The craft was hovering, as if it were a bird of prey readying to swoop. Still out of control range—they must have detectors, perhaps of infrared, which made them suspect his presence. He dared not move.
The safest thing for them to do would be to drop a bomb. Langley had told him about bombs. And that would be the end—a flash and roar he could not feel, dissolution, darkness forever.
Well, he thought, feeling how the slow sad wind ruffled his whiskers, he had little to complain of. It had been a good life. He had been one of the wandering scholars who drifted around the world, always welcomed for the news he could bring, always seeing something fresh in the diversity of basically similar cultures which dotted his planet. His sort bound a planet together. Lately he had settled down, begun a family, taught at the University of Sundance-Through-Rain—but if it came to swift death in an unknown land, life had still been kind.
No, no! He brought his mind up sharply. He could not die, not yet. Not until he knew more, knew that Holat was safe from these pale hairless monsters or knew how to warn and defend her. His muscles bunched to break and run.
The airship descended with a swiftness that sucked a gasp from him. He reached out to grasp the swirling electric and magnetic streams with the force-fields of his brain—and withdrew, shuddering.
No. Wait. There might be a better way.
The craft landed in the fields, a good hundred yards off. Saris gathered his legs and arms under him. How many were there?
Three. Two of them were getting out, the third staying inside. He couldn’t see through the tall stand of grain, but he could sense that one of the two carried some kind of instrument which was not a weapon—a detector, then. Blind in the dark, they could still track him.
But, of course, they weren’t sure it was Saris. Their instrument could just as well be registering a stray animal, or a man. He could smell the sharp adrenalin stink of their fear.
In a gliding rush, Saris Hronna went up the bank and four-legged through the grain.
Someone yelled. A bolt of energy snapped at him, the vegetation flamed up where it struck and ozone scorched his nostrils. His mind could not take care of the weapons, it had already clamped down on the engine and communicator of the vessel.
He hardly felt the beam which sizzled along his ribs, leaving a welt of burned flesh. Leaping, he was on the nearest man. The figure went down, his hands tore out its throat, and he sprang aside as the other one fired.
Someone cried out, a thin panicky wail in the darkness. A gun which threw a hail of lead missiles chattered from the boat’s nose. Saris jumped, landing on the roof. The man remaining outside was flashing a light, trying to catch him in its ray. Coldly, the Holatan estimated distances. Too far.
He yowled, sliding to earth again as he did. The flashlight and a blaster beam stabbed where he had been. Saris covered the ground between in three leaps. Rising, he cuffed hard, and felt neck bones snap under his palm.
Now—the boat! Saris snuffled at the door. It was locked against him, and the lock was purely mechanical, not to be controlled by the small energy output of his brain. He could feel the terror of the man huddled inside.
Well- He picked up one of the dropped blasters. For a moment he considered it, using the general principle that function determines form. The hand went around this grip, one finger squeezed this lever, the fire spat from the other end—that adjustment on the nose must regulate the size of the beam. He experimented and was gratified at having his deductions check out. Returning to the boat, he melted away its door lock.
The man within was backed against the farther wall, a gun in his hand, waiting with a dry scream in his throat for the devil to break through. Saris pinpointed him telepathically -aft of the entrance—good! Opening the door a crack, just enough to admit his hand, he fired around the edge of it. The blaster was awkward in a grasp the size of his, but one bolt was enough.
The smell of burned meat was thick around him. Now he had to work fast; there must be other craft in the vicinity. Collecting all the weapons, he hunched himself over the pilot’s chair—it was too small for him to sit in—and studied the control panel.
The principle used was unfamiliar, something beyond the science of Langley’s time. Nor could he read the symbols on the controls. But by tracing the electric currents and gyromagnetic fields with his mind, and applying logic, he got a notion of how to operate the thing.
It rose a little clumsily as he maneuvered the switches, but he got the hang of it fast. Soon he was high in the sky, speeding through a darkness that whistled around him. One screen held an illuminated map with a moving red point that must represent his own location. Helpful.
He couldn’t stay in this machine long, it would be identified and shot down. He must use it to get supplies and then to find a hiding place before dawn, after which it must fly westward to crash in the ocean. He should be able to adjust the automatic pilot to do that.
Where to go? What to do?
He needed some place where he could lie concealed and think, whence he could go forth to spy, to which he could return and make a stand if luck went against him. He needed time in which to learn and decide.
These humans were a strange race. He didn’t understand them. He had talked much with Langley, there was a comradeship between them, but there had been things half-seen in Langley, too, which had crawled on his nerves. That near-religious concept of exploring all space, simply for its own sake—that wasn’t Holatan. Aside from its pursuit of pure, abstract knowledge, the Holatan mind was not idealistic, it found something vaguely obscene in the picture of utter dedication to an impersonal cause.
These new humans who now held Earth might make a cause out of conquering Holat. The distance was enormous, but you never knew.
It might be safest and wisest to destroy their whole civilization, send them back to the caves. That was an ambitious project, probably too much to attempt; but surely he could do something, if only by playing one faction off against another. He had a pretty good notion already of why they were so anxious to catch or kill him.
He would have to wait, and observe, and think, before deciding on a course of deeds. That required a place in which to lie hidden, and he thought he knew where to go. It was worth trying, at least. He studied the unrolling map, comparing it with those of Langley’s he had seen and put into a well-trained eidetic memory, translating the symbolism by correspondence and estimating the effects of five thousand years” change. Then he turned the boat northeastward and crouched down to wait.
6
Progress does get made: Langley’s refresher cabinet removed all trace of hangover from him the next morning, and the service robot slid breakfast from a chute onto a table and removed it when he was through. But after that there was a day of nothing to do but sit around and brood. Trying to shake off his depression, Langley dialed for books—a slave superintendent had shown him how to operate the gadgets in the apartment. The machine clicked to itself, hunted through the city library microfiles under the topics selected, and made copy spools which the spacemen put into the scanners.
Blaustein tried to read a novel, then some poetry, then some straight articles, and gave it up; with his scant knowledge of their background, they were almost meaningless. He did report that all writing today seemed highly stylized, the intricate form, full of allusions to the classic literature of two millennia ago, more important than the rather trivial content. “Pope and Dryden,” he muttered in disgust, “but they at least had something to say. What are you finding out, Bob?”