50 in 50

The answer came from the alien itself. It turned its head sideways, as if listening to a distant voice, then spoke into a cuplike device at the end of a wire. A moment later Hautamaki's voice spoke out, toneless since each word had been recorded separately.

"I talk through a machine… I talk my talk… a machine talk your talk to you… I am Liem. . we need have more words in machine before talk well."

"This can't wait," Gulyas said. "Tell them that we want a sample of some of their body cells, any cells at all. It is complex, but try to get it across."

The aliens were agreeable. They did not insist on a specimen in return, but accepted one. A sealed container brought a frozen sliver of what looked like muscle tissue over to the ship. Gulyas started towards the lab.

"Take care of the recordings," he told his wife. "I don't think this will take too long."

It didn't. Within the hour he had returned, coming up so silently that Tjond, intent on listening to the language lesson, did not notice him until he stood next to her.

"Your face," she said. "What is wrong? What did you discover?"

He smiled dryly to her. "Nothing terrible, I assure you. But things are very different from what we supposed."

"What is it?" Hautamaki asked from the screen. He had heard their voices and turned towards the pickup.

"How has the language progressed?" Gulyas asked. "Can you understand me, Liem?"

"Yes," the alien said. "Almost all of the words are clear now. But the machine has only a working force of a few thousand words so you must keep your speech simple."

"I understand. The things I want to say are very simple. First a question. Your people, do they come from a planet orbiting about a star near here?"

"No. We have traveled a long way to this star, searching. My home world is there, among those stars there."

"Do all your people live on that world?"

"No, we live on many worlds, but we are all children of children of children of people who lived on one world very long ago."

"Our people have also settled many worlds, but we all come from one world," Gulyas told him, then looked down at the paper in his hands. He smiled at the alien in the screen before him, but there was something terribly sad about this smile. "We came originally from a planet named Earth. That is where your people came from too. We are brothers, Liem."

"What madness is this?" Hautamaki shouted at him, his face swollen and angry. "Liem is humanoid, not human! It cannot breathe our air!"

"He cannot breath our air, or perhaps she," Gulyas answered quietly. "We do not use gene manipulation, but we know that it is possible. I'm sure we will eventually discover just how Liem's people were altered to live under the physical conditions they do now. It might have been natural selection and normal mutation, but it seems too drastic a change to be explained that way. But that is not important. This is." He held up the sheets of notes and photographs. "You can see for yourself. This is the DNA chain from the nucleus of one of my own cells. This is Liem's. They are identical. His people are as human as we are."

"They can't be!" Tjond shook her head in bewilderment. "Just look at him, he is so different, and their alphabet — what about that? I cannot be wrong about that."

''There is one possibility you did not allow for, a totally independent alphabet. You yourself told me that there is not the slightest similarity between the Chinese ideographs and Western letters. If Liem's people suffered a cultural disaster that forced them to completely reinvent writing you would have your alien alphabet. As to the way they look — just consider the thousands of centuries that have passed since mankind left Earth and you will see that his physical differences are minor. Some are natural and some may have been artificially achieved, but germ plasm cannot lie. We are all the sons of man."

"It is possible," Liem said, speaking for the first time. "I am informed that our biologists agree with you. Our points of difference are minor when compared to the points of similarity. Where is this Earth you come from?"

Hautamaki pointed at the sky above them, at the star-filled sweep of the Milky Way, burning with massed stars. "There, far out there on the other side of the core, roughly halfway around the lens of the galaxy."

"The core explains partially what must have happened," Gulyas said, "It is thousands of light-years in diameter and over ten thousand degrees in temperature. We have explored its fringes. No ship could penetrate it or even approach too closely because of the dust clouds that surround it. So we have expanded outwards, slowly circling the rim of the galaxy, moving away from Earth. If we stopped to think about it we should have realized that mankind was moving the other way, too, in the opposite direction around the wheel."

"And some time we would have to meet." Liem said. "Now I greet you, brothers. And I am sad, because I know what this means."