The little figures ran for it, sobbing in alarm to the others who stood around the ship. They all turned to stare at me, except for one who was crouched over, trying to pull a snowsuit on up around himself. As all the others screamed at the sight of me, he straightened up and looked. It was the hermit.
“O, not to worry,” he told them. “I know her.” He put his hands up to form a trumpet around his mouth and shouted, “I regret I was not at home when yez come to call! It seems They’ve decided to take me to Mount Shasta to live with Them permanent-like! Ain’t dat a grand thing, now?”
“Your Library!” I croaked. The little creatures were frantically tossing basket after basket of shells in through the open door of the airship, and two of them grabbed the hermit’s arms to try to hurry him the rest of the way into his suit. He gave me a slightly shamefaced shrug.
“Well, They found me out about that, and They’re confiscating it; but They’re good fellows, like I told yez, and They say I can open a school in Lemuria when she comes up. They say They’ll have to test me worthiness some more, but dat’s all right.” One of them zipped up the front of his suit and pressed a pair of goggles into his hands, signing several times that he should put them on at once. The others were vanishing inside the ship as fast as they could get through the door.
But I wasn’t about to follow them now, priority or no priority, not after the brain-scrambling I’d got when they’d overflown me. My self-preservation program was finally working again, and I stood rooted in place watching the hermit fit the goggles on over his spectacles while the one remaining creature gibbered and tugged on his arm.
“Half a minute, there, I can’t see through this—there now. Why, it’s all funny-looking. Say,” he called across to me, Tez might see if the Sisterhood’s interested in coming out here to the dunes. I still think it’s a capital place for a great center of learning.” The ship began to tremble and hum, and the creature turned to dart through the door, pulling the hermit after him. I recoiled from the waves of radiation that flooded outward. The hermit paused in the doorway, looking back to me, and went on shouting:
“Because, ye know, the vibrations hereabouts is so powerful yez can almost—” the door slid shut with a dull bang, trapping a lock of his beard as the ship began its ascent into the sky. The ascent paused, the door slid open a half-inch and the beard vanished inside; the door slammed again and the ship zoomed upward a few hundred meters, until without turning it sped off at an angle and vanished from sight.
I stood staring for a long moment. Aware that I was still clutching the one clamshell I had managed to grab, I raised my hand painfully and examined it. I nearly screamed.
It was a nice little study of ducks paddling happily on a lake. And look: here were some children on the shore of the lake, feeding the ducks. At least, they might have been children. Oh, who was I kidding? They weren’t children, they were Visitors from Somewhere who had found a unique life form in these dunes. Like me, they had tested a sample; like me, they were transplanting it.
I let my arm drop to my side. Now that the ship had gone I could see across the midden to the high dune beyond, where clamshell letters ten feet high shouted silently:
NOT ALONE.