Lucy said crisply, "I'm a doctor. I think we can move him with least risk this way."
She directed the delicate job of lifting the Aldarian from the back seat onto a stretcher. She accompanied him into the hospital. Hackett pulled his car to one side and sat smoking.
A cop came over, memo pad in hand. Hackett described the accident. The cop looked Hackett's car over. No bumps. No dents.
"You didn't bump into him," he said. "What sort of guys are those Aldarians?"
Hackett said he didn't know. Reporters arrived, and vanished into the hospital. Presently two of them came out, looked around, and made for Hackett.
"Are you the man who brought that Aldarian in?" demanded one feverishly. He backed off and prepared to use a camera.
"No," said Hackett. "That man left. I brought a brother-in-law here. His wife's having triplets."
The reporters went disappointedly away. Hackett reflected sourly that they'd get his name from the police report of the accident anyway. People who knew he'd been dismissed as incompetent to learn Grek physics would be amused.
A long, long time later, there was the heavy, beating rumble of a helicopter. It settled down on a corner of the hospital grounds. Men alighted. Then two Aldarians. Then one Grek. Everybody kowtowed to the gray-skinned Grek. He was a little larger than a man, he was balder than a man, and he was no longer grotesque to anybody who could see newspapers or magazine pictures or Took at television. He made polite and infinitely bored gestures. He and the two Aldarians were escorted into the hospital. A little later they came out again. The two Aldarians carried a stretcher. They put it into the helicopter. The sagging rotors of the copter began to turn. They roared, and the copter rose into the air. It went away across the small town, swinging as it flew, and ultimately it vanished in the direction of that faraway place from which the Grek ship would rise on the morrow.
Again a long time later, Lucy came out of the hospital. Two male internes came with her, talking volubly. Some of their animation disappeared when she smiled brightly at Hackett. He rolled the car over to her. She climbed in and finished her conversation as she closed the door behind her.
"I'd love to see a print of those X-rays," she said sweetly. "If you think I can get them, I'll write and ask."
She waved cheerfully and Hackett drove away. They were two miles from the hospital when Lucy spoke. Then she said in a queer voice, "I did—something peculiar back there, Jim. Maybe I did wrong. I'm worried. But it happened so fast—"
"What was it?"
She hesitated. Then she said, "You were driving for the hospital after we got the Aldarian in the car. I tried to make him comfortable by straightening out his arms and legs the way I've seen them on TV. I think there are some broken bones, but of course I don't know Aldarian anatomy. He—kept moving. Stirring. I though he was in pain, and tried to help him move to the position he wanted. He watched my face. I guess they've come to recognize what our facial expressions mean. He tried desperately to make me understand something. Finally he used words. Words! How could someone whose whole race is deaf know how to form words? I kept trying to soothe him, but he kept trying to move and struggle. . . ."
Hackett's car arrived at a place where the highway he'd come on—itself a secondary road—was silhouetted against the sky. It was a solid mass of cars. They looked like an endless procession of rushing insects, black against the horizon. But then Hackett's present road turned and ran downhill and the highway traffic disappeared behind a hillside.
"I realize now," said Lucy distressedly, "he was trying to make gestures. I thought he was only hurt. Then he—tried to use words. His eyes looked desperate, but I kept on trying to soothe him. And when he was carried into the hospital I could see that he was in a panic. He was terrified!"
"He ought to have known that no human would harm him," said Hackett sardonically. "At least nobody'd harm him yet. Not so long as they pass out gifts!"
Lucy swallowed.
"I'm not at all sure I did the right thing," she said uneasily. "When he saw the X-ray apparatus, he must have known what it was. His eyes looked simply crazy with despair. I bent over him, still trying to soothe him, thinking he must know I meant well for him because we'd pulled him out of the wreck. And—somehow he touched my hand. I looked, and he was trying to put something in it. I let him. He closed my fingers on it, and looked at me, and his eyes—they talked, Jim! He begged me desperately to do something about the thing in my hand. So I—I hid it and put my finger on my lips to say I'd keep it a secret. I don't know how I knew he wanted me to hide it, but I did."
Hackett slowed for a traffic sign. It felt strange to be driving on a minor road with next to no cars left, after the bumper-to-bumper traffic he'd been in for so long.
"You hid it," said Hackett. "On a hunch. Being a woman, you'll call it intuition. Then what?"
"He was perfectly still while the X-rays were being taken. He didn't look at me again. He didn't look desperate. Then the helicopter arrived and the Grek came in. He was very polite and somehow very lordly. But—Greks do make you feel creepy, Jim! They do! It's—unpleasant! Then the other two Aldarians took the stretcher and carried the injured one out. And he looked at me once more, just for an instant, as they carried him away. It was—significant. He was anxious. He was terribly anxious! But he wasn't panicky any more. It was as if he meant that everything was all right so far, but please don't do anything to spoil it!"
"So," said Hackett, "you kept the thing he handed you. And you kept your mouth shut, except to me. And now you suspect you should have done something else. Right?"
"Of course!" said Lucy. "I thought I'd ask you."
It is extremely likely that almost all of us, at that time, would have been shocked at the idea of anybody, for any reason, doing anything as irregular as Lucy had done. It was fortunate for the rest of us that Lucy was a woman. Only a woman would have done it.
3
The small road on which Hackett drove now turned and twisted. Once it dived down and ran under a roil rood crossing. For an instant the sound of the car seemed very loud, reflected as it was from the walls and coiling of the very brief tunnel.
Then Hackett said, "He wasn't making you a gift. It wasn't an expression of gratitude for our pulling him out of the wreck and getting him to a hospital."
Lucy moistened her lips. "No. . . ."
"He didn't want the thing he gave you to show when he was X-rayed," said Hackett. "And he didn't want it given back when he went off with the Grek in the helicopter. That was pretty clear, wasn't it?"
"Y-yes," said Lucy hesitantly. "That was clear."
"He'd know the Greks would see the X-rays," observed Hackett. "He knew he'd be taken back to the ship. So it looks as if he didn't want the Greks to know about the thing he gave you. He wanted to get rid of it."
Lucy nodded. She'd reasoned the same way, after the event, but she still felt uncomfortable about what she'd done. Hackett added, "Offhand, I'm for the Aldarian. They're likeable characters. The Greks aren't. They're obviously very generous—" his tone held irony, here—"but they act too superior. And they're creepy. So I advise you to do what the Aldarian wanted you to. Keep quiet. Don't do anything. It may not be sensible, but you'll feel better if you do."
Lucy said, relieved, "I was going to anyway, but I'm glad you agree."
"In confidence," said Hackett, "I have a reason."
"What? And don't you want to look at the thing?"
"Not now," said Hackett. "I think I want to keep moving. And I wish I hadn't given our names to that cop!"
He drove on. There was bright sunshine, and little white cumulus clouds seeming like islands floating upon the ocean of the sky. Hackett had felt definitely sour for a good part of the time the Grek ship had been aground. It was a vessel of a civilization so far advanced that we humans were savages .by comparison. Its officers behaved with a sort of aloof politeness that some people took for cordiality, but there was boredom behind it.