Six Blind Men & an Alien Read Online Free PDF Page A

seen it before."
        

What the Government Official Saw
        
         Charles Njobo stared at the body of the creature. He knew this party was not the first to discover it, because there were no weapons to be found anywhere in the vicinity of the body. He could believe that the creature’s clothes had rotted away over the years despite the snow and ice, but not its weapons. Someone had taken them,
         Why was he so certain? Because he was a Zanake, and because he was a Tanzanian. Before there was a Tanzania, there were just tribes-and the Zanake had been exploited by the Arabs and then the Germans and the British, and been conquered by the Maasai, and the Nandi and half a dozen other tribes. Then they became Tanzanians, and the Kenyans had dominated them economically, and Idi Amin’s Uganda had invaded them, and the great powers in Europe still held their purse strings. So of course the creature was an alien, here to conquer his people. Wasn’t that what everyone came here for?
         Charles Njobo was the second blind man.
        
***
        
        His name was Zhond Matoka, and this was his continent. Which is say, it was the continent he was responsible for. Other land masses had other members of his race scouting them out, probing for weaknesses, mapping the population centers, estimating the defense capabilities. But Africa, as the inhabitants called it, was his.
        He was at first confused at the physical variety of the sentient beings, because on his own world, and almost all the worlds he had scouted for the military, when there were minor variations-skin color, number of limbs, skin texture, whatever-one race had proven dominant and eliminated the competing races. It was, to Matoka, the natural order of things. Yet here, while the dominant variety or species was black, there were reds and browns, a handful of golds, and one type that ranged from pink to tan, all living on the same land. It went against his experience, and he decided he would have to learn more about this race that alternately called itself man or human before he was ready to report back to the mother ship.
        He had spent a week in Egypt, going forth only at night, swathed in Arab robes and a turban. He was awed as any tourist by the pyramids and the ruins of Karnak and Luxor. Yet try as he might, he could find no sign of the race that required those massive doorways, or sat on those gigantic thrones. He went as far as Abu Simbel, with its 60-foot-high representations of Rameses II and it’s almost equally large statues of Nefertari, and finally concluded that this race of giants had either died off, or had left the Earth to settle (or conquer) another planet. Given their size, it was inconceivable to him that they had been defeated by the comparatively tiny species that now inhabited the continent.
        He’d followed the Nile all the way down to Uganda, then left it and began observing the cities, analyzing their weaponry. Kampala presented no threat to the invading force, and he contacted the mother ship, asking where they wanted him to go next. They didn’t have the names of the cities or countries, but they could pinpoint the artificial structures and measure the neutrino activity, and based on this they could direct him to those cities that seemed the most able to defend themselves against a concerted attack.
        From Kampala they directed him east, over Mount Elgon and past the vast Rift Valley, to Nairobi. As he had done with the other cities he’d explored, he remained in hiding during the daylight and emerged only after midnight, when most of the city was asleep and those who weren’t could plausibly be divided into miscreants and police officers.
        He found a drunk sleeping in an alley and relieved him of his tribal robe, wrapping it around himself. He had seen other men wearing hats and turbans, and wished this one had one, but he settled for what he could get. The tallest