Cry from a Far Planet - Tom Godwin

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cry from a Far Planet by Tom Godwin. The problem
of separating the friends from the enemies was a major
one in the conquest of space, as many a dead
spacer could have testified. A tough job when you could
see an alien and judge appearances, far tougher when they
were only whispers on the wind. A smile of friendship

(00:25):
is a bearing of the teeth, so is a snarl
of menace. It can be fatal to mistake the latter
for the former harm. An alien being only under the
circumstances of self defense trusts no alien being under any circumstances.

(00:47):
From Exploration Ship's Handbook. He listened in the silence of
the exploration ship's control room. He heard nothing, but that
was what bothered him. An ominous quiet where there should
have been a multitude of sounds from the nearby village

(01:07):
for the view screen's audio pickups to transmit. And it
was more than six hours past the time when the
native throne should have come to set it with him.
Outside the ship, as they resumed the laborious attempt to
learn each other's languages, the view screen was black in
the light of the control room, even though it was

(01:29):
high noon outside the dull red sun was always invisible
through the world's thick atmosphere, and to humanize, full day
was no more than a red tinged darkness. He switched
on the ship's outside floodlights, and the view screen came
to a bright white life, showing the empty glades reaching

(01:52):
away between the groves of purple alien trees. He noticed
absently that the trees seemed to have changed a little
in color since his arrival. The village was hidden from
view by the outer trees, but there should have been
some activity in the broad area visible to him. There
was none, not even along the distant segment of what

(02:15):
should have been a busy road. The natives were up
to something, and he knew from hard experience on other
alien worlds that it would be nothing good. It would
be another misunderstanding of some kind, and he didn't know
enough of their incomprehensible language to ask them what it was. Suddenly,

(02:37):
as it always came, he felt someone or something standing
close behind him and peering over his shoulder. He dropped
his hand to the blaster that he had been wearing
at all times and whorled. Nothing was behind him. There
never was. The control room was empty, with no hiding
place for anything, and the door was closed by the

(03:00):
remote control button. Beside him, there was nothing. The sensation
of being watched faded, as though the watcher had withdrawn
to a greater distance. It was perhaps the hundredth time
within six days that he had felt the sensation, and
when he slept at night, something came to nuzzle at

(03:21):
his mind, faceless, formless, utterly alien. For the past three
nights he had not let the blaster get beyond quick
reach of his hand, even when in bed. But whatever
it was, it could not be on the ship. He
had searched the ship twice, a methodical compartment by compartment

(03:42):
search that had found nothing. It had to be the
work of the natives from outside the ship. Except why,
if the natives were telepathic, did one called throne go
through the very weary pretense of trying to learn a
mutually understandable form of communication. There was one other explanation

(04:07):
which he could not accept. That he was following in
the footsteps of will Garrett of Ship nine, who had
deliberately gone into a white son two months after the
death of his twin brother. He looked at the chair
beside his own Johnny's chair, which would forever be empty,
and his thoughts went back down the old bitter paths.

(04:29):
The Exploration Board had been wrong when they thought the
close bond between identical twins would make them the ideal
two man crews for the lonely lifetime journeys of the
exploration ships. Identical twins were too close. When one of
them died, the other died in part with him. They

(04:52):
had crossed a thousand light years of space together, he
and Johnny when they came to the bleak planet that
he would name Johnny. He should never have let Johnny
go up on the slope of the Honeycomb Mountain, but
Johnny had wanted to take the routine record photographs of
the black tiger like beasts, which they had called cave cats,

(05:15):
and the things had seemed harmless and shy despite their
ferocious appearance. I'm taking them a sack of food that
I think they might like, Johnny had said, I want
to try to get some good close up shots of them.
Ten minutes later, he heard the distant snarl of Johnny's blaster.
He ran up the mountain side, knowing that he was

(05:35):
already too late. He found two of the cave cats
lying where Johnny had killed them. Then he found Johnny
at the foot of a high cliff. He was dead,
his neck broken by the fall. Scattered all around him
from the torn sack was the food that he had
wanted to give to the cats. He buried Johnny The

(05:57):
next day, while a cold wind moaned under a lead
gray sky, he built a monument forum, a little mound
of frosty stones that only the wild animals would ever see.
A chime rang high and clear, and the memories were shattered.
The orange light above the hyperspace communicated was flashing, the

(06:18):
signal that meant the Exploration Board was calling him from Earth.
He flipped the switch and said, Paul jameson Exploration Ship one.
The familiar voice of BRender spoke, it's been a long
time since your preliminary report. Is everything all right in
a way, he answered, I was going to give you
the detailed report tomorrow. Give me a brief sketch of

(06:41):
it now. Except for their short brown fur, their natives
are humanoid in appearance, but there are basic differences. Their
body temperature is cool, like their climate. Their vision range
is just from within the visible red on into the infrared.
They'll shade their eyes from the light of anything as
hot and boiling water, but they'll look square into the

(07:05):
ship's floodlights and never see them. And their knowledge of science,
BRender asked, they have a good understanding of it, but
along lines entirely different from what our own were at
the stage of development. For example, they power their machines
with chemicals, but there is no steam, heat, or exhaust.

(07:25):
That's what we want to find worlds where branches of
research unknown to our science are being explored. How about
their language? No progress with it yet. He told BRender
of the silence in the village, and added, even if
Throune should show up, I could not ask him what
was wrong. I've learned a few words, but they have

(07:47):
so many different definitions that I can't use them. I know,
BRender said, variable in and unrelated definitions, undetectable shades of inflection,
and sometimes a language that has no discernibly separate words.
The Singer brothers of Ship eight ran into the latter.
We've given them up as lost. The Singer's dead, he exclaimed,

(08:10):
Good God, it's been only a month since the Ramon
brothers were killed. The circumstances were similar. BRender said, they
always are. There is no way the exploration men can
tell the natives that they mean them no harm, and
the suspicion of the natives grows into dangerous hostility. The
singers reported the natives on the world to be both

(08:32):
suspicious in possessing powerful weapons. The singers were proceeding warily,
their own weapons always at hand, but somehow the natives
caught them off guard, and their last report was four
months ago. There was a silence. Then BRender added their
ship was the ninth and we had only fifteen. He

(08:55):
did not reply to the implications of Brender's statement. It
was obvious to them all what the end of the
plan would be, what it had to be. It had
only been three years since the fifteen heavily armed exploration
ships set out to lead the way for Tearan expansion
across the galaxy, to answer a cry from far planets,

(09:17):
and to find all the worlds that held intelligent life.
That was the ultimate goal of the plan, to accumulate
and correlate all the diverse knowledge of all the intelligent
life forms in the galaxy. Among the achievements resulting from
that tremendous massive data would be a ship's drive faster
even than hyperspace, the third level drive, which would bring

(09:41):
all the galaxies of the universe within reach. And now
nine ships were gone out of fifteen, and nineteen men
out of thirty. The communication barrier. BRender said, the damned
communication barrier has been the cause behind the loss of
every ship. There's nothing we can do about it. We're

(10:02):
stymied by it. The conversation was terminated shortly afterward, and
he moved about the room restlessly, wishing that it was
time to lift the ship again. With Johnny not there,
the dark world was like a smothering tomb. He would
like to leave it behind and drive again into the
star clouds of the galaxy, drive on and on into them.

(10:27):
A ghostly echo touched his mind restlessly, poignantly yearning, he
swung to face the locked door, knowing there could be
nothing behind it. The first real fear came to him
as he did so. The thing was lonely. The thing
that watched him was as lonely as he was. What

(10:48):
else could any of it be but the product of
a mind in the first stage of insanity. The natives
came ten minutes later, the viewscreen showed. Their chemically powered
vehicles emerged from the trees and rolled swiftly across the glades.
Four natives were in it, while a fifth one lay

(11:09):
on the floor, apparently badly injured. The vehicle stopped a
short distance in front of the airlock, and he recognized
the native on the floor. It was thron, the one
with whom he had been exchanging language lessons. They were
waiting for him when he emerged from the ship, pistol
like weapons in their belt and grim accusations in their manner.

(11:33):
Throun was muttering unintelligibly, unconscious. His skin, where not covered
by the brown fur, was abnormal in appearance. He was dying.
The leader of the four indicated Throne and said, in
the quick, brite voice, corigav fen no dran. Only the
one word was familiar, ko, which meant you, and yesterday,

(11:58):
and a great many other things. The question was utterly
meaningless to him. He dropped his hands a little nearer
his blaster, and the leader spoke again, a quick succession
of unknown words that ended with a harshly demanded grisson
criissan meant now or very quickly. All the other words

(12:18):
were unfamiliar to him. They waited, the grim menace about
them increasing when he did not answer. He tried in
vain to find some way of explaining to them he
was not responsible for Throune's sickness and could not cure it.
Then he saw the spray of leaves that had caught
on the corner of the vehicle when it came through

(12:40):
the farther trees. They were of a deep purple color.
All the trees around the ship were almost gray by contrast,
which meant that he was responsible for Thrune's condition. The
cold white light of the ship's floodlights, under which he
and Throne had sat for day after day, contained radiations

(13:01):
that went through the violet and far into the ultra
violet to the animal and vegetable life of the dark world.
Such radiations were invisibly short and deadly. Throne was dying
of hard radiation sickness. It was something he should have
foreseen and avoided, and that would not have happened had

(13:23):
he accepted Old Thrones pantomimed an invitation in the beginning
to go with him into the village to work at
the language study. There, he would have used a harmless
battery lamp for illumination, but there was no certainty that
the natives were not planning to lay a trap for
him in the village, and he had refused to go.

(13:44):
It did not matter. There was a complex radiation neutralizer
and a cell reconstructor in the ship which would return
Thron to full normal health in a few hours after
he was placed in its chamber. He turned to the
leader of the foreign native and motioned from throne to
the airlock. Go there, he said, in the native language Braun.

(14:07):
The leader answered the word meant no, and there was
a determination in the way he said it that showed
he would not move from it. At the end of
five minutes, his attempts to persuade them to take through
and into the ship had increased their suspicion of his
motives to the point of critical danger. If only he
could tell them why he wanted Thron taken into the ship,

(14:30):
but he could not, and would have to take Throne
by first disposing of the four without injuring them. This
he could do by procuring one of the paralyzing needle
guns from the ship. He took a step towards the
ship and spoke the words that, to the best of
his knowledge meant I come back fest win ilitt klaw.

(14:52):
Their reply was to snatch at their weapons in desperate haste.
Even as the leader uttered a hoarse word of command,
he brought up the bluff with the quick motion that
long training had perfected, and their weapons were only half
drawn when his warning came brawn. They froze, but did
not release their weapons. He walked backward to the airlock,

(15:13):
his blaster covering them the tensely waiting manner in which
they watched his progress, telling him that the slightest relaxation
of his vigilance would mean his death. He did not
let the muzzle of the blaster waver until he was
inside the airlock and the outer door had slid shut.
He was sure that the natives would be gone when

(15:35):
he returned, and he was sure of another thing, that
whatever he said to them, it was not what he
had thought he was saying. He saw that the glade
was empty when he opened the airlock again. At the
same time, a bomb like missile struck the ship just
above the airlock and exploded with the savage crash. He

(15:56):
jabbed the close button, and the door clicked shut barely
in bands of three more missiles, which hammered at the
imperviate's armor, so that he thought wearily is that he
laid the useless needle gun aside. The stage was passed
when he could hope to use it. He could save

(16:16):
Throun only by killing some of the others, or he
could lift the ship and leave Thron to die. Either
action would make the natives hate and fear Terrans, a
hatred and fear that would be there to greet all
future Terran ships. That was not the way a race
gave birth to the peaceful galactic empire. Was not the

(16:39):
purpose behind the plan. But always wherever the exploration men went,
they encountered the deadly barrier, the intangible, unassailable communication barrier.
With the weapons and exploration men carried in his ship,
he had the power to destroy a world, but not
the power to ask the simple questions that would prevent

(17:02):
fatal misunderstandings. And before another three years had passed, the
last exploration man would die, the last explorationship would be lost.
He felt the full force of hopelessness for the first time.
When Johnny had been alive, it had been different Johnny,
who had laughed whenever the outlook was the darkest and said,

(17:24):
we will find a way, Paul. The thought broke as suddenly, unexpectedly,
he felt that Johnny was very near. With the feeling
came the soft enclosure of a dreamlike peace, in which
Johnny's death was vague and far away, only something that
had happened in another dream. He knew, without wondering why,

(17:45):
that Johnny was in the control room. A potter of
his mind tried to reject the thought as an illusion.
He did not listen. He did not want to listen.
He ran to the ship's elevator, stumbling like one nut fake.
Johnny was waiting for him in the control room. Alive, alive,

(18:08):
he spoke. As he stepped into the control room, Johnny,
something moved at the control board. Black, an alien, standing
tall as a man on short hind legs. Yellow eyes
blazed in a feline face. It was a cave cat,
like the ones that had killed Johnny. Realization was a

(18:29):
wrenching shock and a terrible disillusionment. Johnny was not waiting
for him, not alive. He brought up the blaster, the
dream like state gone. The paw of the cave cat
flashed out and struck the ship's master light switch with
the movement faster than his own. The room was instantly

(18:51):
totally dark. He fired, and a pale blue fire lanced
across the room to reveal that the cave Cat was gone.
He fired again, quickly, and immediately in front of him.
The pale beam revealed only the ripped metal floor. I
am not where you think. The words spoke clearly in

(19:14):
his mind, but there was no directional source. He held
his breath, listening for the whisper of padded feet as
the cave Cat flashed in for the kill, and made
a swift analysis of the situation. The cave Cat was
telepathic and highly intelligent, and had been on the ship
all the time. It and the others had wanted the

(19:35):
ship and had killed Johnny to reduce opposition to the minimum.
He himself had been permitted to live until the cave
Cat learned from his mind how to operate the almost
automatic controls. Now he had served his purpose. You are
wrong again. There was no way he could determine the

(19:58):
direction from which the thought came. He listened again and
wondered why it had not waylaid him at the door.
Its thought came, I had to let you see me,
or you would not have believed I existed. It was
only here that I could extinguish all the lights and
have time to speak before you killed me. I let

(20:21):
you think your brother was here. There was a little pause.
I am sorry, I am sorry. I am I should
have used some other method of luring you here. He
swung his blaster toward what seemed to be a faint
sound near the astrogator unit across the room. We did

(20:42):
not intend to kill your brother. He did not believe
it and did not reply. When we first made telepathic
contact with him, he jerked up his blaster and fired.
In his mind was the conviction that we had pretended
to be harmless animals so that we could catch him
off guard and kill him. One of us leaped at

(21:03):
him as he fired the second time, to knock the
blaster from his hand. We needed only a few minutes
in which to explain, but he would not trust us
that long. There was a misjudgment of distance, and he
was knocked off the cliff again. He did not reply.
We did not intend to kill your brother. The thought came,

(21:26):
but you do not believe me, he spoke for the
first time. No, I don't believe you. You are physically
like cats, and cats don't misjudge distances. Now you want
something from me before you try to kill me too?
What is it? I will have to tell you of

(21:47):
my race for you to understand. We call ourselves the
varn in so far as it can be translated into
a spoken word, and we are a very old In
the beginning, we did not live in caves, but there
came a long period of time, for thousands of years,

(22:09):
when the climate on our world was so violent that
we were forced to live in the caves. It was
completely dark there, but our sense of smell became very acute,
together with sufficient sensitivity to temperature changes that we could
detect objects in our immediate vicinity. There were subterranean plants

(22:33):
in the caves, and food was no problem. We had
always been slightly telepathic, and it was during our long
stay in the caves that our intelligence and telepathic powers
became fully developed. We had only our minds. Physical science
is not created in dark caves with clumsy paws. The

(22:56):
time finally came when we could leave the caves, but
it was of little help to us. There was no
resources on our world but earth and stone, and the
thin grass of the plains. We wondered about the universe,
and we knew the stars were distant suns because one

(23:16):
of our own sons became a star each winter. We
studied as best as we could, but we could see
the stars only as the little wild animals saw them.
There was so much we wanted to learn, and by
then we were past our zenith and already dying out.
But our environment was a prison from which we could

(23:40):
never escape. When your ship arrived, we thought we might
soon be free. We wanted to ask you to take
some of us with you and arrange for others of
your race to stop by on our world, but you
dismissed us as animals, useful only for making warm fur coats.

(24:00):
Because we lived in caves and had no science, no artifacts, nothing.
You had the power to destroy us, and we did
not know what your reaction would be when you learned
we were intelligent and telepathic. A telepathic race must have
a high code of ethics and never intrude. Unwonted. But

(24:24):
would you have believed that he did not answer? The
death of your brother changed everything. You were going to
leave so soon that there would be no time to
learn more about you. I hid on the ship so
I could study you and wait until I could prove
to you that you needed me. Now I can Throne

(24:46):
is dying, and I can give you the proper words
of explanation that will cause the others to bring him
into the ship. Your real purpose what is it? He
asked to show you that men need the Varn. You
want to explore the galaxy and learn, So do the Varn.

(25:07):
You have the ships, and we have the telepathic ability
that will end the communication problem. Your race and mine
can succeed only if we go together. He searched for
the true and hidden purpose behind the Varn proposal and
saw what it would have to be the long range goal.

(25:28):
You failed to mention that your ultimate aim. I know
what you are thinking. How can I prove you wrong? Now?
There was no way for the Varn to prove him wrong,
nor for him to prove the treachery behind the Varn proposal.
The proof would only come in time when the Terran

(25:48):
Varn co operation has transformed Terrans into a slave race.
The Varn spoke again, you refuse to believe I am sincere.
I would be a naive fool to believe you. It
will be too late to save throne unless we act
very quickly. I have told you why I am here.

(26:10):
There is nothing more I can do to convince you,
but be the first to show trust. When I switch
on the lights, it would be within your power to
kill me. The varn was gambling its life in a
game in which he could be gambling the plan and
his race. It was a game he would end at

(26:32):
the first sound of movement from the astrogator unit across
the room. I have been here beside you all the time.
A furry paw brushed his face. Claws flicked gently but grimly,
reminding along his throat. He whirled and fired. He was
too late. The Varn had already leaped silently away, and

(26:55):
the beam found only the bare floor. Then the lights
came on, glaring bright after the darkness, and he saw
the Varn. It was standing by the control board, its
huge yellow eyes watching him. He brought the blaster into
line with it, his finger on the firing stud. It waited,

(27:16):
not moving or shrinking from what was coming. The translucent
golden eyes looked at him and beyond him, as though
they saw something not in the room. He wondered if
it was in contact with its own kind on Johnny's world,
and was telling them it had made the gamble for
high stakes and had lost. It was not afraid, not

(27:40):
asking for mercy. The killing of it was suddenly in
act without savor. It was something he would do in
the immediate future, but first he would let it live
long enough to save throne. He motioned with the blaster
and said, lead the way to the airlock, and afterward
you will kill me. Lead the way, he replied harshly.

(28:05):
It said no more, but went obediently past him and
trotted down the corridor like a great black dog. He
stood in the open airlock, the varn against the farther wall,
where he had ordered it to stand. Throune was in
the radiation chamber, and he had held his first intelligible
conversation with the natives that day. The varn was facing

(28:28):
into the red black gloom outside the lighted airlock, where
the departing natives could be heard crossing the glade. Their
thoughts no longer hold fear and suspicion, it said. The
misunderstanding is ended. He raised the muzzle of the blaster
in his hand. The black head lifted as the golden

(28:49):
eyes looked up at him. I made you a promise,
he said, I could demand none. I can't stop to
take you back to your own world, and I can
can't leave you alive on this one. With what you've
learned from my mind, you would have the natives build
the Varn a disintegrator equipped space fleet equal to our
own ships. We only want to go with you. He

(29:14):
told it what he wanted it to know before he
killed it, wondering why he should care. I would like
to believe you are a sincere and you know why
I don't dare to. Trusting a telepathic race would be
too dangerous. The Varn would know everything we knew, and
only the Varn would be able to communicate with each

(29:34):
new alien race. We would have to believe what the
Varn told us. We would have to trust the Varn
to see for us and speak for us, and not
deceive us as we went across the galaxy. And then
in the end, Terence would no longer be needed except
as a subject race. They would be enslaved. We would

(29:56):
have laid the groundwork for an empire, the Varn Empire.
There was a silence in which his words hung like
something cold and invisible between them. Then the varn asked,
very quietly, why is the plan failing? You already know,
he said, because of the barrier, the communication barrier that

(30:19):
causes aliens to misunderstand the intentions of the exploration men
and fear them. There is no communication barrier between you
and I, yet you fear me and are going to
kill me. I have to kill you. You represent a
danger to my race. Isn't that the same reason why
aliens kill exploration men? He did not answer, and his

(30:45):
thought came quickly. How does an exploration man appear to
the natives of alien worlds? How did he appear? He
landed on their world in a ship that could smash
it into oblivion. He stepped out of his ship carrying
weapons that could level a city. He represented irresistible power

(31:06):
for destruction, and he trusted no one and nothing, and
in return he hoped to find welcome and friendship and
co operation there. The varn said, is your true barrier,
your own distrust and suspicion? You yourselves create it on each

(31:26):
new world. Now you are going to erect it between
my race and yours by killing me and advising the
exploration board to quarantine my world, and never let another
ship land there again. There was a silence as he
thought of what the Varn had said, and of what
it had said earlier. We are a very old race.

(31:51):
There was wisdom in the Varn's analysis of the cause
of the plan's failure, and with the Varn to vanquish
the communication stalemate, the new approach could be tried. They
could go a long way together, men and Varn, a
long long way, or they could create the Varn empire.

(32:12):
And how could he know which it would be? How
could any one know except the telepathic Varn. The muzzle
of the blaster had dropped, and he brought it back up.
He forced the dangerous indecision aside, knowing that he would
have to kill the Varn at once, or he might
weaken again and set harshly to it. The risk is

(32:36):
too great. I want to believe you, but all your
talk of trust and good intentions is only talk, and
my race would be the only one that had to trust.
He touched the firing stud as the last thought of
the Varn came. Let me speak once more. He waited,
the firing stud, cold and metallic under his finger. You

(32:59):
are wrong. We have already set the example of faith
in you by asking to go with you. I told
you we did not intend to hurt your brother, and
I told you we saw the stars only as the
little wild animals saw them the years in the dark caves.
You do not understand the eyes of the varn looked

(33:20):
into his and beyond him, beautiful, expressionless, like polished gold.
The Varn are blind. End of Cry from a far
Planet by Tom Godwin