About a kilometer or so further on they dropped to all fours again and painfully crawled to the edge once more. Grote hissed the women into silence as they hunched up beside him.
The beach was empty now.
«Do you think they saw us?» Lee asked.
«Don’t know.»
Lee used the electro-optics again and scanned the beach. «No sign of them.»
«Their footprints,» Grote snapped. «Look there.»
The trails of two very human-looking sets of footprints marched straight into the water. All four of them searched the sea for hours, but saw nothing. Finally, they decided to set up the other camera. It was turning dark by the time they finished.
«We’ve got to get back to the car,» Grote said, wearily, when they finished. «There’s not enough food in the suits for another day.»
«I’ll stay here,» Lee replied. «You can bring me more supplies tomorrow.»
«No. If there’s anything to see, the cameras will pick it up. Chien is monitoring them back at the car, and the whole crew of the ship must he watching the view.»
Lee saw there was no sense arguing. Besides, he was bone tired. But he knew he’d be back again as soon as he could get there.
«Well, it settles a three-hundred-year-old argument,» Aaron Hatfield said as he watched the viewscreen.
The biochemist and Lee were sitting in the main workroom of the ship’s Sirius globe, watching the humanoids as televised by the cameras on the cliffs. Charnovsky was on the other side of the room, at a workbench, flashing rock chips with a laser so that a spectrometer could analyze their chemical composition.
The other outsiders were traveling in the skimmer again, collecting more floral and insect specimens.
«What argument?» Lee asked.
Hatfield shifted in his chair, making the webbing creak. «About the human form … whether it’s an accident or a result of evolutionary selection. From them,» he nodded toward the screen, «I’d say it’s no accident.»
One camera was on wide-field focus and showed a group of three of the men. They were wading hip-deep in the surf, carrying slender rods high above their heads to keep them free of the surging waves. The other camera was fixed on a close-up view of three women standing on the beach, watching their men. Like the men, they were completely naked and black-skinned. They looked human in every detail.
Every morning they appeared on the beach, often carrying the rods, but sometimes not. Lee concluded that they must live in caves cut into the cliffs. The rods looked like simple bone spears but even under the closest focus of the cameras he couldn’t be sure.
«They’re not Negroid,» he muttered, more to himself than anyone listening.
«It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?» Hatfield asked.
Nodding, Lee said, «They just don’t look like terrestrial Negroes, except for their skin coloring. And that’s an adaptation to Sirius’ brightness. Plenty of ultraviolet, too.»
Charnovsky came over and pulled up a chair. «So. Have they caught any fish this morning?»
«Not yet,» Lee answered.
Jabbing a stubby finger toward the screen, the Russian asked, «Are these the geniuses who built the machines on Titan? Fishing with bone spears? They don’t make much of an enemy.»
«They could have been our enemy,» Lee answered, forcing a thin smile. He was getting accustomed to Charnovsky’s needling, but not reconciled to it.
The geologist shook his head sadly. «Take the advice of an older man, dear friend, and disabuse yourself of this idea. Statistics are a powerful tool, Sid. The chances of this particular race being the one that built on Titan are fantastically high. And the chances—»
«What’re the chances that two intelligent races will both evolve along the same physical lines?» Lee snapped.
Charnovsky shrugged. «We have two known races. They are both human in form. The chances must be excellent.»
Lee turned back to watch the viewscreen, then asked Hatfield, «Aaron, the biochemistry here is very similar to Earth’s, isn’t it?»
«Very close.»
«I mean … I could eat local food and be nourished by it? I wouldn’t be poisoned or anything like that?»
«Well,» Hatfield said, visibly thinking it out as he spoke, «as far as the structure of the proteins and other foodstuffs are concerned … yes, I guess you could get away with eating it. The biochemistry is basically the same as ours, as nearly as I’ve been able to tell. But so are terrestrial shellfish, and they make me deathly ill. You see, there’re all sorts of enzymes, and microbial parasites, and viruses …»
«We’ve been living with the local bugs for months now,» Lee said. «We’re adapted to them, aren’t we?»
«You know what they say about visiting strange places: don’t drink the water.»
On the viewscreen, one of the natives struck into the water with his spear, and instantly the water began to boil with the thrashing of some sea creature. The other two men drove their spears home, and the thrashing died. They lifted a four-foot-long fish out of the water and started back for the beach, carrying it triumphantly over their heads. The camera’s autotracker kept the picture on them. The women on the beach were jumping and clapping with joy.
«Damn,» Lee said softly. «They’re as human as we are.»
«And obviously representative of a high technical civilization,» Charnovsky said.
«Survivors of one, maybe,» Lee answered. «Their culture might have been wiped out by the Pup’s explosion or by war.»
«Now it gets even more dramatic: two cultures destroyed, ours and theirs.»
«All right, go ahead and laugh,» Lee said. «I won’t be able to prove anything until I get to live with them.»
«Until what?» Hatfield said.
«Until I go out there and meet them face to face, learn their language, their culture, live with them.»
«Live with them?» Rasmussen looked startled; the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain’s monomolecular biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat.
They were sitting around a circular table in the conference room of the Sirius globe: the six «outsiders,» Grote, Chien, Captain Rasmussen, Pascual and Lehman.
«Aren’t you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?» Grote asked, grinning.
«I don’t think they have pots. Or fire, for that matter,» Lee countered.
The laugh turned on Grote.
Lee went on quietly, «I’ve checked it out with Aaron, here. There’s no biochemical reason why I couldn’t survive in the native environment. Doris and Marlene have agreed to gather the same types of food we’ve seen the humanoids carrying, and I’ll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them.»
Lehman hunched forward, from across the table, and asked Lee, «About the dynamics of having a representative of our relatively advanced culture step into their primitive—»
«I won’t be representing an advanced culture to them,» Lee said. «I intend to be just as naked and toolless as they are. And just as black. Aaron can inject me with the proper enzymes to turn my skin black.»
«That would be necessary in any event if you don’t want to be sunburned to death,» Pascual said.
Hatfield added, «You’ll also need contact lenses that’ll screen out the UV and protect your eyes.»
They spent an hour discussing all the physical precautions he would have to take. Lee kept glancing at Rasmussen. The idea’s slipping out from under his control. The captain watched each speaker in turn, squinting with concentration and sinking deeper and deeper into his Viking scowl. Then, when Lee was certain that the captain could no longer object, Rasmussen finally spoke up: «One more question. Are you willing to give up an eye for this mission of yours?»