The Totems of Abydos Read Online Free PDF Page B

gravity was not crushing, and its invisible life forms were such that they could be dealt with by the natural defenses of most organic systems. Moreover, its diurnal and annual cycles were similar to those of many comparable worlds, a fact which to many species is morally and psychologically, and even biologically, important. In a sense no species is satisfied until it has come home. Had its soil been more fertile, its mineral resources more remarkable, its vegetation more appealing, its scenery less tenebrous, its mountains less bleak and forbidding, or even if its location had been more propitious, Abydos might have been better known. But as it was, it was not even strictly analogous to a small town, overlooked by progress, on a more favored planet, far off the beaten pathways between more interesting places. Rather it was more, or at least in the vicinity of the depot and yards, a company camp, a merely dirty, unpleasant place, where rough men of ill-favored visage spent brief tours of duty, little more than a convenience to a corporation, to most of whose officers, of those who knew of it, it was no more than an entry on records. Even the captain of the vessel, for example, though he was surely not important in the corporation, had never been on its surface. His first officer, however, had. Still it was not a likely place to put ashore. As you may be interested in knowing what might be the interest of Rodriguez and Brenner in Abydos it had to do with the Pons.
    “At ten, then,” said Rodriguez.
    The captain then lifted an appendage and Rodriguez, clamping the smoking Bertinian leaf between his teeth, and transferring his stein of Heimat to his left hand, shook one of the extended claws. Brenner, in turn, did the same, leaning forward in the webbing. The claw was dry and well polished. The captain then clapped together his jaws twice, a gesture of contentment and warmth amongst his kind, for even their gods are said to do so, and, with a tiny pressure from his back feet, rose up, turned about, rather like a balloon, in the zero-gravity field, and took his departure.
    “Damned reptile,” said Rodriguez.
    “He is a nice enough fellow,” said Brenner.
    “I like him,” admitted Rodriguez. “At least he can look at you.”
    He then swirled the stein about, mixing the remainder, popped open the slurp hole on the mug and sucked up some of the fermented poison within.
    The captain, of course, was not really a reptile. It was only such things as the skin, the tail, the appendages, the neck, the long tongue, and such things, which suggested that. To be sure, perhaps the captain’s species, in some sense, at some time in the past, might have evolved from reptiles, or something like reptiles, but then, so, too, if it must be known, had that of Rodriguez and Brenner, and from other things before that, which were not even reptiles.
    “You are pleased that I called him a reptile,” said Rodriguez, looking narrowly at Brenner.
    Brenner blushed. “Was it a test?” he asked.
    “No,” said Rodriguez.
    Brenner felt ashamed. Although he himself was pleased to hear things said which he himself found amusing, or true, or both, but would not have dared to say himself, he did tend to suffer for it. This was an effect of his conditioning program. But perhaps it had not been totally efficient, or had not fully “taken,” so to speak, for he was not sickened at the vulgarity of Rodriguez, his offensiveness, his abusive honesty, or at least his attempt to speak and say the world as he saw it, as accurate or awry as his perceptions might be. Rodriguez was more free, and more terrible, and more abominable, and more glorious than any human being Brenner had ever known. He did not know how it was that such a man, who in his time it was said, had been a wastrel, a gambler, a freebooter, a smuggler, a soldier, had become involved in his own field.
    “Are you afraid the machine is recording?” asked Rodriguez.
    “Do you think it is?”