The Steel of Raithskar by Randall Garrett Read Free Book Online Page A

liquid. As it touched the dry, hot desert floor, the dark urine crystallized rapidly, leaving a little heap of yellow crystals. I stared at them for so long that Keeshah walked over and nosed my back, anxious to get going again.
    *
Wait,
* I told him. *
Just a little while.
* Absently I rubbed his jaw and moved my hand up to his ear to scratch lightly. He agreed with some impatience, and lay down by the side of the road.
    You find truth in the oddest places
, I was thinking to myself. The concentration of organic and inorganic salts in that urine solution must have been
high. Very
high! Like the kangaroo rat of the American southwest, my kidneys were designed to save every possible drop of water.
    With a concentration like that, a human being would have died of kidney stones or other renal failure long since. And here was the truth I had found in a simple, natural act.
    I am not
Homo sapiens.
Whatever I am, wherever Gandalara is, I am not a man as I knew men.
    Keeshah growled, and obediently, almost in a daze, I mounted him and we set off again. For a long time I simply clung tightly to his back—as though he were my own humanity and I wanted to hold it as long as possible. I pressed my face into his fur and closed my eyes and tried not to think. But by the time I detected Keeshah’s complaining thought—I was pinching his shoulders, and he could sense my distress and was worried—I had accepted it.
    I was not human.
    I apologized to Keeshah and rode more lightly, turning things over in my mind. The whole situation made less and less sense. And this last twist was cruel. The problem wasn’t so much that I knew I wasn’t human, but that I was so damned
nearly
human. I had already speculated that Gandalara might be, fantastically, on some world that orbited Alpha Centauri or Procyon. If that were true, I wouldn’t really expect to be human—but it was far less likely that I would
look
human.
    Parallel evolution was a little too much to swallow. Look at the wide and wild variety of life that had evolved on Earth during two or three thousand million years. The notion that a water-oxygen world much like Earth would necessarily evolve a dominant, human-shaped, intelligent species was nonsense on the face of it. The Earthly dolphin has a brain as fully evolved as the human.
    I don’t think I’d have gotten as much pleasure out of waking as, say, a highly intelligent, good-natured spider
, I speculated.
But after the first shock, it might have been philosophically easier to accept. And I’d have known, positively, that I wasn’t on Earth.
    I think.
    Information, damn it! I need more data before I can place myself in the “grand scheme of things.”
    For the rest of that day, I tried to keep my mind a blank. I failed, of course. The questions kept circling and spinning, seemingly in rhythm with Keeshah’s powerful movement under me.
    The cloud layer diffused the diminishing rays of sunlight as night approached, so that the light dimmed only gradually. When the sun finally set, the world was plunged into darkness with startling suddenness. I called Keeshah to a halt, slid wearily off his back, and was asleep almost before I touched the ground.
    It was full light when I woke again, and I realized that I was not fully recovered from the desert ordeal yet. I ate a light meal and drank sparingly of the water, still surprised by the tiny amount which satisfied me. Then I mounted Keeshah and we were on our way again. I rested my head on his furred back and dozed as he carried me.
    Keeshah angled toward the left, and I raised my head from his back to see what had caused the slight change in direction. The caravan trail had turned, and Keeshah was following it. If we had continued straight ahead, we would have had to cross an area of the desert that had a strangely smooth and shiny look about it.
    I caught a picture from Keeshah: anyone stepping onto that shiny area would break through the crust and sink. It was a bog of some