by Hal Clement
Since most of Ell ate the evening meal shortly after sundown, there was no great difficulty about intercepting Maeta at her home. Daphne had been sent off with the message that her brother would be home a few minutes later; Jenny accompanied him to the home of the Teroas, who lived in the middle of a fairly extensive garden just at the point where the roads met, and only a few score yards from the library.
Bob and Jenny were greeted cordially. Charles, the son of the family, had been one of Bob's close friends for many years. He and his father were at sea just now, as usual, and the older sister was working in the Tahiti office of PFI, but Maeta, her mother, two of the latter's sisters and a brother-in-law were all there. More time than Bob would have wished was consumed in answering their questions about his college life-not the sort of questions a Boston or New York provincial would have expected from Polynesians. For once, the Hunter was not bored by human conversation, even though it had no connection with his problem.
It did take a while to steer the talk toward the object in the library, but Bob eventually succeeded, Maeta nodded when he mentioned Daphne's calling attention to it, and admitted, with no particular surprise at the question, that she was the donor of the ornament. When he asked where she had found it she did show a polite curiosity about the reason for his interest, and he told the partial truth that he had used before.
"I thought I saw it in the water years ago, but never tried to collect it," he said. "It was on the outer side of Apu, and I didn't want to be served up as hamburger. You must have had a very calm day, or else you are an awfully good swimmer."
One of the aunts chuckled. "Maeta is a better swimmer and a better sailor than any man on Ell." The girl accepted the compliment with a nod, and Bob remembered hearing something similar from Charles in the past. It was quite believable; her strength was not obvious to the eye, but her coordination was, whenever she moved. Bob did not consciously look at her particularly, but Jenny felt that he was and, to her own surprise, she felt a bit annoyed about it. It would not have been surprising if he had; Maeta Teroa might not have been better looking than Jenny, who had a high and quite justified opinion of her own appearance, but she was at very little disadvantage compared to the much taller redhead. Maeta was just over five feet tall, weighing just over a hundred pounds. Names meant little on Ell as far as ancestry was concerned; she showed her Polynesian background in her brown skin and black hair, but Europe-Scotland, Charles had once mentioned -was visible in her blue eyes and relatively straight nose and pointed chin.
"I won't argue," she said in response to the aunt's compliment. "One doesn't contradict one's elders even to be modest, and I'm not that modest. There really wasn’t any risk, though, Bob; I didn't find it on Apu. I spotted it from the Haerehaere on the bottom of the lagoon at least a mile from there-oh, about midway between Tanks Seven and Twelve, as I remember. I was a little surprised to see such a growth there-it's a species you expect out in the reef-so I went down to get it. It was pretty, and I didn't let it go to the Exchange, but kept it at home. When the new library was finished and I started working there I took it over-we all helped decorate the place. I've never figured out how it got so far from the reef. I thought at first that someone had found it there and dropped it overboard bringing it in, but, I couldn't see why the person didn't get it back, in that case. It was in less than twenty feet of water. Besides, you'd think that any previous owner would have noticed when it appeared in the library; there can't be many people, on the island who haven't seen it there."
The Hunter put a question to Bob which puzzled him, but the young man passed it on as his own.
"Did you improve on it any? That is, did you break off any of the coral to make it look prettier, or is it just the way you found it?"
"I certainly didn't. I can't see anything pretty about a broken coral branch, and I remember how glad I was that all the branches were whole. As far as I know it's still that way, though I haven't looked closely at it for a long while. I meant to ask Dad or Charlie what the piece of machinery inside it might be-I suppose it must have come from some ship-but I never happened to think of it while they were around. Maybe you know? You were looking at it today."
"I don't know that much about ships, I'm afraid," Bob evaded. The Hunter prompted him again. "Would you come and look at it with me again some time, and tell me whether it's changed any?"
"Of course." Maeta was clearly puzzled by his interest, but was far too polite to ask for an explanation if Bob didn't volunteer one. "I can't go right now -we're about to have dinner-but afterward if you like. You'll stay and eat with us?"
Bob and Jennymadethe standard courtesies about being expected at their homes, and left after agreeing to meet Maeta at the library the next morning. Outside, the Hunter asked why Bob hadn't arranged the examination for that night,
" I doubt they'll really be through eating before the library closes up," he answered, "and I certainly wouldn't want to seem in a hurry to leave the meal, or to hurry them away from it by coming back later." Jenny, who of course had heard nothing of this exchange, interrupted it by asking Bob the purpose of the question about the coral.
"I don't know," he had to answer. "The Hunter fed them to me, and I was passing them on for him."
"Without knowing why?"
"There was no way to ask him without being obvious about it. I don't have to speak out loud-he can feel the tension in my vocal cords when I'm not quite speaking-but I'd have had to pause in my other conversation, and people would have noticed."
"Well, why not ask him now?"
"How about it, Hunter?" The alien had no reason to hold back.
"I thought I saw a regularity in the coral arrangement when we were in the library. I'm not sure enough to want to be more explicit until we have another look, and get Maeta's assurance that its present condition either is or isn't the way it was when she first noticed it. Also, I'd like to see if either of you notices anything when you see it next time, so I'd rather not tell you what to look for." Bob relayed this to the girl. Neither was particularly satisfied, and Jenny kept trying to persuade the Hunter to say more all the way to her house. Bob knew better, so the conversation was less strained the rest of the way to his own home.
Predictably, his strength was back to normal when he woke up the next morning. However, a new complication had developed in the form of extreme pain in his joints, especially knees and ankles. As usual, the Hunter could find no specific cause, certainly nothing as clear-cut as the crystals of uric or oxalic acid of gout. The Hunter looked for these with especial care; he had persuaded Bob to take a course in human physiology, and had been very conscientious in doing his host's reading with him.
Presumably one of the plates he was juggling, most probably a hormone, was wobbling in its flight, but the presumption was not very helpful. Bob was extremely uncomfortable physically, but seemed to be getting more philosophical as his condition grew worse. He was quite calm, and showed no signs of blaming the Hunter. The latter, on the other hand, felt himself being driven closer and closer to panic by the combination of guilt and helplessness. He knew that panic could hardly be expected to help, but it attacks on a level far below the reach of intelligence. Bob was able to move around, however uncomfortably, and ate breakfast with the family without finding it necessary to tell them about the new trouble. Daphne, luckily, had plans to spend the day with friends of her own age, and presented no problem.
Bob and his companion left by bicycle as soon as the meal was over. Nothing had been specifically said about Jenny's being with the party, but she was waiting in front of her house as they passed, and fell in beside them on her own machine for the short remaining distance to the library.
Maeta had not yet arrived, but must have seen them pass her home; they had to wait only two or three minutes for her. They entered the building together, and the smaller woman spoke briefly to the librarian on duty, not Mrs. Moetua this time. Then she led the way to the case on which the coral-encrusted generator hou
sing stood, and gestured to Bob to lift it down-she herself could not reach it. Jenny, for reasons she probably could not have stated clearly herself, reached it first and carried it, still at Maeta's direction, to a table near the door, where sunlight fell directly on it. They all bent over to examine it closely.
There was no doubt in either Bob's or the Hunter's minds about its being the same object they had seen Apu years before. This was no longer the main question. Bob and Jenny were trying to see what might have caught the Hunter's notice the day before; Maeta, who had no reason to expect anything special, simply reexamined it with interest.
About a third of the metal surface was exposed, and about as much more was so thinly covered with marine growth that its underlying shape was still plain. From the rest, the limy branches grew in random contortions which even the alien found decorative; the branches were covered with the ribbed cups that had once contained living polyps. On the bare metal were patterns of fine scratches which were perfectly legible to the Hunter, though only their essential regularity was apparent to the human beings..
The mere fact that the manufacturer's name, serial number, and various sets of mounting and servicing instructions were present was not the peculiarity which had caught the Hunter's attention the day before. Far more surprising to him was the uniformity with which each of these areas of engraving was ex-posed to view. There were no partly hidden words or phrases or numbers. Each symbol or group of symbols was completely free of coral and other growth, as was the metal for several millimeters around it. The coral did not seem to have been broken away, but it might possibly have been dissolved.
After waiting for some minutes for his host to notice this, the Hunter posed several leading questions. These also failed to bring Bob's attention to the strange regularity, and the alien finally gave, up and pointed it out. Then, of course, it was perfectly clear to the man, and he couldn't understand why he had failed to notice it before.
"Well, you see it now," said his symbiont. "Now let's find out if it was that way when Miss Teroa found it, or if it has become that way since." He left Bob with the problem of executing this simple request.
Logically, the man started with the most general questions possible.
"Mae, are you sure nothing has changed about this thing since you found it?"
"Not perfectly sure, but it definitely hasn't changed very much. Certainly no branches are broken. I admit I don't remember either the exact branch pattern or the arrangement of the patches of bare metal well enough to draw a picture, but if either of these has changed, I don't think it can be very much, either."
"The metal looks the same?"
"As far as I can remember. I'm afraid metal is just metal to me, unless it has a real color like copper or gold."
Bob saw no choice other than to get specific. "I was wondering about the scratches on the metal. They seem to be only on the bare parts-they never run out of sight under the coral. Of course there may be some scratches entirely under it, but it looks sort of as though someone had been making marks on the steel or whatever it is after the coral had grown."
"I see what you mean." Maeta nodded thoughtfully. "I don't remember really noticing the scratches before; maybe someone has been at it. I doubt it, though. The case it's been on is pretty high for young children to reach, and I don't think an adult would spoil it that way." Maeta, like Jenny, had not taken the college option, and for a brief moment Bob was startled by her naivety. He made no comment, however, even to the Hunter.
They moved around the table, examining the object from all sides. If any bit of the engraving was hidden at all, it was completelyhidden, as Bob had said. This, the Hunter feltsure, could not possibly be a matter of chance; andfrom the near despair of that morning, when Bob had awakened with the joint pains, the Hunter suddenly felt happier than he had in two Earth years. Perhapsthat was why he made a mistake.
"Bob," he said. There can't be any doubt. It can't
be an accident. Those areas were uncovered carefully, usingacid, to let someone read the engraving, and only my own people could either have expected to find anything to read or have counted on understanding it after it was uncovered!"
It was a forgivable mistake-not the logic, which was perfectly sound, but the failure to see the results of the remark. After all, Bob had seemed to be taking the situation very calmly-unbelievably calmly. If the young man's physical condition had been normal, the Hunter might have been able to spot the emotional tension of his host; but since the alien himself was handling, more or less directly, most of the hormone systems which emotion tends to affect, he had failed to do so. Bob's reaction took both of them by surprise.
"Then they are here!" he exclaimed happily-aloud. Jenny understood, naturally. Maeta, just as naturally, didn't, and was understandably surprised.
"Who is here?" she asked. "You mean you recognize the sort of ship this came from? That doesn't prove anything-I found this years ago, remember."
Bob covered fairly well, but not perfectly. "That's true," he admitted. "I wasn't thinking for the moment. Can you remember just when that was? You told us pretty well where."
The young woman was silent for some time, the rest watching with varying degrees of patience.
"Let's see," she said slowly at last. "The library was finished early in '51-I remember because I started to work here after school, as soon as it opened, and my first working day was my sixteenth birthday. I'd had this thing quite a while then. A year? No, longer. I never went out in the Haerehaere very often-the first time I was only twelve, and that was the year you came home so early and stayed so long, and when Charlie got his first ship job."
Bob nodded encouragingly, but managed to keep quiet this time. The year he had "stayed so long" was
the one in which the Hunter's first problem had been solved. Maeta went on.
"It must have been some time in March, either '48 or '49-oh, I remember. I'd been taking care of your sister a lot, and she was walking then, so it must have been March of '49, a little over five years ago."
"Good. Beautiful. Thanks a lot."
"So they, whoever they are, may have been here then, but they don't have to be here now," finished Maeta.
But Bob and the Hunter were sure they knew better.
7. Joke
"Bob, have you time to give us some help?"
The Hunter and his host were both startled. They were still standing around, the table which bore the generator case, but there had been several minutes of silence. Everyone had been pursuing his or her own line of thought, some of which had led pretty far from Ell. Maeta's question had not been an interruption, however, since neither Bob nor the Hunter had found a really promising line of thought to follow.
"I guess so," Bob answered. "What is it?"
"Those books you brought back have been brought to the library, and we have to catalog and shelve them. Can you help with the sorting? I'll recognize subjects all right; but we like to have some estimate of scope and difficulty. You've read them-I suppose."
"For the most part," Bob grinned. "All right, I might as well. Jenny, you want to stay and help?"
"No, thanks, I'm not at home in college books, and might feel lost-at least, I wouldn't be much help. I'll go ask Mr. Tavake that question we didn't get around to yesterday."
"All right, good idea." Bob read nothing between the lines of her refusal to stay. "Will you be home afterward? I think it's time we talked things over with your father. The next part of the job won't be easy even if Tavake comes through."
Jenny hesitated a moment; the Hunter assumed, she had made other plans and was weighing their importance. Bob gave no thought to the pause.
"All right," she finally said. "I'll see you-when? A couple of hours, Mae?"
"The whole job will take days, but that much will get us started," the older girl replied. "If this other thing you're talking about is important, my job can wait-or I can do it all myself, though probably not as accurately."
"We're hung
up for the moment on our thing, anyway," Bob assured her. Even the Hunter knew that both Bob and Maeta were merely being polite. He was much less sure about Jenny. Unavoidably, Bob stayed and the redhead departed.
Maeta led the way downstairs. The book crates had been placed beside a large table in a basement room. While it was not regularly used by the library patrons, the walls were lined with partly filled bookshelves. The table was loaded with pots of adhesive, scissors, tape, and similar library equipment, and one corner of the room was occupied by a large, very comfortable-looking armchair with a small table beside it. Maeta looked at these and smiled.
"This was set up as a study for Mr. Thorvaldsen when the library was built, but he fell asleep in the chair so often that he decided to use his old place in the laboratory building. We've taken it over for book processing. How many do you think you have here?"
"Don't remember exactly. They're not all course texts. I was told I could buy other stuff which was recommended to us as reference material; that's why I can't say I've read every last page of it. I guess the easiest thing is to get it all out on the table and start sorting by subject, unless librarians have some more; ingenious way of doing it."
Maeta glanced at him, but had nothing to say to his closing remark, and they started as he had suggested. The girl worked quickly and efficiently, and made good use of Bob's knowledge. She said nothing about the remarks Bob and Jenny had made while they were upstairs, but the Hunter felt sure she was thinking about them. The young woman was obviously far too intelligent not to be curious. The alien was thinking about her more and more as the morning wore on, not only about her evident brains but also about her competence-remarked upon the night before-on and in the water. She could be useful, if Bob's prejudices could be submitted to another blow.
But Bob was getting harder to persuade with each new recruit. It might be necessary to manage Bob for his own good. Jenny would be willing to do that, in principle; but of course there was some difficulty in speaking to Jenny. The Hunter thought deeply, and did not regard the library session as time wasted.