Hal Clement - Assumption Unjustified

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 70.45KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Assumption Unjustified

Thrykar saw the glow that limned the broad pine trunk with radiance and sent an indefinite shadow

toward the spot where he lay, and knew that extreme caution must direct his actions from then on. He

had, of course, encountered living creatures as he had felt his way through the darkness down the

forested mountain side; but they had been small, harmless animals that had fled precipitately as the sounds

denoting his size or the odors that warned of his alienness had reached their senses. Artificial light,

however, which he and Tes had seen from the mountain top and which was now just below him, meant

intelligence; and intelligence meant—anything.

He felt the ridiculousness of his position. The idea of having not only to conceal his intentions, but

even his existence, from intelligent beings could seem only silly to a member of a culture that embraced

literally thousands of physically differing races, and Thrykar did have a rising desire to stand on his feet

and walk openly down the main thoroughfare of the little settlement in the valley. He resisted the

temptation principally because it was not an unexpected one; the handbook had warned that such a

reaction was probable—and warned in the strongest terms against yielding to it.

Instead of yielding, therefore, he resumed his crawling, working his way headforemost downhill until

he had reached the tree. Hugging the rough trunk closely, he reached his eight feet of snaky body to full

height behind it, tapped out the prearranged signal to Tes on the small communicator he carried, and

began carefully examining the town and the ground between him and the outlying houses.

It was not a large town. About three thousand human beings lived in it, though Thrykar was not

familiar enough with men to be able to judge that fact from the number of buildings. He did realize that

some of the structures were probably not dwelling places; the pur-poses of the railway station became

fairly clear as a lighted train chugged slowly into motion and snaked its way out of town to the north.

Most of the lights were concentrated within a few blocks of the station, and it was only in that

neighborhood that Thrykar could see the moving figures of human beings. A few lighted windows, and the

rather thinly scattered street lamps, were all that betrayed the true size of the place.

There was another center of activity, however. As the sound of the train died out in the distance, a

rhythmic thudding manifested itself to Thrykar's auditory organs. It seemed to come from his right, from

that portion of the town nearest to the foot of the mountain. Leaning out from behind his tree, he could

see nothing in that direction; but a fact which he had only subconsciously noted before was brought to

prominence in his mind.

Only a few yards below him, the mountainside fell away abruptly in a sheer cliff which seemed, in the

darkness, to extend for some distance to either side of Thrykar's position. The undergrowth which

covered the slope continued to the very edge of this cliff; so the alien dropped once more to the prone

position and wormed his way downhill until he could look over. He hadn't im-proved matters much, as

the darkness was impenetrable to his eyes, but the sounds were a little clearer. They were quite definitely

coming from the right and below and after a moment's hesitation, Thrykar began crawling along the cliff

edge in that direction. The bushes, which grew thicker here, hampered him somewhat; for the flexibility of

his body, which was no thicker than a man's, was offset by the great, triangular, finlike appendages which

extended more than two feet outward on each side. These, too, were fairly flexible, however, ribbed as

they were with cartilage; and he managed to accommodate himself to the somewhat uncomfortable mode

of travel.

He had gone less than a hundred yards when he found the cliff edge to be curving outward and down,

as though it were the lip of a somewhat irregular vertical shaft cut into the mountain. This impression was

strengthened when the curve led back to the left, away from the source of sound that Thrykar wished to

investigate; but he continued to follow the edge, and eventually reached its lowest point, which must have

been almost directly beneath the place at which he had first looked over. At this point things became

interesting.

On Thrykar's left—that is, within the shaft—the drip-ping of water became audible; and at the same

time the bushes and irregular rocks disappeared, and he found himself on what could be nothing but a

badly kept road. He did not realize its condition at first; but within a few feet he found a rivulet flowing

across it, in a fairly deep gully which it had cut in the hard earth. Investigating this flow of water, he found

that its source was the shaftlike excavation, which was apparently full of water almost to the level of the

road. With growing enthusiasm, Thrykar found that the hole was fully a hundred and fifty yards in the

dimension running parallel to the face of the moun-tain; and he had learned during his descent that it had

fully half that measure in the other direction. If it were only deep enough—he was on the point of entering

the water to investigate, when he remembered the communicator, which might suffer damage if wet, and

from which he had promised Tes not to separate himself. Instead of investigating the pit, therefore, he

turned back, following the road toward the sounds which had first roused his curiosity.

His progress, on the legs which were so ridiculously short for his height, was not rapid. In fifteen

minutes he had passed two more of the water-filled pits and was approaching a third. This he was able to

examine in more detail than the others, though he could not approach it closely; for the road at this point,

and the water near it, were illuminated by the first of the town's outlying street lamps. A few yards farther,

on the side of the road away from the pits, house lights began to be visible; and, seeing them, Thrykar

paused to consider.

The sound was evidently coming from farther inside the town. If he went any further in his

investigations, he not only sacrificed the shelter of darkness, but could also expect a heavier concentration

of human beings. On the other hand, his skin was dark in color, the lights were by to means numerous, he

was very curious about the sounds which had continued without interruption since he had first heard them,

and it would be necessary to confront a human being eventually, in any case—though, if all went well, the

human being would never know it. Thrykar finally elected to proceed, with increased cau-tion.

He chose the side of the road away from the pits, as it was somewhat darker at first, and offered

some conceal-ment in the form of hedges and fences in front of the houses, which now began to be more

numerous. He walked, with his mincing gait, close beside these, standing at his full height and letting the

great, independent eyes set on either side of his neckless, rigidly set head rove constantly around the full

circle of his vision. One more pit was passed in this fashion; but a hundred yards further down the road,

on the right side, a wall began which effectually cut off the sight of any more, if they existed. It was a

fence of boards, solidly built, and its top was fully two feet above Thrykar's head. The sounds appeared

to be coming from a point behind this barrier, but somewhat further down the road.

Having come so far, the alien was human enough to dislike the idea of having wasted his efforts. He

crossed the road at a point midway between two street lamps. Between the pits, the brush-covered slope

of the hill came down almost to the thoroughfare; so he dropped flat once more to take advantage of this

cover as he approached the near end of the wall. He had hoped to find access to the hinder side of the

barrier, but he found that, instead of beginning where it was first visible, the portion along the road was

merely a continuation of a similar structure that came down the hillside; and Thrykar considered it a waste

of time to circumambulate the enclosure on the chance of finding an opening.

Instead, he rose once more to his full height, and looked carefully about him. The neighborhood still

seemed deserted. Pressing close against the boards, he reached up and let the tips of his four wiry

tentacles curl over the top of the fence. The appendages, even at the roots, were not much thicker than a

human thumb, for they were, anatomically, detached portions of the great side fins rather than legs and

feet modified for prehensile use; unless they could be wound completely around an object, they could not

approach the gripping or pulling strength of the human hand and arm. Thrykar, however, let his supple

body sag in an S-curve, and straightened suddenly, leaping upward; and at the same instant exerted all

the strength of which the slender limbs were capable. The effort proved sufficient to get the upper portion

of his body across the top of the fence, and during the few seconds he was able to maintain the position

he saw enough to satisfy him.

There were two more of the pits inside the fence, dimly lighted by electric bulbs. They contained

practically no water, and were enormously deep—the nearer, whose bottom was visible to Thrykar, was

over two hundred feet from the edge to the loose blocks of stone that lay about in the depths. The pits

were quarries, quite evidently. The stone blocks and tools, as well as the innumerable nearly flat faces on

the granite walls, showed that fact clearly. The noises that had aroused the alien's curiosity came from

machines located at the bottom of the nearer pit; and the existence of certain large pipes running up from

them, as well as the almost complete absence of water, assured him that they were pumps.

There was a further deduction to be drawn from the absence of water. These human beings were

strictly air-breathers—the handbook had told Thrykar and Tes that much; and it followed that the pits

farther along the mountain side, which had been allowed to fill with water, must no longer be in use. If

they were as deep as these, there was an ideal hiding place for the ship.

At that thought, Thrykar let himself slip down once more outside the fence. He flexed his body once

or twice to ease the ache where the edges of the boards had cut into his flesh, and started to stretch his

tentacles for the same purpose; but suddenly he froze to rigidity. Behind him, on the road down which he

had come, appeared a glow of yellow that brightened swiftly—so swiftly that before he could move, its

source had swept into sight around the last shallow curve in the route and he was pinned against the fence

by the beams from the twin headlights of an automobile.

As the vehicle reached the straight portion of the street the direct beams left him; but he knew he must

have been glaringly visible during the second or so in which they had dazzled his eyes. He held his breath

as the car approached; and the instant it passed he plunged up the hillside for twenty or thirty yards,

wriggled his way under some dense bushes, and lay as motionless as was physi-cally possible for him. He

listened intently as the sound of the engine faded and died evenly away in the distance, and finally gave a

deep exhalation of relief. Evidently, hard as it was to believe, the occupant or occupants of the vehicle

had not seen him.

It did not occur to Thrykar that, even if the driver had noticed the weird form looming in his headlight

beams, stopping to investigate might be the farthest thing in the universe from his resultant pattern of

action. Thrykar himself, and every one of his acquaintances—which were by no means confined to

members of his own race—would have looked into the matter without a second thought about the safety

or general advisability of the procedure.

He was a little shaken by the narrow shave. He should have foreseen it, of course—it was little short

of stupid to have climbed the wall so close to the road; but what would be self-evident to a professional

soldier, detective, or housebreaker did not come within the sphere of everyday life to a research chemist

on a honeymoon. If Thrykar had known anything about Earth before starting his journey, he wouldn't

have come near the planet. He had simply noted that there was a refresher station near the direct route to

the world which he and Tes had planned to visit on a vacation; and not until he had cut his drive near the

beacon on Mercury had he bothered to read up on its details. They had been somewhat dismayed at

what they found, but the most practicable detour would have consumed almost the entire vacation period

in flight; and, as Tes had said, what others had evidently done he could do. Thrykar suspected that his

wife might possibly have an exaggerated idea of his abilities, but he had no objection to that. They had

stayed.

The car did have one good effect on Thrykar; he became much more cautious. Having satisfied his

curios-ity about the sounds, he began to retrace his way to the ship and Tes; but this time he stayed well

off the road, traveling parallel to it, until the abandoned quarries prevented further progress on that line.

Even then he left the woods and went downhill only far enough to permit him to enter the water without

splashing. He swam rapidly across, holding the communicator out of the water with one tentacle, and

emerged to continue his trip on the other side. He had wasted as little time as possible, as the pit he had

just crossed was the one so comparatively well illuminated by the street lamp.

At the next one, however, he spent more time. Instead of carrying the communicator with him, he

cached it under a bush near the road and disappeared entirely under water. It was utterly black below the

surface, and fit had to trust entirely to his sense of touch; and remembering what he had seen of the walls

of the empty quarries, he dared not swim too rapidly for fear of braining himself against an outcrop of

granite. In conse-quence, it took him over half an hour to get a good idea of the pit's qualifications as a

hiding place. The verdict was not too good, but possible. Thrykar finally emerged, collected his

communicator, and proceeded to the next quarry.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Hal Clement - Assumption Unjustified.pdf

共22页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Hal Clement - Assumption Unjustified

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: