profusion of little legs.
With a sigh of relief, Torwald lowered his beamer and stuck it in his belt. "That was a predator, all right. I'm glad it didn't think we were food. It looked too brainless to die quick."
"Let's take a break," Michelle said, the words paining her cracked lips. "My feet are sore."
"Haven't I always told you how important good boots are to a spacer?" Torwald said.
Michelle sighed as she slumped to the ground. "Yes, Tor, you've told us." Torwald's belief in good footwear rivaled some religions for fervor.
"You never know when you may be set afoot," he reminded them.
"We know that," Nancy said.
"As has, indeed, happened in our case."
"Tor," Michelle said, "will you kindly shut up? I'm too dry to chew you out."
"You see, kid9" he said to Kiril. "This is what they mean when they refer to a prophet without honor." The last words were so faint thai she could barely make them out. Then she felt something. It was something she had felt at the edge pf her perceptions most of her life, but so faint that she was never really sure that it was there. It was strong this time.
"Sshh," she hissed. "We're not alone!" She was as sure of it as she had been of anything in her life.
Torwald looked around, searching the nearby growth for movement. There was nothing to be seen. He strained his ears, as did the others. Nothing. "Hunger's getting to you, kid," he said. "We're all alone here. Just rest a few minutes, you'll be okay."
"They're nearby," she said fiercely.
"Who?" Michelle asked.
"I don't know, but there's a bunch of them."
Nobody seemed willing to give her feeling much credence. They rested for ten minutes, then Torwald said: "On your feet. The sooner we get there, the sooner we have a chance of getting out of this. Not much of a chance, I grant you." They set off again and within ten more minutes they stumbled upon the aliens.
Torwald saw them first. "Freeze." He stood stock-still, his hands weil away from the beamer. "Keep your hands well out and open. They use hand weapons, so they probably have a similar gesture."
The first alien stood in their path, about fifty yards ahead. He saw them a moment later and stopped abruptly. He said something rapidly, not to them but to someone behind him. In seconds five more aliens stood beside him. They advanced on line, in a decidedly military-looking fashion.
"Just be still," Torwald said. "Don't say or do anything. We keep quiet until we have some idea what our status is."
These aliens looked a little different from those who had conferred with the scientists. They wore coveralls of some shimmery, green-tinged fabric. It had a metallic sheen. They also wore flexible boots, and their harnesses were equipped with a number of strange-looking tools and what might have been weapons. None of them held weapons openly, but something in the way they held their arms suggested that some small objects bound to their forearms might be weapons. Their attitude was definitely not friendly.
"Uh-oh, folks," Torwald muttered, "it looks like it's wartime."
The aliens stopped when they were about fifteen feet from the humans. One of them, not the one who had spotted them first, barked some words, punctuated with gestures of pointing at the ground. "I hope that means he wants us to down weapons," Torwald said, "because that's what I'm about to do." Very slowly he lowered one hand to his belt. With thumb and forefinger he drew the beamer from his belt in slow motion. With infinite slowness he lowered himself and laid the weapon on the ground. Then he stood and held his hands out once more. Throughout this ritual he was careful not to smile. What was a gesture of goodwill to humans might be a teeth-baring threat to another species.
The lead alien made a peremptory. gesture. He used the back of his hand instead of a finger, but he plainly wanted them to step back, away from the weapon. They did so, and the leader muttered something to his team. One of the aliens stepped forward and crouched by the beamer. He studied it for several minutes from a number of angles. At last he drew on a pair of gloves and took a small bag from a large pouch at the rear of his harness. Very gingerly he picked up the beamer and put it in the bag, then sealed the bag and placed it in his pouch. The alien leader pointed at the knife at Torwald's belt, and he shed that as well. Kiril undipped her wrist knife and did the same. These weapons the aliens did not accord the caution they had shown with the beamer. The same alien as before simply wrapped them in some kind of fabric and stowed them in his pouch. At no time did he touch these objects with his bare fingers.
On instructions from the leader, three of the aliens rushed behind them. The leader and another flanked them and the last took point. Thus escorted, they set out to the south again. The aliens moved at an easy pace, and there was no prodding of the humans. On the contrary, the aliens did not seem to want to come closer than necessary.
"These boys are smart," Torwald said. "And they're tightly disciplined. At least they aren't likely to do anything hasty." He glanced at the leader, but the leader made no gesture that he should stop talking.
"You saw the way that alien handled the gun and the knife," Michelle said. "The gun he was cautious with because he didn't know what it might do. The knives he wrapped before touching as well. They must have standing precautions to take against contagion."
"Remember, whatever happens," Torwald warned, "it was us that started the war. It may have been Izquierda's plot, but humans attacked aliens, not the other way around. It's up to us to prove to them that our intentions are peaceful."
"I wish we had something to call them besides 'aliens,' " Kiril said. "I mean, Homer's an alien. They'd seem more like people if we knew what to call them."
"Very true," Torwald said. "I'll bet, right now, the guys in that navy ship have already coined some disparaging name for them. Happens every time in war."
"We have to get this war called off," Michelle said. "It would be terrible if humanity's first encounter with another intelligent species started in war."
With that they were all at last too dry to speak at all. The aliens herded them for another hour, then they came into a valley that had an odd shimmer to it. It was something like looking into a heat haze. The point alien walked into it and he began to shimmer, too. Then they were all through it and they saw that the haze had been camouflage for a small installation. A half-dozen small buildings dotted the bottom of the valley. The buildings were strangely irregular in shape, but there was a businesslike, military-seeming arrangement to the whole complex. At intervals around the facility were what looked like dug-in weapon emplacements, although they could see nothing that definitely looked like a weapon.
As they passed the emplacements, aliens stuck their heads out of bunkers and showed a very human-looking astonishment at the spectacle of captive humans being herded into their encampment. They were led to a low hut near the center of the installation. The leader pointed into the low-arched doorway with the back of his hand. Ducking, they went inside.
The interior of the hut was dim, but some thin panels on its upper surface admitted sunlight. It was cool inside, and the floor was ground covered with the mossy "grass" that carpeted most of the ground here in the woods. They sat, sighing with relief, as a guard was posted at the door. The rest of their escort left. Torwald examined the side of their little prison. Its surface was strangely irregular, with occasional tiny holes through it for ventilation. The skylights were formed from thinnings of the material, forming a translucent, parchmentlike material.
"What kind of prefab is this?" Torwald mused in a whisper.
Two aliens came into the hut. These looked more like the ones that had conferred with the scientists. They wore only harnesses loaded with instruments and odd tools. Most of these items, while differing radically, had an irregular appearance reminiscent of the hut they were in. The newcomers signaled the prisoners to move to the rear of the hut. When the order had been complied with, the aliens took fist-sized bulbs from their belts and sprayed the prisoners with a fine mist f
rom head to foot, signaling them to turn so as to get all sides.
"They're medics," Michelle croaked. "We're being disinfected."
"Then these are the boys to ask about some water," Torwald said. He turned to an alien and stuck out his swollen, dry tongue. He gestured as if he were drinking from a glass, then he got onto one knee and mimed scooping up water and drinking. One of the aliens spoke to a guard outside and the guard left.
With other instruments the aliens took readings. They pasted tiny, thin patches on the prisoners' skin and took skin scrapings, which they carefully stored away. Having sprayed the humans, they now showed no hesitation at touching them.
Within a few minutes the guard returned and handed a large flask inside. One of the medics took it and handed it to Torwald. He looked at it suspiciously. "1 hope they didn't just dip this up from a stream." He held out the flask and made a number of finger gestures around it, trying to convey the idea of a great many wiggly little things swimming around in it.
One of the medics jerked his chin forward two or three times. With extremely graceful and precise gestures, he held a hand over the flask. His fingers described wavy, rising motions, then his hand floated across horizontally. He closed his fist rapidly twice, then his fingers descended rapidly, wiggling to simulate falling drops.
"Evaporation, condensation, and precipitation," Michelle said. "He's telling us this water has been distilled!"
Torwald took a drink and paused for a few seconds. "Tastes fine," he reported. He handed it to Nancy. "Here. Beats dying of thirst."
She drank briefly and handed the flask to Kiril. Kiril took a grateful swallow and passed it on to Michelle. They all knew better than to gulp it down. They would sip at the flask for an hour or so, if their captors permitted it.
The medics stayed busy for another hour, taking blood samples, hair samples, and anything else that seemed likely to yield any useful data without doing serious damage to the subjects under examination. In all, they behaved precisely as human biologists might have, except for the strangeness of the instruments. When they took blood samples, they did not use a needle, but instead attached a limpetlike mollusk to the skin. It was pulled away a minute later, leaving only a tiny puncture on the skin.
"Amazing," Torwald said after they had left. "All those scientists with their computers tried for days to establish some sort of communication and came up with nothing. We got a lot of information across both ways with a little makee-pidgin sign language. I guess it just goes to demonstrate the innate superiority of free traders over all other breeds."
"I'll be even more impressed if you can find us some food," Kiril said. Now that thirst had been taken care of, she was far more aware of hunger. For some time now she had been accustomed to eating regularly. It was habit-forming.
"Don't expect anything too soon," Michelle said. "They seem to be quite careful. They'll analyze those samples they took and evaluate their data before they risk feeding us anything. The chances we can digest and metabolize what they eat is extremely slim. They evolved on another planet entirely."
"I was wondering about those instruments of theirs," Torwald mused aloud. "They didn't seem to be made of metal or glass or any synthetic I'm familiar with. The shapes were the kind you can make with extruded plastics, but they looked more like wood or bone."
"Look at this," Nancy said. She was lying on her side, scraping dirt away from the bottom of the wall.
"Hey," Torwald said, "we don't want them thinking we're trying to escape. That's the last thing we want to do. We need to stay put and act friendly and cooperative."
"I said come look at this. I was trying to see how they have this hut attached to the ground. Look." They all bellied down. The barky wall merged with the ground without a seam. Nancy had scraped away the soil to a depth of about two inches. An inch below the ground level the wall subdivided into thousands of thin, hairy fibers which gripped the soil.
"Those are roots," Michelle said disbelievingly. "This thing grew here."
"Are they taking advantage of a local resource," Torwald said, "or did they bring this?"
"This thing was designed as a dwelling for creatures the size of the aliens or us," said Nancy. "It wouldn't have evolved here."
"Then this is a product of gene manipulation," Torwald said. "Do you think they grew their instruments as well? That would explain their organic look."
"If so," said Michelle, "then their level of plant manipulation is immensely greater than ours. We usually have to completely rebuild the soil of a new planet before we can get Earth-evolved plants to grow there. These people can go out in the wilds of a new world and grow their own houses."
"They have to make some use of metals," Torwald said. "They have spacecraft, and vegetable fibers make notoriously poor conductors. And the head alien back at the start of negotiations wore a dagger."
"It was sheathed, we didn't see the blade," Michelle reminded him.
"They have to use metals and glass and synthetics," Torwald insisted stubbornly. "Otherwise they never could have developed an advanced technology and gotten into space. It just doesn't make sense."
"Since when," said Michelle, "is it incumbent upon the universe to make sense to you? Don't you remember our trip to the center of this galaxy? How much of that made sense?"
"Very little. But it might've if we'd had a closer look."
They went on in this vein for some time. Kiril got tired of listening and went to the door to see if anything was going on outside. She sat cross-legged in the doorway to make it plain that she wasn't trying to make a break for it. There was only one guard there, sitting, or rather squatting, next to the door. He appeared at first glance to be unarmed, but now that she had leisure, she looked closely at the complex of little tubes and bumps strapped around his forearm. Some of them ended in open muzzlelike holes just above his wrists. They were almost certainly weapons.
She took a deep breath. "Hello," she hazarded. The guard swiveled his head to look at her. His mouth crooked up at one corner and down at the other. She hoped that was the equivalent of a friendly smile, but it was more likely to be a hostile frown. These people had no reason to like them. Quite the contrary.
The guard said something. Kiril felt, almost, that she could understand a little of what he was saying. It was like when she heard a piece of working machinery that after a while began to sound like voices saying something she couldn't quite understand. "What did you say?" she said.
He spoke again, and this time she could make some sense of it, not as words strung together in sentences, but as concepts surfacing that she could understand. If she concentrated hard enough, she could make out his meaning. It was like listening to someone speaking a language she didn't understand fully, but
of which she knew just enough words to catch the gist.
What he had said, in essence, was: "Why . . . little ship . . . attack? Dzuna . . . peace."
"Hey, did you hear that?" Kiril said to the others. "We didn't have any luck with their language, but they've been learning ours. A few words, anyway."
They stared at her in puzzlement. "All I heard was their language," said Torwald. He sounded concerned. "You'd better take it easy, Kiril. The hunger may be getting to you."
"But I understood him, plain as anything. A little, anyway."
"Maybe you thought you did," Michelle said doubtfully. "What did you hear him say?"
She told them, leaving in the pauses where she hadn't understood. When she got to the word "Dzuna," she had trouble with it. The alien's vocal equipment wasn't human and the sounds were difficult.
"What does that word mean?" Torwald asked.
"It's what they call themselves," she said. It seemed to be obvious.
"How could you know that?" Nancy asked. "Even if you heard him say human words, you've never heard that one before. Without context, it should just be a meaningless sound to you."
"But that's how he meant it!" she insisted. "I know he did! Look, I'll show you." She
faced the guard once more and pointed a finger at herself. "Human," she said.
With a double-jointed contortion the guard indicated himself and said, "Gimlil."
"Didn't sound much like 'Dzuna' to me," Torwald said.
"He thinks we're trading names," she said impatiently. "I'll try again." She pointed at herself: "Human." She pointed at Nancy: "Human." At Torwald: "Human." At Michelle: "Human." She waved to include them all: "Human."
The guard indicated himself, then waved to take in the whole installation. "Dzuna," he said. At least it was close to the word Kiril had repeated. The first sound was a sort of buzz and the n sound had the tinge of an 1, but it was plain enough.
"Well," said Torwald, considerably subdued, "at least now
we know what to call them. That's a help."
"Try to say something to him," Michelle said. "Tell him he's wrong about us."
"Look," Kiril said to the guard, "it wasn't us that attacked you. It was somebody else." The guard's features shifted slightly, but he showed no comprehension.
"Use simple words, Kiril," Nancy advised. "Leave out tenses, use only the present. Use as few words as you can to get meaning across."
Kiril nodded. She waved at her friends and herself and spoke very slowly. "We not attack."
The guard's brow ridges went up and his cheekbones went down, widening his eyes enormously. He had a great deal more facial mobility than his bony features indicated. "We ... see . . . little ship . . . your ship ..." She could tell how astonished he was.
Kiril translated for the others. They had heard only gibberish, but there had been no mistaking the violent change of expression the second time Kiril had addressed him. "I'm not surprised he was astonished," Michelle said. "I believe he heard you speaking his language, just as you heard him speaking yours the first time."
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