Alaree Read online

  “I must go with them,” he said softly. He was quivering with fear.

  Without a further word, the eight marched silently away. I stood there, shaking my head in bewilderment.

  We were scheduled to leave the next day. I said nothing to my crew about the bizarre incident of the evening before, but noted “in my log that the native life of the planet would require careful study at some future time.

  Blast-off was slated for 1100. As the crew moved efficiently through the ship, securing things, packing, preparing for departure, I sensed a general feeling of jubilation. They were happy to be on their way again, and I didn’t blame them.

  About half an hour before blast-off, Willendorf came to me. “Sir, Alaree’s down below,” he said. “He wants to come up and see you. He looks very troubled, sir.”

  I frowned. Probably the alien still wanted to go back with us. Well, it was cruel to deny the request, but I wasn’t going to risk that fine. I intended to make that clear to him.

  “Send him up,” I said.

  A moment later Alaree came stumbling into my cabin. Before he could speak I said, “I told you before—I can’t take you off this planet, Alaree. I’m sorry about it.”

  He looked up pitiably and said, “You mustn’t leave me!” He was trembling uncontrollably.

  “What’s wrong, Alaree?” I asked.

  He stared intensely at me for a long moment, mastering himself, trying to arrange what he wanted to tell me into a coherent argument. Finally he said, “They would not take me back. I am alone.”

  “Who wouldn’t take you back, Alaree?”

  “They. Last night, Alaree came for me, to take me back. They are a We—an entity, a oneness. You cannot understand. When they saw what I had become, they cast me out.”

  I shook my head dizzily. “What do you mean?”

  “You taught me… to become an I,” he said, moistening his lips. “Before, I was part of We—They. I learned your ways from you, and now there is no room for me here. They have cut me off. When the final break comes, I will not be able to stay on this world.”

  Sweat was pouring down his pale face, and he was breathing harder. “It will come any minute. They are gathering strength for it. But I am I,” he said triumphantly. He shook violently and gasped for breath.

  I understood now. They were all Alaree. It was one planet-wide, self-aware corporate entity, composed of any number of individual cells. He had been one of them—but he had learned independence.

  Then he had returned to the group—but he carried with him the seeds of individualism, the deadly, contagious germ we Terrans spread everywhere. Individualism would be fatal to such a group mind; it was cutting him loose to save itself. Just as diseased cells must be excised for the good of the entire body. Alaree was inexorably being cut off from his fellows lest he destroy the bond that made them one.

  I watched Him as he sobbed weakly on my acceleration cradle. “They… are… cutting… me… loose… now!”

  He writhed horribly for a brief moment, and then relaxed and sat up on the edge of the cradle. “It is over,” he said calmly. “I am fully independent.”

  I saw a stark aloneness reflected in his eyes, and behind that a gentle indictment of me for having done this to him. This world, I realized, was no place for Earthmen. What had happened was our fault—mine more than anyone else’s.

  “Will you take me with you?” he asked again. “If I stay here, Alaree will kill me.”

  I scowled wretchedly for a moment, fighting a brief battle within myself, and then I looked up. There was only one thing to do—and I was sure, once I explained on Earth, that I would not suffer for it.

  I took his hand. It was cold and limp; whatever he had just been through, it must have been hell. “Yes,” I said softly. “You can come with us.”

  And so Alaree joined the crew of the Aaron Burr. I told them about it just before blast-off, and they welcomed him aboard in traditional manner.

  We gave the sad-eyed little alien a cabin near the cargo hold, and he established himself quite comfortably. He had no personal possessions—“It is not Their custom,” he said—and promised that he’d keep the cabin clean.

  He had brought with him a rough-edged, violet fruit that he said was his staple food. I turned it over to Kechnie for synthesizing, and we blasted off.

  Alaree was right at home aboard the Burr. He spent much time with me—asking questions.

  “Tell me about Earth,” Alaree would ask. The alien wanted desperately to know what sort of a world he was going to.

  He would listen gravely while I explained. I told him of cities and wars and spaceships, and he nodded sagely, trying to fit the concepts into a mind only newly liberated from the gestalt. I knew he could comprehend only a fraction of what I was saying, but I enjoyed telling him. It made me feel as if Earth were coming closer that much faster, simply to talk about it.

  And he went around begging everyone, “Tell me about Earth.” They enjoyed telling him, too—for a while.

  Then it began to get a little tiresome. We had grown accustomed to Alaree’s presence on the ship, flopping around the corridors doing whatever menial job he had been assigned to. But—although I had told the men why I had brought him with us, and though we all pitied the poor lonely creature and admired his struggle to survive as an individual entity—we were slowly coming to the realization that Alaree was something of a nuisance aboard ship.

  Especially later, when he began to change.

  Willendorf noticed it first, twelve days out from Alaree’s planet. “Alaree’s been acting pretty strange these days, sir,” he told me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you spotted it, sir? He’s been moping around like a lost soul—very quiet and withdrawn, like.”

  “Is he eating well?”

  Willendorf chuckled loudly. “I’ll say he is! Kechnie made up some synthetics based on that piece of fruit he brought with him, and he’s been stuffing himself wildly. He’s gained ten pounds since he came on ship. No, it’s not lack of food!”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Keep an eye on him, will you? I feel responsible for his being here, and I want him to come through the voyage in good health.”

  After that, I began to observe Alaree more closely myself, and I detected the change in his personality too. He was no longer the cheerful, childlike being who delighted in pouring out questions in endless profusion. Now he was moody, silent, always brooding, and hard to approach.

  On the sixteenth day out—and by now I was worried seriously about him—a new manifestation appeared. I was in the hallway, heading from my cabin to the chartroom, when Alaree stepped out of an alcove. He reached up, grasped my uniform lapel, and, maintaining his silence, drew my head down and stared pleadingly into my eyes.

  Too astonished to say anything, I returned his gaze for nearly thirty seconds. I peered into his transparent pupils, wondering what he was up to. After a good while had passed, he released me, and I saw something like a tear trickle down his cheek.

  “What’s the trouble, Alaree?”

  He shook his head mournfully and shuffled away.

  I got reports from the crewmen that day and next that he had been doing this regularly for the past eighteen hours—waylaying crewman, staring long and deep at them as if trying to express some unspeakable sadness, and walking away. He had approached almost everyone on the ship.

  I wondered now how wise it had been to allow an extraterrestrial, no matter how friendly, to enter the ship. There was no telling what this latest action meant.

  I started to form a theory. I suspected what he was aiming at, and the realization chilled me. But once I reached my conclusion, there was nothing I could do but wait for confirmation.

  On the nineteenth day, Alaree again met me in the corridor. This time our encounter was more brief. He plucked me by the sleeve, shook his head sadly and shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.

  That night, he took to his cabin, and b
y morning he was dead. He had apparently died peacefully, in his sleep.

  “I guess we’ll never understand him, poor fellow,” Willendorf said, after we had committed the body to space. “You think he had too much to eat, sir?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t that. He was lonely, that’s all. He didn’t belong here, among us.”

  “But you said he had broken away from that group-mind,” Willendorf objected.

  I shook my head. “Not really. That group-mind arose out of some deep psychological and physiological needs of those people. You can’t just declare your independence and be able to exist as an individual from then on if you’re part of that group-entity. Alaree had grasped the concept intellectually, to some extent, but he wasn’t suited for life away from the corporate mind, no matter how much he wanted to be.”

  “He couldn’t stand alone?”

  “Not after his people had evolved that gestalt-setup. He learned independence from us,” I said. “But he couldn’t live with us, really. He needed to be part of a whole. He found out his mistake after he came aboard and tried to remedy things.”

  I saw Willendorf pale. “What do you mean, sir?”

  “You know what I mean. When he came up to us and stared soulfully into our eyes. He was trying to form a new gestalt—out of us! Somehow he was trying to link us together, the way his people had been linked.”

  “He couldn’t do it, though,” Willendorf said fervently.

  “Of course not. Human beings don’t have whatever need it is that forced those people to merge. He found that out, after a while, when he failed to get anywhere with us.”

  “He just couldn’t do it,” Willendorf repeated.

  “No. And then he ran out of strength,” I said somberly, feeling the heavy weight of my guilt. “He was like an organ removed from a living body. It can exist for a little while by itself, but not indefinitely. He failed to find a new source of life—and he died.” I stared bitterly at my fingertips.

  “What do we call it in my medical report?” asked Ship Surgeon Thomas, who had been silent up till then. “How can we explain what he died from?”

  “Call it—malnutrition,” I said.

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