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“I’m coming back,” I announced finally. “I’m sure as hell not accomplishing anything here.”

I made the trip back down the mooring line more quickly than I had made the trip up. I hurried into the airlock, closed the outer door, and started the pumps to put air into the lock. With my eyes closed I waited for the pressure to equalize. I did my best not to think about anything but what was happening right there in the airlock. I didn’t want to think about the other stuff. There were no answers there, nothing but aggravation, questions we could hardly hope to understand.

Angie looked up when I stepped out of the airlock. She had removed her helmet and pressure suit. There was no obvious threat from the alien, unless he carried microbes that could infect us. It wasn’t until later that I worried about that. It was too late for us, if there was. But the year or so we would spend on the wick heading for home would be a generous incubation period. If there was contamination that might not show in that time, everyone in the Solar System could be in big trouble.

“Any change?” I asked after I took my helmet off.

Angie shook her head. “Nothing major. I’m picking up a solid heartbeat, forty beats per minute. Since we don’t know what’s normal for them, I can’t say if that’s good or bad. His breathing seems easy, about sixteen per minute.”

“We don’t know if any of the readings are normal,” Clay said. “Anything we do could do more harm than good. Unless he wakes up and finds some way to tell us what he needs, we’re blind, deaf, and dumb.”

“How about the second head?” I asked.

“That’s the same as before,” Angie said. “Maybe there’s just a hint of darker color to it now. But what about that? Why did the one do that to the other? What’s the purpose?”

“I know this sounds crazy, but he may have expected that it would give the other some chance to survive. Extreme first aid, maybe, like putting a tourniquet on an arm or leg to stop an arterial bleeder.”

Angie looked at me as if she thought I were crazy for suggesting that. “Either that or he went stark, raving mad.”

Then I mentioned the other possibilities that I had thought of, trophy or some kind of rite.

“Anything is, I suppose, possible,” Clay said. “Since we know absolutely nothing about these aliens but what we can see.”

I had told them about the headless body and the stained metal. If they had bothered, they could have watched the video. I had done a lot of talking while I was in the alien ship, reporting just about everything I saw and did—everything but some of my thoughts.

“I wish we had someone we could call for help, close enough that it might do some good,” Angie said. I guess that we had all wished for that, but wishing would never make it so.

“We are limited,” Clay said. “We are doing perhaps the only thing we can now. Either the alien will get better or he will die. It is out of our hands.”

That much was obvious. But if this alien died—and that seemed likely—then what? I thought that we would have to take the alien ship and the remains of its crew back into the inner Solar System. That was when I started thinking about bacteria and viruses, and anything else small and deadly that the aliens might have carried. The authorities back home would probably not let us dock the alien ship with any of our major facilities. They might not even let any of us get anywhere to pose a hazard to other people for who-knows-how-long. But caution would have to contest with curiosity. They would want to study what we had. I had Barta docked with Ebbie. That would leave Clay the task of pushing the alien ship in. I wasn’t sure that he would care for that arrangement, but I wasn’t going to suggest switching loads.

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” I asked, rather a forlorn plea in my own ears.

Angie shook her head. Clay didn’t waste energy on any reply. It was a stupid question, I guess. And Clay had never been one to waste time on stupidity.

“All we can do is wait,” Angie said.

I got out of my pressure suit. It was beginning to feel like a prison. If there was any danger, so be it. I had already exposed myself. By that time I had started to console myself with the thought, the hope, that the alien’s physiology and biological environment would be so different that any bugs that might infect them would be unable to infect us. That seemed like a safe bet at a time when I didn’t have the option of withdrawing my wager. I was also counting on the guess that the alien spacefarers would be as nearly free of contagious microbes as human space jockeys normally are. We’re flushed regularly, when we return from a deep tour and before we go out on the next one. When you might be more than a year from any sophisticated medical help, you take every precaution.

Even Clay eventually got out of his suit. Then he ate a meal. He sat as far from the alien as possible and worked through a full ration pack. I joined him. Angie stayed by the alien, hardly ever looking away from him, as if she thought she might keep him alive by the force of her stare, and will.

“We’ll never be able to talk with him,” Clay said after he finished eating. “Not in the time we might have. A language with totally alien foundations, with no points of reference in common. No Rosetta Stone.”

“No what?” I asked. He explained the reference.

“If he recovers enough, we’ll find a way to communicate,” I said. “We can find the points of reference. Hell, Reid, we must be in the same business. Orbital mechanics, astrophysics, they’ll be the same. We can start from the math. We can point and each say our name for whatever it is we’re pointing at. We can draw pictures, diagrams, charts. One way or another, we can establish basic communications.”

“Just so he can tell us what to do to help him,” Angie said. “If he ever regains consciousness.”

“As long as he can tell us why he took that second head and sewed it on,” I said, half under my breath.

Nine hours later, Clay was sitting on a bench, his back against the wall. He had been dozing for the past three hours. I was on the floor in the opposite comer. I guess I’d been slipping in and out for nearly as long as Clay. Even Angie’s attention had flagged. She remained sitting next to the alien, but her head had drooped forward—several times. None of us had done much talking in five or six hours. There was nothing intelligent left to say.

When I was alert enough to think, it was things like, I wish he’d make up his mind one way or the other, and, Get it over with; die or wake up. How much longer were we going to have to wait? Could we just load the alien on one of the ships, dock Clay’s candle to the alien vessel, and start for home? Waiting for the alien to decide to live or die was frustrating. At one point I even considered slapping his face to see if it would provoke any reaction. Then I considered suggesting that Angie do it, mostly to save me the bother of getting up and walking over to them. In the end I just kept my mouth shut.

Then I heard a scraping noise, something different, and looked at the alien. He had pulled up his right leg. The knee was twenty centimeters off of the floor. The movement had also caught the attention of Angie and Clay. Reid leaned forward, staring. Angie went into a flurry of activity, turning to look at the elevated knee, then checking the alien’s vital signs.

When Angie gasped, I guessed that the alien had opened his eyes. I was right. I got up on one knee so that I could move in a hurry if I had to, if the alien somehow threatened Angie. Yes, that sounds ridiculous, but we had no idea what to expect.

“We’re doing what we can,” Angie said, leaning closer to the alien’s original head. “It isn’t easy. We don’t know what to do.” Maybe she thought that her words would get through by telepathy. She spent several minutes talking, telling him where he was, who we were, and so forth.