Free Unearthly Neighbors by Chad Oliver

out. The brown rock walls of the canyon seemed higher than they had looked from above, rearing up over his head like mountains. The blue sky seemed far away. He could hear the chuckling gurgle of the stream and feel the gentle stir of the wind on his face. He stood there by the metal sphere and the others joined him.
    Suddenly, he was almost overpowered by a feeling of strangeness. It wasn’t this world that was strange, nor was it the natives who were all around him. It was himself, and it was Tom and Charlie and Ace, with their stubby arms and their layers of clothing. And it was the gray metal sphere they stood beside, a monstrous artificial thing in this valley of stone and water and living plants…
    The people did not react to their presence. They seemed to freeze, neither coming closer nor attempting to get away. They just stood where they were, watching.
    What was the matter with them? Didn’t they have any curiosity at all? Monte began to doubt his own knowledge; he wondered whether all of his training and all of his experience had been any good at all.
    Me, the expert on man! I might as well be a caterpillar.
    Then, at last, a child moved a little way down the trail from one of the caves. He pointed at the sphere and laughed—a high, delighted giggle. The people began to move again, going on about their business—whatever that may have been. They were so close that Monte could practically reach out and touch them, and yet he felt as though he were watching them from across some stupendous, uncrossable gulf. He simply didn’t get them, didn’t understand what he was seeing. The natives had nothing; they lived in caves and hollow trees. Their activities seemed aimless to him; they didn’t seem to do anything that had any purpose to it. They appeared unperturbed, and worse, incurious.
    Yet somehow, they did not give him an impression of primitiveness. (He recognized that that was a weasel word, but he could only think in terms of the words and concepts he knew.) It was rather that they were remote, detached, alien. They lived in a world that was perceived differently, where things had different values…
    An old man, considerably older than the one they had tracked to the hollow tree, walked with difficulty down the trail and stood there just above the sphere. He blinked at them with cloudy eyes and hunched down so that he supported part of his weight on his long arms. The wrinkled skin hung from his face in loose folds, almost like flaps. He was definitely looking at them, not at the sphere. Two young women drifted over and joined him. The child giggled again and nudged one of the wide-eyed girls.
    Monte took a deep breath. He felt like a ham actor who had come bouncing out of the wings, waving his straw hat and doing an earnest soft-shoe routine, only to discover belatedly that the theater was empty…
    Still, these people did not seem to be afraid. They were not so timid as the man in the tree had been. Perhaps,
    Monte thought, the people here did share one human attribute: they were braver in bunches.
    Monte took a step up toward the old man, who frowned at him and blinked his faded eyes. Monte raised his hands, showing him that they were empty. “Monte,” he said, and pointed to himself.
    The old man muttered something and stood his ground.
    Monte tried again, feeling as though he were caught up in a cyclical nightmare. “Monte,” he said.
    The old man nodded slowly and pulled at his ear. “Larst,” he said distinctly.
    By God! He said something!
    Charlie whipped out his notebook and recorded the single precious word in phonetic symbols. Monte smiled broadly, trying to look like the answer to an old man’s prayers. “Charlie,” he said, pointing. “Tom. Ace.”
    The old man nodded again. “Larst,” he repeated. He sighed. Then, incredibly, he began to point to other things: the caves, the stream, the sky, the kids, the women. For each, he gave the native term—slowly, patiently, as though