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Stamped Caution

Raymond Z. Gallun



  Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  stamped CAUTION

  By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

  Illustrated by KOSSIN

  _It's a funny thing, but most monsters seem to be of the opinion that it's men who are the monsters. You know, they have a point._

  * * * * *

  Ten minutes after the crackup, somebody phoned for the Army. Thatmeant us. The black smoke of the fire, and the oily residues, whichwere later analyzed, proved the presence of a probable petroleumderivative. The oil was heavily tainted with radioactivity. Mostlikely it was fuel from the odd, conchlike reaction-motors, the exactprinciples of which died, as far as we were concerned, with thecrash.

  The craft was mainly of aluminum, magnesium and a kind of stainlesssteel, proving that, confronted with problems similar to ones we hadencountered, aliens might solve them in similar ways. From thecrumpled-up wreckage which we dug out of that Missouri hillside, Kleineven noticed a familiar method of making girders and braces lighter.Circular holes were punched out of them at spaced intervals.

  I kept hunting conviction by telling myself that, for the first timein all remembered history, we were peeking behind the veil of anotherplanet. This should be the beginning of a new era, one of immenselywidened horizons, and of high romance--but with a dark side, too. Thesky was no longer a limit. There were things beyond it that would haveto be reckoned with. And how does unknown meet unknown? Suppose onehas no hand to shake?

  The mass of that wreck reeked like a hot cinder-pile and a burninggarbage dump combined. It oozed blackened goo. There were crushedpieces of calcined material that looked like cuttlebone. The thinplates of charred stuff might almost have been pressed cardboard.Foot-long tubes of thin, tin-coated iron contained combined chemicalsidentifiable as proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Food, we decided.

  * * * * *

  Naturally, we figured that here was a wonderful clue to the plant andanimal life of another world. Take a can of ordinary beef goulash; youcan see the fibrous muscle and fat structure of the meat, and thecellular components of the vegetables. And here it was true, too, to alesser degree. There were thin flakes and small, segmented cylinderswhich must have been parts of plants. But most was a homogeneous mushlike gelatin.

  Evidently there had been three occupants of the craft. But the crashand the fire had almost destroyed their forms. Craig, our biologist,made careful slides of the remains, tagging this as horny epidermis,this as nerve or brain tissue, this as skeletal substance, and this asmuscle from a tactile member--the original had been as thin asspaghetti, and dark-blooded.

  Under the microscope, muscle cells proved to be very long and thin.Nerve cells were large and extremely complex. Yet you could say thatNature, starting from scratch in another place, and working throughother and perhaps more numerous millions of years, had arrived atsomewhat the same results as it had achieved on Earth.

  I wonder how an other-world entity, ignorant of humans, would explaina shaving-kit or a lipstick. Probably for like reasons, much of thestuff mashed into that wreck had to remain incomprehensible to us.Wrenches and screwdrivers, however, we could make sense of, eventhough the grips of those tools were not _hand_-grips. We saw screwsand bolts, too. One device we found had been a simple crystaldiaphragm with metal details--a radio. There were also queer rifles.Lord knows how many people have wondered what the extraterrestrialequivalents of common human devices would look like. Well, here weresome answers.

  A few of the instruments even had dials with pointers. And the numeral_1_ used on them was a vertical bar, almost like our own. But zero wasa plus sign. And they counted by twelves, not tens.

  But all these parallels with our own culture seemed canceled by thefact that, even when this ship was in its original undamaged state, noman could have gotten inside it. The difficulty was less a matter ofhuman size than of shape and physical behavior. The craft seemed tohave been circular, with compartmentation in spiral form, like achambered nautilus.

  * * * * *

  This complete divergence from things we knew sent frost imps racing upand down my spine.

  And it prompted Blaine to say: "I suppose that emotions, drives, andpurposes among off-Earth intelligences must be utterly inconceivableto us."

  We were assembled in the big trailer that had been brought out for usto live in, while we made a preliminary survey of the wreck.

  "Only about halfway, Blaine," Miller answered. "Granting that thelife-chemistry of those intelligences is the same as ours--the needfor food creates the drive of hunger. Awareness of death is balancedby the urge to avoid it. There you have fear and combativeness. And isit so hard to tack on the drives of curiosity, invention, andambition, especially when you know that these beings made a spaceship?Cast an intelligence in any outward form, anywhere, it ought to comeout much the same. Still, there are bound to be wide differences ofdetail--with wide variations of viewpoint. They could be horrible tous. And most likely it's mutual."

  I felt that Miller was right. The duplication of a human race on otherworlds by another chain of evolution was highly improbable. And tosuppose that we might get along with other entities on a human basisseemed pitifully naive.

  With all our scientific thoroughness, when it came to examining,photographing and recording everything in the wreck, there was nobetter evidence of the clumsy way we were investigating unknown thingsthan the fact that at first we neglected our supreme find almostentirely.

  It was a round lump of dried red mud, the size of a soft baseball.When Craig finally did get around to X-raying it, indications of aless dense interior and feathery markings suggesting a soft bonestructure showed up on the plate. Not entirely sure that it was theright thing to do, he opened the shell carefully.

  Think of an artichoke ... but not a vegetable. Dusky pink, with thin,translucent mouth-flaps moving feebly. The blood in the tiny arterieswas very red--rich in hemoglobin, for a rare atmosphere.

  As a youngster, I had once opened a chicken egg, when it was ten daysshort of hatching. The memory came back now.

  "It looks like a growing embryo of some kind," Klein stated.

  "Close the lump again, Craig," Miller ordered softly.

  The biologist obeyed.

  "A highly intelligent race of beings wouldn't encase their developingyoung in mud, would they?" Klein almost whispered.

  "You're judging by a human esthetic standard," Craig offered."Actually, mud can be as sterile as the cleanest surgical gauze."

  * * * * *

  The discussion was developing unspoken and shadowy ramifications. Thething in the dusty red lump--whether the young of a dominant species,or merely a lower animal--had been born, hatched, started in lifeprobably during the weeks or months of a vast space journey. Nobodywould know anything about its true nature until, and if, it manifesteditself. And we had no idea of what that manifestation might be. Thecreature might emerge an infant or an adult. Friendly or malevolent.Or even deadly.

  Blaine shrugged. Something scared and half-savage showed in his face."What'll we do with the thing?" he asked. "Keep it safe and see whathappens. Yet it might be best to get rid of it fast--with chloroform,cyanide or the back of a shovel."

  Miller's smile was very gentle. "Could be you're right, Blaine."

  I'd never known Mi
ller to pull rank on any of the bunch. Onlydeliberate thought would remind us that he was a colonel. But hewasn't really a military man; he was a scientist whom the Army hadcalled in to keep a finger on a possibility that they had long knownmight be realized. Yes--space travel. And Miller was the right guy forthe job. He had the dream even in the wrinkles around his deep-setgray eyes.

  Blaine wasn't the right guy. He was a fine technician, good atmachinery, radar--anything of the sort. And a nice fellow. Maybe he'djust blown off steam--uncertainty, tension. I knew that no paperrelating to him would be marked, "Psychologically unsuited for task inhand." But I knew just as surely that he would be quietly transferred.In a big thing like this, Miller would surround himself only with menwho saw things his way.

  That night we moved everything to our labs on the outskirts of St.Louis. Every particle of that extraterrestrial wreck had been packedand crated with utmost care. Klein and Craig went to work to build aspecial refuge for