Pet Farm
By ROGER DEE
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science FictionFebruary 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that theU.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They had fled almost to the sheer ambient face of the crater wall whenthe Falakian girl touched Farrell's arm and pointed back through thescented, pearly mists.
"Someone," she said. Her voice stumbled over the almost forgotten Terranword, but its sound was music.
"No matter," Farrell answered. "They're too late now."
He pushed on, happily certain in his warm euphoric glow of mountingexpectancy that what he had done to the ship made him—and his new-foundparadise with him—secure.
He had almost forgotten who they were; the pale half-memories thatdrifted through his mind touched his consciousness lightly and withouturgency, arousing neither alarm nor interest.
The dusk grew steadily deeper, but the dimming of vision did not matter.
Nothing mattered but the fulfillment to come.
Far above him, the lacy network of bridging, at one time so baffling,arched and vanished in airy grace into the colored mists. To right andleft, other arms of the aerial maze reached out, throwing vaguetraceries from cliff to cliff across the valley floor. Behind him on theplain he could hear the eternally young people playing about theirlittle blue lake, flitting like gay shadows through the tamarisks andcalling to each other in clear elfin voices while they frolicked afterthe fluttering swarms of great, bright-hued moths.
The crater wall halted him and he stood with the Falakian girl besidehim, looking back through the mists and savoring the sweet, quietmystery of the valley. Motion stirred there; the pair of them laughedlike anticipant children when two wide-winged moths swam into sight andfloated toward them, eyes glowing like veiled emeralds.
Footsteps followed, disembodied in the dusk.
"It is only Xavier," a voice said. Its mellow uninflection evoked abriefly disturbing memory of a slight gray figure, jointed yet curiouslyflexible, and a featureless oval of face.
It came out of the mists and halted a dozen yards away, and he saw thatit spoke into a metallic box slung over one shoulder.
"He is unharmed," it said. "Directions?"
Xavier? Directions? From whom?
Another voice answered from the shoulder-box, bringing a second mentalpicture of a face—square and brown, black-browed and taciturnlyhumorless—that he had known and forgotten.
Whose, and where?
"Hold him there, Xav," it said. "Stryker and I are going to try to reachthe ship now."
The moths floated nearer, humming gently.
"You're too late," Farrell called. "Go away. Let me wait in peace."
"If you knew what you're waiting for," a third voice said, "you'd goscreaming mad." It was familiar, recalling vaguely a fat, good-naturedface and ponderous, laughter-shaken paunch. "If you could see the placeas you saw it when we first landed...."
The disturbing implications of the words forced him reluctantly toremember a little of that first sight of Falak.
... The memory was sacrilege, soiling and cheapening the ecstasy of hisanticipation.
But it had been different.
His first day on Falak had left Farrell sick with disgust.
He had known from the beginning that the planet was small and arid,non-rotating, w