Charles H. Grooms

Activity aboard the spaceship, which had reached a peak a short time ago, was slowly winding down as the various sections reached flight readiness. The spaceship was preparing to leave orbit. It had been circling the planet in a geostationary orbit for a half of the planet's year, now. The research teams that he had brought here had been studying the primitive race that was slowly spreading over it's surface. They were a bipedal, hominoid species that the researchers felt would eventually develop a civilization. But for now, they were just starting to chip stone into tools, and even for stone tools, their tools were still very crude and primitive.

This spaceship, the Plengtha, was only one more in a long series of research vessels from various civilized planets that had been visiting this planet for nearly a thousand of it's years now. Although there were sometimes two of the craft in orbit around the planet at the same time, that was unusual. Normally five to ten of it's years would pass between visits, sometimes longer. On Deng's first visit here, nearly fifty of this planet's years ago, they had arrived just as another ship was leaving. But that was the only time that he had ever seen another space craft in the vicinity of this planet.

With any civilized planet, there were always space craft in orbit and others on the ground at the port. That didn't even count the normal complement of artificial satellites with various and sundry purposes such as communications and weather control that any normal planet maintained.

Captain Deng checked the status board again. Nearly all sections of the ship and all departments had checked in, as soon as the last two ready lights came on, he could move out of orbit and head for home. He was finding it difficult not to fidget in his anxiety to be on his way. It would be nice once more to bask under the heat and light of his home world's class F sun. The local class G star was too dim and cool for his liking. It's yellowish light was deficient in the blue end of the spectrum and made things look strange to his eyes.

Besides, this planet had far too much free water to be comfortable. It had so much free water that the majority of it's surface was covered with deep oceans of the stuff. Water was a necessity of life, but that much of the stuff was absurd.

Oh, well, Brask in his infinite wisdom had created an infinite variety of planets with an infinite variety of life forms to live on them. That didn't mean that the captain had to like them all, or even to be comfortable on them.

Actually, he had spent very little of his time on the planet, he tended to remain aboard his ship while he was here. He didn't like the humidity or the smells down there, either. Besides, some of the life forms down there were just plain nasty. For instance, some of the feline life forms had large, sharp teeth and claws. Pretty in a sinuous and graceful sort of way, but meat eaters that liked very fresh meat and considered all but the very largest of the other life forms to be legitimate prey.

In all fairness to the planet, he would have to admit that there was a largish desert (large for this planet) not too far from the main group of aborigines that the researchers had been studying. He and his crew members would sometimes go down there during the midday when it was the hottest. The humidity wasn't too bad then and it wasn't too cool. Still, it couldn't begin to compare with home. Now if this planet were civilized, the natives would have created a habitat for him and the other visitors that very closely approximated their own home conditions.

This was his third visit to this planet and probably wouldn't be his last. That was one of the problems, and advantages, of a universal class starship. It could be easily retrofitted to be a passenger liner, a cargo ship, a research vessel as it was now, or even a war craft. About the only thing that it wasn't good for was a scout ship, it was just far too large for that.

This visit, and the first had been sponsored by the Krangdank University on his home world of Mother. The second visit had been sponsored by the government. Sooner or later, he hoped later, someone would get around to sponsoring another research trip here and he would be back. In the meantime, he would get a much deserved rest with his clutch mate and probably have some business in other, more civilized areas of the galaxy.

He really couldn't understand on a real visceral level why so many people were so interested in this soggy dirt ball and it's grimy and hairy primitives. They hadn't even managed to develop anything like a really comprehensive language yet, just a few basic words. And to make the matter worse, the brutes in one area couldn't talk to those from a different area because their languages were different.

Maybe it was because they were flesh eaters who varied their diets with vegetative material, actually they were omnivorous, which made them unusual. Most intelligent species in the galaxy were either carnivorous or herbivorous, it was unusual to find an intelligent species that ate everything, not unheard of, but unusual. Still, he could see where that could be a very definite survival characteristic. Deng's own race was carnivorous.

Perhaps it was the fact that they were mammalian that interested so many people. Mammalians normally did not get the chance to develop intelligence. Other life forms such as reptilians, amphibians, avians and others normally developed earlier than did the mammalian and one of those would normally develop a species that would become intelligent and become dominant. There were certainly reptilian, amphibian and avian life forms on this planet and there was evidence that a large reptilian population had once existed. Somehow or other, these mammalians were becoming dominant.

One of the ready lights came on, only one more to go. Soon, he and his clutch mate could wallow together in the warm sands of home. The warm sands would soon have his scales burnished to their full iridescence. Of course, he had a robot brusher, but no one had yet managed to develop any machine that could duplicate the action of the sand.

The door of the control room opened and Dr. Kelink entered. Dr. Kelink was in charge of the research teams, which in theory made him the second in command here. In practice, he made no effort at exerting any command over the captain's crew or the ship itself, which was as it should be. Besides, Deng would have tolerated no interference from any being who was not an expert space being.

Now there was a strange individual. From Deng's own home planet, he looked perfectly normal. In fact, some being not very familiar with his race would have trouble telling them apart. No, it wasn't anything about his basic appearance, but more in his behavior. For instance, his crew members, the other members of the research teams, and even the captain, himself, could wax eloquent concerning the charms of their respective clutch mates, but Kelink had never mentioned his clutch mate. Others would brag about the ratio of fully sexed offspring to neuters that their clutch mates produced. Like the primitive race down there, the male parent determined the sex of the offspring, but the female parent determined whether the offspring were fully sexed or neuter. The neuters tended to be dull and unintelligent and only suited to menial labor or to be servants. His own clutch mate had produced only one neuter. He had never heard Kelink mention the ratio of his offsprings. Of course, he had just learned two days ago that Kelink's clutch mate had recently been killed in an accident, maybe that explained his reticence to speak of her.

There were other strange things about him too, like the funny, blank way that he would stare at you sometimes, and then if you spoke to him, he didn't seem to hear you. And another funny thing, he actually seemed to like that misbegotten planet down there. He also seemed to be fascinated by those hairy animals that he was studying.

Still, his position did grant him the right to be in the control room and to have a couch assigned to him. Deng really didn't mind as long as he didn't try to interfere. That was one thing that he could say in the doctor's favor, he never interfered. He would quietly observe, he might even ask questions if it were obvious that the captain had time to answer them. But if the captain were busy, Kelink would always remain silent and hold his questions for a more appropriate time.

Finally, the last ready light came on and he gave the order to the helmsman to take them out of orbit and set a course for home. An energy field expanded around the ship. Gravity did not exist in lines of force, but this field treated it as though it did. Because of this, space beings normally spoke of gravity lines. At any rate, it warped the gravity lines around and ran them through the ship backwards so that the ship would "fall" away from the gravity source. The ship slipped smoothly out of orbit and set course for the more densely populated areas of the galaxy. Only the shifting view on the view screens gave any immediate indication that anything had changed. Captain Deng toggled a switch and spoke into the intercom. "Prepare the waste for jettisoning." An affirmative reply answered him.

Dr. Kelink asked, "You jettison the waste into space? Is that normal?"

"Well, no. If we were in any civilized part of the galaxy, it would be unloaded and processed. If we were around a deserted planet, we would simply dump it on the planet. But here, with a potentially intelligent species forming, we can't do that. There might be something in it that could harm them. Since I certainly don't intend to carry it all of the way back home with us, we will jettison it. Besides, our holding tanks are nearly full, we would not have room in them for the waste that we will generate on the trip back home. What we do is to recover as much of the water and other things that we can easily recycle and jettison the rest. Even so, most of it is still water. Normally, I would hesitate to throw away that much water, but with all of the water down there on that planet, dumping water is no real problem. Anyway, that is the normal procedure for waste disposal around this planet. Not anywhere else in the galaxy that I know of, but it is normal here."

"But if we jettison it here, won't some of it be likely to fall back to the planet?" The tip of his tail twitched nervously as he thought of the alien bacteria and viruses infecting the native population, particularly since they had no medical science, nor any other science at all for that matter, to deal with them.

"Not likely. We will jettison it just before we hit breakout velocity. That is slightly less than escape velocity for this star. Since we can't jettison anything after we hit breakout again until we break back into normal spacetime, it will be the only chance that we will have to dispose of it until we get home."

"Well, if we will still be traveling at less than escape velocity, what will be likely to happen to it?"

"Oh, it will freeze almost immediately. We will be pretty far out from the star by then. Then it will swing way out into space until this star's gravity slows it down enough and then it will come swinging back in. It will probably swing around the star fairly closely and then back out again. Should keep up that routine for several million of this planet's years."

By now, the spaceship was approaching the breakout velocity. He toggled the intercom switch again, "Prepare to jettison."

"Ready Captain," came the reply over the intercom.

"Jettison."

A large mass of waste products, including the water that had been used to flush them away were jettisoned into space. True to the captain's word, the water froze almost immediately and it headed on outward from the star. Eventually, it passed the orbit of this systems outermost planet, the planet that would eventually be called Pluto, and kept on going, even though it was now moving at a considerably slower velocity that it had been when first jettisoned.

The long ages crept by.

Finally, some of the remote descendants of the primitive creatures that had been under study by the research spaceships stood and looked at the comet in the night sky. Some of those humans trained powerful telescopes on it to study it. Many simply marveled at it. Some of them wondered just what it was, where it came from, and how it came to be.

Now you know.

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