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was as exhausted as I was, in his own way; and not prepared to quickly
understand the unexpected."
"What unexpected?" Joe gaped at him. "You talk as if you thought you were in
control of the situation all the way."
"Most of the way," said Cal. "I knew we were due to have a showdown. I was
afraid we'd have it at the foot of the tower but he was waiting until we were
solidly at the top. So I made sure to get up to that flat spot in the tower
first, and cut the rope. He had to come up the tower by himself."
"Which he was very able to do."
"Certainly in one form. He was in one form coming up," said Cal. "He changed
to his fighting form as he came over the edge and those changes took energy.
Physical and nervous, if not emotional energy, when he was pretty exhausted
already. Then I swung at him like Tarzan as he was balanced, coming over the
edge of the depression in the rock."
"And had the luck to knock him off," said Joe. "Don't tell me with someone as
powerful as that it was anything but luck. I was there when Mike and Sam got
killed at the
Harrier, remember."
* * *
"Not luck at all," said Cal, quietly. "A foregone conclusion. As I say, I'd
figured out the balance sheet for the power of adaptation. It had to be
instinctive. That meant that if he was threatened, his adaptation to meet the
threat would take place whether consciously he wanted it to or not. He was
barely into tiger-shape, barely over the edge of the cliff, when I hit him and
threatened to knock him off into thin air. He couldn't help himself. He
adapted."
"Adapted!" said Joe, staring.
"Tried to adapt to a form that would enable him to cling to his perch. That
took the strength out of his tiger-fighting form, and I was able to get us
both off the cliff together instead of being torn apart the minute I hit him.
The minute we started to fall, he instinctively spread out and stopped
fighting me altogether."
Joe sat back in his chair. After a moment, he swore.
"And you're just now telling me this?" he said.
Cal smiled a little wryly.
"I'm surprised you're surprised," he said. "I'd thought people back here would
have figured all this out by now. This character and his people can't ever
pose any real threat to us. For all their strength and slipperiness, their
reaction to life is passive. They adapt to it. Ours is active we adapt it to
us. On the instinctive level, we can always choose the battlefield and the
weapons, and win every time in a contest."
He stopped speaking and gazed at Joe, who shook his head slowly.
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"Cal," said Joe at last, "you don't think like the rest of us."
Cal frowned. A cloud passing beyond the window dimmed the light that had shone
upon him.
"I'm afraid you're right," he said quietly. "For just a while, I had hopes it
wasn't so."
THE CATCH
Time to send the audience out on a light note. Or maybe not so light, after
all. Just maybe, there are times when humans might wish that the aliens are
the ones with the edge.
"Sure, Mike. Gee!" said the young Tolfian excitedly, and went dashing off from
the spaceship in the direction of the temporary camp his local people had set
up at a distance of some three hundred yards across the grassy turf of the
little valley. Watching him go, Mike Wellsbauer had to admit that in motion he
made a pretty sight, scooting along on his hind legs, his sleek black-haired
otterlike body leaning into the wind of his passage, and his wide, rather
paddle-shaped tail extended behind him to balance the weight of his erected
body. All the same . . .
"I don't like it," Mike murmured. "I don't like it one bit."
"First signs of insanity," said a female and very human voice behind him. He
turned about.
"All right, Penny," he said. "You can laugh. But this could turn out to be the
most unfunny thing that ever happened to the human race. Where is the rest of
the crew?"
Peony Matsu sobered, the small gamin grin fading from her pert face, as she
gazed up at him.
"Red and Tommy are still trying to make communication contact with home base,"
she said.
"Alvin's out checking the flora he can't be far." She stared at him curiously.
"What's up now?"
"I want to know what they're building."
"Something for us, I'll bet,"
"That's what I'm afraid of. I've just sent for the local squire." Mike peered
at the alien camp.
Workers were still zipping around it in that typical Tolfian fashion that
seemed to dictate that nobody went anywhere except at a run. "This time he's
going to give me a straight answer."
"I thought," said Penny, "he had."
"Answers," said Mike, shortly. "Not necessarily straight ones." He heaved a
sudden sigh, half of exhaustion, half of exasperation. "That young squirt was
talking to me right now in English. In
English!
What can you do?"
Penny bubbled with laughter in spite of herself.
"All right, now hold it!" snapped Mike, glaring at her. "I tell you that
whatever this situation is, it's serious. And letting ourselves be conned into
making a picnic out of it may be just what they want."
"All right," said Penny, patting him on the arm. "I'm serious. But I don't see
that their learning
English is any worse than the other parts of it "
"It's the whole picture," growled Mike, not waiting for her to finish. He
stumped about to stand half-turned away from her, facing the Tolfian camp, and
she gazed at his short, blocky, red-haired figure with tolerance and a
scarce-hidden affection. "The first intelligent race we ever met. They've got
science we can't hope to touch for nobody knows how long, they belong to some
Interstellar Confederation or other with races as advanced as themselves and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]