“Doctor,” it added, “have you any medical or other developments that you want me to relay to Courier Two?”
“None, friend Fletcher,” Prilicla replied.
'None?” the other said. “What about your missing pathol-°gist? What’s the shape-changer doing about finding her? With
the increased number of casualties I should think her presence is desirable right now.”
“It is…” he began, when Naydrad, who had been assisting him with Keet’s treatment, answered for him in its usual tactless disregard for the fact that the listening patient was wearing a translator.
“It is not desirable, Captain,” it broke in; “it is necessary. Physiologically the Trolanni are an unusually complex life-form. This one will survive but its mate will almost certainly not, unless Murchison, who is a specialist in other-species pathology, returns to us soon. We are all concerned for her safety and the possible loss of her unrivaled expertise.”
Unlike the Kelgian, who could not help saying exactly what it was thinking at any time, the captain tried to be more circumspect.
“Your medical team is two members short,” it said gently, “and Danalta would be of more use to you there than remaining in the vicinity of the bay. What I’m trying to say is that Pathologist Murchison may not be returning to you. Isn’t that a strong possibility, Doctor?”
Prilicla felt a tremor shaking his limbs and body, the significance of which Naydrad, but not Keet, would understand. He controlled his emotions with difficulty and stilled his body before he was able to speak.
“It is a possibility, friend Fletcher,” he said, “but I hope that it is a remote one. Danalta lost contact with Pathologist Murchison shortly after its capture and while it was still on the ground rescuing the communicator. The shape-changer has since been trying to discover the ship to which friend Murchison was taken and where within that ship it is being held, so far unsuccessfully-
“I shall not call off this search,” he went on, “because I have known Pathologist Murchison for many years. I know its personality, its warmth, sympathy, humor, its sensitivity, and in particular the intensity of feeling it holds for its life-mate, and many other qualities that cannot be put into words. Of even more irnportance, I know its emotional-radiation signature almost as well as I know my own.
“The spider ships are at extreme range for my empathic faculty.” he concluded, “and while I cannot honestly say that I sense its presence at any given moment, if friend Murchison was to terminate, I feel sure that I would know of it at once.”
The captain broke contact without speaking.
Murchison began with the approach long-hallowed by tradition, even in the days before mankind had learned how to leave Earth, by drawing pictures of the people and things she wanted to name. They were small and simple; small for the reason that she didn’t know whether or not the supply of broad leaves was limited, and simple because the ink ran like water and she had botched the first two attempts by overloading the brush. She held the leaf horizontally sketch-upwards for the few seconds it took the ink to dry, then showed it to the spider.
Pointing at herself and the body outline in the sketch, she said, “Human.” She repeated the gestures and the word several times before pointing at the spider and its outline and deliberately said nothing.
The silent questioning seemed to work because one of her captor’s clawlike digits moved down to touch the spider outline. It made a low, clicking and cheeping noise that sounded like, “Kritkuk.”
Ignoring the sketches, Murchison pointed at herself and then the spider, and repeated, “Human. Kritkuk.”
“Hukmaki,” it replied; and, more loudly, “Kritickuk.”
The emphasis on the second word, she thought, might be due to irritation at her not pronouncing it correctly. But it wasn’t doing such a hot job of pronunciation on “human,” either. She led a different approach, knowing that it couldn’t understand any of the words yet, but hoping that it would get the message. “You are speaking too quickly for me,” she said in her normal speaking tempo, then went on slowly, “Please… speak… in… a… slow… and… distinct… voice.”
Plainly it had understood the message because this time, while the word didn’t seem to be that much slower, she was able to detect additional syllables in it.
She started to say it but the word choked off into a cough. Taking a deep, calming breath she tried again.
“Krititkukik,” she repeated.
“Krititkukik,” it agreed.
Pleased at her first linguistic success, but not wanting to waste time trying to teach it better Earth-human pronunciation, she knelt down on the folded hammock and, with a new leaf spread flat on the deck before her, she thought hard and began sketching again.
Drawing two circles to indicate their different planets in space might be too confusing at this stage although, being a sailor, her spider would certainly use the stars for navigation between its world’s many islands and might be well aware of the fact that its surface was round. Instead she drew a straight line to represent the horizon across the widest part of a new leaf, placed a small circle with wavy lines radiating from it to indicate that it was the sun and added the outline of the island. Around and below it she drew small, flatcrescent shapes to denote waves, and on one side of it she drew three flat domes to depict the spider’s ships and not to scale, a glider flying above them. She pointed to each of the symbols in turn.
“Sky,” she said. “Sun. Sea. Island. Ship. Glider.”
The spider supplied the equivalent word sounds, and a few of them she was even able to pronounce without being corrected, but the other began walking around her in a tight circle as if in agitation or impatience.
Suddenly it reached forward and took the brush from her hand and began slowly and carefully to add to her sketch. It drew three small, flat rectangles that had to be the buildings of the medical station on the other side of the island. It reversed the brush and used the dry end to point several times at the station.
She wasn’t giving away information that the spiders did not already know from their aerial reconnaissance and they would have been stupid if they did not already know that she had come from there, so she took another leaf and filled it with a drawing of the medical-station buildings in greater detail. She showed the sand below them sloping to the wavy lines of the sea and, on a clear area of sand, four stylized figures: herself; the cylindrical shape with many short legs along its base that was Naydrad; a featureless cone that was Danalta when it wasn’t being something else; and Prilicla. In outline the empath looked very much like Krititkukik except for the two sets of wings and the fact that it was a little distance above the ground. The spider remained motionless for the few seconds, either in surprise or because it was waiting for the ink to dry, then it pointed the brush first at Murchison herself, then used the end of its thin handle to touch her image in the sketch, followed by those of the others, and finally the station. It repeated the process, but this time when it touched each of the four figures it followed by touching the buildings, and ended by tapping repeatedly at the med station alone. Then it looked at her and made a chitter-ing, interrogative sound.
It was saying, she felt sure, that it knew all of them had come from the med station, but where had the med station come from?