Nothing New
Astounding Science Fiction – January 1955
(1955)*
Eric Frank Russell
illustrated by Freas

Concerning a man who kept a promise he didn't imagine had ever been made!

-

	The ship fled through sparkling darkness. There were orbs of flame and whorls of light and glittering spirals that told of multimillion suns and hidden planets stretching onward, ever onward through infinity. And through these streaked the ship, a superfast mote less in the vastness than a bulleting speck of dust, a speck that none the less bore its full quota of life.

	At such pace went the vessel that nearer stars in its line of flight appeared gradually to drift apart hour by hour rather than month by month. It was a mote with a new power undreamed-of in long bygone days when one dead satellite had been claimed with a triumphant shout. A mote whose years were less than days and whose space-reach was enormously long. 

	The man in its nose was not amazed by the near-visible phenomenon of star-drift. It was a normal feature of his day and age, an accepted marvel often depicted on the telereceivers of stodgy stay-at-homes.

	Olaf Redfern, the pilot, sat at his controls and gazed into the shining heavens with the calm, phlegmatic air of one to whom is given the task of finding very small pinheads in very large haystacks. With the aid of charts, instruments, calculating machines the size of cigarette packs, the abilities of Navigator Paul Gildea and the luck of a Terran garnet in his finger ring, he had done it fifty times in the past, was confident of doing it a hundred times in the future.

	Readjusting the controls which were complicated enough to make a major chore of creating a minor shift in flight-angle, he locked them on the fractionally altered course, remained staring broodingly into expanding space. In short time Simkin, the archaeologist, joined him, took the adjacent seat and studied the view.

	"Someone once said," he remarked, "that it is better to travel than to arrive. I don't agree. One can become tired of living one jump ahead of a low-pitched whistle while a multitude of candles float around in the night."

	"That's because you have little to do before you get there," Redfern offered. "Try piloting for a change. You'll find it more interesting."

	"I'm too old to start afresh, too much in love with my chosen field."

	He threw Redfern an apologetic smile. "The kick you get out of finding and landing upon a new world is no greater than the kick I get out of digging up an ancient artifact whole and unscratched."

	"Frankly, I don't see the fascination of your job," said Redfern. "It's rooted in the far past which is finished and done with, whereas mine probes the future into which we're moving every minute. The future is controllable within limits. You can't, do a darned thing about the past."

	"I agree. Nevertheless, we have our surprises and our triumphs. After all, it was a bunch of hole-diggers who proved conclusively that highly intelligent life once existed on those twin worlds near Arcturus."

	"But they're still dead worlds to me," Redfern commented.

	"Maybe so. They're digging deeper, all the same. They want to know why life departed. Did it die out and, if so, of what cause? Or did it depart elsewhere and, if so, by what means and whence? Answers to those questions may tell us things well worth knowing. We're never too big to learn."

	"There's that about it," Redfern conceded.

-

	Falderson, the mass-sociologist, lumbered into the room, flopped on a seat. He was a paunchy man with a nervous twitch in his left eyebrow. The said twitch often served to fascinate alien life forms while under cross-examination.

	"We should land in about fourteen hours' time, according to Gildea's latest estimate," he announced. "And I hope to goodness they won't prove to be a gang of howling barbarians who'll throw things at us on sight. I hate to admit it but this incarceration has loaded me with too much fat for primitive battles."

	"You'll lose the grease," promised Redfern. "It'll all boil out in the cooking pot."

	"I can't imagine immortals being unlettered savages," Simkin opined.

	"Immortals?" Redfern eyed him incredulously. "What are you talking about?"

	Simkin registered equal surprise. "Didn't you know that the planet we're seeking is rumored to be populated by immortals?"

	"First I've heard of it. I get flight-instructions, same as Gildea. We lug loads of experts hither and yon, seldom know or ask the reason why." He frowned to himself, added, "I just can't believe that anyone has discovered the secret of eternal life. I take that idea with a heavy cargo of salt."

	"So do we," Simkin gave back. "But legends often prove to be grossly distorted versions of original truths. Our present purpose is to determine the degree of distortion by discovering how much truth existed and, with luck, still exists."

	"Where do legends come into this?"

	"You tell him—it's your pet subject," Simkin suggested to Falderson.

	The mass-sociologist said, "You've heard of the Alpedes, that seven-planet group beyond Rigel?"

	"I ought to. I've been there twice. Come to that, we're not so far from them right now."

	"Then you'll know that all are populated by intelligent life forms more or less civilized but not sufficiently advanced to be capable of constructing even an antiquated rocketship. Therefore, they can have had no contact with each other until Terrans arrived two centuries back and set up a small inter-system mail service."

	"Yes, a friend of mine is piloting for that outfit."

	"Well," continued Falderson heavily, "what with political, strategical and commercial considerations coming first—not to mention the strong pull of other more urgent interests in a thousand other directions—it was quite a piece before anyone got down to serious study of the seven-fold Alpedian cultural mores. A certain Professor Wade eventually buried himself in that task and after a couple of years came up with a hair-raiser."

	"I view that as an understatement," put in Simkin.

	Taking no notice, Falderson continued, "All seven planets had recorded histories available for study. And before the histories all seven had the usual mess of legend. Naturally, since they lacked contact the histories and legends had nothing in common other than minor items explainable by fortuitous circumstance. But there was one most remarkable exception: all seven planets nursed a fairy tale about a world of immortals."

	"But that suggests contact of some sort," Redfern objected.

	"Precisely! Nevertheless their histories make no mention of it. Therefore, if ever contact was made it was by proxy, it was done by others exactly as it is today. It was done in the far past before history began to be written and in the misty days when legends were born. The logical guess is that they were visited by these immortals and now remember little more than their most striking attribute, namely, immortality."

	"Hm-m-m!" mused Redfern. "Twice can be coincidence, three times can be coincidence, but seven times needs explaining."

	"That's what Professor Wade thought. He dug deep into seven mythologies, came up with a couple more items. First, the immortals had never visited the Alpedes themselves. That plays hob with our logical guess and the only alternative we can think up is that the yarn originated with some third party, some other visitors from space who picked it up and passed it along. Second, all seven legends agreed that the immortals lived on a very big world while four versions asserted that this world is the only planet of a blue sun."

	"So—?"

	"So Wade shot his findings back to Terra without delay. The cosmographologists and other bigbrains were immediately interested, seeing that several times we've extracted from new finds information that has led us straight to others."

	"Thanks in part to archaeology," Simkin put in, nudging the listener.

	"The Rigel sector is only a quarter explored to date," Falderson went on. "All the same, we've got some pretty good spectra charts of that locality. Analysis of them revealed a definite blue-type sun not a devil of a long way from the Alpedes group. Astrophysicists agreed that it's by far the likeliest primary in the whole area and calculated that it could have one large planet of rather low mass."

	"And that's where we're making for right now?" said Redfern.

	"Yes, my boy." Falderson stood up, ruefully patted his paunch. "If we're lucky enough to lay our hands on the secret of life eternal, you may be roaming the space ways forever and ever, amen. As for me, I'll have to get rid of this meaty front before it holds me flat on my face."

-

	He departed, leaving them to their thoughts while the ship sped on and the starfield widened. After a bit Simkin spoke.

	"Well, do you now see the fascination of probing the past?"

	"Yes, I think I do;" Redfern admitted.

	"It holds good for any one world without ever seeing another," assured Simkin. "Take Terra, for example. We know more about our own planet than any in Creation. Yet there's an appalling amount we don't know?"

	"Such as?"

	"Terra's most widespread and well-established legend is that of the Great Flood. Without doubt it has real basis. Something happened to the planet, something of catastrophic proportions. It knocked humanity an unknown distance down the ladder—from what height?"

	"We couldn't have dropped far," Redfern opined. "Before the Flood w*e were scratching in trees."

	"If ever we scratched in trees, which is highly debatable, it was umpteen millennia before the Flood. How far have we climbed in our present recorded history which covers no more than a fragment of time? So where were we and what were we doing when the oceans roared over the land and brought us to near-extinction?"

	"Darned if I know. It's sheer guesswork."

	"Olaf, maybe we've been around longer than we think," said Simkin seriously. "And for that reason I'd give my right hand to achieve the impossible."

	"Meaning what?"

	"I'd give it for a good long look at whatever may be lying whole and undamaged beneath hundreds of fathoms of salt water and great layers of ooze. I'd give it to see what, if anything, was in existence before the valleys were raised and the hills made low, before small, hungry, bewildered bands of semisavage survivors roamed the water-wrecked land."

	"Well," commented Redfern, grinning, " it would be nice to see your face if you dug out of the slime a ship twice as good as this one."

	"And it would be equally nice to see yours," answered Simkin, "when you realized that we have not yet regained the heights from which we fell."

	Redfern let that pass without argument. He was a pilot, eminently a practical man trained to cope with immediate problems and not much given to long-term speculation.

-

	The astrophysicists proved one hundred per cent correct. The blue sun had one large planet of relatively low mass. It was not gaseous, it was not liquid. Thick vegetation covered its surface of loamy earth in which lurked sparse deposits of light metals, none whatever of heavy ones.

	Everything favored a landing. Tests proved the primary's radiations to be innocuous so far as humankind was concerned. The atmosphere was on the thin side but had adequate oxygen content. Finally, the world most obviously was inhabited.

	One low-altitude circumnavigation revealed much about its dominant life form before a specimen had been encountered. Intelligence and vegetarianism were outstanding characteristics of the planetary scene. Sprawling towns of size and substance showed the former; great cultivated areas devoid of herds evidenced the latter.

	Lying awkwardly in the nose and peering down, Falderson said after a while, "Wholly agrarian. Note the lack of heavy industry. And the cities are small from the population viewpoint. They look big merely because of their lavish spread. Every house has a two-acre garden or bigger."

	"Fat lot of traffic either," remarked Gildea. "No railroads, no airplanes, no crowded auto-tracks."

	"Even if you have the brains to theorize locomotives, planes and autos, you cannot do a thing about them if there is complete lack of natural resources," said Falderson. "It's a safe bet that this crowd has never boosted into space and never wall. They're Earthbound because the stuff isn't there. Hm-m-m! It's going to be mighty interesting to see how many social problems have been created and how many solved by sheer lack of what most inhabitable planets have got."

	"Take her down, Olaf," ordered Gildea, pointing. "Plant her by that city near the river. The place looks as important as any we've seen."

	"I'll go wake Taylor," said Simkin, hurrying out.

	Entering, the mid-cabin he roused the linguist from his drug-induced slumber. Taylor, a chronic sufferer from space-migrain, emerged from unconsciousness, sat up, felt himself, blinked blearily.

	"Mean to say we're there already?"

	"We are. Your time-sense is cockeyed with sleep. Get busy sharpening your wits because you'll have to pick up new words, gestures, smoke-signals or whatever mighty fast."

	"I'll manage. That's my job, isn't it?" Taylor yawned, stretched his arms, relaxed again and sighed deeply. "Let's hope this isn't another Comina. It took me eight weeks to pick up that jaw-cracking speech and then I still limped at it. One soft, wet tongue can't reproduce the rhythmic smacking of horn-tipped palps."

	He reeled sidewise on his bunk and the room tilted. Simkin staggered, snatched a handgrip on the wall and hung on. They stayed that way until the ship leveled again and slowed with grinding noises on its belly-skids. It stopped.

	"Thank the Lord," said Taylor, fervently. "Solid earth at last."

	Leaving him, Simkin hastened to the nose. Falderson, Gildea and Redfern were there staring silently through the armorglass. An approaching native was the object of their united attention.

-

	The oncomer had emerged from the nearest house which was long, low and built of ornamentally carved stone blocks. He was making along his garden path toward the ship. His thoroughly alien appearance was nothing startling to space-sophisticated eyes long accustomed to forms far more bizarre. The surprising thing about him was his manner.

	He made for the ship without awe, alarm, curiosity or any other visible symptom usually accompanying first meetings on newfound worlds. On the contrary, he had only the stolidly helpful air of a rural farmer about to see whether a stalled motorist needed hauling out of a hole.

	If assistance was in his mind, it would be a long time acoming because the best pace he could muster approximated to a crawl. He was a biped a fraction under man-height but wide and bulky. Two brilliant yellow eyes shone deep amid the lavish wrinkles covering his gray-skinned face. He wore neat clothing from which protruded a pair of columnar, flexible legs as gray and wrinkled as his face. The legs terminated in feet-pads resembling those of an elephant.

	"Superficially humanoid," decided Falderson. "Notice his hands, just like mine only longer and narrower. But I'll bet that basically he's reptilian. A lizard-type that learned to walk on its hind legs and battle the environment with its brains and forepaws."

	"He hasn't got a tail," Redfern objected.

	"Neither have you—today," Gildea pointed out.

	"He makes me think of someone I read about once," mused Simkin. He racked his brains for the memory, found it! "An ancient character named Chief Taumoto or something similar. He was revered in the Tonga Islands for a couple of centuries. Geratologists took a great interest in him because he was Terra's oldest living creature."

	"How old?" asked Redfern.

	"Nobody knew for certain. He'd gone well past two hundred when he died. He was a giant turtle holding a chieftain's rank."

	"This fellow has a turtle's neck if ever I saw one," Redfern endorsed, continuing to watch the visitor's laborious progress. "And the mad velocity to go with it."

	"Where's Taylor?" inquired Falderson. "Open the trap and drop the ladder, Olaf. If we don't go to meet this character, we'll sit here most of a month before he arrives."

	Scrambling down the metal rungs they made toward the native. Seeing this, he promptly conserved energy by halting and waiting for them. Close up he looked decidedly less humanlike. The two parties stood and examined each other, the Terrans' attitude being one of frank and friendly interest while the gray-skinned one showed no more than patient submission to it.

	Pointing to his own mouth, Taylor voiced a few random words with careful pronunciation and on a rising note of inquiry. The other responded with three or four liquid syllables spoken in little more than a whisper.

	"Well, they communicate vocally," said Taylor with satisfaction. "And I can pick it up without rupturing my epiglottis. Give me two or three days and I'll have enough of the local lingo to get us by."

	Listening to this without change of expression the native waited until he had finished, then made a sluggish gesture toward the house and spoke invitingly.

	"Varm!"

	''Word number one," Taylor remarked. "Varm—come!"

-

	They went. The going was the most difficult task with which they'd had to cope in many years. The stupendous problem of how to annihilate distance by some means even faster than light now seemed less than that of how to walk at the steady pace of half a mile per hour.

	With the other in the lead they mooched around the end of the house, stopped before a pair of wooden doors hand-carved from top to bottom. Opening these, Grayface revealed a machine lurking within.

	"Blazing suns!" snorted Redfern.

	His exclamation was understandable. The contraption was a light framework of aluminum tubes mounted on four canvas-tired wheels and propelled by six sets of pedals. Three pairs of seats topped the assembly and provided accommodation for the source of motive power.

	Drawing this out of its garage they got it onto a narrow road which had the smooth hardness of frosted glass.

	Grayface got into the right-hand front seat, put an expert hand tin the steering wheel. With the other hand he signed the Terrans to climb aboard.

	"You take the other front seat," Gildea suggested to Redfern.

	Settling themselves in the seats, they put feet on pedals which were shaped like small plates and located a couple of inches too high. Grayface raised an authoritative hand to signal readiness to boost.

	The multicycle moved, gathered speed and shot down the road at a splendid twelve miles per hour while a dozen legs pumped in perfect rhythm. Reaching a small crossroad, the captain of the crew jerked a thin cord alongside his steering wheel and something in a box at the back let go with a shrill "Wee-e-eek! Wee-e-eek!"

	An answering "Wee-e-eek!" came from a sideroad where a similar machine slowed for them to pass.

	Falderson, puffing in a rear seat beside Simkin, said, "This will remove some of the adipose tissue from my midriff."

	"I'm baffled," confessed Simkin, gazing around. "Look at those richly decorated houses and well-tended gardens. Every one a picture. You'd think people capable of building high-grade homes could do better for themselves in the matter of transport."

	"With what?" asked Falderson. "You can't make pies without pastry. You can't build cars of soft metals or run them without gas. By the looks of it they don't have electric power either." He breathed heavily, wiped his forehead, added, "I'll bet they're a thoroughly frustrated species."

	"Why?"

	"They're no more immortal than Mrs. Murphy's dog—but the myth of immortality was born of something. Probably they're exceptionally long-lived. If so, they've time on their hands as is suggested by the way they've dolled-up everything in sight. That in turn means time to accumulate wisdom much of which cannot be applied. Maybe they've invented half the things we've thought up, but in blueprint form only. It's as far as they can go."

	"I'd like to stay a year and dig into their past," said Simkin.

	"If there's another ten miles to go," informed Falderson, "I'll stay for keeps by reason of having dropped dead." 

	At that point the machine turned to the right, trundled across a great square in which half a dozen fountains sent feathery sprays skyward. Braking to a stop before the ornate doors of a large, important building, Grayface dismounted, led them inside, signed to them to wait outside an inner room. He entered the room, leaving them to examine the murals on the corridor walls.

-

	Elder Citizen Karfin attended to the papers on his desk with the slow, meticulous care of the aged. He was feeling the immense weight of his fourteen thousand years, knew that he was becoming a little feeble and had no more than two centuries to go. He looked up as someone opened the door and came in. His yellow eyes remained fixed upon the newcomer, steady and unwinking like those of a basking lizard.

	In due time the other arrested his crawl and whispered respectfully, "Honored Elder, I am named Balaine."

	"Yes, Balaine, what is it that you wish?"

	"Honored Elder, at a little past hour nine a sky-ship of the pink-faced bipeds landed beyond my garden. There were five therein. I have brought them hither knowing that you would wish to meet them."

	Karfin sighed and said, "They came in my extreme youth. If I remember aright, they remained for two or three orbits. I cannot be sure because my memory is fading fast."

	"Yes, Honored Elder," said Balaine.

	"They were so clever and had so much. I thought perhaps they found us beneath their notice." He sighed again. "Oh, well, it cannot be said that they pester us. Please show them in."

	"Very well, Honored Elder." Balaine crawled away, brought them back.

	The five Terrans stood before him, eyed him with the bold, far-ranging adventurousness of their kind.

	And not one of them knew that this was the second time.

The End