She was the first to find the intruders.
She had been exploring a shapeless mass of stony asteroid that turned out to be mostly empty space. Some earlier culture had carved out rooms and nooks and tankages and storage chambers, then fused the detritus into more rooms and chambers, until the mass was a stone beehive. It had all happened very long ago, but that was of no interest to her.
In later ages meteoroids had made dozens of holes through the construct. Thick walls had been gradually thinned so that air might be chemically extracted from the stone. There was no air now. There was no metal anywhere. Dry mummies, and stone, stone, little else and nothing at all for an Engineer.
She left via a meteoroid puncture; for all the air locks had been fused shut by vacuum welding. A long time after that someone had removed their metal working parts.
After she was outside, she saw them, very tar away, a tiny glimmer of golden light against the Coal Sack. It was worth a look. Anything was worth a look.
The Engineer returned to her ship.
Telescope and spectrometer failed her at first. There were two of the golden slivers, and some bulk inside each of them, but something was shutting out her view of the masses inside. Patiently the Engineer went to work on her instruments, redesigning, recalibrating, rebuilding, her hands working at blinding speed guided by a thousand Cycles of instincts.
There were force fields to be penetrated. Presently she had something that would do that. Not well, but she could see large objects.
She looked again.
Metal. Endless, endless metal.
She took off immediately. The call of treasure was not to be ignored. There was little of free will in an Engineer.
Blaine watched a flurry of activity through a red fog as he fought to regain control of his traitor body after return to normal space. An all-clear signal flashed from Lenin, and Rod breathed more easily. Nothing threatened, and he could enjoy the view.
It was the Eye he saw first. Murcheson’s Eye was a tremendous ruby, brighter than a hundred full moons, all alone on the black velvet of the Coal Sack.
On the other side of the sky, the Mote was the brightest of a sea of stars. All systems looked this way at breakout: a lot of stars, and one distant sun. To starboard was a splinter of light, Lenin, her Langston Field radiating the overload picked up in the Eye.
Admiral Kutuzov made one final check and signaled Blaine again. Until something threatened, the scientists aboard MacArthur were in charge. Rod ordered coffee and waited for information.
At first there was maddeningly little that he hadn’t already known. The Mote was only thirty-five light years from New Scotland, and there had been a number of observations, some dating back to Jasper Murcheson himself. A G2 star, less energetic than Sol, cooler, smaller and a bit less massive. It showed almost no sunspot activity at the moment, and the astrophysicists found it dull.
Rod had known about the gas giant before they started. Early astronomers had deduced it from perturbations in the Mote’s orbit around the Eye. They knew the gas giant planet’s mass and they found it almost where they expected, seventy degrees around from them. Heavier than Jupiter, but smaller, much denser, with a degenerate matter core. While the scientists worked, the Navy men plotted courses to the gas giant, in case one or the other warship should need to refuel. Scooping up hydrogen by ramming through a gas giant’s atmosphere on a hyperbolic orbit was hard on ships and crew but a lot better than being stranded in an alien system.
“We’re searching out the Trojan points now, Captain,” Buckman told Rod two hours after breakout
“Any sign of the Mote planet?”
“Not yet.” Buckman hung up.
Why was Buckman concerned with Trojan points? Sixty degrees ahead of the giant planet in its orbit, and sixty degrees behind, would be two points of stable equilibrium, called Trojan points after the Trojan asteroids that occupy similar points in Jupiter’s orbit. Over millions of years they ought to have collected dust clouds and clusters of asteroids. But why would Buckman bother with these?
Buckman called again when he found the Trojans. “They’re packed!” Buckman gloated. “Either this whole system is cluttered with asteroids from edge to edge or there’s a new principle at work. There’s more junk in Mote Beta’s Trojans than has ever been reported in another system. It’s a wonder they haven’t all collected to form a pair of moons-“
“Have you found the habitable planet yet?”
“Not yet,” said Buckman, and faded off the screen. That was three hours after breakout.
He called back hail an hour later. “Those Trojan point asteroids have very high albedos, Captain. They must be thick with dust. That might explain how so many of the larger particles were captured. The dust clouds slow them down, then polish them smooth-“
“Dr. Buckman! There is an inhabited world in this system and it is vital that we find it. These are the first intelligent aliens-“
“Dammit Captain, we’re looking! We’re looking!” Buckman glanced to one side, then withdrew. The screen was blank for a moment, showing only a badly focused shot of a technician in the background.
Blaine found himself confronting Science Minister Horvath, who said, “Please excuse the interruption, Captain~ Do I understand you are not satisfied with our search methods?”
“Dr. Horvath, I have no wish to intrude on your prerogatives. But you’ve taken over all my instruments, and I keep hearing about asteroids. I wonder if we’re all looking for the same thing?”
Horvath’s reply was mild. “This is not a space battle, Captain.” He paused. “In a war operation, you would know your target. You would probably know the ephemeris of the planets in any system of interest-“
“Hell, survey teams find planets.”
“Ever been on one, Captain?”
“Well, think about the problem we face. Until we located the gas giant and the Trojan asteroids we weren’t precise about the plane of the system. From the probe’s instruments we have deduced the temperature the Modes find comfortable, and from that we deduce how far from their sun their planet should be-and we still must search out a toroid a hundred and twenty million kilometers in radius. Do you follow me?”
Blaine nodded.
“We’re going to have to search that entire region. We know the planet isn’t hidden behind the sun because we’re above the plane of the system. But when we finish photographing the system we have to examine this enormous star field for the one dot of light we want.”
“Perhaps I was expecting too much.”
“Perhaps. We’re all waiting as fast as we can.” He smiled-a spasm that lifted his whole face for a split second-and vanished.
Six hours after breakout Horvath reported again. There was no sign of Buckman. “No, Captain, we haven’t found the inhabited planet. But Dr. Buckman’s time-wasting observations have identified a Motie civilization. In the Trojan points.”
“They’re inhabited?”
“Definitely. Both Trojan points are seething with microwave frequencies. We should have guessed from the high albedos of the larger bodies. Polished surfaces are a natural product of civilization-I’m afraid Dr. Buckman’s people think too much in terms of a dead universe.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Is any of that message traffic for us?”
“I don’t think so, Captain. But the nearest Trojan point is below us in this system’s plane-about three million kilometers away. I suggest we go there. From the apparent density of civilization in the Trojan points it may be that the inhabited planet is not the real nexus of Motie civilization. Perhaps it is like Earth. Or worse.”
Rod was shocked. He had found Earth herself shocking, not all that many years ago. New Annapolis was kept on Manhome so that Imperial officers would know just how vital was the great task of the Empire.
And if men had not had the Alderson Drive before Earth’s last battles, and the nearest star had been thirty-five light years away instead of four- “That’s a horrible thought.”
“I agree. It’s also only a guess, Captain. But in any event there is a viable civilization nearby, and I think we should go to it.”
“I-just a moment.” Chief Yeoman Lud Shattuck was at the bridge companionway gesturing frantically at Rod’s number-four screen.
“We used the message-sending locator scopes, Skipper,” Shattuck shouted across the bridge. “Look, sir.”
The screen showed black space with pinhole dots of stars and a blue-green point circled by an indicator lightring. As Rod watched, the point blinked, twice.
“We’ve found the inhabited planet,” Rod said with satisfaction. He couldn’t resist. “We beat you to it, Doctor.”
After all the waiting, it was as if everything broke at once. The light was first. There might have been an Earth-like world behind it; there probably was, for it was in the doughnut locus Horvath was searching. But the light hid whatever was behind it, and it wasn’t surprising that the communications people had found it first. Watching for signals was their job.
Cargill and Horvath’s team worked together to answer the pulses. One, two, three, four blinked the light, and Cargill used the forward batteries to send five, six, seven. Twenty minutes later the light sent three one eight four eleven, repeated, and the ship’s brain ground out: P1, base twelve. Cargill used the computer to find e to the same base and replied with that.
But the true message was, We want to talk to you. And MacArthur’s answer was, Fine. Elaborations would have to wait.
And the second development was already in.
“Fusion light,” said Sailing Master Renner. He bent close over his screen. His fingers played strange, silent music on his control board. “No Langston Field. Naturally. They’re just enclosing the hydrogen, fusing it and blasting it out. A plasma bottle. It’s not as hot as our drives, which means lower efficiency. Red shift, if I’m reading the impurities right . . . it must be aimed away from us.”
“You think it’s a ship coming to meet us?”
“Yessir. A small one. Give us a few minutes and I’ll tell you its acceleration. Meanwhile, we assume an acceleration of one gee...Renner’s fingers had been tapping all the while “. . . and get a mass of thirty tons. Later we’ll readjust that.”
“Too big to be a missile,” Blaine said thoughtfully. “Should we meet him halfway, Mr. Renner?”
Renner frowned. “There’s a problem. He’s aiming at where we are now. We don’t know how much fuel he’s got, or how bright he is.”
“Let’s ask, anyway. Eyes! Get me Admiral Kutuzov.” The Admiral was on his bridge. Blurs out of focus behind him showed activity aboard Lenin. “I’ve seen it, Captain,” Kutuzov said. “What do you want to do about it?”
“I want to go meet that ship. But in case it can’t change course or we can’t catch it, it will come here, sir. Lenin could wait for it.”
“And do what, Captain? My instructions are clear, Lenin is to have nothing to do with aliens.”
“But you could send out a boat, sir. A gig, which we’ll pick up with your men. Sir.”
“How many boats do you think I have, Blaine? Let me repeat my instructions. Lenin is here to protect secret of Alderson Drive and Langston Field. To accomplish task we will not only not communicate with aliens, we will not communicate with you when message might be intercepted.”
“Yes, sir.” Blaine stared at the burly man on the screen. Didn’t he have a shred of curiosity? Nobody could be that much of a machine . . . or could he? “We’ll go to the alien ship, sir. Dr. Horvath wants to anyway.”
“Very good, Captain. Carry on.”
“Yes, sir.” Rod cut off the screen with relief, then tuned to Renner. “Let’s go make first contact with an alien, Mr. Renner.”
“I think you just did that,” said Renner. He glanced nervously at the screens to be sure the Admiral was gone.
Horace Bury was just leaving his cabin-on the theory that he might be less bored somewhere else-when Buckman’s head popped out of a companionway.
Bury changed his mind at once. “Dr. Buckman! May I offer you coffee?”
Protuberant eyes turned, blinked, focused. “What? Oh. Yes, thank you, Bury. It might wake me. There’s been so much to do-I can only stay a moment-“
Buckman dropped into Bury’s guest chair, limp as a physician’s display skeleton. His eyes were red; his eyelids drooped at half-mast. His breathing was too loud. The stringy muscle tissue along his bare arm drooped. Bury wondered what an autopsy would show if Buckman were to die at this moment: exhaustion, malnutrition, or both?
Bury made a difficult decision. “Nabil, some coffee. With cream, sugar, and brandy for Dr. Buckman.”
“Now, Bury, I’m afraid that during working hours-Oh, well. Thank you, Nabil.” Buckman sipped, then gulped. “Ah! That’s good. Thank you, Bury, that ought to wake me.”
“You seemed to need it. Normally I would never adulterate good coffee with distilled spirits. Dr. Buckman, have you been eating?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You haven’t. Nabil, food for our guest. Quickly.”
“Bury, we’re so busy, I really haven’t time. There’s a whole solar system to explore, not to mention the jobs for the Navy-tracing neutrino emissions, tracking that damned light-“
“Doctor, if you were to die at this moment, many of yours notes would never be written down, would they?”
Buckman smiled. “So theatrical, Bury. But I suppose I can spare a few minutes. All we’re doing now is waiting for that signal light to go off.”
“A signal from the Mote planet?”
“From Mote Prime, yes, at least it came from the right place. But we can’t see the planet until they turn off the laser, and they won’t. They talk and talk, and for what? What can they tell us if we don’t speak a common language?”
“After all, Doctor, how can they tell us anything until they teach us their language? I presume that’s what they’re trying to do now. Isn’t anyone working on that?”
Buckman gave a feral snarl. “Horvath has all the instruments feeding information to Hardy and the linguists. Can’t get any decent observations of the Coal Sack-and no one’s ever been this close to it before!” His look softened. “But we can study the Trojan asteroids.”
Buckman’s eye took on that look, the focus on infinity. “There are too many of them. And not enough dust. I was wrong, Bury; there’s not enough dust to capture so many rocks, or to polish them either. The Modes probably did the polishing, they must be all through those rocks, the neutrino emissions are fantastic. But how did so many rocks get captured?”
“Neutrino emissions. That means a fusion technology.”
Buckman smiled. “One of a high order. Thinking of trade possibilities?”
“Of course. Why else would I be here?” And I would be here even if the Navy had not made it clear that the alternative was a formal arrest . . .but Buckman wouldn’t know that. Only Blaine did. “The higher their civilization, the more they’ll have to trade,” And the harder they’d be to cheat; but Buckmen wouldn’t be interested in such things.
Buckman complained, “We could move so much faster if the Navy didn’t use our telescopes. And Horvath lets them! Ah, good.” Nabil entered, pushing a tray.
Buckman ate like a starved rat. Between mouthfuls he said, “Not that all the Navy’s projects are totally without interest. The alien ship-“
“Ship?”
“There’s a ship coming to meet us. Didn’t you know?”
“No..”
“Well, its point of departure is a large, stony asteroid well outside the main cluster. The point is, it’s very light. It must have a very odd shape, unless there are gas bubbles all through the rock, which would mean-“
Bury laughed outright. “Doctor, surely an alien space craft is more interesting than a stony meteorite!”
Buckman looked startled. “Why?”
The slivers turned red, then black. Clearly the things were cooling; but how had they become hot in the first place?
The Engineer had stopped wondering about that when one of the slivers came toward her. There were power sources inside the metal bulks.
And they were self-motivated. What were they? Engineers, or Masters, or senseless machinery? A Mediator on some incomprehensible task? She resented the Mediators, who could so easily and so unreasonably interfere with important work.
Perhaps the slivers were Watchmakers; but more likely they contained a Master. The Engineer considered running, but the approaching bulk was too powerful. It accelerated at 1.14 gravities, nearly the limit of her ship. There was nothing for an Engineer to do but meet it.
Besides. . . all that metal! In useful form, as far as she could tell. The Clusters were full of metal artifacts, but in alloys too tough to convert.
All that metal.
But it must meet her, not the other way around. She had not the fuel or the acceleration. She worked out turnover points in her head. The other would do the same, of course. Luckily the solution was unique, assuming constant acceleration. There would be no need for communication.
Engineers were not good at communication.
The alien ship was a compact bulk, irregular of shape and dull gray in color, like modeling clay molded in cupped hands. Extrusions sprouted at seeming random: a ring of hooks around what Whitbread took for the aft end; a thread of bright silver girdling its waist; transparent bulges fore and aft; antennae in highly imaginative curves; and dead aft, a kind of stinger: a spine many times the length of the hull, very long and straight and narrow.
Whitbread coasted slowly inward. He rode a space-to-space taxi, the cabin a polarized plastic bubble, the short hull studded with “thruster clusters”-arrays of attitude jets. Whitbread had trained for space in such a vehicle. Its field of view was enormous; it was childishly easy to steer; it was cheap, weaponless, and expendable.
And the alien could see him inside. We come in peace, with nothing hidden-assuming its alien eyes could see through clear battle plastic.
“That spine generates the plasma fields for the drive,” his communicator was saying. There was no screen, but the voice was Cargill’s. “ We watched it during deceleration. That spiggot device beneath the spine probably feeds hydrogen into the fields.”
“I’d better stay out of its way,” said Mr. Whitbread.
“Right. The field intensity would probably wreck your instruments. It might affect your nervous systems too.”
The alien ship was very close now. Whitbread fired bursts to slow himself. The attitude jets sounded like popcorn popping.
“See any signs of an air lock?”
“No, sir.”
“Open your own air lock. Maybe that will get the idea across.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Whitbread could see the alien through the forward bubble. It was motionless, watching him, and it looked very like the photographs he had seen of the dead one in the probe. Jonathon Whitbread saw a neckless, lopsided head, smooth brown fur, a heavy left arm gripping something, two slender right arms moving frantically fast, doing things out of his field of vision.
Whitbread opened his air lock. And waited.
At least the Motie hadn’t started shooting yet.
The Engineer was captivated. She hardly noticed the tiny vehicle nearby. There were no new principles embodied there. But the big ship!
It had a strange field around it, something the Engineer had never believed possible. It registered on half a dozen of the Engineer’s instruments. To others the force envelope was partly transparent. The Engineer knew enough about the warship already to scare the wits out of Captain Blaine if he’d known. But it was not enough to satisfy an Engineer.
All that gadgetry! And metal!
The small vehicle’s curved door was opening and closing now. It flashed lights on and off. Patterns of elect electromagnetic force radiated from both vehicles. The signals meant nothing to an Engineer.
It was the ship’s gadetry that held her attention. The Field itself, its properties intriguing and puzzling, its underlying principles a matter of guesswork. The Engineer was ready to spend the rest of her life trying. For one look at the generator she would have died. The big ship’s motive force was different from any fusion plant the Engineer had ever heard of; and its workings seemed to use the properties of that mysterious force envelope.
How to get aboard? How to get through that envelope? The intuition that came was rare for an Engineer. The small craft...was it trying to talk to her? It had come from the large craft. Then...
The small craft was a link to the larger ship, to the force envelope and its technology and the mystery of its sudden appearance.
She had forgotten danger. She had forgotten everything in the burning urge to know more about that field. The Engineer opened her air-lock door and waited to see what would happen.
“Mister Whitbread, your alien is trying to use probes on MacArthur,” Captain Blaine was saying, “Commander Cargill says he has them blocked. If that makes the alien suspicious, it can’t be helped. Has he tried any kind of probe on you?”
“No, sir.”
Rod frowned and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You’re sure?”
“I’ve been watching the instruments, sir.”
“That’s funny. You’re smaller, but you’re close. You’d think he-“
“The air lock!” Whitbread snapped. “Sir, the Motie’s opened his air lock.”
“I see it. A mouth opened in the hull. Is that what you me an?”
“Yessir. Nothing coming out. I can see the whole cabin through that opening. The Motie’s in his control cabin- permission to enter, sir?”
“Hmm. OK. Watch yourself. Stay in communication. And good luck; Whitbread.”
Jonathon sat a moment, nerving himself. He had half hoped the Captain would forbid it as too dangerous. But of course midshipmen are expendable... Whitbread braced himself in the open air lock. The alien ship was very close. With the entire ship watching him, he launched himself into space.
Part of the alien’s hull had stretched like skin, to open into a kind of funnel. A strange way to build an air lock, thought Whitbread. He used backpack jets to slow himself as he drifted straight into the funnel, straight toward the Motie, who stood waiting to receive him.
The alien wore only its soft brown fur and four thick pads of black hair, one in each armpit and one at the groin. “No sign of what’s holding the air in, but there’s got to be air in there,” Whitbread told the mike. A moment later he knew. He had run into invisible honey.
The air lock closed against his back.
He almost panicked. Caught like a fly in amber, no forward, no retreat. He was in a cell 130 cm high, the height of the alien. It stood before him on the other side of the invisible wall, blank-faced, looking him over.
The Motie. It was shorter than the other, the dead one in the probe. Its color was different: there were no white markings through the brown fur. There was another, subtler, more elusive difference . . . perhaps the difference between the quick and the dead, perhaps something else.
The Motie was not frightening. Its smooth fur was like one of the Doberman pinschers Whitbread’s mother used to raise, but there was nothing vicious or powerful looking about the alien. Whitbread would have liked to stroke its fur.
The face was no more than a sketch, without expression, except for a gentle upward curve of the lipless mouth, a sardonic half-smile. Small, fiat-footed, smooth-furred, almost featureless- It looks like a cartoon, Whitbread thought. How could he be afraid of a cartoon?
But Jonathon Whitbread was crouched in a space much too small for him, and the alien was doing nothing about it.
The cabin was a crowded patchwork of panels and dark crevasses, and tiny faces peered at him from the shadows.
Vermin! The ship was infested with vermin. Rats? Food supply? The Motie did not seem disturbed as one flashed into the open, then another, more dancing from cover to cover, crowding close to see the intruder.
They were big things. Much bigger than rats, much smaller than men. They peered from the corners, curious but timid. One dodged close and Whitbread got a good look. What he saw made him gasp. It was a tiny Motie!
It was a difficult time for the Engineer. The intruder’s entry should have answered questions, but it only raised more.
What was it? Big, big-headed, symmetrical as an animal, but equipped with its own vehicle like an Engineer or a Master. There had never been a class like this. Would it obey or command? Could the hands be as clumsy as they looked? Mutation, monster, sport? What was it for?
Its mouth was moving now. It must be speaking into a communications device. That was no help. Even Messengers used language.
Engineers were not equipped to make such decisions; but one could always wait for more data.
Engineers had endless patience.
“There’s air,” Whitbread reported. He watched the telltales that showed in a mirror just above his eye level. “Did I mention that? I wouldn’t want to try breathing it. Normal pressure, oxygen around 18 percent, CO2 about 2 percent, enough helium to register, and-“
“Helium? That’s odd. Just how much?”
Whitbread switched over to a more sensitive scale and waited for the analyzer to work. “Around 1 percent. Just under.”
“Anything else?”
“Poisons. SO2, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, ketones, alcohols, and some other stuff that doesn’t read out with this suit. The light blinks yellow.”
“Wouldn’t kill you fast, then. You could breathe it a while and still get help in time to save your lungs.”
“That’s what I thought,” Whitbread said uneasily. He began loosening the dogs holding down his faceplate.
“What does that mean, Whitbread?”
“Nothing, sir.” Jonathon had been doubled over far too long. Every joint and muscle screamed for surcease. He had run out of things to describe in the alien cabin. And the thrice-damned Motie just stood there in its sandals and its faint smile, watching, watching...
“Whitbread?”
Whitbread took a deep breath and held it. He lifted the faceplate against slight pressure, looked the alien in the eye, and screamed ail in one breath, “Will you for God’s sake turn off that damned force field!” and snapped the faceplate down.
The alien turned to his control board and moved something. The soft barrier in front of Whitbread vanished.
Whitbread took two steps forward. He straightened up a half-inch at a time, feeling the pain and hearing the cracking of unused joints. He had been crouched in that cramped space for an hour and a half, examined by half a dozen twisted Brownies and one bland, patient alien. He hurt!
He had trapped cabin air under his faceplate. The stink caught at his throat, so that he stopped breathing; then self-consciously he sniffed at it in case anyone wanted to know what it was.
He smelled animals and machines, ozone, gasoline, hot oil, halitosis, old sweat socks, burning, glue, and things he had never smelled before. It was unbelievably rich-and his suit was removing it, thank God.
He asked, “Did you hear me yell?”
“Yes, and so did everyone in this ship,” said Cargill’s voice. “I don’t think there’s a man aboard who isn’t following you, unless it’s Buckman. Any result?”
“He turned off the force field. Right away. He was just waiting for me to remind him.
“And I’m in the cabin now. I told you about the repairs? It’s all repairs, all hand made, even the control panels. But it’s all well done, nothing actually in the way, for a Motie, that is. Me, I’m too big. I don’t dare move.
“The little ones have all disappeared. No, there’s one peeping out of a corner…the big one is waiting to see what I do. I wish he’d stop that.”
“See if he’ll come back to the ship with you-“
“I’ll try, sir.”
The alien had understood him before, or seemed to, but it did not understand him now. Whitbread thought furiously. Sign language? His eye fell on something that had to be a Motie pressure suit.
He pulled it from its rack, noting its lightness: no weaponry, no armor. He handed it to the alien, then pointed to MacArthur beyond the bubble.
The alien began dressing at once. In literally seconds it was in full gear, in a suit that, inflated, looked like ten beach balls glued together. Only the gauntlets were more than simple inflated spheres.
It took a transparent plastic sack from the wall and reached suddenly to capture one of the ½ -meter-high miniatures. He stuffed it into the sack headfirst while the miniature wriggled, then turned to Whitbread and rushed at the middle with lightning speed. It had reached behind Whitbread with two right hands and was already moving away when Whitbread reacted: a violent and involuntary yip.
“Whitbread? What’s happening? Answer me!” Another voice in the background of Whitbread’s suit said crisply, “Marines, stand by.”
“Nothing, Commander Cargill. It’s all right. No attack, I mean, I think the alien’s ready to go-no, it isn’t. It’s got two of the parasites in a plastic sack, and it’s inflating the sack from an air spiggot. One of the little beasts was on my back. I never felt it.
“Now the alien’s making something. I don’t understand what’s keeping it. It knows we want to go to MacArthur-it put on a pressure suit.”
“What’s it doing?”
“It’s got the cover off the control panel. It’s rewiring things. A moment ago it was squeezing sliver toothpaste in a ribbon along the printed circuitry. I’m only telling you what it looks like, of course. YIPE!”
“Whitbread?”
The midshipman was caught in a hurricane. Arms and legs flailing, he snatched frantically for something, anything solid. He was scraped along the side of the air lock, reached and found nothing to grasp. Then night and stars whirled past him.
“The Motie opened the air lock,” he reported. “No warning. I’m outside, in space.” His hands used attitude jets to stop his tumbling. “I think he let all the breathing air out. There’s a great fog of ice crystals around me, and-Oh, Lord, it’s the Motie! No, it isn’t, it’s not wearing a pressure suit. There goes another one.
“They must be the little ones,” Cargill said.
“Right He’s killed all the parasites. He probably has to do it every so often, to clear them out. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be aboard MacArthur and he doesn’t want them running wild. So he’s evacuated the ship.”
“He should have warned you.”
“Damn right he should! Excuse me, sir.”
“Are you all right, Whitbread?”, A new voice. The Captain’s.
“Yessir. I’m approaching the alien’s ship. Ah, here he comes now. He’s jumping for the taxi.” Whitbread stopped his approach and turned to watch the Motie. The alien sailed through space like a cluster of beach balls, but graceful, graceful. Within a transparent balloon fixed to its torso, two small, spidery figures gestured wildly. The alien paid them no attention.
“A perfect jump,” Whithread muttered. “Unless-he’s cutting it a bit fine. Jesus!” The alien was still decelerating as it flew through the taxi door, dead centered, so that it never touched the edges. “Ho must be awfully sure of his balance.”
“Whitbread, is that alien inside your vehicle? Without you?”
Whitbread winced at the bite in the Captain’s voice. “Yes, sir. I’m going after him.”
“See you do, Mister.”
The alien was at the pilot’s station, studying the controls intensely. Suddenly it reached out and began to turn the quick fasteners at the panel’s edge. Whitbread yelped and rushed up to grab the alien’s shoulder. It paid no attention. Whitbread put his helmet against the alien’s. “Leave that to hell alone!” he shouted. Then he gestured to the passenger’s saddle. The alien rose slowly, turned, and straddled the saddle. It didn’t fit there. Whitbread took the controls gratefully and began to maneuver the taxi toward MacArthur.
He brought the taxi to a stop just beyond the neat hole Sinclair had opened in MacArthur’s Field. The alien ship was out of sight around the bulk of the warship. Hangar deck was below, and the midshipman yearned to take the gig through under her own power, to demonstrate his ability to the watching alien, but he knew better. They waited.
Suited spacers came up from the hangar deck. Cables trailed behind them. The spacers waved. Whitbread waved back, and seconds later Sinclair started the winches to tug the gig down into MacArthur. As they passed the hangar doors more cables were made fast to the top side of the gig. These pulled taut, slowing the taxi, as the great hangar doors began to close.
The Motie was watching, its entire body swiveling from side to side, reminding Whitbread of an owl he had once seen in a zoo on Sparta. Amazingly, the tiny creatures in the alien’s bag were also watching; they aped the larger alien. Finally they were at rest, and Whitbread gestured toward the air lock. Through the thick glass he could see Gunner Kelley and a dozen armed Marines.
There were twenty screens in a curved array m front of Rod Blaine~ and consequently every scientist aboard MacArthur wanted to sit near him. As the only possible way to settle the squabbling Rod ordered the ship to battle stations and the bridge cleared of all civilian personnel. Now he watched as Whitbread climbed aboard the gig.
Through the camera eye mounted on Whitbread’s helmet Blaine could see the alien seated in the pilot’s chair, its image seeming to grow as the middie rushed toward it. Blaine turned to Renner “Did you see what it did?”
“Yah. Sir. The alien was-Captain I’d swear it was trying to take the-gig’s controls apart.”
“So would I.” They watched in frustration as Whitbread piloted the gig toward MacArthur. Blaine couldn’t blame the boy for not looking around at his passenger while trying to steer the boat, but, . best leave him alone. They waited while the cables were made fast to the gig and it was winched down into MacArthur.
“Captain!” It was Staley, midshipman of the watch, but Rod could -see it too. Several screens and a couple of minor batteries were trained on the gig, but the heavy stuff was all aimed at the alien ship; and it had come to life.
A streamer of blue light glowed at the stem of the alien craft. The color of Cherenkov radiation, it flowed parallel to the slender silver spine at the tail. Suddenly there was a line of intense white light beside it.
“Yon ship’s under way, Captain,” Sinclair reported.
“God damn it to hell!” His own screens showed the same thing, also that the ship’s batteries were tracking the alien craft.
“Permission to fire?” the gunnery officer asked.
“No!” But what was the thing up to? Rod wondered. Time enough when Whitbread got aboard, he supposed. The alien ship couldn’t escape. And neither would the alien.
“Kelley!”
“Sir!”
“Squad to the air lock. Escort Whitbread and that thing to the reception room. Politely, Gunner. Politely, but make sure it doesn’t go anywhere else.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
“Number One?” Blaine called.
“Yes, sir,” Cargill answered.
“You were monitoring Whitbread’s helmet camera the entire time he was in that ship?”
”Yes, sir.”
“Any chance there was another alien aboard?”
“No, sir. There wasn’t room. Right, Sandy?”
“Aye, Captain,” Sinclair answered. Blaine had activated a com circuit to both the after bridge and the engine room. “Not if that beastie were to carry fuel too. And we saw nae doors.”
“There wasn’t any air-lock door either, until it opened,” Rod reminded him. “Was there anything that might have been a bathroom?”
“Captain, did we nae see the w.c.? I took the object on port side near the air lock to be such.”
“Yeah. Then that thing’s on autopilot, would you both agree? But we didn’t see him program it.”
“We saw him practically rebuild the controls, Captain,” Cargill said. “My Lord! Do you think that’s how they control...”
“Seems verra inefficient, but the beastie did nae else that could hae been the programming of an autopilot,” Sinclair mused. “And ‘twas bloody quick about it, sir. Captain, do ye think it built an autopilot?”
There was a glare on one of Rod’s screens. “Catch that? A blue flare in the alien ship’s air lock. Now what was that for?”
“To kill yon vermin?” Sinclair asked.
“Hardly. The vacuum would have done,” Cargill answered.
Whitbread came onto the bridge and stood stiffly in front of Blaine’s command chair. “Reporting to Captain, sir.”
“Well done, Mr. Whitbread,” Rod said. “Uh-have you any ideas about those two vermin he brought abroad? Such as why they’re here?”
“No, sir-courtesy? We might want to dissect one?”
“Possibly. If we knew what they were. Now take a look at that.” Blaine pointed at his screens.
The alien ship was turning, the white light of its drive drawing an arc on the sky. It seemed to be heading back to the Trojan points.
And Jonathon Whitbread was the only man alive who had ever been inside. As Blaine released the crew from action stations, the red-haired midshipman was probably thinking that the ordeal was over.
The Engineer’s mouth was wide and lipless, turned up at the corners. It looked like a half-smile of gentle happiness, but it was not. It was a permanent fixture of her cartoon face.
Nonetheless, the Engineer was happy.
Her joy had grown and grown. Coming through the Langston Field had been a new experience, like penetrating a black bubble of retarded time. Even without instruments, that told her something about the Field. She was more eager than ever to see that generator.
The ship within the bubble seemed unnecessarily crude, and it was rich, rich! There were parts in the hangar deck that seemed unattached to anything else, mechanisms so plentiful that they didn’t have to be used! And many things she could not understand at a glance.
Some would be structural adaptations to the Field, or to the mysterious drive that worked from the Field. Others must be genuinely new inventions to do familiar things, new circuits, at least new to an unsophisticated Engineer miner. She recognized weapons, weapons on the big ship, weapons on the boats in the hangar space, personal weapons carried by the aliens clustered around the other side of the air lock.
This did not surprise her. She had known this new class were givers of orders, not takers of orders. Naturally they would have weapons. They might even have Warriors.
The double-door air lock was too complex, too easy to jam, primitive, and wasteful of metals and materials. She was needed here, she could see that. The new class must have come here to get her, there couldn’t be any Engineers aboard the ship if they used things like this. She started to take the mechanism apart, but the stranger pulled at her arm and she abandoned the idea. She didn’t have the tools anyway, and she didn’t know what it would be lawful to use to make the tools. There would be time for all that...
A lot of others, much like the first one, clustered around her. They wore strange coverings, most of it alike, and carried weapons, but they didn’t give orders. The stranger kept trying to talk to her.
Couldn’t they see she wasn’t a Mediator? They were not too bright, this primitive new class. But they were givers of orders. The first one had shouted a clear command.
And they couldn’t speak Language.
The situation was remarkably free of decisions. An Engineer need only go where she was led, repair and redesign where the opportunity arose, and wait for a Mediator. Or a Master. And there was so much to do, so much to do...
The petty officers’ lounge had been converted into a reception room for alien visitors. The petty officers had to take over one of the Marine messes, doubling the joeys into the other. All over the ship adjustments had to be made to accommodate the swarms of civilians and their needs.
As a laboratory the lounge might lack something, but it was secure, and had plenty of running water, wall plugs, hot plates, and refreshment facilities. At least there was nothing to smack of the dissection table.
After some argument it had been decided not to attempt to build furniture to fit the aliens. Anything they built would only accommodate the passenger aboard the probe, and that seemed absurd.
There were plenty of tv pickups, so that although only a few key personnel were allowed in the lounge, nearly everyone aboard the ship could watch. Sally Fowler waited with the scientists, and she was determined to win the Motie’s trust. She didn’t care who was watching or what it would take to do that.
As it turned out, the Motie’s trust was easy to come by. She was as trustful as a child. Her first move on coming out of the air lock with to tear open the plastic sack containing the miniatures, and give it to the first hand that reached for it. She never bothered about them again.
She went where she was led, walking between the Marines until Sally took her by the hand at the reception room door, and everywhere she went she looked about, her body swiveling like an owl’s head. When Sally let go, the Motie simply stood and waited for further instructions, watching everyone with that same gentle smile.
She did not seem to understand gestures. Sally and Horvath and others tried to talk to the Motie, with no result. Dr. Hardy, the Chaplain linguist, drew mathematical diagrams and nothing happened. The Motie did not understand and was not interested.
She was interested in tools, though. As soon as she was inside she reached for Gunner Kelley’s sidearm. At a command from Dr. Horvath the Marine reluctantly unloaded the weapon and let her handle one of the cartridges before surrendering the gun. The Motie took it completely apart, to Kelley’s annoyance and everyone else’s amusement, then put it back together again, correctly, to Kelly’s amazement. She examined the Marine’s hand, bending the fingers to the limit and working them in their joints, using her own fingers to probe the muscles and the complex bones of the wrist. She examined Sally Fowler’s hand in the same way for comparison.
The Motie took tools from her belt and beg~ pork on the grip of the pistol, building it up with plastic squeezed from a tube.
“The little ones are female,” one of the biologists announced. “Like the big one.”
“A female asteroid miner,” Sally said. Her eyes took on a faraway look. “If they use females in a hazardous job like that, they’re going to have a culture a lot different from the Empire’s.” She regarded the Motie speculatively. The alien smiled back.
“We would be better occupied in learning what it eats,” Horvath mused. “It doesn’t seem to have brought a food supply, and Captain Blaine informs me that its ship has departed for parts unknown.” He glanced at the miniature Moties, who were moving about on the big table originally used for spatball. “Unless those are a food supply.”
“We’d best not try cooking them just yet,” Renner announced from near the door. “They could be children. Immature Moties.”
Sally turned suddenly and half gasped before regaining her scientific detachment. Not that she’d be part of cooking anything before she knew what it was.
Horvath spoke. “Mr. Renner, why is MacArthur’s Sailing Master concerning himself with an investigation of extraterrestrial anatomy?”
“The ship’s at rest, the Captain secured from general quarters, and I’m off duty,” Renner said. He conveniently neglected to mention the Captain’s standing orders about crew getting in the scientists’ way. “Are you ordering me out?”
Horvath thought about it. On the bridge, so did Rod Blaine, but he didn’t like Horvath much anyway. The Science Minister shook his head. “No. But I think your suggestion about the small aliens was frivolous.”
“Not at all. They could lose the second left arm the way we lose our baby teeth.” One of the biologists nodded agreement. “What other differences are there? Size?”
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” someone said. Someone else said, “Oh, shut up.”
The alien gave Kelley back his sidearm and looked around. Renner was the only naval officer in the room, and the alien went up to him and reached for his pistol. Renner unloaded the weapon and handed it over, then submitted-to the same ridiculous examination of his hand. This time the Motie worked much faster, its hands moving with almost blinding speed.
“Me, I think they’re monkeys,” Renner said. “Ancestors to the intelligent Moties. Which could mean you were right, too. There are people who eat monkey meat on a dozen planets. But we can hardly risk it yet.”
The Motie worked on Renner’s weapon, then laid it on the table. Renner picked it up. He frowned, for the fiat butt had been built up into curving ridges which were now as hard as the original plastic. Even the trigger had been built up. Renner shifted the piece in his hand, and suddenly it was perfect. Like part of his hand, and it aimed itself.
He savored it for a moment, and noted that Kelley had already reloaded and holstered his own sidearm after a puzzled look. The pistol was perfect, and Renner would hate to lose it; no wonder the Marine hadn’t spoken. The Sailing Master handed the piece to Horvath.
The elderly Science Minister took the pistol. “Our visitor seems to know tools,” he said. “I don’t know guns, of course, but the weapon seems well tailored to the human hand,”
Renner took it back. Something nagged him about Horvath’s comment. It lacked enthusiasm. Could the gun have fit his own hand better than Horvath’s?
The Mode looked around the lounge, swiveling at the torso, staring at each of the scientists, then at other equipment, looking and waiting, waiting.
One of the miniatures sat cross-legged in front of Renner, also watching and waiting. It seemed totally unafraid. Rennet reached to scratch it behind the ear, the right ear. Like the big Motie, it had no left ear; shoulder muscles for the upper left arm depended from the top of the head. But it seemed to enjoy the scratching, Renner carefully avoided the ear itself, which was large and fragile.
Sally watched, wondering what to do next, and wondering also what bothered her about Renner’s performance. Not the incongruity of a ship’s officer scratching the ear of what seemed to be an alien monkey, but something else, something about the ear itself...
Dr. Buckman was on duty in the observation room when the blinding laser signal from the inner system went out.
There was a planet there all right, about the size of Earth, with a distorting fringe of transparent atmosphere. He nodded in satisfaction; that was a lot of detail to see at this distance. The Navy had good equipment and they used it well, Some of the petty officers would make good astronomical assistants; pity they were wasted here
What was left of his astronomy section went to work analyzing data from observations of the planet, and Buckman called Captain Blaine.
“I wish you’d get me back some of my men,” he complained. “They’re all standing around the lounge watching the Mode.”
Blaine shrugged. He could hardly order the scientists around. Buckman’s management of his department was his own affair. “Do the best you can, Doctor. Everyone’s curious about the alien. Even my Sailing Master, who’s got no business down there at all. What have you got so far? Is it a terrestrial planet?”
“In a manner of speaking. A touch smaller than Earth, with a water-oxygen atmosphere. But there are traces in the spectrum that have me intrigued. The helium line is very strong, far too strong. I suspect the data.”
“A strong helium line? One percent or thereabouts?”
“It would be if the reading were correct, but frankly-Why did you say that?”
“The breathing air in the Motie ship was 1 percent helium, with some rather odd components; I think your reading is accurate.”
“But, Captain, there’s no way a terrestrial planet could hold that much helium! It has to be spurious. Some of the other lines are even worse.”
“Ketones? Hydrocarbon complexes?”
“Yes!”
“Dr. Buckman, I think you’d better have a look at Mr. Whitbread’s report on the atmosphere in the Mote ship. You’ll find it in the computer. And take a neutrino reading, please.”
“That won’t be convenient, Captain.”
“Take it anyway,” Rod told the stubborn, bony face on the intercom screen. “We need to know the state of their industry.”
Buckman snapped, “Are you trying to make war on them?”
“Not yet,” Blaine answered; and let it go at that. “While you’ve got the instrumentation set up, take a neutrino reading on the asteroid the Motie ship came from. It’s quite a way outside the Trojan point cluster, so you won’t have a problem with background emissions.”
“Captain, this will interfere with my work!”
“I’ll send you an Officer to help out.” Rod thought rapidly, “Potter. I’ll give you Mr. Potter as an assistant.” Potter should like that. “This work is necessary, Dr. Buckman. The more we know about them, the more easily we can talk to them. The sooner we can talk to them, the sooner we can interpret their own astronomical observations.” That ought to get him.
Buckman frowned. “Why, that’s true. I hadn’t thought of that at all.”
“Fine, Doctor.” Rod clicked off before Buckman could voice a further protest. Then he turned to Midshipman Whitbread in the doorway. “Come in and sit down, Mr. Whitbread.”
“Thank you, sir.” Whitbread sat. The chairs in the Captain’s watch cabin were netting on a steel frame, lightweight but comfortable. Whitbread perched on the very edge of one. Cargill handed him a coffee cup, which he held in both hands. He looked painfully alert.
Cargill said, “Relax, boy.”
Nothing happened.
Rod said, “Whitbread, let me tell you something. Everyone on this ship wants to pick your brain, not later, but now. I get first crack because I’m Captain. When we’re finished, I’ll turn you over to Horvath and his people. When they’re finished with you, if ever, you’ll go off watch. You’ll think then that you’re about to get some sleep, but no. The gun room will want the whole story. They’ll be coming off watch at staggered intervals, so you’ll have to repeat everything half a dozen times. Are you getting the picture?”
Whitbread was dismayed-as he ought to have been.
“Right, then. Set your coffee down on the niche. Good. Now slide back until your spine touches the chair back. Now relax, Damnit! Close your eyes.”
For a wonder, Whitbread did. After a moment he smiled blissfully.
“I’ve got the recorder off,” Blaine told him-which wasn’t true. “We’ll get your formal report later. What I want now is facts, impressions, anything you want to say. My immediate problem is whether to stop that Mote ship.”
“Can we? Still? Sir?”
Blaine glanced at Cargill. The First Lieutenant nodded. “It’s only half an hour away. We could stop it any time in the next couple of days. No protective Field, remember? And the hull looked to be flimsy enough through your helmet camera. Two minutes from the forward batteries would vaporize the whole ship, no sweat.”
“Or,” Blaine said, “we could catch up with it, knock out its drive, and take it in tow. The Chief Engineer would give a year’s salary to take that electromagnetic fusion system apart. So would the Imperial Traders’ Association; that thing’s perfect for asteroid mining.”
“I’d vote against that,” Whitbread said with his eyes closed. “If this were a democracy. Sir.”
“It isn’t, and the Admiral’s inclined to grab that Mote ship. So are some of the scientists, but Horvath’s against it. Why are you?”
“It would be the first hostile act, sir. I’d avoid that right up until the Moties tried to destroy MacArthur.” Whitbread opened his eyes. “Even then, wouldn’t the Field scare them off? We’re in their home system, Captain, and we did come to see if we could get along with them-at least I think we did, sir.”
Cargill chuckled. “Sounds just like Dr. Horvath, doesn’t he, Skipper?”
“Besides, sir, what is the Motie ship doing that might interfere with us?”
“Going home alone, probably with a message.”
“I don’t think there was a message, sir, He didn’t do anything that might have been writing, and he didn’t talk at all.”
“She,” Elaine told him. “The biologists say the Motie is female. Both of the little ones are too, and one is pregnant.”
“Pregnant. Should I have noticed that, sir?”
Blaine grinned. “What would you have looked for? And where? You didn’t even notice that all the little ones have four arms each.”
“Four-?”
“Never mind that, Mr. Whitbread. You saw no messages, but then you didn’t know the Motie was programming-or building-an autopilot until the ship took off. And an empty ship is a message all by itself. We ready for visitors, Jack?”
Cargill nodded. “And if we’re not, you can bet Lenin is.”
“Don’t count on too much help from Lenin, Number One. Kutuzov thinks it might be interesting to see what kind of account of herself MacArthur could give against the Moties. He might not do anything but watch, then run for home.”
“Is that-that doesn’t sound much like the Admiral, sir,” Cargill protested.
“It sounds like him if you’d overheard the fight he had with Dr. Horvath. Our Minister of Science keeps telling the Admiral to keep out of the way, and Kutuzov is about to take him at his word.” Blaine turned to his midshipman. “You don’t have to spread this around the gun room either, Whitbread.”
“No, sir.”
“Now, while we’ve got the time, let’s see what you can remember about that Motie ship.” Blaine touched controls and several views of the alien craft appeared on his wall screens. “This is what the computer knows so far,” Rod explained. “We’ve mapped some of the interior already. There was no shielding from our probes, nothing to hide, but that doesn’t make it all that easy to understand.”
Blaine took up a light pointer. “These areas held liquid hydrogen. Now there was heavy machinery here; did you see any of it?”
“No, sir, but that back panel looked as if it would roll up.”
“Good.” Blake nodded and Cargill sketched it in with the screen stylus.
“Like that?” the First Lieutenant asked. “Fine.” He touched the record button. “Now, we know there was quite a lot of hydrogen fuel hidden away. And that drive of theirs ionizes, heats, and enriches the hydrogen with hot carbon vapor. It takes a lot of machinery to do that. Where was it?”
“Sir, shouldn’t the Chief Engineer be here?”
“He should be here, Mr. Whitbread. Unfortunately there are about ten things happening at once on this ship, and Commander Sinclair is needed elsewhere. He’ll get his chance at you soon enough- Jack, let’s not forget the Mote design philosophy. We keep looking for separate mechanisms to do each job, but on that probe, everything did four or five overlapping things at once, so to speak. It could be we’re looking for too much machinery.”
“Yes, sir-but, Captain, no matter how you slice it, that ship had to perform a minimum number of functions. Had to. And we can’t find equipment enough for half of them.”
“Not with our technology, anyway,” Blaine said thoughtfully. Then he grinned, a young man’s broad and impertinent grin. “We may be looking for a combination microwave oven, fuel ionizer, and sauna. OK, now the alien herself. Your impressions, Whitbread. Is it that intelligent?”
“She didn’t understand anything I said. Except that one time, when I screamed ‘Turn off the force field!’ She understood that right away. Otherwise nothing.”
“You’ve edited that a bit, lad,” Cargill said. “But never mind. What do you think, boy? Does the alien understand Anglic? Is she faking?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t even understand my gestures, except once. That was when I handed her her own suit- and that’s a pretty pointed hint, sir.”
“She may simply be stupid,” Rod said.
“She’s an asteroid miner, Captain,” Cargill said slowly. “That’s fairly certain. At least that’s an asteroid miner’s ship. The hooks and clamps at the stern have to be for hanging on durable cargo, like ore and air-bearing rock.”
“So?” Elaine prompted.
“I’ve known some asteroid miners, Skipper. They tend to be stubborn, independent, self-reliant to the point of eccentricity, and close-mouthed. They’ll trust each other with their lives, but not with their women or property. And they forget how to talk out there; at least it seems that way.”
They both looked hopefully at Whitbread, who said, “I don’t know, sir. I just don’t know. She’s not stupid. You should have seen her hands moving around in the guts of the instrument panel, rewiring, making new circuits, recalibrating half a dozen things at once, it looked like. Maybe-maybe our sign language just doesn’t work. I don’t know why.”
Rod pushed a finger along the knot in his nose. “It might be surprising if it did work,” he said thoughtfully. “And this is one example of a completely alien race. If we were aliens and picked up an asteroid miner, what conclusions would we draw about the Empire?” Blaine filled his coffee cup, then Whitbread’s. “Well, Horvath’s team is more likely to come up with something than we are, they have the Motie to work with.”
Sally Fowler watched the Motie with a feeling of deep frustration. “I can’t decide whether she’s stupid or I am. Did you see what happened when I drew her a diagram of the Pythagorean Theorem?”
“Uh huh.” Renner’s grin was no help at all. “She took your pocket computer apart and put it back together again. She didn’t draw anything. She’s stupid in some ways, though,” he said more seriously. “Meaning no insult to our eminently trustworthy selves, she’s too damned trusting. Maybe she’s low on survival instincts.”
Sally nodded and watched the Motie at work.
“She’s a genius at building things,” Renner said. “But she doesn’t understand language, gestures, or pictures. Could the bloody alien be a genius and a moron at the same time?”
“Idiot savant,” Sally murmured. “It happens with humans, but it’s quite rare. Imbecile children with the ability to extract cube roots and do logarithms in their heads. Mathematical whizzes who can’t buckle their shoes.”
“It’s a difference in perceptions.” Horvath had been engaged in a more thorough study of the small Moties. “One has to learn that a picture is a picture. Your drawings- Good God, what’s it doing now?”
Someone screamed in the companionway.
Ostensibly Cargill was delivering Whitbread to the scientists. Actually, he had no doubt that Whitbread could have found his way to the wardroom where they had brought the Moties while artificers built a cage for the miniatures in the petty officers’ lounge. But Jack Cargill was curious.
Halfway through the companionway he caught his first sight of the alien. It was disassembling the wardroom coffee maker-an act of malice made all the more diabolical by the innocence of her smile.
She cringed away at Cargill’s yell-and the First Lieutenant saw that it was too late. Tiny screws and parts were scattered across the table. The alien had broken the percolator tube, possibly to analyze the soldering technique. Bits of the timing mechanism were neatly arrayed. The Motie had pulled the cylindrical shell open along its welded seam.
Cargill found that the Science Minister had him by the arm. “You’re frightening the alien,” Horvath said in a low voice. “Go away, please.”
“Doctor, have the goodness to tell me-“
“Elsewhere.” Horvath propelled him to the other end of the room. Cargill glimpsed the miniature aliens squatting on the games table, surrounded by members of the life sciences group and by samples from the galley: grain, bread, carrots and celery, defrosted raw and cooked meat. “Now,” said Horvath. “What do you mean by barging into-“
“That monster ruined the wardroom coffee maker!”
“We’re lucky,” Midshipman Whitbread said irreverently.
“She was trying to take apart the number-four air lock mechanism until I stopped her.”
“All she’s interested in is tools.” Horvath was pointedly ignoring Cargill’s agitation. “For once I even agree with Admiral Kutuzov. The alien must not be allowed to see the Alderson Drive or the Field generators. She seems able to deduce what a thing is for and how it works almost without touching it.”
“Never mind that!” Cargill said. “Couldn’t you have given the Motie something else to play with? That coffee maker is half repairs anyway. Nobody could figure out how it’s made since Sandy Sinclair finished with it. And the Motie’s broken some of the parts.”
“If they were that easy to break, they can probably be fixed,” Horvath said soothingly. “Look, we can give you one of the urns from the labs, or have one of our techs- Ah, Miss Fowler, has the alien calmed down? Now, Mr. Whitbread? We’re glad you’re here; we’ve been waiting for you, as the only man to have actually communicated with the alien. Here, Commander Cargill, please stay away from the Motie-“
But Cargill was halfway across the room. The alien cringed a bit, but Cargill stayed well out of her reach. He glowered at her as he considered his coffee maker. It had been reassembled.
The Motie pulled away from Sally Fowler. She found a conical plastic container, filled it with tap water, and used it to fill the coffee maker. One of the wardroom stewards sniggered.
The Motie poured in two containers of water, inserted the grounds basket, and waited.
The amused steward looked to Cargill, who nodded. The messboy dug out the tin of ground coffee, used the measuring spoon, and started the urn. The alien watched closely all the while. So did one of the miniatures, despite the distraction of a biologist waving a carrot in her face. “It did that before, watched me make the coffee, sir,” the steward said. “Thought it might want some, but the scientists didn’t offer it none.”
“We may have a godawful mess here in a minute, Ernie. Stand by to clean up.” Cargill turned to Sally. “How good is that monster at putting things together again?”
“Quite good,” Sally told him. “She fixed my pocket computer.”
The percolator bubbled, and the water in the indicator tube turned brown. Cargill hesitantly poured a cup and tasted. “Why, that’s all right,” he said. He handed the cup to the Mode.
She tasted the black, bitter brew, squawled, and threw the cup at the bulkhead.
Sally led Whitbread into the wardroom pantry. “You made the Motie understand you. How?”
“It was only that once,” Whitbread said. “I’ve been wondering if I made a mistake. Could she have decided to let me loose about the time I opened my helmet and screamed?”
Sally scowled. “She just stands there. She doesn’t even seem to know we’re trying to talk to her. And she never tries to talk back . . .” She dropped her voice, muttering mostly to herself. “It is a basic characteristic of intelligent species that they attempt to communicate. Whitbread, what’s your first name?”
Whitbread was startled. “Jonathon, my lady.”
“All right, Jonathon, I’m Sally. As man to woman, Jonathon, what in blazes am I doing wrong? Why won’t she try to talk to me?”
“Well, Sally,” Whitbread said tentatively. He liked the taste of the name. And she wasn’t more than a couple of years older than he was- “Sally, I could think of half a dozen reasons. Maybe she reads minds.”
“What would that have to do with-“
“She wouldn’t know about language, would she? What you’re trying to teach wouldn’t make sense. Maybe she can only read our minds when we’re screaming mad, like I was.”
“Or Commander Cargill was-“ Sally said thoughtfully. “She did move away from the coffee maker. But not for long. No, I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I. I think she’s lying.”
“Lying?”
“Playing dumb. She doesn’t know what to tell us, so she tells us nothing. Plays for time. She is interested in our machinery. This gives her time to learn about it.”
Sally nodded slowly. “One of the biologists had the same idea. That she’s waiting for instructions, and learning as much as she can until they come- Jonathon, how would we catch her at it?”
“I don’t think we do,” Whitbread said slowly. “How would you catch an intelligent mouse playing dumb, if you’d never seen a mouse and neither had anyone else?”
“Blazes. Well, we’ll just have to keep on trying.” She frowned, thinking of the Motie’s performance with the coffee maker, then gave Whitbread a long, thoughtful look. “You’re exhausted. Go get some sleep, there’s nothing you need to tell us right away, is there?”
“No.” Whitbread yawned. There was a scampering sound behind him and they both turned quickly, but there was nothing there. “Speaking of mice,” Whitbread said.
“How can they live on a steel ship?” Sally asked.
Whitbread shrugged. “They come aboard with the food supplies, even in personal gear. Once in a while we evacuate portions of the ship, move the crew around, and open up to space, to control them, but we never get them all. This trip, with all the extra personnel aboard, we haven’t even been able to do that.”
“Interesting.” Sally nodded. “Mice can live almost anywhere humans can-you know, there are probably as many mice in the galaxy as people? We’ve carried them to nearly every planet. Jonathon, are the miniatures mice?”
Whitbread shrugged. “She certainly didn’t care about them. Killed all but two-but why bring two aboard? And a randomly selected two at that.”
Sally nodded again. “We watched her catch them.” She laughed suddenly. “And Mr. Renner was wondering if they were baby Moties! Get to sleep, Jonathon. We’ll see you in ten hours or so.”
Midshipman Jonathon Whitbread reached his hammock much sooner than he had expected. He sagged blissfully into the netting and closed his eyes . . . and opened one, feeling other eyes upon him.
“Yes, Mr. Potter,” he sighed.
“Mr. Whitbread, I would be obliged if you would talk to Mr. Staley.”
It was not what he expected. Whitbread opened his other eye. “Uh?”
“Something’s upset him. You know how he is, he won’t complain, he’d rather die. But he walks around like a robot, hardly speaks to anyone except politely. He eats alone. . . you’ve known him longer than I have, I thought you might find out why.”
“All right, Potter. I’ll try. When I wake up.” He closed his eyes. Potter was still there. “In eight hours, Potter, It can’t be that urgent.”
In another part of MacArthur Sailing Master Renner tossed fitfully in a stateroom not much larger than his bunk. It was the Third Lieutenant’s berth, but two scientists had Renner’s cabin, and the Third had moved in with a Marine officer.
Renner sat up suddenly in the darkness, his mind hunting for something that might have been a dream. Then he turned on the light and fumbled with the unfamiliar intercom panel. The rating who answered showed remarkable self-control: he didn’t scream or anything. “Get me Miss Sally Fowler,” Renner said.
The rating did, without comment. Must be a robot, Renner thought. He knew how he looked.
Sally was not asleep. She and Dr. Horvath had just finished installing the Motie in the Gunnery Officer’s cabin. Her face and voice as she said “Yes, Mr. Renner?” somehow informed Renner that he looked like a cross between a man and a mole-a remarkable feat of nonverbal communication.
Renner skipped it. “I remembered something. Have you got your pocket computer?”
“Certainly.” She took it out to show him.
“Please test it for me.”
Her face a puzzled mask, Sally drew letters on the face of the flat box, wiped them, scrawled a simple problem, then a complex one that would require the ship’s computer to help. Then she called up an arbitrary personal data file from ship’s memory. “It works all right.”
Renner’s voice was thick with sleep. “Am I crazy, or did we watch the Mode take that thing apart and put it back together again?”
“Certainly. She did the same with your gun.”
“But a pocket computer?” Renner stared. “You know that’s impossible, don’t you?”
She thought it was a joke. “No, I didn’t.”
“Well, it is. Ask Dr. Horvath.” Renner hung up and went back to sleep.
Sally caught up with Dr. Horvath as he was turning into his cabin. She told him about the computer.
“But those things are one big integrated circuit. We don’t even try to repair them.” Horvath muttered other things to himself.
While Renner slept, Horvath and Sally woke the physical sciences staff. None of them got much sleep that night.
“Morning” on a warship is a relative thing. The morning watch is from 0400 to 0800, a time when the human species would normally sleep; but space knows nothing of this. A full crew is needed on the bridge and in the engine rooms no matter what the time. As a watchkeeping officer, Whitbread stood one watch in three, but MacArthur’s orderly quarter bill was confused beyond repair. He had both the morning and forenoon watches off, eight glorious hours of sleep; yet, somehow, he found himself awake and in the warrant officers’ mess at 0900.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Horst Staley protested. “I don’t know where you got that idea. Forget it.”
“OK, Whitbread said easily. He chose juice and cereal and put them on his tray. He was just behind Staley in the cafeteria line, which was natural enough since he had followed Staley in.
“Though I appreciate your concern,” Staley told him. There was no trace of emotion in the voice.
Whitbread nodded agreeably. He picked up his tray and followed Staley’s unnaturally straight back. Predictably, Staley chose an empty table. Whitbread joined him.
In the Empire were numerous worlds where the dominant races were white caucasian. On such worlds the pictures on Navy enlistment posters always looked like Horst Staley. His jaw was square, his eyes icy blue. His face was all planes and angles, bilaterally symmetrical, and without expression. His back was straight, his shoulders broad, his belly was fiat and hard and ridged with muscle. He contrasted sharply with Whitbread, who would fight a weight problem all his life, and was at least slightly rounded everywhere.
They ate in silence, a long breakfast. Finally, too casually, Staley asked, as if he had to ask, “How went your mission?”
Whitbread was ready. “Rugged. The worst hour and a half the Motie spent staring at me. Look.” Whitbread stood. He twisted his head sideways and let his knees sag and shoulders slump, to fit him into an invisible coffin 130 cm high. “Like this, for an hour and a half.” He sat down again. “Torture, I tell you. I kept wishing they’d picked you.”
Staley flushed. “I did volunteer.”
Bull’s-eye. “It was my turn. You were the one who accepted Defiant’s surrender, back off New Chicago.”
“And let that maniac steal my bomb!”
Whitbread put his fork down. “Oh?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Of course not. Think Blaine would spread it all over the ship? You did come back a bit shaken after that mission. We wondered why.”
“Now you know. Some jackass tried to renege. Defiant’s captain wouldn’t let him, but he might have.” Staley rubbed his hands together, painfully hard. “He snatched the bomb away from me. And I let him! I’d have given anything for the chance to-“ Staley stood up suddenly, but Whitbread was quick enough to catch him by the arm.
“Sit down,” he said. “I can tell you why you weren’t picked.”
“I suppose you can read the Captain’s mind?” They kept their voices low by tacit consent. MacArthur’s interior partitions were all sound-absorbent anyway, and their voices were very clear, if soft.
“Second-guessing officers is good practice for a middie,” said Whitbread.
“Why, then? Was it because of the bomb?”
“Indirectly. You’d have been tempted to prove yourself. But even without that, you’re too much the hero, Horst. Perfect physical shape, good lungs-ever meet an admiral with a soft voice?-utter dedication, and no sense of humor.”
”I do too have a sense of humor.”-
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t?”
“Not a trace. The situation didn’t call for a hero, Horst. It called for someone who didn’t mind being made ridiculous in a good cause.”
“You’re kidding. Damn, I never know when you’re kidding’
“Now would be a poor time. I’m not making fun of you, Horst. Listen, I shouldn’t have to explain this. You watched it all, didn’t you? Sally told me I was on all the intercom screens, live, in color and 3D.”
“You were.” Staley smiled briefly. “We should have had a view of your face. Especially when you started swearing. We got no warning at all. The view jumped a bit, then you screamed at the alien, and everybody cracked up.”
“What would you have done?”
“Not that. I don’t know. Followed orders, I guess.” The icy eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t have tried to shoot my way out, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Maybe a second of cutting laser into the control panel? To kill the force field?”
“Not without orders.”
“What about the sign language? I spent some time making gestures, hoping the alien would understand me, but it never did.”
“We couldn’t see that. What about it?”
“I told you,” Whitbread-said. “The mission took someone willing to make a fool of himself in a good cause. Think about how often you heard people laugh at me while I was bringing back the Motie.”
Staley nodded.
“Now forget them and think about the Mode. What about her sense of humor? Would you like a Mode laughing at you, Horst? You might never be sure if she was or wasn’t; you don’t know what it looks like or sounds like-“
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“All anyone knew was that the situation called for someone to find out whether the aliens were willing to talk to us. It didn’t need someone to uphold the Imperial honor. Plenty of time for that after we know what we’re facing~ There’ll be room for heroes, Horst. There always is.”
“That’s reassuring,” said Staley. He had finished breakfast. Now he stood and walked out fast, with his back very straight, leaving Whitbread wondering.
Oh, well, Whitbread thought. I tried. And just maybe...
Luxury in a warship is relative.
Gunnery Officer Crawford’s stateroom was the size of his bed. When the bed was up, he had room to change clothes and a small sink to brush his teeth. To lower the bed for sleeping he had first to step into the corridor; and being tall for a Navy man, Crawford had learned to sleep curled up. - - -
A bed and a door with a lock on it, instead of a hammock or one tier of many bunks: luxury. He would have fought to keep it; but he had lost the toss. Now he bunked in MacArthur’s cutter while an alien monster occupied his quarters.
“She’s only a little more than a meter tall, of course she fits,” Sally Fowler said judiciously. “Still, it’s only a tiny room. Do you think she can stand it? Otherwise we’ll have to keep her in the lounge.”
“I saw the cabin of her ship. It wasn’t any bigger. She can stand it,” Whitbread said. It was too late to try sleeping in the gun room, and he was supposed to tell the scientists everything he knew: at least that ought to work if Cargill asked why he’d been pestering Sally. “I suppose you’ve got someone watching her through the intercom?”
She nodded. Whitbread followed her into the scientists’ lounge. Part of the room had been screened off with wire netting and the two miniatures were in there. One was nibbling at a head of cabbage, using four arms to hold it to her chest. The other, her abdomen swollen with pregnancy, was playing with a flashlight.
Just like a monkey, Whitbread thought. It was the first chance he’d had to look at the miniatures. Their fur was thicker, and mottled brown and yellow where the large one was uniformly soft brown. The four arms were nearly alike, five fingers on the left hands and six on the rights; but the arms and fingers were identically slender, identically jointed. Yet the muscles of the upper left shoulder were anchored to the top of the skull. Why, if not for greater strength and leverage?
He was delighted when Sally led him to a small corner table away from where the biosciences people were scratching their heads and arguing loudly. He got coffee for both of them and asked her about the strange musculature of the miniatures; it wasn’t what he’d really like to talk to her about, but it was a start...
“We think it’s vestigial,” she said. “They obviously don’t need it; the left arms aren’t sized for heavy work anyway.”
“Then the little ones aren’t monkeys! They’re an offshoot of the big ones.”
“Or they’re both an offshoot of something else. Jonathon, we’ve got more than two classifications already. Look.” She turned to the intercom screen and a view of the Motie’s room appeared.
“She seems happy enough,” said Whitbread. He grinned at what the Motie had been doing. “Mr. Crawford isn’t going to like what she’s done to his bunk.”
“Dr. Horvath didn’t want to stop her. She can fiddle with anything she likes as long as it isn’t the intercom.
Crawford’s bunk had been shortened and contoured. The contours were exceedingly strange, not only because of the complex joints in the Motie’s back, but also because she apparently slept on her side. The mattress had been cut and sewn, the underlying steel bent and twisted. Now there were grooves for two right arms and a pit for a projecting hipbone and a high ridge to serve as a pillow- “Why would she sleep only on her right side?” Whitbread asked.
“Maybe she’d rather defend herself with her left, if she happened to be surprised in her sleep. The left is so much stronger.”
“Could be. Poor Crawford. Maybe she’s expecting his to try and cut her throat some night.” He watched the alien at work on the overhead lamp. “She does have one-track mind, doesn’t she? We could get some good out of this. She might improve something.”
“Perhaps. Jonathon, did you study sketches of the dissected alien?”
She sounded like a schoolmistress. She was old enough to be one, too; but much too pretty, Whitbread thought He said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you see any differences?”
“The color of the fur is different. But that’s nothing. The other one was in suspended animation for hundred of years.”
“Anything else?”
“The other one was taller, I think. I wouldn’t swear.”
“Look at her head.”
Whitbread frowned. “I don’t see it.”
Sally used her pocket computer. It hummed slightly, indicating that it was in communication with the main ship’s memory. Somewhere in MacArthur a laser moved across holographic lines. The ship’s memory held everything humanity knew of Moties-such as it was. It found the information Sally asked for and sent it to her pocket computer; a sketch appeared on the face of the flat box.
Whitbread studied the sketch, then looked to the screen and the Motie. “Her forehead. It slopes!”
“That’s what we thought, Dr. Horvath and I.”
“It’s not easy to see. The Motie’s head is so flunking lopsided anyway!’
“I know. But it’s there. We think there’s a difference in the hands, too, but it’s very small.” Sally frowned and three short grooves appeared between brown eyes. She’d cut her hair short for space, and the frown and short hair made her look very efficient. Whitbread didn’t like it. “That gives us three different kinds of Motie,” she said. “And only four Moties. That’s a high mutation rate, wouldn’t you say?”
“I . . . wouldn’t be surprised.” Whitbread remembered the history lessons Chaplain Hardy had held for the midshipmen during the trip out. “They’re trapped in this system. Bottled up. If they had an atomic war, they’d have to live with it afterwards, wouldn’t they?” He thought of Earth and shuddered.
“We haven’t seen any evidence of atomic wars.”
“Except the mutation rate.”
Sally laughed. “You’re arguing in circles. Anyway, it doesn’t hold up. None of these three types is a cripple, Jonathon. They’re all very well adapted, all healthy-except the dead one, of course, and she hardly counts. They wouldn’t choose a cripple to pilot the probe.”
“No. So what’s the answer?”
“You saw them first, Jonathon. Call the one in the probe Type A. What was the relationship between Types B and C?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you saw them together.”
“It didn’t make sense. The little ones stayed out of the big one’s way, at first, and the big one let them alone. Then I signaled the big one that I wanted her to go with me to MacArthur. She forthwith picked the first two little ones that came to hand, made sure they were safe, and killed the rest without warning!”
Whitbread paused, thinking of the whirlwind that had blown him out the Motie ship air lock. “So you tell me. What are the little ones? Pets? Children? But she killed them. Vermin? Why save two of them? Food animals? Have you tried that?”
Sally grimaced. It was almost a snarl, remarkable on her pretty face, an expression she would never have worn any social occasion. “Tried what? Fricassee one of I little beasts and offer it to the big one? Be reasonable.”
The alien in Crawford’s room poured a handful of some kind of seed-and ate it. “Popcorn,” said Sally. “We tried it on the little ones first. Maybe that’s what they were for, food testers.”
“Maybe.”
“She eats cabbage too. Well, she won’t starve, but she may die of vitamin deficiencies. All we can do is watch and wait- I suppose we’ll go to the alien’s home planet pretty soon. In the meantime, Jonathon, you’re the only man who’s seen the Motie ship. Was the pilot’s seat contoured? I only got a glimpse of it through your helmet camera.”
“It was contoured. In fact, it fitted her like a glove. I noticed something else. The control board ran along the right side of the seat. For right hands only...
He remembered a great deal about the mining ship, it turned out. It kept him in Lady Sally’s enjoyable company until he had to go on watch. But none of it was particularly useful.
Whitbread had no sooner taken his station on the bridge than Dr. Buckman called for the Captain.
“A ship, Blaine,” Buckman said. “From the inhabited world, Mote Prime. We didn’t find it because it was hidden by that damned laser signal.”
Blaine nodded. His own screens had shown the Motie ship nine minutes before; Chief Shattuck’s crew wasn’t about to let civilians keep a better watch than the Navy.
“It will reach us in about eighty-one hours,” Buckman said. “It’s accelerating at point eight seven gees, which is the surface gravity of Mote Prime by some odd coincidence. It’s spitting neutrinos. In general it behaves like the first ship, except that it’s far more massive. I’ll let you know if we get anything else.”
“Fine. Keep an eye on it, Doctor.” Blaine nodded and Whitbread cut the circuit. The Captain turned to his exec. “Let’s compare what we know with Buckman’s file, Number One.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Cargill toyed with the computer controls for a few minutes. “Captain?”
“Yes?”
“Look at the starting time. That alien ship got under way in not much more than an hour after we broke out.”
Blaine whistled to himself. “Are you sure? That gives ten minutes to detect us, another ten for us to see them, and forty minutes to get ready and launch. Jack, what kind of ship launches in forty minutes?”
Cargill frowned. “None I ever heard of. The Navy could do it, keep a ship with a full crew on ready alert. .
“Precisely. I think that’s a warship coming at us, Number One. You’d better tell the Admiral, then Horvath. Whitbread, get me Buckman.”
“Yes?” The astrophysicist looked harried.
“Doctor, I need-~everything your people can get about that Motie ship. Now. And would you give some thought to their rather strange acceleration?”
Buckman studied the numbers Blaine sent down to his screen. “This seems straightforward enough. They launched from Mote Prime or a closely orbiting moon forty minutes after we arrived. What’s the problem?”
“If they launched that fast, it’s almost certainly a warship. We’d like to believe otherwise.”
Buckman was annoyed. “Believe what you like, but you’ll ruin the math, Captain. Either they launched in forty minutes, or . . . well, you could start the Motie vehicle something over two million kilometers this side of Mote Prime; that would give them’ more time. . . but I don’t believe it.”
“No more do I. I want you to satisfy yourself about this, Dr. Buckman. What could we assume that would give them more time to launch?”
“Let me see . . . I’m not used to thinking in terms rocketry, you know. Gravitational accelerations are more my field, if you’ll pardon the pun. Hmmm.” Buckman’s eyes went curiously blank. For a moment he looked like an idiot. “You’d have to assume a period of coasting. And a much higher acceleration in the launching mechanism. Much higher.”
“How long to coast?”
“Several hours for every hour you want to give them make up their minds. Captain, I don’t understand your problem. Why can’t they have launched a scientific survey ship in forty minutes? Why assume a warship? After all, MacArthur is both, and it took you an unreasonably long time to launch. I was ready days early.”
Blaine turned him off. I’ll break his scrawny neck, I told himself. They’ll court-martial me, but I’ll claim justifiable homicide. I’ll subpoena everyone who knew him. They’re bound to let me off. He touched keys. “Number One, what have you got?”
“They launched that ship in forty minutes.”
“Which makes it a warship.”
“So the Admiral thinks, sir. Dr. Horvath wasn’t convinced.”
“Neither am I, but we’ll want to be ready for them. And we’ll want to know more about Moties than Horvath’s people are learning from our passenger. Number One, want you to take the cutter and get over to that asteroid the Motie came from. There’s no sign of activity there, it should be safe enough-and I want to know just what the Motie was doing there. It might give us a clue.”
Horace Bury watched the foot-high Moties playing behind the wire screen. “Do they bite?” he asked.
“They haven’t yet,” Horvath answered. “Not even when the biotechs took blood samples.” Bury puzzled him. Science Minister Horvath considered himself a good judge of people-once he’d left science and gone into politics he’d had to learn fast-but he couldn’t fathom Bury’s thought processes. The Trader’s easy smile was only a public face; behind it, remote and emotionless, he watched the Moties like God judging a dubious creation.
Bury was thinking, My but they’re ugly. What a shame. They’d be useless as house pets, unless- He checked himself and stepped forward to reach through a gap in the netting large enough for an arm but not a Motie.
“Behind the ear,” Horvath suggested.
“Thank you.” Bury wondered if one would come to investigate his hand. The thin one came, and Bury scratched her behind the ear, carefully, for the ear looked fragile and delicate. But she seemed to enjoy it.
They’d make terrible pets, Bury thought, but they’d sell for thousands each. For a while. Before the novelty wore off. Best to hit every planet simultaneously. If they breed in captivity, and if we can keep them fed, and if I sell out before people stop buying- “Allah be-! She took my watch!.”
“They love tools. You may have noticed that flashlight we gave them!’
“Never mind that, Horvath. How do I get my watch back? In Allah’s- How did the catch come unfastened?”
“Reach in and take it. Or let me.” Horvath tried. The enclosure was too big, and the Motie didn’t want to give up the watch. Horvath dithered. “I don’t want to disturb them too much.”
“Horvath, that watch is worth eight hundred crowns! It not only tells the time and the date, but-“ Bury paused. “Come to that, it’s also shockproof. We advertise that a shock that will stop a Chronos will also kill the own~ She probably can’t hurt it much.”
The Motie was examining the wrist watch in a sober, studious manner. Bury wondered if others would find the manner captivating. No house pet behaved like that, even cats.
“You have cameras on them?”
“Of course,” said Horvath.
“My firm may want to buy this sequence. For advertising purposes.” That’s one thing, Bury thought. Now there was a Motie ship coming here, and Cargill taking the cutter somewhere. He’d never get anywhere pumping Cargill, but Buckman was going. There might be returns from the coffee the astrophysicist drank after all
The thought saddened him obscurely.
The cutter was the largest of the vehicles in hanger deck. She was a lifting body, with a flat upper surface that fitted flat against one wall of hangar deck. She had her own access hatches, to join the cutter’s air locks to the habitable regions of MacArthur because hangar deck was usually in vacuum.
There was no Langston Field generator aboard the cutter, and no Alderson Drive. But her drive was efficient and powerful, and her fuel capacity was considerable even without strap-on tanks. The ablative shielding along her nose was good for one (1) reentry into a terrestrial atmosphere at up to 20 km/sec, or many reentries if things could be taken more slowly. She was designed for a crew of six, but would carry more. She could go from planet to planet, but not between stars. History had been ma again and again by spacecraft smaller than MacArthur’s cutter.
There were half a dozen men bunking in her now. Or had been kicked out to make room for Crawford win Crawford was kicked out of his own stateroom by a three armed alien.
Cargill smiled when he saw that. “I’ll take Crawford, he decided. “Be a shame to move him again. Lafferty Coxswain. Three Marines . . .” He bent over his crew list. “Staley as midshipman.” He’d welcome a chance to prove himself, and was steady enough under orders.
The cutter’s interior was clean and polished, but there was evidence of Sinclair’s oddball repairs along the port wall where Defiant’s lasers had flashed through the ablative shielding; even at the long distances from which the cutter engaged, the damage had been severe.
Cargill spread his things out in the only enclosed cabin space and reviewed his flight plan options. Over that distance they could go at three gees all the way. In practice, it might be one gee over and five back. Just because the rock didn’t have a fusion plant didn’t mean it was uninhabited.
Jack Cargill remembered the speed with which the Motie had rebuilt his big percolator. Without even knowing what coffee was supposed to taste like! Could they be beyond fusion? He left his gear and put on a pressure suit, a skintight woven garment that was just porous enough to allow sweat to pass; it was a self-regulating temperature control, and with the tightly woven fabric to assist, his own skin was able to stand up to space. The helmet attached to a seal at the collar. In combat heavy armor would go over the whole mess, but this was good enough for inspections.
From the outside there was no evidence of damage or repair. Part of the heat shield hung below the cutter’s nose like a great shovel blade, exposing the control room blister, windows, and the snout of the cutter’s main armament: a laser cannon.
In battle the cutter’s first duty was to make observations and reports. Sometimes she’d try to sneak in on a torpedo run on a blinded enemy warship. Against Motie ships with no Field, that cannon would be more than enough.
Cargill inspected the cutter’s weapons with more than usual thoroughness. Already he feared the Moties. In this he was almost alone; but he would not be so forever.
The second alien ship was larger than the first, but estimates of its mass had a high finagle factor, depending on the acceleration (known), fuel consumption (deduced from drive temperature), operating temperature (deduced from the radiation spectrum, whose peak was in the soft x-ray region) and efficiency (pure guesswork). When ii was all folded together the mass seemed much too small: about right for a three-man ship.
“But they aren’t men,” Renner pointed out. “Four Moties weigh as much as two men, but they don’t need as much room. We don’t know what they’re carrying for equipment, or armament, or shielding. Thin walls don’t seem to scare them, and that lets them build bigger cabins-“
“All right.” Rod cut him off. “If you don’t know, just say so.”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank you,” Rod said patiently. “Is there anything you are sure of?”
“Oddly enough, there is, sir. Acceleration. It’s been constant to three significant figures since we spotted the ship. Now that’s odd,” Renner said. “Normally you fool with the drive to keep it running at peak, you correct minor errors in course. . . and if you leave it alone, there’s still variation. To keep the acceleration that constant they must be constantly fiddling with it.”
Rod rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s a signal. They’re telling us exactly where they’re going.”
“Yes, sir. Right here. They’re saying to wait for them.” Renner wore that strange, fierce grin. “Oh, we know something else, Captain. The ship’s cross-sectional profile has decreased since we sighted it. Probably they’ve ditched some fuel tanks.”
“How did you get that? Don’t you have to have the target transit the sun?”
“Usually, yes. Here it blocks the Coal Sack. There’s enough light bouncing off the Coal Sack to give us a good estimate of that ship’s cross-sectional area. Haven’t you noticed the colors in the Coal Sack, Captain?”
“No.” Blaine rubbed at his nose again. “Throwaway fuel tanks doesn’t make them sound like a warship, does it? But it’s no guarantee. All it really tells us is that they’re in a hurry.”
Staley and Buckman occupied the rear seats in the cutter’s triangular control cabin. As the cutter pulled away at one gee, Staley watched MacArthur’s Field close behind them. Against the black of the Coal Sack the battle cruiser seemed to go invisible. There was nothing to look at but the sky.
Half that sky was Coal Sack, starless except for a hot pink point several degrees in from the edge. It was as if the universe ended here. Like a wall, Horst thought.
“Look at it,” said Buckman, and Horst jumped. “There are people on New Scotland who call it the Face of God. Superstitious idiots!”
“Right,” said Horst. Superstitions were silly.
“From here it doesn’t look at all like a man, and it’s ten times as magnificent! I wish my sister’s husband could see it. He belongs to the Church of Him.”
Horst nodded in the semidarkness.
From any of the known human worlds, the Coal Sack was a black hole in the sky. One would expect it to be black here. But now that Horst’s eyes were adjusting, he saw traces of red glowing within the Coal Sack. Now the nebular material showed like layer after layer of gauzy curtains, or like blood spreading in water. The longer he looked, the deeper he could see into it. Eddies and whorls and flow patterns showed light years deep in the vacuum thin dust and gas.
“Imagine, me stuck with a Himmist for a brother-in-law! I’ve tried to educate the fool,” Buckman said energetically, “but he just won’t listen.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sky. Dr. Buckman, is all that light coming from Murcheson’s Eye?”
“Doesn’t seem possible, does it? We’ve tried to find other sources, fluorescence, UV stars deep in the dust, like that. If there were masses in there we’d have found them with mass indicators. Staley, it’s not that unlikely. The Eye isn’t that far from the Coal Sack.”
“A couple of light years.”
“Well, what of it? Light travels farther than that, giver a free path!” Buckman’s teeth glowed in the faint multi. colored light of the control panel. “Murcheson lost golden opportunity by not studying the Coal Sack when he had the chance. Of course he was on the wrong side of the Eye, and he probably didn’t venture very far from the breakout point . . . and it’s our luck, Staley! There’s never been an opportunity like this! A thick interstellar mass, and a red supergiant right at the edge for illumination! Look, look along my arm, Staley, to where the currents flow toward that eddy. Like a whirlpool, isn’t it? I your captain would stop twiddling his thumbs and give mc access to the ship’s computer, I could prove that that eddy is a protostar in the process of condensation! Or that it isn’t.”
Buckman had a temporary rank higher than Staley’s, but he was a civilian. In any case, he shouldn’t be talking about the Captain that way. “We do use the computer for other things, Dr. Buckman.”
Buckman let go of Staley’s arm. “Too damned many.’ His eyes seemed lost; his soul was lost in that enormous veil of red-lit darkness. “We may not need it, though. The Moties must have been observing the Coal Sack for at their history; hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Especially if they’ve developed some such pseudoscience as astrology. If we can talk to them . . .” He trailed off.
Staley said, “We wondered why you were so eager to come along.”
“What? Do you mean jaunting off with you to see that rock? Staley, I don’t care what the Motie was using it for, I want to know why the Trojan points are so crowded.’
“You think there’ll be clues?”
“Maybe, in the composition of the rock. We can hope so.,,
“I may be able to help you there,” Staley said slowly. “Sauron-my home-has an asteroid belt and mining industries. I learned something about rock mining from my uncles. Thought I might be a miner myself, once.” He stopped abruptly, expecting Buckman to bring up an unpleasant subject.
Buckman said, “I wonder what the Captain expects to find there?”
“He told me that. We know, just one thing about that rock,” said Staley. “A Motie was interested in it. When we know why, we’ll know something about Moties.”
“Not very much,” Buckman growled.
Staley relaxed. Either Buckman didn’t know why Sauron was infamous, or... no. Tactful? Buckman? Not hardly.
The Motie pup was born five hours after MacArthur’s cutter left for the asteroid. The birth was remarkably doglike, considering the mother’s distant relationship to dogs; and there was only the one pup, about the size of a rat.
The lounge was very popular that day, as crew and officers and scientists and even the Chaplain found an excuse to drop by.
“Look how much smaller the lower left arm is,” said Sally. “We were right, Jonathan. The little ones are derived from the big Moties.”
Someone thought of leading the large Motie down to the lounge. She did not seem the least interested in the new miniature Motie; but she did make sounds at the others. One of them dug Horace Bury’s watch out from under a pillow and gave it to her.
Rod watched the activities around the Motie pup when. he could. It seemed very highly developed for a newborn; within hours of its birth it was nibbling at cabbages, and it seemed able to walk, although the mother usually carried it with one set of arms. She moved rapidly and was hardly hampered by it at all.
Meanwhile, the Motie ship drew nearer; and if there was any change in its acceleration, it was too small for MacArthur to detect.
“They’ll be here in seventy hours,” Rod told Cargill via laser message. “I want you back in sixty. Don’t let Buckman start anything he can’t finish within the time limit. If you contact aliens, tell me fast-and don’t try to talk them unless there’s no way out.”
“Aye aye, Skipper.”
“Not my orders, Jack. Kutuzov’s. He’s not happy about this excursion. Just look that rock over and get back.”
The rock was thirty million kilometers distant from MacArthur, about a twenty-five-hour trip each way at C gee. Four gravities would cut that in half. Not enough, Staley thought, to make it worthwhile putting up with four gees.
“But we could go at 1.5 gee, sir,” he suggested to Cargill. “Not only would the trip be faster, but we’d get there faster. We wouldn’t move, around so much. The cut wouldn’t seem so crowded.”
“That’s brilliant,” Cargill said warmly. “A brilliant suggestion, Mr. Staley.”
“Then we’ll do it?”
“We will not.”
“But-why not, sir?”
“Because I don’t like plus gees. Because it uses fuel and if we use too much MacArthur may have to dive into the gas giant to get us home. Never waste fuel, Mr. Staley. You may want it someday. And besides, it’s nitwit idea.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely collection of nitwit ideas that worked.” Cargill smiled at Staley’s puzzled look. “Let me tell you about the one got in the Book. ...”
For a midshipman it was always school time. Staley would hold higher ranks than this one, if he had the ability, and if he lived.
Cargill finished his story and looked at the time. “Get some sleep, Staley. You’ll have the con after turnover.”
From a distance the asteroid looked dark, rough, and porous. It rotated once in thirty-one hours; oddly slow, according to Buckman. There was no sign of activity: motion, no radiation, no anomalous neutrino flux. Horst Staley searched for temperature variations but there were none.
“I think that confirms it,” he reported. “The place must be empty. A life form that evolved on Mote Prime would need heat, wouldn’t it, sir?”
“Yes.”
The cutter moved in. Stippling which had made the rock look porous at a distance became pocks, then gaping holes of random size. Meteors, obviously. But so many?
“I told you the Trojan points were crowded,” Buckman said happily. “Probably the asteroid passes through the thick of the Trojan cluster regularly . . . only, give me a close-up of that big pock there, Cargill.”
Two powers higher, and the screen was half filled by a black pit. Smaller pits showed around it.
“No sign of a crater rim,” Cargill said.
“Noticed that, did you? Damn thing’s hollow. That’s why the density is so low. Well, it’s not inhabited now, but it must have been once. They even went to the trouble of giving it a comfortable rotation.” Buckman turned. “Cargill, we’ll want to search through that thing.”
“Yes, but not you. A Navy crew will board the rock.”
“This is my field of competence, damn it!”
“Your safety’s mine, Doctor. Lafferty, take us around the rock.”
The back of the asteroid was one enormous cup-shaped crater.
“Pocked with little craters. . . but they are craters. Not holes,” said Cargill. “Doctor, what do you make of that?”
”I can’t imagine. Not if it’s a natural formation-“
“It was moved!” Staley exclaimed.
“Oddly enough, just what I was thinking,” Cargill said. “The asteroid was moved using thermonuclear devices, exploding the bombs progressively in the same crater to channel the blast. It’s been done before. Get me a radiation reading, Midshipman.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He left, and returned in a minute. “Nothing, sir. It’s cold.”
“Really?” Cargill went to check that for himself. When he finished he looked at his instruments and frowned. “Cold as a pirate’s heart. If they used bombs, they must have been goddamn clean. That shouldn’t surprise me.”
The cutter circled farther around the flying mountain.
“That could be an air lock. There.” Staley pointed at a raised cap of stone surrounded by an archery target in faded orange paint.
“Right, but I doubt if we’d get it open. We’ll go in through one of the meteor holes. Still . . . we’ll look it over. Lafferty, take us in.”
In their reports they called it Beehive Asteroid. The rock was all many-sided chambers without floors linked by channels too small for men, all choked with dried asymmetrical mummies. Whatever miracles the builders had made, artificial gravity was not one of them. The corridors went in all directions; the larger chambers and storage rooms were studded everywhere with knobs for hand holds, anchor points for lines, storage niches.
The mummies floated everywhere, thin and dried, with gaping mouths. They varied from a meter to a meter and a half in height. Staley chose several and sent them back to the cutter.
There was machinery too, all incomprehensible to Staley and his men, all frozen fast by vacuum cementing. Staley had one of the smaller machines torn from the wall. He chose it for strangeness, not potential use; none of the machines was complete. “No metal,” Staley reported. “Stone flywheels and things that look like they might be integrated circuits-ceramics with impurities, that kind of thing. But very little metal, sir.”
They moved on at random. Eventually they reached a central chamber. It was gigantic, and so was the machine that dominated it. Cables that might have been power superconductors led from the wreck, convincing Staley that this was the asteroid’s power source; but it showed no trace of radiation.
They worked through narrow passages between incomprehensible blocks of stone, and found a large metallic box.
“Cut into that,” Staley ordered.
Lafferty used his cutting laser. They stool around watching the narrow green beam do nothing to the silvery casing. Staley wondered: where was the energy going? Could they be pumping power into it, somehow? Warmth on his face hinted at the answer.
He took a thermometer reading. The casing was just less than red-hot, all over. When Lafferty turned off the laser the casing cooled rapidly; but it maintained the same temperature at every point.
A superconductor of heat. Staley whistled into his suit mike and wondered if he could find a smaller sample. Then he tried using pliers on the casing-and it bent like tin. A strip came away in the pliers. They tore sheets off with their gauntleted hands.
It was impossible to map the Beehive with its tight, curving corridors. It was hard to tell where they were; but they marked their paths as they went, and used proton beam instruments to measure distances through walls.
The corridor walls were eggshell thin throughout the interior. They were not much thicker outside. Beehive Asteroid could not have been a safe place to live.
But the wall beneath the crater was many meters thick. Radiation, Staley thought. There must have been residual radiation. Otherwise they would have carved this wail out the way they did all the others, to make room for themselves.
There must have been a wild population explosion here.
And then something killed them all off.
And now there was no radiation at all. How bong ago did it all happen? The place was covered with small meteor holes; scores of holes in the walls. How long?
Staley looked speculatively at the small, heavy Motie artifact Lafferty and Sohl were manhandling through the corridor. Vacuum cementing-and the wandering of elementary particles across an interface. That might tell MacArthur’s civilian scientists just how long Beehive Asteroid had been abandoned; but already he knew one thing. It was old.