the wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. all the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. it screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow.
the sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. it lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness.
nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked. but the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake with its back broken or a clockwork toy running down. when the movements stopped, there was a click and a strange sound began. thin, scratchy, inaudible more than a yard away, weary but still cocky, there leaked from the shape in the hollow the sound of a human voice.
"i've tried my hands and arms and they seem to work," it began. "i've wiggled my toes with entire success. it's well on the cards that i'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though i don't see how it could happen. right now i don't feel like struggling up and finding out. i'm fine where i am. i'll just lie here for a while and relax, and get some of the story on tape. this suit's got a built-in recorder, i might as well use it. that way even if i'm not as well as i feel, i'll leave a message. you probably know we're back and wonder what went wrong.
"i suppose i'm in a state of shock. that's why i can't seem to get up. who wouldn't be shocked after luck like that?
"i've always been lucky, i guess. luck got me a place in the whale. sure i'm a good astronomer but so are lots of other guys. if i were ten years older, it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. at my age it was luck.
"you'll want to know if the ship worked. well, she did. went like a bomb. we got lined up between earth and mars, you'll remember, and james pushed the button marked 'jump'. took his finger off the button and there we were: alpha centauri. two months later your time, one second later by us. we covered our whole survey assignment like that, smooth as a pint of old and mild which right now i could certainly use. better yet would be a pint of hot black coffee with sugar in. failing that, i could even go for a long drink of cold water. there was never anything wrong with the whale till right at the end and even then i doubt if it was the ship itself that fouled things up.
"that was some survey assignment. we astronomers really lived. wait till you see—but of course you won't. i could weep when i think of those miles of lovely color film, all gone up in smoke.
"i'm shocked all right. i never said who i was. matt hennessy, from farside observatory, back of the moon, just back from a proving flight cum astronomical survey in the starship whale. whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made. take it to any radio station or newspaper office. you'll find you can name your price and don't take any wooden nickels.
"where had i got to? i'd told you how we happened to find chang, hadn't i? that's what the natives called it. walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. the odds against finding chang on a six-sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the googols. we certainly were lucky.
"the chang natives aren't very technical—haven't got space travel for instance. they're good astronomers, though. we were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. in their way, they're a highly civilized people. look more like cats than people, but they're people all right. if you doubt it, chew these facts over.
"one, they learned our language in four weeks. when i say they, i mean a ten-man team of them.
"two, they brew a near-beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the whale.
"three, they've a great sense of humor. ran rather to silly practical jokes, but still. can't say i care for that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff myself, but tastes differ.
"four, the ten-man language team also learned chess and table tennis.
"but why go on? people who talk english, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers.
"it was funny the way they won all the time at table tennis. they certainly weren't so hot at it. maybe that ten per cent extra gravity put us off our strokes. as for chess, svendlov was our champion. he won sometimes. the rest of us seemed to lose whichever chingsi we played. there again it wasn't so much that they were good. how could they be, in the time? it was more that we all seemed to make silly mistakes when we played them and that's fatal in chess. of course it's a screwy situation, playing chess with something that grows its own fur coat, has yellow eyes an inch and a half long and long white whiskers. could you have kept your mind on the game?
"and don't think i fell victim to their feline charm. the children were pets, but you didn't feel like patting the adults on their big grinning heads. personally i didn't like the one i knew best. he was called—well, we called him charley, and he was the ethnologist, ambassador, contact man, or whatever you like to call him, who came back with us. why i disliked him was because he was always trying to get the edge on you. all the time he had to be top. great sense of humor, of course. i nearly broke my neck on that butter-slide he fixed up in the metal alleyway to the whale's engine room. charley laughed fit to bust, everyone laughed, i even laughed myself though doing it hurt me more than the tumble had. yes, life and soul of the party, old charley ...
"my last sight of the minnow was a cabin full of dead and dying men, the sweetish stink of burned flesh and the choking reek of scorching insulation, the boat jolting and shuddering and beginning to break up, and in the middle of the flames, still unhurt, was charley. he was laughing ...
"my god, it's dark out here. wonder how high i am. must be all of fifty miles, and doing eight hundred miles an hour at least. i'll be doing more than that when i land. what's final velocity for a fifty-mile fall? same as a fifty thousand mile fall, i suppose; same as escape; twenty-four thousand miles an hour. i'll make a mess ...
"that's better. why didn't i close my eyes before? those star streaks made me dizzy. i'll make a nice shooting star when i hit air. come to think of it, i must be deep in air now. let's take a look.
