Imbry stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t follow me?” Coogan was the one who’d told him about Petrick’s drinking. He remembered the patronizing lift to Coogan’s lip as he looked across the lounge at the white-faced, muddy-eyed man walking unsteadily through the room.
“Let’s move along,” Lindenhoff said from behind them.
Imbry half turned. He looked down at the Assignment Officer in surprise. He hadn’t heard the man coming. Neither had Coogan. Coogan nodded quickly.
“Just going, Lindy.” Throwing another baffled glance at Imbry, he trotted across the deck toward his sub-ship, where Petrick was standing and waiting.
“Go on, son,” Lindenhoff said. “You’re holding up the show.”
Imbry felt the knotted tension straining at his throat. He snatched up his pack.
“All right,” he said harshly. He strode over to his ship, skirting out of the way of the little trucks that were humming back and forth around the ships, carrying supplies and maintenance crewmen. The flight deck echoed back to the clangs of slammed access hatches, the crash of a dropped wrench, and the soft whir of truck motors. Maintenance men were running back and forth, completing final checks, and armorers struggled with the heavy belts of ammunition being loaded into the guns on Jusek’s ship. In the harsh glare of work lights, Imbry climbed up through his hatch, slammed it shut, and got up into his control compartment.
The ship was a slightly converted model of the standard TSN carrier scout.
He fingered the controls distastefully. Grimacing, he jacked in his communication leads and contacted the tower for a check. Then he set up his flight plan in the ballistic computer, interlocked his AutoNav, and sat back, waiting.
Lindenhoff and his fearsome scar. Souvenir of danger on a frontier world? Badge of courage? Symbol of intrepidness?
Actually, he’d gotten it when a piece of scaffolding fell on him during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, well before he ever came aboard the Saint Marie.
The flight deck cleared. Imbry set his ship’s circulators. The flight-deck alarm blasted into life.
The deck canopy slid aside, and the flight deck’s air billowed out into space. Imbry energized his main drive.
“Imbry clear for launch.”
“Check, Imbry. Launch in ten.”
He counted down, braced back against his couch. The catapult rammed him up off the deck, and he fired his engines. He rose high above the Sainte Marie, hovering, and then the ship nosed down and he trailed a wake of fire across the spangled night, in toward the foreign sun.
Almost from pole to pole, World II was the deep, lush color of rain-forest vegetation. Only at the higher latitudes was it interspersed with the surging brown-green of prairie grass and bush country, tapering into something like a temperate ecology at the very “top” and “bottom” of the planet. Where there was no land, there was the deeper, bluer, green of the sea. And on the sea, again, the green of islands.
Imbry balanced his ship on end, drifting slowly down. He wanted a good look and a long look.
His training in the TSN had fitted him admirably for this job. Admirably enough so that he depended more on his own observation than he did on the aerial survey results, which had been fed raw into a computer and emerged as a digested judgment on the planet’s ecology and population, and the probable state and nature of its culture. The TSN applied this judgment from a military standpoint. The Corporation applied it to contact work. Imbry’s experience had never known it to go far wrong. But he distrusted things mechanical, and so he hung in the sky for an hour or more, checking off promising-looking sites as they passed under him—and giving his bitterness and disillusion time to evaporate.
Down there was a race that had never heard of any people but itself; a race to which large portions of even its own planet must be unknown and enigmatic. A fairly happy race, probably. And if the Corporation found no significance in that, Imbry did. He was going to be their first touch with the incredible vastness in which they floated, and whatever he could do to smooth the shock and make their future easier, he meant to do, to the best of his ability. And if the Corporation had no feelings, he did. If there was no idealism aboard the Sainte Marie, there was some in him.
Finally, he picked an area on the eastern shore of the principal continent and drifted down toward it, slipping in over the swelling expanse of an island-speckled ocean. Following the curve of a chain of atolls extending almost completely across the sea, he lost altitude steadily, finding it possible now, with some of the tension draining out of him, to enjoy the almost effortless drift through the quiet sky and the quick responsiveness of his ship. It wasn’t quite as he’d dreamed it, but it was good. The mother ship was far away, and here on this world he was alone, coming down just above the tops of the breakers, now, settling gently on a broad and gleaming beach.
The anchoring field switched on, and bored down until it found bedrock. The sand around the ship pressed down in a shallow depression. Imbry turned away from the beach and began to walk into the jungle, his detectors and pressor fields tingling out to all sides of him. He walked slowly in the direction of a village, wearing his suit with its built-in equipment, with his helmet slung back between his shoulder blades.
The jungle was typical rain forest. There were trees which met the climatic conditions, and therefore much resembled ordinary palms. The same was true of the thick undergrowth, and, from the sound of them, of the avian fauna. The chatter in the trees was not quite as harsh as the Terrestrial version, nor as shrill. From the little he’d seen, that seemed typical—a slightly more leisurely, slightly gentler world than the Pacific belt of Earth. He walked slowly, as much from quiet enjoyment as from caution. Overhead, the sky was a warm blue, with soft clouds hanging over the atolls at the horizon. The jungle ran with bright color and deep, cool green. Imbry’s face lost its drawn-up tension, and his walk became relaxed.
He found a trail in a very short time, and began following it, trusting to his detectors and not looking around except in sun-pie curiosity. And quite soon after that, his detector field pinged, and the pressor pushed back against the right side of his chest. He turned it down, stopped, and looked in that direction. The field was set for sentient life only, and he knew he was about to meet his first native. He switched on his linguistic computer and waited.
The native, when he stepped out on the trail, was almost humanoid enough to pass for a Terrestrial. His ears were set a bit differently, and his musculature was not quite the same. It was also impossible to estimate his age, for none of the usual Terrestrial clues” were applicable. But those were the only differences Imbry could see. His skin was dark enough so there was no mistaking him for a Caucasian—if you applied human standards—but a great deal of that might be simple suntan. His hair was light brown, grew out of his scalp in an ordinary fashion, and had been cut. He was wearing a short, skirtlike garment, with a perfectly ordinary navel showing above it in a flat stomach. The pattern of his wrap-around was of the blocky type to which woven patterns are limited, and it was bright, in imitation of the forms and colors available in the jungle.
He looked at Imbry silently out of intelligent black eyes, with a tentative smile on his mouth. He was carrying nothing in his open hands, and he seemed neither upset nor timid.
Imbry had to wait until he spoke first. The computer had to have something to work with. Meanwhile, he smiled back. His TSN training had prepared him for situations exactly like this. In exercises, he’d duplicated this situation a dozen times, usually with ET’s much more fearsome and much less human. So he merely smiled back, and there was no tension or misgiving in the atmosphere at all. There was only an odd, childlike shyness which, once broken, could only lead to an invitation to come over to the other fellow’s house.
The native’s smile broadened, and he raised one hand in greeting, breaking into soft, liquid speech that seemed to run on and on without stopping, for many syllables at a time.
The native finished, and Imbry had to wait for his translator to make up its mind. Finally, it whispered in his ear.
“This is necessarily a rough computation. The communication is probably: Hello. Are you a god? (That’s an approximation. He means something between ancestor and deity.) I’m very glad to meet you.”
Imbry shook his head at the native, hoping this culture didn’t take that to mean “yes.”
“No,” he said to the computer, “I’m an explorer. And I’m glad to meet you.” He continued to smile.
The computer hummed softly. “Explorer is inapplicable as yet,” it told Imbry. It didn’t have the vocabulary built up.
The native was looking curiously at the little box of the computer sitting on Imbry’s shoulder.’ His jungle-trained ears were sharp, and he could obviously hear at least the sibilants as it whispered. His curiosity was friendly and intelligent; he seemed intrigued.
“All right, try: I’m like you. Hello,” Imbry told the computer.
The translator spoke to the native. He looked at Imbry in gentle unbelief and answered.
This time, it was easier. The translator sank its teeth into this new material, and after a much shorter lag, without qualification, gave Imbry the native’s communication, in its colloquial English, somewhat flavored:
“Obviously, you’re not like me very much. But we’ll straighten that out later. Will you stay in my village for a while?”
Imbry nodded, to register the significance of the gesture. “I’d be glad to. My name’s Imbry. What’s yours?”
“Good. I’m Tylus. Will you walk with me? And who’s the little ancestor on your shoulder?”
Imbry walked forward, and the native waited until they were a few feet apart and then began leading the way down the trail.
“That’s not an ancestor,” Imbry tried to explain. “It’s a machine that changes your speech into mine and mine into yours.” But the translator broke down completely at that. The best it could offer to do was to tell Tylus that it was a lever that talked. And your speech and my speech were concepts Tylus simply did not have.
In all conscience, Imbry had to cancel that, so he contented himself with saying it was not an ancestor. Tylus immediately asked which of Imbry’s respected ancestors it would be if it were an ancestor, and it was obvious that the native regarded Imbry as being, in many respects, a charming liar. But it was also plain that charming liars were accorded due respect in Tylus’s culture, so the two were fairly well acquainted by the time they reached the outskirts of the village, and there was no longer any lag in translation at all.
The village was built to suit the environment. The roofs and walls of the light, one-room houses were made of woven frond mats tied down to a boxy frame. Every house had a porch for socializing with passersby and a cookfire out front. Most of the houses faced in on a circular village square, with a big, communal cooking pit for special events, and the entire village was set in under the trees just a little away from the shoreline. There were several canoes on the sand above high water, and at some time this culture had developed the outrigger.
There was a large amount of shouting back and forth going on among the villagers, and a good-sized crowd had collected at the point where the trail opened out into the village clearing. But Tylus urged Imbry forward, passing proudly through the crowd, and Imbry went with him, feeling somewhat awkward about it, but not wanting to leave Tylus marching on alone. The villagers moved aside to let him through, smiling, some of them grinning at Tylus’s straight back and proudly carried head, none of them, obviously, wanting to deprive their compatriot of his moment.
Tylus stopped when he and Imbry reached the big central cooking pit, turned around, and struck a pose with one arm around Imbry’s shoulders.
“Hey! Look! I’ve brought a big visitor!” Tylus shouted, grinning with pleasure.
The villagers let out a whoop of feigned surprise, laughing and shouting congratulations to Tylus, and cordial welcomes to Imbry.
“He says he’s not a god!” Tylus climaxed, giving Imbry a broad, sidelong look of grinning appreciation for his ability to be ridiculous. “He came out of a big Ihoni egg on the beach, and he’s got a father-ghost who sits on his shoulder in a little black pot and gives him advice!”