* * * * *
I
Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternal
night. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neither
fins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member of
some smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, in
turn, could pounce and kill.
But still it moved.
Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have told
that this fish was dying.
[Illustration]
In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder--long, tapered, and
oval in cross-section--but it showed none of the exterior markings one
might expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With one
exception, the smooth, silver-pink exterior was featureless.
That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discoloration
that ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters of
length. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying.
Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration.
Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the presence of the burn,
but it was the least of his worries. The internal damage that had been
done to the ship was by far the more serious. It could, quite possibly,
kill him.
The Nipe, of course, had no intention of dying. Not out here. Not so far,
so very far, from his own people. Not out here, where his death would be
so very improper.
He looked at the ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that such
a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendously
energetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so far
out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normally
produce such energetic swirls of magnetic force.
But the thing had been there, nonetheless, and the ship had hit it at high
velocity. Fortunately, the ship had only touched the edge of the swirling
cloud, otherwise the entire ship would have vanished in a puff of
incandescence. But it had done enough. The power plants that drove the
ship at ultralight velocities through the depths of interstellar space had
been so badly damaged that they could only be used in short bursts, and
each burst brought them nearer to the fusion point. Most of the
instruments were powerless; the Nipe was not even sure he could land the
vessel. Any attempt to use the communicator to call home would have blown
the ship to atoms.
The Nipe did not want to die, but, if die he must, he did not want to die
foolishly.
It had taken a long time to drift in from the outer reaches of this sun's
planetary system, but using the power plants any more than absolutely
necessary would have been fool-hardy.
The Nipe missed the companionship his brother had given him for so long;
his help would be invaluable now. But there had been no choice. There had
not been enough supplies for two to survive the long fall inward toward
the distant sun. The Nipe, having discovered the fact first, had, out of
his mercy and compassion, killed his brother while the other was not
looking. Then, having eaten his brother with all due ceremony, he had
settled down to the long, lonely wait.
Beings of another race might have cursed the accident that had disabled
the ship, or regretted the necessity that one of them should die, but the
Nipe did neither, for, to him, the first notion would have been foolish,
and the second incomprehensible.
But now, as the ship fell ever closer toward the yellow-white sun, he
began to worry about his own fate. For a while, it had seemed almost
certain that he would survive long enough to build a communicator--for
the instruments had already told him and his brother that the system ahead
was inhabited by creatures of reasoning power, if not true intelligence,
and it would almost certainly be possible to get the equipment he needed
for them. Now, though, it looked as if the ship would not survive a
landing. He had had to steer it away from a great gas giant, which had
seriously endangered the power plants.
He did not want to die in space--wasted, forever undevoured. At least, he
must die on a planet, where there might be creatures with the compassion
and wisdom to give his body the proper ingestion. The thought of feeding
inferior creatures was repugnant, but it was better than rotting to feed
monocells or ectogenes, and far superior to wasting away in space.
Even thoughts such as these did not occupy his mind often or for very
long. Far, far better than any of them was the desire--and planning for
survival.
* * * * *
The outer orbits of the gas giants had been passed at last, and the Nipe
fell on through the asteroid belt without approaching any of the larger
pieces of rock-and-metal. That he and his brother had originally elected
to come into this system along its orbital plane had been a mixed
blessing; to have come in at a different angle would have avoided all the
debris--from planetary size on down--that is thickest in a star's
equatorial plane, but it would also have meant a greater chance of
missing a suitable planet unless too much reliance were placed on the
already weakened power generators. As it was, the Nipe had been able to
use the gravitational field of the gas giant to swing his ship toward the
precise spot where the third planet would be when the ship arrived in the
third orbit. Moreover, the third planet would be retreating from the
Nipe's line of flight, which would make the velocity difference that much
the less.
For a while, the Nipe had toyed with the idea of using the mining bases
that the local life form had set up in the asteroid belt as bases for his
own operations, but he had decided against it. Movement would be much
freer and much more productive on a planet than it would be in the Belt.
He would have preferred using the fourth planet for his base. Although
much smaller, it had the same reddish, arid look as his own home planet,
while the third world was three-quarters drowned in water. But there were
two factors that weighed so heavily against that choice that they rendered
it impossible. In the first place, by far the greater proportion of the
local inhabitants' commerce was between the asteroids and the third
planet. Second, and much more important, the fourth world was at such a
point in her orbit that the energy required to land would destroy the ship
beyond any doubt.
It would have to be the third world.
As the ship fell inward, the Nipe watched his pitifully inadequate
instruments, doing his best to keep tabs on every one of the
feebly-powered ships that the local life form used to move through space.
He did not want to be spotted now, and even though the odds were against
these beings having any instrument highly developed enough to spot his
craft, there was always the possibility that he might be observed
optically.
So he squatted there in the ship, a centipede-like thing about five feet
in length and a little less than eighteen inches in diameter, with eight
articulated limbs spaced in pairs along his body, any one of which could
be used as hand or foot. His head, which was long and snouted, displayed
two pairs of violet eyes which kept a constant watch on the indicators and
screens of the few instruments that were still functioning aboard the
ship.
And he waited as the ship fell towards its rendezvous with the third
planet.