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Title: Alien Envoy
Date of first publication: 1945
Author: Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945)
Date first posted: Mar. 6, 2022
Date last updated: Mar. 6, 2022
Faded Page eBook #20220305

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines

This file was produced from images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries.




[Source: Astounding Science-Fiction (British Edition), May 1945]




ALIEN ENVOY

By MALCOLM JAMESON


_Those aliens were really alien.  As totally different from man as is
a cactus plant.  Would that difference lead to inevitable
extermination war--or complete lack of conflict?_



The telecom rattled throatily, then cleared.  The voice was that of
Terry, bimmy fieldman.

"Hey, chief, there's something coming in over the visio you ought to
have a squint at.  Think it's right down our alley."

Ellwood shoved the file he was examining aside.  It was the usual
slush about the unrest among the talags of Darnley Valley on Venus
and dire prognostications of revolt, as if talag grousing was
something new.  They always bellyached, and nothing ever came of it.
That's the way talags were.  Anyhow, it was routine and never should
have been sent up to the chief's desk.  The ace bimmy--so-called from
collapsing the initials of the Bureau of Interplanetary Military
Intelligence--preferred not to be bothered with trifles.

"I heard you, Terry," he barked.  "Let 'er flicker."

The big screen across the room came to life.  For a moment there was
nothing but swirling gray chaos, and then the color deepened to a
velvety purple-black.  The screen gained depth and the coldly burning
stars came out one by one.  For some seconds that was all, then an
object drifted into the field.  It was a bulky, teardrop shaped thing
of shimmering silvery green and atop it sat a squat turret out of
which peeped the blunt nose of some kind of lethal projector.  But
the violet aura that usually surrounded the stubby gun was missing.

That was but one detail.  Ellwood gasped as he ran his eye over the
image of the entire ship as it inched its way into the middle of the
field of view.  The after half of it glowed and sparkled with
incandescent lemon-yellow fire, fading slowly to a dull orange and
then a cherry-red as the tortured hull radiated its fierce heat into
space.  The vessel had been caught in a katatron beam.  That was
evident, but it was not all.  There was a gaping hole through the
stern out of which glowing gases were glowing, only to be instantly
dissipated in the vacuum of space.

"An Ursan!" exclaimed Ellwood.  "We finally penetrated one!  Who did
it?"

"Commander Norcross, in the _Penelope_.  He slammed a Mark IX torp
into it, and it took.  But, say, chief, that ain't all the story.
The whole battle was as screwy as could be.  The Ursan didn't fight
back, and you know how tough they usually are.  All it did was set up
a terrible howl that sounded like all the static this side of
Magellan rolled up in one ball.  And take a gander at the
co-ordinates."

Ellwood's gaze dropped to the pale white figures in the lower corner.
There were three of them--celestial latitude and longitude and the
angle of tilt.  The wrecked Ursan was less than a million miles
away--beyond the moon a little distance and up about twenty degrees.

"What in thunder was he doing this far in?" asked Ellwood.  "They
haven't ventured in past Jupiter in forty years."

"Search me.  That's why I called you.  Norcross says he's done his
stuff.  He's put the Ursan on the fritz, and there aren't any more
around.  He wants to know whether he should just call the derelict
squad, kick the wreck into an orbit, or haul it in so you can have a
look-see."

Ellwood fairly yelled his answers into the telecom.

"Park it in the lot by Lab Q-5, of course, you dope.  Isn't this what
we've been waiting for all our lives?"

The telecom crackled and died.  Ellwood's fingers were racing across
a panel of buttons.

"Q-5?  Standby for a triple-priority job ... cruiser got an Ursan ...
no, I mean _got_ it .... it's hanging dead in space, and it's fairly
intact.  They're towing it in to you, and it ought to be there by
this time tomorrow.  Recall Twitcherly, and be sure that Darnhurst is
there.  I'm leaving here right now by stratoline and I'll bring
Gonzales with me.  You have everything all set--complete metallurgy,
chemistry, and magnetonic examination of the hull ... the Valois
procedure will be the best, I think.  And I want a board of outplanet
medicos there.  We want to find out what an Ursan looks like, what
makes him tick, and the rest.  That means an autopsy such as never
was, right down to the histology of every last cell in the monsters.
That is, _if_ they're monsters, and there's anything left of them."

"I get you, chief.  Everything'll be ready to roll."

Ellwood snapped out a score of other calls.  Then he sat back and
relaxed.


It had started out to be a dull, dreary day of stifling details.  Now
that was changed.  It was the day of days, the day of opportunity
every bimmy chief before him had yearned for and never got.  What
were Ursans, anyway?  Where did they come from, and what did they
want?  And since they were aliens from an unknown outer world who
always fought back with murderous savagery while being at the same
time virtually impregnable themselves, what could be done to improve
the technics of warfare against them?  It was a grim question that
had agitated the Earth races ever since the Ursans had first invaded
their system.

Ellwood thought back over recent history.  The first intruders had
come in a wave of some fifty ships, dropping into the ken of the
Space Patrol from the general direction of Ursa Major.  On that
occasion they visited most of the planets, conducting what was
unmistakably a reconnaissance in spite of all the heroic space
fighters could do.  Dozens of the invaders were caught in the quick
blasts of katatrons, but they failed to disintegrate.  They merely
glowed for a moment in blinding incandescence, and proceeded to carry
on.  They would answer the kat blast with a bolt of massive pink
lightning from their own squat guns, and that would be the end of
another terrestrian ship and crew.  Until now not one of our vessels
had managed to stay in action long enough to launch its slower but
more positive torpedoes.

It was strange.  The Ursans came, and they went away, leaving behind
them the burned out hulks of the flower of the Space Navy.  A decade
passed, and they did not return.  Boasters claimed our defense had
taught them a lesson; they would not dare come back.  The Pollyannas
took the view that it was apparent we had nothing they wanted,
therefore they were not to be feared hereafter.  But there were
others who took a soberer view.  The fleet was rebuilt and
strengthened.  Kat pressures were built up; were devised under the
spur of necessity.

The Ursans did come back.  That time they came in not one wave, but
ten, and each wave had more than a thousand ships.  That was the year
of the great running battle from past Neptune all the way in to
Jupiter.  The Earth forces attacked them at the perimeter of the
system and hung on to the bitter end.  There were many enemy
casualties that time, but the surviving Ursans crowded round them and
herded them into what was for them safety--down through the swirling
ammonia clouds of Jupiter to a landing where no terrestrian dared
follow.  The tired remnants of what had been a mighty defensive fleet
had no stomach for the killing gravity of Sol's greatest planet.
They withdrew to lick their wounds.

For a while terror reigned on the inner planets.  The Ursans did not
follow up their attack, but they did not go away.  It was evident
they were making an advance base on Jupiter.  For twenty years their
ships came and went, but they did not come inside the asteroid belt
again.  Doggedly the dwindling Space Navy harried them, but
apparently to no avail.  In a duel between a Terrestrian and an
Ursan, the Ursan always won.  It was a dispirited, losing business.

Then came a day when the whole Ursan armada took off in one vast
cloud and went back toward the upper Northern sky.  Until this lone
ship came wandering in, there had not been another visitation.

"I wonder," mused Ellwood, "do these creatures come in successive
waves like the Goths and the Mongols and the Huns did, and is this
the advance scout for a new invasion?  Or what?  Why did this Ursan
give Norcross time to slip a torpedo into him?  Asleep?  Sick?
Internal difficulty?"

He rose.  Well, they had the ship.  That was something.


Ellwood leaped from the plane and strode across the field.  The bimmy
guards saluted and made gangway.  A hundred yards from the grounded
wreck Ellwood glimpsed three sheeted forms on stretchers.

"Who are they?" he asked.

"Tolliver, Scwheitzer, and Wang Chiang.  They got theirs trying to
get into the forepart--passed out in the lock.  It's hot in there,
and heavy, and what the Ursans use for air is out of this world.
It's all over with those three lads."

Ellwood frowned.  He didn't relish losing men.  Moreover, men with
the qualifications for being good bimmies were as scarce as the
proverbial hen's teeth.  Yet he was glad they had done their duty.
If the forward half of the hostile ship was still intact it was
important that it be left that way.  The easy way would have been to
blast it open, but then they would have to reconstruct the conditions
there.  This way they had only to observe them.

"Did anyone come out--alive?"

"Yes.  Darnhurst.  He says there is at least one living Ursan still
in there.  He saw it crawling around in the control room, and then he
got out quick."

"Did it go for him?"

"Oh, no.  He just couldn't bear up against the pressure and the rest.
There is some kind of gravity device operating in there and inside
you have to work against 3-G's.  The temperature is around a
thousand, and the atmosphere is a mixture of ammonia, methane,
helium, nitrous fumes, and about nine other gases that haven't yet
been identified."

Ellwood said nothing.  A gang of men were just then loading something
into a heavy truck beside the wreck with the aid of a crane.  They
had brought it out through the gaping hole left by the torpedo.
Ellwood walked over and looked at it.  It was truly a monstrous thing.

The dead Ursan partook of the qualities of an articulated deep sea
turtle, crossed with an octopus and recrossed with a giant horned
frog.  There were seven segments, squat and heavily plated, each
supported by one thick, elephantine foot no more than four inches
long.  Some of the segments were topped with a cluster of bony
spikes, each in a different arrangement.  Some were triple, some
quintuple, one a simple pair.  None were of the same length or
thickness, and their spacing varied.  The non-horned segments were
two in number, one near each end.  Instead of horns they were crowned
with flat, lumpy superstructures from which dangled a score of
octopoid antennae.  Some hung loose and flabby, others were half
retracted into the parent shell.  They were variously tipped at their
outer ends.  About half ended in handlike arrangements of several
fingers and an opposing thumb, others terminated in vacuum-grip cups,
still others in horny, toollike finials--chisels, socket wrenches,
and the like.  But of organs such as the fauna of the Solar System
possessed there was no sign.  There was nothing corresponding to
eyes, ears or noses, nor yet the semblance of a mouth.  The creatures
were all plate and horn and tentacle, and incredibly massive.

"How many of these are there?"

"Three.  The black gang, I guess they were.  They aren't damaged
much.  It must have been the loss of their atmosphere that killed
them."

"Rush them along to the lab, then, and let the boys there at them."


There followed a hectic seventy hours during which no bimmy at that
post slept more than a cat nap or ate more than a bolted sandwich.
By the time Ellwood's special harness was completed a lot of
preliminary work had been cleared away.  The easiest part of it was
the accessible part of the ship itself.

The hull was of immense strength and built of an alloy that as yet
defied analysis.  Its tensile strength was of the order of a half a
million pounds to the square inch.  It was acid proof.  It had no
attainable melting point.  It was a wonder that even a katatron could
heat it white, let alone atomize it.  Only the direct hit of a Mark
IX torp could have punctured it.

The main drive was atomic, not much different from the terrestrial
kind.  The guns were simply magnetic versions of the katatron.  The
bimmies whose specialty was ordnance swarmed over them, delightedly
taking notes.  Here was something really fearsome in the way of
armament.  The Ursans had learned the trick of accumulating balls of
magnetrons under terrific initial tension and then launching them at
near the speed of light.  But what was radically different was the
system of control.  No human, or any group of humans that could be
contained in either the turret or the engine room could possibly have
manipulated the scattered, queer shaped controls.  None but Briarean
handed creatures could do the job.  The set-up was strictly Ursan, by
Ursans, for Ursans.  Significantly there was nowhere a single gauge,
meter, label or other visual aid to the operator.

As for the control room where the surviving monster still dwelt,
whining unceasingly on forty different short-wave radio frequencies
at once, Ellwood left that strictly alone.  He was not finished
tooling yet for his entry into it.  The only precautions he took with
it was to see that a reserve supply of the gases needed to replenish
what the monster used was at hand if needed.  But he made one
startling discovery without entering the difficult chamber.  One of
his bimmy engineers deduced the location of the monster's
air-purifying system and tapped it in mid cycle.  The waste product
was amazing.  It was steam!  Just steam.  He led it into a condenser.
The end product was distilled water, a fact grabbed onto with great
interest by the medic gang.

They, too, had done their work, but in the end it had to be taken out
of their hands.  Electronicists and magnetonic sharks took over where
they left off.  If the beast's body chemistry was topsy-turvy, its
nervous system was a thing to drive men mad.  It was a mess of
tangled wire--metallic wire, loaded with radium--and weird ganglia
that might have served as distribution boxes.  There were sets of
flat, semi-bone, metalloid plates that could only be a variety of
condenser.  There were other screwy arrangements that were probably
transformers, and the horns that adorned the spiked segments proved
to be combination triodes and sending and receiving antennae.  Bimmy
after bimmy looked, and bugged his eyes.  A thing like that just
couldn't be.  It violated--well, just about all the laws of
electronics there were.  Yet--  And they would go back to work.  What
they dreamed of in their snatches of sleep they did not divulge, but
it was wild enough to start the doctors shooting hypnophrene as a
regular thing.

"There you are," said Gonzales.  "It's screwy, but it is what we
found."

He handed Elwood the rough draft of the preliminary report.

The Ursans neither ate nor drank.  They breathed--breathed the
outlandish blend of gases found in their ship.  There were gills
under the after edge of each segment's plate except the end ones, and
in each segment was a separate lung.  The lungs themselves were
fantastic beyond expression, an impossible blending of leathery
membrane and flexible quartz tubing.  In the tubing coursed the
creature's blood--a solution of silicon, radium salts, sulphur, iron,
zinc, and a score of other metals in a mixture of acids of which
nitric was the dominant member.  This blood fed the stumpy, clumsy
feet and the agile tentacles.  It also fed the ganglia and nourished
the other electric gadgetry.  There were sinuses filled with the
liquid where it seemed to act as an electrolyte.

"If I believe what I see here," said Ellwood tapping the document,
"we are going to have to throw a lot of preconceived notions out the
window.  Here we have monsters with intricate nervous systems, but no
brain.  Yet they are intelligent, even if they do think with their
reflexes.  They have no organs of sight, touch, or hearing, but they
evidently perceive the stars well enough to navigate, and us well
enough to make us targets.  This requires a radical approach."

"They perceive by means of short-wave radio," Gonzales reminded him.
"That set in the corner is tuned in on the steady drone that
surviving Ursan in the cruiser is sending out.  I think that is what
he keeps track of his surroundings by.  Here's why.  We have
activated the nerve circuits to this pair of horns on number three
segment.  They gave off the identical continuous tone, and they also
pick it up on the rebound.  The return impulses go down to a certain
ganglia and from there are fed to this set of bone plates.  Unless
somebody talks me down, I'm going to label those bones the retina."

Ellwood chuckled.  It was not too absurd a thought.  For centuries
men had been using short-wave radio for night detection.  Here was a
living organism that used it all the time.

"Now these other spikes and horns perform similar, but different
duties," continued Gonzales, putting his finger at spots on the
diagram.  "A current fed to this five-pronged arrangement makes an
armature do funny things when you make noises in the vicinity.  I'd
call it an audio converter.  The Ursans apparently don't care a hang
about listening as such, but they evidently have found it useful to
change what we call sound into something else that has meaning for
them."

"Yes," said Ellwood, thoughtfully.  "You're on the right trail.  I
wonder which frequencies in the band the creature uses for
communication with his mates.  Once we have that I'll have a jumping
off point for what I intend to do."

"We'll see if we can pick it out for you, chief.  There are three or
four waves he uses only intermittently, and that stutteringly.  It
sounds very much to me as if he had been listening in on the
chit-chat between our ships and was trying to imitate it.  Being
electronically minded, the Ursans could hardly fail to have picked up
our ethergrams.  We have recorded a lot of the jabber already and
turned it over to the cryptograph gang, but so far they haven't
cracked the code.  It may be as you suggest--one of those waves is
the Ursan speech wave."

"Maybe, and maybe not," murmured Ellwood, "but it's a thought."

That night he made several important changes in his plans.  He burned
up the air with urgent messages, and before morning the first of the
planes bearing rush equipment began dropping down beside the Ursan
prize.  By ten Ellwood was ready to test out a theory he had spent
the night in evolving.  He meant to go into the sealed control room
and have a direct interview with the captive monster.

"Better play it safe, chief," spoke up the bimmy in charge of the
guard, "That thing may act up.  You ought to carry along a blaster."

Ellwood shook his head

"I think," he said, smiling mildly, "that we got off on the wrong
foot with these creatures right from the beginning.  I don't mean
with this ship or what our gang is doing about it.  I mean the whole
dismal history of our dealings with the Ursans.  I've been thinking
it over.  Has it ever struck you that there has never been an
instance of an Ursan ship firing on one of ours except when ours had
first attacked?  Could it not be that they are an essentially
peaceful race of brutes and not prone to fight except in
self-defense?  I've come to the conclusion, and I'm staking my next
move accordingly.  Whatever that fellow in there was up to, coming
straight toward Earth the way he was, I refuse to believe it was
aggression."

"You're the boss," said the man, shrugging, but the look of
uneasiness did not leave his face.


The ponderous chair was ready.  It stood on the ground just outside
the Ursan entry port, and there was a heavy crane beside it.  Ellwood
let them dress him in the heavy-duty, high-resistant spacesuit fitted
with cooling coils.  That would enable him to endure the cruel
temperatures so dear to his visitor, and at the same time shield his
lungs from the noxious atmosphere.  Then he let them hoist him into
the chair while they rigged his accessory tools handily about him.
The chair itself had been specially built for the occasion.  It was
massive and mounted on a truck carried by thick dollies, and powered
by a small atomic.  In it Ellwood could sit in relative ease despite
the 3-G pull of the control room deck.

He nodded, and the cranemen hoisted him into the open lock door.
They closed it.  Ellwood was in the anteroom of the visitor from the
stars.  The rest was up to him.

The lock grew warm, and the foul atmosphere of the ship whistled in
and filled it.  The pressure built up.  Shortly conditions matched
those in the interior.  The inner lock door slid open with a hiss,
and as Ellwood piloted his sturdy vehicle through it, it clicked shut
behind him.

To human eyes the visibility was bad.  Ellwood saw everything through
a thick, milky haze, but attached to his chair were powerful lights,
and after a minute or so he could see sufficiently well.

The control room was a hemispherical affair, a roundish room with a
domed ceiling.  Except for the floor there was hardly any part of it
that was not encrusted with fantastic, intricate machinery.  It rose
in banks along the curving walls; it hung from the overhead.  Only
creatures with long multi-tentacles could have reached its scattered
controls.  As a piece of functional design it was doubtless
splendid--but from the Ursan point of view.  Ellwood swept it with
one slow, wondering glance, and then put its intricacies out of his
mind.  In time the technicians would unravel the mysteries.  His job
was more comprehensive.

The Ursan lay motionless on the far side of the room.  Ellwood could
only assume that his entry had been noted.  For there was not the
slightest sign on the part of the monster of any change in his
attitude toward his environment.  Ellwood drove his chair part way
across the room and stopped it there.  He scanned the walls afresh
for a relatively flat spot and finally found one--a huge plate that
seemed to be the cover for a portion of an elaborate arrangement of
magnetic gears.  That was well.  Ellwood relaxed and devoted his
attention to the little black box in his lap.  He seized its tuning
knobs and began searching the short-wave band.

The two adversaries remained thus for the space of hours.  Ellwood
simply sat and twiddled knobs, groping for the meaning of what he
heard.  The monster could well have been as dead as the dissected
ones in the laboratory.  It never moved an inch or twitched a
tentacle.  But it kept on doing interesting things with its steady
outpourings of radiation.

It was not long before Ellwood was aware that inside him some
exceedingly queer sensations were being born.  Pimple-raising thrills
would creep up and down his spine; elfin fingers reached inside his
eardrums and thumped them; once there were sudden shooting pains in
his eyeballs; and there was a very trying period several minutes long
when his heart action went crazy.  Ellwood accepted it stoically.  He
was sure of himself and felt no fear.  He was being probed, examined,
mentally dissected by a diffuse electronic mind that felt its way by
reflected radiation.  He knew his own immense curiosity as to the
nature and purposes of the thing opposite to him.  It was not
illogical that the feeling was mutual.

At last there was a lull.  It was time for overtures, the preliminary
sizings up having been completed.  Ellwood flipped a switch and began
sending.  _Dot-dash_, _dot-dot-dot-dash_, and so on, using the wave
he thought most likely the creature communicated ideas on.  He sent
on for one minute, then grinned grimly as he ended with the standard
"Over!"

The monster caught on.  There was an answering rattle of meaningless
_ta-ta-ta-daa-daas_.  It made no sense, but the channel had been
found.  Later the cryptographers could develop the recording tapes
and try their hand at unraveling the meaning.  But it would not be
simple.  Spanish is different from Norse, but closely akin--more so,
say, than Chinese.  Yet all those languages expressed human thoughts
in terms of human visual and aural images.  How did an Ursan, a
creature who had no eyes, ears, or tongue, _think_ of the things his
"brain" conceived?  That was the crux of the problem.

Ellwood was eager to delve into that aspect.  It was for that the
extra stuff had been rushed through the stratolanes of the night, and
he was prepared.  For that reason he persisted with the exchange of
gibberish only a little while.  Then he reached into his bag of
tricks and brought out item number two.

It was a small, self-contained, magazine projector.  Loaded into it
were the excellent films devised by the Outplanet Cultural Society
for the education of the Venusian talag, the Martian phzitz, and the
odd life forms that haunted the Jovial satellites.  Ellwood focused
it on the flat plate he was lucky enough to find.  Then he started it
to running.

The golden key to successful pedagogy is the association of ideas.
That was how the OCS had solved the outland language problem.  It was
true that Ursans could not see, but neither could phzitzn.  It was
true that a talag is congenitally deaf, but they learned.  With an
Ursan it would surely be harder, but Ellwood was hopeful.

Nouns, the names of things, are always the obvious starting point.
Ellwood's first showing was that of the sun, taken close up, near
Mercury.  The impressive parade of raging sunspots was there, and the
streaming prominences.

"Sun," he sent, in the interplanetary code, and simultaneously
uttered the word out loud.  Then he diminished the diameter, showing
the sun successively as it appeared on Earth, on Jupiter, and on
Uranus.  Each time he reiterated the noun, both in dot and dash, and
by voice.  He repeated the performance from the beginning, then sent
"Over!"

"Sun," came back the Ursan's reply.  "Over!"

Ellwood beamed beneath his helmet, though hot sweat was trickling
over his eyes.  The Ursan was smart.  He was catching on.  Now for
another noun, and coupled with it a bit of semantic logic.  He
started the machine off again, and this time shrank the sun to a mere
pinpoint of scintillating white light.

"Star," was his dual message.

"Star," said the Ursan.

Then came the planets, all of them, however different, and each
Ellwood called simply planet.  After that he went through them again,
but that time he put the emphasis on their differences.  He called
them successively Mercury, Earth, Mars, and on in order.  The Ursan
followed.  Now he was beginning to grasp the human communicative
pattern.  There were all-embracing words--the generic terms that
included a whole class of related things.  There were also specific
words applying to individual variations.

Ellwood rested.  Curiously, the Ursan rested, too.  Perhaps he was
pondering what he learned, thought Ellwood.  At any rate he waited,
motionless and with much of his radiation stilled.  Ellwood was
convinced now that this plan would work.  The monster's perceptions
were those of another world, yet they did perceive.  That was what
mattered.

Presently Ellwood repeated the show, hopeful that this time the Ursan
would take another step and supply _his_ version of the word
displayed.  He did not.  Evidently there were no corresponding
concepts in Ursan thought.

Ellwood let it go.  He must be content for the time being with
one-way teaching.  Later--who knew?  He showed next two space-ships.
The first was a Terrestrian cruiser, the other a typical Ursan craft.
He established one after another the general words "spaceship,"
"warship," and then proceeded to differentiate into classes.  The
last lesson of the day was the introduction of adjectives.  There
were the terms Terrestrian and Ursan to define.


Ellwood was exhausted when he came out, and surprised to find that he
had spent but two hours within.  It had seemed far longer under the
terrible conditions suitable to Ursan life.  A group of anxious
bimmies hoisted him out of the lock and released him from his harness.

"_Phew_," he whistled.  "Now I understand why a katatron won't work
against these babies.  They heat up a ship that can't be melted, but
what is heat to creatures who start at one thousand as normal?  And
what is internal pressure increments when 3-G's is standard?  I doubt
if there is any way to kill these things unless it is to deprive them
of the precious stink they breathe."

He rested most of the afternoon, and then went back.  In the tedious
weeks of instruction that followed Ellwood made great progress.
Where the monster's memory resided he could not say, but there was
one.  For when, he finished with the concrete words he held a review.
He flashed the series beginning with the sun, though without naming
the objects.  The Ursan faithfully supplied the appropriate nouns.
He had acquired a vocabulary of more than a thousand words.

The verbs were harder, and the abstractions worse.  But the course
the Society had contrived was cleverly put together.  Ellwood
followed it religiously.  He depicted various human activities, each
neatly illustrated to emphasize the principle concerned.  In the end
he came to the concept of rivalry and showed how rivalry grew into
strife.  Combat was shown in various aspects, but all of it was
combat.  And then Ellwood played his trump.  A scene showing a fight
ended in one party crawling across the lines waving a white flag.
The two combatants then embraced.

At this point Ellwood got his first reaction from the monster that
was more than mere parroting.  It was sending agitatedly in English.
It was a queer sort of English, tinged as it was with an Ursan
accent, for even in code there is such a thing.  The creature got in
all the words, but the syntax was his own.  Some of the inversions
almost defied unscrambling, but Ellwood thought he knew what the
Ursan was driving at.  He quit sending and listened.

"Peace!" the visitor kept repeating.  "Peace.  Yes, that is what I
came for.  We are not enemies, but friends.  You are puny yet savage
monsters in our eyes, but now that I have seen you at close range I
see that you are not wholly bad.  You do many things in clumsy ways,
but we will pass over that.  That is your affair.  You are not to
blame that your sensory equipment and mentality are as limited as
they are, but I now concede that you have done remarkably well in
spite of your handicaps."

"Thank you very much," said Ellwood dryly.

Being thanked seemed to disconcert the Ursan for a moment, as it was
a concept not hitherto explained.  But he took up his harangue again.

"I have been a prisoner in this impossible place for a long time
now," sent the Ursan, "and I have listened to your teachings.  Very
well.  Now I know about you and your strange race, and the hideous
planets you choose to live on.  It's my turn.  Let me teach you _our_
way.  Leave off torturing me with your crude electronic devices and
just sit and absorb.  I assure you that what you have done to me is
quite painful, but in your ignorance you could not help that.  I will
show you that the Ursan way is better."

Ellwood turned off his set meekly.  It had not occurred to him before
that mechanically generated radiation might have subtle differences
in characteristics from the organically generated variety.  He found
himself praying that now that it was his turn and he was on the
receiving end the converse effect would not be equally painful.


It proved not to be, though there were times when Ellwood felt he
would go mad from the exquisite ecstasies that sometimes rose to
intensities amounting almost to agony.  For the Ursan discarded all
dots and dashes and went straight to the source of thought.  By means
of its own uncanny mechanism it managed to tune in on the neural
currents of the brain itself.

It was a dreamlike experience, verging occasionally on the
nightmarish.  Ellwood had a hard time later conveying some stretches
of it to the Grand Council.  Indeed, he had a hard time even
remembering part of what he experienced, so utterly alien to human
conception were many of the bizarre scenes he saw and activities
witnessed.

First he had the giddy feeling one has when succumbing to a general
anesthetic.  It was as if his soul was being torn from his body and
forced to float in space.  There was never a time when he could be
sure that he _saw_ what he saw, or _heard_ what he heard, or _felt_
what he felt.  Sensed?  Divined?  Perceived intuitively?  Some such
verb seemed more appropriate.  But shortly Ellwood quit caring.  He
was in another world, a world so weird, so fantastic, so amazing in
its extremes and distortions of ordinarily accepted laws of nature
that he knew that up to then human science had no more than scratched
the surface of general knowledge.  He saw how chemistry, physics, all
the sciences underwent profound modifications under the terrific
pressures and temperatures he encountered on certain far off planets.
Everything was--well, was _different_.

What the Ursan was giving him was a general orientation course.
Ellwood was shown scores of planets compared with which Jupiter would
be but small fry.  He saw races of other monstrous creatures that
were as different from the Ursan before him as the Ursan was from
him, yet they lived in the same environment.  It was analogous to the
mutual enjoyment of the earth by such diverse creatures as eagles,
elephants, snakes, man, fish and streptococci.  Each had its own
needs and duties, though each impinged at some points on the others.
There was co-operation among them, and also strife.  And what strife!
Ellwood grew faint when he saw the fighting modes of some species of
monsters.

But there was civilization, comprising manufacturing and commerce,
and attended and regulated by a sort of ethic.  There were
governmental organizations, and what must have been religious bodies.
It was the industrial set-up with its mighty factories that
interested Ellwood most.  He saw that on those planets certain
substances quite rare with us were commonplace, and also the
contrary.  Gold was abundant enough to be used for roofing, whereas
ordinary salt was extremely rare.  The greatest dearth lay in the
scarcity of radium, a vital commodity since it was to the Ursan what
the more important vitamins are to us.  It was on account of radium
hunger that they had been so insistent on mining the Red Spot on
Jupiter, despite our inhospitable reception of their ships.

Imperceptibly Ellwood was brought back from the realm of the distant
planets, and was kept for awhile in what can only be termed an
abstract state.  There were no pictures or sound in that.  Only a
flow of ideas.  The Ursan was pouring the Ursan philosophy of
inter-creature relationship into his consciousness.  It was not at
all a bad philosophy.  It was co-operative.  It recognized the rights
of others to live in their own queer ways, and where they conflicted
there existed an elaborate code by which they could be compromised.

At length the Ursan reached his finish.  Ellwood was back in his own
personality, dazed and tired, but immensely satisfied.  He knew,
without knowing how he felt, that henceforth intercourse between him
and this monster would be easy.  It would not be in dots and dashes
or words in any form.  It would not be simple telepathy, which after
all is but the mysterious conveyances of thinkable pictures.  It
transcended that.  It was super-telepathy, made possible by the
amazing electro-magneto-neuro current command available to those with
the Ursan metabolism.  Somehow the raw, basic idea came over all at
once.  It was amorphous, instantaneous, and beyond logical analysis.

Ellwood knew his task was successfully completed.  The wordless
message given him boiled down to this,

"We, the rulers of the Armadian planets about the great sun Gol
midway between you and Polaris, have looked your system over and find
there is a basis for us to work for mutual advantage.  We saw that
you were in useful occupation of certain small planets utterly
unsuitable for us.  We meant to leave you alone, and have left you
alone.  We also found that you have two other planets, one rich and
the other less so, sufficiently large to support our colonies.  They
are useless to you, and must always be, since your personal structure
is so puny and your science elementary.  We, therefore, claimed them
for ourselves, resisting your ignorant and vicious attacks only in so
far as we were compelled to.

"Since I find now that you are ruled by fear, and actuated at times
by greed and envy, we know that you will never be satisfied with
simply ceding to us what is of no value to you.  You want recompense.
Very well, at great risk and no small inconvenience, I have come as
an emissary.  In our part of the galaxy there are many small planets
that would be paradisical to you, and on most of them the life forms
are even more primitive than your own.  If you will grant us
unmolested access to Jupiter and Saturn, we will lead you to these
trivial minor planets amongst us and grant you equal privileges in
return.  I am the envoy of Armadia.  I offer you a treaty."

"I will convey your message to our ruling body," said Ellwood.


"But it is unthinkable," exclaimed Dilling, chairman of the Council.
"Why, think of the risks.  How do we know these ... these _monsters_
have any honor?  If we allow them to build up immense bases, strip
our system of its radium, and nose about at will, it will be but a
question of time until they exterminate us.  Moreover, it is an
ultimatum.  We cannot entertain an ultimatum from ... from ... from--"

He sputtered off into angry silence, still groping for a word beastly
enough to describe the Ursan creatures as he saw them.  Ellwood
regarded him with quiet contempt.

"It is not an ultimatum," he said, coldly.  "Alternatives were never
mentioned, though there has not been a time in the past half century
when the Ursans could not have seared our inner planets from pole to
pole whenever they chose.  I have seen their engines of destruction
and they are unimaginably terrible.  They are asking only that we
stop beating our brains out and sacrificing our ships in futile
nibbling at their radium convoys.  We have had half a million fatal
casualties to their three.  The inmates of the ships we warmed up
were only momentarily stunned.  The three they lost they lost in
offering this friendly gesture."

"Bah," snorted Dilling.  "What is friendly about proposing to rob us
of untold tons of pure radium when we put such high value on the few
pounds we own?"

"The radium in question," said Ellwood, "might as well not exist as
far as we are concerned.  Our ships have neither the structural
strength or the power to negotiate the gravity field of Jupiter, nor
our men the stamina to work the mines if they could go there.  You
are playing dog in the manger.  Yet knowing that, and our weakness,
they have made an offer.  They will cede us planets as valuable to us
as the radium sought is to them.  They do it with their sense of fair
play.  You will accept the treaty because you have no other choice.
They will take the radium in any event and keep on slapping down any
cruisers of ours that try to interfere.  They offer peace instead,
and commerce.  Think, you other gentlemen, of what that promises.
Inter-systemic commerce, not only astronomically speaking, but
between systems of life that are on radically different chemical and
physical levels.  Trade between the tropics and the cold countries
was profitable.  Trade between Venus and us and Mars is profitable.
Here you are offered a prospect that staggers the imagination."

Ellwood chopped off his speech and sat down.  He had said what was to
be said.  The rest was up to the Council.

The discussion that followed was heated and lengthy, but in the end
common sense won.  When he left the chamber it was with authorization
to negotiate.


Ellwood approached the Ursan ship for his final interview with the
alien ambassador.  Shortly he would inherit the interesting wreck for
whatever study he wanted to make of it.  For the Ursan had broadcast
to a waiting horde far out in space that terms had been arrived at.
Shortly another Ursan ship would appear, this time with safe conduct,
and take his envoy home.  Meantime there were the ultimate
formalities to be observed.

Ellwood carried with him the English text of the treaty.  Both the
Terrestrian and the Ursan copies were ingraved in basic, systemic
English on thick sheets of pure beryllium, a metal totally unknown on
the heavy planets.  He was to sign with the monster and leave him one
set.  In his turn the monster was to hand over a copy of the Golic
version.

When Ellwood's chair rolled out onto the floor of the control room,
the Ursan did what it had never done before.  It moved.  Inching
along on its line of monopods caterpillar fashion, it slowly crossed
and met Ellwood midway.  Long dormant tentacles slithered out of
their sockets and went to work.  Two that terminated in the semblance
of hands took the beryllium sheets from Ellwood, shuffled them
rapidly, and returned them to him.  They then reached into a locker
overhead and produced a half dozen golden metallic balls.  Another
tentacle snaked toward a shelf and brought forward an instrument.
Ellwood knew, as if by instinct, what he had to do.

The Golic text of the treaty turned out to be the oddest document in
the libraries of man.  It contained not words, but pure
thought--thought impressed on the surface of the strange metallic
spheres in the form of regenerative neuronic charges.  To comprehend
their meaning any intelligent human had only to run them through the
instrument provided with them.  It was a scanner, and as the balls
rolled through, the hidden message on their surfaces suddenly and
mysteriously became clear to anyone nearby.

Ellwood scanned the Golic text.  It was a marvel of clarity of
expression.  The stipulations contained were the whole thought,
without a jot of qualification or reservation.  One _knew_ what was
meant.  There was no room for quibbling, even if a galaxy of lawyers
undertook the task.  There were no shades of meaning, or misplaced
commas.  There were no ifs and buts and and/ors, or whereases or
parties of this part and that as cluttered up the Solar version.  The
Golic text said what the Solar did, but perfectly.

Ellwood signed it by merely giving his mental assent, which by some
miracle of alien science became at once a part of the document.  Then
he put his own signature to the tin sheets, using a stylus.  The
Ursan signed in similar manner, but employing a special tentacle that
terminated in the suitable tool.  What he put down for his name was
an unintelligible symbol, but it did not matter.  The Solar version
would always be subordinate to the Golic.  It was an anachronism, a
sop to legalistic tradition, a thing to be filed in archive vaults
and forgotten.  If ever there should arise a question, the thought
spheres would provide the answer.

After the exchange of documents there was a moment of stillness.  The
two utterly different organisms--the Earthman and the Ursan--were as
motionless as if hewn from stone.  They were lost in intimate psychic
rapport.  There was gratitude and friendliness in it, and mutual
congratulations.  Each recognized that the other had done a
superlative job, and each understood the purity of the other's
motive.  Then the mood abruptly faded, as if a connection had been
snapped.  Ellwood felt completely at a loss as to how he should
terminate the interview.

At that instant the Ursan did an astonishing thing.  A handed
tentacle crept over to Ellwood's chair and rested lightly for a
moment on the padded arm.  Then it slid forward past the bulbous
hinge of the wrist joint of Ellwood's armor and found his gloved
hand.  The handlike Ursan tentacle tip grasped Ellwood's hand and
shook it solemnly, up and down.  Then it dropped away, and retired to
its sheath.  It was good-by, and good luck.

Out in the lock Ellwood waited for the pressure to fall, and the
good, clean, cool terrestrial air to come in.  There was a lump in
his throat and his eyes were moist, and all of the moisture was not
sweat.

"How did that Ursan know we shook hands on things?" he muttered.
"_I_ never told him.  Not once."


[The end of _Alien Envoy_ by Malcolm Jameson]