“First we’ll have to catch any K Beasts at all, pal. “We should secretly keep one behind for ourselves, then.
Or, you can train one like Pavlov’s dogs, so that it’ll drool if it senses that stocks are going to go down.” If someone’s going to snipe you from the shadows, it’ll call out a warning. “For example, you can bring one with you as a bodyguard. Huge swarms of Lamoan mosquitoes stirred at my approach looking at their bodies shaped like little bomber planes, I was glad my blood wasn’t to the taste of these extraterrestrial vampires. Lots of uses for those.” I waded into the underbrush to collect another trap. “An animal that can predict twelve minutes into the future. “What do you think they want K Beasts for? To put them in a zoo? Do they look like Marilyn Monroe or something?” Old Liu complained, after turning over the hundredth empty cage trap. But I hadn’t realized, this meant the K Beasts could predict our capture attempts. As an interstellar beast-catcher with a couple years of experience, I’d seen plenty of bizarre alien creatures, so I didn’t think much of it at the time. The buyer had told us that K Beasts had the ability to predict events up to twelve minutes into the future. People said that a journey that started badly, ended badly. I hoped we could catch some K Beasts soon and return home to Earth. These days, he was already able to communicate with the locals through a combination of words and gestures. Old Liu, on the other hand, seemed to have much more of a knack for languages than I did. I hadn’t tried learning a foreign language since I’d left school the effort gave me a huge headache. We had to relearn from scratch, like the human anthropologists of old. Worst of all, the shock of the “abnormal landing” cost us the Lamoan language we’d learned through the hypnosis headsets-a severe enough emotional shock to the learner would cause subliminal impartation to lose effect. The translator device was totaled the hypnosis headsets gave out on us. Fortunately, all of Haier’s products were made with standardized interchangeable parts, so repair wasn’t too difficult.īut the impact of the landing damaged quite a few of the smaller electronics. The issue had been with the spaceship’s thrust vector nozzle. They even invited us to eat with them, to settle our nerves, once again proving the universal law that vegetarians were on the side of good Old Liu’s face had gone white with terror, and I wasn’t much better. It was a group of locals who untangled us from our parachute brake, led by someone named Kaka, whose position in Earth terms would be chief of his clan. Which resulted in the spaceship crashing nose-first into the central square of a Lamoan village in a billow of black smoke. So we put on our extraterrestrial language hypnosis-learning headsets, climbed into our sleeping bags, and let autopilot complete our descent. The data they beamed back informed us that the atmosphere was breathable without mechanical assistance, that the locals were one hundred percent vegetarian, and that their society had just recently developed matrilineal clan-based tribes. Once our spaceship cut into Lamo’s planetary orbit, Old Liu and I sent down atmospheric sensors and language-recording equipment.
The beast-catching mission was off to a rocky start.
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