Unearthly Neighbors Read Online Free PDF Page B

everywhere.
    There were two distinct groups in the room. Members of the crew formed a tight, noisy circle around the bar. The anthropologists, as usual, were in conference at the corner table. Monte had no doubt that the crew thought they were just as alien as anything likely to be found on Sirius Nine, and there were times when he agreed with them.
    “Garbage, old man,” Don King said, crossing his long legs without disturbing the crease in his trousers. “Absolute garbage.”
    Tom Stein blinked his pale blue eyes behind his thick glasses and pointed a skinny finger at the archeologist. “Everything is too simple for you. You’ve poked around with projectile points and potsherds so long that you think that’s all man is. I say it is a mistake to regard those people as simple until you know for sure what you are talking about.”
    Don finished off his drink with one long swallow. “You’re making problems where there aren’t any, just like old Monte here. Dammit, man, there are constants in culture. We’re long past the stage where you can seriously suggest that a culture is just a crazy collection of unrelated traits—a thing of shreds and patches, to use Lowie’s unhappy phrase. Cultures, as you guys are always insisting, are hooked together internally. A simple technology—and we don’t even know whether or not they’ve got any technology on Sirius Nine; I ain’t seen any evidence of it yet —means a low level of culture. You don’t invent algebra while you’re out digging up roots, my friend. We’re dealing with a rudimentary tribe of hunters and gatherers. Why make them more complicated than they are?”
    Monte puffed on his pipe, enjoying himself. “That’s what I’m worried about. How complicated are they?”
    Don ignored the bait and shifted his ground, which was a favorite stunt of his. “It’s complicated enough in one sense, I’ll tell you that. It may have sounded nice and simple to Heidelman back at the U.N., but what does he know about it? Did you read that official directive we’re supposed to be working under? It says we’re to make contact with the natives of Sirius Nine. That’s a laugh. How in the devil do you ‘contact’ a world like Sirius Nine? A world is one helluva big place. You’d think they would have found that out back at the U.N.” Ralph Gottschalk shifted his big body on his chair. He had a surprisingly soft voice, but everyone listened to him. “I think Don’s got a point there. So far as we know, there is no hypothetical uniform culture on Sirius Nine—there are thousands of isolated bands of food gatherers. If a spaceship had landed among the Bushmen of Africa fifteen thousand years ago, could it then make contact with Earth? It seems improbable.”
    Monte shrugged. “We all know that we’ll be doing well to make contact with just one group; Heidelman knows that too. But we still have to be careful. A lot depends on what we do on Sirius Nine.”
    Don King raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
    Monte, who would have asked precisely the same question if he hadn’t been in charge of the expedition, took a stab at it. “Apart from the admittedly remote possibility that we may be biting off more than we can chew, it might be argued that we have made at least some progress in ethics and law since the time of Cortes and the rest of his merry crew. We can’t just sail into a new harbor, run up the flag, and line up at the hog trough.”
    “I wonder. Maybe I’m just cynical because I’m between wives at the moment, but I doubt that line of reasoning very much. We say we’re civilized, which means that we have enough surplus to afford luxuries like high-minded philosophies. But if things got tough I’ll bet we’d be right back where we started from quicker than you can say Cuthbert Pomeroy Gundelfinger; it’d be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a pancreas for a pancreas. That’s the way men are.”
    “Maybe we’ll get a chance to find out,” Monte