John D. MacDonald
Shadow on the Sand
Chapter I
Mission
They said to Amro, “And now you will learn a new language.”
There was no desire in him to ask them where the language was spoken and why he was to learn it. He permitted himself to speculate but one of the first rules learned by agents of the Center is that no activity is more purposeless than asking questions. All information that you must know is given to you. The proper outlet for zeal is in performance of the assigned duties. And Amro had been a Center agent for five Stradian years.
He knew that he was a good agent — one of the very best. It gave him a quiet pride to think of it. His body was good — as hard and perfect and tireless as though made of metal and leather. Other agents had been able to withstand seven and eight complete facial operations before the flesh and bone began to rebel.
Amro had been given, during his five years, fourteen separate identities and when the surgeons had last examined him they had reported no signs of tissue weariness. When no more operations could be performed it became necessary to resort to the mask-maker’s art and that was never as completely satisfactory.
But there were more than physical requirements. More important than knowing ten silent ways to kill a man with his hands, than being an expert with knife and farris, were the emotional factors. Amro possessed an almost infinite patience, a thorough lack of imagination, straight-line logic and the ability to make a decision in the smallest fraction of a second.
As a case in point there was the affair of Morr, the almost senile member of the appropriations council. Morr was important only because he sat at council next to Strell, the man most thoroughly suspicious of the Center, the man determined to emasculate the Center through forcing a full scale investigation. Strell, being a shrewd man, had himself guarded every moment with his guard detail screened for substitutions several times each day.
The Center had picked Morr up after Amro had spent two months being prepared, fattened, softened, altered. During the two months Amro had learned to imitate to perfection Morr’s every movement. As Morr, Amro sat in on eleven council meetings before the chance came. It had to be done in such a way that it would not point to the Center.
Amro did it without awakening the suspicion of the two guards who watched the murder.
As the eleventh meeting ended Amro stood up at the same moment as Strell and blundered clumsily into him. To the watchers, Strell appeared to trip and fall toward the table. His bulk screened the quick movement of Amro’s arm as he grasped the front of Strell’s tunic and, with savage force, pulled and guided the fall so that the bridge of Strell’s nose hit the sharp table edge.
That evening the drugged Morr was given the final details. He was placed in his own chambers to awaken the next morning with a complete “memory” of all that had happened...
So now they said, “You will learn a new language.”
He was taken to one of the small windowless rooms where the equipment awaited him. There were a couch, a food terminal, sanitation facilities, an exercise rack. He shut the door behind him. When he was fluent in the language he would open the door. It was that simple.
He selected a spindle at random and threaded it into the instructor. Amro was pleased to hear that, unlike the pipings of the kalla or the metallic clatterings of the Shen, this tongue would not require the use of one of the converters plus ear filters.
The spindles showed no signs of wear. He could not recall ever having heard the language spoken. He shrugged, attached the basic spindle sequence, took two of the learning acceleration tablets, stretched out on the couch and pressed the wall switch.
By the tenth day he was sufficiently fluent to request written texts. He was told that none had been prepared but that he would be given tests prepared by the people in question.
They arrived and they were most curious. He sat on the couch and handled them. In the first place they were printed on a white fragile substance which was new to him. And after many hours of intense effort, aided by captions under many pictures in the texts, he managed to identify specific words he had learned — discovering in the process that the writing was from left to right in a horizontal pattern, continuous as the white sheets were turned from right to left.
In four more days he was reading rapidly, absorbing facts on the mores, folkways, artifacts, ethics and social structure of a large and almost completely alien culture. Almost was the word to use because the aliens as shown in the pictures could just as well have been Stradians. Of course, because the other items in the pictures furnished no points of reference, they could be as tall as his little finger or three times his height, but he had the belief that they were like himself.
He was able to prove this when he found in one of the texts a measurement which he believed to be a universal constant, a table of displacements of metals. He had proven to his own satisfaction that the “gold” of which they spoke was identical to Stradian eronal. With a common starting point he was able to convert their units of linear measurement into Stradian tables and prove that they were indeed identical in height to the average Stradian.
This information caused a small germ of excitement to grow in him. Stradian statistical biologists had proved to everyone’s satisfaction that the probability of identical races springing up on two planets was almost zero — identical, that is, in physical form.
The statistical psychologists had proved that any dominant high-order intelligent species, no matter what the physical form involved, will share with all other dominant species the common factors of power-hunger, ruthlessness, egocentricity and thalamic reasoning. The bitter warfare antedating the colonization of the home planets of the Kalla and the Shen were cases in point.
Thus he read with the idea of comparing similarities and dissimilarities between the men of Strada and the men of this place called Earth.
And he found that the Earthmen were weak. Weak physically in that it was a rare Earthman who could lift more than his own weight. Weak emotionally in that there were societies and organizations dedicated to the aim of stamping out “cruelty” to lesser organisms. Amro struggled with the word “cruelty” for a long time and in the end he was not completely satisfied with his own interpretation.
Their society had social weaknesses in that conflicts of ideology were permitted to be aired and voted upon by everyone, thus dragging out over many years a conflict that could have been decided in the very beginning by a few discreet assassinations. Their whole society gave him a feeling of disorderliness — of vagueness. It seemed full of cross-currents, hints, unwritten suggestions. There were many theologies but their amorphous connotations were beyond him.
In the back of one text he found maps of their world. The ratio of ocean to land was not unlike Strada — in fact he seemed to be able to detect similarities in the continental outlines. Like Strada Earth had polar caps and a tropical belt around the widest circumference. This appeared to refute the statistical geographers who had long since adopted as a basic concept the rule of planetary dissimilarity.
Technologically they were backward even though their dominant cultures were technistic. This did not surprise him. On the planet itself their warring groups were separated on a “geographical” and a “linguistic” basis rather than on a social basis as on Strada. Such rigid compartmentalization would, of course, mean a serious drag on scientific advancement.
They were in the eight-minus level, apparently. Later, when he found a reference to the manufacture of radioactives, he quickly revised it to six-minus, knowing that these people were on the verge of Newtonian sub-light space travel.