A fresh morning breeze, slightly chill, swept down across the meadow in which they had landed. The sky was still gray, and a few last stars of morning still glimmered faintly. But pink streaks of dawning were beginning to splash across the sky. The temperature, Bernard estimated, was in the forties or fifties: promise of a warm morning. The air had the transparent freshness one found only on a virgin world where the belch of a furnace was unknown.
It might have been Earth on some ninth-century morning, thought Bernard; but there were differences, subtle but none the less positive ones. The grass under their feet, only to take one; its blue-green blades sprouted triple from the stalk, twisting round each other in a complex little pattern before springing upward. No grass on Earth had ever grown in such a way.
The trees—looming evergreens two hundred feet high, their boles a dozen feet thick at the base—were different, too. Cones three feet long dangled from the nearest; its bark was pale yellow, ruffled by horizontal striations; its leaves were broad glossy green knives, a foot long, two inches wide. Crickets chittered underfoot, but when Bernard caught sight of one he saw it was a grotesque little creature three or four inches long, green with beady golden eyes and a savage little beak. Great oval toadstools with table-like tops a foot or more in diameter sprouted everywhere in the meadow, bright purple against the blue-green. Dominici knelt to touch one and it crumbled like a dream when his finger grazed the fungus’ rim.
For the long moment, no one spoke. Bernard felt a sort of tingle of awe, and knew the others were sharing his emotion; the wonder of setting foot on a planet where mankind and civilization had not yet begun to work changes. This was the planet as it had come from the maker’s hand, and even a nonbeliever like Bernard could respond to that.
The men were silent, hearing the cool wind whistle sighingly through the towering trees, hearing the unseen harmonious symphony of crickets and the awakening, dawn-hungry birds, and perhaps the deeper cry of some unknown forest beast thrashing through the black thicket to the south.
And then the wonder faded.
This world was not unmarred, Bernard thought.
Perhaps mankind had not yet set down a colony here— but others had.
It was a grim thing to call to mind in the midst of this primeval beauty, the ugly reminder of their purpose in coming here. Bernard’s expression darkened. How could a world this lovely be a menace to Earth? The world itself was not the menace, he thought. It merely symbolized the threat of two colliding cultures.
Laurance cut into his mood, saying quietly, “We’ll proceed to the alien village on foot. There are two landsleds aboard the ship, but I’m not going to use them.”
“Is the hike necessary?” Bernard said.
“I feel it is,” Laurance replied, hiding none too well his annoyance of Bernard’s love of comfort. “I feel it might look too much like an armed invasion to the aliens if we came rolling up inside the landsleds. We might never get a chance to tell them we were friendly.”
“In that case, what about weapons?” Dominici said. “Do you have enough to spare for the four of us? If we have to defend ourselves, we…”
“Weapons?” Laurance repeated, startled. “Do you really expect to carry weapons?”
“Well…” the biophysicist stammered, thrown off balance by Laurance’s tone. “Of course I thought we’d be armed, just as a precautionary measure. Alien beings—you yourself said they might be surprised when we approach them…”
Laurance grimly tapped the magnum pistol at his side. “I’m carrying the only weapon we’ll need.”
“But…”
“If the aliens react to us with hostility,” said Laurance in a dry voice, “you may quite possibly all become martyrs to the cause of Terran diplomacy. I hope each of you is thoroughly reconciled to that fact right here and now. I’d ten times as much rather see us all shot to ashes by alien blasters than to have some jumpy negotiator fly off the handle and pump bullets into them just because one of his private neuroses has been activated. It isn’t wise to make a ten-mile overland journey through unknown territory without some sort of weapon, which is why I’m carrying this. But I’m damned if I’m going to let all of us walk into that alien camp looking like an invasion party.” He glanced around, his eyes coming to rest in turn on Dominici, Havig, Stone, and Bernard. “Is that perfectly clear?” Laurance asked.
No one replied. Uncomfortably, Bernard scratched his cheek and tried to look as though he were reconciled to the idea of martyrdom. He wasn’t.
“No objections,” Laurance said, more relaxedly. “Good. “We’re agreed, then. I carry the gun; I’m alone answerable for the consequences of my carrying it. Believe me, I’m not worried about my survival so much as I am about someone else’s rash actions. Are there any other questions?”
Hearing none, Laurance shrugged. “Very well. We’ll set out at once.”
He turned, checking his position against a tiny compass that was embedded, along with several other indicators, in the sleeve of his leather jacket, and nodded toward the west. Without further preamble or prologue, he began to walk.
Nakamura and Peterszoon fell in wordlessly behind him, Clive and Hernandez back of them. The five men trudged off at a good clip, none of them looking around to see if the negotiators were following.
Shrugging, Bernard scurried after the five rapidly retreating spacemen, Dominici jogging alongside him. Stone followed, with Havig, reserved and self-contained as ever, bringing up the rear.
“They don’t treat us as if we’re very important,” Bernard complained to Dominici. “They seem to forget that we’re the reason they’re here.”
“They don’t forget it,” Dominici growled. “They just feel contempt for lazy Earthlubbers like us. They resent our existence. ‘Transmat people,’ they call us, with a sort of arrogant sneer in their voices. As though there’s something really morally wrong about taking the quickest possible route between two points.”
“Only insofar as it weakens the body’s capacity for endurance,” Havig said quietly from the rear. “Anything which makes us less fit to bear the burden of earthly existence is morally wrong.”
“Taking the transmat does breed some bad habits,” Bernard said, surprised to find himself on the same side as Havig for a change. “We lose a sense of appreciation of the universe. Since the transmat was invented we’ve completely forgotten what the fact of distance really means. We don’t think of time as a function of distance any more; they do. And to the extent that we can’t control our impatience, we’re weaklings in a spaceman’s eyes.”
“And all of us weaklings in God’s eyes,” Havig said. “But some of us more prepared to go to Him than others.”
“Shut up,” Dominici said without rancor. “We might all be going to Him in a very short time. Don’t remind me.”
“Are you afraid of dying?” Havig asked.
“Just annoyed by the thought of not getting done everything I’d like to,” Dominici said. “Let’s get off the topic.”
“And let’s stay off it,” Bernard said vehemently, “That one-track philosopher back there is going to peddle piety once too often, and…”
“Watch it,” Stone murmured warningly.
They fell silent. The path was on a slight upgrade, and despite the tiny extra percentage of oxygen in the air Bernard soon found himself puffing and panting. He had made a point of keeping himself in trim with a weekly visit to an exercise house in Djakarta, but now he was speedily discovering the measurable psychological difference between doing pushups in a gym under relaxed conditions and climbing a steady upgrade on an alien world.