_It's a funny thing, but most monsters seem to be of the
opinion that it's men who are the monsters. You know, they
have a point._
* * * * *
Ten minutes after the crackup, somebody phoned for the Army. That
meant us. The black smoke of the fire, and the oily residues, which
were later analyzed, proved the presence of a probable petroleum
derivative. The oil was heavily tainted with radioactivity. Most
likely it was fuel from the odd, conchlike reaction-motors, the exact
principles of which died, as far as we were concerned, with the
crash.
[Illustration]
The craft was mainly of aluminum, magnesium and a kind of stainless
steel, proving that, confronted with problems similar to ones we had
encountered, aliens might solve them in similar ways. From the
crumpled-up wreckage which we dug out of that Missouri hillside, Klein
even noticed a familiar method of making girders and braces lighter.
Circular holes were punched out of them at spaced intervals.
I kept hunting conviction by telling myself that, for the first time
in all remembered history, we were peeking behind the veil of another
planet. This should be the beginning of a new era, one of immensely
widened horizons, and of high romance--but with a dark side, too. The
sky was no longer a limit. There were things beyond it that would have
to be reckoned with. And how does unknown meet unknown? Suppose one
has no hand to shake?
The mass of that wreck reeked like a hot cinder-pile and a burning
garbage dump combined. It oozed blackened goo. There were crushed
pieces of calcined material that looked like cuttlebone. The thin
plates of charred stuff might almost have been pressed cardboard.
Foot-long tubes of thin, tin-coated iron contained combined chemicals
identifiable as proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Food, we decided.
* * * * *
Naturally, we figured that here was a wonderful clue to the plant and
animal life of another world. Take a can of ordinary beef goulash; you
can see the fibrous muscle and fat structure of the meat, and the
cellular components of the vegetables. And here it was true, too, to a
lesser degree. There were thin flakes and small, segmented cylinders
which must have been parts of plants. But most was a homogeneous mush
like gelatin.
Evidently there had been three occupants of the craft. But the crash
and the fire had almost destroyed their forms. Craig, our biologist,
made careful slides of the remains, tagging this as horny epidermis,
this as nerve or brain tissue, this as skeletal substance, and this as
muscle from a tactile member--the original had been as thin as
spaghetti, and dark-blooded.
Under the microscope, muscle cells proved to be very long and thin.
Nerve cells were large and extremely complex. Yet you could say that
Nature, starting from scratch in another place, and working through
other and perhaps more numerous millions of years, had arrived at
somewhat the same results as it had achieved on Earth.
I wonder how an other-world entity, ignorant of humans, would explain
a shaving-kit or a lipstick. Probably for like reasons, much of the
stuff mashed into that wreck had to remain incomprehensible to us.
Wrenches and screwdrivers, however, we could make sense of, even
though the grips of those tools were not _hand_-grips. We saw screws
and bolts, too. One device we found had been a simple crystal
diaphragm with metal details--a radio. There were also queer rifles.
Lord knows how many people have wondered what the extraterrestrial
equivalents of common human devices would look like. Well, here were
some answers.
A few of the instruments even had dials with pointers. And the numeral
_1_ used on them was a vertical bar, almost like our own. But zero was
a plus sign. And they counted by twelves, not tens.
But all these parallels with our own culture seemed canceled by the
fact that, even when this ship was in its original undamaged state, no
man could have gotten inside it. The difficulty was less a matter of
human size than of shape and physical behavior. The craft seemed to
have been circular, with compartmentation in spiral form, like a
chambered nautilus.
* * * * *
This complete divergence from things we knew sent frost imps racing up
and down my spine.
And it prompted Blaine to say: "I suppose that emotions, drives, and
purposes among off-Earth intelligences must be utterly inconceivable
to us."
We were assembled in the big trailer that had been brought out for us
to live in, while we made a preliminary survey of the wreck.
"Only about halfway, Blaine," Miller answered. "Granting that the
life-chemistry of those intelligences is the same as ours--the need
for food creates the drive of hunger. Awareness of death is balanced
by the urge to avoid it. There you have fear and combativeness. And is
it so hard to tack on the drives of curiosity, invention, and
ambition, especially when you know that these beings made a spaceship?
Cast an intelligence in any outward form, anywhere, it ought to come
out much the same. Still, there are bound to be wide differences of
detail--with wide variations of viewpoint. They could be horrible to
us. And most likely it's mutual."
I felt that Miller was right. The duplication of a human race on other
worlds by another chain of evolution was highly improbable. And to
suppose that we might get along with other entities on a human basis
seemed pitifully naive.
With all our scientific thoroughness, when it came to examining,
photographing and recording everything in the wreck, there was no
better evidence of the clumsy way we were investigating unknown things
than the fact that at first we neglected our supreme find almost
entirely.
It was a round lump of dried red mud, the size of a soft baseball.
When Craig finally did get around to X-raying it, indications of a
less dense interior and feathery markings suggesting a soft bone
structure showed up on the plate. Not entirely sure that it was the
right thing to do, he opened the shell carefully.
Think of an artichoke ... but not a vegetable. Dusky pink, with thin,
translucent mouth-flaps moving feebly. The blood in the tiny arteries
was very red--rich in hemoglobin, for a rare atmosphere.
As a youngster, I had once opened a chicken egg, when it was ten days
short of hatching. The memory came back now.
"It looks like a growing embryo of some kind," Klein stated.
"Close the lump again, Craig," Miller ordered softly.
The biologist obeyed.
"A highly intelligent race of beings wouldn't encase their developing
young in mud, would they?" Klein almost whispered.
"You're judging by a human esthetic standard," Craig offered.
"Actually, mud can be as sterile as the cleanest surgical gauze."
* * * * *
The discussion was developing unspoken and shadowy ramifications. The
thing in the dusty red lump--whether the young of a dominant species,
or merely a lower animal--had been born, hatched, started in life
probably during the weeks or months of a vast space journey. Nobody
would know anything about its true nature until, and if, it manifested
itself. And we had no idea of what that manifestation might be. The
creature might emerge an infant or an adult. Friendly or malevolent.
Or even deadly.
Blaine shrugged. Something scared and half-savage showed in his face.
"What'll we do with the thing?" he asked. "Keep it safe and see what
happens. Yet it might be best to get rid of it fast--with chloroform,
cyanide or the back of a shovel."