Six Blind Men & an Alien (6 page)

    The northern cap, on the other hand, seem more accommodating. The temperatures would be tolerable, and there was a variety of animal life and vegetation. If they couldn’t find sustenance there, they probably couldn’t find it anywhere.

    His decision made, Nibolante maneuvered the ship to a completely deserted area about ten degrees south of the pole. They landed, decided to use the ship for their home until they were sure they wanted to take up permanent residence at this remote spot, and began exploring their surroundings.

    All went well for three days. They found that they could indeed metabolize the creatures that lived in the sea, and while the temperature was less than they were used to, they were able to tolerate it. The atmosphere presented more of a problem; the oxygen content was too high. The vessel had medications to neutralize the effects, but the supply wasn’t endless.

    On the fourth day Nibolante came face-to-face with a polar bear bent over the remains of a dead fish it had been eating. Clearly it was a carnivore or an omnivore, but Nibolante felt no apprehension, because whatever the bear was genetically programmed to eat, his race had to be excluded since there had never been a member of it on the planet until he had landed four days ago.

    Somehow, that fact didn’t bother the bear in the least, and it began approaching Nibolante, who backed away. The bear kept walking toward him, and Nibolante kept backing up, and finally the bear lost all patience, roared an ear-splitting roar, and charged, Nibolante turned and raced toward the ship, yelling to Marbovi and the children to get inside it and to close and lock the hatch the second he entered.

    He made it by less than two seconds. The bear couldn’t stop in time, and skidded painfully into the hatch, precipitating another roar.

    "What was
that
?" asked Marbovi.

    "
I
know," offered Sallassine. "It is called a bear."

    "What does it eat?" asked Nibolante, gasping for breath.

    "Everything," said Sallassine.

    "How many bears are there?"

    "I don’t know. I only studied polar bears."

    "Polar bears?" asked Nibolante.

    "The white ones. They think there are more than one hundred thousand."

    "All over the world?"

    Sallassine shook his head. "Just in the north."

    Nibolante and Marbovi exchanged looks. After a moment Nibolante activated the ship’s video and looked at the viewscreen. The polar bear was laying down-not sleeping, just patiently waiting-outside the hatch.

    He checked it every few hours. The bear was still there. By midnight he’d been joined by another, and by sunrise there were a total of five polar bears surrounding the ship.

    "This is intolerable," announced Nibolante. "We clearly cannot live here. I don’t want my children to go armed every time they leave the ship."

    "It would have been
fun
!" protested Sallassine.

    "Until you were eaten," replied Nibolante. "I must study the computer and decide where we will move to."

    "Don’t forget that there is a terrible war going on," said Marbovi.

    "I know. For that reason I think we can eliminate the continents called Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. And we cannot live on the southern polar cap. That leaves two land masses, Africa and South America. Now, they
were
fighting in the north of Africa, but the computer tells me that it has been resolved."

    "Is
everyone
on this world warlike?" said Marbovi.

    "
We
aren’t, and I must find a place where we’ll be safe." He studied the computer further. "South America seems free from this conflict, but it is populated by the same species as the rest of the world."

    "Isn’t Africa?" asked Marbovi.

    "Yes, of course," answered Nibolante. "I doubt that either continent would welcome us, but I think I’ve found a place where we can be relatively safe."

    "Where?"

    "There is a mountain in Africa, the tallest on the continent. It is in a thinly populated area, relatively few people live on it, those who
do
live on it live primarily on the lower sections. It had a huge ice cap, which can be seen literally fifty miles away, and no one lives above the tree line." Suddenly he smiled. "And there are no polar bears."

    "If it is a mountaintop, there are clearly no oceans," she said. "So what will we eat?"

    "There are dozens of game species on the mountain, some huge, some tiny, most of them edible. And there are streams and rivers filled with fish. And avians everywhere."

    "And these warlike beings are just going to let you walk right in and kill and eat
their
prey animals?" Marbovi said sarcastically.

    "Not everyone is armed with nuclear weapons," answered Nibolante. "From what I can gather, the residents of the mountain, indeed of the entire area, are a pastoral people who hunt and defend themselves with spears and bows and arrows."

    "They can kill you just as dead with a spear or an arrow."

    He smiled, got up, walked to a bulkhead, touched a particular spot on it, and the top slid back. He reached in and withdrew a set of goggles.

    "These enable me to see in the dark as easily as in the daylight," he said. "They have nothing similar, and there are some dangerous animals on the mountain. I will hunt at nights, while they sleep." He paused. "You look dubious."

    "We are leaving here because there are dangerous animals, and now you want to move to where there are
more
dangerous animals."

    "There is a difference," he said. "The polar bears live on fish and the very few mammals they can find up here. But on the mountain, there are literally tens of thousands of herbivores. It means, first, that there will be enough food for us, and second, that no carnivores will wait for us outside the ship simply because there are no other prey animals."

    She made no further comment, and he instructed the ship to lay in a course for Kilimanjaro. The planet’s inhabitants had developed a primitive form of radar, but he knew the ship would be able to avoid or deflect it. It reached the mountain in the middle of the night, hovered above the top while its sensors sought out a flat area halfway up the glacier, and then gently lowered itself until it came to rest on the snow.

    Nibolante used the ship’s sensors to make sure there were no life forms within half a mile, then donned his goggles and stepped out onto the snow and ice. He took a deep breath and was pleased to find the air was thinner and the oxygen count lower than at the north polar cap. He looked down the mountain and couldn’t see any villages, which meant that they wouldn’t be able to see him or the ship either. He could hear the trumpeting of an elephant and the roar of a lion, but they were far down the mountain.

    He spent a few more moments walking around what he thought of as his new homesite, then re-entered the ship.

    "You’ll like it," he announced to his mate. "The air is delicious."

    "Air has no taste," replied Marbovi.

    "
This
air does," he said enthusiastically. "And it’s not as cold. I doubt that we’ll need any protective coverings at all."

    "You can stop promoting it," she said. "We’re here, for better or worse."

    "For better," he said. "You’ll see."

    "I’ll tell you what I won’t see," said Marbovi. "I won’t see any other Pharachi except for you and the children." She frowned. "Now or ever."

    "You’re looking at this all wrong," said Nibolante. "We lived. We survived. We will become the parents of a new race on a new world."

    "We are four Pharachi on a world where the inhabitants spend their time killing each other. Why do you think they’ll accept us-and if they don’t, how long do you think we can stay hidden on this mountain?"

    "Look," he said. "I wish the mother ship hadn’t been destroyed. I wish all our friends were here with us. I wish the inhabitants welcomed us with open arms. But we’re here, we’re alive, and we have to make the best of it."

    "This is not what I wanted for my children."

    "You can’t always have everything you want," he said irritably.

    They exchanged hostile glares, then went to opposite ends of the ship to sleep.

    Nibolante was up early in the morning, and took Sallassine and Cheenapo outside to see their new surroundings. Marbovi remained in the ship.

    "I have been studying the fauna on the computer," said Sallassine. "I can identify any that we see."

    "Try
that
," said Nibolante, pointing to an avian that was riding the warm thermals a few hundred yards out from the mountain.

    "That is a fish eagle," said the youngster proudly.

    Suddenly Nibolante smiled.

    "What is so funny?" asked Sallassine.

    "I have to believe you," he replied. "I haven’t studied them."

    Sallassine identified two more avians, then stared down the mountain. "How far down may we go?"

    "Until we explore it further and see exactly where the villages are, I don’t want you going more than two hundred feet below the tree line," answered Nibolante. The youngster looked his disappointment, and Nibolante laid a hand on his shoulder. "When you are a little bigger, and we know the mountain a little better, you can accompany me some nights when I am hunting for food."

    "Really?" asked Sallassine, his face glowing with excitement.

    "Really."

    "Can we go down to the tree line now?"

    "Yes, as long as you both stay very near me."

    They made their way down the glacier to the tree line, then stopped and observed their surroundings. Suddenly Cheenapo pounced on something, and held it up a moment later.

    "What is it?" she asked.

    "It is called a lizard," said Sallassine. "It eats insects, whatever they are." He stared at it. "They can’t be very big, these insects." He stared at it more closely, then frowned. "It is a gecko lizard or a ugama lizard, but I cannot remember which."

    Cheenapo turned to her father. "Can I keep it?"

    Nibolante frowned. "Conditionally."

    "What does that mean?"

    "We must find out what insects are, and if they live on the glacier. If they don’t, the lizard will starve if you take it back to the ship."

    "Can we walk a little farther?" asked Sallassine.

    "Just a little," said Nibolante.

    They walked another few hundred yards, which put them only sixty feet lower in altitude. They couldn’t see any wildlife, but they could hear the trumpeting of an elephant, the squawks of birds, even the bellow of a buffalo.

    "I am going to like it here," said Sallassine.

    "I’m glad
someone
does," said Nibolante.

    They remained where they were for almost an hour, then retraced their steps and made it back to the ship by midafternoon.

    Cheenapo played with her lizard while Sallassine found out from the computer that they would find no insects for it to eat on the glacier. She announced that she still wanted a pet, but she would find one that lived on the glacier, one that wouldn’t suffer from a change in environments.

    "She will be disappointed," Sallassine told his father when they were alone. "Nothing lives up here. Except us."

    "Nothing
lives
up here," agreed Nibolante, "but perhaps I can get something to
visit
us."

    "I do not understand."

    "Every time I make a kill, I will leave a piece of meat out at the very same spot. It may go unnoticed the first few times, but eventually something will discover the meat, and once it does I think it will come back again and again for a free meal. It will be bigger than a lizard-it may be one of those eagles-so it will not be a pet, but at least she’ll be able to see it."

    "And when it comes, I will identify it," said Sallassine.

    Nibolante went hunting that night, gently placing the lizard under a bush where it would be safe at least until morning. Using a silent weapon he killed a young bush pig at thirteen thousand feet, then spent the rest of the night carrying the carcass back up to the ship.

    "What am I supposed to do with this?" said Marbovi when she awoke and found the pig.

    "We will cut off the portions we want to eat," said Nibolante, "and I will put the rest in the disintegrator."

    "All right," she said. "What parts do you want to eat?"

    He stared at it. "I guess we’ll have to figure it out by trial and error."

    "You chose it. You killed it. You figure it out."

    "What is the matter with you?" he demanded.

    "I hate this place."

    He sighed deeply. "I suppose we can look in South America."

    "‘This place’ is Earth, not the mountain!" she snapped, walking away.

    He found a cutting instrument, sliced off the haunches, cut off the visible fat, and put the rest of it in the disintegrator. He realized that he could freeze it just by putting it outside, but he didn’t want to attract any predators. He knew they rarely came up onto the glacier, but he didn’t know what kind of delicacy a bush pig might be.

    When he was done he was covered with blood, as was the area in which he’d been working, and he made a mental note to bleed his prey in the future before cutting it into pieces.

    That was their routine for the next twenty days. Nibolante went down the mountain at nights whenever they needed more food. He and the children spent the days exploring the glacier and the area just below the tree line. Once they saw a rhino, and another time a buffalo. Marbovi remained in the ship, unhappy and uncommunicative.