Presumably one of the plates he was juggling, most probably a hormone, was wobbling in its flight, but the presumption was not very helpful. Bob was extremely uncomfortable physically, but seemed to be getting more philosophical as his condition grew worse. He was quite calm, and showed no signs of blaming the Hunter. The latter, on the other hand, felt himself being driven closer and closer to panic by the combination of guilt and helplessness. He knew that panic could hardly be expected to help, but it attacks on a level far below the reach of intelligence. Bob was able to move around, however uncomfortably, and ate breakfast with the family without finding it necessary to tell them about the new trouble. Daphne, luckily, had plans to spend the day with friends of her own age, and presented no problem.
Bob and his companion left by bicycle as soon as the meal was over. Nothing had been specifically said about Jenny's being with the party, but she was waiting in front of her house as they passed, and fell in beside them on her own machine for the short remaining distance to the library.
Maeta had not yet arrived, but must have seen them pass her home; they had to wait only two or three minutes for her. They entered the building together, and the smaller woman spoke briefly to the librarian on duty, not Mrs. Moetua this time. Then she led the way to the case on which the coral-encrusted generator housing stood, and gestured to Bob to lift it down-she herself could not reach it. Jenny, for reasons she probably could not have stated clearly herself, reached it first and carried it, still at Maeta's direction, to a table near the door, where sunlight fell directly on it. They all bent over to examine it closely.
There was no doubt in either Bob's or the Hunter's minds about its being the same object they had seen Apu years before. This was no longer the main question. Bob and Jenny were trying to see what might have caught the Hunter's notice the day before; Maeta, who had no reason to expect anything special, simply reexamined it with interest.
About a third of the metal surface was exposed, and about as much more was so thinly covered with marine growth that its underlying shape was still plain. From the rest, the limy branches grew in random contortions which even the alien found decorative; the branches were covered with the ribbed cups that had once contained living polyps. On the bare metal were patterns of fine scratches which were perfectly legible to the Hunter, though only their essential regularity was apparent to the human beings..
The mere fact that the manufacturer's name, serial number, and various sets of mounting and servicing instructions were present was not the peculiarity which had caught the Hunter's attention the day before. Far more surprising to him was the uniformity with which each of these areas of engraving was ex-posed to view. There were no partly hidden words or phrases or numbers. Each symbol or group of symbols was completely free of coral and other growth, as was the metal for several millimeters around it. The coral did not seem to have been broken away, but it might possibly have been dissolved.
After waiting for some minutes for his host to notice this, the Hunter posed several leading questions. These also failed to bring Bob's attention to the strange regularity, and the alien finally gave, up and pointed it out. Then, of course, it was perfectly clear to the man, and he couldn't understand why he had failed to notice it before.
"Well, you see it now," said his symbiont. "Now let's find out if it was that way when Miss Teroa found it, or if it has become that way since." He left Bob with the problem of executing this simple request.
Logically, the man started with the most general questions possible.
"Mae, are you sure nothing has changed about this thing since you found it?"
"Not perfectly sure, but it definitely hasn't changed very much. Certainly no branches are broken. I admit I don't remember either the exact branch pattern or the arrangement of the patches of bare metal well enough to draw a picture, but if either of these has changed, I don't think it can be very much, either."
"The metal looks the same?"
"As far as I can remember. I'm afraid metal is just metal to me, unless it has a real color like copper or gold."
Bob saw no choice other than to get specific. "I was wondering about the scratches on the metal. They seem to be only on the bare parts-they never run out of sight under the coral. Of course there may be some scratches entirely under it, but it looks sort of as though someone had been making marks on the steel or whatever it is after the coral had grown."
"I see what you mean." Maeta nodded thoughtfully. "I don't remember really noticing the scratches before; maybe someone has been at it. I doubt it, though. The case it's been on is pretty high for young children to reach, and I don't think an adult would spoil it that way." Maeta, like Jenny, had not taken the college option, and for a brief moment Bob was startled by her naivety. He made no comment, however, even to the Hunter.
They moved around the table, examining the object from all sides. If any bit of the engraving was hidden at all, it was completelyhidden, as Bob had said. This, the Hunter feltsure, could not possibly be a matter of chance; andfrom the near despair of that morning, when Bob had awakened with the joint pains, the Hunter suddenly felt happier than he had in two Earth years. Perhapsthat was why he made a mistake.
"Bob," he said. There can't be any doubt. It can't
be an accident. Those areas were uncovered carefully, usingacid, to let someone read the engraving, and only my own people could either have expected to find anything to read or have counted on understanding it after it was uncovered!"
It was a forgivable mistake-not the logic, which was perfectly sound, but the failure to see the results of the remark. After all, Bob had seemed to be taking the situation very calmly-unbelievably calmly. If the young man's physical condition had been normal, the Hunter might have been able to spot the emotional tension of his host; but since the alien himself was handling, more or less directly, most of the hormone systems which emotion tends to affect, he had failed to do so. Bob's reaction took both of them by surprise.
"Then they are here!" he exclaimed happily-aloud. Jenny understood, naturally. Maeta, just as naturally, didn't, and was understandably surprised.
"Who is here?" she asked. "You mean you recognize the sort of ship this came from? That doesn't prove anything-I found this years ago, remember."
Bob covered fairly well, but not perfectly. "That's true," he admitted. "I wasn't thinking for the moment. Can you remember just when that was? You told us pretty well where."
The young woman was silent for some time, the rest watching with varying degrees of patience.
"Let's see," she said slowly at last. "The library was finished early in '51-I remember because I started to work here after school, as soon as it opened, and my first working day was my sixteenth birthday. I'd had this thing quite a while then. A year? No, longer. I never went out in the Haerehaere very often-the first time I was only twelve, and that was the year you came home so early and stayed so long, and when Charlie got his first ship job."
Bob nodded encouragingly, but managed to keep quiet this time. The year he had "stayed so long" was
the one in which the Hunter's first problem had been solved. Maeta went on.
"It must have been some time in March, either '48 or '49-oh, I remember. I'd been taking care of your sister a lot, and she was walking then, so it must have been March of '49, a little over five years ago."