The Aliens [сборник]

"The plant I grew in the bottle," said Steve. "It used up all the water. It held it. It got bone-dry to the touch, though it was nearly all water, actually. Then it started to bud. -It works fast. But it hasn't gone on to seed. I don't think it will, of itself. I suspect I can make it-and I suspect I'm going to because it will be good business to have a source of those seeds. But I don't think it will seed of itself. I think there's a very trivial item involved that our friend's friends couldn't figure on in advance. We can figure it, and we would, but I don't think they could."

They came out upon an open space where a great, bald, rounded dome projected from the mountain as a buttress to the monster still reaching thousands of feet toward the sky. This was five thousand feet above the valley floor. Beyond the great rounded projection there was a vista of space illimitable. Mountain after mountain and valley after valley. It was magnificent. But the two men had no eyes for it. They saw only a small, non-human figure in the middle of the huge gray dome.

It was very much smaller than a man. It was grotesque by earthly standards and it was pathetic by any standard. It staggered as it moved out from the bulk of the mountain. It was exhausted, and undoubtedly it was feverish and enfeebled by temperatures which to it were incredible. And it was alone as no human being has ever yet been alone. It went staggering out from the mountain-flank upon this buttress, where there was nowhere that it could flee.

"Got 'an now!" said Brady. Gyp screamed and yelped shrilly at the staggering thing.

"Barely able to walk," said Steve soberly. "Poor devil! Brady, let me take your pistol. I can probably stun him with the noise, if I have to. I'll go out to him alone and try to make him understand we want to be friendly."

He stepped out in slow pursuit. He held up his hands in the universal human sign of peace. The thing stopped and stared fully at him, wavering on its feet. It was a bare quarter-mile away. Steve went coaxingly toward it, trying with infinite care to give the impression of peaceful intentions to a creature which had no single mental link with man. The creature turned and shamified on. Steve halted. He called after it. Then he realized that if it was the creature's voice he had heard after the shot of the night before, that his voice would be low-pitched indeed to its ears. His words would sound to it like low-toned, menacing growlings. It went on. Steve suddenly essayed to run, to head it off from the abyss before it. But the creature seemed to summon a terrible, an infinitely heart-breaking resolve. It lumbered into a wholly desperate and despairing run. The rocky dome sloped downward. The creature moved faster and faster. -. - The rock slanted down…

Steve stopped short. But the creature could not stop. It stumbled and fell and even then it did not stop. It went on, sliding, twisting, turning…

It went out of sight. But it would fall fifteen hundred to two thousand feet before it hit. Steve went desolately back to Brady.

"You saw what happened," he said tiredly. "Maybe I was stupid; But I didn't know what else to do. If we could have communicated with him, we could have made friends… Maybe we could have communicated with the ship he came from. Maybe-But what's the use?"

"No use," said Brady. His forehead was creased. "But that weed business… You think those red plants are goin' to take over as weeds, like you said?"

Steve went to the burro-pack and looked at the glass jar. He'd left the top off. The coiled, twisted, tawny-red object was exactly as he'd left it. He examined it with vast care.

"No," he said drily. "After all-not a chance. These buds haven't developed and now they won't, because these plants work fast. It went so far and no farther. -The limit of a plant's normal northward range and the time of year it blooms is determined by the amount of sunshine it needs each day before it can form a flower and seeds afterward. Spring plants don't need much. Midsummer plants need more. The critical factor is ultraviolet. We've got a thick atmosphere, here on earth. Not much ultraviolet gets through, by comparison with what arrives from the sun. But this plant developed where the air was so thin that the ultraviolet was ten or twenty tunes stronger than on Earth So this plant will never bloom or make seed on Earth unless we put it under a battery of ultraviolet lights. Which we will. We'll want more seeds than I've got."

Then Steve said in rueful satisfaction:

"But will they be swell arid-area plants! We may have to tinker with them with X-rays to get them to mutate, and we may have to propagate favorable varieties by slips, but with a plant that'll grow where these do, we'll wind up with cattle-food and maybe an industrial raw material and-and-"

Brady said:

"We'd oughta try to find that fells's body."

"Naturally," said Steve. "I wish we could have made friends…"

But there simply hadn't been any way to do it. On the way down to the foot of the mountain-buttress, Steve found himself thinking more and more regretfully about that failure. There were other matters to be attended to, of course. The wreckage had to be retrieved and investigated. That should be a government job. There might be some very useful stuff.