"Captain!" It was Staley, midshipman of the watch, but Rod could -see it too. Several screens and a couple of minor batteries were trained on the gig, but the heavy stuff was all aimed at the alien ship; and it had come to life.

A streamer of blue light glowed at the stem of the alien craft. The color of Cherenkov radiation, it flowed parallel to the slender silver spine at the tail. Suddenly there was a line of intense white light beside it.

"Yon ship's under way, Captain," Sinclair reported.

"God damn it to hell!" His own screens showed the same thing, also that the ship's batteries were tracking the alien craft.

"Permission to fire?" the gunnery officer asked.

"No!" But what was the thing up to? Rod wondered. Time enough when Whitbread got aboard, he supposed. The alien ship couldn't escape. And neither would the alien.

"Kelley!"

"Sir!"

"Squad to the air lock. Escort Whitbread and that thing to the reception room. Politely, Gunner. Politely, but make sure it doesn't go anywhere else."

"Aye aye, Captain."

"Number One?" Blaine called.

"Yes, sir," Cargill answered.

"You were monitoring Whitbread's helmet camera the entire time he was in that ship?"

"Yes, sir."

"Any chance there was another alien aboard?"

"No, sir. There wasn't room. Right, Sandy?"

"Aye, Captain," Sinclair answered. Blaine had activated a com circuit to both the after bridge and the engine room. "Not if that beastie were to carry fuel too. And we saw nae doors."

"There wasn't any air-lock door either, until it opened," Rod reminded him. "Was there anything that might have been a bathroom?"

"Captain, did we nae see the w.c.? I took the object on port side near the air lock to be such."

"Yeah. Then that thing's on autopilot, would you both agree? But we didn't see him program it."

"We saw him practically rebuild the controls, Captain," Cargill said. "My Lord! Do you think that's how they control..."

"Seems verra inefficient, but the beastie did nae else that could hae been the programming of an autopilot," Sinclair mused. "And ‘twas bloody quick about it, sir. Captain, do ye think it built an autopilot?"

There was a glare on one of Rod's screens. "Catch that? A blue flare in the alien ship's air lock. Now what was that for?"

"To kill yon vermin?" Sinclair asked.

"Hardly. The vacuum would have done," Cargill answered.

Whitbread came onto the bridge and stood stiffly in front of Blaine's command chair. "Reporting to Captain, sir."

"Well done, Mr. Whitbread," Rod said. "Uh-have you any ideas about those two vermin he brought abroad? Such as why they're here?"

"No, sir-courtesy? We might want to dissect one?"

"Possibly. If we knew what they were. Now take a look at that." Blaine pointed at his screens.

The alien ship was turning, the white light of its drive drawing an arc on the sky. It seemed to be heading back to the Trojan points.

And Jonathon Whitbread was the only man alive who had ever been inside. As Blaine released the crew from action stations, the red-haired midshipman was probably thinking that the ordeal was over.

15 Work

The Engineer's mouth was wide and lipless, turned up at the corners. It looked like a half-smile of gentle happiness, but it was not. It was a permanent fixture of her cartoon face.

Nonetheless, the Engineer was happy.

Her joy had grown and grown. Coming through the Langston Field had been a new experience, like penetrating a black bubble of retarded time. Even without instruments, that told her something about the Field. She was more eager than ever to see that generator.

The ship within the bubble seemed unnecessarily crude, and it was rich, rich! There were parts in the hangar deck that seemed unattached to anything else, mechanisms so plentiful that they didn't have to be used! And many things she could not understand at a glance.

Some would be structural adaptations to the Field, or to the mysterious drive that worked from the Field. Others must be genuinely new inventions to do familiar things, new circuits, at least new to an unsophisticated Engineer miner. She recognized weapons, weapons on the big ship, weapons on the boats in the hangar space, personal weapons carried by the aliens clustered around the other side of the air lock.

This did not surprise her. She had known this new class were givers of orders, not takers of orders. Naturally they would have weapons. They might even have Warriors.

The double-door air lock was too complex, too easy to jam, primitive, and wasteful of metals and materials. She was needed here, she could see that. The new class must have come here to get her, there couldn't be any Engineers aboard the ship if they used things like this. She started to take the mechanism apart, but the stranger pulled at her arm and she abandoned the idea. She didn't have the tools anyway, and she didn't know what it would be lawful to use to make the tools. There would be time for all that...

A lot of others, much like the first one, clustered around her. They wore strange coverings, most of it alike, and carried weapons, but they didn't give orders. The stranger kept trying to talk to her.

Couldn't they see she wasn't a Mediator? They were not too bright, this primitive new class. But they were givers of orders. The first one had shouted a clear command.

And they couldn't speak Language.

The situation was remarkably free of decisions. An Engineer need only go where she was led, repair and redesign where the opportunity arose, and wait for a Mediator. Or a Master. And there was so much to do, so much to do...

The petty officers' lounge had been converted into a reception room for alien visitors. The petty officers had to take over one of the Marine messes, doubling the joeys into the other. All over the ship adjustments had to be made to accommodate the swarms of civilians and their needs.

As a laboratory the lounge might lack something, but it was secure, and had plenty of running water, wall plugs, hot plates, and refreshment facilities. At least there was nothing to smack of the dissection table.

After some argument it had been decided not to attempt to build furniture to fit the aliens. Anything they built would only accommodate the passenger aboard the probe, and that seemed absurd.

There were plenty of tv pickups, so that although only a few key personnel were allowed in the lounge, nearly everyone aboard the ship could watch. Sally Fowler waited with the scientists, and she was determined to win the Motie's trust. She didn't care who was watching or what it would take to do that.

As it turned out, the Motie's trust was easy to come by. She was as trustful as a child. Her first move on coming out of the air lock with to tear open the plastic sack containing the miniatures, and give it to the first hand that reached for it. She never bothered about them again.

She went where she was led, walking between the Marines until Sally took her by the hand at the reception room door, and everywhere she went she looked about, her body swiveling like an owl's head. When Sally let go, the Motie simply stood and waited for further instructions, watching everyone with that same gentle smile.

She did not seem to understand gestures. Sally and Horvath and others tried to talk to the Motie, with no result. Dr. Hardy, the Chaplain linguist, drew mathematical diagrams and nothing happened. The Motie did not understand and was not interested.

She was interested in tools, though. As soon as she was inside she reached for Gunner Kelley's sidearm. At a command from Dr. Horvath the Marine reluctantly unloaded the weapon and let her handle one of the cartridges before surrendering the gun. The Motie took it completely apart, to Kelley's annoyance and everyone else's amusement, then put it back together again, correctly, to Kelly's amazement. She examined the Marine's hand, bending the fingers to the limit and working them in their joints, using her own fingers to probe the muscles and the complex bones of the wrist. She examined Sally Fowler's hand in the same way for comparison.