The humanoid meant it ... meant every word of the thing he said. He was not being dramatic, nor was he blustering . . . and neither was he bluffing. He actually thought that the humans would not leave, that they would not live to leave the planet.

  Decker smiled softly to himself.

  ‘You will die here,’ said the humanoid thought.

  ‘Die?’ asked Decker. ‘What is die?’

  The match-stick man’s thought was pure disgust. Deliberately, he reached up and took off the headset, laid it carefully back upon the table.

  Then he turned and walked away and not a man made a move to stop him.

  Decker took off his headset, slammed it on the table top.

  ‘Jackson,’ he said, ‘pick up a phone and tell the Legion to let him through. Let him leave. Don’t try to stop him.’ ,

  He sat limply in his chair and looked at the ring effaces that was watching him.

  Waldron asked, ‘What is it, Decker?’

  ‘He sentenced us to death,’ said Decker. ‘He said he would not allow us to leave the planet. He said that we would die here.’

  ‘Strong words,’ said Waldron.

  ‘He meant them,’ Decker said.

  He lifted a hand, flipped it wearily. ‘He doesn’t know, of course,’ he said. ‘He really thinks that he can stop us leaving. He thinks that we will die.”

  It was an amusing situation, really. That a naked humanoid should walk out of the jungle and threaten to kill a human survey party. That he should really think that he could do it. That he should be positive about it.

  But there was not a single smile on any of the faces that looked at Decker.

  ‘We can’t let it get us,’ Decker said.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Waldron declared, ‘we should take all precautions.’

  Decker nodded. ‘We’ll go on emergency alert immediately,’ he said. ‘We’ll stay that way until we’re sure ... until we’re ...’

  He halted angrily. Sure of what? Sure that an alien savage who wore no clothing, who had not a sign of culture about him could wipe out a group of humans protected by a ring of steel, held within a guard of machine and robots and a group of fighting men who knew all there was to know concerning the refinement of dealing out swift and merciless extermination to anything that moved against them?

  Ridiculous?

  Of course it was ridiculous!

  And yet the eyes had held intelligence. The being had had not only intelligence, but courage. He had stood within a circle of what to him were alien beings and he had not flinched. He had faced the unknown and said what there was to say and then had walked away with a dignity any human would have been proud to wear. He had known that the alien beings within the confines of the base were not of his own planet, for he had said they should not have come and his thought had implied that he was aware they were not of this world of his. He had understood that he was supposed to put on the headset, but whether that was an act more of courage than of intelligence one would never know - for you could not know if he had realized what the headset had been for. Not knowing, the naked courage of clamping it to his head was of an order that could not be measured.

  ‘What do you think?’ Decker asked Waldron.

  ‘We’ll have to be careful,’ Waldron told him evenly. ‘We’ll have to watch our step. Take all precautions now that we are warned. But there’s nothing to be scared of, nothing we can’t handle.’

  ‘He was bluffing,’ Dickson said. ‘Trying to scare us into leaving.’

  Decker shook his head. ‘I don’t think he was,’ he said. ‘I tried to bluff him and it didn’t work. He’s just as sure as we are.’

  The work went on.

  There was no attack.

  The jets roared out and thrummed away, mapping the land. Field parties went out, cautiously. They were flanked by robots and by legionnaires and preceded by lumbering machines that knifed and tore and burned a roadway through even the most stubborn of the terrain they went up against. Radio weather stations were set up at distant points and at the base the weather tabulators clicked off the data that the stations sent back.

  Other field parties were flown into the special areas pinpointed for more extensive exploration and investigation.

  And nothing happened.

  The days went past.

  The weeks went past.

  The machines and robots watched and the legionnaires stood ready and the men hurried with their work to get off the planet.

  A bed of coal was found and mapped. An iron range was discovered. One area in the mountains to the west crawled with radioactive ores. The botanists found twenty-seven species of edible fruits. The base swarmed with animals that had been trapped as specimens and remained as pets.

  And a village of the match-stick men was found.

  It wasn’t much of a place. Its huts were primitive. Its sanitation was non-existent. Its people were peaceful.

  Decker left his chair under the striped pavilion to lead a party to the village.

  The party entered cautiously, weapons ready but being very careful not to move too fast, not to speak too quickly, not to make a motion that might be construed as hostile.

  The natives sat in their doorways and watched them. They did not speak and they did not move. They simply watched the humans as they marched to the centre of the village.

  There the robots set up a table and placed a mentograph upon it. Decker sat down in a chair and put one of the headsets on his skull. The rest of the party drew up into a line and waited.

  Decker waited and the others waited and the natives sat in their doorways watching.

  They waited for an hour and not a native stirred. None came forward to put on the other headset.

  Decker waved his hand wearily, took off the headset.

  ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘It won’t work. Go ahead and take your pictures. Do anything you wish. But don’t disturb the natives. Don’t touch a single thing.’

  He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his steaming face.

  Waldron came and leaned on the table. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked.

  Decker shook his head. ‘It haunts me,’ he said. ‘There’s just one thing that I am thinking. It must be wrong. It can’t be right. But I thought of it and I can’t get rid of it.’

  ‘Sometimes that happens,’ Waldron said. ‘No matter how illogical a thing may be it sticks with a man, like a burr inside his brain.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Decker, ‘that they have told us all that they have to tell us. That they have nothing more they wish to say to us.’

  ‘That’s what you thought,’ said Waldron.

  Decker nodded. ‘A funny thing to think,’ he said. ‘Out of clear sky. And it can’t be right.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Waldron. ‘Nothing’s right here. Notice that they haven’t got a single iron tool. Not a single scrap of metal in evidence at all. Their cooking utensils are stone, a sort of funny stuff like soapstone. What few tools they have are stone.’

  ‘And yet,’ Decker told him, ‘they’re intelligent. Look at their eyes. Intelligence there if you ever saw it. And that fellow who came into the base. He knew what to do with the headset. He knew that we didn’t belong on the planet.’

  Waldron sucked thoughtfully at a back tooth. ‘We better be getting back to base,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’

  He held his wrist in front of him.

  ‘My watch has stopped,’ he said. ‘What time do you have Decker?’

  Decker’s arm came up and Waldron heard the sharp gasp of his breath. Slowly, Decker raised his head, looked at the other man.

  ‘My watch has stopped, too,’ he said, and his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

  For a moment they were graven images, eyes matching eyes, and then Waldron jerked his head away.

  ‘Assemble,’ he shouted. ‘Back to the base. Quick!’

  The men came running. The robots fell into place. The column marched away. The natives sat in their doorway and watched them leave.

  Decker sat in his camp chair and listened to the canvas of the pavilion snapping softly in the wind, alive in the wind, talking and laughing to itself. The lantern, hung on the ring above his head, swayed gently and cast fleeting shadows that seemed at times to be the shadows of living, moving things. A robot stood quietly by one of the pavilion poles.

  Stolidly Decker reached out a finger and stirred the little pile of wheels and springs that lay upon the table.

  Sinister, he thought.

  Sinister and queer.

  The guts of watches, lying on the table.

  Not of two watches alone, not only his and Waldron’s watches, but many other watches from the wrists of other men.

  All of them silent, stilled in their task of marking time.

  Night had fallen hours before, but the base still was astir with activity that was at once feverish and furtive. Men moved about in the shadows and crossed the glaring patches of brilliance shed by the banks of lights set up by the robots many weeks before. Watching them, one would have sensed that they moved with a haunting sense of doom - and would have known as well that they knew, deep in their inmost hearts, that there was no doom to fear. No definite thing that one could put a finger on and say this is the thing to fear. No direction that one could point and say doom lies out there, waiting to leap upon us.

  Just one small thing.

  Watches had stopped running.

  And that was a simple thing for which there must be some simple explanation.

  Except, thought Decker, on an alien planet no occurrence, no accident or incident, can be regarded as a simple thing for which a simple explanation must necessarily be anticipated. For the matrix of cause and effect, the mathematics of chance, may not hold true on alien planets as they hold true on Earth.

  There was one rule, Decker thought grimly.

  One rule: Take no chances.

  That was the one safe rule to follow, the only rule to follow.

  Following it, he had ordered all field parties back to base, ordered the crew to prepare the ship for emergency take off, had alerted the robots to be ready at an instant to get the machines aboard - to even desert the machines and leave without them if circumstances should dictate that such was necessary.

  Having done that, there was no more to do but wait. Wait until the field parties came back from their advance camps. Wait until some reason could be assigned to the failure of the watches.

  It was not a thing, he told himself, that should be allowed to panic one. It was a thing to recognize, not to disregard. It was a thing which made necessary a certain number of precautions, but it was not a thing that should make one lose all sense of proportion.

  You could not go back to Earth and say: ‘Well, you see, our watches stopped and so...’

  A footstep sounded and he swung around in his chair. It was Jackson.

  ‘What is it, Jackson?’ Decker asked.

  ‘The camps aren’t answering, sir,’ said Jackson. ‘The operator has been trying to raise them and there is no answer . . . Hot a single peep.’

  Decker grunted. ‘Take it easy,’ he said, ‘They will answer. Give them time.’

  He wished, even as he spoke, that he could feel some of the assurance that he tried to put into his voice. For a second a rising terror mounted in his throat and he choked it back.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘We’ll sit here and have a beer and then we’ll go down to the radio shack and see what’s stirring.’

  He rapped on the table. ‘Beer,’ he said. ‘Two beers.’

  The robot standing by the pavilion pole did not answer.

  He made his voice louder.

  The robot did not stir.

  Decker put his fists upon the table and tried to rise, but his legs suddenly were cold and had turned to water and he could not raise himself.

  ‘Jackson,’ he panted, ‘go and tap that robot on the shoulder. Tell him we want some beer.’

  He saw the fear that whitened Jackson’s face as he rose and moved slowly forward. Inside himself, starting in the pit of his belly and rising to worry at his throat, he left the same whiplash terror that Jackson must have felt.

  Jackson stood beside the robot and reached out a hesitant hand, tapped him gently on the shoulder, tapped him harder -and the robot fell flat upon his face!

  Feet hammered across the hard packed earth, heading toward the pavilion.

  Decker jerked himself around, sat four-square and solid in his chair, waiting.

  It was MacDonald, chief engineer.

  He stopped at the table’s edge and gripped .its boards with two grimy hands. His face was twisted as if he were about to weep.

  ‘The ship, sir. The ship...’

  Decker nodded, almost idly. ‘I know, Mr. MacDonald. The ship won’t run.’

  MacDonald gulped. ‘The big stuff’s all right, sir. But the, little gadgets... the injector mechanism, the...’

  He stopped and stared at Decker. ‘You knew,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I knew,’ said Decker, ‘that it would come some day. Not like this, perhaps. But in any one of several ways. I knew that the days would come when our luck would run too thin, when we’d cover all the possibilities but the one that we could not suspect and that, of course, would be the one that would ruin us.’

  He was thinking: The natives had no metal. No sign of any metal in their camp, at all. Their dishes were soapstone and they wore no ornaments. Their implements were stone. (And yet they were intelligent enough, civilized enough, cultured enough, to have fabricated metal. For there was metal here ... a great deposit of it in the western mountains. They tried, perhaps, many centuries ago. Had fashioned metal tools and metal ornaments and had them go to pieces underneath their fingers after a few short weeks.

  Waldron came into the pavilion on cat-like feet.

  ‘The radio’s dead,’ he said, ‘and the robots are dying like flies. The place is littered with them, just so much scrap steel.’

  Decker nodded. ‘The little stuff, the finely fabricated will go first,’ he said. ‘Like watches and radio innards and robot brains and injector mechanisms. After that it will be the big stuff. The ship will melt into a heap of slag.’

  ‘The native told us,’ Waldron said, ‘when you had him up here. You will never leave, he said.’

  ‘We didn’t understand,’ said Decker. ‘We thought he was threatening us and we knew that we were too big, too well guarded for any threat of his to harm us. He wasn’t threatening us at all, of course. He was just telling us. Warning us, maybe, although even then it might have been too late. He might even have felt sorry for us.’

  He made a hopeless gesture with his hand. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ said Waldron, quietly. ‘Not yet at least. We may find out later, but it won’t help us any. A microbe, maybe. A virus. Something that eats iron after it has been subjected to heat or alloyed with other metals. Something that won’t tolerate alloyed metal on the planet. It doesn’t go for iron ore. If it did, that deposit we found would have been gone long ago. Possibly the radioactive ore as well.’

  ‘How does it survive?’ asked Decker. ‘Without stuff to eat, how does it live?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Waldron. ‘It might not be a metal-eating organism at all. It might be something else. Something in the atmosphere.’

  ‘We tested the atmosphere.’

  But, even as the words left his mouth, Decker saw how foolish they were. They had tested the atmosphere, but how could they have detected something they had never run across before? Man’s yardstick was limited - limited to the things he knew about, limited by the circle of his own experience.

  He guarded himself against the obvious and the imaginable. He could not guard himself against the unknowable or the unimaginable.

  Decker stood up and saw Jackson standing by the pavilion pole, with the robot stretched out at his feet, his metal hide gleaming in the shine of the swaying lantern.

  ‘You have your answer,’ he told the biochemist. ‘Remember that first day. You talked with me in the lounge.’

  Jackson nodded. ‘I remember, sir,’ he said. His voice was quiet.

  And suddenly, Decker realized, the entire base was quiet.

  A gust of wind came out of the jungle and rattled the canvas and set the lantern to swaying violently.

  Now, for the first time since they had landed, he caught in the wind the alien smell of an alien world.

 

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