Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 43: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MISSION OF GRAVITY tures who apparently belonged to the identical species as the Bree’s crew. They were certainly alike in shape, size, and coloring; and as they approached the ship they uttered ear-splitting hoots pre- cisely like those Lackland had heard on occasion from his small friends. The canoes were apparently dugouts, hollowed out sufficiently so that only the head end of each crew member could be seen; from their distribution, Lackland suspected that they lay herringbone fashion inside, with the paddles operated by the foremost sets of pincer-equipped arms. Actually they sculled rather than paddled; the blades were not lifted from the water at any time, and there seemed to be little back-and-forth movement. None of Barlennan’s crew analyzed these points; what interested them was the fact that the canoes were approaching far more rapidly than the Bree had ever moved except in a full gale. If their paddlers should prove hostile, as recent incidents made probable, there was nothing that could be done to avoid a fight; there was practically no wind, and what there was blew straight toward the left bank from which the canoes had come. 3 The crew unobtrusively took up their stations on the outer rafts, weapons be- side them. The leeward flamethrowers were manned, though Barlennan doubted that they would be useful under these conditions. Krendoranic, the munitions officer, was working furiously at one of his storage bins, but no one knew what he was up to; there was no standard pro- cedure for his department in such a situation. Actually, the entire defense routine of the ship was being upset by the lack of wind, something that almost never occurred on the open sea. Any chance there might have been to make effective use of the flame dust vanished as the fleet of canoes opened out to surround the Bree. Two or three yards from her on all sides they glided to a stop, and for a minute or two there was. silence. To Lackland’s intense annoyance, the sun set at this point and he was no longer able to see what went on. The next eight minutes he had to spend trying to attach meaning to the weird sounds that came over the set, which was not a very profitable effort since none of them formed words in any language he knew. There was nothing that denoted any yiolent activity; ap- parently the two crews were simply speak- ing to each other in experimental fashion. He judged, however, that they could find no common language, since there appeared to be nothing like a sustained conver- sation. With sunrise, however, he discovered that the night had not been wholly un- eventful. By rights, the Bree should have drifted some distance downstream during the darkness; actually, she was still op- posite the village. Furthermore she was no longer far out in the river, but only a few yards from the bank. Lackland was about to ask Barlennan what he meant by taking such a risk, and also how he had managed to maneu- ver the Bree, when it became evident that the captain was just as surprised as he at this turn of events. His voice could be heard issuing a steady stream of com- ment, orders, and, Lackland suspected, invective in his own language, rising steadily in pitch until he finally seemed to lose his voice entirely. The Earthman could have learned much from that fact if he had been able to interpret it cor- rectly. Instead, he failed even to notice it particularly. Wearing a slightly annoyed expression, he turned to one of the men sitting beside him—the receiving screens for Barlennan’s vision sets had been set up in a small auditorium in the station on Toorey, and expedition members who had nothing else to do could usually be found there—with the remark: “Barl has let himself get into trouble already. I know he’s a smart fellow, but with over thirty thousand miles to go I don’t like to see him getting held up in the first hundred.” ; “Aren’t you going to help him? There are a couple of billion dollars, not to “at mention a lot of reputations, riding with “What can I do? All I could give — would be advice, and he can size up the => situation better than I can. He can see it COMIC OOS com