Fossil

Chapter Six And Clearest Trails The Keenest Minds Misguide

“What’s the strangest thing your people see about star visitors, Ted?” Hugh asked when they were well under way. “Or would you rather not tell us?” For once, he had no ulterior motive behind the question, except perhaps an urge to learn something before his wife did.

“You don’t seem to expect to find each other different,” was the prompt response. “You appear to be— well, an Erthuma is surprised when a Crotonite thinks differently from him, and a Samian is surprised when a Naxian thinks differently from him, and so on. Even Naxians, who are supposed to read feelings, seem to be surprised at some of the feelings they read. You’re not blatant about it; consciously you do expect each other to be different, but you’re still visibly startled, even the Naxians, when it happens. Why? You’re from different places, with different foods and different comfortable temperatures and different ideas of what smells good and what’s polite. Some of you lose consciousness part of the time — you can’t seem to help it — and others get impatient about it and complain about the inconvenience to them. They don’t consider the inconvenience it must be to those who—’sleep’ is the word, I think.”

“But we know that we’re different, and allow for it!” insisted Hugh.

“You know it consciously. Somehow you don’t seem to know it down where your minds really work. It’s as though down below those levels where you know about your own thoughts, you’re sure you are right. That’s a little frightening. We’re glad enough to have you here, of course. We spend a lot of our time just keeping alive, diving to the ocean floor for mud to fertilize the continent and working out ways to take care of people whose farms are melting away on the sun side without being unfair to the ones who work to fertilize new land on the colder shore; but we’ve liked to think about causes and other abstractions as far back as our history goes. You’re certainly giving us new things to think about.”

“How far is that?” asked S’Nash instantly.

“What?”

“Your history.”

“Currently, three hundred twenty two thousand seven hundred seventy years.”

“Habranha years, of course.”

“Of course. We’ve been here and about the same for a lot longer, we’re sure, but every now and then records get lost during transfer from the melting to the growing side of the Ring, and sometimes records are a little ambiguous because nothing much has happened out of the ordinary for a few thousand years. The arrival of you aliens will help enormously with that problem for a million years or so, anyway.”

The aliens all fell silent as they tried to work out the time period in their own standards. For Hugh, it was not quite twenty thousand Common Years. A respectable recorded history, better than any Erthumoi world he knew of. But then, with a single planet-wide culture, what could happen to make history?

It occurred to Hugh that thinking carefully about the sort of mind now being displayed by Ted, who as far as he knew was a perfectly ordinary working citizen and not a professional philosopher, might answer that question. He’d have to make time for that later. He’d also like to arrange to listen in on a lunchtime conversation, or its equivalent, between a couple of Habras.

Or better, half a dozen if his translator could handle it.

Keeping to the road was getting difficult. Another snow squall was blocking vision for Erthuma, Naxian, and robot. Ted was, as far as they could tell, still circling overhead; whether he was above the blinding stuff or relying on his other senses Hugh didn’t know, and the wind at the moment was too loud to let him ask. Eleventh-Worker had made himself familiar with the packed-ice structure of the road itself under the drifts, and assured Hugh that he would know if they strayed off it; but the robot’s inertial sense was probably enough to forestall that. The way was known to be straight as far as the turn-off.

“I hope we don’t overshoot,” Hugh remarked after what seemed months of blind travel. The robot promptly answered the implied question, in spite of the presence of non-Erthumoi passengers. It must have interpreted the words as an order, missing the implications that the ability to do this might bother the aliens. Fuzzy-logic systems could do that; Hugh hoped they wouldn’t do it too often just yet.

“Seventy-four point three kilometers from the truck’s starting point by the shed is the road distance I was told. We have three point four to go.” If S’Nash and the Locrian read anything more than the literal information in the message, they failed to show it.

By the time two of the kilometers had been covered, the snow had stopped, but the wind had not. It was a biting, turbulent blast from their right — the south — which threatened at times to tip the carriage off its treads, had cleared every particle of loose snow from the road and left its solid surface visible to all, and was making it hard for the three living passengers to keep from blowing away. Above them, Ted was still flying, but his natural skills were being taxed near their limit and his strength even more so.

Every minute or two he would be swept out of sight to their left, to reappear seconds later as the wind eased a little.

Fortunately, the squall lasted less than ten minutes. When it abruptly ended, the Habra settled toward his companions, embraced the tube of the wind-sweeper, and folded his wings.

“I’m not as surprised as I was about that detached wing you found in the Pit,” he remarked. “Mine feel as though they’ve nearly pulled off. Someone who ventured here alone and met turbulence like that could easily have trouble, especially if he wasn’t protected from the cold. Did you find any trace of armor or clothing with that wing?”

“None,” replied Hugh. “I was there when it was excavated. The wing itself was surrounded by the usual bits of plant root you find all through the ice, but nothing artificial.”

S’Nash cut in.

“Did Janice date the plant material as well as the wing tissue?”

“Sure. She’s been doing bits of root all along. The age was the same, as nearly as she could measure.”

“Why would there be only bits, and not complete plants?” asked the Locrian. He was hard to hear; they had passed the region cleared by the wind, and the sweeper was in use again.

“The guess at the moment is that plants like those we see around here put down roots as far as they can to hold themselves in place, until some ice dune covers them and kills them…”

“It doesn’t always kill them,” pointed out S’Nash. “Some of them seem able to separate from their roots and blow away when threatened with burial— the tumbleweeds.”

“True. Well, we’ve found a few complete bush specimens in the ice at various depths. Jan’s been trying to make a depth-against-age table with them and the root fragments she’s dated, but it hasn’t been very consistent so far. Whole plants are usually older-hundreds of Habra years, even a thousand— than the root fragments at the same depth, and the bits themselves vary quite a lot at any given level, and, too, we only have specimens from this particular dig — the stuff the lasers have spotted between the Pits, and the occasional things we’ve actually run into directly as the Pits deepened, like that wing.”

“Precisely.” S’Nash uttered only the single word. Hugh felt sure it was meant more for him than for the others. He would have continued lecturing gladly had he been able to speak, but his fingers were getting tired again, and there was silence for a time as the sweeper carriage trundled along. He wondered how much Eleventh-Worker had taken in.

Hugh knew little of Locrians and their social systems, and couldn’t guess at the interests and mental abilities of someone presumably fairly low on their labor scale, judging by his name. His one question so far had been very much to the point; it would be best to assume that he was grasping everything unless he indicated otherwise, and risk the possibility that embarrassment would prevent his revealing ignorance. It was easy to regard the being as a person, despite his vague resemblance to a four-limbed insect.

“We have two hundred meters to go, if the distance you supplied is correct,” the robot interrupted Hugh’s cogitations at this point. Eleventh-Worker did not wait to be instructed, but peeled back the outer lids and exposed his single eye for full penetration, not bothering to rise or shift position to get a clearer “view” ahead. Hugh watched closely, indifferent to S’Nash’s knowledge of his efforts, but failed to observe anything which he and Janice hadn’t discussed before. The Locrian sense was still a mystery to him.

“Slow down, please,” Eleventh-Worker requested after a moment. “I want to examine everything within twenty meters on each side, and we’re going much too fast for a careful look.”

The robot obeyed without consulting Hugh; he wondered how S’Nash and Eleventh-Worker felt about that. They showed neither surprise nor revulsion nor any other emotion Hugh could read. The Naxian, it seemed likely, had merely recorded the event as another bit of evidence; it/he was, one could reasonably infer, gathering data on how intelligent the “limited decision” robots Hugh had acknowledged using in Pitville might actually be.

“You suspected that the truck stopped for a time in this area.” Eleventh-Worker’s words were a statement, not a question. Hugh agreed. “Stop here. Sweep the snow away for the next fifteen meters along the left side of the road, and an equal distance away from it.”

Again the robot obeyed without waiting for Erthuma confirmation, and the roar of the sweeper battled that of the wind. No heat beam was used this time, and Hugh felt sure that S’Nash was noting the fact and considering its implications about the robot’s intelligence. There were more items for it/him to think about in a few seconds; the loose snow billowing from the surface where the jet of air struck was swept back toward the watchers by the wind, and still without consulting anyone the robot cut off the blast, moved the sweeper around to the upwind side, carefully keeping its tracks off the area described by the Locrian, and resumed operations. Within a minute the patch of bare ice predicted by Hugh appeared from under its white covering, some of the blanket sticking and resisting stubbornly for seconds before flying away in fist-sized chunks.

The exposed surface was not perfectly smooth. Examining it closely, Hugh and the others decided that it must have stayed slushy long enough for blowing snow to be caught and build odd-shaped mounds and towers which had frozen to the substrate far too firmly for the sweeper to remove.

Among these shapes, however, tread marks could be seen and even some motions analyzed. The truck had not come to a stop, paused, and gone straight on: it had made a turn, and Hugh felt he was not yielding too much to wishful thinking in deciding that the turn had been toward Pitville. S’Nash, more objectively, insisted that the truck could have been going either way — that they could, in fact, be examining marks left by Rekchellet more recently.

“We can call him and check how long he stayed at the roadside,” Hugh pointed out. “That’s why I brought the transmitter. We’ll feel less silly, though, if Eleventh-Worker looks around for more signs of stopping, first.”

“I suggest you make the call. Eleventh-Worker make the examination, and I look over this area more broadly,” answered S’Nash. “That should make the best use of time.”

Hugh was at the transmitter before it occurred to him that S’Nash could do the talking much more easily, but both the others were now invisible in the fog which had been thickening in the minutes since the wind had died down. It seemed too much trouble to look for the serpentine form, and obviously the Locrian had to do the examining, so Hugh energized the signal equipment.

Third-Supply-Watcher responded; Rekchellet and his Habra companions were in the air. She was able to assure Hugh that they had not paused at all at the roadside; the automatic driver had guided their truck away for some two hundred meters before reaching a point where surface elevation had changed enough since the vehicle’s earlier passage to make it go on strike over failure to follow its vertical guidance — or less figuratively, had probably interpreted the failure as a malfunction and responded to a built-in stop command. Third-Supply-Watcher could tell precisely how far this was from the road and from where they had left it, if necessary. Hugh decided that it was not, and signed off with appropriate thanks.

He looked around to find himself still alone.

The fog had thickened. He could see for some three meters; nearly all of the sweeper and its carriage, but little else. S’Nash, Eleventh-Worker, and, he suddenly realized, the robot were all out of sight.

He had given the machine no instructions, which made its disappearance interesting, to say the least. One of the two possibilities which came immediately to mind was also disturbing. Hugh had been sitting on the sweeper carriage; now he slipped to the ice, stood up, glanced around carefully, looked at his left wrist, and for the first time realized that he was not carrying an inertial tracker — something he had solemnly sworn, half a Common Year ago, never again to be without on Habranha.

Going back for one now would be neither practical nor productive. Fafnir was intermittently visible, now much nearer the horizon than when it had illuminated Rekchellet’s dive into the snow, and would furnish direction for a while yet if visibility grew no worse. The road surface itself was fairly easy to distinguish — clearance by wind was roughly up with coverage by precipitation for the moment. Looking for people might not be safe, but it was important.

And his code sounder should be audible; the wind was down for the time being, too.

“S’Nash? Eleventh-Worker? Are you close enough to hear me?”

The Locrian answered at once.

“Yes. I have covered about one hundred meters of the north side of the road, to a width of fifty meters and a depth of about three. Should I work the other side, or increase the width or length of my search pattern on this?”

Hugh thought briefly. “Width on that side, I’d say,” he finally pronounced, mentally filing the possibility that the depth represented a Locrian limit. “That’s where things seem to have happened, if anything did. Can you see S’Nash?”

There was a pause, presumably while the worker looked around. “Yes,” came the answer at length. “It/he and the robot are thirty meters to the south of the road, and about fifty to the east of your position, apparently examining something on the ground.”

“Thanks.” The Erthuma took another look at Fafnir and set out toward the still invisible pair. He would have been kicking himself had his armor allowed. So what if he hadn’t brought a tracker? The robot had a built-in location system, and the Naxian had had the sense to use it. There had been no need for the safety chief to worry about losing personnel on this trip — where was Ted? He hadn’t been on the carriage when the talk with the truck had ended.

Well, Hugh hadn’t called him. He’d surely stay within range of the Erthuma’s translator, unless—

He had. He responded at once, and Hugh’s professional worries ceased for the moment. The native assured his chief that all of the party was obvious to his electrical sense, though he couldn’t always actually see them through the fog.

“Can you tell me whether I’m heading toward S’Nash?”

“Not exactly, but you’ll be close enough to see them in a few seconds.”

“Did I start out right, or are they moving?”

“I didn’t notice your start. They aren’t moving now. The Naxian is examining something on the ground.”

It/he was still examining it when Hugh came close enough to see distinctly. The robot was standing a meter or so away, motionless. The man tried to make out what was attracting the other being’s attention, but between the fog and the poor light saw nothing. He turned his own lamp on the surface.

“What’s there?” he keyed. Ted hummed to a landing beside them. S’Nash continued to examine the ice for many seconds before answering.

“I’m not sure,” it/he said at last. “The marks are faint, and many of them obliterated. We’re beyond the edge of the patch melted by the truck, but something has either chipped or melted or pressed small dents in the road ice — little cup-shaped openings. I don’t recognize them at all. What do you make of them?”

“I can’t even see them,” Hugh admitted. “Ted?”

“Nor I.”

“How big are they? I didn’t know your people could see smaller things than mine, but maybe that’s the problem.”

“They’re just over five millimeters across. There are a lot of small bumps and pits made by snow-flakes which stuck or liquid drops which froze when they hit, and these are mixed in with them. I distinguish them only by their regularity. They form a pattern — so.” A handler extended from the tubular armor and indicated, one after another, a row of dimples in the ice which answered his description. Hugh shook his head.

“I’d never have made those out from the rest of the marks. You think they’re a track of some sort?”

“Can you see the pattern, Ted?” asked the Naxian. The Habra answered negatively.

“That’s interesting. I don’t know what they are. Hugh. A track is the best word I can think of, but I have no idea what made them.”

“How far have you followed them?”

“They start at the edge of the melted surface left by the truck and end here.”

“And they’re perfectly uniform all the way? That’s — oh, thirty meters or so?”

“About that. No, they’re not all exactly equally spaced, and they’re not all along perfect lines, but they’re all — I can’t come up with a word. They’re related. That’s the best I can say.” S’Nash looked briefly at the robot, but if it/he had planned to address it, the intention was dropped before anything was said.

“Do you think someone or something left the truck at this point?” asked Hugh bluntly.

“I have no opinion. Something could have, certainly. This could be a trace, but so far it’s no help. I don’t know what it could be a trace of.”

The Erthuma hesitated, then turned to the robot.

“Make a record, to hundredth-millimeter precision, of the marks pointed out by S’Nash.”

“I fail to distinguish them from the other marks.”

“S’Nash will indicate the strip in which they lie. Record the entire strip.”

The Naxian extended its/his gleaming armored body in a straight line. “Parallel to this, near side thirty centimeters to my right, twenty wide, starting at my tail and moving forward to my head. You should probably include my image for scale.”

“That will not be needed. Absolute measurements will be included in the record.”

“All right. When you reach my head, stop, and I’ll go forward to mark the next segment, and so on.”

The robot made no verbal response to this, but followed the instructions. Within a minute it reported the record complete.

“All right,” keyed Hugh. “We could spend hours here, but I doubt we’d find anything more. Can any of you suggest anything specific before we go back to town?”

Ted spoke up rather diffidently.

“We seem convinced that the tractor stopped here for a time, after traveling to some part of the Solid Ocean. Right?”

“Right.” Code and translated words mingled.

“Then some of the melted ice might contain plant remains from wherever it had been earlier. Should we not collect some of the frozen material, to be checked for root varieties?”

“We don’t know how species vary on the different parts of the dark hemisphere,” objected S’Nash.

“Not yet,” answered the Habra. “If what we gather here shows any difference, we will have something to look for.”

Hugh and the Locrian agreed eagerly, while S’Nash acknowledged its/his own error with less enthusiasm. They were not equipped with proper containers or labeling materials, but they were only about seventy-five kilometers from Pitville. Ted winged eagerly away, and returned, having exceeded by a wide margin what Hugh had thought was his species’ speed limit, in less than two hours with a sack carried in his handlers.

This proved to contain fully a hundred small transparent envelopes, each already numbered, and a large recording sheet. The others had filled the time by extending the search area, but not even Eleventh-Worker had found anything except the place where the autodriver had stopped the truck. This had left another sheet of ice, but no markings of the sort S’Nash had found at the road.

“Janice says to fill every one of the bags, and if any record is ambiguous you know what she’ll do,” the native reported to Hugh. “She says that any clue to what part of the truck anything fell from will be helpful. She also wants at least twenty chips of plain ice from the melted area, with no plant remains visible in it.”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” answered Hugh.

“Visible to whom?” queried Eleventh-Worker.

‘Tin sure she meant me,” replied the Erthuma. “I doubt there’s anything on the planet in which you couldn’t spot impurities.”

“You flatter me. I have no reason to believe that my resolving power is any better than your own. I am merely less hampered by what you find to be obstacles.” Hugh filed this remark as well.

“All right. Let’s dig. S’Nash, point out one of those track marks, or whatever they are, please; I’ll chip it out complete for the lab, too.”

The Naxian complied, and in due course the envelopes were filled. “Due course” meant a fortunate twenty minutes of absolutely still, clear air; another twenty of rising fog, while Fafnir slowly sank behind a hill to the northwest; and ten of increasing wind which cleared the view again but threatened to broadcast the collecting envelopes over the snowscape. Two of them were indeed snatched from unprepared hands to vanish against the dimly lit whiteness, but they were of nonconducting material, quickly picked up a frictional charge as they blew across the snow, and were found easily enough by Ted.

Hugh suspected that the Naxian was a little disappointed by this, and that it/he would have liked to make another test of the robot’s powers. The Erthuma was just as glad that nothing of the sort had happened. He didn’t want things to go too fast.

They restored the envelopes to Ted’s bag and sent him back to the settlement and Janice. The ground travelers boarded the sweeper caisson and returned more slowly. It would be half of another Common Day before Fafnir really set, but the sunlet was now behind hills nearly all the time, and the road was almost completely dark. The organic members of the group were tired and hungry, but still reasonably alert. Hugh called the truck twice during the trip to learn whether Rekchellet had found anything.

The first answer was a simple negative from the Crotonite himself, who chanced to be inside and resting, though about to go out again.

The second, a little over an hour later, was answered by Third-Supply-Watcher. Hugh was exhausted enough to react only very slowly to the report that all the fliers were out of sight and had not communicated since Rekchellet’s last departure from the vehicle.

However slow, the reaction was violent enough. The robot’s inability to get more speed out of the caisson they were riding made it worse. For an instant, Hugh considered taking it on the track of the other vehicle. Then sanity prevailed. The trail was unmarked, and even though both he and S’Nash were wearing recycling suits Eleventh-Worker was not. They were simply not prepared for an indefinite trip. There were supplies on the truck itself, but no assurance that they could find it; the communicator, as a by-product of its near-instantaneous signal speed, could not be lined up — all direction-finding devices from the earliest radio days had depended basically on the fact that the carrier impulse reached one side of a loop antenna or similar structure measurably earlier than the other. The Habras with Rekchellet and the truck also seemed to be gone even if Ted could get close enough to talk to them directly.

Hugh ordered the robot to take them back to Pitville at the greatest possible speed.

A little later he explored the idea of sending the robot alone to the truck’s aid. The machine, however, had only auditory communication, understood only Hugh’s own language and code, and carried no translator. Also, it was probably not a good idea to entrust an artificial intelligence with that much responsibility in front of S’Nash and Eleventh-Worker.

The Naxian and Locrian had heard the message from the truck. Ted presumably had not. Hugh now called the Habra down and explained the situation. The native, not surprisingly, responded with a plan of action.

“I’ll head over in the general direction they were going and try to get in touch with Walt and Crow,” he said promptly. “If you keep that light on at its present power and spread I can find you again more easily than by field alone. I can’t hear you or talk to you from very far, of course, but as long as the air is clear I can see that light from many kilometers away, and I’ll have no trouble sensing the carrier and robot from three or four at least. Ask Third-Supply-Watcher to call you right away if any of the fliers reports in, so you can tell me when I get back in touch.”

“All right. If possible, come back over us to report, even negatively, every few minutes, please. It may help to know what areas we don’t have to cover with an all-out search.”

“I understand.”

Hugh turned back to the transmitter to send Ted’s request, and found himself getting no response from the truck. After several minutes of this, he rather foolishly asked the robot whether they were going as fast as possible. He was told that they were. The machine did not add anything like, “Of course,” or, “As you ordered,” but Hugh was sure that S’Nash was reading the embarrassment which washed over the Erthuma’s sense of anger and helplessness.

Frustratingly, the air remained clear; visibility was hemmed in only by the surrounding snow dunes. At first, some of their tops were still brightened by the last rays of Fafnir, but these became fewer and fewer until only a few high cirrus clouds were illuminated.

After about a quarter of an hour they heard Ted’s voice.

“I’ve covered only about twenty kilometers. I stayed low and looked closely. Have you heard from anyone?”

Hugh reported that the truck seemed to be missing, too.

“Would it be wise for me to climb to, say, a kilometer, which is about my limit in these clothes, and sense only for the truck, and examine it when I find it, then report back to you, before looking further for the fliers — who may be moving around anyway?”

“That seems a good idea, Ted.” Hugh glanced up and caught a brief glimpse of the slender figure silhouetted against the faintly lit clouds.

If the truck were really missing, something worrisome was going on. Hugh had refused to let himself get really concerned about the fliers, who might merely have found something interesting and be trying to find out what it was before reporting, but a dozen tons of surface-bound metal had no business vanishing, or even letting itself get buried, which was the easiest way for it to disappear. It might conceivably have been lifted off the planet by a spacecraft, but surely the Locrian would have considered that worth reporting. If she could.

Hugh made four more efforts to call Third-Supply-Watcher before the caisson brought them back to the warehouse. None got any answer. By arrival time, Hugh had a formal search fairly well planned. Finding Ged Barrar checking out the frozen Habra body was extremely convenient. He saw no reason to wonder about the administrator’s activity, which seemed perfectly in character. The Samian had no obvious special observing or measuring equipment on or in his skeletonlike walker, but this meant nothing; Hugh knew nothing about the species’ natural sensory equipment, and couldn’t even identify the “eyes” of the machine.

The Erthuma wasted no time on courtesy.

“I’m going to commit all my fliers to a search,” he keyed as the caisson came to a stop. “We’ll have to reschedule some sentry assignments. Also, I may need one of the transport aircraft — possibly; I don’t know yet whether I’ll have to go along myself.”

“What has changed?” came the slow response.

Hugh summarized the events of the last few hours. Barrar said nothing for half a minute; the Erthuma impatiently let the slow Samian thoughts wind to their next question.

“Is it necessary to find the truck? We know whose it is, and they are not really our problem.”

“Third-Supply-Watcher is my problem. So are Rekchellet and the Habras with him, though I admit they may not be with the truck and are likely to turn up by themselves. The Locrian needs to be found, in my judgment.”

There was another pause. “I agree. I approve your commitment of the flying personnel. Whether I can free an aircraft is another matter; I will have to get back to the office to check their status.”

“Can’t you just ask Spreadsheet-Thinker from here?”

“I prefer not to interrupt her cogitations. I’ll let you know as quickly as I can.” Barrar strode deliberately away.

Hugh had to be content with this, or at least to make the best he could of it. He unloaded the transmitter from the caisson by himself, dismissed robot and sweeper, left the communication device at the warehouse door, and headed slowly back to his own office — even more slowly than the Samian; so slowly as to be striding almost erect, instead of with the forward slant of an Erthuma in low gravity. His mind was very busy.

S’Nash writhed along just behind him, also silent.

There was a neutrino transmitter in the safety office, and Hugh made another futile attempt to get in touch with the truck. He decided against calling Barrar, who was presumably doing as much as he could to fulfill his promise. Hugh could have demanded one for emergency use, as he had at the time of the Pit accident, but he was not quite sure that this, even now, was a life-and-death emergency.

Not quite. Third-Supply-Watcher had a communicator at hand; why hadn’t she used it?

Perhaps she couldn’t.

Perhaps she didn’t want to.

And any imagination, especially if freed from the chains of normal discipline by the acid of worry, could produce an indefinitely large set of possible reasons for either situation.

Hugh firmly welded the chains back together, and began calling his safety people. He also put S’Nash to work rescheduling the sentry assignments of the nonflying members of his staff. If the Naxian preferred hanging around in what should be its/his free time, it/he might as well be put to useful work, especially if Naxians were going to form almost the whole of the sentry crews for some dozens of hours to come.

Moments after he started calling, a Habra appeared at the office air lock and cycled himself through. Hugh didn’t look carefully enough.

“Ted! What have you found?”

“This is Walt. We haven’t seen Ted. Hugh, there’s something strange going on.”

The Erthuma recovered from his surprise, resisted the temptation to respond sarcastically in code, and confined his reply to “What?”

“Rek was flying well ahead of us and higher than we can go, when he called to ask if we could see a light coming our way. We did, and he said to watch but not get too close while he looked it over. We agreed. We couldn’t see very well, of course, but could sense a dozen or so people flying with the light. We were expecting him to tell us what was happening. After he closed with the group, he said they were all going down. We followed, and they landed far ahead of the truck. A few seconds later his translator cut off. Then the whole group suddenly left in many different directions. We went in immediately but couldn’t sense Rek’s equipment, and it was too dark in the shadows to see him on the ground if he was there, and it was starting to fog in. We neither saw nor sensed anything. We spent a long time searching a five-kilometer radius, since the fog turned to snow. Then we decided it wasn’t wise to stay out of touch so long, so we went back to the truck. We couldn’t get in.” “What?”

“The outer door controls wouldn’t work. It had stopped. We could see into the driver’s section, and a Locrian was there, but we couldn’t tell who; they all look alike to us.”