“Would be gold,” snapped Aistair. “Or platinum, or jewels which he would hope to fight clear with!”
“Just so,” said Jack. “Now, I’m only guessing, but those creatures are not human, nor even animals. Yet they eat animal food. They treasure animal food as a human being would treasure diamonds. An animal’s remains—leather—they wear as an ornament. It looks to me as if animal tissue was rather rare on their planet, to be valued so highly. In consequence—”
Alstair stood up, his features working. “Then our bodies would be the same as gold to them! As diamonds! Gary, we haven’t the ghost of a chance to make friends with these fiends!”
Jack said dispassionately: “No; I don’t think we I have. If a race of beings with tissues of metallic gold landed on Earth, I rather think they’d be murdered. But there’s another point, too. There’s Earth. From our course, these creatures can tell where we came from, and their space ships are rather good. I think I’ll put somebody else on the dictawriter job and see if I can flash a message back home. No way to know whether they get it, but they ought to be watching for one by the time it’s there. Maybe they’ve improved their receptors. They intended to try, anyhow.”
“Men could meet these creatures’ ships in space,” said Alstair harshly, “if they were warned. And guns might answer, but if they didn’t handle these devils Caldwell torpedoes would. Or a suicide squad, Using their bodies for bait. We’re talking like dead men, Gary.”
“I think, sir,” said Jack, “we are dead men.” Then he added: “I shall put Helen Bradley on the dictawriter, with a guard to handle the Centaurian. He’ll be bound tightly.”
The statement tacitly assumed that Aistair’s order to avoid her was withdrawn. It was even a challenge to him to repeat it. And Alstair’s eyes glowed and he controlled himself with difficulty.
“Damn you, Gary,” he said savagely, “get out!”
He turned to the visiplate which showed the enemy ship as Jack left the control room.
The eggshaped ship was two thousand miles away now, and just decelerating to a stop. In its first flight it had rocketed here and there like a mad thing. It would have been impossible to hit it with any projectile, and difficult in the extreme even to keep radiation on it in anything like a tight beam. Now, stopped stock-still with regard to the Adastra, it hung on, observing, very probably devising some new form of devilment. So Alstair considered, anyhow. He watched it somberly.
The resources of the Adastra, which had seemed so vast when she took off from Earth, were pitifully inadequate to handle the one situation which had greeted her, hostility. She could have poured out the treasures of man’s civilization to the race which ruled this solar system. Savages, she could have uplifted. Even to a race superior to men she could have offered man’s friendship and eager pupilage. But these creatures that—
The space ship stayed motionless. Probably signaling back to its home planet, demanding orders. Reports, came in to the Adastra’s main control room and Aistair read them. The Centaurians were unquestionably extracting carbon dioxide from the air. That compound was to their metabolism what oxygen is to men, and in pure air they could not live.
But their metabolic rate was vastly greater than that of any plant on Earth. It compared with the rate of earthly animals. They were not plants by any definition save that of constitution, as a sea anemone is not an animal except by the test of chemical analysis.
The Centaurians had a highly organized nervous system, the equivalent of brains, and both great intelligence and a language. They produced sounds by a stridulating organ in a special body cavity. And they felt emotion.
A captive creature when presented with various objects showed special interest in machinery, showing an acute realization of the purpose of a small sound recorder and uttering into it an entire and deliberate series of sounds. Human clothing it fingered eagerly. Cloth it discarded, when of cotton or rayon, but it displayed great excitement at the feel of a woolen shirt and even more when a leather belt was given to it. It placed the belt about its middle, fastening the buckle without a fumble after a single glance at its working.
It unraveled a thread from the shirt and consumed it, rocking to and fro as if in ecstasy. When meat was placed before it, it seemed to become almost delirious with excitement. A part of the meat it consumed instantly, to ecstatic swayings. The rest it preserved by a curious chemical process, using substances from a small metal pack it had worn and for which it made gestures.
Its organs of vision were behind two slits in the upper part of its body, and no precise examination of the eyes themselves had been made. But the report before Alstair said specifically that the Centaurian displayed an avid eagerness whenever it caught sight of a human being. And that the eagerness was not of a sort to be reassuring.
It was the sort of excitement—only much greater—which it had displayed at the sight of wool and leather.
As if by instinct, said the report, the captive Centaurian had several times made a gesture as it turning some weapon upon a human when first it sighted him.
Alstair read this report and others. Helen Bradley reported barely two hours after Jack had assigned her to the work.
“I’m sorry, Helen,” said Alstair ungraciously. “You shouldn’t have been called on for duty. Gary insisted on it. I’d have left you alone.”
“I’m glad he did,” said Helen steadily. “Father is dead, to be sure, but he was quite content. And he died before he found out what these Centaurians are like. Working was good for me. I’ve succeeded much better than I even hoped. The Centaurian I worked with was the leader of the party which invaded this ship, He understood almost at once what the dictawriter was doing, and we’ve a good vocabulary recorded already. If you want to talk to him, you can.”
Aistair glanced at the visiplate. The enemy ship was still motionless. Easily understandable, of course. The Adastra’s distance from Proxima Centauri could be measured in hundreds of millions of miles, now, instead of millions of billions, but in another terminology, it was light-hours away still. If the space ship had signaled its home planet for orders, it would still be waiting for a reply.
Alstair went heavily to the biology laboratory, of which Helen was in charge, just as she was in charge of the biological specimens—rabbits, sheep, and a seemingly endless array of small animals—which on the voyage had been bred for a food supply and which it had been planned to release should a planet suitable for colonizing revolve about the ringed star.
The Centaurian was bound firmly to a chair with a myriad of cords. He—she—it, was utterly helpless. Beside the chair the dictawriter and its speaker were coupled together. From the Centaurian came hooted notes which the machine translated with a rustling sound between words.
“You—are—commander—this—ship?” the machine translated without intonation.
“I am,” said Aistair, and the machine hooted musically.
“This—woman—man—dead,” said the machine tonelessly again, after more sounds from the extraordinary living thing which was not an animal.
Helen interjected swiftly: “I told him my father was dead.”
The machine went on: “I—buy—all—dead—man—on—ship—give—metal—gold—you—like–—”
Alstair’s teeth clicked together. Helen went white. She tried to speak, and choked upon the words.
“This,” said Alstair in mirthless bitterness, “is the beginning of the interstellar friendship we hoped to institute!”