The reason she and the other Fixers knew this so well was because the Whuggs were just as intensely curious about the Expeditions themselves as their fruits, and each Fixer was in essence a mini-Expedition studying the Expedition of which he or she was a part. Each possessed special equipment for that task.
Claire knew that if Arthur ever found out about this hidden agenda he would be devastated by the seeming demotion from master of scientific research to just one more lab rat, and explaining that the endlessly curious Whuggs were studying her methods and actions as well probably wouldn’t help much.
She turned her head to check on him. He was working away at the science station, completely absorbed and totally oblivious. Just the way she liked him.
She slipped her hand inside her blouse and closed her fingers around the locket hanging between her breasts, then subvocalized a command. Access. Break code.
Working, the device whispered inside her head, then with no perceptible pause, Done.
She grinned as the screen redrew; the gibberish it had displayed turned into plain English. Whugg computers could translate anything. That code, which might have taken one of Earth’s biggest computers several months to break, had been chewed through by the pea-sized yellow lump inside her locket in less than a second flat.
Moments later she was frowning. There were only five entries, and not a one of them made any immediate sense. Cracking the encryption had only netted her:
HOLY SHIT!
GIZZARDS!
NO GENE POOL STAGNATION/DIVERGENCE.
CLEVER BASTARDS!
JACK.
“This isn’t jack,” she muttered darkly. “What the hell were you up to, Maud?”
“Claire?”
“Yeah?” she answered, shaking herself from her reverie. The last thirty minutes had been blown sitting there staring at those five enigmatic entries, and she’d gotten nothing but a headache for her troubles.
“I think I have something.”
“I’m glad someone does.” She got up, detoured to pour herself fresh coffee, then went to look over her husband’s shoulder. “What have you got?”
“Check it out.” On the screen before them one of the indigenes strolled nonchalantly into the clearing in front of the missing professor’s invisible blindship. The alien was bipedal, about 1.3 meters tall, and walked upright on flat scaly feet.
“The fellow looks rather like a turtle without its shell,” Arthur commented dryly.
“A turtle with bat ears, a furry tail and teeth like a politician.” Claire leaned closer for a better look. “It’s wearing a belt, a knife and carrying a… purse?”
“A carry sack of some sort,” Arthur agreed. “Once again the sketchy information I have indicates that they are hunter-gatherers, their development roughly equivalent with the later stages of our own Stone Age. I can’t tell you anything about their social habits. Studying that was supposed to have been Maud’s job.”
“Clever bastards,” Claire murmured.
He frowned back at her. “Why do you say that?”
“A notation Maud made sometime before she turned herself into a leviathan yummy.”
Arthur turned back toward the screen. “OK, here we go. This is what I saw that made me call you.”
The indigene ambled over to another of the helical-trunked trees, knelt down, and, using the long nails on its broad flat hands, unearthed a long black pod identical to the one Maud had dug.
“You found the monkey-see,” Claire muttered with a pleased nod. “Good spotting, love.”
The alien sauntered to the center of the clearing and deftly unzipped the pod, releasing an expanding mass of bubbles. Then it waited, its hairless head bobbing rhythmically.
“Stone age, you said?”
Arthur nodded. “There seem to be similarities.”
“Must be listening to rock music.”
He sighed, then pointed to the data track. “Here we go. There’s a leviathan coming.”
“And Elvis hears it.” The indigene turned its head and stared intently into the surrounding growth. Its eyes were large and round, like a lemur’s. Its ears swiveled to home in on the sound, but nothing in its posture suggested alarm.
They watched as the leviathan hove into view, thundering along on its twelve muscular legs. There followed a reenactment of Whalsitz s fate; the humongous life-form jonahed up the indigene, let out a joyful rooooooo! and beat a duodenarypedal retreat.
“It asked to be eaten!” Arthur exclaimed, freezing the image, then swiveling his chair so he faced his wife. “I just don’t get it.”
“Neither do I,” she admitted, then yawned and stretched. “We’re both whipped and hip deep in the bizarre. What say we call it a night and start fresh in the morning?”
“What about Maud?”
Claire chuckled and helped herself to a seat in his lap. “The damned fool turned herself into fast food. I still intend to get to the bottom of this mess, but guess we can write off rescue as an option. So there’s no need to pull an all-nighter at work.”
She squirmed around, batted her eyes and toyed with the buttons of her blouse. “Howzabout instead we pull one by you and me becoming the first humans to get lucky on this planet?”
Arthur blinked furiously, crimson creeping into his cheeks. Her sudden changes from dedicated investigator to sex maniac always caught him off guard. “But what about—I mean, with Maud dead and all, doesn’t that seem kind of, well…” He shrugged.
“Don’t worry, darling,” she cooed. “It’s OK.” She unbuttoned her blouse, pulled it open. “See? I’m wearing black!”
Arthur snored blissfully on as Claire kissed his forehead and then eased carefully out of bed. She grabbed her robe and slipped stealthily out of their bedroom, closing the door behind her.
She headed for the kitchen, blinking against the light and shrugging on the robe as she went. After nuking a cup of leftover coffee to reheat it, she returned to the blindship’s living room and settled herself into the chair at the science station.
Most times sex served as the old married folks’ sleeping potion, but every now and then it had the opposite effect, leaving her all revved up and ready for something. Arthur had just given her one hell of a jump-start. She figured she might as well put it to use.
It took her only a moment to call up those five decrypted but still cryptic entries. She took a swig of coffee and took another run at them.
HOLY SHIT. That usually denoted surprise and or amazement. Something here must have really grabbed the old bag’s attention. Something she was determined to hide. None of her recordings had been edited and passed over to the Whugg systems, either. Why was she playing so fast and loose with the rules?
GIZZARD. Whenever Arthur cooked chicken he always sauteed the gizzard in butter and garlic for himself. Canadian cuisine. Go figure. People didn’t have gizzards, but birds did. Was it that or the crop they used to macerate food, using swallowed stones as grinders? A perfectly bewildering and yet still boring lead for Arthur to follow in the morning.
NO GENETIC STAGNATION OR DIVERGENCE. Maud had to be talking about the indigenes, didn’t she? They were her field.
Claire frowned and took another sip of coffee. Pitstop’s peculiar topography kept the pockets of life on it isolated from each other. Each pocket should have been a separately evolving “island” with its own specialized biologic adaptations, like Earth s own Australia or Hawaii. Going on the assumption that they didn’t have some highly exotic reproductive mechanism to compensate, each indigene grouping should have been inbred and to some degree divergent from each other. Maud seemed to be saying that they weren’t. Why? How? And for that matter, how was it that there were indigenes in almost all of the habitable pits? They couldn’t have all appeared everywhere all at once, could they?