UNWELCOMED VISITOR

Episode 2

Everywhere he met the same indifference as at first. Even the children stared at him without curiosity, and went on with their games. He stopped to watch—and to listen.

They bounced balls, and as they bounced, they recited words. When something interrupted the even tenor of the game and they had to begin again, they went back to the start of the recitation. Surely, they were counting. Listening carefully, he learned the fundamentals of their system of numerals. At the same time, for the sake of permanence, he made pictorial and auditory records

Every now and then the game would be interrupted by a quarrel. And a childish quarrel, of course, was sure to be full of recriminations. You did this, I did that. He learned the names of the objects with which they played, he learned the words for first and second persons in their different forms. He learned the word for the maternal parent, who seemed to stand in the closest relation to the young ones.

By evening he had acquired a fairly good child's grasp of the language. He rolled back in the direction of the ship. When he came to the place where it should be, he had a sudden feeling of panic. The ship was gone.

They must have dragged it away. Their whole pretense of indifference must have been a trick, he thought excitedly. They had waited until they could tamper with it without his interference, in order to learn its secrets. What had they done with it? Perhaps they had harmed it, possibly they had ruined the drive. How could he ever get off this accursed planet, how would he ever get back to Gfun?

He rolled hastily over to the nearest man and tried to put his newfound vocabulary to use. "Where—where—" He realized suddenly that he didn't know the word for ship. "Where galenfain?"

The man looked at him as if he were crazy, and walked on.

Xhanph did some swearing on his own account. He began to roll madly around the square, becoming more desperate from moment to moment. Finally, just when he thought he would explode from rage and frustration, he found the ship again. It had been dragged to a neighboring street and left on a vacant lot, surrounded by rusty cans, broken bottles, and various other forms of garbage and rubbish indigenous to this section of the planet.

Relief mingled with a feeling of outrage. Xhanph swore again. The indignity of it was enough to start an interplanetary war. If they ever heard of it back on Gfun, they would want to blast this stupid and insulting planet out of existence.

He hastened into the ship, and found to his joy that there had been no damage. There was nothing to prevent him from taking off again and getting back to Gfun. But the mystery of his reception still intrigued him. He could not leave without solving it.

He rolled out of the ship again and stood there watching it. Evidently they had regarded this miracle of engineering as nothing more than so much rubbish. They would probably leave it alone now. He could let it remain here, and in the meantime carry on his investigating as before.

Things would go more rapidly now that he understood some of the elements of human speech. All he had to do was keep his hearing appendages open and interpret the key words as he heard them. It shouldn't take him long. One of the reasons he had been selected to make the trip was that he had a gift for languages, and a day or two more should suffice to establish communications.

He left the ship again and began to roll around the city. He listened to traffic policemen directing the flow of helicopters, he stood by unobtrusively while boys talked with girls—these conversations turned out to be very limited in scope, as well as uninstructive in the syntax— and he even managed to get into a place of amusement where three-dimensional images created in him a sense of nostalgia. From his slight knowledge of the language, he could perceive that the dialogue was so stale that he himself could have supplied it from stories written long ago on his native planet. After a lapse of many hours, the majority of the people disappeared from the streets, and he decided it was time to return to his ship and suspend the animation.

In the morning, he set out again. By the end of that day, he felt he could understand the spoken language well enough. What next?

To learn the language in written form might take too long, and besides, to solve his mystery he would have to waste time in digging up the recorded forms that contained the necessary information. No, he would have to find some one to talk to, some one who would have the necessary information at his tentacle-tips, or as they called the appendages here, finger-tips.

He began to approach various people again, undiscouraged by their cold and impolite replies. Finally he found the informant he had been seeking, an old, white-haired individual who was walking slowly, with the aid of a cane, along one of the wider and quieter streets.

The man looked at him with calm lack of interest as he approached. Xhanph came to a stop, and said, "Greetings! I, Xhanph, bring you greetings from the inhabitants of the planet, Gfun. I come with a message of friendship."

"Very glad to make your acquaintance, sir," said the old man politely, but still without genuine interest.

At last, someone who had answered! Xhanph started his portable recording machine going

"I wish for information. Perhaps you can give it to me."

"Ah, my young fellow, I have seen a great deal and know a great deal. But it isn't very often that you young ones want to find out what we old folks know."

"Perhaps I have not made myself clear. I am an inhabitant of the planet, Gfun."

"Yes, indeed. Do you intend to stay here long?"

"I have come with a message of friendship. But I have found no one to receive it."

"Mmm. That's unfortunate," the old man said. "People are very impatient nowadays. Time is money, they say. I can't spare the money to stop and talk. Couldn't spare it myself, not so long ago. I'm retired now, though. Used to run a stereo store up around Mudlark Street. The biggest store in the city. Everybody used to buy from me. Jefferson J. Gardner's my name. You may have heard of me from—where did you say you came from?"

"Gfun. However, I wish to make it clear—"

"Never sold any stereos to anyone on Gfun. Probably don't get good reception up there. Sold 'em to everybody else, though. I'm well known here, Mr.—"

"Xhanph. But before you go further—"

"Got into the stereo game when they first came out. Went like hotcakes in those days. Although I don't suppose you know what a hotcake is. Quality didn't count. Only thing that counted was size of screen and strength of the three-dimensional effect. Mr. Gloopher—he was Mayor then—Robert F. Gloopher—had a daughter who went in for acting...."

Not for the first time, Xhanph cursed this damnable planet. The only man he had found willing to talk was senile and his conversation rambled wildly like a feather in a strong and particularly erratic whirlwind. Still, he told himself with a touch of philosophy, I have wasted so much time, I can afford to waste a little more. Sooner or later, this individual will tell me what I want to know.

Half an hour later, however, when Jefferson J. Gardner began to repeat himself, Xhanph realized that he couldn't just wait for the old man to talk himself out. Different tactics were needed.

He interrupted rudely. "Why don't people pay any attention to me?"

"Eh? What's that you say?"

"I come from the planet, Gfun. I thought that as an interplanetary visitor I would be received with tremendous enthusiasm. Instead I find myself disregarded."

I recollect that back in the old days—"

"Never mind that. Why don't people pay any attention to me?"

"Why should they?"

"That is no answer!"

"But it is, sir," said the old gentleman with dignity. "They don't find you out of the ordinary. Why pay attention to you?"

"You mean that you are accustomed to visitors from space?"

"No, sir, I mean nothing of the kind. What I do mean is that we are now thoroughly accustomed to the idea of you. I remember—"

"Never mind what you remember!"

"When I was a child, stories about visitors from Mars or Venus were already trite and stereotyped. What could a visitor do? What might a visitor look like? All the possible answers had already been given, and we were familiar with every one of them. We imagined visitors with tentacles and without, with a thousand legs and no legs, with five heads and seven feet, and eighteen stomachs. We imagined visitors who were plants, electrical impulses, viruses, or energy creatures. They had the power to read minds, to move objects telekinetically, and travel through impossible dimensions. Their spaceships were of all kinds, and they could race along at many times the speed of light or crawl at the speed of molasses. I do not know, sir, into which category you fall—whether you are animal, vegetable, mineral, or electrical—but I know that there is nothing new about you."

"But you are familiar merely with the idea. I am a real visitor!"

"Young man, I am a hundred and ten years old, and the idea of you was already ancient when I was eight. I remember reading about you in a comic book. You are not the first visitor who has pretended to be real. There were hundreds before you. I have seen press agent stunts by the dozen, and advertising pictures by the hundreds about Mars, Venus, the Moon, about visitors from interstellar space. Your pretended colleagues have walked the streets of innumerable cities, until now we are weary of the entire tribe of you. And you yourself, sir, if you will pardon the expression, you are an anticlimax."

"Your race must be insane," protested Xhanph. "For all you know I may come with great gifts which I wish to confer upon you."

"We have been fooled before. And in view of the fact, as I have reminded you, that time is money, we do not wish to bankrupt ourselves by investigating."

"But suppose I'm here to harm you!"

"If your race is capable of it, we can hardly stop you, so it is no use trying. If incapable, you are wasting your efforts."

"This is insanity, genuine racial insanity!"

"You repeat yourself. The fact is, we have become blasé," said the old man. "Thanks to the efforts of our science fiction writers, we have experienced in imagination all there is to experience in interplanetary contact, and the genuine article can be only a disappointment. I am reminded of an incident that occurred when Gerald Crombie, who was City Councilman at the time, ordered a twenty-five inch stereo set...."