Mission

By John Hollis Mason
It would be so easy to conquer these primitive creatures....
The cylinder stood on the edge of a grassy plain. It was enveloped in a shimmering nimbus of golden brilliance. Lying grotesquely crumpled before the cylinder was a strange, alien figure—unmoving.... A little distance away was another figure, also crumpled and still, but more human-like in appearance. Fifty yards beyond began a deep forest.
Aside from the occasional murmuring breeze that rustled the grass there was no sound or movement to disturb the tableau. And the stillness made it all the more mysterious.
Krai landed on the edge of the forest. His search for intelligent life had been unfruitful up to now. But as he passed over the forest he had seen what he was looking for. A village of tree-dwellers.
Equipping himself with a portable pressure projector, Krai let himself out through the air-lock and stepped for the first time to the surface of earth. The air-lock's outer seal—a cumbrous affair over three feet thick—swung automatically back into place behind him and, as it did, a shimmering nimbus of brilliant golden light enveloped the space ship.
Krai experienced some difficulty in accustoming himself to the heavier gravitational pull of the new planet at first. But this was short-lived.
As he moved over the plain toward the forest, Krai cut a strange figure. He was small and squat, barely four feet high; his body triangular-shaped and tapering to a truncated point at the top. Three thin tentacular legs supported the trunk and provided locomotion. Four equally thin and powerful appendages were attached to the upper part of the trunk, two on the chest and one on each side of the hardly visible head. Each of Krai's two large eyes was embedded in the end of a foot-long stalk, giving him highly maneuverable and easily concentrated vision in all directions. Several spiracles dotted the lower part of the head, on each side of which was a huge ear—nature's answer to the problem of his own world's thin atmosphere.