Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
stamped CAUTION
By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
Illustrated by KOSSIN
It's a funny thing, but most monsters seem to be of theopinion that it's men who are the monsters. You know, theyhave a point.
en minutes after the crackup, somebody phoned for the Army. Thatmeant us. The black smoke of the fire, and the oily residues, whichwere later analyzed, proved the presence of a probable petroleumderivative. The oil was heavily tainted with radioactivity. Mostlikely it was fuel from the odd, conchlike reaction-motors, the exactprinciples of which died, as far as we were concerned, with thecrash.
The craft was mainly of aluminum, magnesium and a kind of stainlesssteel, proving that, confronted with problems similar to ones we hadencountered, aliens might solve them in similar ways. From thecrumpled-up wreckage which we dug out of that Missouri hillside, Kleineven noticed a familiar method of making girders and braces lighter.Circular holes were punched out of them at spaced intervals.
I kept hunting conviction by telling myself that, for the first timein all remembered history, we were peeking behind the veil of anotherplanet. This should be the beginning of a new era, one of immenselywidened horizons, and of high romance—but with a dark side, too. Thesky was no longer a limit. There were things beyond it that would haveto be reckoned with. And how does unknown meet unknown? Suppose onehas no hand to shake?
The mass of that wreck reeked like a hot cinder-pile and a burninggarbage dump combined. It oozed blackened goo. There were crushedpieces of calcined material that looked like cuttlebone. The thinplates of charred stuff might almost have been pressed cardboard.Foot-long tubes of thin, tin-coated iron contained combined chemicalsidentifiable as proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Food, we decided.
aturally, we figured that here was a wonderful clue to the plant andanimal life of another world. Take a can of ordinary beef goulash; youcan see the fibrous muscle and fat structure of the meat, and thecellular components of the vegetables. And here it was true, too, to alesser degree. There were thin flakes and small, segmented cylinderswhich must have been parts of plants. But most was a homogeneous mushlike gelatin.
Evidently there had been three occupants of the craft. But the crashand the fire had almost destroyed their forms. Craig, our biologist,made careful slides of the remains, tagging this as horny epidermis,this as nerve or brain tissue, this as skeletal substance, and this asmuscle from a tactile member—the original had been as thin asspaghetti, and dark-blooded.
Under the microscope, muscle cells proved to be very lon