“Something’s moving!” Maggie cried. “Over there!”
Jameson whipped around and saw a tiny glittering thing emerge from a pile of castoff clothing and begin to climb the slanting wall. Before he could do anything there was a blur of pink motion as one of the diminutive humanoids streaked for the thing. It trapped it in a dainty four-fingered hand and presented it to Jameson.
Jameson looked it over and immediately smashed it beneath his heel.
“What … was it?” Dmitri said.
“Piece of electronics,” Jameson said. “One of Klein’s motile probes. Pinhead lens, rice-grain mike, little magnetized ball-bearing wheels, trailing a spider-thread antenna. It must have been activated by our movements or body heat. Klein’s watching his rear.”
“So now he knows we’re after him,” Ruiz mused.
“Probably. I don’t know what the range of a thing like that is.”
“How do we find them?”
“Good question. He’s got those miniature probes to scout out a safe route for him. Wish we had the same. Or at least a bloodhound. Now, which direction did he go in?”
He looked around the expanse of floor, frowning.
“What’s got into them?” Maggie said.
The two humanoids were behaving oddly. They were prowling the area on all fours—not on hands and knees, as people would have done, but bent double in an impossible arch, walking on the tips of their toes and the backs of their little hands, with their fingers curled up. The position seemed entirely natural for them. They moved with a supple, spidery grace, their faces casting back and forth a half inch from the floor.
Dmitri watched them intently as they worked in widening circles, then turned to Jameson.
“I think you’ve got your bloodhounds,” he said.
Chapter 27
They climbed more than a mile before they saw their first live Cygnan. Klein had been correct in his assumption: Even in an artificial environment that was more crowded than Hong Kong or Dallasworth there were service and utilities routes that were untraveled and almost unvisited.
“This is like sneaking through the sewers of Paris in an old novel by Victor Hugo,” Ruiz observed, “while thousands of Parisians are walking around a few feet overhead.” Then he had to explain who Victor Hugo was.
The route they followed was a tangled confusion of pipes, enormous three-sided ducts and twisting cables as thick around as oak trees. They passed through narrow chimneys of metal that they had to squeeze through inch by inch, and yawning spaces that seemed to have been wasted in the design of the ship. Jameson was reminded of just how old the ship must be; some of the chambers they traversed had been used for various purposes and abandoned by past generations of Cygnans. The dust of centuries lay on the crumbling artifacts that loomed in the flickering dimness provided by skeins of leaking optical fibers.
“Cygnans are sloppy housekeepers,” Jameson said at one point, looking at an electrical cable that had been gnawed clean through by some small animal. “They never repaired this.”
“The function it served might have disappeared a thousand years ago,” Ruiz said. “Do we maintain the Roman aqueducts, or the transatlantic cables?”
There was life all around them in the unused spaces—little furry things that fled chittering as they approached. Mosslike fungus grew near damp spots where pipes had burst or condensation beaded the walls. Once they saw a small flying thing—a podlike shape suspended from a crown of furiously beating transparent wings.
The ducts and conduits branched off like some immense fossil vine to disappear through bulkheads or snake their way through side tunnels and adjacent chambers. Once Jameson put his eye to a rent that showed light and saw a horde of Cygnans slithering across a floor to crowd around a dozen raised perches where other Cygnans dispensed tiny pea-green cubes from wide-mouthed baskets slung around them. Another time the feathery humanoids stopped Dmitri just in time to prevent him from stepping through an opening where Cygnans disembarked from a travel tube to a platform that debouched to a multibranched artery.
It was the humanoids that kept them out of trouble. They darted ahead and then back like coursing gazehounds, sniffing out danger and herding Jameson and the others into side tunnels, or by example making them hide behind ducts and bulkheads till stray Cygnans passed. And all the time, the two elvish beings followed the trail of Klein and his group, selecting trails from among alternate routes with utter certainty.
“Butyric acid,” Dmitri said suddenly.
“What?” Jameson called.
“Butyric acid. It’s a constituent of human sweat. Every time you take a step, something like two hundred and fifty billion molecules of butyric acid pass through the sole of your shoe. A good bloodhound or German shepherd can detect a millionth of that amount and follow a trail a week old. These two fluffballs of ours seem to live by scent.”
“Very interesting. But we haven’t time to—”
“There’s something else.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ruiz and Maggie had stopped to listen. The two humanoids were twenty feet farther on, dancing impatiently up and down.
“How do they make us hide when there are Cygnans nearby?” Dmitri asked.
Jameson wrinkled his brow. “Why … they make a lot of gestures, and they act excited, and then they hide behind something…”
“Think again. We don’t wait around and stop to think. We act very quickly. They tell us Cygnans are around.”
Maggie said, “Well, we seem to sense what they mean. I can almost feel us getting close to Cygnans … Oh!”
Dmitri grinned with triumph. “Exactly. It’s the most evocative of the senses. Human beings use it every day without being aware of it. It makes us like people or dislike them, triggers sexual behavior, evaluates our surroundings on a subconscious level, makes us nostalgic without knowing why—”
“Slow down,” Jameson said.
“He’s too much of an ox to notice,” Maggie said. She turned to Jameson and said: “Smell! They tell us by smell! When they want to warn us that there are Cygnans around, they lose that nice spicy aroma and they suddenly smell sort of musty, the way Cygnans do.”
Dmitri nodded vigorously. “They manufacture smells as well as detect them. They probably can imitate any smell they encounter. Make up new ones, too.” He laughed delightedly. “Odors to order!”
“Maybe,” Jameson said. “Come on, we’re wasting time.”
“I’ll show you,” Dmitri said.
He hurried to catch up to the humanoids, the others following. The two creatures were at a division in the metallic gorge where two narrow flumes diverged, making motions to go right. Dmitri ignored them and turned left.
“What—” Jameson began.
“Watch,” Dmitri said. “Or I should say, smell.”
The little creatures squeaked with distress. After a couple more attempts to turn Dmitri around, they planted themselves at the right, waving their pink tails in agitation.
It hit Jameson with full force. A smell like old socks. A locker room with a million sweaty feet. The lemurlike creatures were fanning it toward the three humans with their bushy tails.
“I’m convinced,” Jameson said. To the evident relief of the humanoids, the humans began following them up the metal flume, climbing the thick vinelike cables. In the low gravity, it was easy.
Ruiz, his jury-rigged spear slung across his back, inquired between puffing breaths: “Why would any critter develop an ability like that?”