And a brave man would lift the top of a box; inside he would see other boxes, and in them oblong pale shapes wrapped in something transparent that was not cellophane. He would unwrap one, feel it, smell it, show it around, and finally taste it; and then his eyebrows would go up.
The color and the texture were unfamiliar, but the taste was unmistakable! Tortillas and beans! (Or taro; or rice with bean-sprouts; or stuffed grape leaves; or herb omelette!)
The exception was the ship that landed outside Capetown, in an open field at the foot of Table Mountain.
Aza-Kra woke me at dawn. “They are here.”
I mumbled at him and tried to turn over. He shook my shoulder again, buzzing excitedly to himself. “Please, they are here. We must hurry.”
I lurched out of bed and stood swaying. “Your friends?” I said.
“Yes, yes.” He was struggling into the black dress, pushing the peaked hat backward onto his head. "Hurry.”
I splashed cold water on my face, and got into my clothes. I pulled out the top dresser drawer and looked at the two loaded automatics. I couldn’t decide. I couldn’t figure out any way they would do me any good, but I didn’t want to leave them behind. I stood there until my legs went numb before I could make up my mind to take them anyhow, and the hell with it.
There were no taxis, of course. We walked three blocks along the deserted streets until we saw a battered sedan nose into view in the intersection ahead, moving cautiously around the heaps of litter.
“Hold your breath!”
The car moved on out of sight. We found it around the comer, up on the sidewalk with the front fender jammed against a railing. There were two men and a woman in it, Europeans.
“Which way?”
“Left. To the mountain.”
When we got to the outskirts and the buildings began to thin out, I saw it up ahead, a huge silvery-metal shelf jutting out impossibly from the slope. I began to tremble. They’ll cut me up and put me in a jar, I thought. Now is the time to stop, if I’m going to.
But I kept going. Where the road veered away from the field and went curving on up the mountain the other way, I stopped and we got out. I saw dark shapes and movements under that huge gleaming bulk. We stepped over a broken fence and started across the dry, uneven clods in the half-light.
Light sprang out: a soft, pearl-gray shimmer that didn’t dazzle the eye although it was aimed straight toward us, marking the way. I heard a shrill wordless buzzing, and above that an explosion of chirping, and under them both a confusion of other sounds, humming, droning, clattering. I saw a half-dozen nightmare shapes bounding forward.
Two of them were like Aza-Kra; two more were squat things with huge humped shells on top, like tortoise-shells the size of a card table, with six long stump-ended legs underneath, and a tangle of eyes, tentacles, and small wriggly things peeping out in front; one, the tallest, had a long sharp-spined column of a body rising from a thick base and four startlingly human legs, and surmounted by four long whiplike tentacles and a smooth oval head; the sixth looked at first glance like an unholy cross between a grasshopper and a newt. He came in twenty-foot bounds.
They crowded around Aza-Kra, humming, chirping, droning, buzzing, clattering. Their hands and tentacles went over him, caressingly; the newt-grasshopper thing hoisted him onto its back.
They paid no attention to me, and I stayed where I was, with my hands tight and sweating on the grips of my guns. Then I heard Aza-Kra speak, and the tallest one turned back to me.
It reeked: something like brine, something like wet fur, something rank and indescribable. It had two narrow red eyes in that smooth knob of a head. It put one of its tentacles on my shoulder, and I didn’t see a mouth open anywhere, but a droning voice said, “Thank you for caring for him. Come now. We go to ship.”
I pulled away instinctively, quivering, and my hands came out of my pockets. I heard a flat, echoing crack and a yell, and I saw a red wetness spring out across the smooth skull; I saw the thing topple and lie in the dirt, twitching,
I thought for an instant that I had done it, the shot, the yell and all. Then I heard another yell, behind me: I whirled around and heard a car grind into gear and saw it bouncing away down the road into town, lights off, a black moving shape on the dimness. I saw it veer wildly ahd slew into the fences at the first turn; I heard its tires popping as it went through and the muffled crash as it turned over.
Dead, I thought. But the next time I saw two figures come erect beyond the overturned car and stagger toward the road. They disappeared around the turn, running.
I looked back at the others, bewildered. They weren’t even looking that way; they were gathered around the body, lifting it, carrying it toward the ship.
The feeling—the black depression that had been getting stronger every day for three weeks—tightened down on me as if somebody had turned a screw. I gritted my teeth against it, and stood there wishing I were dead.
They were almost to that open hatch in the oval hub that hung under the rim when Aza-Kra detached himself from the group and walked slowly back to me. After a moment one of the others—a hump-shelled one—trundled along after him and waited a yard or two away.
“It is not your fault,” said Aza-Kra. “We could have prevented it, but we were careless. We were so glad to meet that we did not take precautions. It is not your fault. Come to the ship.”
The hump-shelled thing came up and squeaked something, and Aza-Kra sat on its back. The tentacles waved at me. It wheeled and started toward the hatchway. “Come,” said Aza-Kra.
I followed them, too miserable to care what happened. We went down a corridor full of the sourceless pearl-gray light until a doorway suddenly appeared, somehow, and we went through that into a room where two tripeds were waiting.
Aza-Kra climbed onto a stool, and one of the tripeds began pressing two small instruments against various parts of his body; the other squirted something from a flexible canister into his mouth.
And as I stood there watching, between one breath and the next, the depression went away.
I felt like a man whose toothache has just stopped; I probed at my mind, gingerly, expecting to find that the feeling was still there, only hiding. But it wasn’t. It was gone so completely that I couldn’t even remember exactly what it had been like. I felt calm and relaxed—and safe.
I looked at Aza-Kra. He was breathing easily; his eyes looked clearer than they had a moment before, and it seemed to me that his skin was glossier. The feathery neck-spines hung in relaxed, graceful curves.
... It was all true, then. It had to be. If they had been conquerors, the automatic death of the man who had killed one of their number, just now, wouldn’t have been enough. An occupying army can never be satisfied with an eye for an eye. There must be revenge.
But they hadn’t done anything; they hadn’t even used the gas. They’d seen that the others in the car were running away, that the danger was over, and that ended it. The only emotions they had shown, as far as I could tell, were concern and regret—
Except that, I remembered now, I had seen two of the tripeds clearly when I turned back to look at them gathering around the body: Aza-Kra and another one. And their neckspines had been stiff....
Suddenly I knew the answer.
Aza-Kra came from a world where violence and cruelty didn’t exist. To him, the Earth was a jungle—and I was one of its carnivores.
I knew, now, why I had felt the way I had for the last three weeks, and why the feeling had stopped a few minutes ago. My hostility toward him had been partly responsible for his fear, and so I had picked up an echo of it. Undirected fear is, by definition, anxiety, depression, uneasiness—the psychologists’ Angst. It had stopped because Aza-Kra no longer had to depend on me; he was with his own people again; he was safe.