“The computer’s learning all the time,” Jao said defensively. “Sooner or later it might hit on something.”
“What you’ve done is amazing,” Bram assured him.
Jao brightened. “Want to know what the hardest part was? It wasn’t the program. It was inventing the gizmo to recognize the polarization through different planes of orientation, then to transmit the same way. That’s what takes up so much room in the backpack. I had to scavenge the faceplates of a whole bunch of helmets to build it.”
Heln, arms spread low, purposely penetrated the avoidance zone and dropped to one knee, then danced back as the creatures showed restlessness. Her equipment blazed a signal that looked sustained to human eyes but that to the aliens, of course, would have flickered. Bram saw the shadowy facial limbs lift as if to ward off something, but the creatures never stopped their prowling movements.
“They still don’t see it as speech,” Jao said. “Something missing.”
“Very frustrating,” Bram said.
One of the insect-people was using an odd camera—a sizable box with one curved face studded with thousands of pinhole lenses. It took its pictures by sweeping areas of the ruins in short arcs.
“Multiple fixed-focus lenses,” Jao said. “Motion shifts the pattern. They must have some way of reading the result. Like Heln said, it’s the way they see.”
“They’re not much interested in the people,” Bram said. “Or individual objects. They seem to want fields of view.”
“Looking for another place to light,” Jao said. “The digs here are ready-made of them—honeycombed with chambers connected by a tunnel system.”
“No,” Bram said. “We can’t allow that. We’ll be coming back here someday. We’ve got to talk them out of it.”
“First we’ve got to find a way to talk to them.”
The insect-people spent the next few hours exploring, completely ignoring the holiday crowd that tagged along. After a while, Bram became aware that their seemingly random forays added up to an extremely efficient search grid.
Besides the camera, whose purpose was obvious, they used a number of other instruments. One was a long stinger that came out of a cylinder on legs and penetrated the ground to a depth of—Bram estimated by counting the telescoping sections—thirty feet, at least. The tripod gave a little jump when it hit bottom. “Their version of a thumper,” Jao said. “They’re searching for cavities.” Other instruments, with a little thought, were soon recognized as a surveyor’s transit and a range finder, adapted to the peculiar insect vision.
The creatures seemed to get restive after a while, and after they had darted at one another in a series of little mock attacks, they all filed back to their vehicle, launched themselves up into the end of the angled tubular chassis, and disappeared inside. Bram waited, but the barrel-wheeled vehicle showed no signs of starting up.
Heln sauntered over. “Lunch break for them,” she observed. “Or some kind of break. Whatever it is, they’ve got to take off those helmets to do it.”
After twenty minutes passed, the creatures popped out of the end of the tube again and resumed their mysterious activities. Several of them could be observed preening their nightmare faces. Jorv appeared with an assistant, who took more pictures.
At the end of another couple of hours, the creatures found the ramp to the parking garage under the sports arena. This seemed to excite them. There was another head-to-head conference, with eight long tail sections sticking out and wobbling, the gauntleted claspers working convulsively.
They knew about air locks. Afraid that they might damage the locks leading to the stadium interior, Bram had been about to order that the creatures be let through while someone held the door, but one of them figured out the human machinery at a jelly-eyed glance, and they swarmed inside. They even closed it behind them.
They seemed to be awfully good with machinery.
“They can notice inanimate objects,” Bram puzzled, “but not a crowd of people.”
“You don’t understand,” Heln said. “We are inanimate objects.”
“Yar,” Jao said, as if he were an expert. “We haven’t impinged on them.”
A thought struck Bram. “They must have seen the shuttles parked in the field on their way through. If not man, then man’s works! Why didn’t they take an interest in those?”
“Held no meaning for them,” Heln supplied. “Wasn’t important. Not like the air lock here. They wanted to get inside.”
Bram spoke to his traffic control-deputies. “Keep the mob outside. I won’t evict anyone who’s already in there, but I think we’d better keep the numbers down.”
Without their space suits, the creatures from Sol were an unnerving sight—spiny legs, globular green eyes, and hard shiny integument bristling with stiff hairs. The four-fingered claspers at their projecting rears were pincers of horn, and the forward manipulating limbs, now revealed, were all tweezers and hooks.
They prowled the floor and balconies of the chamber, taking no more notice of the gawking humans than humans would have taken of moss on a rock. With the boxy helmets off, the clicking noises they made to each other could be heard like a high-speed rattle of broken sticks.
Their insect ancestry was fully apparent. “You see,” Jorv said ecstatically, “how evolution modified the exoskeleton in a way that permitted them to grow to size. It became a partially embedded, hinged, mostly external skeleton that operates as a system of levers. The extensor and flexor muscles operate separately, bridging the hinges on opposite sides.”
The skeletal apparitions gave everybody cause to remember their childhood ghost stories in Chin-pin-yin; the word for a foreigner was, literally, a “bones-outside,” and now Bram heard people around him starting to call the Earthlings that.
Jorv could hardly contain himself. “You see the pulsating of the abdomen? I think they breathe through their anus. I wonder what evolution gave them in place of lungs.”
“What are they?” Ame asked.
“I don’t know,” Jorv said. “They may have been aquatic. In that case—”
He was interrupted by a chattering Cuddly that skidded to a stop in front of the group and climbed up the nearest person to reach the shelter of human arms. The person happened to be Ame, who petted the fluffy little beast and cooed, “There, there, nothing’s going to hurt you.” The Cuddly had ventured too close to a prowling insect-thing and had had second thoughts about approaching it.
The insect-beings, in fact, had quite an audience of Cuddlies by this time. When the strange creatures had arrived and shucked their space suits, the couple of dozen Cuddlies that normally mooched around the chamber looking for handouts had immediately disappeared. After a while, when nothing much happened and the human beings seemed unconcerned, a few cautious little furry heads had popped up.
Now the Cuddlies were getting bolder. One fat little creature sat up on its haunches and scolded an insect-being that had paused, for a moment to survey the arena floor.
“Isn’t that cute?” Ame said. “It wants the bones-outside to pay some attention to it.”
“If we can’t get their attention with computer displays and polarized light, there’s not much hope for a Cuddly,” Shira said.
The little beast hopped closer and chittered more loudly.
“It’s getting awfully close to the avoidance zone.” Heln frowned. “I wonder…”