Which would not have been such a bad way to finish out a life, sitting there eating an day and night, except that when Skidoop took Hirt’s imagination, he took Hirt’s ability to think of anything else but baked beans to eat. So the last meal consisted of baked beans, plate by plate by plate by…

Obviously, it was a deal from the bottom.

In many ways, it was a fate worse than death.

The Wind Beyond the Mountains

Wummel saw the shining thing come down. He watched it from the stand of gnarl-bushes as the pointed thing flamed across the sky, streaking toward the red sun. It flashed brightly above the land, and disappeared quickly. Wummel found himself shaking.

His pointed face quivered, and his split tongue slipped in and out of his mouth nervously. It had not been a bird, that was obvious. Nor a beast of the land. Whatever it had been, it stirred a strange sensation in him.

As though he were seeing a long-missing brother returning from across the mountain passes, coming home finally, after a long, long absence. But that could not be: this metal thing he had never seen before. Yet he could not shake the feeling.

Wummel, for the first time in a life filled with fears, was terribly frightened.

He crouched down, his triply-jointed legs crossing under him. He crouched down to watch the sky. If the flaming thing was to make another appearance, he would be there when it did.

He had not long to wait. The sun had slipped across the pale blotch of grey sky, when the thing appeared again. The thing dipped as it approached The Forest, and banked down toward the rising yellow-feathertops of the trees. In a few moments Wummel saw the falling thing point its sharp beak into the trees, and disappear through the foliage.

A muted roaring came to Wummel’s horn-bell ears, and a ropey pillar of angry smoke twisted up into the late afternoon sky.

The roaring grew in violence, then suddenly ceased. The semi-silence of The Forest dropped down again, as though it had never been shattered.

The swip-swip-swip of the forest crickets resumed. The cough and growl of the land beasts took up where it had died. A yellow-striped prowl-cat slipped through the trees at the edge of the clearing. The wind whistled softly in among the yellow feather-leaves, and The Forest looked as it had always looked.

Only Wummel, of all the Ruskind, knew the thing had come, knew The Forest was not as it had always been.

And he turned immediately, scuttling off on digger fingers and triple—jointed legs, to tell the Ruskind. He might have sent the message by thought to the One, who would have told the Ruskind, but—somehow—this message had to be delivered personally. He disappeared through the undergrowth.

In The Forest, there was movement from the thing that had ceased to flame.

“Sellers, dispatch your crew into that section of the forest over there. See if you can find anything of the creatures who built that village.

“Galen, I’d like you to take the flit—be careful now—and check if those mountains we saw are inhabited. Let’s make this a thorough one, boys. It’s the last one before home.”

He fitted the picture of a spaceman. Tall, bronzed from many suns; wide and blocky hands, altogether able hands that commanded with ease.

Eyes blue as the seas over which he had flown, a mouth that spoke sharply, but bore no grudge. A man with lines of character in his face; not a blank mold of a face that smiled and made sounds, but a face that had been the home of sadness and hard times. A man who had grown tired but never beaten, searching for an ideal.

“This survey has to be really good, Charlie,” the Captain said to his First. “There’s talk back home about too much for appropriations for the Mapping Command. They may swallow us into the mercantile guild systems.

That wouldn’t be so hot.” He spoke earnestly, and there was a depth to his words.

The First Mate wanted badly to touch this man, to lay a hand on his arm and say, “We’ll make it, Vern,” or something less trite. But he could not. Instead, he remarked, “You look tired, Vern. Catch much during the last leg?” The Captain shook his head and grinned broadly, though the weariness was moving in his eyes. “You know me, Charlie. ‘No-Wink, No-Blink, No-Nod Kovasic’ they called me at the Academy.” Then, the jibe still moist on his lips, he sobered.

“Bring something back, Charlie. Bring it back—we need it bad. We need something to open their eyes back home. To make them understand we’re not just idly flitting around the galaxy—that we can bring back useful information. We have to keep the Command in business. It was thirty years coming, Charlio—be a hell of a note to lose it now.

“We need it, Charlie.” He added softly, almost to himself, as he turned away, “Need it bad.”

They came clumping through The Forest, nineteen of them, walking strangely.

They moved erect, with their hands swinging at their sides. Their hands were even different. How could they dig without spade-shaped fingers? How could they hear from those odd little flat things so close to their heads? Their eyes. Such strange eyes. Mere, angry slits.

The eyes watching the strange ones were not slits. They were huge, platter-like organs without lids. They watched unblinking as the strangers from the flaming thing tromped through The Forest.

They were going to the Village Home.

The thought went out from the One, to the other Ruskind, Be careful, my children. They seem to bode no harm, but they are not of Ruska, they are not the Ruskind; not of the land, nor of the sea, nor of the air we know. Be careful.

Wummel heard the thought, and hunkered deeper under the spread roots of the gnarl-bush. Yet…there was something about these strange erect wanderers that drew him.

Is it because I saw them first? he wondered. Or is it something else. I feel—I sense—a deeper bond in these strange ones. They are not wholly unknown to me.

He reached out daintily, searching with his mind, plucking delicately as though on some fragile musical instrument.

A stirring of buried racial memory. A common germ, a flame, a whirling nebula and a throwing-out of flashing arms. One parent. One world, so far back even the concept had been drowned by memory on memory.

He watched their progress, deeper into the mingled tree-shapes. The Forest held many of Wummel’s people.

The Ruskind had left the Village Home, till the strange ones left the planet.

His eager eyes caught the every flicker of their bodies, the every tread of their step, the every thought of their minds. A wild, conflicted and confused something, as rolled and entwined as the slender stringer arms of the sewlan vines. Their minds were never at rest. They could not speak between each other—in thoughts—and they struggled in the cages of their bodies to communicate.