Joseph Samachson

Xhanph was the fully accredited ambassador from Gfun,
and Earth's first visitor from outer space.
History and the amenities called for a tremendous
reception. But earth people are funny people....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

All the way over, all through the loneliness of the long trip, he had consoled himself with the thought of the reception he would get. How they would crowd around him, how they would gape and cheer! All the most prominent and most important Earthlings would rush to see him, to touch their own appendages to his tentacles, to receive his report of interplanetary good will. His arrival would certainly be the most celebrated occasion in all the history of Earth....

He was coming in for a landing, and it was no time for day-dreaming. He brought the ship down slowly, in the middle of a large square, as carefully as if he were settling down among his own people. He gave them a chance to get out from under him before making contact with the ground. When the ship finally rested firmly on the strange planet, he gave a sigh of relief, and for a few long seconds sat there motionless. And then he began to move toward the door.

The increased gravity did not affect him as badly as he had thought it would. For the dense atmosphere, with its high oxygen content, he had of course been prepared. He injected another dose of respiratory enzyme into his bloodstream just to make sure, and then swung open the door. The inrush of air caused only a momentary dizziness.

Then he climbed over the side and stared about in surprise.

No one was paying any attention to him.

Their indifference was so enormous that it struck him like a blow. Individuals of both sexes—he could easily distinguish them by the difference in their clothing—were going about their own business as if he simply were not there. A small animal running about on all fours had its forepart to the ground. It trotted from one place to another, making a slight noise with an organ that he felt sure was used for the intake of oxygen. When it came to him, it sniffed slightly, without any especial interest, and then ran off to more important business. No other creature paid him even that much attention.

Can it be, he asked himself incredulously, that they don't see me? Perhaps their organs of vision make use of different wave lengths. Perhaps to them I and the ship are not pink and gray respectively, but a perfect black which fails to register. I must speak to them, I must make myself known. They may be startled, but I must take the chance.

He rolled over to an individual who towered over him a full spard, and said gravely, "Greetings! I, Xhanph, bring you greetings from the inhabitants of the planet, Gfun. I come with a message of friendship—"

There could be no doubt that the other heard him. And saw him too. He looked straight at Xhanph, muttered something, probably about a pink monster, which Xhanph could guess at but not really interpret, and moved on impatiently. Xhanph stared after him with an incredulity that grew by the moment.

They didn't understand his language, that he realized. But surely they didn't have to understand in order to be interested. The very sight of his ship, a mere glimpse of him, the first visitor from interplanetary space, should have been enough to bring them flocking around. How could they possibly greet him with such disinterest, with such faces which even to a stranger seemed cold and chilling?

When you have traveled as far as he had traveled, you don't give up easily. Another, a shorter individual, was coming toward him, and he began again, "Greetings! I, Xhanph—"

This time the individual didn't even stop, but muttered something which must surely have been of the nature of an oath. And hurried on.

Xhanph tried five more times before he gave up. If there had been the slightest indication of interest, he would have kept on. But there wasn't. The only feeling he could detect was one of impatience at being annoyed. And he saw that there was nothing else to do but go back to his ship.

For a while he sat there, brooding. One possible solution struck him, although it didn't seem at all probable. These people were not representative of their kind. Perhaps this entire area he had taken for a city was nothing more than a retreat for the mentally disabled, for those who had found the strain of living too much and had sunk back into a kind of stupor. Perhaps elsewhere the people were more normal.

At the thought, he brightened for a moment. Yes, that must be it. Convincing himself against his own better judgment, he lifted the ship into the air again and set it down a few dozen grolls away.

But there was no difference. Here, too, the faces looked at him blankly, and people hurried away impatiently when he tried to stop them.

He knew now that it was useless to pick up the ship still another time and set it down elsewhere. If there was some rational explanation for such irrational behavior, it could be found here just as well as anywhere else. And explanation there must be. But he would have to look for it. It would not come to him if he simply sat there in the ship and waited for it.

He got out and locked the ship so that in case some one finally did show curiosity, no harm would come to it. Then he began to roll around the city.

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 boy talked with girl—these conversations turned out to be very limited in scope, as well as uninstructive in 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 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 some one 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. 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. Biggest store in the city. Everybody used to buy from me. Jefferson J. Gardner's my name. You may have heard of me on—where did you say you come from?"

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

"Never sold any stereos to any one 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 by 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, or electrical impulses, or viruses, or energy-creatures. They had the power to read minds, to move objects telekinetically and to travel through impossible dimensions. Their space ships were of all kinds, and they could race along with many times the speed of light or crawl with the speed of molasses. I do not know, sir, in 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 ideas. 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, about Venus, about 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...."

Xhanph rolled away. He had his answer now, and he couldn't stand listening any longer to the old man's babbling. He rolled aimlessly, up one street and down another. And he thought of how they would receive his answer when he went back to Gfun.

Was it him or the planet that they would consider mad? Almost certainly, they wouldn't believe him. He could imagine the exchange of wondering glances, the first delicate hints that the long trip had deranged him, the not so delicate hints later on when he persisted in sticking to his story. He remembered the high hopes with which he had departed, the messages with which he had been entrusted by the Chief of Planetary Affairs, the Head of the Scientific Bureau, the Director of Economic Affairs, and countless others. And he could imagine the reception he would find when he reported that he had been unable to deliver a single message.

How long he rolled in this aimless fashion he did not know. After a time he seemed to come to his senses. It was no use trying to run away from reality, as he was doing. He had to go back to the ship and return to Gfun. Let them believe him or not, his report would tell the truth. And the pictorial and auditory records would confirm his story.

What a planet, he thought again. Of all its hundreds of millions, its billions of inhabitants, not one had the curiosity, the ordinary intellectual decency, to be interested in him. Not one had the imagination, the awareness—

"Pardon me," said a shrill voice, "Excuse me for reading thoughts, but I could not help overhearing—I am a visitor here myself."

He swung around. The figure before him was strange, but an aura of friendliness came from it and he knew there was nothing to fear. Nothing to fear—and much to be thankful for.

With a heartfelt double sigh, while disinterested passersby spared them not even a glance, pink tentacles and green streamers clasped in a gesture of friendship that spanned the millions of miles of interplanetary space.