William Tenn - The Liberation of Earth

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The Liberation of Earth

William Tenn

This, then, is the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters. Heigh-ho, here is the tale.

August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we

progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive an-cestors, our unliberated,

unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds. Still the tale must be told, with all of

its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.

Why must it be told? Have any of you a better thing to do? We have had water and weeds and lie

in a valley of gusts, So rest, relax and listen. And suck air, suck air.

On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known

as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous

silver cigar.

The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly

materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran, how they shouted, how they pointed!

How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of their chiefest institutions, that a strange metal

craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order here to cause military

aircraft to surround it with loaded weapons, gave instructions there for hastily grouped scientists, with

signaling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras

took pictures of it; men with typewriters wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of

it.

All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.

Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship, and the first of the aliens stepped out

in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic

garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely

folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.

Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about

halfway up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a

response when he had finished, and, receiving none, retired into the ship.

That night, the first of our liberation! Or the first of our first liberation, should I say? That night,

anyhow! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice-hockey, televising,

smashing atoms, red-baiting, conducting giveaway shows, and signing affidavits—all the incredible

minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live—as

com-pared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.

The big question, of course, was—what had the alien said? Had he called on the hu-man race to

surrender? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he

considered a reasonable offer—for, let us say, the north polar icecap—politely withdrawn so that we

could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that

he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race—and would we

please direct him to the proper authority so that he might submit his credentials?

Not to know was quite maddening.

Since decision rested with the diplomats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that

night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations

waited under the belly of the motionless starship. The delegation had been instructed to welcome the

aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind's

friendly inten-tions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more

than one atom bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag—along with the U.N. banner and their

own national emblem. Thus did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.

When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the

three official languages of the United Nations—English, French and Russian—asked him to consider this

planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before—which

was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him as it was completely

incomprehen-sible to the representatives of world government.

Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a sus-picious similarity

between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled

over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by aliens of this

particular type, humanity's most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries

of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to

any subsequent exploring party.

However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the

dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment. Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences

for our kind.

You, sir, now you sit back and listen. You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well

enough do I remember, how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did;

you will listen until too much high land be-tween water holes blocks me off from life.

Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints,

recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.

Pursuant to the young Hindu's suggestions, the one professor of comparative lin-guistics in the world

capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar ver-sion of the dead dialect was summoned from

an academic convention in New York, where he was reading a paper he had been working on for

eighteen years: An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in

Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.

Yea, verily, all these things—and more, many more—did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance

contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?

The disgruntled scholar, minus—as he kept insisting bitterly—some of his most essential word lists,

was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous

black shadow of the alien spaceship.

Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not

been allayed by a new and disconcerting development. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship

carrying great quantities of immense, shim-mering metal which they proceeded to assemble into

something that was obviously a machine—though it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built,

and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood

courteously in the neighborhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go

through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost for-gotten when the cornerstone of the

library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the U.N. would reply, each one hoping desperately to

make up for the alien's lack of fa-miliarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand gestures and

facial expres-sions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out

the difficulties in such physical, gestural communication with creatures possessing—as these aliens

did—five manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.

The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the

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William Tenn - The Liberation of Earth

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