Just before the spring equinox, the festival of Ostara on Earth, he chanced across a blue planet in a remote corner of the galaxy. It was the first one that showed extensive signs of liquid water and he eagerly dove toward the surface. He came in over an ocean, much like the ones on earth. It was blue, with whitecaps breaking here and there. He wasn’t sure the water was a hydrogen-oxygen combination, but it sure looked like it. No land was in sight and he directed the hexenbesen to find it.

When he reached the shore, it was a jumble of sharp-edged rocks, almost impossible to climb through. He persevered and finally came to a small valley with no vegetation and a stream of reddish water running through it. There was no life in sight.
“Breathable air?” he asked the broom

“Yes, but microbes in it. Will kill you.”

He sighed. It was always so. He had finally found a planet with breathable air, but he still could not breathe it. He could not put his foot on the surface of an alien land, not even for one second. Well, he had to be content with what he could do, look and move around.

Following the stream into the interior, he came upon a waterfall and here the scene changed. There were plants with extremely large green leaves that grew horizontally all the way up the stem. There were also some things he might call trees, but nothing like the trees on earth. They were rectangular in shape, dusty red all over with no bark at all and no branches. At the top, the material split open and huge ovals somewhat like pine cones in shape but with no scales clustered in a circle around the center. From these ovals, a red dust emerged to drift away on a light breeze. Spores? Possibly they were but he couldn’t tell. The sky above him was covered with yellowish, swirling clouds that created a garish light over the scene.

There was some movement below and he circled lower. Something pinkish lay on the sand by the stream. It had no eyes, no ears, it was simply a pinkish blob, fat in the middle, tapered at both ends. He came closer and landed in front of it. He could see that its body was covered with a transparent slime, but there were no signs of arms, legs, neck, anything. As he watched, something emerged from the blob near one of the ends. It looked something like a narrow tongue, pink, with a groove in the middle. The blob began scratching in the sand with it.

At that moment, he heard a crash and looked up. Some kind of black animal with long, hairy legs, looking almost like a spider, was striding through the trees. It was tall, almost twice the height of the surrounding foliage and it moved in a jerky fashion as it came toward them. The blob made a mewing sound, like a kitten, and started to wiggle toward the stream like a fat snake. The spider reached the blob, squatted down and picked up the complaining organism in a pair of scooplike devices that extended from its body. Then it turned and began striding off. Curious, he followed it as it made its way across the plain toward a cliff on the far side of the valley. When it was within about twenty or thirty feet of this obstacle, a sheer wall that rose some thousand feet or more above them, it reached with one of its legs and extracted the blob from the scoop where it had been carried. It raised the leg as straight and high as it could, and then, like a pitcher winding up to deliver a fastball, it reared back and flung the blob with terrific force against the cliff. The blob hit with a terrible crunch and orange liquid and pink flesh sprayed everywhere. It was gruesome and he had to turn away. He expected that the spider would proceed to eat the blob and he didn’t want to watch this either. But the black killer did nothing but sit and make a humming, buzzing sound, bouncing up and down slightly on its spindly legs. Then, as if satisfied that it had done something noteworthy, it started to stride away from the cliff, its mission accomplished.

It was an unbelievable demonstration of pure savagery, killing for killing’s sake. He was shaken at this display of wanton violence and sat there several more minutes trying to make sense of it. But nothing made sense in this totally alien setting, as far different from Earth as you could get. He watched the spider disappear in the forest and then he remembered that the blob had been drawing something when it was attacked. He decided to go back to the stream to see what it was.

When he got there, it was a little difficult to make out at first, then he recognized it, the five points of the star, the pentagram. The blob was a fellow witch and he was trying to communicate with him in the only way he knew how when the spider came and snatched him. Intelligent life, no matter how different from that on Earth, and now it was smeared over the face of a cliff. There was no justification for this action and anger began to rise in him. The first time he had encountered alien life, pagan life at that, and it had been destroyed for no reason at all that he could see.

His first instinct was to pursue the spider and take revenge for this shameless killing. But then he had another thought. The spider was only doing what it had been programmed to do. The gods had created both spider and blob, endowed the blob with intelligent life, and then wasted it in an utterly illogical fashion. The gods were playing with blob life on this planet the same as they dallied with human life on earth.