Unearthly Neighbors Read Online Free PDF Page A

trip to Sirius was annoyingly like packing for any trip anywhere. There were the same nagging problems about what to take and what to leave behind, the same soggy decisions about whether or not to rent the house, the same frayed nerves and perpetual irritations. The force of habit was so strong that they even planned it so that their departure took place between semesters.
    When they finally got away, it was a relief—and the jump up to the U.N. satellite had been all that they had imagined it would be. The stars were so close that you could almost touch them with your hand, and the dark abyss of space was a real and tangible thing. It was much the same feeling that a man had when he went to sea for the first time, and he stood on the deck with the wind in his face and looked out across the living green waves and the bowl of the sky and knew that the world was new and mysterious and anything could happen…
    Once they were inside the swollen steel bubble of the spaceship, however, it was all very different. It rapidly became evident that the trip to Sirius was going to be something less than a fury of excitement. Admiral York ran a tight ship, and he smothered the possibility of emergencies with a calm efficiency that took everything into account and corrected errors before they occurred. There was nothing to see and very little for a passenger to do.
    When you got right down to it, Monte supposed, an interstellar spaceship was the least interesting way to travel that there was. He made the discovery that millions of men had made before him: that riding in a big plane, for example, isn’t half as much fun as riding in a small plane—and that for sheer interest no plane can compete with a horseback ride through beautiful country or a canoe trip down a clear stream leaping with rapids. The more exotic the mode of travel—spaceship, submarine, what-have-you—the more man had to carry his own specialized environment with him. Further, the more specialized the artificial environment, the less direct contact he could have with the natural world outside.
    The hyperspace field surrounding the spaceship might have been fascinating beyond belief, but you couldn’t see it, feel it, hear it, or touch it. Your world was inside the ship, and that was a rather barren world of gray metallic walls and fragile catwalks and cool, dead air that whispered and hissed through damp gleaming vents and endlessly circulated and re-circulated in the vault that had become the universe.
    Eleven months in a vault can be a long, long time.
    Still, there was work to be done…
     
    Voices.
    Monte leaned against the cold wall of the little boxlike room that Charlie Jenike had rigged up for his recording equipment and absently stroked his beard. He listened to the sounds that came out of the speakers and perversely tried to make some sense out of them.
    It was impossible, of course. The voices sounded human enough; he could recognize what seemed to be words spoken by both men and women, together with utterances that sounded like the speech of children. But the sounds which had been picked up by the hidden mikes of the first Sirius expedition conveyed no meaning to him at all. They were voices that spoke from across the immense gulf that separated one kind of man from another, voices of people who were more remote from him than a Neanderthal from the last age of ice…
    “Doing any good, Charlie?”
    Charlie Jenike twisted his aromatic form around on his stool and shrugged. Monte had the distinct feeling that he was about to spit on the floor, but he was spared this indelicacy.
    “Good? I’ll tell you something, Stewart. I’m right where I was a week ago, and that is precisely nowhere. Let me show you something.”
    “Please do.”
    Jenike, moving with surprising grace and skill, set up a projector and fiddled with some buttons that controlled the sounds coming out of the speaker. “Got an action sequence here with a few sentences to go with it,”