It had been worth his minute pains; he had got two hundred feet of film while she staggered and reeled loathsomely. And she had, after
the Optol evaporated, described with amazed delight how different everything had looked, and how exquisitely she had danced . . .
“S-z-aw-t!” announced the native from the mouth of the burrow. It bowled at him marbles of rock salt from the surface, where rain never fell to dissolve them.
He licked one, then cautiously sipped water. He looked at the native, thought, and put his knife away. It came into the burrow and reclined at the opposite end from Smith.
It knows what a knife is, and water and salt, and something about language, he thought between sips. What’s the racket?
But when? But when?
Wait longer, little ones. Wait longer.
“You understand me?” Smith asked abruptly. The amber drop exuded, and the native played whiningly: “A-ah-nn-nah-t-ann.”
“Well,” said Smith, “thanks.”
He never really knew where the water came from, but guessed that it had been distilled in some fashion within the body of the native. He had, certainly, seen the thing shovel indiscriminate loads of crystals into its mouth—calcium carbonate, aluminum hydroxide, anything— and later emit amorphous powders from one vent and water from another. His food, brought on half an STC can, was utterly unrecognizable—a jelly, with bits of crystal embedded in it that he had to spit out.
What it did for a living was never clear. It would lie for hours in torpor, disappear on mysterious errands, bring him food and water, sweep out the burrow with a specialized limb, converse when requested.
It was days before Smith really saw the creature. In the middle of a talk with it he recognized it as a fellow organism rather than as a machine, or gadget, or nightmare, or alien monster. It was, for Smith, a vast step to take.
Not easily he compared his own body with the native’s, and admitted that, of course, his was inferior. The cunning jointing of the limbs, the marvelously practical detail of the eye, the economy of the external muscle system, were admirable.
Now and then at night the posse would return and crowd about him as he lay dreaming, and he knew that he screamed then, rever-beratingly in the burrow. He awoke to find the most humanoid of the native’s limbs resting on his brow, soothingly, and he was grateful for the new favor; he had begun to take his food and water for granted.
The conversations with the creature were whimsy as much as anything else. It was, he thought, the rarest of Samaritans, who had no interest in the private life of its wounded wayfarer. «
He told it of life in the cities of the planet, and it sawed out politely that the cities were very big indeed. He told it of the pleasures of human beings, and it politely agreed that their pleasures were most pleasant.
Under its cool benevolence he stammered and faltered in his ruthlessness. On the nights when he woke screaming and was comforted by it he would demand to know why it cared to comfort him.
It would saw out: “S-z-lee-p mm-ah-ee-nn-d s-z-rahng.” And from that he could conjecture that sound sleep makes the mind strong, or that the mind must be strong for the body to be strong, or whatever else he wished. It was kindness, he knew, and he felt shifty and rotted when he thought of, say, Amy.
It will be soon, will it not? Soon?
Quite soon, little ones. Quite, quite soon.
Amy had not fallen; she had been led, slowly, carefully, by the hand. She had gone delightfully down, night after night. He had been amused to note that there was a night not long after the night of Optol when he had urged her to abstain from further indulgence in a certain diversion that had no name that anyone used, an Avernian pleasure the penalties against which were so severe that one would not compromise himself so far as admitting that he knew it existed and was practiced. Smith had urged her to abstain, and had most sincerely this time meant it. She was heading for the inevitable collapse, and her father was due back from his inspection tour. The whole process had taken some fifty days.