Foreigner

Meanwhile all of them who went out on Survey, laying down their little grids of tape and counting grass species, took careful specimens of anything new, bushes, grasses, seeding and sporing plants and fungi and the like. The medics waved a part of that sample past Estevez‘ nose and taped other samples to his skin. They hung simple adhesive strips in the wind, and counted what impacted them, and analyzed snips of the filters, figuring at first that whatever Estevez was reacting to had to be airborne. But they were working on a new theory now, and analyzed samples of soil and dead grasses, looking for molds.

So they added the soil punch to the regular test, and extended the grid of samples beyond the sterilized ground. Ian took a soil sample every hundred meters, a punch of a plastic tube down past the root-line, and left his blue plastic tube inserts in a row down the hillside, to pick up on the way back. The old hands down here could walk briskly. He ambled, stopped often, lungs aching, on the long easterly climb uphill, into the rising sun.

He’d spotted different color on the east hill yesterday. It looked like a blooming plant, and if it did bloom, in the economy of nature, one could guess it did that to put forth genetic material for sexual combination to produce seed, as the grasses did, a likely and advantageous system according to their own Earthly prejudice.

That indicated, then, that it was shedding something into the air, and if it was shedding something, one might well argue it was pollen. The committee was still arguing the matter—quasi-pollen or quasi-spores from quasi-flowers, but ask Estevez if hecared. The reproduction of the broadleaf grasses might need debate, and possibly a new nomenclature, but those looked to him like flowers of the sort they grew in the herbarium from Earth seed, red-violet, specifically, different than anything they had yet seen in the landscape.

And sweet-smelling, deliciously sweet, once he’d climbed far enough up the hill to catch the scent, and to take his whole-plant sample.

Stowing that, with best hopes for Estevez, he drew his square, pegging one-meter lines on a plastic grid, took up his handheld recorder, and began counting ordinary grasses—there was a type, Lawton argued, that, with 136 grains per ear on average, showed evidence of artificial selection, probably had drifted from cultivated fields, and that that might let them, at safe distance, gather information on the edibility for humans of what the natives cultivated.

Which would tell them—

A siren blasted out abruptly, down among the base buildings. Ian froze, sitting as he was, looked downhill and looked about him, thinking some surveyor across the valley must have misjudged his position and triggered the perimeter alarm.

Grass near him whispered out of time with the breeze.

Startled, he spun on one knee and found himself staring at a pair of brown, dusty boots, and the hem of a brown, knee-length, many-buttoned coat, and the tall perspective of an ebon-skinned giant.

He couldn’t move. He heard the alarm sounding in the distance, and realized in shock that he was the emergency, and this was the cause of it, this… man, this creature that had picked his approach and his moment and chosen him…

The native beckoned to him, once, twice, unmistakably, to get up. Impossible not to recognize the intelligence, the purpose, the civilized nature of the native, who was black as night, with a face not by any remotest kinship human, but sternly handsome in its planes and angles.

A third time it beckoned. He saw no imminent threat as he rose. It was imposingly tall—more than a head taller—and broad-shouldered. He saw no weapons about its person—in which thought he suddenly realized that it might take some of his equipment for weaponlike. He was afraid to reach even for the probe he’d used, afraid to make a move in any direction, recalling all Earth’s history of war-making mistakes and missed chances for reason.

But he moved a cautious hand to his breast pocket, thumbed the switch on the pocket radio to the open position, all the while watching for the least alarmed reaction.

He said quietly, “Base, I’ve made contact,” and watched the native’s face. “Base.” He kept his voice low, his eyes constantly on the intruder, as if he were speaking to him. “Base, this is Ian. I’ve made contact. I’ve got company out here.”

The native still offered no objection, but in sudden fear of an imprudent answer from Base blasting out, he thumbed the volume control in the direction he devoutly hoped was down.

“Nil li sat-ha,” the intruder said to him—it sounded like that, at least, a low and, thank God, reasonable-sounding voice. He indicated the downward course toward the base, making his own invitation.

It motioned again up the bill.