicated ungainly gait; the other was standing exactly where they had left it.
“I’ll drive back,” Napier said, climbing into the car first and experimenting with the simplified controls while the others were taking their seats. He got the vehicle moving, swung it round and set off up the hill at an oblique angle. “We’ll go the long way round in case we run into a crowd following our tracks out.”
Garamond nodded, his thoughts still wholly absorbed by the two creatures on the plain. “There was no arachnid reaction — I suppose that’s something we can feel good about — but I felt totally inadequate. There was no point to it at all. I can’t see us and them ever relating or interacting.”
“I don’t know about relating, Vance, but there’s going to be plenty of interacting.” Napier pointed out through the windshield to the left, where the curve of the hill was falling away to reveal new expanses of prairie. The pale blue buildings of the alien city, instead of thinning out, were spread across the fresh vistas of grassland like flowers in a meadow, seemingly going on for ever.
Mason whistled and raised his recorder. “Do you think it makes a circle outside the hills? Right round our base?”
“It looks that way to me. They must have been here a long time…” Napier allowed his words to tail off, but Garamond knew at once what he was thinking.
Liz Lindstrom had brought a third of a million settlers with her on the very first load, and the big ships would soon be bringing land-hungry humans in batches of a full million or more. Interaction between the two races was bound to take place in the near future, and on a very large scale.
eleven
Rumours of massacre came within a month.
There had. been a short-term lull while the shallow circular basin centred on Beachhead City absorbed the first waves of settlers. During this brief respite a handful of External Affairs representatives arrived, aware of their inadequacy, and ruled that no humans were to go within five kilometres of the alien community until negotiations had been completed for a corridor through to the free territory beyond. A number of factors combined against their efficacy, however. The Government men had been late on the scene, no broadcasting media were available to them, and — most important — there was a widespread feeling among the settlers that attempting diplomatic communication with the Clowns, as they had been unofficially named, would be an exercise in futility.
At first the bright-hued aliens had been approached with caution and respect, then it was learned that they possessed no machines beyond the simplest farming implements. Even their houses were woven from a kind of cellulose rope extruded from their own bodies in roughly the same way that a spider produces its web. When it was further discovered that the Clowns were mute, the assumption of their intelligence was called into question by many of the human settlers. One theory advanced was that they were degenerate descendants of the race which had built the fortifications around the Beachhead City aperture; another that they were little more than domestic animals which had outlived their masters and developed a quasiculture of their own.
Garamond was disturbed by the attitude implicit in the theories, partly because it was a catalyst for certain changes which were taking place in the Earth settlers. The subtle loosening of discipline he had noticed among his own men within minutes of their setting foot on Orbitsville had its counterpart among the immigrants in the form of a growing disregard for authority. Men whose lives had been closely controlled in the tight, compacted society of Earth now regarded themselves as potential owners of continents and were impatient for their new status. All they had to do to transform themselves from clerks to kings was to load up the vehicles provided by the Starflight workshops and set out on their golden journeys. The only directive was that they should travel far, because it was obvious that the further a man went when fanning out from Beachhead City the more land would be available to him.