Six Blind Men & an Alien (2 page)

    "You’re probably right," said Ray. He flashed us a sudden smile. "My hunch is that he loses ‘em on purpose."

    We had a quick breakfast of eggs and sausage, and then Gorman got up, clapped his hands twice, and announced that it was time to get started.

    "I have a thought," said Jim Donahue. "Why don’t we offer a thousand dollar bonus to whoever spots the leopard first? It won’t cost us a thing unless someone delivers."

    "Bad idea," said Gorman, and I noticed that Charles Njobo was nodding his head in agreement with him.

    "Why?"

    "The porters are here for our support," said Gorman. "They carry the tents, the food, the tea, the cameras, just about everything else. You offer a thousand dollars for finding a leopard that probably doesn’t exist and they’ll be all over the mountain, and when we actually do need them they’ll be nowhere to be found."

    "Okay, point taken," admitted Donahue. "What if we just ask them to look, then, with no reward?"

    A truly amused smile crossed Gorman’s face.

    "Well," he said, "you can
try
."

    Muro approached us then, and announced that the tents had been stashed in the huts, the porters had loaded up all the camera and sound gear and the medical kit, and we were ready to continue our ascent of Kilimanjaro.

    "Anyone need any more time?" asked Gorman. "No? Okay then, let’s go."

    We began climbing, and even though there was hardly enough snow to make a snowman, it was
cold
up there. The air was thin, and within a few minutes we were all panting and gasping. Well, all except Muro and the porters, who seemed to find our discomfort amusing.

    Gorman had enough brains-I would never write it off to compassion-to call a break about every half hour and let us catch our breath. It was on the third break, about 9:30 AM, that Muro stared off in the distance, then pulled out his binoculars and held them up to his eyes.

    "What do you suppose he sees?" asked Bonnie, squinting in the same direction.

    "Our leopard?" asked Donahue hopefully.

    I shook my head. "Not likely."

    "Why not?"

    "No cover," I pointed out. "It’s a steep slope, but leopards hide up trees, not down rocks, and that slope’s never held a tree in its life. Besides, most of the vegetation colonized here after the snow left; the stuff that was here a century ago couldn’t have supported enough prey animals."

    "You’re sure?"

    "This is my specialty," I replied. "It’s why you brought me along."

    Muro turned to Gorman with a triumphant smile on his narrow face. "
Chui!
" he exclaimed.

    "Chewy?" asked Ray. "Sounds like he’s talking about gum."

    "
Chui,
" I repeated. "It’s the Swahili word for leopard."

    "I thought you said it couldn’t be a leopard," said Donahue.

    "I said it wasn’t likely," I replied. "And it wasnt." I began trudging off in the direction Muro had indicated. "Let’s go take a look at it."

    Muro rushed past me and actually trotted the remaining half mile, then began yelling something in Chagga that even Gorman couldn’t understand.

    We all hurried forward, panting for breath, ignoring the cold and the sharp pains in our chests, and a few minutes later we had gathered around a mound of dirt-covered slush. There was obviously a body under it. One leg stuck out, rigid and frozen, covered with a brown pelt.

    "That sure as hell doesn’t look like a leopard’s leg to me," said Bonnie.

    "It isnt," I said.

    "I agree," said Gorman. "That foot never held claws, retractable or otherwise."

    "Is it a human?" asked Ray.

    It was so obviously
not
a human that no one even bothered answering him.

    "Well, let’s pull it out and see what we’ve got," said Bonnie.

    "It is the property of the Tanzanian government," said Njobo. "Nobody may touch it."

    "I agree," I said. "No one lays a finger on it. Our DNA and any stray microbes that we’re carrying could contaminate it. I need to send for the proper equipment to move it to a secure environment."

    "No one is moving it anywhere," insisted Njobo.

    "I’m not talking about moving it off the mountain," I assured him. "But we need to move it to a place where a crew of experts can examine it.

    There must be a secure cave higher up, where it’s still freezing."

    "It stays where it is."

    "Do you really want to be known as the man who was responsible for screwing up the first example of whatever it is?" I asked. "What will your superiors say?"

    Njobo was silent for a moment. "I will consider it," he said at last. Then he added: "If anyone touches it without my permission, I will send them back down the mountain alone."

    Gorman stared at the thing."I thought I knew every animal that ever lived on Kilimanjaro, but I sure don’t recognize this one," he said. He turned to Muro. "Have a couple of the porters come up and shovel some of this junk off it." He paused and looked at Njobo. "With your permission," he added.

    Njobo looked questioningly at me.

    I nodded. "
Carefully,
" I said.

    Muro relayed the order, and twenty minutes later two of the porters had meticulously uncovered the whole body. It looked bipedal, maybe sixty inches top to bottom. It was definitely not human or anthropoid, and I couldn’t think of any other bipedal animals that large. It didn’t quite have a snout, but its face seemed somehow elongated. It’s fur-down, really-was auburn, and nowhere near as thick as an ape’s.

    "Well, Professor?" said Gorman. "I admit I’m stumped."

    "Jim, Bonnie," I said, "take all the pictures you can of it. Take it from every angle. Take close-ups of every feature. When you’re done, I want to transfer them to my computer and e-mail them to some of my colleagues."

    "Just what kind of animal is it?" asked Bonnie.

    "I don’t want to offer an opinion until I consult with the men I’m sending the photos to," I answered.

    "A missing link?" asked Ray.

    I shook my head. "We never evolved from
that,
" I said. "Look at it. The eyes are set lower in the head than the nostrils. Its hips aren’t jointed like any human or ape I’ve ever seen. And it’s got opposing thumbs." I paused and considered that. "I’ve never seen
anything
with opposing thumbs." I kept cataloging the differences. "From the structure of the jaw and the few teeth I can see, I’d guess it’s an omnivore."

    "Intelligent?" asked Bonnie.

    "It’s possible," I replied. "It’s got a big enough brain pan."

    "But it’s not wearing any clothes or trinkets," said Ray.

    "Not all men wore clothes or trinkets," I said. "At least, not until they ran into other men who had better preachers or better weapons."

    Donahue let out a whoop, and we all turned to look at him.

    "A genuine Man from Mars!" he hollered happily. "We’re all going to be millionaires-the first expedition ever to discover one!"

    "We don’t know
what
it is yet," I pointed out. "This thing is going to require a
lot
of study. Tonight I’ll contact some of my colleagues and urge them to come over here to examine it. Then I have to find some people who know what they’re doing and have the proper equipment to move it to a secure cave."

    "You know," said Bonnie thoughtfully, "we’ve got a better mystery on our hands than Papa ever did. All he had to figure out was what a leopard was doing above the snow line.
We
have to figure out what this
is
as well as what it was doing here."

    They guessed at its origins and talked and took their pictures, but I could tell that each of them was thinking the same thing:

    
Could it be, could it possibly be an alien? And if so, what was it doing on Earth. Why was nobody aware of it before today? And more to the point, why was it buried above the snow line on mighty Kilimanjaro?

    

    

    
Jim Donahue walked up to the body, bent over it, and began photographing it in small sections, taking more than one hundred photos before he’d captured every square inch of it. He photographed the foreface and took close-ups of the nostrils. He got on his knees, bent over, and photographed the hands and fingers. He was equally thorough on every part of the body. And then, when the party was getting a little bored and a little less attentive, he took four more quick photos of the almost imperceptible thing he had noticed on the left ankle.

    
He would get rich from the photos, of course, but he might get even richer when he sold an exclusive article explaining what the alien was doing here. Even if someone else in the party saw the slight abrasions on that left leg, they hadn’t photographed men with similar abrasions. Men in custody.

    
Men in chains.

    
Convicts-

    
Jim Donahue was the first blind man.

    

    

    Earth hadn’t been his first choice. The oxygen content was too high, the gravity too heavy, but his options had been limited. He had killed the guards as they were preparing to transport him to the high-security prison on Bareimus, where he would be one of only sixty-three living beings in the entire system. The prison was completely automated. The food was prepared by machines that had no motive power and never left the kitchen. There were no bars, just a trio of deadly force fields surrounding each cell, one always active and two in constant readiness in case the first ever failed. There would be no visitors, no exercise, no guards, no religious services, no medics-just sixty-three prisoners who would remain there until the last of them was dead.

    He knew he would never be able to escape from Bareimus. The prison had been in existence for 364 years and there had never been a single escape. Gangs, indeed armies, had tried to break in to free their compatriots; none had succeeded and precious few had survived the single landing field’s automatic and deadly defenses, programmed to destroy anything but the prison transport ship. So if he was ever to escape, it would have to be before he was delivered to the prison.

    He couldn’t wait until the ship to Bareimus took off. Even though there would be a pair of guards, there was no pilot. The ship was programmed to land at the prison, and even if he killed the guards there was no way to alter the ship’s programming. It cost him half of his accumulated and ill-gotten gains, but he had a confederate kill one guard while he disabled the other as they walked to their ship at the spaceport.

    His legs were still shackled, and the guards were past giving him the codes that would unlock them, so he took a pulse gun from one of them and blew the chains apart. He’d worry about removing what remained from his legs later; at least now he had freedom of movement again.

    His race disdained clothing, so he carried the pulse gun in his left hand and raced to the nearest small ship. There were shots from the command center. His confederate screamed and fell to the ground, spurting blood, but he made it to the ship unscathed. A figure stood in the hatch, telling him not to come any closer. He fired the gun before the ship’s owner finished his warning, stood aside as the body tumbled down to the ground, raced into the ship, and ordered the hatch to close and lock behind him.

    It took him less than thirty seconds to break the ship’s security code. (That was, after all, his specialty.) The ship asked for his name. He knew he couldn’t use his real name, that any ship on the planet would shut down all systems the instant he uttered it, so he thought back to his childhood and used the name of a youthful friend, one he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

    "My name," he said, "is Machti."

    "Destination?"

    He looked at the viewscreen and saw that the security guards would reach him in about thirty seconds.

    "What’s the nearest world with an oxygen content similar to ours?"

    "Define similar," said the ship.

    "Within ten percent."

    "The third planet in the Sol system."

    "Take off immediately."

    The ship made no verbal response, but he could feel the gravitational force as it shot up to the stratosphere and then beyond.

    "Do you have any of the planet’s languages in your data bank?" he asked as the ship began approaching light speeds.

    "No. I have never been there."

    "But you knew the oxygen content," said the being that was now Machti.

    "The atmospheric content
is
in my data bank; the native languages are not," said the ship. "It is entirely possible that no ship has ever landed there." While Machti was considering that answer, the ship announced that they were being pursued.

    "Wonderful," muttered Machti. "By how many ships?"

    "Two."

    "Can they overtake us?"

    "Eventually."

    "Before we reach Sol’s system?"

    "No."

    "All right," said Machti. "We’ll land there, and I’ll stay in hiding for as long as it takes for them to forget about me or at least decide I’m not worth the trouble, and then we’ll find a more hospitable world." He paused. "How long will it take to get there?"

    "Through normal space, seven years and-"

    "
Not
through normal space," he interrupted.

    "Via the Jaxtoplin Wormhole, three days."

    "Go that way."

    "That is three of
our
days," continued the ship. "Based on the destination world’s rotation speed, it will be 3.4983 of their days."