The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (3 page)

He returned a while later, or so I thought. He was not wearing the thought-converter. That surprised me. Alaree knew the helmet was a valuable item, and he had been cautioned to take good care of it.

I sent a man inside to get another helmet for him. I put it on him—this time tucking that wayward ear underneath properly—and looked at him sternly. “Where’s the other helmet, Alaree?”

“We do not have it,” he said.

“
We?
No more I?”

“We,” Alaree said. And as he spoke, the leaves parted and another alien—Alaree’s very double—stepped out into the clearing.

Then I saw the helmet on the newcomer’s head, and realized that he was no double. He was Alaree, and the other alien was the stranger!

“I see you’re here already,” the alien I knew as Alaree said to the other. They were standing about ten feet apart, staring coldly at each other. I glanced at both of them quickly. They might have been identical twins.

“We are here,” the stranger said, “We have come to get you.”

I took a step backward, sensing that some incomprehensible drama was being played out here among these aliens.

“What’s going on, Alaree?” I asked.

“We are having difficulties,” both of them said, as one.

Both
of them.

I turned to the second alien. “What’s your name?”

“Alaree,” he said.

“Are you all named that?” I demanded.

“We are Alaree,” Alaree Two said.

“They are Alaree,” Alaree One said. “And
I
am Alaree.
I
.”

At that moment there was a disturbance in the shrubbery, and half a dozen more aliens stepped through and confronted Alarees One and Two.

“We are Alaree,” Alaree Two repeated exasperatingly. He made a sweeping gesture that embraced all seven of the aliens to my left, but pointedly excluded Alaree One at my right.

“Are we—you coming with we—us?” Alaree Two demanded. I heard the six others say something in approximately the same tone of voice, but since they weren’t wearing converters, their words were only scrambled nonsense to me.

Alaree One looked at me in pain, then back at his seven fellows. I saw an expression of sheer terror in the small creature’s eyes. He turned to me.

“I must go with them,” he said softly. He was quivering with fear.

Without a further word, the eight marched silently away. I stood there, shaking my head in bewilderment.

We were scheduled to leave the next day. I said nothing to my crew about the bizarre incident of the evening before, but noted in my log that the native life of the planet would require careful study at some future time.

Blast-off was slated for 1100. As the crew moved efficiently through the ship, securing things, packing, preparing for departure, I sensed a general feeling of jubilation. They were happy to be on their way again, and I didn’t blame them.

About half an hour before blast-off, Willendorf came to me. “Sir, Alaree’s down below,” he said. “He wants to come up and see you. He looks very troubled, sir.”

I frowned. Probably the alien still wanted to go back with us. Well, it was cruel to deny the request, but I wasn’t going to risk that fine. I intended to make that clear to him.

“Send him up,” I said.

A moment later Alaree came stumbling into my cabin. Before he could speak I said, “I told you before—I can’t take you off this planet, Alaree. I’m sorry about it.”

He looked up pitiably and said, “You mustn’t leave me!” He was trembling uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong, Alaree?” I asked.

He stared intensely at me for a long moment, mastering himself, trying to arrange what he wanted to tell me into a coherent argument. Finally he said, “They would not take me back. I am alone.”

“Who wouldn’t take you back, Alaree?”

“
They.
Last night, Alaree came for me, to take me back. They are a
we
—an entity, a oneness. You cannot understand. When they saw what I had become, they cast me out.”

I shook my head dizzily. “What do you mean?”

“You taught me…to become an
I
,” he said, moistening his lips. “Before, I was part of
we—they
. I learned your ways from you, and now there is no room for me here. They have cut me off. When the final break comes, I will not be able to stay on this world.”

Sweat was pouring down his pale face, and he was breathing  harder. “It will come any minute. They are gathering strength for  it. But I am
I
,” he said triumphantly. He shook violently and gasped  for breath.

I understood now. They were
all
Alaree. It was one planet-wide, self-aware corporate entity, composed of any number of individual cells. He had been one of them—but he had learned independence.

Then he had returned to the group—but he carried with him the seeds of individualism, the deadly, contagious germ we Terrans spread everywhere. Individualism would be fatal to such a group mind; it was cutting him loose to save itself. Just as diseased cells must be excised for the good of the entire body, Alaree was inexorably being cut off from his fellows lest he destroy the bond that made them one.

I watched him as he sobbed weakly on my acceleration cradle. “They…are…cutting…me…loose…
now
!”

He writhed horribly for a brief moment, and then relaxed and sat up on the edge of the cradle. “It is over,” he said calmly. “I am fully independent.”

I saw a stark
aloneness
reflected in his eyes, and behind that a gentle indictment of me for having done this to him. This world, I realized, was no place for Earthmen. What had happened was our fault—mine more than anyone else’s.

“Will you take me with you?” he asked again. “If I stay here, Alaree will kill me.”

I scowled wretchedly for a moment, fighting a brief battle within myself, and then I looked up. There was only one thing to do—and I was sure, once I explained on Earth, that I would not suffer for it.

I took his hand. It was cold and limp; whatever he had just been through, it must have been hell. “Yes,” I said softly. “You can come with us.”

And so Alaree joined the crew of the
Aaron Burr.
I told them about it just before blast-off, and they welcomed him aboard in traditional manner.

We gave the sad-eyed little alien a cabin near the cargo hold, and he established himself quite comfortably. He had no personal possessions—“It is not
their
custom” he said—and promised that he’d keep the cabin clean.

He had brought with him a rough-edged, violet fruit that he said was his staple food. I turned it over to Kechnie for synthesizing, and we blasted off.

Alaree was right at home aboard the
Burr
. He spent much time with me—asking questions.

“Tell me about Earth,” Alaree would ask. The alien wanted desperately to know what sort of a world he was going to.

He would listen gravely while I explained. I told him of cities and wars and spaceships, and he nodded sagely, trying to fit the concepts into a mind only newly liberated from the gestalt. I knew he could comprehend only a fraction of what I was saying, but I enjoyed telling him. It made me feel as if Earth were coming closer that much faster, simply to talk about it.

And he went around begging everyone, “Tell me about Earth.” They enjoyed telling him, too—for a while.

Then it began to get a little tiresome. We had grown accustomed to Alaree’s presence on the ship, flopping around the corridors doing whatever menial job he had been assigned to. But—although I had told the men why I had brought him with us, and though we all pitied the poor lonely creature and admired his struggle to survive as an individual entity—we were slowly coming to the realization that Alaree was something of a nuisance aboard ship.

Especially later, when he began to change.

Willendorf noticed it first, twelve days out from Alaree’s planet. “Alaree’s been acting pretty strange these days, sir,” he told me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Haven’t you spotted it, sir? He’s been moping around like a lost soul—very quiet and withdrawn, like.”

“Is he eating well?”

Willendorf chuckled loudly. “I’ll say he is! Kechnie made up some synthetics based on the piece of fruit he brought with him, and he’s been stuffing himself wildly. He’s gained ten pounds since he came on ship. No, it’s not lack of food!”

“I guess not,” I said. “Keep an eye on him, will you? I feel responsible for his being here, and I want him to come through the voyage in good health.”

After that, I began to observe Alaree more closely myself, and I detected the change in his personality too. He was no longer the cheerful, childlike being who delighted in pouring out questions in endless profusion. Now he was moody, silent, always brooding, and hard to approach.

On the sixteenth day out—and by now I was worried seriously about him—a new manifestation appeared. I was in the hallway, heading from my cabin to the chartroom, when Alaree stepped out of an alcove. He reached up, grasped my uniform lapel, and, maintaining his silence, drew my head down and stared pleadingly into my eyes.

Too astonished to say anything, I returned his gaze for nearly thirty seconds. I peered into his transparent pupils, wondering what he was up to. After a good while had passed, he released me, and I saw something like a tear trickle down his cheek.

“What’s the trouble, Alaree?”

He shook his head mournfully and shuffled away.

I got reports from the crewmen that day and next that he had been doing this regularly for the past eighteen hours—waylaying crewmen, staring long and deep at them as if trying to express some unspeakable sadness, and walking away. He had approached almost everyone on the ship.

I wondered now how wise it had been to allow an extraterrestrial, no matter how friendly, to enter the ship. There was no telling what this latest action meant.

I started to form a theory. I suspected what he was aiming at, and the realization chilled me. But once I reached my conclusion, there was nothing I could do but wait for confirmation.

On the nineteenth day, Alaree again met me in the corridor. This time our encounter was more brief. He plucked me by the sleeve, shook his head sadly and shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.

That night, he took to his cabin, and by morning he was dead. He had apparently died peacefully in his sleep.

* * * *

“I guess we’ll never understand him, poor fellow,” Willendorf said, after we had committed the body to space. “You think he had too much to eat, sir?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that. He was lonely, that’s all. He didn’t belong here, among us.”

“But you said he had broken away from that group-mind,” Willendorf objected.

I shook my head. “Not really. That group-mind arose out of some deep psychological and physiological needs of those people. You can’t just declare your independence and be able to exist as an individual from then on if you’re part of that group-entity. Alaree had grasped the concept intellectually, to some extent, but he wasn’t suited for life away from the corporate mind, no matter how much he wanted to be.”

“He couldn’t stand alone?”

“Not after his people had evolved that gestalt setup. He learned independence from us,” I said. “But he couldn’t live with us, really. He needed to be part of a whole. He found out his mistake after he came aboard and tried to remedy things.”

I saw Willendorf pale. “What do you mean, sir?”

“You know what I mean. When he came up to us and stared soulfully into our eyes.
He was trying to form a new gestalt—out of us!
Somehow he was trying to link us together, the way his people had been linked.”

“He couldn’t do it, though,” Willendorf said fervently.

“Of course not. Human beings don’t have whatever need it is that forced those people to merge. He found that out, after a while, when he failed to get anywhere with us.”

“He just couldn’t do it,” Willendorf repeated.

“No. And then he ran out of strength,” I said somberly, feeling the heavy weight of my guilt. “He was like an organ removed from a living body. It can exist for a little while by itself, but not indefinitely. He failed to find a new source of life—and he died.” I stared bitterly at my fingertips.

“What do we call it in my medical report?” asked Ship Surgeon Thomas, who had been silent up till then. “How can we explain what he died from?”

“Call it—
malnutrition
,” I said.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Originally published in
Galaxy Magazine
, November 1958.

It was our first day of recruiting on the planet, and the alien life forms had lined up for hundreds of feet back from my rented office. As I came down the block from the hotel, I could hear and see and smell them with ease.

My three staff men, Auchinleck, Stebbins, and Ludlow, walked shieldwise in front of me. I peered between them to size up the crop. The aliens came in every shape and form, in all colors and textures—and all of them eager for a Corrigan contract. The Galaxy is full of bizarre beings, but there’s barely a species anywhere that can resist the old exhibitionist urge.

“Send them in one at a time,” I told Stebbins. I ducked into the office, took my place back of the desk, and waited for the procession to begin.

The name of the planet was MacTavish IV (if you went by the official Terran listing) or Ghryne (if you called it by what its people were accustomed to calling it). I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. I believe in keeping the locals happy wherever I go.

Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding arrival. Stuff like this:

Want to visit Earth—see the Galaxy’s most glittering and exclusive world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial, there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F. Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until 2937, so don’t miss your chance! Hurry! A life of wonder and riches can be yours!

Broadsides like that, distributed wholesale in half a thousand languages, always bring them running. And the Corrigan Institute really packs in the crowds back on Earth. Why not? It’s the best of its kind, the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the other species of the universe.

The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, “The first applicant is ready to see you, sir.”

“Send him, her, or it in.”

The door opened and a timid-looking life form advanced toward me on nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a big basketball, yellowish green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body. There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones, one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.

His voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. “You are Mr. Corrigan?”

“That’s right.” I reached for a data blank. “Before we begin, I’ll need certain information about—”

“I am a being of Regulus II,” came the grave, booming reply, even before I had picked up the blank. “I need no special care and I am not a fugitive from the law of any world.”

“Your name?”

“Lawrence R. Fitzgerald.”

I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick cough. “Let me have that again, please?”

“Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The R stands for Raymond.”

“Of course, that’s not the name you were born with.”

The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation, remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of an apologetic smile. “My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.”

The little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained. “You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

“I’ll be placed on exhibition at your institute on Earth. You’ll pay for my services, transportation, and expenses. I’ll be required to remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.”

“And the pay will be—ah—fifty dollars Galactic a week, plus expenses and transportation.”

The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping on one side, two on the other. “Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I accept the terms!”

I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into the other office to sign him up.

I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show; the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him didn’t mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran moniker would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get to Earth. My conscience won’t let me really exploit a being, but I don’t believe in throwing money away, either.

The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan’s Planet, four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at anything short of top rate.

Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a handout than a job. If there’s any species we have a real oversupply of, it’s those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn’t even get the handout he was angling for. I don’t approve of begging.

The flow of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right.

It was the isolationism of the late twenty-ninth century that turned me into the successful proprietor of Corrigan’s Institute, after some years as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off bounds for non-terrestrial beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement.

Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down, a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo.

That’s what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is, of course. A zoo. But we don’t go out and hunt for our specimens; we advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth once in his lifetime, and there’s only one way he can do it.

We don’t keep too big an inventory. At last count we had 690 specimens before this trip, representing 298 different intelligent life forms. My goal is at least one member of at least 500 different races. When I reach that, I’ll sit back and let the competition catch up—if it can.

After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed on eleven new specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids, fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks.

It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some four hundred feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn’t see how we could take one on. They’re gentle and likable beings, but their upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.

“One more specimen before lunch,” I told Stebbins, “to make it an even dozen.”

He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long close look at the life form when it came in, and after that I took another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.

He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was tall and extremely thin, with pale-blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look about him. He said, in level Terran accents, “I’m looking for a job with your outfit, Corrigan.”

“There’s been a mistake. We’re interested in non-terrestrials only.”

“I’m a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz XIII.”

I don’t mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line at getting bilked myself. “Look, friend, I’m busy, and I’m not known for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.”

“I’m not panhandling. I’m looking for a job.”

“Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You’re as Earthborn as I am.”

“I’ve never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth,” he said smoothly. “I happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don’t you want me in your circus?”

“No. And it’s not a circus. It’s—”

“A scientific institute. I stand corrected.”

There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on his ear without another word. Instead I played along. “If you’re from such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?”

“I’m not speaking. I’m a telepath—not the kind that reads minds, just the kind that projects. I communicate in symbols that you translate back to colloquial speech.”

“Very clever, Mr. Gorb.” I grinned at him and shook my head. “You spin a good yarn—but for my money, you’re really Sam Jones or Phil Smith from Earth, stranded here and out of cash. You want a free trip back to Earth. No deal. The demand for beings from Wazzenazz XIII is pretty low these days. Zero, in fact. Good-bye, Mr. Gorb.”

He pointed a finger squarely at me and said, “You’re making a big mistake. I’m just what your outfit needs. A representative of a hitherto utterly unknown race identical to humanity in every respect! Look here, examine my teeth. Absolutely like human teeth! And—”

I pulled away from his yawning mouth. “Good-bye, Mr. Gorb,” I repeated.

“All I ask is a contract, Corrigan. It isn’t much. I’ll be a big attraction. I’ll—”

“Good-bye, Mr. Gorb!”

He glowered at me reproachfully for a moment, stood up, and sauntered to the door. “I thought you were a man of acumen, Corrigan. Well, think it over. Maybe you’ll regret your hastiness. I’ll be back to give you another chance.”

He slammed the door and I let my grim expression relax into a smile. This was the best con switch yet—an Earthman posing as an alien to get a job!

But I wasn’t buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness intellectually. There’s no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there’s only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket home.

I didn’t know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.

The first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan, and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds. Hardly had the ’dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him officially.

He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high, and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting gesture, and growled, “I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me immediately to a contract!”

“Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks.”

“You will grant me a contract!”

“Will you please sit down?”

He said sulkily, “I will remain standing.”

“As you prefer.” My desk has a few concealed features which are sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed life forms. My fingers roamed to the mesh-gun trigger, just in case of trouble.

The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They’re hairy creatures, and this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle, and ceremonial blaster of his warlike race.

I said, “You’ll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it’s not our policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our Institute. And we’re not currently in need of any Kallerian males, because—”

“You will hire me or trouble I will make!”

I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty.

The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. “Yes, you have four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn! For three years I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to the noble Clan Gursdrinn!”

At the key word avenge, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he didn’t move. He bellowed, “I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!”

I’m a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and one of the most important of those principles is that I never let myself be bullied by anyone. “I deeply regret having unintentionally insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?”

He glared at me in silence.

I went on, “Please be assured that I’ll undo the insult at the earliest possible opportunity. It’s not feasible for us to hire another Kallerian now, but I’ll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon as a vacancy—”

“No. You will hire me now.”

“It can’t be done, Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to it.”

“You will rue! I will take drastic measures!”

“Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I’ll get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting—”

You’d think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there’s always the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we’re insulting all the others.

I nudged the trouble button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left. They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him away. He wasn’t minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw, but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was out in the hall.