Skylark Three by E. E. Smith

Author:E. E. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620125885
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter IX - The Welcome to Norlamin

*

The Skylark was now days upon her way toward the sixth planet, Seaton gave the visiplates and the instrument board his customary careful scrutiny and rejoined the others.

"Still talking about the human fish, Dottie Dimple?" he asked, as he stoked his villainous pipe. "Peculiar tribe of porpoises, but I'm strong for 'em. They're the most like our own kind of folks, as far as ideas go, of anybody we've seen yet—in fact, they're more like us than a lot of human beings we all know."

"I like them immensely—"

"You couldn't like 'em any other way, their size—"

"Terrible, Dick, terrible! Easy as I am, I can't stand for any such joke as that was going to be. But really, I think they're just perfectly fine, in spite of their being so funny-looking. Mrs. Carfon is just simply sweet, even if she does look like a walrus, and that cute little seal of a baby was just too perfectly cunning for words. That boy Seven is keen as mustard, too."

"He should be," put in Crane, dryly. "He probably has as much intelligence now as any one of us."

"Do you think so?" asked Margaret. "He acted like any other boy, but he did seem to understand things remarkably well."

"He would—they're 'way ahead of us in most things." Seaton glanced at the two women quizzically and turned to Crane. "And as for their being bald, this was one time, Mart, when those two phenomenal heads of hair our two little girl-friends are so proud of didn't make any kind of hit at all. They probably regard that black thatch of Peg's and Dot's auburn mop as relics of a barbarous and prehistoric age—about as we would regard the hirsute hide of a Neanderthal man."

"That may be so, too," Dorothy replied, unconcernedly, "but we aren't planning on living there, so why worry about it? I like them, anyway, and I believe that they like us."

"They acted that way. But say, Mart, if that planet is so old that all their land area has been eroded away, how come they've got so much water left? And they've got quite an atmosphere, too."

"The air-pressure," said Crane, "while greater than that now obtaining upon Earth, was probably of the order of magnitude of three meters of mercury, originally. As to the erosion, they might have had more water to begin with than our Earth had."

"Yeah, that'd account for it, all right," said Dorothy.

"There's one thing I want to ask you two scientists," Margaret said. "Everywhere we've gone, except on that one world that Dick thinks is a wandering planet, we've found the intelligent life quite remarkably like human beings. How do you account for that?"

"There, Mart, is one for the massive old bean to concentrate on," challenged Seaton: then, as Crane considered the question in silence for some time he went on: "I'll answer it myself, then, by asking another. Why not? Why shouldn't they be? Remember, man is the highest form of earthly life—at least, in our own opinion and as far as we know.

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