Free Takeoff! by Randall Garrett Page A

the ship’s engines squealed with power as they brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to the planet below. In the magniscreen, the landscape became stationary.
    He twisted the screen’s magnification control up, and the scene beneath the ship ballooned outward, spilling off the edges as the surface came closer.
    “There!” he said. “Pelquesh, what is that?”
    It was a purely rhetorical question. The wavering currents of two hundred odd miles of atmosphere caused the image to shimmer uncertainly, but there was no doubt that it was a city of some kind. Lieutenant Pelquesh said as much.
    “Plague take it!” Thagobar snarled. “An occupied planet! Only intelligent beings build cities.”
    “That’s so,” agreed Pelquesh.
    Neither of them knew what to do. Only a few times in the long history of the Dal had other races been found—and under the rule of the Empire, they had all slowly become extinct. Besides, none of them had been very intelligent, anyway.
    “We’ll have to ask General Orders,” Thagobar said at last. He went over to another screen, turned it on, and began dialing code numbers into it.
    Deep in the bowels of the huge ship, the General Orders robot came sluggishly to life. In its vast memory lay ten thousand years of accumulated and ordered facts, ten thousand years of the experiences of the Empire, ten thousand years of the final decisions on every subject ever considered by Thagobar’s race. It was

    more than an encyclopedia-it was a way of life.
    In a highly logical way, the robot sorted through its memory until it came to the information requested by Thagobar; then it relayed the data to the screen.
    “Hm-m-m,” said Thagobar. “‘Yes. General Order 333,953,216A-j, Chapter MMCMXLIX, Paragraph 402. ‘First discovery of an intelligent or semi-intelligent species shall be followed by the taking of a specimen selected at random. N o contact shall be made until the specimen has been examined according to Psychology Directive 659-B, Section 888,077-q, at the direction of the Chief Psychologist. The data will be correlated by General Orders. If contact has already been made inadvertently, refer to GO 472,678-R-s, Ch. MMMCCX, Par. 553. Specimens shall be taken according to…’”
    He finished reading off the General Order and then turned to the lieutenant. “Pelquesh, you get a spaceboat ready to pick up a specimen. I’ll notify psychologist Zandoplith to be ready for it.”
    Ed Magruder took a deep breath of spring air and closed his eyes. It was beautiful; it was filled with spicy aromas and tangy scents that, though alien, were somehow homelike-more homelike than Earth.
    He was a tall, lanky man, all elbows and knees, with nondescript brown hair and bright hazel eyes that tended to crinkle with suppressed laughter.
    He exhaled the breath and opened his eyes. The city was still awake, but darkness was coming fast. He liked his evening stroll, but it wasn’t safe to be out after dark on New Hawaii, even yet. There were little night things that fluttered softly in the air, giving little warning of their poisonous bite, and there were still some of the larger predators in the neighborhood. He started walking back toward New Hilo, the little city that marked man’s first foothold on the new planet.
    Magruder was a biologist. In the past ten years, he had prowled over half a dozen planets, collecting specimens, dissecting them with precision, and entering the results in his notebooks. Slowly, bit by bit, he was putting together a pattern-a pattern of life itself. His predecessors stretched in a long line, clear back to Karl von Linne, but none of them had realized what was missing in their work. They had had only one type of life to deal with-terrestrial life. And all terrestrial life is, after all, homogenous.
    But, of all the planets he’d seen, he liked New Hawaii best. It was the only planet besides Earth where a man could walk around without a protective suit of some kind-at least,