Within the broad translucent doughnuts that circled the fore end he could see moving shapes. They showed clearly enough to arouse horror: vaguely human shadows twisted out of true.
Four toroids, and shadows within them all. Whitbread reported, “They’re using all their fuel tanks for living space. They can’t expect to get home without our help.”
The Captain’s voice: “You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir. There could be an inboard tank, but it wouldn’t be very large.”
He had nearly reached the alien craft. Whitbread slowed to a smooth stop just alongside the inhabited fuel tanks. He opened his air-lock door.
A door opened immediately near the fore end of the metal core. A Motie stood in the oval opening; it wore a transparent envelope. The alien waited.
Whitbread said, “Permission to leave the—”
“Granted. Report whenever convenient. Otherwise, use your own judgment. The Marines are standing by, Whitbread, so don’t yell for help unless you mean it. They’ll come fast. Now good luck.”
As Cargill’s voice faded, the Captain came on again. “Don’t take any serious risks, Whitbread. Remember, we want you back to report.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The Motie stepped gracefully out of his way as Whitbread approached the air lock. It left the Motie standing comically on vacuum, its big left hand gripping a ring that jutted out from the hull. “There’s stuff poking out all over,” Whitbread said into his mike. “This thing couldn’t have been launched from inside an atmosphere.”
He stopped himself in the oval opening and nodded at the gently smiling alien. He was only half sardonic as he asked formally, “Permission to come aboard?”
The alien bowed from the waist—or perhaps it was an exaggerated nod? The joint in its back was below the shoulders. It gestured toward the ship with the two right arms.
The air lock was Motie-sized, cramped. Whitbread found three recessed buttons in a web of silver streamers. Circuitry. The Motie watched his hesitation, then reached past him to push first one, then another.
The lock closed behind him.
The Mediator stood on emptiness, waiting for the lock to cycle. She wondered at the intruder’s queer structure, the symmetry and the odd articulation of its bones. Clearly the thing was not related to known life. And its home ship had appeared in what the Mediator thought of as the Crazy Eddie point.
She was far more puzzled at its failure to work out the lock circuitry without help.
It must be here in the capacity of a Mediator. It had to be intelligent. Didn’t it? Or would they send an animal first? No, certainly not. They couldn’t be that alien; it would be a deadly insult in any culture.
The lock opened. She stepped in and set it cycling. The intruder was waiting in the corridor, filling it like a cork in a bottle. The Mediator took time to strip off her pressure envelope, leaving her naked. Alien as it was, the thing might easily assume she was a Warrior. She must convince the creature that she was unarmed.
She led the way toward the roomier inflated sections. The big, clumsy creature had trouble moving. It did not adapt well to free fall. It stopped to peer through window panels into sections of the ship, and examined mechanisms the Browns had installed in the corridor… why would an intelligent being do that?
The Mediator would have liked to tow the creature, but it might take that as an attack. She must avoid that at all costs.
For the present, she would treat it as a Master.
There was an acceleration chamber: twenty-six twisted bunks stacked in three columns, all similar in appearance to Crawford’s transformed bunk; yet they were not quite identical, either. The Motie moved ahead of him, graceful as a dolphin. Its short pelt was a random pattern curved brown and white stripes, punctuated by four patches of thick white fur at the groin and armpits. Whibread found it beautiful. Now it had stopped to wait for him—impatiently, Whitbread thought.
He tried not to think about how thoroughly he was trapped. The corridor was unlighted and claustrophobically narrow. He looked into a line of tanks connected by pumps, possibly a cooling system for hydrogen fuel. It would connect to that single black fin outside.
Light flashed on the Motie.
It was a big opening, big enough even for Whitbread. Beyond: dim sunlight, like the light beneath a thunderstorm. Whitbread followed the Motie into what had to be one of the toroids. He was immediately surrounded by aliens.
They were all identical. That seemingly random pattern of brown and white was repeated on every one of them. At least a dozen smiling lopsided faces ringed him at a polite distance. They chattered to each other in quick squeaky voices.
The chattering stopped suddenly. One of the Moties approached Whitbread and spoke several short sentences that might have been in different languages, though to Whitbread they were all meaningless.
Whitbread shrugged, theatrically, palms forward.
The Motie repeated the gesture, instantly, with incredible accuracy. Whitbread cracked up. He sprawled helplessly in free fall, arms folded around his middle, cackling like a chicken.
Blaine spoke in his ear, his voice sober and metallic. “All right, Whitbread, everyone else is laughing too. The question is—”
“Oh, no! Sir, am I on the intercom again?”
“The question is, what do the Moties think you’re doing?”
“Yessir. It was the third arm that did it.” Whitbread had sobered. “It’s time for my strip-tease act, Captain. Please take me off that intercom…”
The telltale at his chin was yellow, of course. Slow poison; but this time he wasn’t going to breath it. He took a deep breath, undogged, and lifted his helmet. Still holding his breath, he took SCUBA gear from an outside patch of his suit and fitted the mouthpiece between his teeth. He turned on the air; it worked fine.
Leisurely he began to strip. First came the baggy coverall that contained the suit electronics and support gear. Then he unsnapped the cover, strips that shielded the zippers, and opened the tight fabric of the pressure suit itself. The zippers ran along each limb and up the chest; without them it would take hours to get in and out of suit, which looked like a body stocking or a leotard. The elastic fibers conformed to every curve of his musculature, as they had to, to keep him from exploding in vacuum; with their support, his own skin was in a sense his pressure suit, and his sweat glands were the temperature regulating system.
The tanks floated free in front of him as he struggled out of the suit. The Moties moved slowly, and one—a Brown, no stripes, identical to the miner aboard MacArthur—came over to help.
He used the all-purpose goop in his tool kit to stick his helmet to the translucent plastic wall. Surprisingly it did not work. The brown Motie recognized his difficulty instantly. He (she, it) produced a tube of something and dabbed it on Whitbread’s helmet; now it stuck. Jonathon faced the camera toward him, and stuck the rest of his suit next to it.
Humans would have aligned themselves with their head at the same end, as if they must define an up direction before they could talk comfortably. The Moties were at all angles. They clearly didn’t give a damn. They waited, smiling.
Whitbread wriggled the rest of the way out of his suit until he wore nothing at all.
The Moties moved in to examine him.
The Brown was startling among all the brown-and-white patterns. It was shorter than the others, with slightly bigger hands and an odd look to the head, as far as Whitbread could tell, it was identical to the miner. The others looked like the dead one in the Motie light-sail probe.