When Lysander reached the hospital Marguery Darp was not in her room. A nurse showed him to a solarium lounge, where Marguery was talking on the telephone. She was dressed and apparently ready to leave, but when she put down the phone she patted a space on the couch beside her. She looked at him inquiringly. “Is something the matter, Sandy?” she asked.
He laughed at her. “Which something do you want to hear about?” he asked.
“You pick,” she said, and listened carefully as he told her about his unsatisfactory conversation with ChinTekki-tho. She looked different today, he thought—not ill, at all; not hostile; not even remote, but somehow more serious than she had seemed before. When he finished she commented, “It looks as though they’ve got more plans for Africa than they’ve told us. Did he say anything about what they’re building out there?”
Lysander was startled. “Building? No. Are they building something?”
“It looks like it,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Lysander? You know we’ve been taping the Hakh’hli transmissions. Would you be willing to translate some of them?”
He frowned over that. “The reason they’re in Hakh’hli is that they don’t want humans to hear them,” he pointed out.
“Naturally. But if they aren’t up to anything, why shouldn’t we know what they’re saying?”
Another hard question to think about. While he was thinking, Marguery added softly, “As a favor to me, maybe?” Then she saw the sudden expression of pain on his face. “What’s the matter?”
He said gruffly, “I’m confused. Are we falling in love, or what?”
She answered him in perfect seriousness. “The only way to tell that is to wait and see how it comes out, I think.”
“Yes, but—but it’s all so mixed up! Are we friends? Or sweethearts? Are we going to get married? Or is all this just because you were assigned to keep me interested so you can spy on me?”
She flared at him, “That was my assignment, yes. In the beginning. What’s wrong with that? Weren’t you assigned to spy on us?”
He scowled. “Well—sort of, I suppose.”
“So we’re even on that, aren’t we? Sandy, dear,” she said, putting her hand on his, “we’ve got two different things going here. One is you and me, and that’ll just have to work itself out however it comes. The other’s a little more urgent. That’s the human race and the Hakh’hli, and you have to decide what side you’re on. Now.”
He looked at her angrily. “Why do I have to take sides?”
“Because there are two sides,” she said firmly, “and there’s no room in the middle. Will you translate?”
He thought it over for a long moment. Then he decided. “If there’s nothing bad in what the Hakh’hli are saying to each other, then I’m not doing them any harm by translating, am I? And if there is—all right,” he said, standing up, “I’ll do it. Let’s take you home.”
She stood up too. “That’s my boy,” she said, applauding. “Only we’re not going home right now.”
“But I thought that was what I came here to do.”
“Dear Sandy,” she said, half-affectionate, half-somber, “you can take me home later. Maybe even often. But right now we’ve got somewhere else to go.”
The “somewhere else” was a windowless, gray granite building that bore a legend incised on its stone facade:
INTERSEC
YORK COMMONWEALTH
DIVISION OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE
It was neither surprising to Lysander nor reassuring. They paused at a garage ramp, where Marguery opened the car window and displayed a medallion to a guard. Then they were passed into an underground garage.
Hamilton Boyle was waiting for them at the elevator. “Through there,” he ordered Sandy, pointing at a flat-topped archway. Marguery didn’t say anything; she just motioned to Sandy to go first. As he passed through it he saw a uniformed woman studying a screen beside the arch and realized he had just been inspected for weapons.
“What’s this all about?” he demanded.
“You’ll see. We have to go up to the third floor,” Boyle said.
At least Marguery took Sandy’s hand in the elevator. Boyle noticed, but didn’t comment. When the elevator door opened at the floor a tall, elderly woman with a gun strapped to her belt was standing before a control panel. She nodded to Boyle and pushed a button. To their right a metal-barred gate slid noiselessly back, and Boyle motioned Sandy to pass through.
An armed guard! A prison door! Sandy had seen such things only on television, but he knew what they meant.
He released Marguery’s hand and confronted Hamilton Boyle. “Are you arresting me?” he demanded.
Boyle gave him an unfriendly look. “Why would I do that? We’re on the same side—I hope.”
“Then what?”
“I want to show you something,” Boyle said grimly, motioning for them to enter a room. In the center of the room, almost filling it, was a conference table, with half a dozen chairs around it. On one wall was a large television screen. “Sit down,” Boyle commanded, and took his place at a console.
As the room lights went dim Lysander looked at Marguery and got a faint, unreassuring smile back. Then the screen lit up.
They were looking at the Hakh’hli ship again. It glowed as clearly as before. But it was not the same as before.
Perplexed, Lysander frowned at the picture. Something had been added to the ship. A structure was beginning to take shape. Extravehicular-labor Hakh’hli were visible, using small tugs to move concave metal shell sections of—something or other—into position.
“There it is, Lysander,” Boyle said. “They started doing it yesterday. Do you have any idea what it is?”
Lysander shook his head.
“You’ve never seen it before?” Boyle pressed.
“No. Well, I couldn’t have, could I? I mean, that looks pretty flimsy. It isn’t something they could have built onto the ship while it was in drive; it would have needed all kinds of bracing and support, or it would have just broken away.”
“Maybe they didn’t need it before,” Boyle commented.
Marguery stirred. “There’s a chance that it’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Remember, the Hakh’hli were talking about beaming microwave energy down to us. This could just be the antenna for that.”
In the semidarkness, Boyle turned to stare at her. “Do you believe that?”
She shrugged, and looked to Lysander.
“I don’t actually think so,” Sandy said. “Power transmission isn’t my specialty, but I learned a little about it. I think they use a different kind of antenna.”
“Then what?” Boyle demanded. “It’s awfully big, Lysander. Bigger than anything I’ve seen. Bigger than the old dish at Arecibo, even.” He paused. Then he asked brutally. “Is it a weapon?”
“A weapon?” Lysander cried, startled. “Of course not! The Hakh’hli don’t even have any weapons, that I ever heard of. One of the worst things they used to say about Earth people was that they—we—used weapons all the time; I just can’t believe that they would use any themselves.” He shook his head vigorously. “No, maybe Marguery’s guess was right—a microwave beam, only a different design than anything I saw—”
“But Lysander,” she sighed, reaching for his hand again, “even that could be a weapon, couldn’t it? Can you imagine what a beam like that could do if it struck Hudson City or Brasilia or Denver?”
“And why do we have to guess,” Boyle demanded, “when we’ve got tapes of everything they’ve been saying to each other, if you’d only translate them?”