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that could be attached by it to any of the arms; it had evolved to the point
where it had become the potential solution to any need by pilot or gunner for
anything from food and drink to a wound needing emergency medical attention.
It was also used by crew members to find any small thing that might have
been accidentally dropped and which had rolled away out of sight into any of
the tiny nooks and crannies produced by the equipment tightly crammed into the
interior of the vessel.
But none of that was on Jim's mind now. What was concerning him at the
moment was a guilty conscience at having let Mary go unanswered and unknowing
while he marvelled at his discoveries aboard the Laagi ship. The fact that she
had not complained about it, or acknowledged it, except by the momentary
expression of the emotion in her mental voice when he once more spoke to her
from back aboard AndFriend, made it worse.
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He found himself wanting her to complain, so he could excuse himself more
fully. But whether she understood his reasons or not, complaining seemed to be
the one thing she was absolutely refusing to do. It left Jim uncomfortable
with the feeling that he was now in debt to her, and he did not see any way by
which he might get out.
On the other hand, if she thought that having him in debt to her was going
to make him more likely to give in to her wishes...
He checked himself on that thought. They had just finally got on good terms
with each other and here he was starting to think in terms of an argument. The
robot came back aboard with its recording job accomplished and Jim immediately
phase-shifted a full light-year from the dead alien ship.
"Look," he said, once they had made the shift. "I didn't mean to ignore you
when I was on the Laagi ship. It was just that I was hit so hard by the
differences aboard there. Also, I could hardly hear you when I was on the
outside of that ship; and inside, I don't think I was hearing you at all."
"It doesn't matter," she said. "Could you move anything in the ship?"
"No," he said. "I didn't try anything but the controls; I could move
them-but nothing happened. No telling how long that ship's been sitting there.
You'll see what I mean when we look at the pictures Fingers took. I'm sure
that ship's engines and everything operable about her's been dead for a long
time. What was left of the two Laagi who'd crewed her -well, as I say, you'll
see the pictures for yourself. Maybe they've been dead for centuries."
"And the other Laagi never came and got the ship, when we're this close to
their civilization centers?" she said.
"Maybe they couldn't find it? Finding just one ship, even if you know its
position within something like a couple of times instrument range, can be
pretty rough. If this vessel was as much as a light-year out of position,
their chances of finding it..."
His voice trailed off.
"We found it," said Mary. "In a matter of centuries, you'd think they could
do that well if they wanted to."
"We didn't really find it," said Jim. "We stumbled across it."
"Don't split hairs," said Mary. "We were looking for Laagi ships, and it's
right on the centerline. If we could stumble across it going right down the
centerline, you'd think they'd be bound to find it doing the same thing. What
did these Laagi look like? I know I'll be seeing the pictures as soon as the
robot gets them stored and on the screen, but what I want to hear is your
personal opinion."
"I don't know what they looked like," said Jim, a little irritably. "I
didn't see them, you know. I just felt them, along with everything else about
the ship. But they were sort of collapsed in on themselves, I'd say. They
don't seem to have a structured skeleton inside them, the way we do. You'll
have to look at the pictures and make up your own mind about it. Fingers,
where are those pictures you just took?"
The robot had been waiting for a specific command to show them. Its first
task had been to store what it had recorded from its own memory to the ship's
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memory, relating it to anything already in the ship's memory to which it
seemed pertinent. Jim could merely have "remembered," therefore, what the
robot had seen. But Mary, of course, could not do that. She would have to see
the actual pictures on the screen.
As soon as Jim spoke, the screen lit up.
The robot had used his own exterior lights to illuminate what he was to
record. To Jim, who had felt what was in the alien ship before seeing it, what
he looked at now seemed garish under the bright white light in its shapes and
strange colors. It was as if some maker of commercial entertainments had
created a mock-up of what he had experienced directly.
Gone-he had hardly expected it to be otherwise-was the disgust, charnel
house-sadness that had seemed to touch him while he had been in the other
ship. But surprisingly also gone was the sense of something built and used by
aliens. Besides the impression that what he looked at was a commercial mock-up
of something alien was the sense that the film merely showed the interior of a
different model of fighter ship, one that could as well have been designed and
built by humans.
Because the effect of seeing it was so less than he had expected, therefore,
he was taken unprepared by the wave of excitement that reached him from Mary.
"Jim! They're mummified. As if they've been there for centuries!"
He did not say, "That's what I just told you." Suddenly, he was very aware
of her reactions. They were a blend of fascination and a curiosity that was so
profound in her that it could almost be described as ravenous.
"Jim," she said. "I've got to analyze all of this. You'll have to order the
controls for me. Tell your robot to give me, up on the screen, the results of
his gas samples of the interior atmosphere first, and after that the results
of the scrapings he made of every surface, and then after that the
measurements and interior views of those two Laagi bodies-"
"Wait a minute!" Jim said. "What do you mean, gas samples, scrapings, all
this other stuff? A fighter ship robot-"
"Yours was updated so I could use him as a research tool. Just do what I'm
asking you to do, Jim. I'm sorry there wasn't time to tell you everything we'd
done to make my end of this trip productive. Now, first the scrapings... "
Jim did as she said, ending up by running the ship's artificial intelligence
in calculations under her directions using values she had somehow derived from
what the robot had reported, on a number of experiments Jim had never
suspected it of making on the alien vessel.
"How did you know we'd run into a derelict Laagi ship?" he asked.
"We didn't. This was just general purpose facility built into AndFriend, and
so forth, so I could investigate anything we did run into. Would you mind
holding the questions for the moment, Jim? I'm up to my ears in these
calculations."
He gave up and simply waited her out, ordering the ship and its parts to
respond to her wishes as she expressed them through him. Eventually, she came
to an end of her labors.
"Well," she said in his mind, and he felt a note of satisfaction in her
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mental voice, "this tells us a lot. Only it raises more questions than it
answers."
"Doesn't everything about the Laagi?" said Jim sourly. But his own curiosity
was getting the better of him. "What did you find out?"
"Mainly just enough to raise more questions, as I said," she answered. "Call
up the list of values I'll give you now, and I can show you a mock-up on the
screen of what I think those two Laagi looked like when they were alive."
He did so, and stared with disbelief at what appeared in the tank of the
screen before his control chair.
"That?" he said.
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