Foeman, Where Do You Flee?

Foeman, Where Do You Flee?

By Ben Bova

Within minutes the whole scientific staff had piled into the rec room and crowded around the table, together with all the crew members except the two on duty in the command globe.

The ship’s automatic cameras took twenty more photographs of the area before their orbit carried them over the horizon from the spot. Five of the pictures showed the shadowy figure of a bipedal creature.

The spot was in darkness by the time their orbit carried the over it again. Infrared and radar sensors showed nothing.

They squinted at the pictures, handed them from person to person, talked and argued and wondered through the entire eight-hour shifts. Crewmen left for duty and returned again. The planet turned beneath them, and once again the shoreline was bathed in Sirius’s hot glow. But there was no trace of the humanoid. Neither the cameras, the manned telescopes, nor the other sensors could spot anything.

One by one, men and women left the rec room, sleepy and talked out. Finally, only Lee, Charnowsky, Kehman and Captain Rasmussen were left sitting at the chess table with the finger-grimed photos spread out before them.

“They’re men.” Lee murmured. “Erect bipedal men.”

“It’s only one creature,” the captain said. “And all we know is that it looks like a man.”

Rasmussen was tall, hamfisted, rawboned, with a ruddy face that could look either elfin or Viking but nothing in between. His voice, though, was thin and high. To the everlasting applause of all aboard, he had fought to get a five-year supply of beer brought along. Even now, he had a mug tightly wrapped in one big hand.

“All right, they’re humanoids,” Lee conceded. “That’s close enough”.

Foeman, where do you flee. Photo - Elena

The captain hiked a shaggy eyebrow. “I don’t like jumping at shadows, you know. These pictures -”

“Men or not.” Charnovsky said, “We must land and investigate closely.”

Lee glanced at Lehman, straddling a turned-around chair and resting his arms tiredly on the back.

“Oh, we’ll investigate,” Rasmussen agreed, “but not too fast. If they are an intelligent species of some kind, we’ve got to go gingerly. I’m under orders from the Council, you know.”

“They haven’t tried to contact us,” Lee said. “That means they either don’t know we’re here, or they’re not interested, or -”

“Or what?”

Lee knew how it would sound, but he said it anyway. “Or they’re waiting to get their hands on us.”