Volpla, Wyman Guin [ebook reader for surface pro txt] 📗

stared at me. "Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?"

"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus."

She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. "Wouldn't you just settle for a worldly martini?"

"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss."

I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.

I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first white men enter these hills.

When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers would laugh.

Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He would conclude, "I am convinced that they have a language and speak it intelligently."

The government would issue denials. Reporters would "expose the truth" and ask, "Where have these aliens come from?" The government would reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends.

Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I think, are the funniest.

"Darling, are you listening to me?" my wife asked with impatient patience.

"What? Sure. Certainly."

"You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space." She got up and poured me another martini. "Here, maybe this will sober you up."

I pointed. "That's probably Guy and Em."

A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down to meet them.

I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, "Do you have your TV set on?"

"No," I answered. "Should I?"

"It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it."

"What broadcast?"

"From the rocket."

"Rocket?"

"For heaven's sake, darling," my wife complained, "I told you about Guy's rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the broadcasts."

As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. "He's out of contact today. Thinks he's Zeus."

I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.

Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage rocket.

After a bit, I got up and said, "I have something out in the lab I want to check on."

"Hey, wait a minute," Guy objected. "They're about to show the shots of the launching."

My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat down again.

The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.

Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.

"You look real good," I said. "A regular Space Ranger. What are you shooting at?"

"Darling, will you please—be—quiet?"

"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around."

On the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there. Well, now—say, that would be something! I began to feel a little ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about my volplas. But only for a moment.

A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a flaming pillar, then was gone.

The screen returned to a studio, where an announcer explained that the film just shown had been taken day before yesterday. Since then, the rocket's third stage was known to have landed successfully at the south shore of Mare Serenitatis. He indicated the location on a large lunar map behind him.

"From this position, the telemeter known as Rocket Charlie will be broadcasting scientific data for several months. But now, ladies and gentlemen, we will clear the air for Rocket Charlie's only general broadcast. Stand by for Rocket Charlie."

A chronometer appeared on the screen and, for several seconds, there was silence.

I heard my boy whisper, "Uncle Guy, this is the biggest!"

My wife said, "Em, I think I'll just faint."

Suddenly there was a lunar landscape on the screen, looking just as it's always been pictured. A mechanical voice cut in.

"This is Rocket Charlie saying, 'Hello, Earth,' from my position in Mare Serenitatis. First I will pan the Menelaus Mountains for fifteen seconds. Then I will focus my camera on Earth for five seconds."

The camera began to move and the mountains marched by, stark and awesomely wild. Toward the end of the movement, the shadow of the upright third stage appeared in the foreground.

Abruptly the camera made a giddy swing, focused a moment, and we were looking at Earth. At that time, there was no Moon over California. It was Africa and Europe we were looking at.

"This is Rocket Charlie saying, 'Good-by, Earth.'"

Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes. The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at once.

I used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month. I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early infants were females, which sped things up considerably.

By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own way.

I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model, and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their little skulls a bit.

My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out of the lab.

I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley about a mile back in the ranch.

They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously. They kept me busy relating their words for "tree," "rock," "sky" to the objects. They had a little trouble with "sky."

Until I had them out in the open country, it had been impossible to appreciate fully what lovely little creatures they were. They blended perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes.

Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll.

He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He sailed over her in a stunning sweep. Then he rose up and up until he hung in the breeze for a long moment, thirty feet above the ground.

He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.

The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little whoop. After that, it was a carnival.

They learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking, turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.

I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the Chronicle motored out into the hills to witness this!

Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool. They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes stretched to dry.

I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little actual surviving. I called the male over to me.

He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.

"Before the red men came, did we live here?"

"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors."

"We can learn again. We want to stay here." His little face was so solemn and thoughtful that I reached out and stroked the fur on his head reassuringly.

We both heard the whir of wings overhead. Two mourning doves flew across the stream and landed in an oak on the opposite hillside.

I pointed. "There's your food, if you can kill it."

He looked at me. "How?"

"I don't think you can get at them in the tree. You'll have to soar up above and catch one of them on the wing when they fly away. Think you can get up that high?"

He looked around slowly at the breeze playing in the branches and dancing along the hillside grass. It was as if he had been flying a thousand years and was bringing antique wisdom to bear. "I can get up there. I can stay for a while. How long will they be in the tree?"

"Chances are they won't stay long. Keep your eye on the tree in case they leave while you are climbing."

He ran to a nearby oak and clambered aloft. Presently he launched himself, streaked down-valley a way and caught a warm updraft on a hillside. In no time, he was up about two hundred feet. He began criss-crossing the ridge, working his way back to us.

The two girls were watching him intently. They came over to me wonderingly, stopping now and then to watch him. When they were standing beside me, they said nothing. They shaded their eyes with tiny hands and watched him as he passed directly above us at about two hundred and fifty feet. One of the girls, with her eyes fast on his soaring planes, reached out and grasped my sleeve tightly.

He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.

I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I did so. "He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here." I got up and found a stick. "Can you do this?"