At first sight the similarities between the Titanian people and ourselves are more noticeable than the differences; we impress what we expect to see on what we do see, as a wind-sculptured rock may look like a human head or a dancing bear. Take the pretty little “mouth” for example; how was I to know that it was an organ for breathing solely?
Conceded that they are not human and that, despite the casual similarities of four limbs and a head-like protuberance, we are less like them than is a bullfrog like a bullpup; nevertheless the general effect is pleasing, not frightening, and faintly human. “Elfin” I should say—the elves of Saturn’s moons. Had we met them before the slugs we call titans possessed them I think we could have gotten along with them. Judged by their ability to build the saucers they were our equals—if they did build them. (Certainly the slugs did not build them; slugs are not builders but thieves, cosmic cuckoos.)
But I am letting my own later thoughts get in the way. When I saw the little fellow I managed to draw my gun. The Old Man, anticipating my reaction, turned and said, “Take it easy. It’s dead—they are all dead, smothered in oxygen when the tank ruined their air seal.”
I still had my gun out. “I want to burn the slug,” I insisted. “It may still be alive.” It was not covered by the horny shell we had lately come to expect but was naked, moist and ugly.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. It can’t possibly hurt you.”
“Why not?”
“Wrong chemistry. That slug can’t live on an oxygen breather.” He crawled across the little body, giving me no chance to shoot had I decided to. Mary, always so quick with a gun, had not drawn but had shrunk against my side and was breathing in sharp little sobbing gasps. The Old Man stopped and said patiently, “Coming, Mary?”
She choked and then gasped, “Let’s go back! Let’s get out of here!”
I said, “She’s right. This is no job for three people; this is something for a research team and proper equipment.”
He paid no attention to me. “It has to be done, Mary. You know that. And you have to be the one to do it.”
“Why does she have to do it?” I demanded angrily.
Again he ignored me. “Well, Mary?”
From somewhere inside herself she called on reserves. Her breathing became normal, her features relaxed, and she crawled across the slug-ridden elfin body with the serenity of a queen going to the gallows. I lumbered after them, still hampered by my gun and trying not to touch the body.
We came at last to a large chamber. It may have been the control room, for there were many of the dead little elfin creatures in it, though I saw nothing resembling (to my eye) instruments or machinery. Its inner surface was cavitated and picked out with lights much brighter than the reddish illumination and the chamber space was festooned with processes as meaningless to me as the convolutions of a brain. I was troubled again with the thought—completely wrong, I know now—that the ship itself was a living organism.
The Old Man paid no attention but crawled on through and into another ruddy-glowing tube. We followed its contortions to a place where it widened out to ten feet or more with a “ceiling” overhead almost tall enough to let us stand erect. But that was not what caught our eyes; the walls were no longer opaque.
On each side of us, beyond transparent membranes, were thousands on thousands of slugs, swimming, floating, writhing in some fluid which sustained them. Each tank had an inner diffuse light of its own and I could see back into the palpitating mass—and I wanted to scream.
I still had my gun out. The Old Man reached back and placed his hand over the bell of it. “Don’t yield to temptation,” he warned me. “You don’t want to let that loose in here. Those are for us.”
Mary looked at them with a face too calm. Thinking back, I doubt that she was fully conscious in the ordinary sense. I looked at her, glanced back at the walls of that ghoulish aquarium, and said urgently, “Let’s get out of here if we can—then just bomb it out of existence.”