Its beach-ball configuration was collapsing, flattening out and spreading across the ground like a mottled red, yellow, and green pancake. Suddenly it rolled itself up into a long, cylindrical, caterpillar shape with a great many legs, before heading for the highest tree. She watched as it wound itself around the lower trunk corkscrew-fashion and began to climb rapidly. The view from up there will be much better,” it said.
Murchison laughed and moved to follow it. Silently she was calling herself all kinds of a fool because if she were to become -Casualty through falling out of a tree she would never live it down. But she was feeling like a child again, when tree-climbing had figured high among her accomplishments, and the sun was shining and all was right with this world and she just didn’t care.
“Earth-human DBDGs can climb trees, too,” she said. “Our prehistoric ancestors did it all the time.”
A few minutes later she was as close to the top as it was safe to go, with one arm wrapped around the trunk and a branch that looked strong enough to bear her weight gripped tightly between her knees. Danalta, whose latest body-shape enabled it to distribute its weight more evenly than her own, was clinging to the thinner branches a few meters above her. The view over the island and beyond was perfect.
In all directions they could see across the dark green, uneven carpet of treetops and clearings to the ragged edges where it met the beach. The medical station looked like a collection of white building-blocks standing in the dark, lengthening shadows of approaching evening, and the ocean was empty except for a tight group of pale blue swellings that were probably the mountaintops of a large island that was below the horizon. Danalta extruded an appendage to point slightly to one side of the distant mountains.
“Look,” it said. “I can see a bird. Do you?”
Murchison stared hard in the indicated direction. She thought she saw a tiny, fuzzy speck almost touching the horizon, but it could just as easily have been her imagination.
“I can’t be sure. …” she began, and broke off to stare at the thick cylindrical member that was growing out of the top of Danalta’s head. “Now what are you doing?”
“I’m maximizing my visual acuity,” it replied, “by positioning a lens of long focal length the required distance from my retina and making small focusing adjustments. Since the material is organic and the viewing base is moving perceptibly in the wind, some distortion is to be expected, but I’m sure that I can resolve the image to show . . .”
“You mean you’re growing a telescope?” she broke in. “Dr. Danalta, you never cease to surprise me.”
“Definitely some kind of bird,” it said—obviously pleased at the compliment—and went on, “with a small body, wide, narrow wings and a triangular tail whose outer edges are uneven. At this distance the size is uncertain. It appears to be dark brown or grey in color and non-reflective. It has a short, thick neck but I cannot resolve any details of the head and there are no other body projections, so presumably its legs are folded for aerodynamic reasons. The wings do not appear to be beating and it seems to be soaring on the air currents. It is close to the horizon and shows no sign of dropping below it.
“Birds did not evolve on my home planet,” it went on, “but I have studied the various species with a view to possible mimicry. So far, the general appearance and behavior of this one resembles that of a carrion-eater found on your own planet. At this range anything else I could tell you would be mostly guesswork.”
“Let’s go back to the station,” said Murchison quietly. “I want to be there before sunset.”
Danalta had spotted the planet’s first bird, she thought, as she climbed to the ground, and it seemed to be the equivalent of an outsized vulture, with all that that implied. It was silly to feel so disappointed just because this perfect-seeming world had shown its first imperfection.
CHAPTER 14
Captain Fletcher and Lieutenant Dodds were being extremely careful, Prilicla noted with approval, and displaying a level of vigilance that elevated caution to the status of a major art form. Phis time they were using Rhabwar’s pinnace, a vehicle normally used for evacuating space-wreck casualties whose condition was lot serious enough to require litters, to move a variety of specially insulated test equipment to a more convenient distance from the investigation site. All of the analyzers had one or more backups, in case they probed a sensitive area and the alien ship killed the instrument stone-dead as it had done to Terragars sensors.