the Starflight men who were now in pursuit and, without needing to be told, bundled Mason into the vehicle and climbed in after him. The engine gave a barely perceptible whine as Garamond switched from heel to toe pressure on the pedal, sending the car snaking along the packed earth of the road as the excess of power forced its drive wheels to slide from side to side.
In less than a minute they had cleared the perimeter of the township and were speeding towards the sunlit hills.
The alien settlement came in view as soon as the car reached the crest of the circular range of hills. It was composed of pale blue rectangles shining in the distance like chips of ceramic. His brief study of the photographs had given Garamond the impression that the buildings were in a single cluster, but in actuality they spanned the entire field of view and extended out across the plain for several kilometres. Garamond realized he was looking at a substantial city. It was a city which appeared to lack a definite centre — but nevertheless large enough to sustain a population of a million or more, judging by human standards. Garamond eased back on the throttle, slowing the car’s descent. He had just picked out the colourful moving specks which he believed were the first contemporaries mankind had ever encountered beyond the biosphere of his birth planet.
“Cliff, didn’t I hear something about the Starflight science teams duplicating our experiment with a reconnaissance torpedo?” Garamond frowned as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the glittering city.
“I think so.”
“I wonder if the cameras were activated?”
“I doubt it. They could hardly have missed seeing this.”
Mason, who had recovered from his shot of sedative, stirred excitedly in the rear seat, panning with his scene recorder. “What are you going to say to these beings, Captain?”
“It doesn’t matter what any of us say — they won’t understand it.”
“They mightn’t even hear it,” Napier said. “Maybe they don’t have ears.”
Garamond felt his mouth go dry. He had visualized this moment many times, with a strength of yearning which could not be comprehended by anyone who had not looked into the blind orbs of a thousand lifeless worlds, but the prospect of coming face to face with a totally alien life form was upsetting his body chemistry. His heart began a slow, powerful pounding as the pale blue city rose higher beyond the nose of the car. Without conscious bidding, his foot eased further back on the throttle and the hum of the engine became completely inaudible at the lower speed. For a long moment there was no sound but that of the tough grasses of Orbitsville whipping at the vehicle’s bodywork.
“What’s the trouble, Vance?” Napier’s eyes were watchful and sympathetic. “Arachnid reaction?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t worry — I can feel it too.”
“Arachnid reaction?” Mason leaned forward eagerly. “What’s that?”
“Ask us some other time.”
“No, it’s all right,” Garamond said, glad of the opportunity to talk. “Do you like spiders?”
“I can’t stand them,” Mason replied.
“That’s fairly universal. The revulsion that most people get when they see spiders — arachnids — is so strong and widespread it has led to the theory that arachnids are not native to Earth. We have a sense of kinship, no matter how slight, with all creatures which originated on our own world, and this makes them acceptable to us even when they’re as ugly as sin. But if the arachnid reaction is what some people think it is — loathing for something instinctively identified as of extraterrestrial origin — then we might be in trouble when we make the first contact with an alien race.
“The worry is that they might be intelligent and friendly, even beautiful, and yet might trigger off hate-and- kill reactions in us simply because their shape isn’t already registered in a kind of checklist we inherit with our genes.”
“It’s just an idea, of course.”
“Just an idea,” Garamond agreed.
“What’s the probability of it being right?”
“Virtually zero, in my estimation. I wouldn’t…” Garamond stopped speaking as the car lifted over a slight rise and he saw two bright-hued beings only a few hundred paces ahead. The aliens were a long way out from the perimeter of their city, isolated. He brought the car to a gradual halt.
“I guess… I have a feeling we ought to get out and walk the rest of the way.”
Napier nodded and swung open his door. They got out, paused for a moment in the heat of Orbitsville’s constant noon, and began walking towards the two man-sized but unearthly figures. Mason followed with his scene recorder.
As the distance between them narrowed, Garamond began to discern the shape of the aliens and was relieved to discover he was not afraid of them in spite of the fact that they were unlike anything he had ever imagined. The creatures seemed, at first, to be humanoids wrapped in garments which were covered with large patches of pink, yellow and brown. At closer range, however, the garments proved to be varicoloured fronds which partly concealed complex, asymmetrical bodies. The aliens did not have clearly defined heads — merely regions of greater complexity at the tops of their blunt, forward-leaning trunks. From a wealth of tendrils, cavities and protuberances, the only organs Garamond was able to identify with any certainty were the eyes, which resembled twin cabochons of green bloodstone.
“What are they like?” Napier whispered.
“I don’t know.” Garamond felt a similar need to relate the aliens to something from his past experience. “Painted shrimps?”
He became aware that the reporter had fallen behind, and that he and Napier were now only a few paces from the aliens. Both men stopped walking and stood facing the fantastic creatures, which had not moved nor given any indication of being aware of their approach. Silence descended over the tableau like liquid glass, solidifying around them. The plain became a sun-filled lens and they were at the centre of it, immobilized and voiceless. Psychic pressures built up and became intolerable, and yet there was nothing to do or say.
Garamond’s mind escaped into irrelevancy.
A minute endured like an age, and then another.
“We’ve done our bit,” Napier announced finally. “Let’s go, Vance.”
Garamond turned thankfully and they walked towards Mason, who backed away from them, still holorecording all that was happening. Not until he had reached the car did Garamond look in the direction of the aliens. One of them was moving away towards its city with a complicated ungainly gait; the other was standing exactly where they had left it.
“I’ll drive back,” Napier said, climbing into the car first and experimenting with the simplified controls while the others were taking their seats. He got the vehicle moving, swung it round and set off up the hill at an oblique angle. “We’ll go the long way round in case we run into a crowd following our tracks out.”
Garamond nodded, his thoughts still wholly absorbed by the two creatures on the plain. “There was no arachnid reaction — I suppose that’s something we can feel good about — but I felt totally inadequate. There was no point to it at all. I can’t see us and them ever relating or interacting.”
“I don’t know about relating, Vance, but there’s going to be plenty of interacting.” Napier pointed out through the windshield to the left, where the curve of the hill was falling away to reveal new expanses of prairie. The pale blue buildings of the alien city, instead of thinning out, were spread across the fresh vistas of grassland like flowers in a meadow, seemingly going on for ever.
Mason whistled and raised his recorder. “Do you think it makes a circle outside the hills? Right round our base?”
“It looks that way to me. They must have been here a long time…” Napier allowed his words to tail off, but Garamond knew at once what he was thinking.
Liz Lindstrom had brought a third of a million settlers with her on the very first load, and the big ships would soon be bringing land-hungry humans in batches of a full million or more. Interaction between the two races was bound to take place in the near future, and on a very large scale.
