Distant Atmospheres Daily 1000

Two Figures Stood at the Top of the Rickety Tower... (1014#)

Two figures stood at the top of the rickety tower structure; one, the human, gripped the siderail with both hands and crouched, trying not to look down. The other, a Selasoid, balanced on a tripod of spindly legs and scanned the horizon with his radar.

“Damn, it’s cold up here. Can’t we go down now?” the human asked. He was the commissioner of the local Selasoid Cooperation Committee. Someone had to serve as the escort for the visiting Selasoid delegation, and Hank had drawn the short straw.

The Selasoid started clacking his mouthparts, and then the computerized language processor that was sewn into his breastplate started up. “We just got up here.”

“Yeah, but I’m freezing.”

The Selasoid continued to rotate his radar head around as his trunk came up from its pocket in the front of his breastplate and turned to point toward Hank. The alien’s eyeball—it wasn’t an eyeball, and the Selasoid didn’t use vision, but it served as a mechanism for sensing the environment—settled on Hank’s face. “You do seem to be turning a little blue.”

“I thought y’all couldn’t see color.”

The trunk retracted and descended back into its pocket. “We can’t. I was being sympathetic.”
“I’m going down. I’ll wait in the car for you.” Hank stepped off toward the stairs, hanging onto the siderail hand over hand as he did so.

“No, no, I’m almost done. I want you to rope down with me.”

Hank turned. “You want me to what?”

“Rope down with me,” the Selasoid said. The trunk came out again; it moved to a pouch on the Selasoid’s thigh, which, as a result of its spindly anatomy, was quite short and held nearly horizontally. A pair of tongue-like projections extended from inside the trunk. They deftly opened the pouch and brought out a coil of thin rope, then the trunk threw the main body of the coil over the edge of the rail, holding on to one end of it, and the thin rope extended all the way to the ground. “We’ll do back down on this rope.”
“Um, absolutely not,” Hank responded. He turned and tried to take a step, but suddenly his leg simply would not move forward. It was as if there were some sort of thick transparent, invisible jelly that got thicker and thicker until it resisted further movement. Hank turned around. “What’s wrong with my leg all of a sudden?”

“Nothing,” the Selasoid answered. His trunk was busy tying the end of the rope to the railing. To Hank’s horror, he lifted one of his spindly legs up and over the railing. His trunk tongues grasped the rope, and he lifted the second leg over. Now only a single one of his three legs remained on the platform. “Come on over and we’ll go down together.” The Selasoid shifted his weight and brought the third leg up and over the railing. “Come on.”

Hank moved toward the Selasoid. His hands were in his pockets—the pockets weren’t doing a great job at keeping his hands warm, but it was better than having them out in the cold. In his left pocket was his pocketknife. He pulled it out and held it alongside his leg such that the Selasoid couldn’t see it with his radar.

As Hank was moving toward the railing, the Selasoid began descending down the rope. He slowly disappeared down the rope, and as the top of his radar head left Hank’s line of sight, Hank moved a little more briskly to the railing. He brought the knife up, using his other hand to open the blade. When he got to the railing, he grasped it with one hand and leaned over enough to see the Selasoid. The top of the alien’s radar head was about 10 feet below the railing.

In one smooth, deliberate movement, Hank cut through the rope. The release of tension in the portion of the rope that was tied to the railing made that end of it flop back and over onto the platform side of the rail. The rest of the rope, and the Selasoid, started descending at 9.8 feet per second per second to the ground 130 feet below.

Hank turned away from the railing—he didn’t want to see the mess that the Selasoid would make when he hit the ground. He didn’t really want to hear it either, but he supposed that would be unavoidable, and indeed it was. The Selasoid hadn’t screamed or made any sort of vocal outburst at all, but when it hit the bare ground on that side of the tower, there was a wet splat that was hard for Hank to hear, followed by a single oddly pitched groan.

Hank winced and braced himself to hear more. Perhaps the Selasoid would scream; perhaps he would moan; perhaps he would beg piteously for assistance.

But he did not of this. There was just the lonely cawing of a single hawk, which was orbiting far above, and the white noise of the surrounding forest. At the bottom of the stairs which Hank and the Selasoid had climbed with some difficulty only half an hour ago were two backpacks, one intended for the human anatomy and one for the Selasoid, with extra-long straps and lower-slung cargo chamber. Inside each was two liters of water, two daily food packs, and in Hank’s pack, a variety of materials to start and support a warming fire. Hank would descend the tower, get the water and food out of the Selasoid’s pack, and prepare for the two-day hike back to the ship. He would enter, shower and sleep, and then when the orbiting return module was in the right place, he would blast off of this overgrown rock, dock with the module, and begin the long trip back to Earth.

There would be questions and he’d have to answer them, but there would be no worry. As a legal matter, Selasoid were not capable of being torted, and there would be a replacement Selasoid—in fact, the replacement would almost certainly be a clone of the one that he had killed—in his office within the hour.