“In the control room,” Elke said. “We were in such a hurry to get here, we left Gressel behind.”
Korin hesitated. “I’m tempted to say, let’s leave Gressel right out of things for the moment. But if we do, Casement will have to do his debriefing all over again later on, and I’m not sure what to do about her.” He pointed a gnarled finger at Vow-of-Silence, still tight-curled and motionless on the floor. “Oh, all right. Rombelle and Morse, you go get the Angel and bring it to my quarters. Dalton, give me a hand with the Pipe-Rilla. I don’t know a thing about alien physiology, but the ship’s computer should. We’ll drop her off in the med center and hope the unit can give her treatment. Dr. Siry, I’d like a summary of what you and the Angel have found out since last we talked, and you can give me that while we deal with Vow-of-Silence.”
“What about me?” Danny said, as Bony and Liddy hurried away to the control room and Chan hoisted Vow-of-Silence to waist level, so Dag Korin could grab the long, curved abdomen.
The General stared at him. “You save your strength and put your thoughts in order. Before any drink goes to your head, I need you to tell us every last thing that happened before you went ashore and after you arrived there. I’d like to know what the land looks like, feels like, and smells like. Describe the plants and animals. Describe the encampment. Describe the aliens. Describe the human you saw, if you saw him. Describe anything and describe everything.” Korin took his share of the load of Vow-of-Silence, and grunted at the weight. “You carried her back here all alone? Then you deserve to drink the ship dry if you feel like it. But you won’t see a drop until the rest of us know as much about life ashore as you do.”
Danny did his best. What he would really have liked was a long, strong drink immediately followed by a long, deep sleep, but he recognized his responsibility and tried to make sure that the others learned everything he had seen, heard, thought, and suspected during his day ashore.
The Angel didn’t make his job any easier. Bony Rombelle and Liddy Morse had trundled it in on an improvised trolley, and either its desertion in the control room or the rough journey along the ship’s corridors was not to its liking. For the first few minutes, Gressel sat hunched as far down in the pot of earth as possible, fronds folded. And when the Angel finally began to open and take notice and even interrupt, there was a sideways jump to its logic that left Danny blinking.
“At what exact local time of day was it when you emerged from the sea?” the Angel asked, as Danny was busy trying to give every detail of their arrival ashore.
“I’m not sure. Why do you want to know?”
“We wish to develop an exact chronology of all events affecting the shore party.”
“Well, I can’t tell you to better than an hour.”
“His suit will tell us,” Bony said. “The thermal balance would change as he came out of the water and into air, and that will be recorded against a time line.”
“Look into it later.” Chan was impatient to move on to the meeting with the land aliens. “What next, Danny, after the group reached the shelter of the vegetation?”
“We would like to have removed our suits, for comfort, but there were too many unfamiliar critters around. And we didn’t want to go crawling through the jungle for the same reason. A few of the Tinker components had already gone winging off over the top of the plants, and they all vanished. So we took the gadget that Bony made, and we gave it to Vow-of-Silence, and—”
Danny wanted to describe what the Pipe-Rilla had seen through the periscope, but Gressel was in first. The Angel clapped top fronds together loudly to gain attention, and interrupted. “Exactly how many Tinker components flew away?”
Another off-the-wall question. Danny was exhausted, he still didn’t have his drink, and he found it hard enough to provide a clear version of events without stupid interruptions. “How many components? I’m not sure. There were bits and pieces of Tinker coming and going all the time. What difference does it make?”
“Perhaps none. Perhaps the number will prove of great significance.” The Angel sank down into silence.
Danny waited, but apparently no more explanation was forthcoming.
“The periscope,” Chan prompted.
“It wasn’t long enough for anyone else to see over the ridge,” Danny went on. “But Vow-of-Silence was so tall, she could do it. Here’s what she saw — or said she saw. Remember now, none of the rest of us had anything to go on except what was told to us.”
He summarized what he and the others hidden in the scrub had heard about the encampment, and the aliens, and the form wandering around free that looked like a human.
“Looked to a Pipe-Rilla like a human,” Dag Korin said. “But damn it, do you think some gooky misfit lengths of animated drainpipe could look through a shaky handheld periscope, and be sure she was looking at a person a kilometer or more away?”
The Angel stirred, but Danny could recognize a rhetorical question when he heard one.
“We wanted to confirm what Vow-of-Silence had seen,” he said, “so we decided — after a bit of argument — that Chrissie and the Tarb should go take a closer look-see.”
“What argument?” Dag Korin said. “I want to hear about that, too. Don’t decide for yourself that something isn’t important, and leave it out. Let’s hear the lot.”
Danny sighed. Did they really want to know about the dark-red wriggly thing that he had found on the purple fern? Did they want to hear about Scruffy, and the hassle Deb had given Tarbush about taking the ferret with him? At some point he knew what they were going to say. Other than bugs and plants and soil, he hadn’t seen a single blessed thing. Everything that he knew about the encampment, about Friday Indigo, and about the mowing down of Chrissie and Tarbush had come to him secondhand as a report from either Deb or the Pipe-Rilla. They had seen and spoken, he had listened. He was a mere conveyor of hearsay.
It was easiest to make no judgment, reorganize no facts, and simply offer a stream-of-consciousness version of events. Let the listener decide what was important.
He described, through Vow-of-Silence’s eyes, the appearance of something that looked like a human which had apparently persuaded Chrissie and the Tarb to move forward when they ought to have retreated. The approach as far as the encampment’s guarding fence. The emergence of three dark-shelled and fast-moving shapes. The run for cover — the raised black canes — the fall, to lie motionless on the bare ground.
And now, at last, something to which he could personally attest: the high-pitched, eerie moan that had emerged from Vow-of-Silence’s narrow head. The final dispersal of Eager Seeker into a great cloud of components, circling Danny and the rigid Pipe-Rilla like a tornado before flying off in all directions. And, five seconds later, Vow-of-Silence’s collapse forward at Danny’s side, into a fit or trance from which neither he nor Deb had been able to wake her.
“I ask again.” the Angel interrupted Danny’s reliving of the moment. “How many components had Eager Seeker lost, in total, prior to this dispersal? Lost from every cause?”
“Does it matter?” Dag Korin made no attempt to hide his irritation with Gressel. “What difference does it make if a hundred or a thousand Tinker components flew away?”
Danny was glad to see somebody else fencing with the Angel. He no longer had the strength — he was so tired he could barely follow Gressel’s questions, never mind answer them.