“Feth, dig up a camera somewhere. I’m going to get Drai.” Ken was gone almost before the words had left his diaphragm, and for once Feth had nothing to say. His eyes were stall fixed on the mark.
There was nothing exactly weird or terrifying about it; but he was utterly unable to keep his mind from the fascinating problem of what had made it. To a creature which had never seen anything even remotely like a human being, a hand print is apt to present difficulties in interpretation. For all he could tell, the creature might have been standing, sitting, or leaning on the spot, or sprawled out in the manner the Sarrians substituted for the second of those choices. There was simply no telling; the native might be the size of a Sarrian foot, making the mark with his body — or he might have been too big to get more than a single appendage into the compartment. Feth shook his head to clear it — even he began to realize that his thoughts were beginning to go in circles. He went to look for a camera.
Sallman Ken burst into the observatory without warning, but gave Drai no chance to explode. He was bursting himself with the news of the discovery — a little too much, in fact, since he kept up the talk all the way back to the shop. By the time they got there, the actual sight of the print was something of an anticlimax to Drai. He expressed polite interest, but little more. To him, of course, the physical appearance of Earth’s natives meant nothing whatever. His attention went to another aspect of the compartment.
“What’s all that white stuff?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ken admitted. “The torpedo just got back. It’s whatever Planet Three’s atmosphere does to the samples I sent down.”
“Then you’ll know what the atmosphere is before long? That will be a help. There are some caverns near the dark hemisphere that we’ve known about for years, which we could easily seal off and fill with whatever you say. Let us know when you find out anything.” He drifted casually out of the shop, leaving Ken rather disappointed. It had been such a fascinating discovery.
He shrugged the feeling off, collected what he could of his samples without disturbing the print, and bore them across the room to the bench on which a makeshift chemical laboratory had been set up. As he himself had admitted, he was not an expert analyst; but compounds formed by combustion were seldom extremely complex, and he felt that he could get a pretty good idea of the nature of these. After all, he knew the metals involved — there could be no metallic gases except hydrogen in Planet Three’s atmosphere. Even mercury would be a liquid, and no other metal had a really high vapor pressure even at Sarrian temperature. With this idea firmly in mind like a guiding star, Ken set blithely to work.
To a chemist, the work or a description of it would be interesting. To anyone else, it would be a boringly repetitious routine of heating and cooling, checking for boiling points and melting points, fractionating and filtering. Ken would have been quicker had he started with no preconceived notions; but finally even he was convinced. Once convinced, he wondered why he had not seen it before.
Feth Allmer had returned long since, and photographed the hand print from half a dozen angles. Now, seeing that Ken had stopped working, he roused himself from the rack on which he had found repose and approached the work bench.
“Have you got it, or are you stumped?” he queried.