Unearthly Neighbors Read Online Free Page A

day—remember, I told you about it—that estimated that there was less than one chance in a million for the independent evolution of man somewhere else. According to this joker’s theory—”
    “You know what you always say about theories.”
    “Yes. But it’s a strange feeling just the same.”
    Strange, and more than strange. The light that took the photograph I held in my hand an hour or so ago won’t reach the Earth for more than seven years. It is far, so far…
    He held his wife tightly in the circle of his arm. He was not afraid, but she suddenly seemed infinitely precious to him. She was all that was warm and alive in a universe vast and uncaring beyond belief.
    “Well, old girl,” he said quietly, “I’m glad you’re going with me.”
    She kissed him, hard. “You’ll have to go farther way than Sirius to get away from me,” she whispered.
    They stood for a long time before the window that opened on the night, watching and wondering and trying to believe.
    They could see Sirius plainly.
    It was the brightest star in the sky.

3
    How do you go about setting up an expedition that is designed to make the first contact with an alien, extraterrestrial culture? Monte didn’t know, for the excellent reason that it had never been done before.
    Obviously, it was too big for a one-man job; he couldn’t just put on his boots and pith helmet and sally forth with notebook in hand. Nevertheless, the other extreme was equally impossible—he couldn’t take everybody who might have an interest in the problem. For one thing, it would have required a fleet of spaceships. For another, unleashing a horde of investigators upon what seemed to be a relatively simple culture would have been a sure way of guaranteeing that no one would get any real work done.
    Quite early, he decided on a minimal expedition. He would take the men he needed for the basic spade-work, and leave the more specialized problems for later. He told himself that he was motivated by practical considerations, which he was to some extent, but the fact was that Monte had a deep-seated suspicion of all massive and grandiose research schemes. Multiplying the number of brains working on a given job, he knew from long experience, was far from a sure-fire way of improving the quality of the final product.
    Well, who did he need?
    Monte himself was something of a maverick in modem anthropology. He was primarily a social anthropologist, and his major research had been involved with a search for regularities in the culture process. Characteristically, however, Monte hadn’t stopped there. Impelled partly by a taste for the unconventional and partly by an admittedly egotistical faith in his own abilities, he had also made himself a leading authority on the most technical field of physical anthropology, population genetics. (The thought of getting blood samples from the natives of Sirius Nine made him as eager as any Transylvanian vampire would have been under the same circumstances.)
    Obviously, he needed a linguist. The whole shebang cried out for the best damned linguist available, and so Monte swallowed his personal feelings and chose Charlie Jenike. Charlie was a sour and faintly uncouth individual who somewhat resembled a dyspeptic penguin, and he had the quaint habit of wearing shirts for days on end until they virtually anesthetized unwary coworkers. Just the same, Charlie Jenike was a brilliant linguist. If anyone could crack one of the native languages in a hurry, Charlie could do it. Oddly enough, human animals being the strange critters that they are, Charlie’s wife, Helen, was a doll—tiny and dainty and singularly charming. Helen and Louise got on well together, which partly compensated for the sparks that flew when Monte and Charlie glared at one another over their cocktail glasses.
    Harvard’s Ralph Gottschalk was probably the best of the younger physical anthropologists, and he knew as much as any living man about the primates generally. In