Anywhen by James Blish Page B

and begin to catch distorted hints of the constellation the Sun belongs to from far away, called the Parrot. Only a computer can analyze our constellations in space; the eye can see nothing but the always visible stars, clouds and clouds of them, glaring and motionless . . .
    However, I had better sense than to daydream long on office time. I set the airlock to cycling, and touched my helmet to the closed outer seal to listen for the muted groan of the flamers. It came through right on time, a noise halfway between a low bull-fiddle note and that of a motor trying to start. Satisfied, more or less, I plodded away through the extremely tall grass.
    It was lonely here. My radar sweeper kept me posted on where the gig was, and where I was supposed to go from there; but I was not going to have any company, because I was to be only one unit of a very wide circle, and the Marines were already fanning out and away from me to take up their own posts on that perimeter.
    Possibly I was already being stalked, too. If so, the radar would never let me know about it, as long as the stalker kept himself bent low in the sea of grass. Above, the violet sky arched and burned. It was moonless, we had been careful enough about our timing to insure that; but there were no clouds, either. If the natives had sharp eyes, as hunters had to have, they might well see the glints of starlight on my helmet, or even on the shoulders of my suit. And I was very aware of my weight. Every step was elephantine. I had to admit to the alien night that I was not really in very good shape for a fighting man, hard though I tried to blame it all on the i.8 Gee field.
    And my flamer was locked to my suit. We were under no circumstances to use them to defend ourselves, and couldn't have gotten them unlocked in time to disobey the order. They were only for afterwards, in case the flaming circuit inside the airlock had been knocked out for some reason. As weapons, they were as useless tonight as a tightly laced boot.
    After at least a thousand million increasingly ponderous, sweating steps, the PPI scope told me I had walked out the prescribed two and a half miles, I switched to rebroadcast, and got the picture as the gig saw it. My set had a few pips that might have been Marines, but it was impossible for my suit sweeper to see all around the circle. On repeat from the gig, the scope showed several men still coming into line on the far side, which gratified me for no reason I could pin down.
    They straggled in, and then each pip in the circle turned red, one by one, showing me that they too were now getting the rebroadcast and, hence, were aware of where all the rest of us were. I ran a nose count: . . . ten, eleven, and twelve, counting me. Okay.
    So far, no sign of savages. But they too were present and accounted for. The radar didn't show them, and neither by eye nor by sniperscope could I see anything more than the night and the waves going over the grass. But Dr. Roche had assured us that they would be there—and games theory penetrates the strategic night far better than any sensing instrument, alive or dead.
    I cut out of the rebroadcast and cut in again, making my own pip blink green for a moment. At once, all eleven other pips went green and stayed that way. They had seen the warning.
    It was time for human vision.
    I snapped shut the lock switch on my little device. The gig came glaring into blue-white, almost intolerable existence in the middle of our circle. A triplet of star shells stitched across the sky above her. I could almost read the hateful legend on her side.
    And there were the savages.
    For those crucial three seconds they sat transfixed on their six-legged mounts, knees clenched across pommels, disproportionately long spines stiff, long bald heads thrown back, staring up at the star shells. The hairy, brown, cruelly beaked creatures they were sitting on stared too, stretching out necks as long as those of camels.
    There were four of them inside