The Mote in God's Eye

“I don’t see you. We could be twenty kilometers apart. Your signal is none too strong,” Whitbread answered.

Staley struggled to his feet. “First things first,” he muttered. He looked the lifeboat over carefully. There was no place a miniature might have hidden and lived through reentry, but he looked again to be sure. Then he switched to hailing frequency and tried to call Lenin—expected no answer and got none. Suit radios operate on line of sight only and they are intentionally not very powerful, otherwise all of space would be filled with the chatter of suited men. The redesigned lifeboats had nothing resembling a radio. How did the Brownies intend for survivors to call for help?

Staley stood uncertainly, not yet adjusted to gravity. There were cultivated fields all around him, alternating rows of purple eggplant-looking bushes with chest-high crowns of dark leaves, and low bushes bright with grain. The rows went on forever in all directions.

“Still haven’t spotted you yet, Horst,” Whitbread reported. “This is getting us nowhere. Horst, do you see a big, low building that gleams like a mirror? It’s the only building in sight.”

Staley spotted it, a metal-gleaming thing beyond the horizon. It was a long walk away, but it was the only landmark in sight. “Got it.”

“We’ll make for that and meet you there,”

“Good. Wait for me.”

“Head that way, Gavin,” Whitbread’s voice said.

“Right,” came the reply. There was more chatter between the other two, and Horst Staley felt very much alone.

“Wup! My rocket’s out!” Potter shouted.

Whitbread watched Potter’s cone drop toward the ground. It hit point first, hesitated, and toppled into the plants. Whitbread shouted, “Gavin, are you all right?”

There were rustling sounds. Then Whitbread heard: “Oh, sometimes I get a twinge in my right elbow when the weather’s nasty… old football injury. Get as far as you can, Jonathon. I’ll meet you both at the building.”

“Aye aye.” Whitbread tilted the cone forward on his rocket The building was large ahead of him.

It was large. At first there had been nothing to give it scale; now he had been flying toward it for ten minutes or more.

It was a dome with straight sides blending into a low, rounded roof. There were no windows, and no other features except a rectangular break that might have been a door, ridiculously small in the enormous structure. The gleam of sunlight on the roof was more than metallic; it was mirror-bright.

Whitbread flew low, traveling quite slowly. There was something awesome about the building set in the endless croplands. That more than the fear that his motor might burn out checked his first impulse to rush to the structure.

The rocket held. The miniatures might have changed the chemicals in the solid motor; no two things built by Moties were ever quite identical. Whitbread landed just outside the rectangular doorway. This close the door loomed over him. It had been dwarfed by the building.

“I’m here,” he almost whispered, then laughed at himself. “There’s a doorway. It’s big and closed. Funny—there aren’t any roads leading here, and the crops grow right up to the edge of the dome.”

Staley’s voice: “Perhaps planes land on the roof.”

“I don’t think so, Horst. The roof is rounded; I don’t think there are ever many visitors. Must be some kind of storage. Or maybe there’s a machine inside that runs itself.”

“Best not fool with it. Gavin, are you all right too?”

“Aye, Horst. I’ll be at yon building in half an hour. See you there.”

Staley prepared for a longer hike. There were no emergency rations that he could see in the lifeboat. He thought for a while before removing his combat armor and the pressure suit under it. There weren’t any secrets there. He took the helmet and dogged it onto the neck seal, then rigged it as an air filter. Then he took the radio out of the suit and slung it on his belt, first making one last attempt to contact Lenin. There was no answer. What else? Radio, water bag, sidearm. It would have to do.

Staley looked carefully around the horizon. There was only the one building—no chance of walking toward the wrong one. He started out toward it, glad of the low gravity, and swung easily into stride.

A half-hour later he saw the first Motie. He was practically alongside before he noticed it: a creature different from any he’d seen before, and just the height of the plants. It was working between the rows, smoothing soil with its hands, pulling out weeds to lay between the careful furrows. It watched him approach. When he came alongside it turned back to work.

The Motie was not quite a Brown. The fur patches were thicker, and more thick fur encased all three arms and the legs. The left hand was about the same as a Brown’s but the right hands had five fingers each, plus a bud, and the fingers were square and short. The legs were thick and the feet large and flat. The head was a Brown’s with drastically back-sloping forehead.