Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“Hell yes, what’s time to a geologist?”

They agreed to stay on ship-time. Svirsky was already taking soil and water specimens from a sluggish stream nearby. Chalmers gathered grass seeds and berries.

“Help with the biota, Webb, and we’ll do a minimal job, get out fast,” Gard offered.

“No,” Onderdonck growled, “and don’t figure on that account I’ll take galley duty, either.”

Gard shrugged his broad shoulders.

Chalmers started on protein analysis and Svirsky on the microbiota. Gard, McPherson and Minelli set up observation units in the few varying habitats the gray-green flatness afforded on a five-mile radius from the ship. Each unit transmitted to a scope on the monitor panel in the main workroom and could be switched at will to the large stereo-screen. The three men took turns on monitor watch, making selective recordings of animal behavior for later analysis.

Native protein was unusually similar to that of Earth. The native vertebrates were Earth-homologous too, including birds and reptiles, but small. The largest land animal seemed to be a goat-sized herbivore. Svirsky turned to a comparative anatomy series and Gard and the shipman trapped specimens for him when off watch. Minelli ranged afield in the atmospheric flyer for geology specimens. Outside the ship the men wore swimming trunks and cursed the heat. After two standard weeks Gard tentatively decided to lift out on the following day.

That afternoon Pete Minelli burst into the main workroom shouting, “Ed, hey Ed, there’s men on this planet!”

Svirsky turned sharply from his dissecting table. Chalmers came in from his lab across the passageway, pale and staring. McPherson, at the monitor panel, tugged at his red mustache and Onderdonck flushed. Gard spoke for them all.

“Pete, you’re crazy with the heat! What do you mean?”

“At least one man, by God!” Minelli insisted. “Big as you and red-headed as Ike over there. Naked and bearded and wild.”

“Tell us about it. Did you speak to him?”

“I was taking a core not far from here and this fellow was all of a sudden there, walking sideways around me with a stupid look on what I could see of his face. It shook me up, Ed. All I could think to do was keep turning to face him. After about three laps he went into the brush and I got out so fast I left my drill rig there.”

“Somebody marooned? Maybe a lost Earth colony?” McPherson wondered, rubbing his long chin.

“Could be native,” Gard murmured.

“I’ll be damned,” McPherson said. “Everybody knows men are unique to Earth. We haven’t found humans on ten thousand planets now.”

“We’ve found bipedal mammals on plenty of them. These could easily be human-homologs. Right, Joe?”

Svirsky nodded gravely, his eyes wide.

“If so, it’s contact,” Onderdonck said thickly. “Gard, you fool, you’ve found man’s first rival for the galaxy. You would persist!”

“Hey, here’s one come into a scope!” McPherson shouted. “I’ll switch it over.”

A scene of brown-flowered grass and gray-green shrubs took shape in the big stereo. A naked woman squatted, partially covered by long, coppery hair, and plucked grass racemes which she ate or fed to a scrabbling infant beside her.

“Who’s crazy now?” Minelli asked, looking around the group. “Ike, there’s a carrot-top soulmate for you.”

The woman suddenly looked directly out of the screen. Her heavy features were expressionless, her slaty eyes dull.

“Opposites attract,” McPherson retorted. “Pete, she’s giving you the eye.”

“Not a very bright eye,” Gard said. “They’re not exactly potent rivals, Webb.”

The woman shambled off the screen, eating as she went, the child scrabbling after. McPherson worked his controls.

“Here, I got ’em on another one,” he said. “Hey! there’s a man!”

The man was eating one of the goat-things. It twitched and jerked with residual life. The woman joined him in gnawing at it. From time to time she fed partially chewed flank muscle to the infant.

“Hell, they must be native,” McPherson said disgustedly. “No human could slide back that far.”

“Gard, let’s get out of here fast,” Hank Chalmers said abruptly.

“Not till I try communication.”

“Obviously useless. They’re pure animal, for all their shape.”

“Hank, you know better than that. Extrapolate from that otter-homolog Joe has on his table. These Proteans must have a nervous system capable of forming a very rich symbol world. Right, Joe?”

“Yes, but unlike the skeleton and musculature it is Earth-anomalous,” Svirsky said. “The pyramidal motor tracts in the cord do not cross. It might be a very strange symbol world.”

“In what way?”

“We don’t care!” Onderdonck burst out. “This is a waste of time on an unauthorized deviation from assigned mission. I vote to supersede Gard and go home. Who’s with me?”

“I am,” Chalmers muttered, casting down his eyes.

“Damn it, Ed, I want to back you, but set some limit,” Minelli pleaded.

“Okay, Pete, a time limit. Give me one standard week.”

“Okay, a week. I’ll ride along.”

“Me too,” McPherson said. Svirsky nodded agreement.

Over the next three days Proteans by the score came into the observation area, circling aimlessly to within a mile of the ship. They fled when Gard approached them in the field, doubling back to their dumb circling of him when he stood still. He developed headaches and overpowering fits of lethargy and suspected a virus, but Chalmers’ bio-analyzer found no foreign protein in him. Frequently McPherson and Minelli watched his maneuverings on the scopes and twitted him later.

“You’re too hoity-toity, Ed,” McPherson said. “Squat down and eat snakes with ’em and they’ll trust you.”

“If you’d grow a beard, Ike, they’d make you a chief,” Gard grinned.

On the morning of his fourth day in the field Gard woke in confusion on a grassy bank. McPherson and Minelli were bending over him and his left shoulder ached horribly.

“She was eating me,” he said stupidly.

“Yes,” Minelli agreed, white-faced. “You just folded up. Lucky we were watching. Lucky nobody had the flyer out.”

“Get aboard, get aboard,” McPherson urged. “That shoulder needs fixing.”

Chalmers, treating the wound a few minutes later, laughed shortly. “Communication by bite, eh, Gard? Where did you bite her?”

Gard called a luncheon conference around the big table in the workroom. Outside the primary sun was setting.

“They are animals,” he said ruefully to the men around the table. “We’ve never seen them communicate or cooperate. I doubt they even have voices. I propose we trap one and make him talk to us in action-language, the way we make rats tell us what they can see and remember.”

“How can you make a rat talk?” McPherson asked.

“You teach him triangle means food and square means shock, Ike. When he learns to run to one and away from the other then you and he have a common language of two symbols.”

“Ed’ll be the food,” Minelli said. “They think he’s yummy.”

“Go crawl under a rock, Pete. This is serious.”

“Keep on meddling,” Qnderdonck said under his breath.

Gard firmed his lips. “What do you think, Joe?”

“They must have a nervous system adequate for language,” Svirsky said. “The symbol-world is in them, in neural impulse pattern and humoral gradient, far more intricately structured than in any rat. But they lack the Word. I suspect they’re like a supersaturated solution lacking a mote to crystallize a world around. But drop a primal symbol into them and they may develop language and verbal thought almost explosively.”