“Here.” He indicated the same spot as well as he could with a handler, and the paper turned brown before he hastily snatched it away. Then he remembered something else. “Not tomorrow. Not one day after now. Two days.” Mr. Wing frowned.
“Not tomorrow?”
“No. Two days. Go now; cold.” And Sallman Ken turned, took the extra radio from the cargo compartment, placed it on the ground, said, “Carry!” and addressed himself to the task of attaching himself to the torpedo once more. He had detached himself, in spite of his original plan, when he found that he could not reach the cargo compartment while chained to the hull of the carrier.
The native mercifully said nothing as he completed this task. As a matter of fact, Mr. Wing was too dumbfounded at this turn of events to say anything; and even the children wondered how he had done it. Ken rose into the air amid a dead silence, until the two youngest children remembered their training and shrilled, “Goodbye!” after the vanishing form. He barely heard the words, but was able to guess at the meaning.
Back at the Karella, his first care was to get the vivarium inside. He had already evacuated the space between the walls by opening a small valve for a time during the journey through space; now he started the refrigerator, and refused to take his eyes from the inside thermometer until he had satisfied himself that all fluctuation had ceased. Then, and then only, did he start going over the tape record with Feth to make sure he remembered the hundred or so words he had been taught during his brief dive. Laj Drai, rather to Ken’s surprise, forbore to interrupt, though Feth said he had listened carefully during the entire stay on the planet. During this session, Ken managed to tell the mechanic what he had done with the radio, and the latter agreed that it had been a wise move. There was now no need to fear a casual check on the contents of the torpedo by Drai or Lee.
It seemed that Ken had been more convincing than he had expected, in his speech to Drai just before leaving. He had been a little surprised when the boss had failed to interrupt him after his return; now he found that Drai had been itching to do just that, but had been afraid of putting himself in the wrong again. The moment the conference between Ken and Feth came to an end, he was at the scientist’s side, asking for an eyewitness account to supplement what he had heard on the radio.
“I really need a camera to give a good idea of appearances,” Ken replied. “I seem to have been wrong about their size; the ones I saw before appear to have been children. The adults are a trifle bulkier than we are.
“I don’t think the language is going to be difficult, and it looks as though this group, at least, is very cooperative.” He told about the help he had received in making the plant collection.
“I was looking at that,” said Drai. “I don’t suppose any of those things is what we’re after?”
“No, unless they use different names for the living plant and the product. They named each of these to me as they set them in, and you’d have heard as well as I if they’d said ‘tofacco’ once.” Drai seemed thoughtful for a moment before he spoke again.