It took five or six minutes to climb the hill at the tank’s five-mile speed, so the sun was definitely behind them when they reached the top. Lackland found that several of the gaps between the larger stones were wide enough for the tank and sled, and he angled toward one of these as he approached the crest of the ridge. He crunched over some of the smaller boulders, and for a moment Dondragmer, on the ship behind, thought one of them must have damaged the tank; for the machine came to an abrupt halt. Barlennan could be seen still on top of the vehicle, all his eyes fixed on the scene below him; the Flyer was not visible, of course, but after a moment the Bree’s mate decided that he, too, must be so interested in the valley beyond as to have forgotten about driving.
“Captain! What is it?” Dondragmer hurled the question even as he gestured the weapons crew to the flame tanks. The rest of the crew distributed themselves along the outer rafts, clubs, knives, and spears in readiness, without orders. For a long moment Barlennan gave no answer, and the mate was on the point of ordering a party overboard to cover the tank—he knew nothing of the nature of the jury-rigged quick-firer at Lackland’s disposal—when his captain turned, saw what was going on, and gave a reassuring gesture.
“It’s all right, I guess,” he said. “We can see no one moving, but it looks a little like a town. Just a moment and the Flyer will pull you forward so that you can see without going overboard.” He shifted back to English and made this request to Lackland, who promptly complied. This action produced an abrupt change in the situation.
What Lackland had seen at first—and Barlennan less clearly—was a broad, shallow, bowllike valley entirely surrounded by hills of the type they were on. There should, Lackland felt, have been a lake at the bottom; there was no visible means of escape for rain or melted snow. Then he noticed that there was no snow on the inner slopes of the hills; their topography was bare. And strange topography it was.
It could not possibly have been natural. Starting a short distance below the ridges were broad, shallow channels. They were remarkably regular in arrangement; a cross section of the hills taken just below where they started would have suggested a very pretty series of ocean waves. As the channels led on downhill toward the center of the valley they grew narrower and deeper, as though designed to lead rain water toward a central reservoir. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, they did not all meet in the center—they did not even all reach it, though all got as far as the relatively level, small floor of the valley. More interesting than the channels themselves were the elevations separating them. These, naturally, also grew more pronounced as the channels grew deeper; on the upper half of the slopes they were smoothly rounded ridges, but as the eye followed them down their sides grew steeper until they attained a perpendicular junction with the channel floors.
A few of these little walls extended almost to the center of the valley. They did not all point toward the same spot; there were gentle curves in their courses that gave them the appearance of the flanges of a centrifugal pump rather than the spokes of a wheel. Their tops were too narrow for a man to walk on.
Lackland judged that channels and separating walls alike were some fifteen or twenty feet wide where they broke off. The walls themselves, therefore, were quite thick enough to be lived in, especially for Mesklinites; and the existence of numerous openings scattered over their lower surfaces lent strength to the idea that they actually were dwellings. The glasses showed that those openings not directly at the bottoms of the walls had ramps leading up to them; and before he saw a single living thing, Lackland was sure he was examining a city. Apparently the inhabitants lived in the separating walls, and had developed the entire structure in order to dispose of rain. Why they did not live on the outer slopes of the hills, if they wanted to avoid the liquid, was a question that did not occur to him.
He had reached this point in his thoughts when Barlennan asked him to pull the Bree over the brow of the hill before the sun made good seeing impossible. The moment the tank began to move, a score of dark figures appeared in the openings that he had suspected were doorways; no details were visible at that distance, but the objects, whatever they were, were living creatures. Lackland heroically refrained from stopping the tank and snatching up the glasses once more until he had pulled the Bree into a good viewing position.
As it turned out, there was no need for him to have hurried. The things remained motionless, apparently watching the newcomers, while the towing maneuver was completed; he was able to spend the remaining minutes before sunset in a careful examination of the beings. Even with the glasses some details were indistinguishable—for one reason, they seemed not to have emerged entirely from their dwellings; but what could be seen suggested strongly that they belonged to the same race as Barlennan’s people. The bodies were long and caterpillarlike; several eyes—they were hard to count at that distance—were on the foremost body segment, and limbs very similar to if not identical with Barlennan’s pincer-equipped arms were in evidence. The coloration was a mixture of red and black, the latter predominating, as in the Bree’s complement.
Barlennan could not see all this, but Lackland relayed the description to him tensely until the city below faded from sight in the dusk. When he stopped talking the captain issued a boiled-down version in his own language to the tensely waiting crew. When that was done Lackland asked:
“Have you ever heard of people living this close to the Rim, Barl? Would they be at all likely to be known to you, or even speak the same language?” ’
“I doubt it very much. My people become very uncomfortable, as you know, north of what you once called the ‘hundred-G line.’ I know several languages, but I can’t see any likelihood of finding one of them spoken here.”
“Then what shall we do? Sneak around this town, or go through it on the chance its people are not belligerent? I’d like to see it more closely, I admit, but we have an important job to do and I don’t want to risk its chances of success. You at least know your race better than I possibly can; how do you think they’ll react to us?”
“There’s no one rule, there. They may be frightened out of their wits at your tank, or my riding on it—though they might not have normal instincts about height, here at the Rim. We’ve met lots of strange people in our wanderings, and sometimes we’ve been able to trade and sometimes we’ve had to fight. In general, I’d say if we kept weapons out of sight and trade goods in evidence, they would at least investigate before getting violent. I’d like to go down. Will the sled fit through the bottom of those channels, do you think?”
Lackland paused. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted after a moment. “I’d want to measure them more carefully first. Maybe it would be best if the tank went down alone first, with you and anyone else who cared for the ride traveling on top. That way we might look more peaceful, too—they must have seen the weapons your men were carrying, and if we leave them behind—”
“They didn’t see any weapons unless their eyes are a great deal better than ours,” pointed out Barlennan. “However, I agree that we’d better go down first and measure—or better yet, tow the ship around the valley first and go down afterward as a side trip; I see no need to risk her in those narrow channels.”
“That’s a thought. Yes, I guess it would be the best idea, at that. Will you tell your crew what we’ve decided, and ask if any of them want to come down with us afterward?”
Barlennan agreed, and returned to the Bree for the purpose—he could speak in a lower tone there, although he did not feel that there was any real danger of being overheard and understood.
The crew in general accepted the advisability of taking the ship around rather than through the city, but from that point on there was a little difficulty. All of them wanted to see the town, but none would even consider riding on the tank, often as they had seen their captain do so without harm. Dondragmer broke the deadlock by suggesting that the crew, except for those left to guard the Bree, follow the tank into the town; there was no need to ride,
since all could now keep up the speed the vehicle had been using up to this time.
The few minutes this discussion consumed brought the sun once more above the horizon; and at Barlennan’s signal the Earthman swung the tank ninety degrees and started around the rim of the valley just below its coping of boulders. He had taken a look at the city before starting, and saw no sign of life; but as the tank and its tow swung into motion heads appeared once more at the small doors-many more of them, this time. Lackland was able to concentrate on his driving, sure now that their owners would still be there when he was free to examine them more closely. He attended to his job for the few days required to get the sled around to the far side of the valley; then the tow cable was cast off, and the nose of the tank pointed downhill.
Practically no steering was required; the vehicle tended to follow the course of the first channel it met, and went by itself toward the space which Lackland had come to regard—wholly without justification—as the market place of the town. Approximately half of the Bree’s crew followed; the rest, under the second mate, remained as guards on the ship. Barlennan, as usual, rode on the tank’s roof, with most of the small supply of trade goods piled behind him.
The rising sun was behind them as they approached from this side of the valley, so the seeing was good. There was much to see; some of the town’s inhabitants emerged entirely from their dwellings as the strangers approached. Neither Lackland nor Barlennan attached any significance to the fact that all who did this were on the far side of the open space; those closer to the approaching travelers remained well under cover.
As the distance narrowed, one fact became evident; the creatures were not, in spite of initial appearances, of the same race as Barlennan. Similar they were, indeed; body shape, proportions, number of eyes and limbs—all matched; but the city dwellers were over three times the length of the travelers from the far south. Five feet in length they stretched over the stone floors of the channels, with body breadth and thickness to match.
Some of the things had reared the front third of their long bodies high into the air, in an evident effort to see better as the tank approached—an act that separated them from Barlennan’s people as effectively as their size. These swayed a trifle from side to side as they watched, somewhat like the snakes Lackland had seen in museums on Earth. Except for this barely perceptible motion they did not stir as the strange metal monster crawled steadily down the channel it had chosen, almost disappeared as the walls which formed the homes of the city dwellers rose gradually to its roof on either side, and finally nosed its way out into the open central space of the town through what had become an alley barely wide enough for its bulk. If they spoke, it was too quietly for either Lackland or Barlennan to hear; even the gestures of pincer-bearing arms that took the place of so much verbal conversation with the Mesklinites Lackland knew was missing. The creatures simply waited and watched.
The sailors edged around the tank through the narrow space left—Lackland had just barely completed emerging from the alley—and stared almost as silently as the natives. Dwellings, to them, consisted of three-inch-high walls with fabric roofs for weather protection; the idea of a covering of solid material was utterly strange. If they had not been seeing with their own eyes the giant city dwellers actually inside the weird structures, Barlennan’s men would have taken the latter for some new sort of natural formation.
Lackland simply sat at his controls, looked, and speculated. This was a waste of time, really, since he did not have enough data for constructive imagination; but he had the sort of mind that could not remain completely idle. He looked about the city and tried to picture the regular life of its inhabitants, until Barlennan’s actions attracted his attention.
The captain did not believe in wasting time; he was going to trade with these people, and, if they wouldn’t trade, he would move on. His action, which focused Lackland’s attention on him, was to start tossing the packaged trade goods from the roof beside him, and calling to his men to get busy. This they did, once the packages had stopped falling. Barlennan himself leaped to the ground after the last bundle—an act which did not seem to bother in the least the silently watching giants—and joined in the task of preparing the goods for display. The Earthman watched with interest.
There were bolts of what looked like cloth of various colors, bundles that might have been dried roots or pieces of rope, tiny covered jars and larger empty ones—a good, varied display of objects whose purpose, for the most part, he could only guess at.
With the unveiling of this material the natives began to crowd forward, whether in curiosity or menace Lackland could not tell. None of the sailors showed visible apprehension—he had come to have some ability at recognizing this emotion in their kind. By the time their preparations seemed to be complete an almost solid ring of natives surrounded the tank. The way it had come was the only direction unblocked by their long bodies. The silence among the strange beings persisted, and was beginning to bother Lackland; but Barlennan was either indifferent to it or able to conceal his feelings. He picked an individual out of the crowd, using no particular method of choice that the Earthman could see, and began his selling program.
How he went about it Lackland was utterly unable to understand. The captain had said he did not expect these people to understand his language, yet he spoke; his gestures were meaningless to Lackland, though he used them freely. How any understanding could be transmitted was a complete mystery to the alien watcher; yet apparently Barlennan was having some degree of success. The trouble was, of course, that Lackland in his few months’ acquaintance with the strange creatures had not gained more than the tiniest bit of insight into their psychology. He can hardly be blamed; professionals years later were still being puzzled by it. So much of the Mesklinite action and gesticulation is tied in directly with the physical functioning of their bodies that its meaning, seen by another member of the same race, is automatically clear; these giant city dwellers, though not of Barlennan’s precise species, were similar enough in make-up so that communication was not the problem Lackland naturally assumed it would be.
In a fairly short time, numbers of the creatures were emerging from their homes with various articles which they apparently wished to trade, and other members of the Bree’s crew took active part in the bargaining. This continued as the sun swept across the sky and through the period of darkness—Barlennan asked Lackland to furnish illumination from the tank. If the artificial light bothered or surprised the giants at all, even Barlennan was unable to detect any signs of the fact. They paid perfect attention to the business at hand, and when one had gotten rid of what he had or acquired what he seemed to want, he would retire to his home and leave room for another. The natural result was that very few days passed before Barlennan’s remaining trade goods had changed hands, and the articles freshly acquired were being transferred to the roof of the tank.
Most of these things were as strange to Lackland as the original trade materials had been; but two attracted his attention particularly. Both were apparently living animals, though he could not make out their details too well because of their small size. Both appeared to be domesticated; each stayed crouched at the side of the sailor who had purchased it, and evinced no desire to move away. Lackland guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that these were creatures of the sort the sailors had been hoping to raise in order to test possible plant foods.
“Is that all the trading you’re going to do?” he called, as the last of the local inhabitants drifted away from the neighborhood of the tank.
“It’s all we can do,” replied Barlennan. “We have nothing more to trade. Have you any suggestions, or do you want to continue our journey now?”
“I’d like very much to find out what the interiors of those houses are like; but I couldn’t possibly get through the doors, even if I could discard my armor. Would you or any of your people be willing to try to get a look inside?” Barlennan was a trifle hesitant.
“I’m not
sure whether it would be wise. These people traded peacefully enough, but there’s something about them that bothers me, though I can’t exactly put a nipper on it. Maybe it’s because they didn’t argue enough over prices.”
“You mean you don’t trust them—you think they’ll try to get back what they’ve given, now that you’re out of trade goods?”
“I wouldn’t say precisely that; as I said, I don’t have actual reason for my feeling. I’ll put it this way; if the tank gets back to the valley rim and hooked up to the ship so that we’re all ready to go, and we’ve had no trouble from these things in the meantime, I’ll come back down and take that look myself. Fair enough?”
Neither Barlennan nor Lackland had paid any attention to the natives during this conversation; but for the first time the city dwellers did not share this indifference. The nearer giants turned and eyed, with every indication of curiosity, the small box from which Lackland’s voice was coming. As the talk went on, more and more of them drew near and listened; the spectacle of someone talking to a box too small, they knew, to contain any intelligent creature seemed, for the first time, to break down a wall of reserve that not even the tank had been able to affect. As Lackland’s final agreement to Barlennan’s suggestion came booming from the tiny speaker, and it became evident that the conversation was over, several of the listeners disappeared hastily into their homes and emerged almost at once with more objects. These they presented, with gestures which the sailors now understood quite well. The giants wanted the radio, and were willing to pay handsomely for it.
Mission of Gravity Page 8
