Said body is a prolate spheroid supported on five legs. Its remotest ancestors were radially symmetric, somewhat like starfish, though they were not starfish. It has evolved to walk upright on its arms and, through a fortuitous doubling of genes, alternated these with smaller manipulating appendages. All organs needful for a happy life are gathered into the spheroid that gives it its name. It is more nonchalant about ionizing radiation than humans or apkallu, but works with dread around electrical fluids. It wears clothing—he’s an alien, not a savage—and, like a human, pulls his pants on one leg at a time. It just takes a little longer.
We will call it “Jim-7” and this for two reasons. First, the central lower tone of the creature’s name-chord does sound a bit like “jim” while none of the rest of it sounds much like anything at all, even the parts within the normal range of human hearing. (Its speech resembles a concertina scolding a set of bagpipes.) And, second, since “Jim” does not sound much like a creature from outer space, the addition of a “-7” lends it a properly alien aspect. It beats a long gargle of random consonants.
If what the creature calls itself is hard to say, whether it calls itself he, she, or it is even harder, as there are circumstances under which it might be each, all, or none, and it trades them off as needful. There are more pronouns in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philology.
But Jim’s plight is no laughing matter, and this again for two reasons. First, no life struggling on the lip of the Great Abyss is cause for mirth. If Jim fails, one more candle in a cold, dark universe is blown out.
Dogs feel emotions, and reptiles, and even crummy little cockroaches as they scurry terrified from the menacing light. Hence, Jim-7, drifting in her malfunctioning vessel far off the lines of advance of her Nest, feels something very much like what any human would feel when staring Death in its stinking face.
She casts about for something, for anything, to pin her hopes upon, and so discerns the electronic umbra from the third planet. The enzymes that course through her are not the same as ours, and strictly speaking they are not even enzymes, but what she feels is a joy as buoyant as any human if, adrift upon the trackless ocean, she glimpses a flotation device bobbing nearby.
Electronic emissions mean that the planet produces materials that might be adapted to the necessary repairs. There may be little difference between a snowball’s chance in hell and two snowballs’ chance; but that is an enormous gulf to no chance at all. And so it nests in orbit and sets about obtaining the required components. This is not as easy as it sounds. It cannot simply walk into Fry’s and purchase them. Several difficulties to this course immediately suggest themselves.
It is alone and afraid on a world full of strange beings who, it suspects, would react poorly to a shiny, two-meter tall pentapede in their midst. And so it beams down at small hours to deserted places, seeking out storehouses of electronic components. The task is anything but straightforward. What does an alien warehouse look like? But eventually, it discovers such a repository, notes the sigils that identify it, and pilfers a representative sample of doohickeys.
After that, the tedium of testing begins. It must discover what each thingamabob is, and determine its rating. You can’t really expect headwalker resistors or capacitors to look like ours, or to be graduated in ohms and farads. Form follows function, but at a respectable distance, and Jim’s people long ago standardized on different shapes and scales. Fortunately, he is the ship’s engineer, accustomed to cut-and-try.
There is time for this. It has renewable air and drink. And food is plentiful, since its two crewmates perished in the malfunction. It has eaten part of one of them (the navigator) and has been using the pilot for occasional sexual relief. (It’s an alien, remember; and who are we to judge?)
Her second joy—and the second reason why her peril is no laughing matter—is that the planet is almost ideally proportioned to support her kind. All the place needs is a good scrubbing. The atmosphere wants a boost in its chlorine content—that usually sanitizes quite nicely—and a little less free water vapor. Her people have nested upon worlds far more inhospitable.
So while Jim’s failure to escape from Earth would be the tragic loss of a life unique, her success would be no great shakes, either. Fortunately—or not, depending on one’s point of view—it has other things on its mind at present.
Performing a bit of mental triage, Jim occupies itself with identifying and modifying the components necessary for what it can fix. It has not yet identified local gizmos adaptable to the temporal precessor, but owns a touching faith that “something will turn up.” Alien is as alien does, but no creature is so alien as to neglect its own survival.
In line with this objective, she does not simply loot a single site lest it draw unwanted attention. Although she regards the autochthons individually as of no account, there are a considerable number of them, and it would be best not to startle them. She uses pattern recognition to identify additional repositories along her vehicle’s ground track. Her plan is to filch a little bit here and a little bit there, as she reaches the point in the repair plan that needs the components on her pick list and thus, as we might say, “fly under the radar.” It was a good plan, and should have worked.
But while looting the fourth such locale, Jim is struck by a hammer. His instruments register aetherial gyroscopes spinning nearby. A precessor on a planetary surface? Has a rescue ship come seeking her, only to crash? She cries hallelujah (or its equivalent) and rushes outside, heedless of concealment.
His vision is radial, so there is no need to look around wildly. Instruments identify the source as a small, boxy vehicle nesting in the shadows across the way, and he sprints toward it. The vessel is unfamiliar and too small even for a shuttlecraft. He thinks he can kill its pilot and take the precessor.
But the boxy thing vanishes, leaving Jim the headwalker equivalent of gobsmacked. Beamed objects fade and, more to the point, there is no instrumental trace of a transport beam.
Alarms draw near and he beams back to his scout ship, where he gets drunk (in his own peculiar way), diddles the dead pilot (again, in his own peculiar way), and worries for several days that he is going mad.
But you can’t keep a good headwalker down. Jim is very good at compartmentalizing and loses himself for several cycles in the minutiae of adapting his latest haul to the repair of the spin stabilizer control circuit. The ship reeks for a time of tangy fumes, and flashes with bright actinic flickers. This is its milieu; this is when it feels most fully itself. He tries to forget about the vanishing box.
“Fool,” says the corpse of the pilot when he embraces it afterward, and Jim cocks his legs up in shame. The pilot is right. When exigent circumstances call for it, a man does not lose himself, even in his primary task.
“Should I seek out the source of the temporal distortion?” he asks the pilot and hugs it in that special way.
“Sure,” the pilot replies.
Now, Jim knows that he is only hearing waste gasses squeezed out through the reeds of the corpse’s voice-box, and that he interprets the resultant chords as words. The carcass doesn’t really speak. His people are alien, but not that alien. Dead is dead. The custom of “inquiring of the dead” has been embedded in her culture a very long time but, deep down, she knows that asking the pilot for advice is like consulting a Magic 8-Ball.