Robert wished Athaclena had consented to come along. But she had insisted on remaining in her glade near the caves, experimenting with tame vines and crafting strange, ornate glyphs that were far too subtle to be kenned by his own weak powers. Robert had felt hurt and stormed off, almost outracing his escorts for the first few kilometers.

“So much life.” The Earth woman kept pace beside him and inhaled the rich odors. “This is a peaceful place.”

You’re wrong on both counts, Robert thought, with a trace of contempt for her dull, human insensitivity to the truth about Garth, a truth he could feel all around him. Through Athaclena’s tutoring he now could reach out — albeit tentatively, awkwardly — and trace the life-waves that fluxed through the quiet forest.

“This is an unhappy land,” he replied simply. He did not elaborate, even when she gave him a puzzled look. His primitive empathy sense withdrew from her confusion.

For a while they moved in silence. The morning aged. Once the scouts whistled, and they took cover under thick branches as great cruisers lumbered overhead. When the way was clear Robert took to the trail again without a word.

At last, Lydia McCue spoke again. “This place we’re heading for,” she asked, “this Howletts Center. Would you please tell me about it?”

It was a simple request. He could not refuse, since Prathachulthorn had sent her along to be shown things. But Robert avoided her black eyes as he spoke. He tried to be matter-of-fact, but emotion kept creeping into his voice. Under her low prompting Robert told Lydia McCue about the sad, misguided, but brilliant work of the renegade scientists. His mother had known nothing of the Howletts Center, of course. It was only by accident that he himself had learned of it a year or so before the invasion, and he had decided to keep silent.

Of course the daring experiment was over now. It would take more than a miracle to save the neo-gorillas from sterilization, now that the secret was known, to people like Major Prathachulthorn.

Prathachulthorn might hate Galactic Civilization with a passion that bordered on fanaticism, but he knew how essential it was that Terrans not break their solemn pacts with the great Institutes. Right now, Earth’s only hope lay in the ancient codes of the Progenitors. To keep the protection of those codes, weak clans had to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.

Lydia McCue listened attentively. She had high cheekbones and eyes that were sultry in their darkness. It pained Robert to look at them, though. Those eyes seemed somehow to be set too close together, too immobile. He kept his attention on the crooked path ahead of him.

And yet, with a soft voice the young Marine officer drew him out. Robert found himself talking about Fiben Bolger, about their narrow escape together from the gas-bombing of the Mendoza Freehold, and of his friend’s first journey down into the Sind.

And the second, from which he never returned.

They crested a ridge topped with eerie spine-stones and came to an opening overlooking a narrow vale, just west of Lome Pass. He gestured to the tumbled outlines of several burned structures. “The Howletts Center,” he said, flatly.

“This is where you forced the Gubru to acknowledge chim combatants, isn’t it? And made them give parole?” Lydia McCue asked. Robert realized he was hearing respect in her voice, and turned briefly to stare at her. She returned his look with a smile. Robert felt his face grow warm.

He swung back quickly, pointing to the hillside nearest the center and rapidly describing how the trap had been laid and sprung, skipping only his own trapeze leap to take out the Gubru sentry. His part had been unimportant, anyway. The chims were the crucial ones that morning. He wanted the Earthling soldiers to know that.

He was finishing his story when Elsie approached. The chimmie saluted him, something that had never seemed necessary before the Marines arrived.

“I don t know about actually goin’ down there, ser,” she said, earnestly. “The enemy’s already shown an interest in those ruins. They may have come back.”

Robert shook his head. “When Benjamin paroled the enemy survivors, one condition they accepted was to stay out of this valley, and not even keep its approaches under surveillance, from then on. Has there been any sign of them breaking their word?”

Elsie shook her head. “No, but — ” Her lips pressed together, as if she felt she ought to forbear comment on the wisdom of trusting the pledges of Eatees.

Robert smiled. “Well, then. Come on. If we hurry we can be in and back out by nightfall.”

Elsie shrugged. She made a quick set of hand gestures. Several chims darted out of the spine-stones and down into the forest. After a moment there came an all-clear whistle. The rest of the party crossed the gap at a brisk run.

“They are very good,” Lydia McCue told him softly after they were back under the trees again.

Robert nodded, recognizing that she had not qualified her remark by adding, “for amateurs,” as Prathachulthorn would have done. He was grateful for that, and wished she wasn’t being so nice.

Soon they were picking their way toward tumbled ruins, carefully searching for signs that anyone else had been there since the battle, months ago. There did not seem to be any, but that did not diminish the intense vigilance of the chims.

Robert tried to kenn, to use the Net to probe for intruders, but his own jumbled feelings kept getting in the way. He wished Athaclena were here.

The wreckage of the Howletts Center was even more comp\ete ttvan \\ad been apparent from the hillside. The fire-blackened buildings had collapsed further under wild jungle vegetation now growing rampant over former lawns. The Gubru vehicles, long ago stripped of anything useful, lay in tangles of thick grass as tall as his waist.

No, clearly nobody’s been here, he thought. Robert kicked through the wreckage. Nothing remained of interest. Why did I insist on coming? he wondered. He knew his hunch — whether it panned out or not — had actually been little more than an excuse to escape from the caves — to get away from Prathachulthorn.

To get away from uncomfortable glimpses of himself.

Perhaps one reason he had chosen to come to this place was because it was here that he had had his own brief moment of hand-to-hand contact with the enemy.

Or maybe he had hoped to recreate the feelings of only a few days ago, traveling unfettered and unjudged. He had hoped to come here with different female company than the woman who now followed him, eyes darting left and right, putting everything under professional scrutiny.

Robert turned away from his brooding thoughts and walked toward the ruined alien hover tanks. He sank to one knee, brushing aside the tall, rank grass.

Gubru machinery, the exposed guts of the armored vehicles, gears, impellers, gravities…

A fine yellow patina overlay many of the parts. In some places the shining plastimesh had discolored, thinned, and even broken through. Robert pulled on a small chunk which came off, crumbling, in his hands.

Well I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher. I was right. My hunch was right.

“What is it?” Lieutenant McCue asked over his shoulder.

He shook his head. “I’m not sure, yet. But something seems to be eating through a lot of these parts.”

“May I see?”

Robert handed her the piece of corroded ceramet.

“This is why you wanted to come here? You suspected this?”

He saw no point in telling her all the complex reasons, the personal ones. “That was a large part of it. I thought, maybe, there might be a weapon in it. They burned all the records and facilities when they evacuated the center. But they couldn’t eradicate all the microbes developed in Dr. Schultz’s lab.”

He didn’t add that he had a vial of gorilla saliva in his pack. If he had not found the Gubru armor in this state, on arriving here, he had planned to perform his own experiments.