“The box—” Dane kept returning to the only rational explanation. But from that it was easy to take the next step. “Another box?”
Rip nodded. “Not only another box, but surely an importation of other life forms. There is no duplication of such an animal from one world to the next. So, someone imported a modern antline, gave it the retrogressive treatment, and produced that thing. Just as we have the dragons—”
“The dragons!” Dane remembered the missing cargo. “Did it eat them?”
“No—little one—freed them—” The words were high pitched with a metallic undernote. Dane stared at his two companions. Neither one of them had said that. And they, in turn, were looking at a point behind him as if they could not believe in what they saw. He turned his head.
Once more the male brach hunched on the shelf where he had sat to listen to the chittering of Dane’s voice out of the disk. But now the alien had something in his forepaws, pressed against his throat—the translator.
“Little one freed them.” The brach was certainly speaking, and the words issuing from the disk made sense. “He was curious, and he thought that it was not right—those things in our home. They hurt him when he opened cage. He called—we went to him. The great thing came, but the dragons were already gone into the woods. This is so.”
“By the brazen hoofs of Kathor!” exclaimed Ali. “It’s talking!”
“With the translator!” Dane was almost as startled. He had left that other throat mike some distance away. The brach must have gone after it, working out that Dane’s was what made the man’s voice intelligible, and was now using it. But what a gigantic upstep in intelligence that action revealed—unless the brachs had never been truly the animals they had seemed and the radiation box had not as far back to take them as the Terrans believed.
“You talk.” The brach indicated the mike it held pressed to its throat and then pointed to the disk. “I heard.
I talk, you hear. This is true. But the dragon things not eaten by the big one. They were big also—too big for cage place. Pushing on wall, clawing door—Little one thought they be too tight, open to give them room. They fly—”
“Fly?” Dane echoed. It was true the creatures had flapping skin appendages that would in the far future be the wings of the lathsmers. But that they could use them for flying—!
“We have to get them back, and if they are flying in the woods—” he began when the brach added:
“They do not fly good, many times on ground—hop, hop—” He gestured with his free paw to represent progress in a jerky manner.
“They could be anywhere,” Rip said. The brach looked to him questioningly, and Dane realized the alien could understand only when Dane spoke with the translator.
“They could have gone in any direction,” he repeated for the alien.
“Seek water—need water—” the brach replied. “Water there—” He pointed now to the south, as if he could see pond, lake, or streams through the solid wall of the LB.
“But the lake is in that direction.” Rip nodded to the northwest, where it lay behind the plateau.
“That direction—lake,” Dane translated.
“No, not go there—but there!” And again the alien waved to the south.
“You see them?” Ali asked. Then realizing that Dane alone could voice the question, he added, “Ask him why he is so sure.”
But Dane had already begun. If the long-snouted face with its so alien features could have mirrored the emotion surprise, Dane believed he would be reading it. Then the brach’s paw touched that part of his head that would be a human forehead and answered, “The dragons want water bad, so we feel—feel the want—”
“Telepathy!” Rip almost shouted.
But Dane was not sure. “You feel what thing thinks?” He hoped that was clear.
“Not what thinks, only what other brach thinks—sometimes. What thing feels, we feel. It feels strong, we know.”
“Emotional broadcast of some kind,” Ali summed up.
“Little one feel dragons want out, so let them,” continued the brach. “Then dragon hurt little one. A thing of badness—”
“The cold,” Rip said. “If they went hunting water to the south, the cold will get them.”
“So we have to find them first,” Dane answered.
“Someone has to stay for the com,” Ali pointed out.
“Pilot does that,” Dane said swiftly before Rip could protest. “We take travel coms with us. You can signal us back if you have to.”
He expected a protest from Shannon, but the other was already hauling out packs, opening the storage cabinets for supplies. It was the brach who spoke.
“Go with. Can feel dragons—tell where—”
“Too cold,” Dane returned quickly. He might have lost part of the cargo, but the brachs were infinitely more important than the hatched embryos, and he was not going to risk them.
“I don’t know.” Rip held one of the supply bags. “Put a small heat unit in this, cut to low, pack our friend in with that”—he nodded toward the padding they had stripped out of the cage—“and he would be warm enough. What he says makes sense. If he can give you a guide to the dragons, you could save a lot of time and energy.”
Dane took the bag from Rip. It was watertight, pressurized in part, meant to carry supplies on wholly inimically atmosphered planets, another of the save-life equipment of the LB, and it was certainly roomy enough to hold the brach, even with the warming factors Rip had listed. If what the brach boasted was the truth—that he could keep in touch with the lathsmer changelings by some kind of emotional direction finder—then his company would keep them from losing time. And Dane had the feeling, which grew stronger every time he left the LB, that the sooner they were out of this wilderness, the better.
Ali’s trained hands carried out Rip’s suggestion. A small heat unit went into the bottom of the bag, and the padding was wrapped around and around the sides, leaving a center core in which the brach could be inserted. The shoulder straps on the side could be easily lengthened to fit Dane, while Ali himself could carry the other supply bag. They each had a personna com clipped to the hoods of their jackets, and in addition Dane’s translator was fastened close to his cheek in his.
The brach had gone to his family in the hammock, and from the subdued murmur there Dane guessed he was explaining his coming absence. If there were protests from the others, Dane was not to know, for the male had left the translator to be affixed in the bag.
It was midmorning when they set out, taking the path back to the cage. The door swung open, and the antline, if mutated antline the thing really was, had gone. Marks, deep grooved in the ground, suggested that it had crawled rather than walked to the eastward.
“Lair is that way,” Ali observed. “I think that the lie out in the cold for so long didn’t do it any good. At least you can hear it coming.”
“If it is an antline returned to an earlier form—” Dane still found it difficult to accept that.
“Then who brought it here and why?” Ali ended his question for him. “That is something to think about. I believe we can assume that ours was not the first box, also that they were too hurried over shipping this one. Looks almost as if they were being rushed in some way. The Combine didn’t have any trouble on this mail run. Which means if another box came through, it was better shielded, or else there was no live cargo to cause suspicious complications. And that I can’t believe. The settlers have regular embryo shipments, not only of lathsmers, but other livestock.”