“All right.” The scientists vanished through the door, and Barlennan followed them more slowly. He was just beginning to realize how valid Bedivence’s point was. What could be made to happen, in range of one of the Esket’s vision transmitters, which would not suggest that there were Mesklinites in the neighborhood, but which would attract human interest — and tempt the big creatures to edit their reports? Could he think of such a thing without knowing why the reports were being held up? Or, for that matter, without being quite sure that they were?
It was still possible that the delay on the Kwembly matter had been a genuine oversight; as the young human had suggested, each person might have thought that someone else had attended to the matter. To Barlennan’s sailor’s viewpoint this smacked of gross incompetence and inexcusable disorganization; but it would not be the first time he had suspected human beings — not as a species, of course, but on an individual basis — of these qualities.
The test certainly had to be made, and the Esket’s transmitters must surely be possible tools for the purpose. As far as Barlennan knew, these were still active. Naturally, care had been taken that no one enter their field of view since the “loss” of the cruiser, and it had been long since any human being had made mention of them. They would have been shuttered rather than avoided, since this obviously left the Mesklinites at the place much greater freedom of action; but the idea of the shutters had not occurred until after Destigmet had departed with his instructions to set up a second Settlement unknown to the human beings.
As Barlennan remembered, one of the transmitters had been at the usual spot on the bridge, one in the laboratory, one in the hangar where the helicopters were kept — these had been out on routine flights when the “catastrophe” occurred — and the fourth in the life-support section, though not covering the entrance. It had been necessary to take much of the equipment from this chamber, of course.
With all the planning, the situation was still inconvenient; having the lab and life rooms out of bounds, or at best possible to visit with only the greatest care, , had caused Destigmet and his first officer caused Destigmet and his first officer, Kabremm, much annoyance. They had more than once requested permission to shutter the sets, since the technique had been invented. Barlennan had refused, not wanting to call human attention back to the Esket; but now — well, maybe the same net could take two fish. The sudden blanking of one, or perhaps all four, of those screens would certainly be noticed from above. Wheter the humans would feel any inclination to hide the event from the Settlement there was no way of telling; one could only try.
The more he thought it over, the better the plan sounded. Barlennan felt the glow familiar to every intelligent being, regardless of species, who has solved a major problem unassisted. He enjoyed it for fully half a minute. At the end of that time, another of Guzmeen’s runners caught up with him.
“Commander!” The messenger fell into step beside him in the nearly dark corridor. “Guzmeen says that you should come back to Communications at once. One of the human beings — the one called Mersereau — is on the screen. Guz says he ought to be excited, but isn’t, because he’s reporting something going on at the Esket — something is moving in the laboratory!”
10
Keeping in phase with Barlennan as he switched direction took some doing, but the messenger managed it. The command took his continued presence for granted.
“Any further details? When, or what was moving?”
“None, sir. The man simple appeared on the screen without any warning. He said, ‘Something is happening at the Esket. Tell the commander.’ Guzmeen ordered me to bring you back on hurricane priority, so I didn’t hear any more.”
“Those were his exact words? He used our language?”
“no, it was the human speech. His words were—” the runner repeated the phrase, this time in the original tongue. Barlennan could read no more into the words than had been implicit in the translation.
“The we don’t know wheter someone slipped up and was seen, or dropped something into the field of the lens, or—”
“I doubt the first, sir. The human could hardly have failed to recognize a person.”
“I suppose not. Well, some sort of detail should be in by the time we get back there.”
There wasn’t, however. Boyd Mersereau was not even on the screen by the time Barlennan reached Communications. More surprising, neither was anyone else. The commander looked at Guzmeen suspiciously; the communication officer gave the equivalent of a shrug. “He just went, sir, after that one sentence about the lab.”
Barlennan, mystified, squeezed the “attention” control.
But Boyd Mersereau had other things on his mind. Most, but not quite all, were concerned with events on Dhrawn, but not with the Esket; and there were a few matters much closer than the giant star-planet.
The chief of these was the cooling down of Aucoin. The planner was annoyed at not having been brought into the exchanges between Dondragmer and Katini, and the captain and Tebbets. He was inclined to blame young Hoffman for going ahead with policy-disturbing matters without official approval. However, he did not want to say anything which would annoy Easy; he regarded her, with some justification, as the most nearly indispensable member of the communications group. In consequence, Mersereau and others received some fallout form the administrator’s deflected ire.
This was not too serious, as far as Boyd was concerned. He had years before pigeonholed the pacifying of administrators along with shaving — something which took up time but did not demand full attention, and worth doing at all only because it was usually less trouble in the long run. The real attention-getter, the thing which kept even news from the Esket in the background, was the state of affairs at the Kwembly…
By himself he might have been moderately concerned, but only moderately. The missing Mesklinites weren’t close personal friends of his. He was civilized enough not to be any less bothered by their loss than if they had been human, but it was not as thought they were his brothers or sons.
The Kwembly herself was a problem, but a fairly routine one. Land-cruisers had been in trouble before, and so far had always been extricated sooner or later. So, all in all, Mersereau would have been merely absorbed, not bothered, if left to himself.
He was not left to himself. Benj Hoffman felt much more strongly about the whole matter, and had a way of making his feelings clear. This wasn’t entirely by talking, though he was perfectly willing to talk. Even when silent he empathized. Boyd would find himself discussing with Dondragmer the progress of the melting-out plan, or the chances of another flood in terms of their effect on the missing helmsmen, rather than with reasonable proper professional detachment. It was annoying. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, and even Kervenser, just weren’t that central to the work, and the real question was the survival of the crew. Benj, sitting silently beside him, or, at most, interjecting a few remarks or questions, somehow managed to make objectivity seem like callousness; and Mersereau, who had never raised any children of his own, had no defense against that particular treatment. Easy knew perfectly well what was going on, but she did not interfere because she shared almost perfectly her son’s feelings. Partly because of her own background she felt a very intense sympathy for Beetchermarlf and his companion, and even for Takoorch. She had been caught in a rather similar situation some twenty-five years before, when a concatenation of errors had stranded her in a n unmanned research vessel on a high-temperature, high pressure planet.