“Perhaps you do not notice it any longer. The left side, a tightening in the eyes and the mouth.”
“I don’t have anything like that.”
Tseng looked at Gijan, just a quick glance, and then back at Warren. There was something in it Warren did not like and he found himself focusing his attention on his own face, waiting to see if there was anything wrong with it he had not noticed. Maybe he—
“Well, we shall let it pass. A casual remark, that is all. I did not come to criticize you but to, first, ask for your help, and second, to get you off this terrible island.”
“You coulda got me off here days ago. Gijan had the radio.”
“His task came first. You are fascinated by the same problem, are you, Warren?”
“Seems to me my big problem is you people.”
“I believe your long exposure out here has distorted your judgment, Warren. I also believe you overestimate your ability to survive for long on this island. With Underofficer Gijan the two of you did well enough, but in the long run I—” Tseng stopped when he saw the slight upward turn of Warren’s mouth that was clearly a look of disdain.
“I saw that case of rations Gijan had stashed back in the brush,” Warren said. “None of you know nothing about living out here.”
Tseng stood up, tall and straight, and leaned against the back wall of the office. It gave him a more casual look but put him so that Warren had to look up to talk to him.
“I will do you the courtesy of speaking frankly. My government—and several others, we believe—has suspected for some time that there are two distinct populations among the aliens. One—the Swarmers—is capable of mass actions, almost instinctive actions, which are quite effective against ships. The others, the Skimmers, are far more intelligent. They are also verbal. Yet they did not respond to our research vessels. They ignored attempts to communicate.”
Warren said, “You still have ships?”
For the first time Gijan spoke. “No. I was on one of the last that went down. They got us off with helicopters, and then—”
“No need to go into that,” Tseng cut him off smoothly.
“It was the Swarmers who sank you. Not Skimmers,” Warren said. It was not a question.
“Skimmer intelligence was really only a hypothesis,” Tseng said, “until we had reports that they had sought out single men or women. Usually people adrift, though sometimes even at the shore.”
“Safer for them,” Warren said.
“Apparently. They avoid the Swarmers. They avoid ships. Isolated contact is all that is left to them. It was really quite stupid of us not to have thought of that earlier.
“Yeah.”
Tseng smiled slightly. “Everything is of course clearer in, as you say, the rearview mirror.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It seems they learned the bits of German and Japanese and English from different individual encounters. The words were passed among the Skimmers so that each new contact had more available vocabulary.”
“But they didn’t know the words were from different languages,” Gijan added.
“Maybe they only got one,” Warren said.
“So we gather,” Tseng said. “I have read your, ah, summary. Yours is the most advanced contact so far.”
“A lot of it doesn’t make much sense,” Warren said. He knew Tseng was drawing him into the conversation, but it did not matter. Tseng would have to give away information to get some.
“The earlier contacts confirm part of your summary.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They said that Swarmers can go ashore.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s in the stuff I wrote. The stuff Gijan stole.”
Gijan said sharply, “You showed it to me.”
Warren looked at him without expression and Gijan stared back and after a moment looked away.
“Let us not bother with that. We are all working on the same problem, after all.”
“Okay,” Warren said. He had managed to get the talk away from how he knew about the Swarmers going on the land. Tseng was good at talking, a lot better than Warren, so he would have to keep the man away from some things. He volunteered, “I guess going up on the shore is part of their, uh, evolution.”
“You mean their development?”
“They said something, the last day I saw them, about a deathlight. A deathlight coming on the land and only the Swarmers could live through it.”
“Light from their star?”
“Guess so. It comes sometimes and that’s why the Skimmers don’t go up onto the land.”
Tseng stood and began pacing against the back wall. Warren wondered if he knew that Swarmers had already gone inland on an island near here. Tseng gave no sign of it and said out of his concentration, “That agrees with the earlier survivors’ reports. We think that means their star is irregular. It flares in the UV. The Swarmers have simple nervous systems, smaller brains. They can survive a high UV flux.”
“For about two of their planet’s years, the Skimmers said,” Warren murmured. “But you’re wrong—the Swarmers aren’t dumb.”
“They have heads of mostly bone.”
“That’s for killing the big animals, the ones that float on the surface of their sea. Something like whales, I guess. Maybe they stay at the top to use the UV or something.”
“The Swarmers ram them, throw those webs over them? Sink them?”
“Yeah. Just what they did to our ships.”
“Target confusion. They think ships are animals.”
“The Swarmers, they drag the floaters under, eat some kind of pods inside ’em. That’s what triggers their going up on the land.”
“If we could find a way to prevent their confusing our ships with—”
Gijan said, “But they are going to the land now. They are in the next mode.”
“Uh-huh.” Warren studied the two men, tried to guess if they knew anything he could use. “Look, what’re they doing when they get ashore?”
Tseng looked at him sharply. “What do the Skimmers say?”
“Far as I can tell, the Swarmers aren’t dumb, not once they get on land. They make the machines and stuff for the Skimmers. They’re really the same kind of animal. They grow hands and feet and the Skimmers have some way to tell them—singing—how to build stuff, make batteries, tools, that stuff.”
Tseng stared at Warren for a long moment. “A break in the evolutionary ladder? Life trying to get out of the oceans, but turned back by the solar flares?” Tseng leaned forward and rested his knuckles on the gray plywood. He had a strange weight and force about him. And a desperate need.
Warren said, “Maybe it started out with the Swarmers crawling up on the beaches to lay eggs or something. Good odds they’d be back in the water before a flare came. Then the Skimmers invented tools and saw they needed things on the land, needed to make fire or something. So they got the Swarmers, the younger form of their species, to help. Maybe—”
“The high UV speeded up their evolutionary rate. Perhaps the Swarmers became more intelligent, in their last phase, on land, where the intelligence would be useful in making the tools. Um, yes.”
Tseng gave Gijan an intense glance. “Possible. But I think there is more than that. These creatures are here for some purpose beyond this charming little piece of natural history we have been told. Or sold.”
Tseng turned back to Warren. “We have our partially successful procedures of communication, as you have probably guessed. I have been ordered to carry out systematic methods of approach.” He was brisk and sure, as though he had digested Warren’s information and found a way to classify it. “Yours will be among them. But it is an idiosyncratic technique and I doubt we could teach it to our field men. Underofficer Gijan, for example.” The contempt in his voice for Gijan was obvious. “Meanwhile, I will call upon you for help if we need it, Warren.”