When the sun sank low and crimson colorings filled the west, they were
less happy. They watched the glory of their first sunset with scared,
incredulous eyes. Yellows and reds and purples reared toward the zenith.
It became possible to look at the sun directly. They saw it descend
behind something they could not guess at. Then there was darkness.
The fact stunned them. So night came like this!
Then they saw the stars for the first time, as they came singly into
being. And the folk from the lowland crowded frantically into the cave
with its faint odor of having once been occupied by something else. They
filled the cave tightly. But Burl had some reluctance to admit his
terror. He and Saya were the last to enter.
And nothing happened. Nothing. The sounds of sunset continued. They were
strange but soothing and somehow--again ancestral memory spoke
comfortingly--they were the way night-sounds ought to be. Burl and the
others could not possibly know it, but for the first time in forty
generations on the forgotten planet, human beings were in an environment
really suited to them. It had a rightness and a goodness which was
obvious in spite of its novelty. And because of Burl's own special
experiences, he was a little bit better able to estimate novelties than
the rest. He listened to the night-noises from close by the cave's small
entrance. He heard the breathing of his tribesfolk. He felt the heat of
their bodies, keeping the crowded enclosure warm enough for all. Saya
held fast to his hand, for the reassurance of the contact. He was
wakeful, and thinking very busily and painfully, but Saya was not
thinking at all. She was simply proud of Burl.
She felt, to be sure, a tumult which was fear of the unknown and relief
from much greater fear of the familiar. She felt warm, prideful
memories of the sight of Burl leading and commanding the others. She had
absorbing fresh memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and mental
pictures of sky and grass and trees which she had never seen before.
Confusedly she remembered that Burl had killed a spider, no less, and he
had shown how to escape a praying-mantis by flinging it at an ant, and
he had grandly led the others up a mountainside it had never occurred to
anybody else to climb. And the giant millipede would have devoured them
all, but that Burl gave commands and set the example, and he had marched
magnificently up the mountainside when it seemed that all the cosmos
twisted and prepared to drop them into an inverted sky....
Saya dozed. And Burl sat awake, listening, and presently with
fast-beating heart he slipped out of the entrance to the cave and stared
about him in the night.
There was coolness such as he had never known before, but nightfall was
not long past. There were smells in the air he had never before
experienced,--green things growing, and the peculiar clean odor of wind
that has been bathed in sunshine, and the oddly satisfying smell of
resinous trees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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