Part 40 (1/2)

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, brus.h.i.+ng aside the tall, rank gra.s.s.

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 s.h.i.+ning 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.

”Hm.” Lydia McCue crumbled the material in her hand. She got down and crawled under the machine to examine which parts had been affected. Finally she emerged and sat next to Robert.

”It could prove useful. But there would still be the problem of a delivery system. We don't dare venture out of the mountains to spray the t.i.ttle bugs over Gubru equipment in Port Helenia.

”Also, bio-sabotage weapons are very short term in their effectiveness. They have to be used all at once and by surprise, since countermeasures are usually swift and effective. After a few weeks, the bugs would be neutralized-chemically, with coatings, or by cloning another beastie to eat ours.

”Still,” she turned another piece over and looked up to smile at Robert. ”This is great. What you did here before, and now this . . . These are the right ways to fight guerrilla war! I like it. We'll find a way to use it.”

Her smile was so open and friendly that Robert couldn't help responding. And in that shared moment he felt a stirring that he had been trying to suppress all day.

d.a.m.n, she's attractive, he realized, miserably. His body was sending him signals more powerful than it ever had in the company of Athaclena. And he barely knew this woman! He didn't love her. He wasn't bound up with her, as he was with his Tymbrimi consort.

And yet his mouth was dry and his heart beat faster as she looked at him, this narrow-eyed, thin-nosed, tall-browed, female human. . . .

”We'd better be heading home,” he said quickly. ”Go ahead and take some samples, lieutenant. We'll test them back at base.”

He ignored her long look as he stood up and signaled to Elsie. Soon, with specimens stowed away in their packs, they were climbing once more toward the spine-stones. The watchful guards showed obvious relief as they shouldered their rifles and leaped back into the trees.

Robert followed his escort with little attention to the path. He was trying not to think of the other member of his own race walking beside him, so he frowned and kept himself banked in behind a brumous cloud of his own thoughts.

59 Fiben Fiben and Gailet sat near each other under the unblinking regard of masked Gubru technicians, who focused their instruments on the two chims with dispa.s.sionate, clinical precision. Multi-lensed globes and flat-plate phrased arrays floated on all sides, peering down at them. The testing chamber was a jungle of glistening tubes and s.h.i.+ny-faced machinery, all antiseptic and sterile.

Still, the place reeked of alien bird. Fiben's nose wrinkled, and once again he disciplined himself to avoid thinking unfriendly thoughts about the Gubru. Certainly several of the imposing machines must be psi detectors. And while it was doubtful they could actually ”read his mind,” the Galactics certainly would be able to trace his surface att.i.tudes.

Fiben reached for something else to think about. He leaned to his left and spoke to Gailet.

”Um, I talked to Sylvie before they came for us this morning. She told me she hasn't been back to the Ape's Grape since that night I first came to Port Helenia.”

Gailet turned to look at Fiben. Her expression was tense, disapproving.

”So? Games like that striptease of hers may be obsolete now, but I'm sure the Gubru are finding other ways to use her unique talents.”

”She's refused to do anything like that since then, Gailet. Honestly. I can't see why you're so hostile toward her.”

”And I find it hard to understand how you can be so friendly with one of our jailers!” Gailet snapped. ”She's a probationer and a collaborator!”

Fiben shook his head. ”Actually, Sylvie's not really a probie at all, nor even a gray or yellow. She has a green repro-card. She joined them because-”

*'l don't give a d.a.m.n what her reasons were! Oh, I can imagine what sort of sob story she's told you, you big dope, while she batted her eyelashes and softened you up for-”

From one of the nearby machines came a low, atonal voice. ”Young neo-chimpanzee sophonts . . . be still. Be still, young clients . . .” it soothed.

Gailet swiveled to face forward, her jaw set.

Fiben blinked. I wish I understood her better, he thought. Half the time he had no idea what would set Gailet off.

It was Gailet's moodiness that had started him talking with Sylvie in the first place, simply for company. He wanted to explain that to Gailet, but decided it would do no good. Better to wait. She would come out of this funk. She always did.

Only an hour ago they had been laughing, jostling each other while they fumbled with a complicated mechanical puzzle. For a few minutes they had been able to forget the staring mechanical and alien eyes while they worked as a team, sorting and resorting the pieces and arranging them together. When they stood back at last and looked on the completed tower they had made, they both knew that they had surprised the note-takers. In that moment of satisfaction, Gailet's hand had slipped, innocently and affectionately, into his.

Imprisonment was like that. Part of the time, Fiben actually felt as if he were profiting from the experience. It was the first time in his life, for instance, that he'd ever really had time to just sit and think. Their captors now let them have books, and he was catching up on quite a few volumes he'd always wanted to read. Conversations with Gailet had opened up the arcane world of alienology. He, in turn, had spoken to her of the great work being done here on Garth, delicately nudging a ruined ecosystem back toward health.

But then, all too common, had been die long, darker intervals, when the hours dragged on and on. A pall hung over them at such times. The walls seemed to close in, and conversation always came back to the War] to memories of their failed insurrection, to lost friends and gloomy speculations over the fate of Earth itself.

At such times, Fiben thought he might trade all hope of a long life for just an hour to run free under trees and clean sky.

So even this new routine of testing by the Gubru had come as a relief for both of them. At least it was a distraction.

Without warning, the machines suddenly pulled away, opening an avenue in front of their bench. ”We are finished, finished. . . . You have done well, done well, you have . . . Now follow the globe, follow it, toward transportation.”

As Fiben and Gailet stood up, a brown, octahedral projection took form in front of them. Without looking at each other they followed the hologram past the silent, brooding avian technicians, out of the testing chamber, and down a long hallway.

Service robots swept past them with the soft whisper of well-tuned machinery. Once a Kwackoo technician darted out of an office door, favored them with a startled look, then ducked back inside. At last Fiben and Gailet pa.s.sed through a hissing portal and emerged into bright suns.h.i.+ne. Fiben had to shade his eyes. The day was fair, but with a bite that seemed to say that brief summer was now well on its way out. The chims he could see in the streets, beyond the Gubru compound, were wearing light sweaters and sneakers, another sure sign that autumn was near.

None of the chims looked their way. The distance was too great for Fiben to tell anything of their mood, or to hope that somebody might recognize him or Gailet.

”We won't be riding the same car back,” whispered Gailet. And she motioned down a long parapet toward the landing ramp below. Sure enough, the tan military van that had brought them had been replaced by a large, roofless hover barge. An ornate pedestal stood in the open deck behind the pilot's station. Kwackoo servitors adjusted a sunshade to keep the fierce light of Gimelhai off their master's beak and crest.

The large Gubru was recognizable. Its thick, faintly luminous plumage looked s.h.a.ggier than the last time they had seen it, in the furtive darkness of their suburban prison. The effect was to make it seem even more different than the run-of-the-mill Gubru functionaries they had seen. In some places the allochroous feathers had begun to appear frayed, tattered. The avian aristocrat wore a striped collar. It paced impatiently atop its perch.

”Well, well,” Fiben muttered. ”If it ain't our old friend, the Somethin' of Good Housekeeping.”

Gailet snorted in something just short of a small laugh. ”It's called the Suzerain of Propriety,” she reminded him. ”The striped tore means it's the leader of the priestly caste. Now just you remember to behave yourself. Try not to scratch too much, and watch what I do.”