End of an Era

But at that moment our campsite exploded in light, then, just as quickly, everything was darkness again. My head snapped up at the sky. Off in the west, a huge spherical object was moving above the trees, its shape visible only as a black nothingness that blocked the stars. Another eye-jabbing flash of brilliance, followed by the black of night, afterimages burning in my retinas. Searching beams, like those from lighthouses, were probing the landscape. Suddenly all the beams converged on the Sternberger, perched high up on the crater wall. Then, as one, they scanned down the mound of earth, past our parked Jeep, and over to Klicks and me and our spluttering fire.

I shielded my eyes from the glare and tried to make out the source of the searchlights. The giant spherical object must have been sixty meters in diameter, floating silently above our heads. As it descended from the sky, the sphere’s color — an uneven mixture of tawny and beige — became visible as the light from its beams reflected back at it from the cracked surface of the mud plain. Dead leaves and loose pieces of dirt swirled upward in a small cyclone directly beneath the lowering sphere.

As it descended, something thick and gray began to ooze from its bottom, a glistening amorphous lump. The lump touched the ground and spread out like a slug’s body as it took the weight of the sphere. There was a brief period while the sphere settled in, the gray foot expanding to form a Poli-Grip seal with the mud plain.

The sphere’s surface seemed to be plated with meter-wide hexagonal scales that had a rough, natural appearance. The whole thing pulsed gently, exposing fibrous pink tissue in the cracks between the scales as it did so. I’d at first assumed that this was one of the Het spaceships we’d seen flying high overhead early this morning, but the sphere seemed to be breathing. A living spaceship? Well, why not?

Suddenly there was a sound from the sphere, a whispering sigh as an opening appeared above its landing foot. A slit was widening, the scales bunching up on either side, as thick vertical lips stretched wide. The interior glowed softly. More of the amorphous gray material pulsed within, but it seemed to be expanding, growing larger. It extruded through the opening, a great wet tongue sticking its way out into the night. Slowly the extension reached the ground. It continued to grow, to lengthen, until it had formed a gently sloping ramp leading from the thick-lipped mouth of the spaceship out onto the mud plain. The tongue stiffened and flattened, then the moisture on its surface seemed to dry as though it had been sucked back into pores.

Nothing happened for several seconds, then a shape appeared at the top of the ramp silhouetted against the glowing mouth. I knew in an instant that what I was seeing was a truly alien form of life. It had two arms and two legs, but they were reversed from the human norm. The legs — the limbs used for locomotion — were attached at the shoulders of the broad torso. They stretched a meter and a half to the ground, ending not in feet but in round pads. The arms — the limbs used for manipulation — were attached at the bottom of the torso, where human hips would be. It was as if this creature’s four-footed ancestors had gained bipedalism by rising up on their knuckles, freeing the rear limbs to dangle freely. No form of life on Earth had ever made that evolutionary choice; this was a true brachiator, a creature that propelled itself using its upper limbs — something that had formed in a different ecosystem.

The brachiator came down the ramp, its giant stride bringing it close to us far more quickly than human steps could have managed. I looked it up and down. The head, if you could call it that, was a broad dome rising directly from the shoulders. There was no neck. Long sausage-shaped eyes seemed to completely encircle the edge of the dome. Each eye had two pupils in it, again, a decidedly nonterrestrial solution to the problem of stereoscopic vision.

The body seemed at first glance to be covered with copper fur, but on closer inspection it was something different: thick spiraling cables of tissue. They overlapped and intertwined in complex patterns, providing not only thermal insulation but also what looked like very sensitive touch sensors.

I focused on the manipulatory appendages, and immediately realized the benefit of having them below and inside the