ZEN
By JEROME BIXBY
Because they were so likable and intelligentand adaptable—they were vastly dangerous!
Illustrated by ASHMANIt's difficult, when you're onone of the asteroids, to keepfrom tripping, because it'salmost impossible to keep youreyes on the ground. They nevergot around to putting portholesin spaceships, you know—unnecessarywhen you're flying by GB,and psychologically inadvisable,besides—so an asteroid is aboutthe only place, apart from Luna,where you can really see the stars.
There are so many stars in anasteroid sky that they look likeclouds; like massive, heaped-upsilver clouds floating slowlyaround the inner surface of thevast ebony sphere that surroundsyou and your tiny foothold. Theyare near enough to touch, andyou want to touch them, but theyare so frighteningly far away ...and so beautiful: there's nothingin creation half so beautiful asan asteroid sky.
You don't want to look down,naturally.
I had left the Lucky Pierre tosearch for fossils (I'm DavidKoontz, the Lucky Pierre's paleontologist).Somewhere off inthe darkness on either side of mewere Joe Hargraves, gadgetingfor mineral deposits, and EdReiss, hopefully on the lookoutfor anything alive. The LuckyPierre was back of us, her bodyout of sight behind a low blackridge, only her gleaming nosepoking above like a porpoisecoming up for air. When I lookedback, I could see, along the jaggedrim of the ridge, the busyreflected flickerings of the bubble-campthe techs were throwingtogether. Otherwise all was black,except for our blue-white torchbeams that darted here and thereover the gritty, rocky surface.
The twenty-nine of us wereE.T.I. Team 17, whose assignmentwas the asteroids. We werefour years and three months outof Terra, and we'd reached Vestaright on schedule. Ten minutesafter landing, we had known thatthe clod was part of the crust ofPlanet X—or Sorn, to give it itsright name—one of the few suchparts that hadn't been blownclean out of the Solar System.
That made Vesta extra-special.It meant settling down for awhile. It meant a careful, months-longscrutiny of Vesta's everysquare inch and a lot of her cubicones, especially by the life-scientists.Fossils, artifacts, animatelife ... a surface chunk of Sornmight harbor any of these, or all.Some we'd tackled already hada few.
In a day or so, of course, we'dhave the one-man beetles andcrewboats out, and the floodlightsorbiting overhead, and Vestawould be as exposed to us as amolecule on a microscreen. Thenwork would start in earnest. Butin the meantime—and as usual—Hargraves,Reiss and I were outprowling, our weighted bootsclomping along in darkness. CaptainFeldman had long ago givenup trying to keep his science-mindedcharges from gallopingoff alone like this. In spite ofbeing a military man, Feld's anice guy; he just shrugs and says,"Scientists!" when we appearbrightly at the airlock, waiting tobe let out.
So the three of us went our separateways, and soon wereout of sight of one another. EdReiss, the biologist, was lookinghardest for animate life, naturally.
But I found it.
I had crossed a long, roundedexpanse of rock—lava, wonderfullycolored—and was descendinginto a boulder-clutteredpocket. I was nearing the "bottom"of the chunk, the part