Bright Segment (8 page)

“Shall I sterilize the floor?” Moira asked.

“No,” said Teague shortly.

“But—bacteria … spores …”

“Forget it,” said Teague.

April was crying. Tod held her close, but made no effort to stop her. Something in him, deeper than panic, more essential than wonderment, understood that she could use this circumstance to spend her tears for Alma, and that these tears must be shed now or swell and burst her heart.
So cry
, he pled silently,
cry for both of us, all of us
.

With the end of action, belated shock spread visibly over Carl’s face. “The ship’s gone,” he said stupidly. “We’re on a planet.” He looked at his hands, turned abruptly to the door, stared at it and began to shiver. Moira went to him and stood quietly, not touching him—just being near, in case she should be needed. April grew gradually silent. Carl said, “I—” and then shook his head.

Click. Shh. Clack, click
. Methodically Teague was stacking the scattered contents of the medical kit. Tod patted April’s shoulder and went to help. Moira glanced at them, peered closely into Carl’s face, then left him and came to lend a hand. April joined them, and at last Carl. They swept up and racked and stored the clutter, and when Teague lowered a table, they helped get the dead lizard on it and pegged out for dissection. Moira cautiously disentangled the huge insect from the folds of the cloak and clapped a box over it, slid the lid underneath to bring the feebly squirming thing to Teague.
He studied it for a long moment, then set it down and peered at the lizard. With forceps, he opened the jaws and bent close. He grunted. “April …”

She came to look. Teague touched the fangs with the tip of a scalpel. “Look there.”

“Grooves,” she said. “Like a snake.”

Teague reversed the scalpel and with the handle he gingerly pressed upward, at the root of one of the fangs. A cloudy yellow liquid beaded, ran down the groove. He dropped the scalpel and slipped a watch-glass under the tooth to catch the droplet. “Analyze that later,” he murmured. “But I’d say you saved Tod from something pretty nasty.”

“I didn’t even think,” said April. “I didn’t … I never knew there was any animal life on Prime. I wonder what they call this monster.”

“The honors are yours, April. You name it.”

“They’ll have a classification for it already!”

“Who?”

Everyone started to talk, and abruptly stopped. In the awkward silence Carl’s sudden laugh boomed. It was a wondrous sound in the frightened chamber. There was comprehension in it, and challenge, and above all, Carl himself—boisterous and impulsive, quick, sure. The laugh was triggered by the gush of talk and its sudden cessation, a small thing in itself. But its substance was understanding, and with that an emotional surge, and with that, the choice of the one emotional expression Carl would always choose.

“Tell them, Carl,” Teague said.

Carl’s teeth flashed. He waved a thick arm at the door. “That this isn’t Sirius Prime. Nor Earth. Go ahead, April—name your pet.”

April, staring at the lizard, said, “
Crotalidus
, then, because it has a rattle and fangs like a diamondback.” Then she paled and turned to Carl, as the full weight of his statement came on her. “Not—
not Prime?”

Quietly, Teague said, “Nothing like these ever grew on Earth. And Prime is a cold planet. It could never have a climate like that,” he nodded toward the door, “no matter how much time has passed.”

“But what … where …” It was Moira.

“We’ll find out when we can. But the instruments aren’t here—they were in the ship.”

“But if it’s a new … another planet, why didn’t you let me sterilize? What about airborne spores? Suppose it had been methane out there or—”

“We’ve obviously been conditioned to anything in the atmosphere. As to its composition—well, it isn’t poisonous, or we wouldn’t be standing here talking about it. Wait!” He held up a hand and quelled the babble of questions before it could fully start. “Wondering is a luxury like worrying. We can’t afford either. We’ll get our answers when we get more evidence.”

“What shall we do?” asked April faintly.

“Eat,” said Teague. “Sleep.” They waited. Teague said, “Then we go outside.”

III

There were stars like daisies in a field, like dust in a sunbeam, and like flying, flaming mountains; near ones, far ones, stars of every color and every degree of brilliance. And there were bands of light which must be stars too distant to see. And something was stealing the stars, not taking them away, but swallowing them up, coming closer and closer, eating as it came. And at last there was only one left. Its name was Alma, and it was gone, and there was nothing left but an absorbent blackness and an aching loss.

In this blackness Tod’s eyes snapped open, and he gasped, frightened and lost.

“You awake, Tod?” April’s small hand touched his face. He took it and drew it to his lips, drinking comfort from it.

From the blackness came Carl’s resonant whisper, “We’re awake. Teague?…”

The lights flashed on, dim first, brightening swiftly, but not so fast as to dazzle unsuspecting eyes. Tod sat up and saw Teague at the table. On it was the lizard, dissected and laid out as neatly as an exploded view in a machine manual. Over the table, on a gooseneck, was a floodlamp with its lens masked by an infrared filter. Teague turned away from the table, pushing up his “black-light”
goggles, and nodded to Tod. There were shadows under his eyes, but otherwise he seemed the same as ever. Tod wondered how many lonely hours he had worked while the two couples slept, doing that meticulous work under the irritating glow so that they would be undisturbed.

Tod went to him. “Has my playmate been talking much?” He pointed at the remains of the lizard.

“Yes and no,” said Teague. “Oxygen-breather, all right, and a true lizard. He had a secret weapon—that tail-segment he flips over his head toward his victims. It has primitive ganglia like an Earth salamander’s, so that the tail-segment trembles and squirms, sounding the rattles, after he throws it. He also has a skeleton that—but all this doesn’t matter. Most important is that he’s the analog of our early Permian life, which means (unless he’s an evolutionary dead-end like a cockroach) that this planet is a billion years old at the least. And the little fellow here—” he touched the flying thing—“bears this out. It’s not an insect, you know. It’s an arachnid.”

“With
wings?
”

Teague lifted the slender, scorpion-like pincers of the creature and let them fall. “Flat chitinous wings are no more remarkable a leg adaptation than those things. Anyway, in spite of the ingenuity of his engineering, internally he’s pretty primitive. All of which lets us hypothesize that we’ll find fairly close analogs of what we’re used to on Earth.”

“Teague,” Tod interrupted, his voice lowered, his eyes narrowed to contain the worry that threatened to spill over, “Teague, what’s happened?”

“The temperature and humidity here seem to be exactly the same as that outside,” Teague went on, in precisely the same tone as before. “This would indicate either a warm planet, or a warm season on a temperate planet. In either case it is obvious that—”

“But,
Teague—
”

“—that a good deal of theorizing is possible with very little evidence, and we need not occupy ourselves with anything else but that evidence.”

“Oh,” said Tod. He backed off a step. “Oh,” he said again, “sorry,
Teague.” He joined the others at the food dispensers, feeling like a cuffed puppy.
But he’s right
, he thought.
As Alma said … of the many things which might have happened, only one actually has. Let’s wait, then, and worry about that one thing when we can name it
.

There was a pressure on his arm. He looked up from his thoughts and into April’s searching eyes. He knew that she had heard, and he was unreasonably angry at her. “Damn it, he’s so cold-blooded,” he blurted defensively, but in a whisper.

April said, “He has to stay with things he can understand, every minute.” She glanced swiftly at the closed Coffin. “Wouldn’t you?”

There was a sharp pain and a bitterness in Tod’s throat as he thought about it. He dropped his eyes and mumbled, “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t think I could.” There was a difference in his eyes as he glanced back at Teague.
But it’s so easy, after all, for strong people to be strong
, he thought.

“Teague, what’ll we wear?” Carl called.

“Skinflex.”

“Oh, no!” cried Moira. “It’s so clingy and hot!”

Carl laughed at her. He swept up the lizard’s head and opened its jaws. “Smile at the lady. She wouldn’t put any tough old skinflex in the way of your pretty teeth!”

“Put it down,” said Teague sharply, though there was a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “It’s still loaded with God-knows-what alkaloid. Moira, he’s right. Skinflex just doesn’t puncture.”

Moira looked respectfully at the yellow fangs and went obediently to storage, where she pulled out the suits.

“We’ll keep close together, back to back,” said Teague as they helped each other into the suits. “All the weapons are … were … in the forward storage compartment, so we’ll improvise. Tod, you and the girls each take a globe of anesthene. It’s the fastest anesthetic we have and it ought to take care of anything that breathes oxygen. I’ll take scalpels. Carl—”

“The hammer,” Carl grinned. His voice was fairly thrumming with excitement.

“We won’t attempt to fasten the door from outside. I don’t mean
to go farther than ten meters out, this first time. Just—you, Carl—lift off the bar as we go out, get the door shut as quickly as possible, and prop it there. Whatever happens, do not attack anything out there unless you are attacked first, or unless I say so.”

Hollow-eyed, steady, Teague moved to the door with the others close around him. Carl shifted the hammer to his left hand, lifted the bar and stood back a little, holding it like a javelin. Teague, holding a glittering lancet lightly in each hand, pushed the door open with his foot. They boiled through, stepped aside for Carl as he butted the rod deep into the soil and against the closed door. “All set.”

They moved as a unit for perhaps three meters, and stopped.

It was daytime now, but such a day as none of them had dreamed of. The light was green, very nearly a lime-green, and the shadows were purple. The sky was more lavender than blue. The air was warm and wet.

They stood at the top of a low hill. Before them a tangle of jungle tumbled up at them. So vital, so completely alive, it seemed to move by its own power of growth. Stirring, murmuring, it was too big, too much, too wide and deep and intertwined to assimilate at a glance; the thought,
this is a jungle
, was a pitiable understatement.

To the left, savannah-like grassland rolled gently down to the choked margins of a river—calm-faced, muddy and secretive. It too seemed astir with inner growings. To the right, more jungle. Behind them, the bland and comforting wall of their compartment.

Above—

It may have been April who saw it first; in any case, Tod always associated the vision with April’s scream.

They moved as she screamed, five humans jerked back then like five dolls on a single string, pressed together and to the compartment wall by an overwhelming claustrophobia. They were ants under a descending heel, flies on an anvil … together their backs struck the wall and they cowered there, looking up.

And it was not descending. It was only—big. It was just that it was there, over them.

April said, later, that it was like a cloud. Carl would argue that
it was cylindrical, with flared ends and a narrow waist. Teague never attempted to describe it, because he disliked inaccuracies, and Moira was too awed to try. To Tod, the object had no shape. It was a luminous opacity between him and the sky, solid, massive as mountains. There was only one thing they agreed on, and that was that it was a ship.

And out of the ship came the golden ones.

They appeared under the ship as speckles of light, and grew in size as they descended, so that the five humans must withstand a second shock; they had known the ship was huge, but had not known until now how very high above them it hung.

Down they came, dozens, hundreds. They filled the sky over the jungle and around the five, moving to make a spherical quadrant from the horizontal to the zenith, a full hundred and eighty degrees from side to side—a radiant floating shell with its concave surface toward, around, above them. They blocked out the sky and the jungle-tops, cut off most of the strange green light, replacing it with their own—for each glowed coolly.

Each individual was distinct and separate. Later, they would argue about the form and shape of the vessel, but the exact shape of these golden things was never even mentioned. Nor did they ever agree on a name for them. To Carl they were an army, to April, angels. Moira called them (secretly) “the seraphim,” and to Tod they were masters. Teague never named them.

For measureless time they hung there, with the humans gaping up at them. There was no flutter of wings, no hum of machinery to indicate how they stayed aloft, and if each individual had a device to keep him afloat, it was of a kind the humans could not recognize. They were beautiful, awesome, uncountable.

And nobody was afraid.

Tod looked from side to side, from top to bottom of this incredible formation, and became aware that it did not touch the ground. Its lower edge was exactly horizontal, at his eye level. Since the hill fell away on all sides, he could see under this lower edge, here the jungle, there down across the savannah to the river. In a new amazement he saw eyes, and protruding heads.

In the tall grass at the jungle margin was a scurry and cease, scurry and cease, as newtlike animals scrambled not quite into the open and froze, watching. Up in the lower branches of the fleshy, hook-leaved trees, heavy scaly heads of leaf-eaters showed, and here and there was the armed head of a lizard with catlike tearing tusks.

Leather-winged fliers flapped clumsily to rest in the branches, hung for a moment for all the world like broken umbrellas, then achieved balance and folded their pinions. Something slid through the air, almost caught a branch, missed it and tumbled end-over-end to the ground, resolving itself into a broad-headed scaly thing with wide membranes between fore and hind legs. And Tod saw his acquaintance of the night before, with its serrated tail and needle fangs.