And then there was just a swarm of silver insects hovering against the black depths, diminishing until they were lost among the stars. The edge of the swarm had been seared by the dreadful violent flame of the drive. They were the lucky ones.
The survivor was too terrified to let go of his handhold. Grogan and one of his men had to suit up and go outside to pry him loose. They coaxed him forward toward the auxiliary air lock behind the observatory. After a while he understood that ten centimeters per second per second wasn’t dangerous if you kept contact with the ship, and scrambled forward on his own.
When the bulky figure stumbled into the bridge with Grogan, there was a rush to help him out of his helmet. A long blond braid tumbled out.
It was the girl. The only one of them who’d had the sense to save herself. People turned from the observation window to stare at her with open curiosity. In all the months of the journey, only a handful of people had seen her. Hollis had kept her bottled up with his men. Jameson caught Klein eyeing her with furtive interest.
She was a big one all right, as Grogan had said. The suit peeled off to reveal a chunky thick-waisted body; heavy in the shoulders, in a bulging skintight liner that had smitty stitched over one flattened breast. She had a baby-fat face with a little pug nose and a mouth blurred by makeup that had been hastily scrubbed at. Smitty had a lovely, enormous black eye. Jameson wondered which of the twenty-three men in the nuclear-bomb crew had given it to her.
“You all right?” Grogan asked solicitously.
The answer was an uninflected stream of foul language that made up in repetition what it lacked in inventiveness.
Grogan nodded. “You’re all right.” He turned back to the observation window to watch with the others.
The cloud of swarming lights had grown to blot out the stars. All of a sudden, they all winked out.
Chapter 14
The three orange-ringed eyes of the creature from Cygnus stared into Jameson’s face from less than a foot away. Two of them were where you’d expect eyes to be. The third, surprisingly, was under the jaw. They were extended on stubby polyps that twitched like a puppy’s nose, as if the thing were trying to sniff at him rather than see him.
Jameson switched on his flashlight for a better look. The creature blinked—if that sudden reflexive puckering around the eyes could be called a blink—and then, too fast for any movement to be seen, the Cygnan was simply gone.
Almost immediately it was replaced by another. This one clung to the outside of the observation bubble for a moment, giving Jameson a brief, palpitating scrutiny, and then it too darted off, clambering across the transparent plastic in quick little fits and starts. The Cygnans moved in a sequence of disconcerting skips, like a stop-action film. You’d be looking at them and then, abruptly, they’d be in a new position.
They’d been crawling all over the outside of the ship for nine or ten minutes now, like ants over a picnic ham. More were arriving every minute on their queer broomsticks. They were sleek, elongated creatures, a little smaller than men with six slender limbs. Incredibly, they weren’t wearing spacesuits, just transparent sheaths stretched over their narrow heads and their clubbed tails. For the rest of it, their mottled hides were as shiny and naked as a lacquered snake.
“I feel like a goldfish in a bowl,” Ruiz said. “Why can’t we get their attention?”
People were lined up along the rail, waving at Cygnans, gesturing to them, trying vainly for some response. The communications teams were knocking themselves out with hand signals and easel pads. But the Cygnans didn’t seem at all interested in communicating. They’d stare for a moment, then dart away.
“Maybe we’re not intelligent enough for them,” Jameson said. “Maybe they just came over to look at the animals.”
“Or maybe they’re not intelligent enough,” Ruiz said. “Maybe they’re just the Cygnans’ equivalent of trained hounds, sent over to sniff us out. Look at those narrow heads. You couldn’t fit much of a brain into them.”
Jameson squinted at the nearest alien. It squinted back at him with its three stalked eyes. He shivered, glad it was on the other side of the Lexiglass. Ruiz was right. There was something primitive about that tapering, arrowhead-shaped skull. The jaws split it down the middle in a permanent reptilian smile. There were no teeth. The inside of the mouth, when it opened, was an unpleasant-looking rasp. The Cygnan put its mouth around its food, whatever it was, and filed it down. There was a tubular, needle-spined tongue way back in the gullet to go with it.
Dmitri pushed past Jameson to take a close-up picture. He shot off a second’s worth of high-speed frames on full automatic before the Cygnan twitched its body around and ran off. He was in biologist’s paradise.
“You’re wrong,” he burbled happily. “The brain doesn’t have to be in the head. The head may just be an extended structure for the mouth and the sense organs. Take a closer look. There’s nothing like a proper, rigid braincase. Just some kind of tough cartilaginous material.”
Jameson peered up again at the undersides of scurrying Cygnans. Dmitri was right. Those long narrow heads were flexible. They tended to bend in the direction the Cygnan was looking, like an elephant’s trunk.
“Where’s the brain, then?” Jameson said.
“In the most sensible place, I imagine—at the top of the nerve cord. That would put it between where its shoulders would be, if it had shoulders instead of that almost-round cross section. The nerve cord probably runs through the center of the body—not dorsally, like us vertebrates, or ventrally, like terrestrial insects. Because…” Dmitri’s face flushed in triumph. “Because Cygnans aren’t bilaterally symmetrical. They’re built on a radial plan, like hydras or starfish. They’re descended from something like coelenterates, not flatworms.”
Ruiz looked at him sharply, then out the observation bubble again. Jameson said, “Radial? But their limbs are paired!”
“Are they? Look again.”
Jameson tried to focus again on the scampering aliens. It was hard, because they were never still. But then he saw what Dmitri was driving at. There was something odd about the placement of the Cygnans’ limbs.
There were two arms and four legs, or four arms and two legs, depending on how you looked at it. The middle pair functioned as either arms or legs, as the Cygnans’ whim dictated, so that they were continually shifting from centaurlike beings to four-armed bipeds. The three splayed fingers—or toes, if you preferred—were monkey-clever. All the joints bent in a rubbery curve, showing that evolution had provided a flexible alternative to the ball-and-socket joint.
But that wasn’t where the impression of strangeness came from.
The limb arrangement was asymmetrical. When you looked closely, you saw that the limbs were staggered—one placed noticeably forward of its mate on the opposite side. The middle pair in particular were lopsided. The attaching muscles on the middle limbs seemed to be placed higher, too—Jameson would have said they were rooted near the spine, except that there was no visible spine, just rippling bands of muscle ringing the creature’s body.
But once the eye got used to the asymmetry, there was no sense of wrongness. It was just … different.
“You see, the limbs have been displaced by evolution,” Dmitri said smugly. “Once there were two sets of three equidistant limbs or tentacles, like a double-ended hydra. But when it became a land creature, it had to choose an up and a down. They probably evolved the same way we did—took to the trees and came down again a few million years later. Only more deft and agile than us monkeys—with a choice of four hands for making tools or four legs for running away from their enemies.”