"You are trying to break it gently." Atterlin was both shocked and despondent. "This being the first planet you have visited, you simply did not realize how feeble our minds really are."
"Oh, not at all, really, sir and lady." Garlock began deftly to repair the morale he had shattered. "Merely younger. With your system of genetics, so much more logical and efficient than our strict monogamy, your race will undoubtedly make more progress in a few centuries than we made in many millennia. And in a few centuries more you will pa.s.s us--will master this only partially-known Gunther Drive.
"Esthetically, Lady Neldine, I would like very much to father you a child." He allowed his coldly unmoved gaze to survey her charms. "I am sorry indeed that it cannot be. I trust that you, Governor Atterlin, will be kind enough to spread word of our physical shortcomings, and so spare us further embarra.s.sment?"
"Not shortcomings, sir, and, I truly hope, no embarra.s.sment," Atterlin protested. "We are immensely glad to have seen you, since your very existence gives us so much hope for the future. I will spread word, and every Hodellian will do whatever he can to help you in your quest."
"Thank you, sir and lady," and Garlock took his leave.
"What an act, my male-looking but impotent darling!" came Belle"s clear, incisive thought, bubbling with unrestrained merriment. "For our Doctor Garlock, the Prime Exponent and First Disciple of Truth, _what_ an act!
_Esthetically_, he"d like to father her a child, it says here in fine print--Boy, if she only knew! One tiny grain of truth and she"d chase you from here to Andromeda! Clee, I _swear_ this thing is going to kill me yet!"
"Anything that would do that I"m very much in favor of!" Garlock growled the thought and snapped up his shield.
This one was, quite definitely, Belle"s round.
Garlock took the Hodellian equivalent of a bus to the center of the city, then set out aimlessly to walk. The buildings and their arrangement, he noted--not much to his surprise now--were not too different from those of the cities of Earth.
With his guard down to about the sixth level, highly receptive but not at all selective, he strolled up one street and down another. He was not attentive to detail yet; he was trying to get the broad aspects, the "feel" of this. .h.i.therto unknown civilization.
The ether was practically saturated with thought. Apparently this was the afternoon rush hour, as the sidewalks were crowded with people and the streets were full of cars. It did not seem as though anyone, whether in the buildings, on the sidewalks, or in the cars, was doing any blocking at all. If there were any such things as secrets on Hodell, they were scarce. Each person, man, woman, or child, went about his own business, radiating full blast. No one paid any attention to the thoughts of anyone else except in the case of couples or groups, the units of which were engaged in conversation. It reminded Garlock of a big Tellurian party when the punch-bowls were running low--everybody talking at the top of his voice and n.o.body listening.
This whole gale of thought was blowing over Garlock"s receptors like a Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did not address anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city--and it did not take long--no one paid any more attention to him than they did to each other.
Probing into and through various buildings, he learned that groups of people were quitting work at intervals of about fifteen minutes. There were thoughts of tidying up desks; of letting the rest of this junk go until tomorrow; of putting away and/or covering up office machines of various sorts. There were thoughts of powdering noses and of repairing make-up.
He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for guardians--he"d have to call them that until either he or Lola found out their real name. Same as at the airport--the more people, the more guardians. What were they? How? And why?
He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn"t make sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it was. It seemed to be a ma.s.s-detector ... no, two of them, paired and balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other guardians--balanced across a sort of bridge--_that_ was how they kept the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range receptors there, too, but nothing seemed to be coming in....
While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone"s far-flung receptors.
Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock, directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insistent, low-pitched, whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of one eye, a yellowish something flashing downward through the air.
At the same moment the woman immediately in front of Garlock stifled a scream and jumped backward, b.u.mping into him and almost knocking him down. He staggered, caught his balance, and automatically put his arm around his a.s.sailant, to keep her from falling to the sidewalk.
In the meantime the guardian, having landed very close to the spot the woman had occupied a moment before, leaped again; this time vertically upward. The thing, whatever it was, was now braking frantically with wings, tail, and body; trying madly to get away. Too late. There was a bone-crushing impact as the two bodies came together in mid-air; a jarring thud as the two creatures, inextricably intertwined, struck the pavement as one.
The thing varied in color, Garlock now saw, shading from bright orange at the head to pale yellow at the tail. It had a savagely-tearing curved beak; tremendously powerful wings; its short, thick legs ended in hawk-like talons.
The guardian"s bowed legs had already immobilized the yellow wings by clamping them solidly against the yellow body. His two lower arms were holding the frightful talons out of action. His third hand gripped the orange throat, his fourth was exerting tremendous force against the jointure of neck and body. The neck, originally short, was beginning to stretch.
For several seconds Garlock had been half-conscious that his accidental companion was trying, with more and more energy, to disengage his encircling left arm from her waist. He wrenched his attention away from the spectacular fight--to which no one else, not even the near-victim, had paid the slightest attention--and now saw that he had his arm around the bare waist of a statuesque matron whose entire costume would have made perhaps half of a Tellurian sun-suit. He dropped his arm with a quick and abject apology.
"I should apologize to you instead, Captain Garlock," she thought, with a wide and friendly smile, "for knocking you down, and I thank you for catching me before I fell. I should not have been startled, of course. I would not have been, except that this is the first time that I, personally, have been attacked."
"But what _are_ they?" Garlock blurted.
"I don"t know." The woman turned her head and glanced, in complete disinterest, at the two furiously-battling creatures. Garlock knew now that this was the first time, except for that instantly-dismissed thrill of surprise at being the actual target of an attack, that she had thought of either of them. "Orange-yellow? It could be a ... a fumapty, perhaps, but I"ve no idea, really. You see, such things are none of our business."
She thought at him, a half-shrug, half-grimace of mild distaste--not at the personal contact with the man nor at the savage duel; but at even thinking of either the guardian or the yellow monster--and walked away into the crowd.
Garlock"s attention flashed back to the fighters. The yellow thing"s neck had been stretched to twice its natural length and the guardian had _eaten_ almost through it. There was a terrific crunch, a couple of smacking, gobbling swallows, and head parted from body. The orange beak still clashed open and shut, however, and the body still thrashed violently.
Shifting his grips, the guardian proceeded to tear a hole into his victim"s body, just below its breast-bone. Thrusting two arms into the opening, he yanked out two organs--one of which, Garlock thought, could have been the heart--and ate them both; if not with extreme gusto, at least in a workmanlike and thoroughly competent fashion. He then picked up the head in one hand, grabbed the tip of a wing with another, and marched up the street for half a block, dragging the body behind him.
He lifted a manhole cover with his two unoccupied hands, dropped the remains down the hole thus exposed, and let the cover slam back into place. He then squatted down, licked himself meticulously clean with a long, black, extremely agile tongue, and went on about his enigmatic business quite as though nothing had happened.
Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a "taxi" and was taken out to the _Pleiades_. Belle and Lola were in the Main.
"I saw the _d.a.m.ndest_ thing, Clee!" Lola exclaimed. "I"ve been gnawing my fingernails off up to the knuckles, waiting for you!"
Lola"s experience had been very similar to Garlock"s own, except in that her monster was an intense green in color and looked something like a bat about four feet long, with six-inch canine teeth and several stingers....
"Did you find out the name of the thing?" Garlock asked.
"No. I asked half-a-dozen people, but n.o.body would even listen to me except one half-grown boy, and the best he could do was that it might be something he had heard another boy say somebody had told him might be a "lemart." And as to those lower-case Arpalones, the best I could dig out of anybody was just "guardians." Did you do any better?"
"No, I didn"t do as well," and he told the girls about his own experience.
"But I didn"t find any detectors or receptors, Clee," Lola frowned.
"Where were they?"
""Way up--up here," he showed her. "I"ll make a full tape tonight on everything I found out about the guardians and the Arpalones--besides my regular report, I mean--since they"re yours, and you can make me one about your friend the green bat...."
"Hey, I _like_ that!" Belle broke in. "That _could_ be taken amiss, you know, by such a sensitive soul as I!"
"Check." Garlock chuckled. "I"ll have to file that one, in case I want to use it sometime. How"re you coming, Belle?"
"Nice!" Belle"s voracious mind had been so busy absorbing new knowledge that she had temporarily forgotten about her fight with her captain. "I"m just about done here. I"ll be ready tomorrow, I think, to visit their library and tape up some planetological and planetographical--notice how insouciantly I toss off those two-credit words?--data on this here planet Hodell."
"Good going. You"ve been listening to this stuff Lola and I were chewing on--does any of it make sense to you?"
"It does not. I never heard anything to compare with it."
"Excuse me for changing the subject," Lola put in, plaintively, "but when, if ever, do we eat? Do we _have_ to wait until that confounded James boy gets back from wherever it was he went?"
"If you"re hungry, we"ll eat now."
"_Hungry?_ Look!" Lola turned herself sidewise, placed one hand in the small of her back, and pressed hard with the other her flat, taut belly.