Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 43: what you’re looking at

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

SHARE OUR WORLD 41 ing. ““That’s what we’ve been waiting for,” he said. “The ... the nibblies!” she said, smiling briefly at Balch. “Ten of them.” “Thirteen, in fact. Fourteen. This should be better for you than the movies Ranji and I brought you. Take a good look at how they graze.” “Don’t worry, I am.” The nibblies were quadrupeds, over a meter long. In general they were a. good deal like several non-predatory species from home, or from Earth and A Centauri, which Chang had studied ; but several things gave them a dis- tinctive “personality” in Chang’s mind. Their round, tailless bodies led without the intervention of any neck into the sharp snouts with the pe- culiarly mobile tips. And their gait was unique. At every step their whole body would rise a quarter of a meter in the air, hind quarters first, then the front. This herd of them made quite a picture when they were all loping together in the same direction: a denser, green-brown wave rippling through the blue-green haze of the rippling forest. For a while they grazed calmly. Chang could not see what they were eating, though she could make several good guesses. Then she thought they began to seem restless. She stood up and craned her neck to both sides, trying to get a better view. For a moment she thought she’d been mis- taken, but then the three nibblies de- tached themselves from the group and went off a little to the right. They loped from one, of the slender “‘tree trunks” to another, stopping to nudge each one firmly with the sides of their round bodies. With her eyes Chang followed sev- eral of the trunks up through the tangle of the forest, identifying them when she could. They were without horizontal branches. Also, like most of the large photosynthetic species on Four, they did not have single trunks ; each tree stood on three or more approximately vertical “‘legs,’’ which merged ten or twenty meters up. Otherwise, she knew, such slender stems could never keep an upright position. They were intertwined with each other from the ground to the tree tops, and vines scarcely dis- tinguishable from the trees climbed among them. Chang remembered Balch had told her of a section of forest which had apparently been blown down a while before, or. simply fallen under its own weight; it was hard to see why it didn’t happen oftener. The three nibblies traveled in a figure-8, nudging trunk after trunk. Then they stopped and looked up, surveying the tangled braid into which the trunks led. (When they wanted to look behind them, they simply tipped their heads farther back instead of turning them sideways—a maneuver which delighted Chang.) Next they loped back to the rest of the herd. “Balch, you’ve got plenty of movies of all this?” “Plenty. There are a good many new ones in the report I just sent you. Relax.” The whole herd had gathered in a tight circle, facing inward so that the noses touched. They remained that way, motionless, for over two and a half minutes—Chang timed it. Then they dispersed. Chang said, “Now, do they wiggle their noses when they have these huddles?” She giggled involuntarily. *“Can’t tell; we’ve never been close enough to them to know for sure.” ‘Four is a very strange planet.” Most of the herd withdrew a little into the forest. Three of them—the same three?—approached different conniclboolks.cornn