Six Blind Men & an Alien (12 page)

    He pulled his arrows out of the lioness. Not that he planned on using them again, even in self-defense; he had brand new arrows for that if it became necessary. But he was certain the sentient residents of the mountain had their own markings identifying their arrows, and he didn’t want them looking for a stranger whose arrows could not be identified.

    He considered going back to the ship, but decided there was no reason for it. After all, he was here not only to slay the lion but the climb the mountain.

    He took one last look at the lioness and the bushbuck. He wished he had a knife so that he could cut off a piece of the bushbuck’s haunch to eat. He considered the problem, then walked over, knelt down, and pulled at the small holes the lion’s teeth had made while it was suffocating its prey. Some of the skin began parting, and he managed to rip off a piece of flesh. He stood up and looked down at the bushbuck. Yes, an observer would probably think the lioness had taken a bite of the bushbuck before she herself was killed.

    He began chewing on the flesh as he ascended the mountain, keeping far from the villages. When the sun rose he was at an elevation of six thousand feet, and more than two miles from the nearest village. He saw no reason to stop, so he kept climbing.

    He lay down beneath a thick bush at midday, thinking he’d get up at midnight and continue his quest. But instead he woke up at twilight, a horrible pain in his belly. He got to his knees, leaned over, and vomited.

    He decided that it must have been the flesh, and made a mental note to avoid eating bushbuck in the future. He got up, began walking, felt queasy, ignored it and increased his pace, reaching twelve thousand feet before the nausea and the pain forced him to stop.

    He tried to vomit again, but nothing came out. He lay down and tried to sleep, but his stomach began cramping, and he couldn’t get comfortable. He tossed and turned, and finally fell into a restless slumber. He awoke before sunrise, tried once more to vomit, and began walking. He became increasingly dizzy, but he found a relatively straight branch on the ground, rid it of its leaves, and used it as a walking stick.

    It took him the rest of the day to reach the tree line, and finally he walked out onto the glacier-and realized that far from being cold, he was uncomfortably warm. He walked another two hundred yards, and then collapsed.

    
What is the matter with me?
he wondered.
I have never been sick a day of my life. I have conquered thirty worlds. What has happened?

    He thought about everything he had done since leaving the ship, and then it hit him: the standing water and the bushbuck’s flesh. One or the other, possibly both, had native parasites that didn’t bother the inhabitants of the mountain, but presented serious problems to which his system lacked any natural immunities. He didn’t know if even his medical kit had a cure for them, but it didn’t matter anyway, because the kit was back on Thandor IV.

    And since he had no cure, all he could do was hope that eventually his body would find some way to combat the parasites, or that they would pass from his system, but either way he wasn’t going to solve his problem by sitting here. He got painfully to his feet and began climbing, although he was becoming dizzier and sicker by the minute.

    Finally he could go no farther. He did not even have the strength to lower himself gently to the ice. Instead he tossed his branch away and immediately collapsed, sprawled out awkwardly.

    
At least I won’t freeze to death
, he thought sardonically.
I’m burning up with fever.

    Another hour passed, and then another, and he realized that this spot was where he would die.

    
How ironic
, he thought as his life ebbed away.
To conquer the greatest mountains and oceans, to kill the greatest beasts, and to finally succumb to something so small that I cannot even see it.

    He tried to smile as the thought crossed his mind, but it was too late even for that.

    

    

    Bonnie Herrington walked over to me again, video camera in hand.

    "Are you sure you don’t want to be a little more positive about the man from Mars here?" she asked. "Everyone else is offering guesses about where he came from."

    "Everyone else is a photographer, a sound man, a government official, a guide, and a bunch of porters," I said. "They’re hardly trained to make definitive judgments about it."

    "You don’t really think he was born on Earth, do you?" she persisted.

    "Is your camera off?"

    "The camera’s off, and my sound man’s fifty feet away," she said, nodding her head toward Ray Glover.

    "All right," I said. "No, this creature wasn’t born on Earth. And of course he wasn’t born on Mars. That leaves about ten billion other locations in this galaxy alone."

    "And you won’t take a guess as to where?"

    "Only generically. It had to be a planet with a similar oxygen atmosphere and gravity. Not identical, but similar."

    "Then why won’t you say so for the camera?" persisted Bonnie.

    I wanted to say
Because my word carries more weight than yours, and there’s no sense lending any gravitas to these speculations until we know what we’re dealing with.
But I knew it would offend, so I just shrugged and said, "Because these are speculations. Extraterrestrial conditions are not my field of expertise. We should wait until we can get some expert opinions."

    She asked a few more questions, was clearly disappointed with the answers, and wandered back to where Glover was standing. Then Jim Donahue had us all stand together next to the body so he could take some group photos.

    Finally Adrian Gorman suggested that there was nothing further to be done until I contacted my experts and they arrived.

    I tapped the pocket that was holding my cell phone. "I’ll be calling them in a few minutes."

    "We could conceivably have them up here tomorrow," he said. "If they can charter a jet and be in Arusha by, say, noon, they can fly up to this spot via helicopter. There’s enough level ground for a ‘copter to set down without any problem."

    Njobo nodded his agreement. "I will contact my superiors in Dodoma"-it was the first time he’d admitted that he
had
any superiors-"and they will determine when and where the body can be moved."

    "It’ll be dark in a couple of hours," noted Gorman. "There’s no sense all of us freezing our asses off up here. We need one volunteer to guard the body, and I think we’ll leave one of the porters up here too, in the unlikely event that you have to scare away a hyena or a jackal. The rest of us will go back to the huts where we left the tents and come back first thing in the morning."

    Everyone was silent for a moment. I think they were all waiting for Gorman to volunteer. When it became obvious that he had no intention of staying on the glacier, I decided that Bonnie, Ray, Jim and even Gorman had already been working, so it made sense for me to offer to stay.

    I raised a hand and said, without much enthusiasm, "I’ll do it."

    "Good," said Gorman, looking a bit relieved.

    Muro spoke to the porters, and the big one I’d noticed before nodded his head, walked over, and spoke to Gorman in Swahili.

    "Professor, this is Jaka. He’ll be staying up here with you. We’ll leave you some food and a bunch of thermal blankets you can wrap around yourselves. It won’t feel like the Ritz, but you won’t freeze to death."

    "Sounds good enough," I said.

    "Then we’ll be on our way," said Gorman. "See you in the morning."

    They marched off, and I pulled out my cell phone and began contacting my colleagues. Most were in America or Europe, but Ralph Galler was actually relatively nearby, in Nairobi. He told me that he’d drive to Arusha during the night, charter a helicopter at the small airport there, have it fly over the glacier, and home in on my cell phone’s signal. He promised he’d be there at sunrise.

    I tried to start a conversation with Jaka, but it was a very frustrating experience. His English simply wasn’t up to the task. We each wrapped a thermal blanket around ourselves, grabbed some beef jerky from the supply kit, and ate in silence.

    As the night closed in I tore some bushes out of the ground and tried to build a fire, but the wind kept blowing it out before it could really get started. I pulled the blanket more tightly around me, and tried not to pay attention to the freezing wind. To help keep awake I called some friends in England and America. Then, when I felt myself about to nod off, I broke the connection, and walked around the creature several times until the cold had thoroughly wakened me.

    "How long until the helicopter gets here?" I asked Jaka as I was running out of tricks to keep alert.

    "The sun should begin rising in another hour," he replied.

    "Good," I said. "I thought morning would never come."

    "It is on its way, alas," he said, starting to get to his feet.

    I stared at him, frowning. "Your English is suddenly better," I said. "Where did a Chagga porter who lives on Kilimanjaro learn a word like ‘alas’? And why would you use it?"

    "Because I am tired of pretending, and very soon you will know the truth anyway."

    "The truth?" I repeated. "What truth?"

    "I’d hoped you’d be asleep by now," he said. "It would have been easier for both of us."

    "Enough guessing games!" I snapped. "
What
would have been easier?"

    "What I have to do."

    "What the hell are you talking about?" I said, backing away from him.

    "Just relax, Tony," he said. "If I may call you Tony? I’m not going to hurt you."

    "Suddenly you don’t sound like any porter or any Chagga I’ve ever met," I said accusingly.

    He sighed deeply. "I really wish you’d fallen asleep."

    I stared at him. "Are you here to steal our story?"

    "No, Tony," he said. "I’m here to kill your story."

    "Who
are
you?"

    "Wrong question, Tony."

    "What are you talking about?" I demanded.

    "A better question would be:
what
am I?"

    If I hadn’t spent all day staring at the thing on the ground, I’d have had a lot more difficulty believing the thing in front of me.

    "All right," I said. "
What
are you?"

    "First let me tell you what I am not," he said. "I am not your enemy."

    "Suppose you tell me your real name."

    He smiled sadly as the first rays of sunlight appeared on the horizon. "You couldn’t pronounce it."

    "Do you really look like this?" I asked.

    "Only when I choose to," he replied.

    "A shape-changer?" I said. "I don’t believe it."

    "I only have one shape," he answered. "What you see is an image I project."

    Suddenly the full impact of my situation hit me, and I backed away a few steps. "Now that I know what you are, are you going to kill me?" I asked.

    "Of course not, Tony."

    "So you’ve just come for your friend," I said.

    "He was not my friend."

    

    

    "Then why are you here?" I asked. "Was he a criminal?"

    An amused smile. "No, Tony. He was a pet."

    "A
what
?"

    "You know how your miners used to carry a small bird-a canary, I believe it was called-into a mine? It wasn’t as strong as the miners. If there were any poisonous fumes, it would collapse first, and that was a signal to them to get out of the mine." He paused. "This was the same principle. We are a starfaring race, but although we breathe an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere very similar to your own, not all planets are hospitable to us. There are certain inert elements, certain ultra-violet rays, certain microbes, that our systems cannot handle. This is not unusual. When your race reaches the stars, you will encounter the same thing. We can analyze samples all we want, but the surest way remains using our version of a canary." He smiled sadly. "This one made it only four months. I have to take him home so we can find out exactly what killed him and whether we can come up with a means of counteracting it."

    "Why was he-and your race-here at all?" I asked.

    "Why do you have children?" he replied. "We have a desire to spread our seed throughout the galaxy, but only on worlds where we will be welcomed, where we can live in peace with the inhabitants. Earth might have been such a world, had my pet lived."

    "How long has he been here?" I asked.

    "Not quite a century," replied Jaka.

    "And you’re just coming for him now?" I said, frowning.

    "None of us is permitted to stay here more than three months," he said. "In fact, only I have been here more than once, because it truly was my pet. One of us has been on every expedition on this side of the mountain since the day he died. But there were very few expeditions back then, and far more snow than there is today. We knew he was here, and we knew he was hidden beneath the snow and ice, so we were not worried that some lone man would find him. It would take an expedition, because almost no one goes up on the glacier alone, and since no one was looking for him and no one would be digging through the ice for him, we knew that he almost certainly wouldn’t show up until the periodic warming trend began melting the ice cap."

    "And what happens now?" I asked.

    "Now," he said, "I take him home. We need to know why he died. There is an outside possibility that it was not something inimical to us. We hope that we may still be able to reach a friendly accommodation with you at some point in the future, when you are a little better prepared for visitors."