made it. The rest were caught in the tunnels when the Loarra
swarmed over them, and they went up in smoke too. Then
the automatic locks shut, and the mountain was sealed off.
And six of us sat there, watching on the screen as the Loarra
swept back and forth outside, cleaning up the bits and pieces
they'd missed.
I sent out three of my "eyes," but they too were promptly
vaporized.
Then we waited for them to hit the mountain itself . . . half
a dozen frightened men huddled in the comp-room, none of
us saying anything. Just sweating.
But they didn't come. They swarmed together in a tight
spiral, went three times around the mountain, made one final
salute-dip and then whirled straight up and out of sight. Only
a handful of them were left behind out there.
After a while I sent out a fourth "eye." One of the Loarra
came over, flitted around it like a firefly, biinked through the
spectrum, and settled down to hover in front for talking. It
was Pura Pur who was a thousand million billion life cycles
removed from the Pur we know and love, of course, but
nonetheless still pretty much Pur.
I sent out a sequence of lights and movements that trans-
lated, roughly, as, "What the hell did you do that for?"
And Pur glowed .pale yellow for several seconds, then gave
me an answer that doesn't translate. Or, if it does, the transla-
tion is just "Because."
Then I asked the question again, in different terms, and she
gave me the same answer in different terms. I asked a third
time, and a fourth, and she came back with the same thing.
She seemed to be enjoying the variations on the Dance; maybe
she thought we were playing.
Well . . . We'd already sent out our distress call by then,
so all we could do was wait for a relief ship and hope they
wouldn't attack again before the ship came, because we didn't
have a chance of fighting themwe were miners, not a mili-
tary expedition. God knows what any military expedition
could have done against energy things, anyway. While we
were waiting, I kept sending out the "eyes," and I kept talk-
ing to one Loarra after another. It took three weeks for the
ship to get there, and I must have talked to over a hundred
of them in that time, and the sum total of what I was told
was this:
Their reason for wiping out the mining operation was
untranslatable. No, they weren't mad. No, they didn't want
us to go away. Yes, we were welcome to the stuff we were
taking out of the depths of the Loarran ocean.
And, most importantly: No, they couldn't tell me whether
or not they were likely ever to repeat their attack.
So we went away, limped back to Earth, and we all made
our reports to Unicentral. We included, as I said, every bit of
data we could think of, including an estimate of the value of
the new elements on Loarrwhich was something on the
order of six times the wealth of Earthsystem. And we put it
up to Unicentral as to whether or not we should go back.
Unicentral has been humming and clicking for ten months
now, but it hasn't made a decision.
Carr, Terry - Dance Of The Changer And The Three.txt Page 3