The Karella had indeed left the earth’s atmosphere, but had not returned to her previous height. Two-way communication had been re-established — Ken wished he knew just when — and Feth was once more controlling the torpedo which carried the scientist. The process of getting aboard was no more complicated than usual. Ken left the two “live” boxes in the air lock for the time being, having set their refrigerators to the same power as the first had seemed to require; the other two, partly filled with mineral specimens, he brought inside. Drai greeted him rather sourly as he emerged from his metal chrysalis.
“So you’re finally back. What did you get, if anything?” Ken eyed him with the closest approach to a defiant expression he had yet worn.
“Very little. Thanks to the slight distraction you seem to have engineered, the natives had other things to do than talk to me.”
“How was I to know that the ship’s hull would set off a chain reaction in the local vegetation? I should think if anything could do it, it would have happened long ago from some other cause.”
“I seem to recall telling you of the danger myself. And it may have happened before; the natives seemed to have fairly well organized means of dealing with it.”
“Then the fire is out?”
“Not quite. It will probably react for some hours yet. What I dislike is your habit of assuming that I am either a liar or a fool. I told you what happened to the piece of vegetation I picked up; I told you what I was doing with the native in the matter of learning his language. You were listening to me most if not all of the time. What possessed you to come down the way you did?”
“Because I doubted what you told me.” Drai made the statement without circumlocution; he apparently felt he was on secure ground. “You said that there had been no talk between you and the native on the subject of tofacco; you even said that you doubted that this was the same native we’ve been trading with.”
“I said I wasn’t sure he was the same. That’s minor, though — go ahead.”
“The first day, while you were down talking to him, the signal came from the fixed transmitter, indicating that they were ready to trade.”