Boys -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
When the floor of the valley came up he leveled off, then silently
sped along in search of dwellings. Beneath him, on level stretches of
land, stood odd four-legged creatures. The dominants of this world? he
wondered. Probably not. The extremities of their limbs appeared to be
too blunt and crude to do even the simple tooling he'd noticed during
his flight in. Beasts of transport, no doubt. Boldly, he swooped low
over a group, scattering them in panic.
The meadow ended with almost sheer mountain wall, and the Scout whipped
his craft up its face and down the opposite side. Something flickered
in his vision screen and he swung the controls. A dwelling! In a moment
he was back over it, hanging motionless. Sure enough, a revolting crude
shack that nestled high in the branches of one of this world's surface
growths.
This was it. There was no time nor need to search further.
He locked the controls, then turned on the deadly screen that would
kill all life directly beneath, save one properly shielded such as
himself, and would stun all life attempting to enter the edges of the
field.
Pulling on his helmet, the Scout reached to the stud at his belt and
reduced his weight to but a fraction of itself. Then he opened the
hatch and clambered out into the air.
His first few minutes of exploration in the tree house were
disappointing. There was no life, no corpses about for him to dissect
and study. But the hunting club puzzled him. Obviously tooled by
machinery and scuffed from much killing, it bore what might be a word
burnt into its thickened end: "SPAULDING." He realized he was in an
extremely primitive section of the planet, for this weapon was, no
doubt, a trade article from some more advanced portion of the globe.
Too bad he'd had to land in this region. Dull.
The club he chucked into the bag over his shoulder.
A round object, made of some fairly soft material, with seams twisting
over its surface next caught his eye. He took it up, shook it. It, too,
bore the symbol "SPAULDING." Probably a totem word. Perhaps the sign
of this particular tribe. He put it with the club. It was followed
by a small package of soft white cylinders which were stuffed with
crumbles of dried weed. Each cylinder bore the sign "CAMEL" as did the
container, which also showed a beast, somewhat like those he had buzzed.
And beyond that there was nothing.
A simple people indeed, he pondered. He was about to leave when he
noticed the stack of artifacts in one corner. The Scout bent to examine
them. They seemed to be composed of the same material as the white of
the "CAMEL" cylinders, but thicker and bound together in long wide flat
construction. There were bright colors on the outside of each, and
just as he discovered that the individual leaves of material could be
separated and turned, the alarm bell sounded twice in his helmet. Life
had blundered into the outer edges of his field.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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