Our display cases flanked the entrance with their assortment of beads, bracelets, earrings, toys and models, gifts for the natives. Inside, seats were arranged for the three-dimensional movies of Earth’s wonders, natural and technological. Placed unobtrusively behind us inside the tent, its viewing lens protruding through a flap in the canvas, our language computer was set up and waiting. From the apex of the tent, a concealed loudspeaker sent the jerk and jive melodies of the Grave Images rolling down over the meadow.
I was recording data orally into the captain’s log as Red scanned the treeline across the valley to pick up a sight of our first customers when he motioned me to turn off the recorder.
“Why don’t we tune down that racket?” he asked. “I can’t hear myself see.”
“Regulations,” I answered.
“Up regulations,” he snorted.
I returned to the log, recording observations I could make from where I sat. Then I clicked off the log and shoved it into my tunic case, joining Red in his scanning of the distant treeline. There was nothing alive out there. We waited—fifteen minutes, half-an-hour, forty-five minutes—and there was nothing.
“Why don’t I go over?” Red suggested. “At least I could get an idea what the building is.”
“Regulations,” I said. “You could walk into an ambush.”
He looked at me. “I never thought Jack Adams was a book officer.”
I am not an officer who goes strictly by the book, but I did not want Red to know it.
“You’re learning, boy,” I snapped. “Scan the sector from twelve o’clock to four o’clock.”
He lapsed into a disgusted silence as I continued to sweep a zone ahead of me with the glasses, twenty degrees to right, twenty degrees to left—procedures established by Navy Regulations.
We saw them simultaneously, bipeds at ten o’clock, that broke from behind the knob across the valley, rushing down the slope wearing primitive leg armor and brandishing clubs. As I clicked off the Grave Images, Red said laconically, “Thanks. It looks like your ambush couldn’t wait, or they don’t like the music.”
In the silence, we could hear their war whoops drift across the valley and Red said, “Better start some martial music—for us.”
He reached back to our Earth-gifts display case and drew our laser rifles from a concealed drawer. I laid the weapon he handed me across my lap as I counted the warriors, twelve in all, armored but running at a speed no loinclothed Apache of Earth could have matched as they charged down the slope.
Suddenly they stopped at the flat area in the amphitheater, apparently for a war conference, and spread out into a line of battle. They planted markers on each flank of their skirmish line, and, suddenly, they began to kick a ball around.
“Forget our war, Jack,” Red said. “It’s a soccer team.”
Not exactly soccer, I decided, as I put my weapon away. They were playing a combination of soccer, lacrosse and tenpins, kicking the ball with tremendous force toward a wicket of three pins guarded by a goalie who guarded with a stick. The object, apparently, was to score a strike on the pins behind the goalie, and one player succeeded as I turned the volume up on the Grave Images, hoisting it a few decibels to let it carry to the playing field.
But the players did not look up.
“Maybe they’re nearsighted,” I was saying when Red shouted, “Saints be praised, Jack. Look at that!”
Fifty yards below us and to the right, a girl had emerged from the line of woods.
“Jesus Christ!” I breathed—and I had not taken the Lord’s name in vain—as I swung my glasses onto her figure.
For an approximation of the girl’s stride, take the flow of a tiger’s pacing, the lilt of a springbok’s leap, and mix with the grace of a ballerina. Her whole movement was visible. She was less than five feet tall, but fully three of those feet were dedicated—no, consecrated—to legs. Bare feet, ankles, calves, knees and bare thighs swelled in diapasons to the glory of her buttocks, which swooped back and in to her narrow waist. Her dress, loosely gathered by a belt of ribbon, barely reached below her hips.
“This is no country for thigh men,” O’Hara sighed.
She walked toward the amphitheater at an angle that would carry her face beyond our view and I reluctantly lifted my attention upward along her torso. Twin mammae protruded from her chest in the configuration of homo sapiens and a near-human head was balanced on her neck. Her face was bare of fur, as were her arms and legs, and she had eyebrows arching above two dark eyes, larger and farther apart than a human’s. Her skin was white and her hair was black.
“ ‘All that’s best of dark and bright,’ ” Red said, “ ‘meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ ”
“And her arse,” I added, for the swing of her walk jostled the hemline of her skirt to reveal new prospects. Female she was, and not solely on the evidence of her breasts. She wore no panties.
“Homo sapiens,” Red gasped. “Proof positive!”
“Not by regulations,” I snapped, still studying the girl’s face. Not once had those eyes lifted toward us, and the guitars of the Grave Images beat against her unheeded. “She must be deaf,” I said.
“Who in hell wants to talk to her?” Red asked. “Look!”
An irregular host of the long-legged beings trailed behind her from the woods, all moving with the same grace, with females outnumbering males. All wore the same short tunic. They walked singly, and the females were without jewelry or make-up. None so much as cast a glance toward our ship or our gaudy pavilion. No one talked, no one smiled.
“They have no curiosity,” I said.
“Maybe they’re more interested in soccer than in space ships and the Grave Images,” Red answered.
“But there’s no animation on their faces. They don’t talk. They’re drifting along like a herd of gazelles. Perhaps they’re beasts, dumb brutes.”
“Animals don’t go to soccer games,” Red said. “Anyway it looks like we’re getting a couple of customers.”
We were indeed. Two of the beings had detached themselves from the group and were walking up the slope toward us. They were children, a boy and a girl, and Red reached back into the toy case, pulled out a basketball and inflated it with a cylinder. He was spinning it in his hands when they glided close and stopped, keeping about twelve feet away and ten feet apart, looking at us with wide, expressionless eyes.
They were the equivalent of eight-year-olds on Earth, with rosy cheeks that might have come from the north of England. Their tawny hair curled back from their forehead and we could see ears beneath the hair. Their eyes were the same brown color as their hair.
“If eyes are the windows of the soul,” Red said, “these beings must have great souls.”
He smiled at the children, and his words and gesture revealed that he was making the common error of a spaceman—personifying aliens. To an alien, a smile may be an expression of hostility—even on Earth a laughing hyena is not noted for its sense of humor—and a hand extended in friendliness to a nonhuman may result in a broken arm. And Red’s assumption that these beings had souls was against Navy Regulations.
“They appear to be evolved from lemur monkeys crossed with kangaroos,” I said.
Ignoring me, Red pointed to himself. “Red,” he said to the boy. Then, pointing to me, “Jack.”
The children merely watched.
“Boy,” he said, pointing to the boy. “Girl.”
The children watched.
“Here,