"Did you program it for understatement?" Jennifer asked. Greenberg chuckled softly and shook his head.
Having nothing else to do, they spent their first hour on Gilver making love. Just as they were hurrying toward the end, a missile made a ground hit close enough to shake the ship. Jennifer laughed softly.
"What is it?" Greenberg gasped above her.
"Stupid twentieth-century joke," she answered, clutching him to her. "Did the earth move for you, too?" Then, for a while that could never be long enough, all speech left her.
Afterward, as he was dressing, Greenberg said, "Now I know you were really meant to be a scholar and not a trader."
"Why, Bernard?"
"Because who but a born scholar would come up with thousand-year-old jokes at a time like that? And thousand-year-old stupid jokes?you were right."
"I told you as much aboard the Flying Festoon. You didn't believe me then; I guess that's why you upgraded me from apprentice to journeyman."
"Partly I didn't believe you, I suppose. But there was more to it than that. You showed me you were a good trader. You got done what needed doing. You didn't seem to do it the way anybody else would, but it works for you, and that's the only thing that counts in the long run."
"I was using ancient literature as my data base instead of traders' manuals. No wonder things I tried looked strange to you."
"That's not all of what I meant, either," he said. "Most traders?just about all traders?push hard at everything they do. Pushing is part of being a trader. You're not like that. You're more reserved, shy almost. You were shy then?less so now, I think. But you still got a lot of business done."
"It's how I am," Jennifer said.
"I like how you are." His eyes softened as he smiled at her.
The communicator had developed a way of spoiling tender moments, almost as if it were a baby that resented anyone else's getting attention. It did not break the pattern now. "Horzefalus Kwef to human ship Harold Meeker. We have beaten the Rof Golani pirates away. You may emerge and join our scientific team."
"Then again, we may not," Jennifer said, irked at getting interrupted yet again.
The communicator was silent only a moment. Then the Foitan on the other end said, "Our weapons are trained on you. You will emerge and join our scientific team."
This time, the look Greenberg shot Jennifer was reproachful. She felt suitably reproached; she'd known since her first contact with the species that the Foitani were humorless. Greenberg said, "Thank you, Horzefalus Kwef. Let us put on our suits, if you don't mind?the computer says it's 'hot' out there. Then we will emerge and join your scientific team." Sighing, he walked over to the air lock. Sighing even louder, Jennifer followed.
VI
The planet Gilver had obviously had little to recommend it even before the Foitani from Rof Golan attacked. Back in what on Earth was still the Pleistocene, the Foitani had done a much more thorough job on it during their Suicide Wars. They'd eliminated their own species from the planet, and come too bloody close to destroying the whole ecosystem. Life still clung to Gilver. It no longer thrived there.
Jennifer found depressing a landscape that showed more slagged desert than forest and grassland. When she looked east rather than west, though, she looked toward a landscape with no life at alclass="underline" the precinct surrounding the Great Unknown was sterile as an operating theater. The column at the heart of the Great Unknown speared the sky, though the research facility of the Foitani from Odern was more than fifteen kilometers away. That seemed to be far enough to keep the big, blue aliens safe from the hideous insanity that plagued them closer to the gleaming white tower. Their instruments wandered the precinct of the Great Unknown and probed what they could; the Foitani themselves were barred.
"The instruments don't pick up any too much, either," Jennifer complained.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "If instruments provided the data we need, we would not have been required to requisition your services."
She gave the Foitan reluctant credit for not being mealy-mouthed, but said, "If I'm going to do you any good at all"?and if I'm ever going to get out of here, she added mentally?"I'll have to examine your Great Unknown for myself."
"By all means," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "The human Bernard is already proficient with our ground vehicles. Before you enter the precinct of the Great Unknown, you would be wise to acquire a similar proficiency. Bear in mind that, should difficulty arise, you will have to effect your own rescue, as we shall be unable to come to your aid."
She had to admit that made sense. The ground vehicle proved simple to operate. It was a battery-powered sledge, tracked for good ground-crossing capability, and steered with a tiller. The size of the tiller was her only problem; she had to stand up to shift it from side to side.
She and Greenberg rode separate sledges into the area surrounding the tall, white pillar. The Foitani had not argued about that; they believed in redundancy, too. The vehicles purred forward side by side.
The radiation level had gone down in a hurry; the Foitani from Rof Golan had thrown neutron bombs, no doubt to make their own planned landing easier. Jennifer wasn't sorry it hadn't worked. One set of Foitani at a time was plenty.
After they'd gone four or five kilometers, she said, "We have more privacy here than we did on the Harold Meeker. Whatever we do, the Foitani aren't going to come after us to stop us."
"True enough," Greenberg said, "but what do you want to bet these chassis have explosives in them along with the motors?"
She thought it over. "You own a nasty, suspicious mind, and I've no doubt whatever that you're right."
They rode on. The sledges had one forward speed, slow, and one reverse speed, slower. Eventually they reached the beginning of one of the colonnaded paths that led inward to the Great Unknown's central column. The path, of gleaming gray stone, was as fresh as if it had been set in place the day before. Not even a speck of dust marred its surface. However the Great Ones had managed that, Jennifer wished her kitchen floor were equipped with a like effect.
The columns that supported the roof overhead gradually grew taller and thicker as they approached the central tower. The effect went from impressive to ponderous to overwhelming. Jennifer did not think that was merely because she was smaller than a Foitan. How any living creature could have felt anything but antlike on that journey was beyond her.
She said, "I don't like this. Why would the old-time Foitani want to make themselves into midgets? I've seen pictures of our own old monumental architecture?the pyramids of Egypt, the freeways of Los Angeles?but none of it, not even the pyramids, sets out to deliberately minimize observers the way this thing does."
"The stuff you're talking about was done in low-tech days," Greenberg said. "I suppose the effects were worked out empirically, too?on the order of, it's big, so it must be impressive. The thing to remember about the old-time Foitani is, they knew exactly what they were doing. They had all our modern building techniques and then some, and they were able to figure out just how they wanted this thing to look, too. And if it works on us, just think what it does to their descendants."
Jennifer thought about the tapes she'd seen, then quickly shook her head. She preferred not to recall the drooling, mindless Foitani who had come to the Great Unknown. She tried to imagine instead what the colonnade might have been used for, back in the days of the great Foitani empire. She pictured hundreds of thousands of big, blue aliens triumphantly marching toward the column, and hundreds of thousands more standing on either side of the path and cheering.