But perfection is a cold word. This had the warmth as well as the aloofness of achievement Her throat constricted, she walked round it God knew what it was doing standing in a stinking shack.
It was a statue of one of the aliens. She did not need telling it had also been wrought by one of them.
What she did need telling was whether the work had been done yesterday or thirty-six centuries ago.
After a while, when this thought had made the circuit of her brain several times, it registered on her attention, and she realized why she had postulated thirty-six centuries. That would be the age of the Egyptian XVIIIth Dynasty statue of a seated figure she often went to contemplate in the British Museum.
This work, carved like the other out of a dark granite, had some of the same qualities.
The alien stood on his six limbs, in perfect balance, one of his pointed heads a shade more elevated than the other. Between the catenary curve of his spine and the parabola of his belly lay the great symmetrical boat of his body. She felt curiously humble to be in the room with him; for, this was beauty, and for the first time she held in the hollow of her understanding a knowledge of what beauty was: the reconciliation between humanity and geometry, between the personal and the impersonal, between the spirit and the body.
Now Mrs. Warhoon shook inside her mock-male. She saw a lot of things which, because they were important, she did not wildly want to see.
She saw that here was a civilized race that had come to its maturity by a very different path from man's. For this race from the start and continuously (or without more than a brief intermission) had never been in conflict with nature and the natural scene that sustained it. It had remained in rapport, undivorced.
Consequently, its struggle towards the sort of abilities living in this shaped granite - ah. but the philosopher and the sculptor, the man of the spirit and the man with the instrument, had been one here! - was the struggle with its natural repose (torpor, many would have said); while man's struggle had in the main been an outward struggle, against forces that he saw as being in opposition to him.
As surely and simply as Mrs. Warhoon saw all this, and before she embellished it for her report, she saw that mankind could not fail to misunderstand this lifeform: for here was an equipoise that would, could, neither oppose nor flee from him. As this was a race without pain, as it was a race without fear, it would remain alien to man.
She had her arm about the flank of the statue, her temple resting on its polished side.
She wept For all these perceptions - which came to her on the wing as she walked once round the figure - were mainly intellectual, and fled as they came. In their place grew a womanly perception she could less easily, afterwards, deny.
She perceived the humanity in the statue. It was this humanity that had reminded her of the Egyptian statue. She saw that although this was an abstraction, yet it retained humanity, or the quality humans call humanity; and it was something that mankind had lost and might have retained. She wept for the loss: her loss, everyone's loss.
It was then that the distant shouts broke in on her melancholy. Shots followed, and then the whistles and wails of aliens. Captain Pestalozzi was having or creating trouble.
Wearily, she stood up and brushed her hair off her forehead. She told herself she was being silly.
Without looking again at the figure, she went to the door of the building.
Four ship's days later, the Gansas was ready to move on to the next planet.
After the experiences of the first day, despite all that a rather hysterical Mrs. Warhoon could say, it was generally agreed that the aliens were a degenerate form of life, if anything rather worse than animals, and were therefore fair game for the natural high spirits of the men. For a day or two, a little hunting could hurt no one.
True, it soon became obvious from planetary sweeps that Pestalozzi harbored only a few hundred thousand of the large sexipeds, congregating round wallows and artificially created swamps; and these began to show evidence that they resented the old Adam in their Eden. But several specimens were captured and penned aboard the Gansas; Mrs. Warhoon's statue was likewise collected, and a number of artifacts of a miscellaneous nature, and specimens of plant life.
Disappointingly, there were few other lifeforms on the planet; several varieties of bird, six-legged rodents, lizards, armor plated flies, fish and Crustacea in the rivers and oceans, an interesting shrew discovered in the Arctic regions that seemed to be an exception to the rule that small warm-blooded animals could not survive in such conditions. Little else. Methodically, the Exo Section stocked up the ship.
They were ready to embark on the next leg of their reconnaissance.
Mrs. Warhoon went with the ship's padre, the ship's adjutant, Lattimore. and Quilter (who had just been promoted to a new post as Lattimore's assistant) to say good-bye to Samuel Melmoth, alias Aylmer Ainson, in his stockade.
"I just hope he's going to be all right," Mrs. Warhoon said.
"Stop worrying. He's got enough ammunition here to shoot every living thing on the planet," Lattimore said. He was irritated by his new success with the woman. Ever since the first day of Pestalozzi when she had suddenly become chummy and climbed into his bed, Hilary had been weepy and unsettled.
Lattimore reckoned he was easy-going enough where women were concerned, but he like some token that his attentions had a benevolent effect.
He stood by the gate of the stockade, resting on his thigh crutches and feeling vaguely aggrieved with the universe. The others could say farewell to young Ainson. Speaking for himself, he had had enough of the Ainsons.
The stockade was of reinforced wire net. It formed a wall eight feet high about two square acres of ground. A stream ran through the ground. Some damage had been done in the way of trampling down vegetation and shattering trees by the labor force detailed to erect the stockade, but apart from that the area represented a typical bit of Pestalozzi country. By the rivulet was a wallow which led to one of the low native houses. Salad and vegetable beds lay by the wallow, and the whole patch was sheltered rather delightfully by the outrageous trees.
Beyond the trees stood the automatic observation post. its radio mast rising gracefully into the air. Next to it was the eight-roomed building designed from prefabricated parts for Ainson's residence. Two of the rooms constituted his living space; the others contained all the apparatus he would need for recording and interpreting the alien language, an armory, medical and other supplies, the power plant, and the food synthesizer, which could be fed water, soil. rock, anything, and would turn them into nourishment.
Beyond the works of man, keeping apart and considerably abashed, sat an adult female alien and her off-spring. Both had all limbs retracted. Good luck to the lot of them. Lattimore thought, and let's get to hell out of here.
"May you find peace here, my son." said the padre, taking Ainson's hand and jogging it up and down between his own. "Remember that in your year of isolation you will always be in God's presence.”
"Good luck in your work, Melmoth," said the adjutant. "We'll be seeing you in a year's time.”
"Adios, Sam, and I'm sorry about that black eye 1 gave you," Quilter said, clapping Ainson on the back.
"Are you sure there's nothing else you need?" asked Mrs. Warhoon.
Responding as adequately as possible to their words, Aylmer turned and hobbled into his new home.
They had rigged him ingenious crutches to combat the gravity, but he had yet to get accustomed to them.
He went and lay down on his bed, put his hands behind his head, and listened to them departing.