_Because they were so likable and intelligent
and adaptable--they were vastly dangerous!_
[Illustration: Illustrated by ASHMAN]
It's difficult, when you're on one of the asteroids, to keep from
tripping, because it's almost impossible to keep your eyes on the
ground. They never got around to putting portholes in spaceships, you
know--unnecessary when you're flying by GB, and psychologically
inadvisable, besides--so an asteroid is about the only place, apart from
Luna, where you can really see the stars.
There are so many stars in an asteroid sky that they look like clouds;
like massive, heaped-up silver clouds floating slowly around the inner
surface of the vast ebony sphere that surrounds you and your tiny
foothold. They are near enough to touch, and you want to touch them, but
they are so frighteningly far away ... and so beautiful: there's nothing
in creation half so beautiful as an asteroid sky.
You don't want to look down, naturally.
* * * * *
I had left the _Lucky Pierre_ to search for fossils (I'm David Koontz,
the _Lucky Pierre_'s paleontologist). Somewhere off in the darkness on
either side of me were Joe Hargraves, gadgeting for mineral deposits,
and Ed Reiss, hopefully on the lookout for anything alive. The _Lucky
Pierre_ was back of us, her body out of sight behind a low black ridge,
only her gleaming nose poking above like a porpoise coming up for air.
When I looked back, I could see, along the jagged rim of the ridge, the
busy reflected flickerings of the bubble-camp the techs were throwing
together. Otherwise all was black, except for our blue-white torch beams
that darted here and there over the gritty, rocky surface.
The twenty-nine of us were E.T.I. Team 17, whose assignment was the
asteroids. We were four years and three months out of Terra, and we'd
reached Vesta right on schedule. Ten minutes after landing, we had known
that the clod was part of the crust of Planet X--or Sorn, to give it its
right name--one of the few such parts that hadn't been blown clean out
of the Solar System.
That made Vesta extra-special. It meant settling down for a while. It
meant a careful, months-long scrutiny of Vesta's every square inch and a
lot of her cubic ones, especially by the life-scientists. Fossils,
artifacts, animate life ... a surface chunk of Sorn might harbor any of
these, or all. Some we'd tackled already had a few.
In a day or so, of course, we'd have the one-man beetles and crewboats
out, and the floodlights orbiting overhead, and Vesta would be as
exposed to us as a molecule on a microscreen. Then work would start in
earnest. But in the meantime--and as usual--Hargraves, Reiss and I were
out prowling, our weighted boots clomping along in darkness. Captain
Feldman had long ago given up trying to keep his science-minded charges
from galloping off alone like this. In spite of being a military man,
Feld's a nice guy; he just shrugs and says, "Scientists!" when we appear
brightly at the airlock, waiting to be let out.
* * * * *
So the three of us went our separate ways, and soon were out of sight of
one another. Ed Reiss, the biologist, was looking hardest for animate
life, naturally.
But I found it.
* * * * *
I had crossed a long, rounded expanse of rock--lava, wonderfully
colored--and was descending into a boulder-cluttered pocket. I was
nearing the "bottom" of the chunk, the part that had been the deepest
beneath Sorn's surface before the blow-up. It was the likeliest place to
look for fossils.
But instead of looking for fossils, my eyes kept rising to those
incredible stars. You get that way particularly after several weeks of
living in steel; and it was lucky that I got that way this time, or I
might have missed the Zen.
My feet tangled with a rock. I started a slow, light-gravity fall, and
looked down to catch my balance. My torch beam flickered across a small,
red-furred teddy-bear shape. The light passed on. I brought it sharply
back to target.
My hair did _not_ stand on end, regardless of what you've heard me
quoted as saying. Why should it have, when I already knew Yurt so
well--considered him, in fact, one of my closest friends?
The Zen was standing by a rock, one paw resting on it, ears cocked
forward, its stubby hind legs braced ready to launch it into flight. Big
yellow eyes blinked unemotionally at the glare of the torch, and I cut
down its brilliance with a twist of the polarizer lens.
The creature stared at me, looking ready to jump halfway to Mars or
straight at me if I made a wrong move.
I addressed it in its own language, clucking my tongue and whistling
through my teeth: "Suh, Zen--"
In the blue-white light of the torch, the Zen shivered. It didn't say
anything. I thought I knew why. Three thousand years of darkness and
silence ...