Then I climbed into Oscar and buttoned up. “Tight?”
(“Tight!”)
I glanced at the reflected dials, noticed the blood-color reading, reduced pressure until Oscar almost collapsed. At nearly sea-level pressure I was in no danger from hypoxia; the trick was to avoid too much oxygen.
We started to leave when I remembered something. “Just a second, Oscar.” I wrote a note to my folks, telling them that I was going to get up early and catch the first bus to the lake. I could write while suited up now, I could even thread a needle. I stuck the note under the kitchen door.
Then we crossed the creek into the pasture. I didn’t stumble in wading;
I was used to Oscar now, sure-footed as a goat.
Out in the field I keyed my talkie and said, “Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.”
Seconds later my recorded voice came back: ” ‘Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.'”
I shifted to the horn antenna and tried again. It wasn’t easy to aim in the dark but it was okay. Then I shifted back to spike antenna and went on calling Peewee while moving across the pasture and pretending that I was on Venus and had to stay in touch with base because it was unknown terrain and unbreathable atmosphere. Everything worked perfectly and if it had been Venus, I would have been all right.
Two lights moved across the southern sky, planes I thought, or maybe helis. Just the sort of thing yokels like to report as “flying saucers.” I watched them, then moved behind a little rise that would tend to spoil reception and called Peewee. Peewee answered and I shut up; it gets dull talking to an idiot circuit which can only echo what you say to it.
Then I heard: “Peewee to Junebug! Answer!”
I thought I had been monitored and was in trouble-then decided that some ham had picked me up. “Junebug here. I read you. Who are you?”
The test rig echoed my words.
Then the new voice shrilled, “Peewee here! Home me in!”
This was silly. But I found myself saying, “Junebug to Peewee, shift to directional frequency at one centimeter — and keep talking, keep talking!” I shifted to the horn antenna.
“Junebug, I read you. Fix me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven–”
“You’re due south of me, about forty degrees. Who are you?”
It must be one of those lights. It had to be.
But I didn’t have time to figure it out. A space ship almost landed on me.
Chapter 4
I said “space ship,” not “rocket ship.” It made no noise but a whoosh and there weren’t any flaming jets-it seemed to move by clean living and righteous thoughts.
I was too busy keeping from being squashed to worry about details. A space suit in one gravity is no track suit; it’s a good thing I had practiced. The ship sat down where I had just been, occupying more than its share of pasture, a big black shape.
The other one whooshed down, too, just as a door opened in the first. Light poured through the door; two figures spilled out and started to run. One moved like a cat; the other moved clumsily and slowly-handicapped by a space suit. S’help me, a person in a space suit does look silly. This one was less than five feet tall and looked like the Gingerbread Man.
A big trouble with a suit is your limited angle of vision. I was trying to watch both of them and did not see the second ship open. The first figure stopped, waiting for the one in the space suit to catch up, then suddenly collapsed-just a gasping sound, “Eeeah!”-and clunk.
You can tell the sound of pain. I ran to the spot at a lumbering dogtrot, leaned over and tried to see what was wrong, tilting my helmet to bring the beam of my headlight onto the ground.
A bug-eyed monster-
That’s not fair but it was my first thought. I couldn’t believe it and would have pinched myself except that it isn’t practical when suited up.
An unprejudiced mind (which mine wasn’t) would have said that this monster was rather pretty. It was small, not more than half my size, and its curves were graceful, not as a girl is but more like a leopard, although it wasn’t shaped like either one. I couldn’t grasp its shape-I didn’t have any pattern to fit it to; it wouldn’t add up.