His first impulse was to get out of sight himself, and he almost turned back toward the end of the tunnel.
However, the woman had already seen him; and if there were people in the plant room who had also heard her cry. .
He came quickly down the tunnel to where the woman was standing. “What’s the trouble?” he asked, in a voice whose anxiety was not entirely feigned.
“I saw something — one of the outside animals — duck into that side alley,” she replied, in a voice much calmer than the cry of a moment earlier.
“How could that be possible?” asked Fyn. “How would one get in the city?”
“Don’t be silly,” was the less than tactful reply.
“They could get in through any air lock. The mayor insists we can’t watch them all and claims it’s dangerous to block any of them up. I say it is more dangerous to leave them open now that we don’t need them all. But what are we to do about this animal?”
“Why do anything? What harm can he do?” asked Fyn in what he considered a calm and reasonable manner. The woman turned sharply and looked at him carefully for the first time.
“Where were you brought up?” she snapped. “They’re not citizens, and have no right to the city’s air.
Are you one of these liberal delinquents who claim there’s more than enough oxygen?”
“But they don’t use air. They don’t breathe,” Earrin pointed out.
“How would you know?” the woman peered more closely.
“I work outside.” Earrin made the only possible answer, at the same time holding up his breathing mask.
“And how would that tell you anything about the animals, unless — ” she paused, and appeared to forget her first anxiety for a moment. “Come back to the light with me.” She took him by the arm and marched him rapidly toward the end of the tunnel. Earrin, unused to such a forceful personality except when masked by Kahvi’s loving tact, and quite unable to employ violence against a person, went along.
He was still trying to decide whether he should face recognition as a Nomad or jerk away, join Bones — who must have been following him after all, it seemed — and face only suspicion w hen they reached daylight. He could only come up with what he considered reasonable words.
“How could they live outside if they had to breathe?” he asked. “I thought citizens, even if they stay indoors all the time, were supposed to know at least as much as Surplus kids.”
“You can skip the insults,” was the answer as she tugged him along even faster. “You can’t tell me that there’s anything that doesn’t have to breathe somehow.”
“But how do they — ” Earrin gave up. This was a Hiller, and Hillers thought differently, as Bones sometimes seemed to. Bones, however, was usually rational if one took the time to work out in detail what he was saying; this seemed different, somehow.
Out in the sunlight the woman took one look at him.
“I thought so. Nomad. I suppose you brought that animal in with you.”
“No, Teacher.” Earrin was not being funny; old reflexes had been triggered. “It may have been following me, but I didn’t know about it.”
The woman — a rather thin individual of middle height, with her hair largely gray but neither skin nor hair showing any trace of the yellow which went with outdoor life — seemed to accept the statement.
Nomads, as was common knowledge, did not lie. “Have you seen it before?” she asked.
“I have seen one before, quite often,” Fyn answered carefully. “I did not see this one clearly enough to be sure whether it is the same.” He felt a slight twinge of conscience, but was able to convince himself that this was not deceit; this might not be Bones, though the other was supposed to be a prisoner. “Shall we try to catch him and find out?”
“You should get out of the city at once — you can’t say you aren’t breathing out air. Still, if you willpromise not to try to get away from me, and to help me if we do catch up with that thing, all right.”
“I promise.” Fyn wanted, as badly as the Hiller woman did, to get a better look at the native. It seemed most probably that it was Bones, but the more Earrin thought, the more he felt that there had been something different about the fleetingly glimpsed figure.
“All right. Come on.” The woman, again taking Fyn’s word at face value, led the way back into the tunnel. They approached the cross passage where the native had disappeared and looked around the corner. Nothing but dimly lit stone and darker doorways could be seen. They went along this, checking inside each room as they passed it. For thirty or forty meters there was no conversation; then the woman spoke again.
“Why did you come into the city? Were you planning to steal something?”
“What does that mean?”
“Take something for your own without having made it or paid for it.”
“No. I was looking for something, but not to take it.”
“Not even air?” the woman sneered. Fyn was a little shocked at the question.
“How can you steal air?” he asked. “I know you regard it as city property, but surely you wouldn’t keep it from anyone for that reason. Of course I would have recharged at your air center.” His voice made no secret of his feeling about the matter.
“That is stealing. You have no right to do such a thing.”
“I don’t agree. In the first place, you don’t keep air from anyone who needs it. In the second, some of your people made me go with them last night, and use air I would otherwise have replenished from my own source. I think I have a perfect right to a charge at your city’s expense. Those people owe it to me.”
“They brought you into the city?”
“No.” Fyn’s habitual truthfulness was in complete charge, though he had some doubt about telling the whole story to this Hiller. “They said they were going to, but I got away from them. They wanted me to do something I did not approve of. If I had gone home they could have caught me again easily, so I came here to recharge.”
“And you just came in through the first air lock you found. No one stopped you?”
“No one was around. It was night. I’ve been trying to find my way around here all day.” His interrogator looked at him shrewdly and, he thought, a little more sympathetically.
“You might have charged up with more than air, then,” she remarked.
“Of course. Food goes with air, anyway. Or doesn’t your food grow on — ”
“Oh, yes. Well, maybe if you’re helpful with this animal we can supply you with some of both.”
“You owe me some already, if there are any new varieties. I haven’t been paid for my cargo yet, and the payment was to be at least two new cultures for making air, food, or some structural material.” Earrin explained the situation in detail, still omitting mention of Bones and the Fyn family’s relations with the being. The woman seemed quite surprised.
“I hadn’t heard of such arrangements being made with Nomads,” she said. “I know that people sometimes trade with them, and I’d heard that some people were careless enough of the rules to let new varieties of plant survive. I’m very surprised that such materials were actually used. I don’t see what anyone would want with copper or glass. I’ve seen a few tools made of the metal, and of course the roof of the air section has glass in it to let the sunlight in; but surely no one is going to build more air rooms.”