The Star Trek Reader by James Blish

Author:James Blish [Blish, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780841504677
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 1976-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

thereafter moved with still greater caution, constantly shooting glances from side to side and up and down with a quickness which was in itself almost birdlike. Nor was he wrong; for the next day they saw three more of the sparrowlike Birds, and the next day, five. And the morning after that, they emerged from their sleeping burrow to find a smoke-black thing like an enormous crow looking down upon them, just out of club’s reach, its head bent, its neck extended until it seemed almost snakelike, its eyes glassy and unblinking.

Memories of Macbeth and Edgar Allan Poe would have made Martels shudder had he been in his right body, but Tlam was still nominally in charge, and he froze again. For very disparate reasons, neither of the two minds was surprised when the Bird’s beak parted, its throat ruffled and pulsed, and it said in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard:

“Go home.”

“I have no home any more,” 11am said hopelessly. “I am an outcast from my tribe, and all the tribes of men.”

“Go home,” the sooty thing said. “I lust for your eyes. The King has promised them to me if you do not go.”

Curiously, this did not seem to frighten 11am any further; perhaps it was a standard threat—or perhaps, if he had never been here before, he had already reached the limits of his terror. A line from James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night came back to Martels: “No hope can have no fear.” The tribesman said only:

“I cannot.”

“The King hears.”

“So be it.”

“Go home.”

“I cannot.”

This exchange was threatening to turn into a ritual, and certainly was producing no more information. In growing im

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