Vernadsky remained cheerful. There's only so much I can do. The system has to be flushed for three hours with helium before I can get inside. And then I have to calibrate the new semireflector and that takes time. I could get it almost right in minutes, but that's only almost right. You'd break down before you reach the orbit of Mars.'
The captain glowered. 'Go ahead. Get started.'
Vernadsky carefully maneuvered the tank of helium on board the ship. With ship's pseudo-grav generators shut off, it weighed virtually nothing, but it had its full mass and inertia. That meant careful handling if it were to make turns correctly. The maneuvers were all the more difficult since Vernadsky himself was without weight.
It was because his attention was concentrated entirely on the cylinder that he took a wrong turn in the crowded quarters and found himself momentarily in a strange and darkened room.
He had time for one startled shout and then two men were upon him, hustling his cylinder, closing the door behind him.
He said nothing, while he hooked the cylinder to the intake valve of the motor and listened to the soft, soughing noise as the helium flushed the interior, slowly washing absorbed radioactive gases into the all-accepting emptiness of space.
Then curiosity overcame prudence and he said, 'You've got a silicony aboard ship, Captain. A big one.' The captain turned to face Vernadsky slowly. He said in a voice from which all expression had been removed, 'Is that right?'
'I saw it. How about a better look?'
'Why?'
Vernadsky grew imploring. 'Oh, look, Captain, I've been on this rock over half a year. I've read everything I could get hold of on the asteroids, which means all sorts of things about the siliconies. And I've never seen even a little one. Have a heart.'
'I believe there's a job here to do.'
'Just helium-flushing for hours. There's nothing else to be done till that's over. How come you carry a silicony about, anyway, Captain?'
'A pet. Some people like dogs. I like siliconies.'
'Have you got it talking?'
The captain flushed. 'Why do you ask?'
'Some of them have talked. Some of them read minds, even.'
'What are you? An expert on these damn things?'
'I've been reading about them. I told you. Come on, Captain. Let's have a look.'
Vernadsky tried not to show that he noticed that there was the captain facing him and a crewman on either side of him. Each of the three was larger than he was, each; weightier, each-he felt sure-was armed.
Vernadsky said, 'Well, what's wrong? I'm not going to steal the thing. I just want to see it.'
It may have been the unfinished repair job that kept him alive at the moment. Even more so, perhaps, it was his look of cheerful and almost moronic innocence that stood him in good stead.
The captain said. 'Well, then, come on.'
And Vernadsky followed, his agile mind working and his pulse definitely quickened.
Vernadsky stared with considerable awe and just a little revulsion at the gray creature before him. It was quite true that he had never seen a silicony, but he had seen trimensional photographs and read descriptions. Yet there is something in a real presence for which neither words nor photographs are substitutes.
Its skin was of an oily smooth grayness. Its motions were slow, as became a creature who burrowed in stone and was more than half stone itself. There was no writhing of muscles beneath that skin; instead it moved in slabs as thin layers of stone slid greasily over one another.
It had a general ovoid shape, rounded above, flattened below, with two sets of appendages. Below were the 'legs,' set radially. They totaled six and ended in sharp flinty edges, reinforced by metal deposits. Those edges could cut through rock, breaking it into edible portions.
On the creature's flat undersurface, hidden from view unless the silicony were overturned, was the one opening into its interior. Shredded rocks entered that interior. Within, limestone and hydrated silicates reacted to form the silicones out of which the creatures's tissues were built. Excess silica re-emerged from the opening as hard white pebbly excretions.
How extraterrologists had puzzled over the smooth pebbles that lay scattered in small hollows within the rocky structure of the asteroids until the siliconies were first discovered. And how they marveled at the manner in which the creatures made silicones-those silicone-oxygen polymers with hydrocarbon side chains-perform so many of the functions that proteins performed in terrestrial life.
From the highest point on the creature's back came the remaining appendages, two inverse cones