Unearthly Neighbors Read Free

“Language, you say? Careful, now—even chimpanzees make a lot of vocal racket, but they don’t have a language. How are you using the word?”
    “Well, they seem to talk in about the same circumstances we do. And they are definitely not limited to a few set sounds or cries—they yak in a very human manner. We have some movies synchronized with the sounds, and several of them show what appear to be parents telling things to their children, for instance. That good enough?”
    Monte dropped back into his chair and pulled out his pipe. “I’d say that settles it. They’re men in my book. How about the rest of their culture—things you could see from a distance, I mean?”
    Heidelman frowned. “That’s the odd thing about it, Monte. The survey boys were pretty careful, but they couldn’t see any of the things I would have expected. No cities or anything of that sort. Not even any houses, unless you call a hollow tree a house. No visible farming or industry. The people don’t even wear clothing. In fact—unless the survey was cockeyed—they don’t seem to have any artifacts at all.”
    “No tools? No weapons? Not even stone axes or wooden clubs?”
    “Nothing. They go naked and they don’t carry anything with them. When they swing through the trees—”
    Monte almost dropped his pipe. “You’re kidding. Are you trying to tell me that these people brachiate—swing hand over hand through the trees?”
    “That’s what they do. Of course, they walk on the ground too—they’re fully erect in their posture and all that. But with those terrifically long arms of theirs…”
    Louise laughed with delight, as though someone had dumped a sack of diamonds into her lap. “Show us the pictures, Mark! We can’t take much more of this.”
    “Maybe that would be best.” Heidelman grinned, knowing that he had them thoroughly on the hook now. He stood up. “I have the photographs right over here in my briefcase.”
    Monte Stewart stared at the brown briefcase on his living-room table with an excitement he had never known before. He felt like Darwin must have felt when he first stepped ashore on that most important of all islands…
    “For God’s sake,” he said, “let’s see those pictures!”

2
    There were five tri-di photographs in full color. Heidelman handed them over without comment. Monte shuffled through them rapidly, his quick gray eyes searching for general impressions, and then studied them one by one.
    “Yes and no,” he muttered to himself.
    The pictures—which were obviously stills blown up from a movie film—weren’t too clear. They were a bit fuzzy, and the subject matter was irritatingly noncommittal. It was as though a camera had been stuck out of a window and pictures snapped at random.
    Still, they were the most fascinating pictures that Monte had ever seen.
    “Look at those arms,” Louise breathed.
    Monte nodded, trying to get his thoughts in some kind of order. There was so much to see in five pictures, so much to see that was new and strange—and hauntingly familiar.
    The landscape was disturbing, which made it difficult to get the man-like figures into perspective. There was nothing about it that was downright grotesque, but the shapes of the trees and plants were subtly wrong. The colors, too, were unexpected. The trees had a blue cast to their bark, and their leaves were as much red as green. There were too many bright browns and blues, as though a painter’s brush had unaccountably slipped on a nightmare canvas.
    The Sun, which was visible in two of the pictures, was a brilliant white that filled too much of the sky.
    The whole effect, Monte thought, was curiously similar to the painted forests one sometimes saw in books for, children. The trees were not quite the trees you knew, and the pastel flowers grew only in dreams…
    “They are men,” Louise said. “They are, Monte.”
    Yes, yes, he thought. They are men. How easy it is to say! Only—what is a man? How will we know