His fingers made the settings on the computer section as the second hand of his chronometer crawled toward the even minute…
There.
His finger activated the computer. The Messenger began to hum faintly, with a soft internal vibration.
The sound of scraping against rock was right at the lip of the depression, but out of sight.
He stood up. Four minutes the Messenger must remain undisturbed. Rapidly, but forcing himself to calmness, he unwound the rest of the rope from about him and unclipped it. He was facing the lip of the depression over which the alien would come, but as yet there was no sign. Cal could not risk the time to step to the depression’s edge and make sure.
The alien would not be like a human being, to be dislodged by a push as he crawled over the edge of the lip. He would come adapted and prepared. As quickly as he could without fumbling, Cal fashioned a slipknot in one end of the rope that hung from his waist.
A gray, wide, flat parody of a hand slapped itself over the lip of rock and began to change form even as Cal looked. Cal made a running loop in his rope and looked upward. There was a projection of rock in the ascending walls on the far side of the depression that would do. He tossed his loop up fifteen feet toward the projection. It slipped off—as another hand joined the first on the lip of rock. The knuckles were becoming pale under the pressure of the alien’s great weight
Cal tossed the loop again. It caught. He drew it taut.
He backed off across the depression, out of line with the Messenger, and climbed a few feet up the opposite wall. He pulled the rope taut and clung to it with desperate determination.
And a snarling tiger’s mask heaved itself into sight over the edge of rock, a tiger body following. Cal gathered his legs under him and pushed off. He swung out and downward, flashing toward the emerging alien, and they slammed together, body against fantastic body.
For a fraction of a second they hung together, toppling over space while the alien’s lower extremities snatched and clung to the edge of rock.
Then the alien’s hold loosened. And wrapped together, still struggling, they fell out and down toward the rock below accompanied by a cascade of rocks.
XI
“Waking in a hospital,” Cal said later, “when you don’t expect to wake at all, has certain humbling effects.”
It was quite an admission for someone like himself, who had by his very nature omitted much speculation on either humbleness or arrogance before. He went deeper into the subject with Joe Aspinall when the Survey Team Leader visited him in that same hospital back on Earth. Joe by this time, with a cane, was quite ambulatory.
“You see,” Cal said, as Joe sat by the hospital bed in which Cal lay, with the friendly and familiar sun of Earth making the white room light about them, “I got to the point of admiring that alien—almost of liking him. After all, he saved my life, and I saved his. That made us close, in a way. Somehow, now that I’ve been opened up to include creatures like him, I seem to feel closer to the rest of my own human race. You understand me?”
“I don’t think so,” said Joe.
“I mean, I needed that alien. The fact brings me to think that I may need the rest of you, after all. I never really believed I did before. It made things lonely.”
“I can understand that part of it,” said Joe.
“That’s why,” said Cal, thoughtfully, “I hated to kill him, even if I thought I was killing myself at the same time.”
“Who? The alien?” said Joe. “Didn’t they tell you? You didn’t kill him.”
Cal turned his head and stared at his visitor.
“No, you didn’t kill him!” said Joe. “When the rescue ship came they found you on top of him and both of you halfway down that rock slope. Evidently landing on top of him saved you. Just his own natural toughness saved him—that and being able to spread himself out like a rug and slow his fall. He got half a dozen broken bones—but he’s alive right now.”
Cal smiled. “I’ll have to go say hello to him when I get out of here.”
“I don’t think they’ll let you do that,” said Joe. “They’ve got him guarded ten deep someplace. Remember, his people still represent a danger to the human race greater than anything we’ve ever run into.”
“Danger?” said Cal. “They’re no danger to us.”
It was Joe who stared at this. “They’ve got a definite weakness,” said Cal. “I figured they must have. They seemed too good to be true from the start. It was only in trying to beat him out to the top of the mountain and get the Messenger off that I figured out what it had to be, though.”
“What weakness? People’ll want to hear about this!” said Joe.
“Why, just what you might expect,” said Cal. “You don’t get something without giving something away. What his race had gotten was the power to adapt to any situation. Their weakness is that same power to adapt.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my alien friend on the mountain,” said Cal, a little sadly. “How do you suppose I got the Messenger off? He and I both knew we were headed for a showdown when we reached the top of the mountain. And he had the natural advantage of being able to adapt. I was no match for him physically. I had to find some advantage to outweigh that advantage of his. I found an instinctive one.”
“Instinctive…” said Joe, looking at the big, bandaged man under the covers and wondering whether he ought not to ring for the nurse.
“Of course, instinctive,” said Cal thoughtfully, staring at the bed sheet. “His instincts and mine were diametrically opposed. He adapted to fit the situation. I belonged to a people who adapted situations to fit them. I couldn’t fight a tiger with my bare hands, but I could fight something half-tiger, half something else.”
“I think I’ll just ring for the nurse,” said Joe, leaning forward to the button on the bedside table.
“Leave that alone,” said Cal calmly. “It’s simple enough. What I had to do was force him into a situation where he would be between adaptations. Remember, he was as exhausted as I was, in his own way; and not prepared to quickly understand the unexpected.”
“What unexpected?” Joe gaped at him. “You talk as if you thought you were in control of the situation all the way.”
“Most of the way,” said Cal. “I knew we were due to have a showdown. I was afraid we’d have it at the foot of the tower—but he was waiting until we were solidly at the top. So I made sure to get up to that flat spot in the tower first, and cut the rope. He had to come up the tower by himself.”
“Which he was very able to do.”
“Certainly—in one form. He was in one form coming up,” said Cal. “He changed to his fighting form as he came over the edge—and those changes took energy. Physical and nervous, if not emotional energy, when he was pretty exhausted already. Then I swung at him like Tarzan as he was balanced, coming over the edge of the depression in the rock.”
“And had the luck to knock him off,” said Joe. “Don’t tell me with someone as powerful as that it was anything but luck. I was there when Mike and Sam got killed at the Harrier, remember.”
“Not luck at all,” said Cal, quietly. “A foregone conclusion. As I say, I’d figured out the balance sheet for the power of adaptation. It had to be instinctive. That meant that if he was threatened, his adaptation to meet the threat would take place whether consciously he wanted it to or not. He was barely into tiger-shape, barely over the edge of the cliff, when I hit him and threatened to knock him off into thin air. He couldn’t help himself. He adapted.”
“Adapted!” said Joe, staring.