Gallifa looked quizzically at his aide. "Well, what do you make of them?" he asked. "Do you think they could have anything to do with Bradshaw's sudden crackup?"
Samuels removed his hat and ran stubby fingers through his blond, short-cropped hair. "It's hard to tell," he answered. "But they sure look harmless to me. In fact, they look somewhat like a bunch of Celtic little people."
Gallifa frowned. He didn't understand.
"You know," Samuels grinned. "Gnomes or elves with big ears. Large dwarf model."
Gallifa turned his attention back to the visitors and laughed. "I see what you mean," he agreed. "Ears and all. They do seem harmless. But it's strange they aren't upset by us. They could be semi-intelligent."
Gallifa stepped gingerly from the truck. He really didn't expect to find a modicum of intelligence. The spotting cruiser had orbited around the planet for more than seventy-two hours before the crew had been deposited, and had almost definitely established the contrary.
On every Earth-type planet that had ever been discovered, if there were intelligent life it had developed according to water-oxygen evolution; and the culture invariably parallelled homo sapiens. It was as if a busy and preoccupied nature had hit upon a pattern which worked and never bothered to change the mold. There were minor deviations, of course, biologically and structurally, but never culture-wise.
The swift, but amazingly discerning survey, had revealed absolutely no evidence of any intelligence on the planet. There were no artifacts, dwellings, roads, dams, bridges—primitive or otherwise. Any stage of culture would have been observed by the cruiser immediately. The planet seemed ideally suited to colonization.
Gallifa, the trained biologist, carefully studied the creatures. The dwarf-like gnomes, as Samuels had dubbed them, might be considered caricatures of humanity.
They were about four feet high—bipeds, and covered with a soft, pinkish fur. They walked erect; normally so, Gallifa could tell, because their upper limbs were too short for knuckling and were not jointed correctly for moving on all fours. They had five digited limbs, both upper and lower, just as did all higher life forms ever discovered on any planet. Their features were without hair and of a fairy story-humanoid type. With their large, floppy ears, and round-solemn eyes they were very unusual gnomes indeed.