Hal Clement - Natives of Space

Thrykar acquiesced, with the proviso that neither of them should wander far from the hollow in which the ship was located. He was perfectly aware of his limita-tions in an uncivilized environment, and knew that it wouldn’t take a very skillful stalker to approach them without their knowing it. In the open, that could be dangerous; with the ship and its equipment at hand, countermeasures could always be taken.

They went out together, leaving the outer air lock door open — it could have been locked and reopened electrical-ly; but Thrykar had once read of an individual in a position similar to theirs who had returned to his ship to find the power cut off by a burned-out relay, leaving him in a very embarrassing position. The weather was overcast, as it had been ever since their arrival, but there were signs that the sun might soon break through. The woods were dripping wet, which made them if anything more unpleasant for the aliens. The temperature was, from their point of view, cool but not uncomfortable.

There was plenty of animal life. Although none of the small creatures permitted them to approach at all closely, the two were able to examine them in considerable detail; retinal cells rather smaller than those in the human eye and eyeballs more than three times as large permitted them to distinguish clearly objects for which a human being would have needed a fair-sized opera glass. The bird life was of particular interest to Tes; no such creatures had ever evolved on their watery home planet, and she made quite a collection of cast-off feathers.

The largest animal they saw was a deer. It saw them at the same moment, standing at the edge of the hollow at a point where very few trees grew; it stared at them for fully half a minute trying to digest a new factor in its existence. Then, as Tes made a slight motion toward the creature, it turned and bounded off, disappearing at once below the edge of the cup. They hastened toward the spot where it had stood, hoping to catch a final glimpse, but they were far too slow, and nothing was visible among the trees when they got there. Tes turned to her partner.

“Why isn’t it possible to use an animal like that? It’s easily large enough to take no harm, and must be at least as similar to us as these human beings.” Thrykar rippled a fin negatively.

“I’m a chemist, not a biologist, and I don’t know the whole story. It has something to do with the degree of development of the donor’s nervous system. It may seem odd that that should affect its blood, but it seems to — remember, every cell of a creature’s body has the chromosomes and genes and whatever else the biologists know about in that line, which make it theoretically possible to grow a new animal of the same sort from any of the cells. I don’t believe it’s been done yet,” he added with a touch of humor, “but who am I to say it can’t be?”

Tes interrupted him with a gesture.

“Tell me, Thrykar, is that throbbing noise I hear now the one produced by those pumps? I’m surprised that it should be audible at this distance. Listen.” He did so, wondering for a moment, then gave once more a sign of negation.

“It’s a machine of some kind, but I can’t say just what, It doesn’t seem to be down there in the town — we’d be hearing it more definitely from that direction. It might be almost anywhere among these mountains — not too far away, of course — with echoes confusing us as to its point of origin.

It can’t be an aircraft, because it’s too loud and — look out! Don’t move, Tes!” He froze as he spoke, and his wife followed his example. As the last words left his mouth, the pulsing drone increased to a howling roar which, at last, had a definite direction. The eyes of the aliens rolled upward to follow the silvery, winged shape that fled across their field of vision scarcely five hundred feet above them.

The pilot of the A-26 saw neither the aliens nor their ship. He passed directly above the latter, so that it was out of his direct vision; and although Thrykar and Tes felt horribly conspicuous in the almost clear area where they were standing, the speed of the machine and the pilot’s preoccupation with the task of navigating com-bined to prevent untimely revelations.

As the roar faded once more to a drone, Thrykar galvanized into action. He plunged into the hollow toward his ship; and Tes, after a moment’s startled immobility, followed.

“What’s the matter?” she called after him. “I don’t think he saw us, and anyway it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“That’s not the trouble,” replied Thrykar as he flung himself up the ramp into the ship. “You should have spotted that yourself. You mentioned something this morning about the tendency of man toward superstition. If he’s in that stage of social development, be shouldn’t have more than the rudiments of any of the physical sciences. The book said as much, as I recall; and I want to check up on that, right now!” He snatched up the volume, which fell open at the already well-thumbed section dealing with Earth, and began to read. Tes, with an effort, forbore to interrupt; but she vas not kept waiting long. Her husband looked up presently, and spoke.

“It’s as I thought. According to this thing, mankind has as one of its most advanced mechanisms the steam-powered locomotive. I saw one last night, you may recall. I assumed without really giving the matter much thought that the quarry pumps were also steam-driven. It says here that animals are even used for hauling or carrying loads over short distances. That all ties in with a culture still influenced by superstition. The book does not mention aircraft — and that machine wasn’t steam-powered. Those were internal-combustion engines. I think now that the pumps in the quarries had similar power plants; and if men can make them at once light and powerful enough to drive aircraft, they know more of molecular physics and chemistry than they should.”

“But why should that be a manmade ship?” asked Tes. “After all, we are here; why shouldn’t another spaceship have come in at the same time? After all, Earth is a refresher station.”

“For a variety of reasons,” replied Thrykar. “First, anyone coming here for refreshing would keep out of sight, as we are doing; and that ship flew in plain sight of the town below here, and made racket enough to be heard for miles. Second, that wasn’t a spaceship — you must have seen that it was driven by rotating airfoils and supported by fixed ones. Why should anyone from off the planet go to the trouble of bringing and assembling such a craft here, when they must have infinitely better transpor-tation in the form of their spaceship? No, Tes, that thing was manmade, and there’s something very wrong with the handbook. It’s the latest revision on this sector, too — the Earth material is only sixty or seventy years old. I hope it isn’t so badly off on the biology and physiology end; we certainly don’t want to cause injury to any man.”

“But what can you do, if the book can’t be trusted?”

“Feel my way carefully, and go on the evidence already at hand. We can’t very well leave now — you’re safe, as you aren’t of age yet, but I might be in rather bad shape by the time we reached another refresher station. We’ll carry on as planned for the present, and move the ship down to the quarry tonight. I just hope the human race isn’t so far advanced in electronics as they seem to be elsewhere; if they are, we are wide open to detection. I wonder how in blazes the individual who reported on this planet could have come to do such a slipshod job. Failure to measure their chemical or biological advancement is forgivable, those wouldn’t be so obvious; but missing aircraft, and electric lights, and internal-combustion en-gines in general is a little too much.