* * * * *
_The problem of separating the friends from the enemies was a major one
in the conquest of space as many a dead spacer could have testified. A
tough job when you could see an alien and judge appearances; far tougher
when they were only whispers on the wind._
* * * * *
_A smile of friendship is a baring of the teeth. So is a snarl of
menace. It can be fatal to mistake the latter for the former._
_Harm an alien being only under circumstances of self-defense._
_TRUST NO ALIEN BEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES._
--From _Exploration Ship's Handbook_.
He listened in the silence of the Exploration ship's control room. He
heard nothing but that was what bothered him; an ominous quiet when
there should have been a multitude of sounds from the nearby village
for the viewscreen's audio-pickups to transmit. And it was more than six
hours past the time when the native, Throon, should have come to sit
with him outside the ship as they resumed the laborious attempt to learn
each other's language.
[Illustration: Was the cat native to the planet, or to his imagination?]
The viewscreen was black in the light of the control room, even though
it was high noon outside. The dull red sun was always invisible through
the world's thick atmosphere and to human eyes full day was no more than
a red-tinged darkness.
He switched on the ship's outside floodlights and the viewscreen came to
bright white life, showing the empty glades reaching away between groves
of purple alien trees. He noticed, absently, that the trees seemed to
have changed a little in color since his arrival.
The village was hidden from view by the outer trees but there should
have been some activity in the broad area visible to him. There was
none, not even along the distant segment of what should have been a busy
road. The natives were up to something and he knew, from hard experience
on other alien worlds, that it would be nothing good. It would be
another misunderstanding of some kind and he didn't know enough of their
incomprehensible language to ask them what it was--
* * * * *
Suddenly, as it always came, he felt someone or something standing close
behind him and peering over his shoulder. He dropped his hand to the
blaster he had taken to wearing at all times and whirled.
Nothing was behind him. There never was. The control room was empty,
with no hiding place for anything, and the door was closed, locked by
the remote-control button beside him. There was nothing.
The sensation of being watched faded, as though the watcher had
withdrawn to a greater distance. It was perhaps the hundredth time
within six days that he had felt the sensation. And when he slept at
night something came to nuzzle at his mind; faceless, formless, utterly
alien. For the past three nights he had not let the blaster get beyond
quick reach of his hand, even when in bed.
But whatever it was, it could not be on the ship. He had searched the
ship twice, a methodical compartment-by-compartment search that had
found nothing. It had to be the work of the natives from outside the
ship. Except....
Why, if the natives were telepathic, did the one called Throon go
through the weary pretense of trying to learn a mutually understandable
form of communication?
There was one other explanation, which he could not accept: that he was
following in the footsteps of Will Garret of Ship Nine who had
deliberately gone into a white sun two months after the death of his
twin brother.
He looked at the chair beside his own, Johnny's chair, which would
forever be empty, and his thoughts went back down the old, bitter paths.
The Exploration Board had been wrong when they thought the close bond
between identical twins would make them the ideal two-man crews for the
lonely, lifetime journeys of the Exploration Ships. Identical twins were
too close; when one of them died, the other died in part with him.
They had crossed a thousand light-years of space together, he and
Johnny, when they came to the bleak planet that he would name Johnny's
World. He should never have let Johnny go alone up the slope of the
honey-combed mountain--but Johnny had wanted to take the routine record
photographs of the black, tiger-like beasts which they had called cave
cats and the things had seemed harmless and shy, despite their ferocious
appearance.
"I'm taking them a sack of food that I think they might like," Johnny
had said. "I want to try to get some good close-up shots of them."
Ten minutes later he heard the distant snarl of Johnny's blaster. He ran
up the mountainside, knowing already that he was too late. He found two
of the cave cats lying where Johnny had killed them. Then he found
Johnny, at the foot of a high cliff. He was dead, his neck broken by the
fall. Scattered all around him from the torn sack was the food he had
wanted to give to the cats.
He buried Johnny the next day, while a cold wind moaned under a
lead-gray sky. He built a monument for him; a little mound of frosty
stones that only the wild animals would ever see--
* * * * *
A chime rang, high and clear, and the memories were shattered. The
orange light above the hyperspace communicator was flashing; the signal
that meant the Exploration Board was calling him from Earth.