We were damned near purring ourselves. This was a livable world—at least as far as gravity and oxygen went. Which is doing all right for an emergency crash-landing.
It was our third trip into space, and the first time we’d found a star with planets—seven of them, no less, of which this one (with two moons) was the second. We found the system and overdrove back to Communications, that Earth-built satellite of Alpha Centauri, the poor sun that never spawned any planets of its own. Don’t ask me why you can install overdrive in a scoutship, but not Faster than Light communication. All I know is it takes something the size of the Communications satellite to house FL transmitters and receivers, and we have to go there to clear with the red-tape boys back home.
So we got the clearance: No other scouts had reported our system, so go ahead and good luck. Find a habitable planet and you take the jackpot that’s been accumulating compound interest for almost two centuries ever since the UN set it up just after the first moon flight.
So we overdrove back to our system . . . and crash-landed.
For a minute I thought we were through as a team. Laus kept looking back and forth between me and his smashed instruments, flexing his fingers and rubbing that damned bare chin of his. Any second he was going to go off with a Bikini burst. Even Mavra wasn’t trining; she was withdrawn, off someplace of her own where she didn’t have to look at a thing like me.
Then Bast decided that I was the best prospect to hit. She rubbed her order against my leg, looking up with a woebegone face whose big eyes plainly stated that nobody ever fed cats on this godforsaken spaceship—but if I acted fast I might be able to prevent a serious case of starvation.
Among our blessings, the reutilizer had sprung a leak. I didn’t turn the spigot; I just put the dehydrated fish in a pan and held it under the leak. I mixed it, set it down, gave Bast a couple of little strokes behind the ears, and got out some plastiflux to stopper the leak. Bast looked at the pan dubiously, and I said, “Go on: Nice fish for fine cats.” She hesitantly tried a mouthful, agreed, and made a brief remark of minimum gratitude.
“Well,” I said, “somebody’s speaking to me.”
Mavra came back from wherever she’d been, and laughed. “Bast’s right,” she said. “You’re still human. You’re still useful. We’re still alive. What more do we want?”
Laus still looked at the ruined instruments, as though it would take him a good hour to begin answering that question. But he looked at Bast too, and finally at me. “All right, Kip,” he said. “Astrogation’s a new science—”
“Science, hell!” I grinned at him. “It’s an art. I don’t know any more about the science of overdrive than the first airplane ace knew about the science of heavier-than-air flight. I fly with my synapses, if that’s the word I want, and sometimes I guess they don’t apse.”
He was staring at my useless control dials. “I can see your problem. You’re working in such incalculable distances that a relatively minute error is absolutely enormous. A miscalculation of 20,000 miles could be fatal in causing a crashpull into a planet’s gravity—and it would show up on that dial as .000,000,001 parsec.” He seemed to feel better, as if stating our problem in decimal fractions he’d worked out in his head made it all a little more endurable.
“Well,” said Mavra, “we’re on a planet. The next test for the UN jackpot is the little word habitable. I don’t suppose the atom-analyzer still . . . ?”
It didn’t, and that’s where the argument started about who was to be first guinea pig through the airlock.
Now we three watched Bast finish her bath, and knew that at least we could breathe here. There were little items like food and water still to worry about, but it was safe to leave the ship. I was just starting to open the lock when Mavra’s cry called me back to the port. That was how we saw the first of the Giants.
It looked like an Earth meadow out there. The sun, we knew from our scouting tests, was a little colder than Sol, but the planet was closer in than Earth. The sunlight was about the same, and it was bright noon now. The grass was, so far as we could see, just plain grass, and if the flowers in the meadow and the trees beyond it looked unfamiliar, they didn’t seem improbable—no more strange than Florida would look to a New Englander, or maybe not so much.
But the Giants . . . There were two of them, and they were of different sexes, if holding hands and looking (I guess the technical word is gazing) into each other’s eyes, and not noticing where the hell you’re going, have universal meaning. From which you’ll gather they were humanoid—hands and eyes and all the other standard attributes so far as we could see, for they wore clothes—free-flowing garments which looked like woven cloth, implying some degree of civilization.
But there were three nonhumanoid things about them. A: they were both absolutely flat-chested, which sort of spoiled the picture. B.: they were both absolutely bald, which didn’t help it any either. And C: they were both, as best we could judge using Bast as a measuring comparison, well over twelve feet tall and built (by humanoid standards) in proportion.
“It isn’t possible . . . !” Mavra gasped. “This planet’s Earth-size, Earth-gravity. They’d be bound to be . . .”
“Why?” Laus asked bluntly. “I’ve always doubted that point. Wrote a paper on it once. Earth has creatures
