“It can waste time.”

  “I wonder what they eat. I don’t see any mouths.”

  “Those tentacles look like capillary suckers. I bet they are parasites, or overgrown leeches, or something else like one of my competitors. Come along.”

  “What do we do after we’ve established which species could possibly be the crew?” said Torrance. “Try to communicate with each in turn?”

  “Not much use, that. They hide because they don’t want to communicate. Unless we can prove to them we are not Adderkops…but hard to see how.”

  “Wait! Why’d they conceal themselves at all, if they’ve had contact with the Adderkops? It wouldn’t work.”

  “I think I tell you that, by damn,” said van Rijn. “To give them a name, let us call this unknown race the Eksers. So. The Eksers been traveling space for some time, but space is so big they never bumped into humans. Then the Adderkop nation arises, in this sector where humans never was before. The Eksers hear about this awful new species which has gotten into space also. They land on primitive planets where Adderkops have made raids, talk to natives, maybe plant automatic cameras where they think raids will soon come, maybe spy on Adderkop camps from afar or capture a lone Adderkop ship. So they know what humans look like, but not much else. They do not want humans to know about them, so they shun contact; they are not looking for trouble. Not before they are well prepared to fight a war, at least. Hell’s sputtering griddles! Torrance, we have got to establish our bona fides with this crew, so they take us to Freya and afterward go tell their leaders all humans are not so bad as the slime-begotten Adderkops. Otherwise, maybe we wake up one day with some planets attacked by Eksers, and before the fighting ends, we have spent billions of credits.” He shook his fists in the air and bellowed like a wounded bull. “It is our duty to prevent this!”

  “Our first duty is to get home alive, I’d say,” Torrance answered curtly. “I have a wife and kids.”

  “Then stop throwing sheepish eyes at Jeri Kofoed. I saw her first.”

  The search turned up one more possibility. Four organisms the length of a man and the build of thick-legged caterpillars dwelt under greenish light. Their bodies were dark blue, spotted with silver. A torso akin to that of the tentacled centauroids, but stockier, carried two true arms. The hands lacked thumbs, but six fingers arranged around a three-quarter circle could accomplish much the same things. Not that adequate hands prove effective intelligence; on Earth, not only simians but a number of reptiles and amphibia boast as much, even if a man has the best, and man’s apish ancestors were as well equipped in this respect as we are today. However, the round flat-faced heads of these beings, the large bright eyes beneath feathery antennae of obscure function, the small jaws and delicate lips, all looked promising.

  Promising of what? thought Torrance.

  Three Earth-days later, he hurried down a central corridor toward the Ekser engine room.

  The passage was a great hemicylinder lined with the same rubbery gray plastic as the cages, making footfalls silent and spoken words weirdly unresonant. But a deeper vibration went through it, the almost subliminal drone of the hyperengine, driving the ship into darkness toward an unknown star, and announcing their presence to any hunter straying within a light-year of them. The fluoros strung by the humans were far apart, so that one passed through bands of humming shadow. Doorless rooms opened off the hallway. Some were still full of supplies, and however peculiar the shape of tools and containers might be, however unguessable their purpose, this was a reassurance that one still lived, was not yet a ghost aboard the Flying Dutchman. Other cabins, however had been inhabited. And their bareness made Torrance’s skin crawl.

  Nowhere did a personal trace remain. Books, both codex and micro, survived, but in the finely printed symbology of a foreign planet. Empty places on the shelves suggested that all illustrated volumes had been sacrificed. Certainly he could see where pictures stuck on the walls had been ripped down. In the big private cabins in the still larger one which might have been a saloon as well as in the engine room and workshop and bridge, only the bollards to which furniture had been bolted were left. Long low niches and small cubbyholes were built into the cabin bulkheads, but when bedding had been thrown into a white-hot cauldron, how could a man guess which were the bunks…if either kind were? Clothing, ornaments, cooking and eating utensils, everything was destroyed. One room must have been a lavatory, but the facilities had been ripped out. Another might have been used for scientific studies, presumably of captured animals, but was so gutted that no human was certain.

  By God, you’ve got to admire them, Torrance thought. Captured by beings whom they had every reason to think of as conscienceless monsters, the aliens had not taken the easy way out, the atomic explosion that would annihilate both crews. They might have, except for the chance of this being a zoo ship. But given a hope of survival, they snatched it, with an imaginative daring few humans could have matched. Now they sat in plain view, waiting for the monsters to depart—without wrecking their ship in mere spitefulness—or for a naval vessel of their own to rescue them. They had no means of knowing their captors were not Adderkops, or that this sector would soon be filled with Adderkop squadrons; the bandits rarely ventured even this close to Valhalla. Within the limits of available information, the aliens were acting with complete logic. But the nerve it took!

  I wish we could identify them and make friends, thought Torrance. The Eksers would be damned good friends for Earth to have. Or Ramanujan, or Freya, or the entire Polesotechnic League. With a lopsided grin: I’ll bet they’d be nowhere near as easy to swindle as Old Nick thinks. They might well swindle him. That I’d love to see!

  My reason is more personal, though, he thought with a return of bleakness. If we don’t clear up this misunderstanding soon, neither they nor we will be around. I mean soon. If we have another three or four days of grace, we’re lucky.

  The passage opened on a well, with ramps curving down either side to a pair of automatic doors. One door led to the engine room, Torrance knew. Behind it, a nuclear converter powered the ship’s electrical system, gravitic cones, and hyperdrive; the principles on which this was done were familiar to him, but the actual machines were engines cased in metal and in foreign symbols. He took the other door, which opened on a workshop. A good deal of the equipment here was identifiable however distorted to his eyes: lathe, drill press, oscilloscope, crystal tester. Much else was mystery. Yamamura sat at an improvised workbench, fitting together a piece of electronic apparatus. Several other devices, haywired on breadboards, stood close by. His face was shockingly haggard, and his hands trembled. He’d been laboring this whole time, stimpills holding him awake.

  As Torrance approached, the engineer was talking with Betancourt, the communications man. The entire crew of the Hebe G.B. were under Yamamura’s direction, in a frantic attempt to outflank the Eksers by learning on their own how to operate this ship.

  “I’ve identified the basic electrical arrangement, sir.” Betancourt was saying. “They don’t tap the converter directly like us; evidently they haven’t developed our stepdown methods. Instead, they use a heat exchanger to run an extremely large generator—yeah, the same thing you guessed was an armature-type dynamo—and draw AC for the ship off that. Where DC is needed, the AC passes through a set of rectifier plates which, by looking at ’em, I’m sure must be copper oxide. They’re bare, behind a safety screen, though so much current goes through that they’re too hot to look at close up. It all seems kind of primitive to me.”

  “Or else merely different,” sighed Yamamura. “We use a light-element fusion converter, one of whose advantages is that it can develop electric current directly. They may have perfected a power plant which utilizes moderately heavy elements with small positive packing fractions. I remember that was tried on Earth a long while ago, and given up as impractical. But maybe the Eksers are better engineers than us. Such a system would have the advantage of needing less refinement of fuel—which’d be a real advantage to a ship knocking about among unexplored planets. Maybe enough to justify that clumsy heat exchanger and rectifier system. We simply don’t know.”

  He stared head-shakingly at the wires he was soldering. “We don’t know a damn thing,” he said. Seeing Torrance: “Well, carry on, Freeman Betancourt. And remember, festina lente.”

  “For fear of wrecking the ship?” asked the captain.

  Yamamura nodded. “The Eksers would’ve known a small craft like ours couldn’t generate a big enough hyperforce field to tug their own ship home,” he replied. “So they’ll have made sure no prize crew could make off with it. Some of the stuff may be booby-trapped to wreck itself if it isn’t handled just right; and how’d we ever make repairs? Hence we’re proceeding with the utmost caution. So cautiously that we haven’t a prayer of figuring out the controls before the Adderkops find us.”

  “It keeps the crew busy, though.”

  “Which is useful. Uh-huh. Well, sir, I’ve about got my basic apparatus set up. Everything seems to test okay. Now, let me know which animal you want to investigate first.” As Torrance hesitated, the engineer explained: “I have to adapt the equipment for the creature in question, you see. Especially if it’s a hydrogen breather.”

  Torrance shook his head. “Oxygen. In fact, they live under conditions so much like ours that we can walk right into their cages. The gorilloids. That’s what Jeri and I have named them. Those woolly, two-meter-tall bipeds with the ape faces.”

  Yamamura made an ape face of his own. “Brutes that powerful? Have they shown any sign of intelligence?”

  “No. But then, would you expect the Eksers to? Jeri Kofoed and I have been parading in front of the cages of the possible species, making signs, drawing pictures, everything we could think of, trying to get the message across that we are not Adderkops and the genuine article is chasing us. No luck, of course. All the animals did give us an interested regard, though except the gorilloids…which may or may not prove anything.”

  “What animals, now? I’ve been so blinking busy—”

  “Well, we call ’em the tiger apes, the tentacle centaurs, the elephantoid, the helmet beasts, and the caterpiggles. That’s stretching things, I know; the tiger apes and the helmet beasts are highly improbable, to say the least, and the elephantoid isn’t much more convincing. The gorilloids have the right size and the most effective-looking hands, and they’re oxygen breathers, as I said, so we may well take them first. Next in order of likelihood, I’d guess, are the caterpiggles and the tentacle centaurs. But the caterpiggles, though oxygen breathers, are from a high-gravity planet; their air pressure would give us narcosis in no time. The tentacle centaurs breathe hydrogen. In either case, we’d have to work in space armor.”

  “The gorilloids will be quite bad enough, thank you kindly.”

  Torrance looked at the workbench. “What exactly do you plan to do?” he asked. “I’ve been too busy with my own end of this affair to learn any details of yours.”

  “I’ve adapted some things from the medical kit,” said Yamamura. “A sort of ophthalmoscope, for example, because the ship’s instruments use color codes and finely printed symbols, so that the Eksers are bound to have eyes at least as good as ours. Then this here’s a nervous-impulse tracer. It detects synaptic flows and casts a three-dimensional image into yonder crystal box, shows us the whole nervous system functioning as a set of luminous traces. By correlating this with gross anatomy, we can roughly identify the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems—or their equivalents—I hope. And the brain. And, what’s really to the point, the degrees of brain activity more or less independent of the other nerve paths. That is, whether the animal is thinking.”

  He shrugged. “It tests out fine on me. Whether it’ll work on a nonhuman, especially in a different sort of atmosphere, I do not know. I’m sure it’ll develop bugs.”

  “‘We can but try,” ’ quoted Torrance wearily.

  “I suppose Old Nick is sitting and thinking,” said Yamamura in an edged voice. “I haven’t seen him for quite some time.”

  “He’s not been helping Jeri and me either,” said Torrance. “Told us our attempt to communicate was futile until we could prove to the Eksers that we know who they are. And even after that, he said, the only communication at first will be by gestures made with a pistol.”

  “He’s probably right.”

  “He’s not right! Logically, perhaps, but not psychologically. Or morally. He sits in his suite with a case of brandy and a box of cigars. The cook, who could be down here helping you, is kept aboard the yacht to fix him his damned gourmet meals. You’d think he didn’t care if we’re blown out of the sky!”

  He remembered his oath of fealty, his official position, and so on and so on. They felt nonsensical, here on the edge of extinction. But habit was strong. He swallowed and said harshly, “Sorry. Please ignore what I said. When you’re ready, Freeman Yamamura, we’ll test the gorilloids.”

  Six men and Jeri stood by in the passage with drawn blasters. Torrance hoped fervently they wouldn’t have to shoot. He hoped even more that if they did have to, he’d still be alive.

  He gestured to the four crewmen at his back. “Okay, boys.” He wet his lips. His heart thuttered. Being a captain and a Lodgemaster was very fine until moments like this came, when you must make a return for your special privileges.

  He spun the outside control wheel. The airlock motor hummed and opened the doors. He stepped through, into a cage of gorilloids.

  Pressure differentials weren’t enough to worry about, but after all this time at one-fourth G, to enter a field only ten percent less than Earth’s was like a blow. He lurched, almost fell, gasped in an air warm and thick and full of unnamed stenches. Sagging back against the wall, he stared across the floor at the four bipeds. Their brown fleecy bodies loomed unfairly tall, up and up to the coarse faces. Eyes overshadowed by brows glared at him. He clapped a hand on his stun pistol. He didn’t want to shoot it, either. No telling what supersonics might do to a nonhuman nervous system; and if these were in truth the crewfolk, the worst thing he could do was inflict serious injury on one of them. But he wasn’t used to being small and frail. The knurled handgrip was a comfort.

  A male growled deep in his chest, and advanced a step. His pointed head thrust forward, the sphincters in his neck opened and shut like sucking mouths; his jaws gaped to show the white teeth.

  Torrance backed toward a corner. “I’ll try to attract that one in the lead away from the others,” he called softly. “Then get him.”

  “Aye.” A spacehand, a stocky slant-eyed nomad from Altai, uncoiled a lariat. Behind him, the other three spread a net woven for this purpose.

  The gorilloid paused. A female hooted. The male seemed to draw resolution from her. He waved the others back with a strangely humanlike gesture and stalked toward Torrance.

  The captain drew his stunner, pointed it shakily, resheathed it, and held out both hands. “Friends,” he croaked.

  His hope that the masquerade might be dropped became suddenly ridiculous. He sprang back toward the air lock. The gorilloid snarled and snatched at him. Torrance wasn’t fast enough. The hand ripped his shirt open and left a bloody trail on his breast. He went to hands and knees, stabbed with pain. The Altaian’s lasso whirled and snaked forth. Caught around the ankles, the gorilloid crashed. His weight shook the cubicle.

  “Get him! Watch out for his arms! Here—”

  Torrance staggered back to his feet. Beyond the melee, where four men strove to wind a roaring, struggling monster in a net, he saw the remaining three creatures. They were crowded into the opposite corner, howling in basso. The compartment was like the inside of a drum.

  “Get him out,” choked Torrance. “Before the others charge.”

  He aimed his stunner again. If intelligent, they’d know this was a weapon. They might attack anyway…Deftly, the man from Altai roped an arm, snubbed his lariat around the gargantuan torso, and made it fast by a slip knot. The net came into position. Helpless in cords of wire-strong fiber, the gorilloid was dragged to the entrance. Another male advanced, step by jerky step. Torrance stood his ground. The animal ululation and human shouting surfed about him, within him. His wound throbbed. He saw with unnatural clarity the muzzle full of teeth that could snap his head off, the little dull eyes turned red with fury, the hands so much like his own but black-skinned, four-fingered, and enormous…

  “All clear, Skipper!”

  The gorilloid lunged. Torrance scrambled through the air-lock chamber. The giant followed. Torrance braced himself in the corridor and aimed his stun pistol. The gorilloid halted, shivered, looked around in something resembling bewilderment, and retreated. Torrance closed the airlock.

  Then he sat down and trembled.

  Jeri bent over him. “Are you okay?” she breathed. “Oh! You’ve been hurt!”

  “Nothing much,” he mumbled. “Gimme a cigarette.”

  She took one from her belt pouch and said with a crispness he admired, “I suppose it is just a bruise and a deep scratch. But we’d better check it anyway and sterilize. Might be infected.”

  He nodded but remained where he was until he had finished the cigarette. Farther down the corridor Yamamura’s men got their captive secured to a steel framework. Unharmed but helpless, the brute yelped and tried to bite as the engineer approached with his equipment. Returning him to the cubicle afterward was likely to be almost as tough as getting him out.

  Torrance rose. Through the transparent wall, he saw a female gorilloid viciously pulling something to shreds, and realized he had lost his turban when he was knocked over. He sighed. “Nothing much we can do till Yamamura gives us a verdict,” he said. “Come on, let’s go rest awhile.”

  “Sick bay first,” said Jeri firmly. She took his arm. They went to the entry hole, through the tube, and into the steady half-weight of the Hebe G.B. which van Rijn preferred. Little was said while Jeri got Torrance’s shirt off, swabbed the wound with universal disinfectant, which stung like hell, and bandaged it. Afterward he suggested a drink.