by Ben Bova
“Can we see the sun?” she asked, looking skyward.
“I’m not sure. I think maybe... there...” He pointed to a second-magnitude star shining alone in the grayish sky.
“Where, which one?”
He took her by the shoulder with one hand so that she could see where he was pointing.
“Oh yes, I see it.”
She turned and she was in his arms and he kissed her.
“Oh, Sid... I’ve waited so long.”
“I’ve wanted you too, Marlene... but there’s so much... so much...”
“Shh... don’t talk, don’t say anything... not a word....”
If any of the others suspected that Lee and Marlene had spent the night outside, they didn’t mention it. All six of them took their regular pre-breakfast checks in the medical booth, and by the time they were finished eating in the cramped galley the computer had registered a safe green light for each of them.
Lee slid from the galley’s folding table and made his way forward. Grote was slouched in the driver’s seat, his lanky frame a geometry of knees and elbows. He was studying the viewscreen map.
“Looking for a pass through these hills for our vehicle,” he said absently, his eyes on the slowly moving photo-map.
“Why take the skimmer?” Lee asked, sitting on the chair beside him. “We can cross these hills in the powersuits.”
Grote cocked an eye at him. “You’re really set on getting to the coast, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?”
That brought a grin.
“Of course,” Lee said, almost seriously, “your orders are to stay inside the skimmer. Or do you think being inside a powersuit wouldn’t bend those orders too much?”
Laughing, Grote asked, “How much do you think we ought to carry with us?”
They split the team into three groups. Chien and Charnovsky stayed with the car. Marlene and Doris would go with Lee and Grote to study the flora and fauna (if any) on the shore side of the hills. Lee and the engineer carried a pair of video camera packs with them, to set up close to the shoreline.
“Beware of the natives,” Charnovsky’s voice grated in Lee’s earphones as they walked away from the skimmer. “They might swoop down on you with bows and arrows!” His laughter showed what he thought of Lee’s theories.
Climbing the hills wasn’t as bad as Lee had thought it would be. The powersuits did most of the work, and the glassy rock wasn’t slippery enough to cause real troubles with footing. It was hot, though, even with the suit’s cooling blowers turned up to full blast. Sirius blazed overhead, and the rocks beat glare and heat back into their faces as they climbed.
It took most of the day to get over the crest of the hills. But finally, with Sirius edging toward the horizon behind them, Lee saw the water.
The sea spread to the farther horizon, cool and blue, with long gentle swells that steepened into surf as they ran up toward the land. And the land was green here: shrubs and mossy-looking plants were sprinkled around patchily.
“Look! Look here!” Doris’ voice.
Lee turned his head and saw her clumsily sinking to her knees, like an armor-plated elephant getting down ponderously to do a circus trick. She knelt beside a fernlike plant. They all walked over and helped her to photograph it, snip a leaf from it, probe its root system.
“It’s the most advanced form of life we’ve found yet,” Doris said proudly.
Aside from the men, Lee thought.
“Might as well sleep here tonight,” Grote said. “I’ll take the first watch.”
“Can’t we set the scanners to give an alarm if anything approaches?” Marlene asked. “There’s nothing here that’s dangerous enough to...”
“I want one of us awake at all times,” Grote said firmly. “And nobody outside of their suits.”
“There’s no place like home,” Doris muttered. “But after a while even your own smell gets to you.”
The women lay down, locking the suits into roughly reclining positions. To Lee they looked like oversized beetles that had gotten stuck on their backs. It didn’t look possible for them to get up again. Then he looked at Marlene and another thought struck him. He chuckled to himself. Super chastity belts.
He sat down, cranked the suit’s torso section back to a comfortable reclining angle, and tried to doze off. He was dreaming of the buildings on Titan again when Grote’s voice in his earphones woke him up.
“Is it my turn?” he mumbled groggy.
“Not yet. But turn off your transmitter. You were groaning in your sleep. Don’t want to wake up the girls, do you?”
Lee took the second watch and simply stayed awake until daybreak without bothering any of the others. They began marching toward the sea.
The hills descended only slightly into a rolling plateau that went on until they reached the bluffs that overlooked the sea. A few hundred feet down was a narrow strip of beach, with breakers surging in.
“This is as far as we go,” Grote said.
The women spent the morning collecting plant samples. Doris found a few insects and grew more excited over them than she had about the shrubbery. Lee and Grote walked alongside the edge of the cliffs, looking for a good place to set up their cameras.
“You’re sure this is the area where they were seen?” Lee asked.
The engineer turned his head inside the plastic helmet. Lee could see he was on edge, too.
“I know how to read a map, Sid.”
“Sorry, I’m just anxious,...”
“So am I.”
They walked until Sirius was almost directly overhead, a pitiless white furnace trying to melt them. They saw nothing except the constant sea, the beach, and the spongy-looking plants that huddled close to the ground.
“Not even a damned tree for shade,” Grote grumbled.
They turned back and headed for the spot where they had left the women. Far up the beach, Lee saw a tiny dark spot.
“What’s that?”
Grote stared for a few moments. “Probably a rock.”
“Wasn’t there before.” Lee touched a button on the chest of his suit and an electro-optical viewpiece slid down in front of his eyes. Grote did the same. Turning a dial on the suit’s control panel, Lee tried to focus on the spot. It wavered in the heat currents of the early afternoon, blurred and uncertain. Then it seemed to jump out of view.
Lee punched the button and the lens slid away from his eyes. “It’s moving!” he shouted, and started to run.
He heard Grote’s heavy breathing as the engineer followed him and the electrical hum of the suit’s tiny motors as they both nearly flew in the powersuits along the edge of the cliffs, covering a dozen meters with each stride.
It was a man! No, not one, Lee saw, but two of them walking along the beach, their feet in the foaming water.
“Get down, you bloody fool!” he heard Grote shrilling at him.
He dove headlong, bounced, cracked the back of his head against the helmet’s plastic, then banged his chin on the soft inner lining of the collar.
“Don’t want them to see us, do you?” Grote was whispering now.
“They can’t hear us, for God’s sake,” Lee said into his suit radio.
They wormed their way to the cliff’s edge again and watched. The two men seemed to be dressed in black. But with the electro-optical viewers, Lee saw that they were black-skinned and naked.
After a hurried council, they unslung one of the video cameras and its power unit, set it up right there, turned it on, and then backed away from the edge of the cliff. Then they ran as hard as they could, staying out of sight of the beach, with the remaining camera. They passed the startled women and breathlessly shouted out their find. The women dropped their work and started running after them.
About a kilometer or so farther on they dropped to all fours again and cautiously crawled to the edge once more. Grote hissed the women into silence as they hunched up beside him.
The beach was empty now.
&n
bsp; “Do you think they saw us?” Lee asked.
“Don’t know.”
Lee used the electro-optics again and scanned the beach. “No sign of them.”
“Footprints!” Grote snapped. “Look there!”
The trails of two very human-looking sets of footprints marched straight into the water. All four of them searched the sea for more than an hour, but saw nothing. Finally they decided to set up the other camera. It was turning dark by the time they finished.
“We’ve got to get back to the car,” Grote said wearily when they finished. “There’s not enough food in the suits for another day.”
“I’ll stay here,” Lee replied. “You can bring me more supplies tomorrow.”
“No. If there’s anything to see, the cameras will pick it up. Chien’s monitoring them back at the car, and the whole crew of the ship must be watching the view.”
Lee saw there was no use arguing. Besides, he was bone-tired. But he knew he’d be back again as soon as he could get here.
“Well, it settles a three-hundred-year-old argument,” Aaron Hatfield said as they watched the viewscreen.
The biochemist and Lee were sitting in the main workroom of the ship’s Sirius globe, watching the humanoids as televised by the cameras on the cliffs. Charnovsky was on the other side of the room, at a workbench, flashing rock samples with a laser so that a spectrometer could analyze their chemical composition. The other “outsiders” were traveling in the skimmer again, collecting more floral and insect specimens.
“What argument?” Lee asked.
Hatfield shifted in his chair, making the webbing creak. “About the human form... whether it’s an accident or the result of evolutionary selection. From them,” he nodded toward the screen, “I’d say it’s no accident.”
One camera was on wide-field focus, and showed a group of three men. They were wading hip-deep in the mild surf, carrying slender rods high above their heads to keep them free of the surging waves. The other camera was fixed on a close-up view of three women standing on the beach, watching their men.
They looked almost completely human. Their faces were slightly different: broader, heavier, with noticeable brow ridges. Their skins were black.
They were almost completely hairless. And entirely naked.
Every morning they appeared on the beach, often carrying the rods, but sometimes not. Lee concluded that they must live in caves cut into the cliffs. The rods looked like simple bone spears, but even under the closest focus of the cameras he couldn’t be sure.
“If I didn’t know better,” Lee muttered, more to himself than anyone else, “I’d almost say they were Neanderthals.”
“Neanderthals?” Hatfield echoed. “But Neanderthals were shaggy and shambling... more like an ape, weren’t they?”
Lee shook his head. “Of course not. Nobody knows what their hair and skin coloring was. And they might have been squatter and shorter than these people, but then again... hell, I wish we had an anthropologist here.”
“I thought you were the anthropology expert.”
“What I know about anthropology you could stuff in Rassmussen’s beer mug and still have room for two pints. Who knew we’d run into people? Everybody was expecting six-legged purple things.”
Charnovsky came over and pulled up a chair. “So. Have they caught any fish yet this morning?”
“Not yet,” Lee answered.
Jabbing a stubby finger toward the screen, the Russian asked, “Are these the geniuses who built the machines on Titan? Fishing with bone spears? They don’t make much of an enemy, Lee.”
“They could have been our enemy,” Lee answered, forcing a thin smile. He was getting accustomed to Charnovsky’s needling, but not reconciled to it.
The geologist shook his head sadly. “Take the advice of an older man, dear friend, and disabuse yourself of this idea. Statistics are a powerful tool, Lee. The chances of this particular race being the one that built on Titan are fantastically high. And the chances...”
“What’re the chances of two intelligent races both evolving along the same physical lines?” Lee snapped.
Charnovsky shrugged. “We have two known races. They are both human in form. The chances must be excellent.”
Lee turned back to watch the viewscreen, then asked Hatfield, “Aaron, the biochemistry is the same as Earth’s, isn’t it?”
“Very close.”
“I mean... I could eat local food and be nourished by it? I wouldn’t be poisoned or anything like that?”
“Well-I-I,” Hatfield said, visibly thinking it out as he spoke, “as far as the structure of the proteins and other foodstuffs are concerned... yes, I guess you could get away with eating it. The biochemistry is basically the same as ours, as nearly as I’ve been able to tell. But so are terrestrial shellfish, and they make me deathly ill. You see, there’re all sorts of enzymes, and microbial parasites, and viruses....”
“We’ve been living with the local bugs for months now,” Lee said. “We’re adapted to them, aren’t we?”
“You know what they say about visiting strange places: don’t drink the water.”
One of the natives struck into the water with his spear and instantly the water began to boil with the thrashing of some sea creature. The other two men drove their spears home and the thrashing died. They lifted a four-foot long fish out of the water and started back for the beach, carrying it triumphantly over their heads. The camera’s autotracker kept the picture on them. The women on the beach were jumping and clapping with joy.
“Damn,” Lee said softly. “They’re as human as we are.”
“And obviously representative of a high technical civilization,” Charnovsky said.
“Survivors of such a culture, maybe,” Lee answered. “Their culture might have been wiped out by the Pup’s explosion.... Or by war.”
“Ah, now it gets even more dramatic: two cultures destroyed, ours and theirs.”
“All right, go ahead and laugh,” Lee said. “I won’t be able to prove anything until I get to live with them.”
“Until what?” Hatfield said.
“Until I go out there and meet them face to face, learn their language, their culture, live with them.”
Late that night, after hours of pacing the tiny cubicle that was his quarters, Lee phoned Marlene.
“I have to talk to you,” he said.
Her face on the small phonescreen seemed puzzled, almost worried. “It’s pretty late, Sid, and honestly, I’m nearly wiped out. Doris and I have been outside all day...”
“It’s important,” he said. “It won’t take long.”
She smiled at that and suddenly he felt puzzled.
“All right,” Marlene said. “If it won’t take long.”
He padded barefoot down the dim, night-lit passageway to her door. She opened it when he tapped at it.
She was grinning. “I haven’t done anything like this since I left the dorm at CalTech.”
The remark didn’t register with Lee. He sat down on the only chair in the compartment and began telling her about his plans. Slowly her smile faded and she sat on the bunk and listened.
“It’s the only thing we can do,” he finished. “I’ve got to go down there and live with them, find out about them. I’ve got to.”
For the first time, he looked straight at her.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I...” Then he shrugged.
She said, “Your mind’s made up. You want to go and live with them. Why come in the middle of the night to tell me? What do you expect me to do about it?”
“I... well, I wanted you to know. It’s something I’ve got to do, Marlene.”
She was controlling herself carefully. Lee knew that her calm expression and soft voice were a mask. Her hands were twining together, fingers locking together and unlocking.
“All right,” she said. “If you want me to admit that I’d rather not see you do it, I’ll admit it. Why did you come and
tell me, Sid? Was it to find an excuse for not going, or to have your ego boosted by having me beg you not to go, or just to see how much you can hurt me?”
“Hurt you?” He felt stunned.
“Oh...” Now there was turmoil in her eyes. “You know I don’t want you to go. It is dangerous, and I don’t want to lose you, not again, not for a second. It’s hard enough to be with you every day and night with all these other people crowded around us.... No, I don’t want you to go. But I know you will. So that’s where it is. Now why don’t you just get out of here and let me cry in private.”
“Marlene, I didn’t want to hurt you.... I just thought you ought to know before I told anybody else. I thought I owed you that much.”
“More, Sid. A hell of a lot more, you owe. But not to me. To yourself. Now go on, get out. Leave me alone.”
Baffled, he got up from the web chair and went to the door. He hesitated there for an uncertain moment, looked back toward her. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk, nearly doubled over in a tight knot of misery, staring at the floor.
“Marlene...”
She wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t even look up at him.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to do this. I’ll be back....”
Her only response was to shake her head.
“Live with them?” Rassmussen looked startled, the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain’s monomolecular biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat.
They were sitting around a circular table in the conference room of the Sirius globe: the “outsiders,” plus Grote, Chien, Captain Rassmussen, Pascual, and Lehman. But Marlene wasn’t there; she hadn’t left her room all day.
“Aren’t you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?” Grote asked, grinning.
“I don’t think they have pots. Or fire, for that matter,” Lee countered.
The laugh turned on Grote.
Lee went on quietly, “I’ve checked it out with Aaron, here. There’s no biochemical reason why I couldn’t survive in the native environment. Doris and Alicia have agreed to gather the same types of food we’ve seen the humanoids carrying, and I’ll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them.”