Orphu! How long had he been unconscious, dreaming of Shakespeare? Mahnmut’s internal chronometer said that it had been a bit less than four hours.

He still might be alive in there. He started walking toward the water, intending to walk the bottom all the way out to the stranded submersible.

A dozen little green men moved between Mahnmut and the water, blocking his way. Then twenty. Then fifty. A hundred more surrounded him on the beach.

Mahnmut had never lifted his hand or manipulator in anger, but he was ready to fight now, to punch and slash and kick his way through this mob if he had to. But he would try to talk to them first. “Get out of my way,” he said, voice on full amplification and sounding loud in the Martian air. “Please.”

The black eyes in green faces stared at him. But they had neither ears to hear him with nor mouths to speak with.

Mahnmut laughed sadly and started to push his way through them, knowing that however much stronger he might be, they could overcome him by sheer numbers—sit on him while they tore him apart. The thought of such violence, his or theirs, made his organic insides clutch with horror.

One of the little green men held his hand up as if to say “stop.” Mahnmut paused. All the green heads turned to the right and looked up the beach. The mob parted magically as a little green man who looked exactly like the other little green men approached, stopped in front of Mahnmut, and extended both hands as if cupping an invisible bowl or praying.

Mahnmut did not understand. Nor did he want to take time to parley through sign language even if he could. Orphu might still be alive.

He started to brush past the little man, but a score of others closed ranks behind this emissary, blocking Mahnmut’s way. He would either have to fight now or pay attention to the gesturing green figure.

Mahnmut let out a sigh not much different than a moan and paused, holding his hands out in mimicry of the little green man’s gesture.

The emissary shook his head, touched Mahnmut’s left arm—both organic and moraveccian sensors told him that the green fingers were cool—and lowered Mahnmut’s left arm, then gripped the right. The little green man pulled Mahnmut’s hand closer, closer, until the moravec’s fingers and palm were flat against the cool, transparent flesh.

The little green man pulled harder, pushing himself forward and pulling Mahnmut’s hand hard enough that the moravec’s palm dented the flat chest, pressed the flesh inward, then . . . penetrated.

Mahnmut would have drawn his hand back in shock at this, but the little green man did not relent with his grip or with his strong pull. Mahnmut could see his dark hand entering the fluid of the little green man’s chest, could feel the transparent flesh closing tight around his forearm in a vacuum seal.

All of the little green men raised their hands to their chests.

Mahnmut’s splayed fingers encountered something hard, almost spherical. He could see a green blob about the size of a human heart centered in the man’s chest. His palm felt it pulse.

The little green man pulled again and Mahnmut understood. He closed his organic fingers around the organ.

WHAT

DO

YOU

NEED?

Shocked, Mahnmut almost jerked his hand free. He forced himself to leave his fingers where they were, wrapped around the little man’s green heart-blob. Mahnmut had felt the question flow up to his brain in pulses, throbs, vibrations. Not in words, certainly not in English or French or Russian or Chinese or Primary or any language Mahnmut had ever used. He did not know how to respond in kind, so he spoke. “I need to save my friend, who is trapped in the ship out there.”

A hundred and fifty green heads turned in unison to look at the submersible. Three hundred black eyes gazed a few seconds and then turned their gaze back on Mahnmut.

TELL

US

WITH

YOUR

THOUGHTS

WHERE

HE

IS

Mahnmut closed his eyes and formed an image of Orphu in the blocked hold, an image of the bay doors, an image of the interior corridor. The vibration-response throbbed back up his arm:

WAIT

Mahnmut’s hand was suddenly free and he pulled it from the little green man’s tight flesh with an audible squishing sound. The little green man collapsed onto the sand then, rolling on his side and lying motionless; the green blobs in his body ceased to flow, his black eyes clouded white and stared blindly, and his fingers twitched once and were still. The hundred and forty-something of the others turned away and went efficiently about the task of saving Orphu.

Mahnmut collapsed onto the sand next to what was clearly the emissary’s lifeless corpse. Mother of God, thought the moravec. It kills them to communicate.

More little green men kept coming down the steep path from the cliff. Two hundred. Three hundred. Six hundred. Mahnmut quit trying to count and—ignoring the dead emissary’s request for him to wait—he waded and then paddled through the slight surf to the grounded submersible. Mahnmut went down through the conning tower airlock into his dry enviro-crèche, checking to see if any of the batteries had come back online. They hadn’t. He cycled through the internal airlock into the flooded corridor to the hold and swam down to the collapsed hull there. No way through to Orphu that way. Returning to the control room, he tried the hardline comm again. Silence. Salvaging his hardback edition of the sonnets, safe in a waterproof wrapper, Mahnmut stuffed other gear into a backpack—the remote comm he’d devised for Orphu if he could get him out, the ship’s log disks, hardcopy maps, a flare pistol, power cells—and clambered up to the top of the conning tower.

The little green men had brought great coils of their black cable down from the stone head they had been hauling along the cliff. They also brought scores of the rollers that the huge pallet had been moving on. They worked with an unbelievable efficiency—some swimming out to the submersible and attaching lines both above and under the waterline, others sinking metal rods from the rollers deep into the sand while pounding others into the rocky cliff face, still rigging pulleys and running the cable from the shore to the sub and back to the shore.

The sub was heavy—especially heavy with its water-damped reactor, flooded hold and corridors—and Mahnmut had trouble imagining these tiny green men actually moving the thing.

But they did.

Within twenty minutes, there were hundreds of cables running to the sub and then ashore and many little green men on each cable. They understood it was a rescue mission; the first thing they did was pull hard enough from the shore—the cables stretching like a black web back to the beach to the east—to tip the sub on its right side.

Mahnmut’s instinct was to go help pull on the cables, but he knew that would be useless. Instead, he waited on the hull of The Dark Lady—shifting as the submersible shifted—and as soon as the bay doors were clear of the mud, he dove into the shallow water with a cell-bowered pry bar, his shoulder lamps on full bright.

The hull-bay doors had been twisted and partially melted by entry into the atmosphere, and Mahnmut was unable to open them more than a few centimeters before they jammed completely. Wanting to weep with frustration, pounding the hull with impotent fury, he suddenly had the sense that he was not alone and he swung around in the silt-filled seawater.

Half a dozen little green men stood on the bottom of the sea nearby, watching him. They did not seem to need to breathe.

Not wanting to “communicate” with them again at the price of killing one of them, Mahnmut pointed to the pried-up section of door, pointed to the surface, made a gesture of rolling cable and wrapping it around the torn flange of metal, and pantomimed pulling.