The Aliens [сборник]

Brady jerked his thumb at the line which was not woven or twisted, but was one single strand of a single substance.

"Ain't any rope like that, either," he observed. Then he looked at Gyp. "Nor any smell like he wants to trail.-Try it?'

Steve hesitated. He tucked a handful of the nacreous small seeds into an envelope and put it in his pocket. He examined the other piles. All were alike. He filled wide-mouthed glass specimen containers with the seeds and capped them. He put them back in the burro-packs.

"We might as well," he said uneasily. "It looks like there was something alive in there, and it came out and has gone off. It doesn't seem like it could have been a man, though. It might have been a child-but that's not right, either!"

It didn't make sense. Not any of it. Brady poured out water from the supply a burro carried. He offered it to Gyp. The dog drank with feverish thirst. Then he licked Brady's hand and went back to the trail. Again he barked and snarled and growled at it.

The two men followed him toward the hills.

Brady frowned as Gyp went on over the desert, using bad language all the way. Gyp did not usually make such a racket on a trail. The scent was evidently one which agitated him unreasonably. Presently he led the men to a sheltered spot where there was shade. The surface of the ground was slightly crusted from the vanished rain, and there were tracks. More-something had rested on the sand.

Gyp barked and snarled until he seemed to scream hatred at the place where something had apparently lain down. Steve looked. Brady scowled.

"Just what," asked Steve, "would you say made that, Brady?"

"There ain't anything that makes that kinda trail, or that kinda print when it lays down," said Brady curtly. "I'd admire to see that thing. -It ain't big," he added. "A .45 bullet would stop it, sure. I'd like to look it over."

"No bird or animal or lizard," said Steve, as if arguing with himself. "It came from that-wreckage out in the valley. Hmm... We'll track this down, Brady but we don't shoot too quick."

Brady grunted. They went on. At four in the afternoon Gyp was a badly whipped dog. He was beaten by the heat and the awful dryness. Steve had drunk two canteens of water, despite rigorous self-denial. But Brady had known what to expect. Each of their burros carried water as a full half of its burden. They could go a week and longer without coming upon a water-hole. But they were a silent, dogged crew, the two men and two burros and the dog as they trudged across a waste of incandescent heat and sunshine, with a cloud of fine dry dust rising behind them. They reached the far side of Seco Valley just at sunset, Glorious colorings filled the sky. Without a word, they began the ascent of the hills. Gyp could barely drag one paw before the other. Brady halted and gave him water. The dog drank as if he would never stop. Then he went back to the trail, growling again.

"Never seen him like this before," said Brady uncomfortably. "He hates whatever he's trailin'. He don't feel like that about mountain lions or anything else. What is it, anyways?"

Steve had been thinking. He'd hunted conscientiously enough for signs of vegetation coming from the rain of Wednesday. But he'd been thinking hard. Seeds which lay on absolutely dry sand and put out threads as fine as gossamer, which wormed their way through a foot and a half of dry soil to find dampness, and there swelled monstrously to greasy-looking rootlets. There wasn't any plant like that. There were no such seeds! And the smashed thing in the valley. It was artificial, certainly. But nobody would make anything like that. The rope-nobody could make anything like that. The scent of the interior of the smashed thing-vaguely, Steve was beginning to imagine it reconstructed into a globe was so alien that there was no word for it. And Gyp-

"I've got a hunch," said Steve abruptly. "Stop at a level place, Brady. I'm going to put one of those seeds in water. I've got an idea it will surprise us. But the idea of how is crazy! But-anyhow, did you notice how that wreckage was braced?"

Brady grunted negatively.

"It was braced against outside pressure," said Steve. "Like a submarine. The pressure-cabin of the plane I was in was braced against inside pressure pushing out. This was braced against outside pressure pushing in. Mean anything?"

Brady shook his head. They were now perhaps two hundred feet above the valley floor. Brady halted. Steve went to one of the burrows and got out a specimen-jar. He slushed it half full of water-and drank deeply of the rest. He reached in his pocket for the envelope of seeds he had brought. He tried to pull the envelope out. He had trouble.

When it came, it ripped to shreds.

A tress of cobwebby threads stretched tenaciously back to his pocket. It was elastic. It was strong. Each thread was infinitesimal, but their total strength was great. As he tagged at them he felt crawling sensations next to his skin. He gasped suddenly and tore off his clothes. The gossamer threads went through his shirt, between the weave of the cloth. Inside there were fat, worm-like objects which began in the fine, silky threads but were themselves swollen and like beef-fat in appearance. They were rootlets, each one developed from a thread from a seed. Each seed in the envelope in Steve's pocket had put out a probe which had worked through his garments to the moisture next his skin. Every thread had swollen hugely in that moisture. Some of them were half the size of a lead-pencil. The sun sank behind the mountains in a glory of rose and gold. Darkness flowed over the valley which was quite the most arid spot on earth. There was a winking glitter of reflected sunlight from polished plastic.