First published Galaxy
Science Fiction, April 1954.
One of the great
strengths of SF is its flexibility. You can take a lot of other
genres and lay an SF gloss over them. That’s why we get space cops,
mil SF, noirish cyberpunk novels and of course, space westerns. This
is another of the frontier stories that keep cropping up in these volum, featuring a
heroic prospector and some hijacking varmints.
Hands Off! is a tale of
two spaceships on a remote and undeveloped planet. The first – the
near-derelict Endeavour – is crewed by a gang of pirates ready to
do anything in the name of loot. The second is owned by a
hard-working prospector trying to make a living.
The twist, of course,
is that the honest miner is an alien.
Sheckley presents two
narratives in parallel. The story Agee, Victor and Captain Barnett of
Earth begins:
On the ground, they sent up an orange and green parley flare, but there was no answer from the alien ship. The planet’s atmosphere tested breathable, with a temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit. After waiting a few minutes they marched out, freeze blasters ready under their jumpers.
About a page later,
have elected to steal his ship, we meet the alien:
Kalen had stopped at this little world hoping to blast out a few tons of erol, a mineral highly prized by the Mabogian people. He had no luck. The unused thetnite bomb was still lodged in his body pouch, next to a stary kerla nut. He would have to return to Mabog with ballast instead of cargo.
It’s one of those SF
writing workshop moments. In fact, I bet that any number of SF
stories contain some variation of those lines, swapping out different
pseudo-alien gobbledygook. It’s made clear that we’re dealing
with an alien here and we’re given specific physical details to
reinforce it – we don’t know what thetnight or kerla are, but we
know enough about bombs and nuts to form a picture of of Kalen’s
world, particularly when we picture these things in a stomach pouch.
In fact, Kalen is a
working joe a bit like you and me, just trying to get through a bit
of honest graft. He’s also from a naturally peaceful race and at
first can’t fathom what’s going on.
They were shooting at him!
For a moment his thinking centres refused to accept the evidence of his senses. Kalen knew what murder was. He had observed this perversity with stunned horror among certain debased animal forms. And of course there were the abnormal psychology books, which documented every case of premeditated murder that had occurred in the history of Mabog.
Note the subtle use of
alienating vocabulary here – his ‘thinking centres’, rather
than his mind or thoughts. Sheckley never stops reminding us of the
physicality of the Kalen; he has a number of other unusual physical
characteristic, as well as the above-mentioned stomach pouch.
However, Kalen’s ‘thought centres’ are entirely human in
spirit, somewhat more so than the rogues who attempt to steal his
ship.
Rather than a
conventional contest of brute force, the victor in this scenario is
decided through a classic battle of wits: who can best survive in the
other’s environment? In the end it’s the tough clever alien that
wins, despite his pacifist tendencies and the pirates are seen off,
humiliated.
This is a really
enjoyable story from an old favourite writer. His was definitely a name I
looked out for and I read a few of his solo anthologies and novels. I
haven’t read any of his stories for years, but this was really good
fun.
Themes: The frontier,
detailed aliens, humans are bastards, space pirates.
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