Ship of Strangers

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Candar waited seven thousand years before he saw his second spaceship.

He had been little more than a cub when he saw the first, but the images of that event were still bright and sharp in his memory. It had been a warm, moist morning and his mother and father had just begun cutting through a village of the two-legged food creatures. Candar was quietly watching their great grey bodies at work when his long-range senses warned him he was being approached by something very large, something which was outside all his previous experience. He raised his head, alarmed, but his parents—their perceptions swamped by the abundance of red-reeking food—remained unaware of the menace until it came into view.

It was not until after the big ship had passed overhead that the awful sound of it came hammering down, levelling the food creatures’ flimsy huts even more efficiently than mother and father could have done. The ship banked sharply, halted high in the morning air, and suddenly Candar and his parents were lifted into the sky. Candar found that he was caught in some kind of force net. He measured its shifting frequencies, wave lengths, intensity gradients, and even discovered that his brain could produce a similar field of its own—but he could not break free of the invisible constraints which had clamped around his body.

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