“He took it,” the ostler said. “Your friend. Said he was getting a head start, that you’d catch up with him.”
“Jorv?”
“Short chubby fellow, sort of a restless way with him? I told him that I wasn’t finished packing it up, but he said as long as it had enough air and power on the meter to get him there, it was good enough. He almost wouldn’t wait long enough for me to put in a reserve air tank. I said to him, you don’t want to go out there without one—never mind that you’re only one person in a life-support system that’s supposed to handle three.”
“How long ago?”
“About two hours.”
Bram turned to the others. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but we’d better run him down before he gets there.”
“We’ll have to triple up,” Jao said. He looked at the mound of gear they had brought with them, then his eye lit on the red-haired sociobiologist. “Why don’t you and Ame and Shira ride together, and Heln and I can squeeze in with all this equipment.”
The walkers loped side by side across the dim plain, stretching their legs of plastic and synthetic protein. Their yellow headlamps bored into the endless ribbon of rubblescape ahead of them. They had traveled far enough so that the tethered moon was at their backs, showing its shape like a child’s top. To their right was the bloated face of a disk, casting a rusty light. To their left were the deeps of space with a hoarfrost of stars.
“Not a sign of him,” Bram said.
“Don’t forget, he’s running lighter,” Ame pointed out.
She was squeezed against him on the narrow bench. On her other side, Shira’s bony hip dug into her. The lanky paleobiologist said, “He’s had a two-hour head start. But Jorv’s not a good driver. He’ll try to hurry his walker too much, and that’ll mean that its legs will just be churning around in midair a good deal of the time.”
“Could we have passed him somehow?”
“We can see clear to the edge on either side. We’d have noticed his lights.”
“If he remembered to turn them on,” Shira said, and fell silent.
“We’ve been running for three hours,” Bram said. “We’ll be there soon. If we were going to catch up to him, we’d have done it by now.”
“Don’t worry, Bram-tsu.” Ame said. “Jorv is a very intelligent man. He won’t do anything too rash. All he wants to do is study them.”
“They may be studying him by now,” Bram said, and urged the walker on.
An hour later, the great pearly dome of the alien bubble grew out of the dimness ahead. There was no question of it appearing over the horizon—not on the diskworld. It simply became visible as a dot and grew larger.
Bram slowed the walker and approached at a trot. Jao, driving the other walker, fell in beside him.
The aliens were deploying around their bubble, queer sticklike creatures who hurried back and forth, carrying huge cone-shaped containers that they peeled open to reveal equipment and housing materials. Wheeled vehicles, whose barrel-shaped tires seemed to be clustered at one end, leaving a tubular chassis projecting with an upward cant, were being readied. All the activity was taking place under the glare of work lamps set up on tall stands around the perimeter of the camp.
“They like things bright,” Ame said, looking at the pool of light around the tremendous ball.
“Look, there’s Jorv’s walker,” Bram said.
The spindly vehicle, its bubble deflated, stood a short distance from the equipment-littered area of activity. There was no sign of Jorv himself.
“Collapsed bubble,” Bram said. “It should have reinflated itself by now. I hope Jorv’s not—”
Shira tossed her head. “If I know Jorv, he was careless about getting out, that’s all. Walked away and left it unsealed.”
“Bram-tsu,” Ame said. “Do you notice something strange?”
It struck Bram after a moment. “Yes, why aren’t there swarms of those creatures around the walker for a closer look at it? It’s just sitting there. Don’t they have any curiosity?”
“Maybe Jorv’s getting all the attention.”
“No, he isn’t.” Jao’s voice came through the suit radio. “There he is, wandering around in the middle of their camp, and they’re ignoring him.”
Bram spotted the human figure after a moment. Jorv was dawdling about in bemused fashion, pausing here and there to look at things that interested him. He might have been out for a Tenday stroll. The stick creatures hurried past him on their errands without stopping.
It wasn’t quite true that they were ignoring Jorv, though. Jorv got too close to some piece of equipment that a group of them were setting up, and one of them detached itself from the work party long enough to make a number of short, aggressive rushes at the space-suited human. Jorv scrambled back out of the way. Bram couldn’t blame him; even from a distance the rushes looked scary. Jorv kept his distance, and the alien went back to its work, paying no further attention to him.
As the walkers cantered closer, Bram was able to make out more details of the creatures. They were long, tubular beings with pipestem limbs that seemed to grow out in a cluster from just below an oversize head. They walked upright on all fours, like animated plant stands—keeping the trailing portion of their bodies from scraping the ground by curling it upward in balance.
“Our ancestors ran on all fours, too,” Shira said, mostly for Bram’s benefit. “They learned to knuckle-walk, so that they could carry things at the same time. That’s why evolution let us keep forelimbs we could manipulate with.”
“It made for the development of intelligence,” Ame agreed. “But these creatures never adapted for a two-legged gait. I wonder if…”
Bram studied the distant figures. The beanstalk creatures seemed not at all handicapped by their quadruped stance. The forward pair of legs did double duty as arms, and when the creatures carried things—tottering in the low gravity and intermittently dropping a front limb for temporary balance—Bram was amazed to see the tubelike abdomen curve flexibly around to assist with the grip. There seemed to be a clasping member at its tip.
The creatures wore enormous boxlike helmets that were far too large even for the oversize heads that could be seen shadowily within. A human child could have curled up inside.
“They want lots of room in those helmets,” Bram said aloud. “I wonder why.”
He reined the walker to a halt next to Jorv’s abandoned vehicle. Jao and Heln pulled up behind him.
“We’d better walk from here,” he said.
The five of them climbed to the ground. The pipestem figures in their unwieldy many-faceted helmets made no move in their direction. They went on with their restless scurrying to and fro, never pausing in their chores.
“Do you see what they’re doing?” Jao said, putting a hand on Bram’s sleeve.
Bram looked over to where the floodlights lit the underside of the tremendous cloudy ball that had been first a fuel tank, then an environmental module, then a landing craft.
It was growing all sorts of attachments. An undergrowth of prefabricated polyhedrons. Huge glistening balloons that were blown up and sprayed with hardening foam to become permanent structures. A network of tube-ways and covered platforms that connected with the beginnings of some kind of large excavation.
“That lander will never go anywhere again,” Jao said.
Bram nodded. “They’re here to stay. First spot they touched down on. I get the feeling it could have been anywhere on the rim. They didn’t waste any time unpacking, either.”
Heln came over, festooned with cameras and recorders. “This is all I’ll need,” she said. “I’m leaving the rest of it in the walker. I was able to go through most of the material on the way.”