systems.
That wouldn’t be so hot.” He spoke earnestly, and there was a depth to his words.
The First Mate wanted badly to touch this man, to lay a hand on his arm and say, “We’ll make it, Vern,” or something less trite. But he could not. Instead, he remarked, “You look tired, Vern. Catch much during the last leg?” The Captain shook his head and grinned broadly, though the weariness was moving in his eyes. “You know me, Charlie. ‘No-Wink, No-Blink, No-Nod Kovasic’ they called me at the Academy.” Then, the jibe still moist on his lips, he sobered.
“Bring something back, Charlie. Bring it back—we need it bad. We need something to open their eyes back home. To make them understand we’re not just idly flitting around the galaxy—that we can bring back useful information. We have to keep the Command in business. It was thirty years coming, Charlio—be a hell of a note to lose it now.
“We need it, Charlie.” He added softly, almost to himself, as he turned away, “Need it bad.”
They came clumping through The Forest, nineteen of them, walking strangely.
They moved erect, with their hands swinging at their sides. Their hands were even different. How could they dig without spade-shaped fingers? How could they hear from those odd little flat things so close to their heads? Their eyes. Such strange eyes. Mere, angry slits.
The eyes watching the strange ones were not slits. They were huge, platter-like organs without lids. They watched unblinking as the strangers from the flaming thing tromped through The Forest.
They were going to the Village Home.
The thought went out from the One, to the other Ruskind,
Wummel heard the thought, and hunkered deeper under the spread roots of the gnarl-bush. Yet…there was something about these strange erect wanderers that drew him.
Is it because I saw them first? he wondered. Or is it something else. I feel—I sense—a deeper bond in these strange ones. They are not wholly unknown to me.
He reached out daintily, searching with his mind, plucking delicately as though on some fragile musical instrument.
A stirring of buried racial memory. A common germ, a flame, a whirling nebula and a throwing-out of flashing arms. One parent. One world, so far back even the concept had been drowned by memory on memory.
He watched their progress, deeper into the mingled tree-shapes. The Forest held many of Wummel’s people.
The Ruskind had left the Village Home, till the strange ones left the planet.
His eager eyes caught the every flicker of their bodies, the every tread of their step, the every thought of their minds. A wild, conflicted and confused something, as rolled and entwined as the slender stringer arms of the sewlan vines. Their minds were never at rest. They could not speak between each other—in thoughts—and they struggled in the cages of their bodies to communicate.
Occasionally one would move its mouth at the other, and a fraction of the real communication would be understood.
There was a wandering in them. They were never at rest. Their lives were meshes of step and run and scamper. Never at peace, never at rest, always driven on, always driven on…
Thought returned:
They caught him in the village. They had been studying the thatchy hutches, when the First Mate had seen him. He had been watching them from the edge of the forest, and the First caught the movement of his green fur from the comer of his eye.
He had dispatched men to circle the thing, and they had closed in on it carefully. It had started to scamper away when they were a good twenty feet from it. But the enmeshing action of the power-driven elasticord in their Molasses-guns had trapped it.
The little thing lay still, as they picked him up, warped into a small furry ball, with the adhesive elasticord wound about him in many twistings. They carried him out of the forest, and laid him before the First Mate. It lay still even as they surrounded him. It stared up out of saucer-sized yellow eyes, and the green smooth fur of its flanks quivered under their gaze.
“Is it animal, vegetable, or…” one of the noncoms began, but the First Mate cut him off with a wave of the hand.
“Do you feel anything?”
The others shook their heads, but the First noticed one man whose eyes had clouded, whose brow was furrowed with lines of concentration. As though he were listening for a sound, far off. “Queer lookin’ little thing,” one of the men said. “Wonder what it eats. Or if
The First cut him off hard.
“Shut up!” His face had an odd shine to it, as though a thin film of perspiration was about to break through. “I—I—” the words only half-formed. He knew what he wanted to say, but he could not. The thing before him was a beast of the woods; a dumb thing with neither mind nor manner. Still…he was certain it was—he could hardly form the thought
Strange words with a strange tone. Words and thoughts of a million years. The thoughts of an entire race; a race that had never left its world, that had never climbed from the dirt, and yet was sublimely happy. Tied to its world, and at peace with the universe.
The First Mate had been in space eighteen years. He had grown hard fighting for the Mapping Command, and it had been many more years than he could remember since he had cried.
But he felt the tears beginning. The thoughts were too sweet, too clear, too demanding in their picturing.
“Take him to the ship,” he said, turning toward the forest. “We’ll let the Captain have a look at him.” The men lifted the little beast and carried him back through the foliage.
The First Mate followed a few feet behind, his head lowered.
They wanted to take Wummel to Earth. He could hear them saying it in the caverns of their minds. The thought came strongest from the man they called the Captain. He thought, and the thoughts came to Wummel, and Wummel listened, but he could
To Earth, the thought said.
