Earthman

“ When the object of their visit was accomplished the Earthman thanked the woman much, and said: "You do not relish our meat and drink, wherefore I will bestow something else upon thee." With these words he gave her a whole apronful of black coals, and taking his lantern again he lighted the midwife and her husband home. On the way home she slily threw away one coal after another. The Earthman said nothing until he was about to take his leave, when he observed merely: "The less you scattered the more you might have." ”

“ She thought I was a human—an Earth human. I was a man, of course, not an alien like a Martian. Earthmen ran the whole Solar Federation, but I was just as good as an Earthman. With my suntan and short mane, I could pass, couldn't I? ”

“ And paradoxically enough, being the only Earthman on the streets had made him feel less alien than before. He attracted no attention, in a spaceport city: he walked side by side with squat Dritik and spidery Oladsa, beings of a hundred different races from as many stars. ”

“ Only one Earthman on this whole blinking planet, puts up at a good hotel, best in town, these boys put the snatch on me thinking I'm a visiting VIP, loaded, have no idea I'm just poor common trash like the rest of us Earthmen. ”

“ His ship was a Starflite class, Serial CY 122439. Get the idea?
So I keep watching all the incoming tourists like you. Someday I figure I'm going to run into a decolorized Earthman. They won't be able to stay away any more than the other peoples of the Galaxy. Old Mother Earth keeps dragging them back even though they've been gone for over a thousand years. Don't get the idea they want to see Mars. It's Earth that draws them. And it'll draw an Earthman's kids. And I figure that if I could read Redman's mind, I can read theirs, too even though I haven't read a thought since. ”

“ Smile, then, damn you....
"We want nothing, Earthman, but to prevent from happening on your planet the thing that happened on this. If they succeed in destroying you as they have us, then this System will always be under their heel, and we shall never be rid of them. Understand, their numbers were too few ever to conquer a planet with a civilization as large and as highly organized as that of Earth, by physical means.
"Knowing that, we—they call us gypsies, nomads, desert-scum today—we were not too alarmed when they landed here two centuries ago. ”

“ We wish to give you data to take back to your Earth which will banish disease for you—all disease. Data which will give you spacecraft that match our own in technical perfection. Data that will make you the undisputed masters of your environment. We offer you the stars, Earthman. ”

“ An Earthman, captured by aliens, finds himself in a position in which he is unable to tell even the smallest lie. But by telling the absolute truth, he convinces the aliens that homo sapiens is a race of super-duper supermen. He does it so well that the aliens surrender without attacking, even before the rest of humanity is aware of their existence. ”

“ Earthman's burden. We're the most advanced race; we help the others. But no one twists our arms to come out to these worlds and share what we have. Call it an inner compulsion.
He intended to work until noon; in the afternoon a Markin high priest was coming to the enclave to see him, and the interview would probably take almost till sundown. But about 1100 he was interrupted suddenly by the sound of jeeps unexpectedly entering the compound, and he heard the clamor of voices—both Terran voices and alien ones. ”

“ He narrowed the beam down to the smallest possible coverage, employed a frequency as far as possible from that ordinarily used by the Overlords, and continued to observe. It was risky, but it was necessary. It was beginning to appear as though the Earthman might not be able to escape, and he must not die in vain. ”

“ The survivors were handicapped in only one respect: all the food on the post had been destroyed with the commissary. However, Tchassen did not consider that a serious problem. He was sure they could reach the coast by the following morning.
Shortly before three o'clock—nearly two hours after the supply robot crashed—the survivors left the station. They headed west on a highway unused since the conquest. Tchassen and Tynia sat together in back. The Captain kept all the weapons. Briggan's warning couldn't be ignored; one of the other three might be an Earthman. ”

“ The radio commentators calmly informed the world that it was merely a large meteor burning itself up in the atmosphere. (The stubborn refusal of Earthmen to accept our existence continually baffles me.)
40
From what I have heard these radio spokesmen say, Earthmen who believe in us seem to regard us with a sort of awe. They rightly consider us much farther advanced than themselves, but you should hear the outlandish descriptions some have given us. And after the weird appearance they present to us, too!
I have judged the people of Earth to be excitable and unpredictable. ”

“ Besides the geographer, the geologist and his scientific brother the mineralogist are concerned with the Earth regarded as a planet moving through space as the other planets do. The geologist studies the actual structure of the Earth, its circumstances and history so far as they have been revealed to us, whilst the mineralogist investigates and names the materials of which it is composed, and classifies such materials with the assistance of the geologist on the one hand and of the chemist on the other. ”

“ Why, if a ship from Earth landed tomorrow, I don't think twenty people would leave with it.
"But you, Erling, you and your friends—you grew up in the ship, and you made a successful adaptation to it. You spent your formative years wandering. By now—you're cosmopolites. For you, a mountain range will always be more than it really is, because of what's behind it. One horizon isn't enough, you've got to have many, as many as there are in the universe.
"Find Earth? Why, you yourself admitted you don't care whether Earth is ever found. ”

“ In the case of an Earth type planet having intelligent life, they would——
They would do just what my damned "meteor" had done.
They would home in on an individual, "explode," penetrate—and set up heavy housekeeping on a permanent basis. They did. Lovely. Oh, joy!
Well. We would all like to see the Garden of Eden; but being it is something quite else again.
Me, a colony!
My—uh—population had no idea where they were in relation to their original home, or how long they had traveled through space. ”

“ Astronomy had been unable to establish the plurality of habitable worlds throughout space, however favourite a subject of conjecture and speculation; but geology, although it cannot prove that other planets are peopled with appropriate races of living beings, has demonstrated the truth of conclusions scarcely less wonderful,—the existence on our own planet of so many habitable surfaces, or worlds as they have been called, each distinct in time, and peopled with its peculiar races of aquatic and terrestrial beings. ”

“ Earth air and Earth smells in Carlin's nostrils, sleepy Earth sounds in his ears; the shine of the old spaceport's beacons, and the soaring loom of the distant tower that marked the spot where a man of long ago had first dared space. This world, this little Earth, was worth risking death for, even for a stranger from far stars! ”

“ As to man on Ento, Earth and other Planets, we find our brethren so like ourselves that, logically, we all must claim the same origin. Yes, madame, I do assure you that in limitless space there are myriads of worlds, varying as to bulk, density, and atmospheric conditions, but in other respects so like Ento and Earth as to present fauna and flora very similar to those of either Planet. They are peopled by humans like ourselves, in various stages of evolvement, and all, like the peoples of Ento and Earth, are engaged in the endeavor to solve the problem of eternal progress. ”

“ The preliminary exploration team had established the fact that the planet was more or less Earth-type, that its air was breathable, its temperature agreeably springlike, its mineral composition very similar to Earth's, with only slight traces of unknown elements, that there was plenty of drinkable water and no threatening life-forms. Human beings could, therefore, live on it.
It remained for the scout team [Pg 81] to determine whether human beings would want to live on it—whether, in fact, they themselves would want to, because, if so, they had the option of becoming the first settlers. ”

“ Tellus-type planet, apparently strictly so. Oceans and continents. Lots of inhabitants—farms, villages, all sizes of cities. Not close enough to say definitely, but inhabitants seem to be humanoid, if not human."
"Hold her here. Besides astronomy, which is all yours, what do we need most?"
"We should have enough to classify planets and inhabitants, so as to chart a space-trend if there is any. I'd say the most important ones would be geology, stratigraphy, paleontology, oceanography, xenology, anthropology, ethnology, vertebrate biology, botany, and at least some ecology." ”

“ Their investigations had eventually a powerful effect in dispelling the illusion which had long prevailed concerning the absence of analogy between the ancient and modern state of our planet. A close comparison of the recent and fossil species and the inferences drawn in regard to their habits, accustomed the geologist to contemplate the earth as having been at successive periods the dwelling-place of animals and plants of different races, some terrestrial, and others aquatic—some fitted to live in seas, others in the waters of lakes and rivers. ”

“ Here the science of geology takes its start with the metamorphic rocks, and it is the dividing line between the inner, smaller, and the outer, larger, planets.
IV. The Terraqueous Stage, when the surface has become substantially stable, there are great oceans gradually diminishing in size, and land gradually increasing. This is the stage of the sedimentary rocks, the time when the planet passes from its own supply of heat to dependence upon that of the sun; the stage when life begins, and the one in which the Earth is now. ”

“ We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too.
If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they'll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we'll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.
This is our planet and we want no aliens. ”

“ But if, at another epoch, we suppose 121 a continuance of the same agency to transfer an equal volume of land from the torrid zone to the temperate and arctic regions of the northern and southern hemispheres, or into one of them, there might be so great a refrigeration of the mean temperature in all latitudes, that scarcely any of the pre-existing races of animals would survive; and, unless it pleased the Author of Nature that the planet should be uninhabited, new species, and probably of widely different forms, would then be substituted in the room of the extinct. ”

“ Or, perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet, it may be still healthy, perchance unearthy, not composed of dirt and stones, whose primary strata only are strewn, and where no weeds are sown. It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. ”

“ But when the Earthmen accompanied the girl to the secret workshop, directly next to the sphere's outer skin, they found she had spoken the truth in every respect. The men there, nearly all pathetic wrecks of the First Race's system, were at first a little doubtful about admitting the Earthmen, but one after another they were won over to the idea of seeking sanctuary on Earth rather than on some satellite of Jupiter where they would never be entirely safe. Besides, the Earthmen, though they had been stripped of all their weapons, represented additional fighting strength. ”

“ No one knows better than you how different from life on Earth is existence on Mars or Venus or the Jovian moons or the rough-and-ready asteroids. Each planet and satellite has, in its own way, proved inhospitable to Man, has induced in its inhabitants a return in some form to more primitive ways of life to insure survival. ”

“ But, taking into account the internal forces of the earth, which, upheaving the sea bottom, give rise to new land, he thought that these operations of degradation and elevation might compensate each other: and that thus, for any assignable time, the general features of our planet might remain what they are. ”

“ Extraterrestrial occupant emerges, extends friendly greetings, confides his wish to help the human race solve its problems, takes Earthling for a cruise to another planet, brings Earthling200 back. After promising to maintain a sort of guardianship over the earth, the visitor says farewell and flies back to his home planet. ”

“ Man, being a warm blooded animal, in early ages on either Planet, his natural habitat was in their warmer divisions, which in the fullness of time became suited for the entertainment of the evolved, Spiritualized human, who through succeeding exigencies of existence, has learned to adjust himself to manifold conditions which may apply to the race under consideration who, since a remote time, have occupied localities extending from the southern limit of Ento's south temperate zone, to near the south pole. ”