Whitbread was dismayed-as he ought to have been.

"Right, then. Set your coffee down on the niche. Good. Now slide back until your spine touches the chair back. Now relax, Damnit! Close your eyes."

For a wonder, Whitbread did. After a moment he smiled blissfully.

"I've got the recorder off," Blaine told him-which wasn't true. "We'll get your formal report later. What I want now is facts, impressions, anything you want to say. My immediate problem is whether to stop that Mote ship."

"Can we? Still? Sir?"

Blaine glanced at Cargill. The First Lieutenant nodded. "It's only half an hour away. We could stop it any time in the next couple of days. No protective Field, remember? And the hull looked to be flimsy enough through your helmet camera. Two minutes from the forward batteries would vaporize the whole ship, no sweat."

"Or," Blaine said, "we could catch up with it, knock out its drive, and take it in tow. The Chief Engineer would give a year's salary to take that electromagnetic fusion system apart. So would the Imperial Traders' Association; that thing's perfect for asteroid mining."

"I'd vote against that," Whitbread said with his eyes closed. "If this were a democracy. Sir."

"It isn't, and the Admiral's inclined to grab that Mote ship. So are some of the scientists, but Horvath's against it. Why are you?"

"It would be the first hostile act, sir. I'd avoid that right up until the Moties tried to destroy MacArthur." Whitbread opened his eyes. "Even then, wouldn't the Field scare them off? We're in their home system, Captain, and we did come to see if we could get along with them-at least I think we did, sir."

Cargill chuckled. "Sounds just like Dr. Horvath, doesn't he, Skipper?"

"Besides, sir, what is the Motie ship doing that might interfere with us?"

"Going home alone, probably with a message."

"I don't think there was a message, sir, He didn't do anything that might have been writing, and he didn't talk at all."

"She," Elaine told him. "The biologists say the Motie is female. Both of the little ones are too, and one is pregnant."

"Pregnant. Should I have noticed that, sir?"

Blaine grinned. "What would you have looked for? And where? You didn't even notice that all the little ones have four arms each."

"Four-?"

"Never mind that, Mr. Whitbread. You saw no messages, but then you didn't know the Motie was programming-or building-an autopilot until the ship took off. And an empty ship is a message all by itself. We ready for visitors, Jack?"

Cargill nodded. "And if we're not, you can bet Lenin is."

"Don't count on too much help from Lenin, Number One. Kutuzov thinks it might be interesting to see what kind of account of herself MacArthur could give against the Moties. He might not do anything but watch, then run for home."

"Is that-that doesn't sound much like the Admiral, sir," Cargill protested.

"It sounds like him if you'd overheard the fight he had with Dr. Horvath. Our Minister of Science keeps telling the Admiral to keep out of the way, and Kutuzov is about to take him at his word." Blaine turned to his midshipman. "You don't have to spread this around the gun room either, Whitbread."

"No, sir."

"Now, while we've got the time, let's see what you can remember about that Motie ship." Blaine touched controls and several views of the alien craft appeared on his wall screens. "This is what the computer knows so far," Rod explained. "We've mapped some of the interior already. There was no shielding from our probes, nothing to hide, but that doesn't make it all that easy to understand."

Blaine took up a light pointer. "These areas held liquid hydrogen. Now there was heavy machinery here; did you see any of it?"

"No, sir, but that back panel looked as if it would roll up."

"Good." Blake nodded and Cargill sketched it in with the screen stylus.

"Like that?" the First Lieutenant asked. "Fine." He touched the record button. "Now, we know there was quite a lot of hydrogen fuel hidden away. And that drive of theirs ionizes, heats, and enriches the hydrogen with hot carbon vapor. It takes a lot of machinery to do that. Where was it?"

"Sir, shouldn't the Chief Engineer be here?"

"He should be here, Mr. Whitbread. Unfortunately there are about ten things happening at once on this ship, and Commander Sinclair is needed elsewhere. He'll get his chance at you soon enough- Jack, let's not forget the Mote design philosophy. We keep looking for separate mechanisms to do each job, but on that probe, everything did four or five overlapping things at once, so to speak. It could be we're looking for too much machinery."

"Yes, sir-but, Captain, no matter how you slice it, that ship had to perform a minimum number of functions. Had to. And we can't find equipment enough for half of them."

"Not with our technology, anyway," Blaine said thoughtfully. Then he grinned, a young man's broad and impertinent grin. "We may be looking for a combination microwave oven, fuel ionizer, and sauna. OK, now the alien herself. Your impressions, Whitbread. Is it that intelligent?"

"She didn't understand anything I said. Except that one time, when I screamed ‘Turn off the force field!' She understood that right away. Otherwise nothing."

"You've edited that a bit, lad," Cargill said. "But never mind. What do you think, boy? Does the alien understand Anglic? Is she faking?"

"I don't know. She didn't even understand my gestures, except once. That was when I handed her her own suit- and that's a pretty pointed hint, sir."

"She may simply be stupid," Rod said.

"She's an asteroid miner, Captain," Cargill said slowly. "That's fairly certain. At least that's an asteroid miner's ship. The hooks and clamps at the stern have to be for hanging on durable cargo, like ore and air-bearing rock."

"So?" Elaine prompted.

"I've known some asteroid miners, Skipper. They tend to be stubborn, independent, self-reliant to the point of eccentricity, and close-mouthed. They'll trust each other with their lives, but not with their women or property. And they forget how to talk out there; at least it seems that way."

They both looked hopefully at Whitbread, who said, "I don't know, sir. I just don't know. She's not stupid. You should have seen her hands moving around in the guts of the instrument panel, rewiring, making new circuits, recalibrating half a dozen things at once, it looked like. Maybe-maybe our sign language just doesn't work. I don't know why."

Rod pushed a finger along the knot in his nose. "It might be surprising if it did work," he said thoughtfully. "And this is one example of a completely alien race. If we were aliens and picked up an asteroid miner, what conclusions would we draw about the Empire?" Blaine filled his coffee cup, then Whitbread's. "Well, Horvath's team is more likely to come up with something than we are, they have the Motie to work with."

Sally Fowler watched the Motie with a feeling of deep frustration. "I can't decide whether she's stupid or I am. Did you see what happened when I drew her a diagram of the Pythagorean Theorem?"

"Uh huh." Renner's grin was no help at all. "She took your pocket computer apart and put it back together again. She didn't draw anything. She's stupid in some ways, though," he said more seriously. "Meaning no insult to our eminently trustworthy selves, she's too damned trusting. Maybe she's low on survival instincts."

Sally nodded and watched the Motie at work.

"She's a genius at building things," Renner said. "But she doesn't understand language, gestures, or pictures. Could the bloody alien be a genius and a moron at the same time?"

"Idiot savant," Sally murmured. "It happens with humans, but it's quite rare. Imbecile children with the ability to extract cube roots and do logarithms in their heads. Mathematical whizzes who can't buckle their shoes."