By the time they were ready to make planetfall on the unexplored world,
Purcell knew his dislike of Glaudot bordered on actual hatred. Purcell,
who was forty-five years old and a bachelor, liked his spacemen tough,
yes: you had to be tough to land on, explore, and subdue a couple of
dozen worlds, as Purcell himself had done. But he also liked his
spacemen with humility: facing the unknown and sometimes the unknowable
at every step of the way, you needed humility.
Glaudot, younger than Purcell by fifteen years, confident, arrogant, a
lean hard man and handsome in a gaunt-cheeked, saturnine way, lacked
humility. For one thing, he treated the crew like dirt and had treated
them that way since blastoff from Earth almost five months before. For
another, he seemed impatient with Purcell's orders, although Purcell was
not a cautious man, and certainly not a timid one. What had been growing
between them flared out into the open moments before planetfall.
"I can't get over it," Purcell said. "I've never seen a world anything
like it." They had made telescopic observations from within the
atmosphere. "Giants living in caves," Purcell went on. "Sailing ships
flying the Jolly Roger. A town consisting of miniature replicas of the
White House on Earth. Mermaids."
"Don't tell me you really thought you saw mermaids?" Glaudot asked a
little condescendingly.
"All right, I'll admit I only caught a glimpse of them. I thought they
were mermaids. But what about the Indians?"
"Yes," Glaudot admitted. "I saw the Indians."
Using their atmospheric rockets, they had flown over the Indian village
at an altitude of only a few hundred feet, to see bronze-skinned men
rush out of tents and stare up at them in awe. After that, Purcell had
decided to find some desolate spot in which to land, in order not to
risk a too-sudden encounter with any of the fantastically diversified
natives.
Now Glaudot said: "You're taking what we saw too literally, Captain.
Why, I remember on Harfonte we had all sorts of hallucinations until
Captain Jamison discovered they were exactly that--we'd been hypnotized
into seeing the things we most feared by powerless natives who really
feared us."
"This isn't Harfonte," Purcell said, a little irritably.
"Yeah, but you weren't there."
"I know that, Glaudot. I'm only trying to point out that each world must
be considered as unique. Each world presents its own problems, which--"
"I say this is like Harfonte all over again. I say if you'd had the guts
to land right smack in the middle of that Indian village, you'd have
seen for yourself. I say to play it close to the vest is ridiculous,"
Glaudot said, and then smiled deprecatingly. "Begging your pardon, of
course, Captain. But don't you see, man, you've got to show the
extraterrestrials, whatever form they take, that Earthmen aren't afraid
of them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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