12 Jan 53
TO: All personnel involved in Project Bogeyman.
FROM: Psych Group (R. Sweeney, chmn).
RE: Psychological profile of the Achernar aliens.
I’m stuffing this in your mailboxes because we just don’t have enough to make it worth calling a general meeting.
Take the following list with a ton of salt. The essence of psychology, in the only sense that’s applicable here, is in figuring out consistent stimulus-response patterns in the population under scrutiny. We have only a small set of stimuli to consider, and responses that as often as not make no sense whatsoever.
Possible Characteristics
1. Courage or lack of concern over personal welfare.
As O’Brien remarked on the cube, a Tamer in a GPEM suit is a pretty dangerous organism, and looks it. The aliens didn’t bother with weapons when they first confronted the five Tamers. Either they didn’t realize that the suited Tamers could do them harm- an unlikely supposition in light of their technological sophistication-or they didn’t care what happened to them personally (this theory is buttressed by the passive reaction of the female leader to her grave injury).
Another explanation would be a kind of judgmental blindness, an egotism that wouldn’t allow them to consider another race as being a potential danger.
2. Confidence; lack of xenophobia.
The female leader was immediately in charge of the situation. She communicated very well in sign language and, again, showed no sign of fear.
3. Aggression.
It would have been interesting to see what the aliens would have done had the Tamers not gone along with them. As it is, all we have to go on is the explosion of violence at the end, and the sound the leader made before the slaughter, which resembled a growl. This could be the normal tone and timbre of their language, though.
4. Sensuality (?).
One gesture the female leader made would have been frankly sexual in human beings. It’s more likely, though, that she was simply indicating that the Tainers didn’t need their suits inside the ship. (Though it may be worthwhile to remember that human societies allowing casual, nonsexual nudity do have restrictions on the range of gestures allowed in public.)
5. Incuriosity.
The aliens seemed not at all interested in the Tamers once they were killed. It is possible that something in their philosophy or psychology prohibited them from investigating the dead. As a wild guess, one might posit a purification ritual that had to follow killing; there was no way for them to know that the corpses would soon disappear.
Other Points
1. Smiles.
Although two of the aliens smiled frequently, there is no reason to believe that they were trying to convey a feeling of friendliness, to put the Tamers off their guard. Even in human cultures the smile is often an ambiguous or even negative expression. In other primates, the baring of teeth is usually an aggressive challenge.
2. Tools or puppets.
Dr. Bondi suggests that the aliens O’Brien encountered might not have been the “true” aliens, the ones who built the starship. They may have been constructs, flesh-and-blood robots designed for dangerous work.
This is an ominous possibility, in view of their striking similarity to human beings. The aliens appeared less than five minutes after the Tamers translated onto the planet. If they were puppets constructed to mimic human form, then either their masters were able to divine an accurate picture of human anatomy and build four humans in minutes, or they were already familiar with the human form. It’s hard to say which explanation is more frightening. If the first is true, we are dealing with a race that has vast psychic and scientific powers (and apparently no respect for life). If the second, we are dealing with a race that has observed humanity, and presumably knows where Earth is.
3. The aliens as adversaries.
We assume that the aliens have not settled any planets closer than Achernar, since we haven’t recorded the peculiar gravity wave bursts in the neighborhood of any closer stars. This doesn’t mean they aren’t on their way.
In day-to-day work with the Levant-Meyer Translation, we tend to forget, or ignore, the fact that the LMT is a time machine. When we detect a gravity wave from Achemar, it is the record of an event that occurred 115 years ago. If we respond to that event with the LMT, it gathers information 115 years in that event’s future; then brings it back to the past for us to investigate.