“And that, you know,” Kordov added, “is common sense. Let us explore the valley—if it is promising, make a place there for our people. But at the same time an exploring team can operate to map the district. Only, let us not make contact with any race we find, until we know its attitude.”
“Or what manner of creature,” Carlee said softly to herself.
“What manner of creature.” Dard had caught that. Carlee most likely believed that the intelligence which might share this world was nonhuman. Man’s old fear of the unknown, the not-understood, would again haunt them. This was an alien world, could they ever make it home?
“These—these are beautiful!” Trude Harmon had knelt beside him in the sand to see the small carvings he was mechanically unwrapping.
The one he held represented an animal which was a weird cross between horse and deer—possessing flowing mane, tail and horns. Presented as rearing, with snorting nostrils, it was a miniature of savage fury. Tiny gems were set in the eye sockets and the hooves were plated with a contrasting metal. Some master-craftsman had endowed it with life.
“All these things-they are so wonderful!”
“They loved beauty,” Dard answered her. “But I think that these”—he picked up a second carving, representing quite a different creature—a manikin with webbed feet, a monkey face and hands lacking a thumb—“are all pieces to be used in a game. See, here’s another horned horse, but made of a different color, and another webfooted monkey. Chessmen?”
“And a little tree!” She freed a third piece from its wrappings. “A tree of golden apples!”
True enough, on the branches of the tone shaped tree there were round gems of a glowing yellow. Golden apples! That story Lars used to tell Dessie about the apples of the sun!
“Huh?” Harmon squatted down by his wife to see what held her attention. “Apples? What’s that about apples, Trude?”
She held out her hand with the small tree standing on its flattened palm. “Golden apples! See, Tim?”
“Looks more like some kind of a pine to me.” But he took the tree gently. “Fruit-that’s what those are supposed to be all right.” His eyes went past the star ship to the open mouth of the valley where the blue-green of growing things beckoned. “Might find us a pine growin’ apples at that, Trude. After them there flyin’ snakes, and floatin’ spider-plants, and them green and yellow duck-dogs what keep peekin’ at us from holes yonder-well, I can believe that we’re gonna pick us apples offa pine trees, too. Only we’d better get about the business of goin’ to hunt them trees pretty soon.”
The business of hunting their future settlement began the next morning. Kimber with Rogan and Santee took off in the sled to make a circuit of the inner valley. When they signaled that they viewed nothing disturbing there, a second exploring party set off on foot. Gully, Harmon and Dard, with packets of supplies, stun rifles and water-filled canteens progressed slowly up the river.
At the entrance to the inner valley the sand was broken by patches of soil shading from red-yellow to a dark brown. In this earth grew tufts and clumps of thin-bladed, very tough-stemmed grass which in its turn gave way to small bushes, clothed with ragged blue-green leaves.
All three of the explorers stopped short as the grass before them swayed, masking the progress of some living thing. Dard was the first to move forward with his silent woodsman’s tread. Cautiously he parted the tall stalks to see below him a real path, as well marked as a Terran game trail, but in miniature. As the swaying still continued he stood waiting, hardly daring to breathe.
Around the roots of a low bush a small red-brown head, almost indistinguishable from the bare earth of the trail, showed. Dard waited. With a hop the traveler came into plain sight.
Close to the size of a Terran rat it hopped on large, over-developed hind legs, between which bobbed a fluff of tail. Small handlike paws hung down across its darker belly fur. The ears were large, fan shaped, and fringed with the same fluff as the tail. Black buttons of eyes showed neither pupil nor iris, and a rounded muzzle ended in a rodent’s prominent teeth. But Dard did not have long to catalogue such physical points. It sighted him. Then it gave a wild bound, making an about-face turn while in the air—disappearing in a second. Dard was left to pick up from the center of the trail the object it had just dropped in its flight.
“Rabbit?” Harmon wondered, “or squirrel, or rat? How’re we gonna know? What did that critter drop, boy?”
Dard held a pod about three inches long, dark blue and shiny. He surrendered it to Harmon who slit the outer covering with thumbnail and shook out a dozen dark-blue seeds.
“Pears, beans, wheat?” Harmon’s bewilderment showed signs of irritation. “It grows, ripens this way, and it may be good to eat. But,” he turned to his companions and ended with an explosive, “how’re we ever gonna know?”
“Take ‘em back and try ‘em on the hamsters,” Cully returned laconically. “But that hopper sure could go, couldn’t he?” Thus he unconsciously christened the third type of fauna they had discovered in the new world.
Harmon stowed seeds and pod away in a zipper closed pocket, before they moved on through grass which arose waist high about them. Here and there in it they spotted more of the seed pods.
In fact shortly the pod-headed plants were so thick around them that they might have been swishing through a field of ripened grain. Harmon broke silence:
“This remind you of anything?”
They regarded the expanse of blue doubtfully and shook their heads.
“Well, it does me. This here looks jus’ like a wheatfield all ready t’ be reaped! I tell you I’m athinkin’ we’re walkin’ over somebody’s farm!”
“But there’s no fences,” protested Dard.
“No, but you take a farm that’s not been touched for a good long time-this stuff coulda jus’ kept seedin’ itself and spread out a lot. I gotta feelin’ this is part of a farm!”
With that Harmon took the lead, cutting across the narrowest section of the ripe crop to a line of bushes. Now that his attention had been stimulated by Harmon’s theory Dard thought that that clump of taller vegetation was strung out as if it might provide a barrier for the grain, a fence for the field.
They worked their way around this line of brush to discover Harmon’s instinct right. For there was no disguising the artificiality of the large dome flanked by several smaller ones which stood surmounted and surrounded by rank vines, tall grass and long unpruned shrubbery.
But it was not those domes which held the explorers’ attention. A constant murmur of sound and a flash of flying things drew them to a tree standing in what once must have been the front yard—if Those Others cultivated front yards.
“The golden apples!” Dard identified the tree from the carved piece he had seen the night before.
Its symmetrical cone shape of blue-green provided the right background for the yellow globes which dragged down branches with their weight. And the air and grass about the tree were alive with feasters.
The Terrans watched the wheeling birds—or were they oversized butterflies—that settled and squabbled for a chance to sink beaks into those ripened orbs. While, on the ground, there was a steady coming and going of hoppers harvesting the soft fallen fruit. And from that scene of activity the breeze wafted a scent which set the watchers’ mouths watering—semi-intoxicating with its promise of juicy delights.
As the men advanced, the busy feeders displayed no signs of alarm. One hopper ran straight between Cully’s feet, a quarter section of dripping fruit clasped in its arms. And a bird-butterfly skimmed Dard’s head on its way to the banquet.
“Well—for–!” Cully caught himself in midstride to avoid stepping on a furry red-brown mass. He picked up one of the hoppers in a completely comatose state. Harmon gave a bark of laughter.
“Dead drunk,” he commented. “Seen chickens—pigs, too—get that way on cider leavin’s. Lookit here—this bird can’t fly straight neither!”
He was right. A lavender creature, whose wings were banded with pale green and gray, flapped an erratic course to a nearby bush and clung there as if it did not trust its powers for a farther flight.
Cully laid down the limp hopper and picked one of the golden apples. It snapped away easily, and he held it out for their closer examination. The skin was firm over the pulp, and radiating out from the stem were tiny rosy freckles. And the enticing scent was a temptation hard to withstand. Dard wanted to snatch the fruit from the engineer, to sink his teeth in that smooth skin and prove to himself that it tasted as good as it smelled.