“Commander!” The messenger fell into step beside him in the nearly dark corridor. “Guzmeen says that you should come back to Communications at once. One of the human beings — the one called Mersereau — is on the screen. Guz says he ought to be excited, but isn’t, because he’s reporting something going on at the Esket — something is moving in the laboratory!”

Keeping in phase with Barlennan as he switched direction took some doing, but the messenger managed it. The command took his continued presence for granted.

“Any further details? When, or what was moving?”

“None, sir. The man simple appeared on the screen without any warning. He said, ‘Something is happening at the Esket. Tell the commander.’ Guzmeen ordered me to bring you back on hurricane priority, so I didn’t hear any more.”

“Those were his exact words? He used our language?”

“no, it was the human speech. His words were—” the runner repeated the phrase, this time in the original tongue. Barlennan could read no more into the words than had been implicit in the translation.

“The we don’t know wheter someone slipped up and was seen, or dropped something into the field of the lens, or—”

“I doubt the first, sir. The human could hardly have failed to recognize a person.”

“I suppose not. Well, some sort of detail should be in by the time we get back there.”

There wasn’t, however. Boyd Mersereau was not even on the screen by the time Barlennan reached Communications. More surprising, neither was anyone else. The commander looked at Guzmeen suspiciously; the communication officer gave the equivalent of a shrug. “He just went, sir, after that one sentence about the lab.”

Barlennan, mystified, squeezed the “attention” control.

But Boyd Mersereau had other things on his mind. Most, but not quite all, were concerned with events on Dhrawn, but not with the Esket; and there were a few matters much closer than the giant star-planet.

The chief of these was the cooling down of Aucoin. The planner was annoyed at not having been brought into the exchanges between Dondragmer and Katini, and the captain and Tebbets. He was inclined to blame young Hoffman for going ahead with policy-disturbing matters without official approval. However, he did not want to say anything which would annoy Easy; he regarded her, with some justification, as the most nearly indispensable member of the communications group. In consequence, Mersereau and others received some fallout form the administrator’s deflected ire.

This was not too serious, as far as Boyd was concerned. He had years before pigeonholed the pacifying of administrators along with shaving — something which took up time but did not demand full attention, and worth doing at all only because it was usually less trouble in the long run. The real attention-getter, the thing which kept even news from the Esket in the background, was the state of affairs at the Kwembly…

By himself he might have been moderately concerned, but only moderately. The missing Mesklinites weren’t close personal friends of his. He was civilized enough not to be any less bothered by their loss than if they had been human, but it was not as thought they were his brothers or sons.

The Kwembly herself was a problem, but a fairly routine one. Land-cruisers had been in trouble before, and so far had always been extricated sooner or later. So, all in all, Mersereau would have been merely absorbed, not bothered, if left to himself.

He was not left to himself. Benj Hoffman felt much more strongly about the whole matter, and had a way of making his feelings clear. This wasn’t entirely by talking, though he was perfectly willing to talk. Even when silent he empathized. Boyd would find himself discussing with Dondragmer the progress of the melting-out plan, or the chances of another flood in terms of their effect on the missing helmsmen, rather than with reasonable proper professional detachment. It was annoying. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, and even Kervenser, just weren’t that central to the work, and the real question was the survival of the crew. Benj, sitting silently beside him, or, at most, interjecting a few remarks or questions, somehow managed to make objectivity seem like callousness; and Mersereau, who had never raised any children of his own, had no defense against that particular treatment. Easy knew perfectly well what was going on, but she did not interfere because she shared almost perfectly her son’s feelings. Partly because of her own background she felt a very intense sympathy for Beetchermarlf and his companion, and even for Takoorch. She had been caught in a rather similar situation some twenty-five years before, when a concatenation of errors had stranded her in a n unmanned research vessel on a high-temperature, high pressure planet.

In fact, she went to greater lengths than Benj dared. Dondragmer might — probably would — have sent out a ground part to the site of Reffel’s disappearance, since the location was fairly well known; but it was unlikely that he would have risked sending one of his three remaining communicators along. Easy, partly by straight forward argument in her own name and partly by using her son’s techniques to swing Mersereau to the same side, convinced the captain that the risk of not taking the equipment along would be even greater. This discussion, like so many others, was conducted in Aucoin’s absence, and, even as he argued with Dondragmer, Mersereau was wondering how he would justify this one to the planner. Nevertheless, he argued on Easy’s side, with Benj almost grinning in the background.

With this claim on his attention, Boyd scarcely noticed the call from another observer that a couple of objects were moving across the screen which showed the Esket’s laboratory. He switched channels briefly and passed the word on to the Settlement, cutting back to the Kwembly without waiting for the end of the communication cycle. Later he claimed that he never been really conscious of the Esket’s name in the report; he had thought of the message as a routine report from some observer or other, and his principal feeling had been one of irritation at being distracted. Some people would have snapped at the observer; Boyd, being the person he was, had taken what seemed to him the quickest and simplest way of disposing of the interruption. He had then quite genuinely forgotten the incident.

Benj had paid even less attention. The Esket incident had occurred long before his arrival at the station, and the name meant nothing in particular to him, although his mother had once mentioned her friends Destigmet and Kabremm to him.

It was easy, of course, who had really reacted to the call. She scarcely noticed what Mersereau did or said, and never thought of telling Barlennan herself until more details came in. She moved immediately to a chair coming a view of the “lost” cruiser’s screens and relegated the rest of the universe to background status.

Barlennan’s return call, therefore, brought him very little information. Easy, to whom it was passed, had seen nothing herself; by the time she had reached her new station all motion had ceased. The original observer was only able to say that he had seen two objects, a reel of cable, or rope, and a short length of pipe, roll across the Esket’s laboratory floor. It was possible that something might have pushed them, though there had been no sign of life around the vehicle for several terrestrial months; it was equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that something had tilted the Esket to start them rolling. SO said the observer, though he could not suggest specifically what might have tipped the monstrous machine.