the odd spear-carrier. Several heads turned to watch me go, but their glances were incurious and nobody tried to haul me back into the party with an excess of drunken zeal.
I don’t like parties, anyhow.
The noise seemed somehow louder as it oozed out after me than it had been when I was in the middle of it. I suppose that was because I had the silence to compare it to. Outside, there was a light breeze and the sun was going down. There was not a soul in sight. To get away from the intrusive sound I went down the steps and began to walk away, into the village. I was, I suppose, walking down what one day might become the main street, but for the time being the conglomeration of buildings lacked that much organization. The hall where the welcoming party was staggering on toward the evening hours was simply the geometrical center of a loosely knit community extending on all sides. The distribution of homes and outhouses obeyed—in a rough and ready fashion—the inverse square law. Even the farm where the ship rested, which was something more than a mile to the west, was “in” the village,—a part of the community whose focal point this was.
I’d gone maybe twenty or thirty paces when I heard someone coming after me. The feet fell lightly, and I knew without looking back that it wasn’t one of the natives. I waited, but didn’t turn until she was level with me. It was Karen Karelia, the spare ship-jockey.
“Fleeing in disgust?” she asked. The hint of irony was rarely missing from her voice. Peter Rolving, whose position as captain she affirmed by fulfilling the role of “crew,” described her as a space freak, implying that she wanted off Earth largely because she wasn’t fond of her fellow men. She was crazy enough, of course—you have to be certifiable to want to ride a starship—but she wasn’t really a volunteer alien.
“I just want to look around before it gets dark,” I told her. “Why should I be disgusted?”
“Doesn’t it strike you as being a little over-extravagant? The food...the people...the way they’re working s hard to pretend that it’s a momentous occasion?”
“It is,” I pointed out. “First contact in five generations, maybe six. The first of the sardine cans must have landed nearly a hundred and eighty years ago, the last...well maybe one-forty, give or take a few.”
“But it isn’t quite what we expected, is it?” she said.
I looked around, at the neat buildings grouped about the hall. There was a store, which had been extended within the last few years so that it now looked like two buildings tacked together. Its business must still be expanding as more and more goods came in from outside. There was a blacksmith’s shop. There were three great barns, semicircular in section, which—at the proper season—might be filled with the produce of the whole village, preparatory to its being loaded into wagons and hauled away.
“I didn’t come with any fixed notions,” I told her. “No, this isn’t what Kilner found. Here, for once, the colony seems to have been successful. It looks good. And they weren’t ready to cut our throats when we came out through the lock...on the contrary, they seemed delighted to see us, even if it did take Nathan half an hour to explain who and what we are.”
“But you sound as if you can’t quite believe it,” she said, “whether you expected the unexpected or not. And you’ve got to admit that they come as something of a surprise. Damn it all, half of them are getting on for seven feet tall!”
I began to walk on, and she walked with me. We headed for a small stone bridge over the stream which cut a curved path through the village.
“It’s odd,” I agreed.
“What’s caused it?”
“Maybe they eat well,” I said. It wasn’t a sarcastic remark, but she took it as such.
“I know people back home who made eating the purpose of their lives,” she said. “People who knew just about everything there is to know about stuffing themselves full of every goddamn edible thing under the sun. They grew fat, but they didn’t grow seven feet tall.”
“We’re under a different sun now,” I pointed out.
She allowed me to dismiss the question without beginning to take it seriously. Inside, though, it was the thing that worried me most. The people looked healthy, happy, and strong. Very strong. A race of giants. People do grow that big on Earth—occasionally. There are a handful of giants in every generation. It’s natural...there’s nothing so very strange about it. But when everybody is built like an Olympic hammer-thrower...you have to wonder whether you’re not discovering a different order of nature altogether.
But there was time to think about such questions. Abundant time. For now, though, I was on an alien world for the first time. I was walking on alien soil, beneath a different sky. I was beset by a strange mixture of sensations—a combination of familiarity and strangeness. It was absurd that the sky should be blue, that the sun sinking toward the horizon should have just the same ruddy face, that the distant clouds hazing its face should be the same clouds that floated over the Earth. Superficially, the familiarity concealed the alien. But there was the knowledge, inside me, that everything here was different. The sun and the sky were not the ones I knew, but were merely in disguise. The lack of any real sensory confirmation of the fact that this world was Floria, ninety light-years from Earth, and not the Earth itself, made me feel that this was all an elaborate facade...a sham...and that there was something weird and terrible lurking just out of sight in the corner of my eye.
I stopped to lean on the parapet of the bridge, to look down into the water of the stream. It was only a couple of feet deep, but the rippled surface was so full of shadows and the red reflected glow of the sun that I couldn’t see anything beneath it.
“No fish at all,” murmured Karen.
“None whatsoever,” I agreed. Here was a point of essential difference. But it was a covert difference. Even if I had been able to see the depths beneath the surface, how could my senses have told me “This is not Earth...because there is no fish to be seen”? There were no fish in the streams of Earth. Only in the farms and the factories, where the water flowed in sculpted channels, artificially aerated and thermostatically adjusted.
She pulled herself up onto the parapet and used its height as a vantage point from which to look out at the village—but the stream itself was in a gully, and she could see little more from here than from the steps of the hall whence we had set out. I scanned the buildings incuriously, but my powers of observation worked uncontrolled, and my brain processed their information as a matter of habit.
I noted that the buildings—each and every one, whether home or hut, brick or stone or wood, great or small—seemed curiously unfinished. There was not a one that had been. architecturally planned. They had been put up quickly, each to serve their function, with the assumption that each one might be constantly rebuilt—improved and extended. Each building had a life of its own. They were capable of growth and change, perhaps even of metamorphosis.
It was a small thing, but it seemed meaningful. No one built that way on Earth. Here, the community was in a constant state of remaking itself: reshaping and replanning and reforming. They were unaffected by insidious myths of optimum use of resources and ultimate ends. There was a relaxation in the way things were done here, and a tension in the way they were done on Earth.
“Perhaps it’s a local thing,” said Karen.
“What?”
“The giant business. Perhaps they’re inbred, perhaps it’s a freak.”
“I
