“Shh!” said Mavra irrationally, as if the Giants might hear us.
We watched Bast’s jump of astonishment as the four Giant feet pounded the soil near her. She looked at them curiously but without bristling, much as she had, from time to time, regarded the things that lived in the spaceship without our knowledge. As they sauntered along, lost in each other, Bast made up her mind. She stood up, leaned back on her hind feet, dug her foreclaws into the ground well in front of her, gave her vertebrae a thorough stretching, then recompacted herself and walked casually toward the Giants, her tail carried like a tall exclamation point over the round dot beneath.
She picked the larger and presumably male Giant for her rubbing post. When, for the first time since we’d seen him, he took his eyes from his companion, Bast rolled over in her extra-voluptuous pose, the one that suggests that there’s a mirror in the ceiling.
They both stopped and bent over her. You could guess the dialogue from the humanoid gestures and expressions: What on Earth’s that? Never saw one before. Well, it seems friendly anyhow. And it’s cute too. Look, it wants to be rubbed. See, it likes it. Especially right there . . .
“She’s a lucky Giantess,” said Mavra. “Nothing like tactile intuition in a man.”
“I hope you’ve noticed,” I said, “that Bast likes me.”
“Shh!”she said, having started the conversation.
The male fumbled in a sort of sporran and tossed something to Bast, who fielded it nicely. The lovers grinned and looked at each other and stopped grinning and went on looking. Their hands met again and they started to stroll away, in no condition to notice a trifle like a scoutship crashed in the bushes at the edge of the meadow.
Bast spent a minute using the Giant’s gift as a toy, batting it along the grass and chasing it. Then her interest became more practical. She sniffed at it, turned it over once and crouched eying it, tail atwitch. When she finally ate it, it made three mouthfuls.
Laus and I each held one of Mavra’s hands, but it was no such hand-holding as we’d been witnessing. It was just trine unification in the intensity of our suspense—suspense squared as Bast decided that now, in all this lovely sun, was just the time for a nap. But she had hardly curled up when one of the tiny flying things passed over her. She bounded up with another of those leaps, chased it vainly for a full minute, then abruptly stopped and trotted sedately back to the ship as though that was all she’d intended all along.
We all let out our breaths at once. Laus dropped Mavra’s hand; I didn’t. “So there’s also food here,” he said, “that’s at least not immediately poisonous. If one food’s edible, doubtless most are; it implies a reasonably similar metabolism. It’s a habitable planet.”
“Jackpot!” I said, and then felt like seventy-eight kinds of damned fool.
Mavra smiled at me. “The Giants seem not uncivilized. They might even be able to repair the ship. But whether the UN ever learns the fact or not, we can live here.”
“If,” said Laus, “we can communicate with the Giants.”
He was flexing his fingers again and rubbing his bare chin, but this time I knew his concern was focused on himself. This was his job; would he do it better than I’d done mine?
We were a team of specialists:
Kip Newby, astrogator. I was deciding to invent a new slogan for the Service: “You can’t call yourself an astrogator until you’ve had your first crash-landing.” By which standard I would be the only astrogator in the Galaxy.
Dr. Wenceslaus Hornung, xenologist—even more untried in his job than I was in mine. For the Giants were the first Xenoids (aliens to you) that an Earth man had ever found. For more than two centuries we’d been developing what some of them called Contact-Theory. It had never proved necessary in the solar system, but the theoretical work went on. Of all the boys who’d ever taken the works in BLAM (Biology, Linguistics, Anthropology, Mathematics) Laus was reckoned the absolute tops in xenology—so damned good that he could even get away with eccentricities like taking a pet on a space trip or scraping the hair off his face like an ancient Roman or a Dawn-Atomic man.
Mavra Dario, co-ordinator. We haven’t developed a good word yet for her specialty. I’ve known lads that called her a “neuro-sturgeon,” which I’m told derives from an early investigator who discovered some of the principles of trine symbiosis. Her specialty is being unspecialized, being herself and thereby making each of us be more himself and at the same time more a part of the team. If you’ve never been on a team I couldn’t make it clear to you; if you have I don’t need to.
That was the team, plus—thank God for Laus’s eccentricities—Bast. Laus has told me, more than once, all about the Egyptian goddess, but I still think of that name as an affectionate but not wholly inaccurate shortened form.
She was at the airlock now. I opened it. She seemed to think this was fine. It had been weeks since she’d had a door to decide whether or not to go through.
While she was making up her mind, Mavra spoke. “Don’t rush it, Laus. There’s no hurry for First Contact. If we’re lucky, we can take a few days to size them up beforehand. And the first thing is to get busy with this shrubbery and try a reasonable job of camouflaging the ship. The next Giants may not be in love.”
We were lucky. Our meadow was a mountain meadow; as we guessed then and later learned,
