Free Unearthly Neighbors by Chad Oliver Page A

instructing a backward child. His voice was weak and quavering, but his words were clear. Monte matched him with English, then eased himself to one side and let Charlie Jenike take over.
    Charlie worked fast, determined to grab his opportunity and hold on tight. He tested phrases and sentences, scribbling as fast as his pen would write. He built up a systematic vocabulary, building on the words he had already learned from the tapes. The old man seemed vaguely surprised at his fluency, and patiently went on talking.
    Tom Stein maneuvered two of the kids, both boys, down the trail that led to the stream. He took a length of cord from his pocket and made a skillful cat’s cradle on his fingers. The boys were intrigued, and watched him closely. Tom went through his whole bag of string tricks—the anthropologist’s ace in the hole—and tried his level best to make friends.
    Monte was as excited as though he had just tripped over the Rosetta Stone—which, in a manner of speaking, he had. He stuck to the rules of the game; they were all he had to go on. Begin with the person in authority. How many times had he told his students that? Find out what the power structure is, and work from the top down. Okay. Swell. Only who was the person in authority?
    Looking around him, he couldn’t be sure. It could hardly be Larst, who was close to senility. It certainly wouldn’t be one of the children. The women backed away from him whenever he tried to approach—one of them actually blushed—and they didn’t seem to be very likely candidates. One difficulty was that many of the natives were not paying any attention to them at all; they simply went on doing whatever they were doing, and he was unable to get any clear impression of how they ranked. It was very hard, he realized, to size up people who wore no clothing; there were no status symbols to give you a clue. Except, perhaps, for the chest stripes…
    He compromised by wandering around with his notebook and trying to map the cave village. The people did not hinder him, but he considered it best not to try to enter the caves themselves. He plotted the distribution of the caves and jotted down brief descriptions of the people he found in front of each one. He took some photographs, which didn’t seem to bother the natives at all.
    But they had made contact!
    That was what counted; the rest would follow in time.
    His one thought was to get as much done as possible. He lost himself in his work, forgetting everything else.
    The great white sun moved across the arc of the sky and the black shadows lengthened on the floor of the brown-walled canyon…
     
    Monte never knew what it was that warned him. It was nothing specific, nothing dramatic. It certainly wasn’t a premonition. It was rather a thread of uneasiness that wormed its way into his brain, a subtle wrongness that grew from the very data he collected.
    Long afterward, he told himself a thousand times that he should have seen it before he did. He of all people, moving through the cave village with his notebook and camera, should have caught on. But the plain truth was that he was so excited at actually working with the natives that he wasn’t thinking clearly; his brain was dulled by the flood of impressions pouring into it.
    And, of course, there had been no real cause for alarm in the weeks they had spent on Sirius Nine. Somehow, the human mind continues its age-old habit of fooling itself by moronic extrapolation: because there has been peace there will always be peace, or because there has been war there will always be war…
    The thing that triggered Monte’s brain back into awareness, oddly enough, was not a man—it was an animal. He spotted the creature sitting in front of one of the caves, apparently warming itself in the late afternoon sun. (If you habitually lived in a furnace, he supposed, it took a good bellows to heat you up a little.) Monte snapped a picture of the thing, then studied it carefully from a short