Free Bright Segment by Theodore Sturgeon

went to him. “Has my playmate been talking much?” He pointed at the remains of the lizard.
    “Yes and no,” said Teague. “Oxygen-breather, all right, and a true lizard. He had a secret weapon—that tail-segment he flips over his head toward his victims. It has primitive ganglia like an Earth salamander’s, so that the tail-segment trembles and squirms, sounding the rattles, after he throws it. He also has a skeleton that—but all this doesn’t matter. Most important is that he’s the analog of our early Permian life, which means (unless he’s an evolutionary dead-end like a cockroach) that this planet is a billion years old at the least. And the little fellow here—” he touched the flying thing—“bears this out. It’s not an insect, you know. It’s an arachnid.”
    “With
wings?
”
    Teague lifted the slender, scorpion-like pincers of the creature and let them fall. “Flat chitinous wings are no more remarkable a leg adaptation than those things. Anyway, in spite of the ingenuity of his engineering, internally he’s pretty primitive. All of which lets us hypothesize that we’ll find fairly close analogs of what we’re used to on Earth.”
    “Teague,” Tod interrupted, his voice lowered, his eyes narrowed to contain the worry that threatened to spill over, “Teague, what’s happened?”
    “The temperature and humidity here seem to be exactly the same as that outside,” Teague went on, in precisely the same tone as before. “This would indicate either a warm planet, or a warm season on a temperate planet. In either case it is obvious that—”
    “But,
Teague—
”
    “—that a good deal of theorizing is possible with very little evidence, and we need not occupy ourselves with anything else but that evidence.”
    “Oh,” said Tod. He backed off a step. “Oh,” he said again, “sorry,Teague.” He joined the others at the food dispensers, feeling like a cuffed puppy.
But he’s right
, he thought.
As Alma said … of the many things which might have happened, only one actually has. Let’s wait, then, and worry about that one thing when we can name it
.
    There was a pressure on his arm. He looked up from his thoughts and into April’s searching eyes. He knew that she had heard, and he was unreasonably angry at her. “Damn it, he’s so cold-blooded,” he blurted defensively, but in a whisper.
    April said, “He has to stay with things he can understand, every minute.” She glanced swiftly at the closed Coffin. “Wouldn’t you?”
    There was a sharp pain and a bitterness in Tod’s throat as he thought about it. He dropped his eyes and mumbled, “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t think I could.” There was a difference in his eyes as he glanced back at Teague.
But it’s so easy, after all, for strong people to be strong
, he thought.
    “Teague, what’ll we wear?” Carl called.
    “Skinflex.”
    “Oh, no!” cried Moira. “It’s so clingy and hot!”
    Carl laughed at her. He swept up the lizard’s head and opened its jaws. “Smile at the lady. She wouldn’t put any tough old skinflex in the way of your pretty teeth!”
    “Put it down,” said Teague sharply, though there was a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “It’s still loaded with God-knows-what alkaloid. Moira, he’s right. Skinflex just doesn’t puncture.”
    Moira looked respectfully at the yellow fangs and went obediently to storage, where she pulled out the suits.
    “We’ll keep close together, back to back,” said Teague as they helped each other into the suits. “All the weapons are … were … in the forward storage compartment, so we’ll improvise. Tod, you and the girls each take a globe of anesthene. It’s the fastest anesthetic we have and it ought to take care of anything that breathes oxygen. I’ll take scalpels. Carl—”
    “The hammer,” Carl grinned. His voice was fairly thrumming with excitement.
    “We won’t attempt to fasten the door from outside. I don’t meanto go farther than