Captain Boyle pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He was still wearing his cap, but otherwise he’d stripped to shorts. His bare torso was as red as a boiled lobster, but a lot of the meat was gone, and his once-florid face was blotchy. He looked a decade older.
He looked Jameson up and down. “Where’ve you been, Tod?” he said mildly.
“I’ve been talking to Cygnans,” Jameson said.
There was a stirring at the fringes of the Chinese group. Tu Jue-chen stepped forward, her waxen face angry. “Impossible,” she snapped. “No one can talk to them. They tried to communicate with Comrade Yeh. They kept him in a cell for days before putting him here with the rest of us. Isn’t that so, Comrade?”
Yeh shuffled uncomfortably. “It’s true. They tried to make me copy their whistles. I thought I had a word or two at first, but they meant something different every time.”
Jameson nodded at the big man. He was surprised that Yeh had survived. When he’d seen him borne off by a horde of Cygnans, he was sure they’d killed him, as they had Grogan.
“That’s because you were whistling in different keys, Comrade,” he said. “It depends on absolute pitch.”
Boyle’s square head came up alertly. “You found a way to talk to them?”
“That’s right, Captain,” Jameson said.
“You are a traitor, admit it!” Tu Jue-chen said in a fury. “Otherwise they would not have pampered you so! Now they’ve sent you here to spy on us!”
Boyle’s face hardened as he spoke to the Struggle Group leader. “You can’t have it both ways, Comrade Tu,” he said. “If he doesn’t know how to talk to Cygnans, then he can’t be a spy for them.” He turned back to Jameson. “You better tell us about it,” he said.
Patiently Jameson explained about how Cygnan phonemes were formed, and how he’d programmed the Moog synthesizer to imitate them.
“Can you still communicate with them?” Boyle asked urgently.
“Without the Moog, it’s hard, Captain. But I can get a few primitive ideas across … if they bother to pay attention. And I can understand most of what they say directly to me—again, if they bother to try. When they talk to one another, I miss a lot.”
“Commander, we’re in bad shape here. We could use some of the stuff from the ship. Clothing, soap. Razors. Birth-control pills. And we could stand an improvement in our rations. Kiernan and Wang are trying to get an ecology going. The Cygnans gave us some plants from hydroponics, some hamsters and fish and so forth. But it’ll be some time till we can feed ourselves entirely—if ever. In the meantime we depend on the synthetic slop they dish out to us, and Dr. Lemieux and Dr. Phelps say it isn’t adequate. Wrong balance of amino acids, vitamin deficiencies, and so on.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Captain. At least I know where they’ve stockpiled our stuff. But I don’t know if I can get them to listen to me.”
“You’ve got to, boy! Those damned walking eels are trying to take care of us, I suppose. But it doesn’t seem to occur to them that we’re trying to communicate. When I think of how—” He broke off. “We’re just curiosities to them. Zoo animals.”
Jameson’s gaze strayed to the branching transparent pipes overhead. There were a few shadowy six-legged shapes moving through them. “I know what you mean, Captain,” he said.
“Dammit, they know we’re intelligent beings!”
“We know porpoises are intelligent beings, Captain. Known it for fifty years. That doesn’t stop us from putting them in aquariums.”
“Or killing them when they get in the way of our fishing remotes,” Janet Lemieux put in.
Boyle had command of himself again. Jameson was pleased to see the Old Man’s spine straighten. “Did you see any spacesuits, Tod?” the captain said.
Jameson was startled. “Captain, you’re not thinking about an escape?”
“It’s my responsibility to think about it, Commander. Captain Hsieh and I have talked it over. We’re keeping our options open.”
“Captain, what if we get out of our cage, even out of this zoo enclosure? It’d be like those porpoises getting out of their tanks. In an inland aquarium at that! Where do we go?”
“Our ship has to be parked somewhere nearby. Some of the crew members regained consciousness soon enough to see the Cygnans pushing it along behind us.”
“Captain, I saw the ship.”
“You saw—” Boyle swallowed, then went on more quietly. “You saw the ship? What kind of shape is it in?”
“I don’t know what the interior’s like, Captain. I didn’t see any evidence that they’d ripped out any essential equipment. Just carted away some of the loose stuff. I’d guess that the power plant and the controls are intact … and maybe even enough frozen seed stock in hydroponics to get an air plant going again. The outside of the ship’s okay, though. The missile racks are still in place, if that’s any indication—they hadn’t even gone near them. And the pod for the Callisto lander is intact. I suppose it could be used to nudge—”
“I beg your pardon, Commander,” a voice said. Jameson turned to see People’s Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang emerging from the knot of Chinese. The bomb-crew officer was a lean, ascetic man who had managed to keep his beard plucked and his head closely cropped despite his incarceration. He’d donated his shirt, but retained a cotton singlet with a huge puckered ridge that indicated that he’d somehow contrived to darn the frayed edges of a hole together.
“Yes, Comrade,” Jameson said politely.
“Did I hear you say that the nuclear missiles are intact?”
“They seem to be, but I hope … There’s nothing we could do with them except annoy the Cygnans … Oh, I see what you’re getting at! You think we might be able to use the propulsive units to maneuver the ship if we have to.”
“Perhaps.”
Boyle broke in briskly. “Well, we can talk about all that later. The first step is to inject some morale into the crew, get them properly fed and cleaned up, whip things into shape around here. We’re human beings, not animals. I don’t know if we can ever be entirely self-supporting, even with our hamsters and fish and vegetables, but we’re damn well going to control our own destiny to the extent we’re able.”
Then everybody was crowding around Jameson, asking breathless questions about his sojourn with the Cygnans, clapping him on the shoulder, welcoming him, while Maggie snuggled up to him. Even the Chinese broke through their reserve and, forgetting ideology, pestered him with questions.
The kitten, Mao, was popular with both factions. He was passed from hand to hand, fussed over, coaxed to eat tidbits that had been saved from human rations. Jameson got a lump in his throat when he saw how pathetically starved everyone was for this little furry link with Earth and the human race. He couldn’t help thinking of the Jovians, swimming forlornly in their tank of liquid hydrogen in the next exhibition hall.
The normally standoffish Klein surprised Jameson by making an awkward effort to be sociable. Jameson, a little ashamed of his dislike of the man, did his best to answer Klein’s persistent questions about the sights he’d seen through the walls of the travel tube leading down the ship’s arm, the layout of the zoo and the surrounding Cygnan country, and the like.
Klein still looked fit, compared to most of the crew; he’d made an effort to take care of-himself. His sleek seal’s head was combed and plastered down, his sloping shoulders and thick upper arms showed knots of hard muscle, his shorts were mended and somehow pressed.
“You mean you were in the place where those snakes live, Commander?” Klein was saying. “When they went to get those nervous system guns of theirs—”