Then a third man (might as well call them “men,” Jackson decided) stepped in front of the belligerent two. This one was older. He spoke rapidly. He gestured. The two with the knives looked.
“That’s right,” Jackson said encouragingly. “Take a good look. Heap big spaceship. Plenty strong medicine. Vehicle of great power, fabricated by a real advanced technology. Sort of makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”
It did.
The aliens had stopped; and if not thinking, they were at least doing a great deal of talking. They pointed at the ship, then back at their city.
“You’re getting the idea,” Jackson told them. “Power speaks a universal language, eh, cousins?”
He had been witness to many of these scenes on many different planets. He could nearly write their dialogue for them. It usually went like this:
Intruder lands in outlandish space vehicle, thereby eliciting (1) curiosity, (2) fear, and (3) hostility. After some minutes of awed contemplation, one autochthon usually says to his friend: “Hey, that damned metal thing packs one hell of a lot of power.”
“You’re right, Herbie,” his friend Fred, the second autochthon, replies.
“You bet I’m right,” Herbie says. “And, hell, with that much power and technology and stuff, this son-of-a-gun could like enslave us. I mean he really could.”
“You’ve hit it, Herbie, that’s just exactly what could happen.”
“So what I say,” Herbie continues, “I say, let’s not take any risks. I mean, sure, he looks friendly enough, but he’s just got too damned much power, and that’s not right. And right now is the best chance we’ll ever get to take him on account of he’s just standing there waiting for like an ovation or something. So let’s put this bastard out of his misery, and then we can talk the whole thing over and see how it stacks up situationwise.”
“By Jesus, I’m with you!” cries Fred. Others signify their assent.
“Good for you, lads,” cries Herbie. “Let’s wade in and take this alien joker like now!”
So they start to make their move; but suddenly, at the last second, Old Doc (the third autochthon) intervenes, saying, “Hold it a minute, boys, we can’t do it like that. For one thing, we got laws around here—”
“To hell with that,” says Fred (a born troublemaker and somewhat simple to boot).
“—and aside from the laws, it would be just too damned dangerous for us.”
“Me ’n’ Fred here ain’t scared,” says valiant Herb. “Maybe you better go take in a movie or something, Doc. Us guys’ll handle this.”
“I was not referring to a short-range personal danger,” Old Doc says scornfully. “What I fear is the destruction of our city, the slaughter of our loved ones, and the annihilation of our culture.”
Herb and Fred stop. “What you talking about. Doc? He’s just one stinking alien; you push a knife in his guts, he’ll bleed like anyone else.”
“Fools! Schlemiels!” thunders wise Old Doc. “Of course, you can kill him! But what happens after that?”
“Huh?” says Fred, squinting his china-blue pop eyes.
“Idiots! Cochons! You think this is the only spaceship these aliens got? You think they don’t even know whereabouts this guy has gone? Man, you gotta assume they got plenty more ships where this one came from, and you gotta also assume that they’ll be damned mad if this ship doesn’t show up when it’s supposed to, and you gotta assume that when these aliens learn the score, they’re gonna be damned sore and buzz back here and stomp on everything and everybody.”
“How come I gotta assume that?” asks feeble-witted Fred.
“’Cause it’s what you’d do in a deal like that, right?”
“I guess maybe I would at that,” says Fred with a sheepish grin. “Yeah, I just might do that little thing. But look, maybe they wouldn’t.”
“Maybe, maybe,” mimics wise Old Doc. “Well, baby, we can’t risk the whole ball game on a goddamned maybe. We can’t afford to kill this alien joker on the chance that maybe his people wouldn’t do what any reasonable-minded guy would do, which is, namely, to blow us all to hell.”
“Well, I suppose we maybe can’t,” Herbie says. “But Doc, what can we do?”
“Just wait and see what he wants.”
2
A scene very much like that, according to reliable reconstruction, had been enacted at least thirty or forty times. It usually resulted in a policy of wait and see. Occasionally, the contactor from Earth was killed before wise counsel could prevail; but Jackson was paid to take risks like that.
Whenever the contactor was killed, retribution followed with swift and terrible inevitability. Also with regret, of course, because Earth was an extremely civilized place and accustomed to living within the law. No civilized, law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don’t like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished; everybody knows that. But it still doesn’t feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man’s entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote.
Fortunately, there was never much occasion for that sort of mess. Aliens usually caught on pretty fast. Despite the language barrier, aliens learned that you simply don’t kill Earthmen.
And then, later, bit by bit, they learned all the rest.
The hotheads had sheathed their knives. Everybody was smiling except Jackson, who was grinning like a hyena. The aliens were making graceful arm and leg motions, probably of welcome.
“Well, that’s real nice,” Jackson said, making a few graceful gestures of his own. “Makes me feel real to-home. And now, suppose you take me to your leader, show me the town, and all that jazz. Then I’ll set myself down and figure out that lingo of yours, and we’ll have a little talk. And after that, everything will proceed splendidly. En avant!”
So saying, Jackson stepped out at a brisk pace in the direction of the city. After a brief hesitation, his newfound friends fell into step behind him.
Everything was moving according to plan.
Jackson, like all the other contactors, was a polyglot of singular capabilities. As basic equipment, he had an eidetic memory and an extremely discriminating ear. More important, he possessed a startling aptitude for language and an uncanny intuition for meaning. When Jackson came up against an incomprehensible tongue, he picked out, quickly and unerringly, the significant units, the fundamental building blocks of the language. Quite without effort he sorted vocalizations into cognitive, volitional, and emotional aspects of speech. Grammatical elements presented themselves at once to his practiced ear. Prefixes and suffixes were no trouble; word sequence, pitch, and reduplication were no sweat. He didn’t know much about the science of linguistics, but he didn’t need to know. Jackson was a natural. Linguistics had been developed to describe and explain things which he knew intuitively.
He had not yet encountered the language which he could not learn. He never really expected to find one. As he often told his friends in the Forked Tongue Club in New York, “Waal, shukins, there just really ain’t nuthin’ tough about them alien tongues. Leastwise, not the ones I’ve run across. I mean that sincerely. I mean to tell you, boys, that the man who can express himself in Sioux or Khmer ain’t going to encounter too much trouble out there amongst the stars.”