"I've found how to remove the helmets," he cried, "by inserting a small rod that locks the lever resting against the skull. We...."
"No time for that now," he told the animat, paying no heed to the battered control case Onin held gingerly in his long fingers. "The Frogs are attacking!"
They sprawled atop the wreckage of what had been the Sun Maiden, their puny expoders sending their explosive needles at the blurred shapes that crept out of the fog's pall.
Down below the two women guarded the airlock with the two other expoders, and with them waited the club-armed animats.
"Y'know, Onin," Jay said, touching the button that sent a short burst into the butrads crawling closer, "I'm beginning to believe that we're not animats."
The lanky animat gulped. "Huh? You think we're human?"
"Sounds reasonable. Your knowledge of the control case—of which I'd know little or nothing. And I know about the butrads, all their little strategies. Even Venus seems familiar."
"But we don't know our own names. Just numbers. I'll confess I know little about Venus or its fauna. But I remember Blake City on Mars. I can describe the laboratories of the university."
Jay stitched a burst of needles across a trio of the grotesque froglike natives. Two flattened where they lay to move not again and the third raced for the fog's shield.