on the other stretched the forest of giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.
'You'd expect to see a goblin,' Caroline said, and she shivered as she said it.
All at once the goblin was there.
He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its cheek and dripped onto its chest.
'Good Lord!' said Gary. 'I know that fellow!”
The goblin leaped into the air and cracked its heels together and gobbled like an excited turkey.
'He's the one that was there the day the Engineers held the conference,”
said Gary. 'You remember, when they got all the aliens together — all those that had come through space to the city of the Engineers. It was him — or one just like him. He sat opposite me and he winked at me, just like he did now, and I thought that…
'There's another one,' said Caroline.
The second one was perched on top of one of the mushrooms, with his splayed feet swinging over the edge.
Then there was a third one peeping from behind a stem and still another one, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stem. All of them were watching and all of them were grinning, but the grins were enough to strike terror and revulsion into one's soul.
Caroline and Gary retreated backward to the ship, step by slow step until they stood with their backs against it.
Now there was sound, the soft padding of feet coming through the toadstool forest, the clucking noises that the goblins made.
'Let's go away,' said Caroline. 'Let's get in the ship and go.”
'Wait,' counseled Gary. 'Let us wait a while. We can always go. These things are intelligent. They have to be, since they were among the ones the Engineers called in.”
He stepped out from the ship two slow paces and called.
'Hello,' he called.
They stopped their clucking and their running and stood and looked at him out of slitted eyes.
'We are friends,' said Gary. They didn't move a muscle.
Gary held up his empty hands, palms outward in the human gesture of peace.
'We are friends,' he said.
The silence was on the world again — the dreadful, empty silence. The goblins were gone.
Slowly Gary came back to the ship.
'It doesn't work,' he said. 'I had no reason to believe it would.”
'All things,' said Caroline, 'would not necessarily communicate by sound.
That's just one way of making yourself understood. There would be many other ways. These things make sounds, but that doesn't mean they would have to talk with sound. They may have no auditory apparatus. They may not even know that they make sounds, might not know what sound is.”
'They're back again,' said Gary. 'You try this time. Try thinking at them.
Pick out one of them and concentrate on him.”
A minute passed, a minute of utter silence.
'It's funny,' said Caroline. 'I couldn't reach them at all. There wasn't even a flicker of response. But I had the feeling that they knew and that they rejected what I tried to tell them. They closed their minds and would not listen.”
'They don't talk,' said Gary. 'And they either can't or won't telepath.
What's next?”
'Sign language,' Caroline said. 'Pictures after that. Pantomime.”
But it did no good. The goblins watched with interest when Gary tried sign language. They crept close to watch as he drew diagrams in the sandy soil.
And they squealed and chortled when he tried pantomime. But that they understood any of it they gave not a single sign.
Gary came back to the ship.
'They're intelligent,' he said. 'They have to be, otherwise how would they ever have been brought to the rim of the universe by the Engineers.
Something like that takes understanding, a mechanical aptitude, a penchant for higher mathematics.”
He gestured in disgust. 'And yet,' he said, 'they do not understand even the most elementary symbolism.”
'These ones may not be trained,' said Caroline. 'There may be others here who are. There may be an elite, an intelligentsia. These may be the peasants and the serfs.”
Gary said wearily: 'Let's get out of here. Make a circuit or two of the planet. Watch closely for some sign of development, some evidence of culture.”
Caroline nodded. 'We could have missed it before.”
They went into the ship and closed the port behind them. Through the vision plates they saw the goblins, a large crowd of them by now, lined up at the edge of the mushroom forest, staring at the ship.
Gary lowered himself into the pilot's chair, reached out for the warming knob and twisted it over. Nothing happened. He twisted it back and turned it on again. Silence swam within the ship — no sound of warming jets.
Lord, thought Gary, what a place to get stuck.
Outside the ship, equipped with a kit of tools, he crawled into the take-off tubes, took off the plates that housed the warming assembly and pried into their innards.
An hour later he had finished. He crawled out, grimed and smudged with carbon.
'Nothing wrong,' he told Caroline. 'No reason why they shouldn't work.”
He tried again and they didn't work.
He checked the feed line and the wiring. He ripped off the control panel and went over it, wire by wire, relay by relay, tube by tube. There was nothing wrong. But still it wouldn't work.
'The goblins,' Caroline guessed.
He agreed. 'It must be the goblins. There is nothing else to think.”
But how, he asked himself, could such simple-minded things turn an almost foolproof, letter-perfect spaceship into a heap of junk?
Chapter Fourteen
The next morning the Hellhounds came, a small ship quartering down out of the dawn light of the great red sun. It came down on a long smooth slant and landed not more than half a mile away, plowing a swath through the mushroom forest as it grounded. There was no mistaking its identity, for its lines were distinctive and the insignia upon its bow was the insignia that both Caroline and Gary had seen many times on the ships that screamed down to lay bombs upon the mighty city of the Engineers.
'And us,' said Gary, 'with nothing but hand guns in the locker and a ship that we can't lift.”
He saw the stricken look on Caroline's face and tried to make amends.
'Maybe they won't know who we are,' he said. 'Maybe they…”
'Don't let's fool ourselves,' Caroline told him. 'They know who we are, all right. More than likely we're the reason that they're here. Maybe they…”
She hesitated and Gary asked, 'Maybe they what?”
'I was thinking,' she said, 'that they might have twisted the tunnel. The mathematics might have been all right. Somebody might have brought us here.
