“I see. Hot,” replied Mr. Wing.
“No. Cold.” Ken paused, seeking words. “Little hot. Hot to you. Hot to—” he waved a sleeve of his armor in a wide circle—”plants, these things. Cold to me.”
Don muttered to his father, “If he regards Mercury as too cold for comfort, he must come from the inside of a volcano somewhere. Most astronomers are satisfied that there’s no planet closer to the sun, and he didn’t show one on his diagram, you’ll notice.”
“It would be nice if we knew just how hot he liked it,” agreed the older man. He was about to address Ken again in the hope of finding out something on this point when a burst of alien speech suddenly boomed from the torpedo’s speaker. Even to Ken, it carried only partial meaning.
“Ken! This—” Just those two words, in Feth’s voice; then the transmission ceased with the click that accompanies a broken circuit. Ken called Feth’s name several times into his own microphone, but there was no response. He fell silent, and thought furiously.
He suspected from the fact that the natives were simply looking at him that they realized something had gone wrong; but he did not want to worry about their feelings just then. He felt like a diver who had heard a fight start among the crew of his air-pump, and had little attention for anything else. What in the Galaxy were they about, up there? Had Drai decided to abandon him? No, even if the drug-runner had suddenly decided Ken was useless, he would not abandon a lot of expensive equipment just to get rid of him. For one thing, Ken suspected that Drai would prefer to see him die of drug hunger, though this may have been an injustice. What then? Had Drai become subtle, and cut off the transmitter above in the hope that Ken would betray himself in some way? Unlikely. If nothing else, Feth would almost certainly have warned him in some fashion, or at least not sounded so anxious in the words he had managed to transmit.
Perhaps Drai’s distrust — natural enough under the circumstances — had reached a point where he had decided to check personally on the actions of his tame scientist. However, Ken could not imagine him trusting himself in armor on the surface of the Planet of Ice no matter what he wanted to find out.
Still, there was another way of coming down personally. Lee would not like it, of course. He might even persuade his employer that it was far too dangerous. He would certainly try. Still, if Drai really had the idea in his mind, it was more than possible that he might simply refuse to listen to persuasion.
In that case, the Karella’s shadow might fall across them at any moment. That would fit in with Feth’s attempt to warn him, and its abrupt interruption. If that were actually the case, he need not worry; his conscience was clear, and for all that was going on at the moment Drai was perfectly welcome to look on until his eyes froze to the ports. There had been no sign of tofacco anywhere, although the native children had been coming back at frequent intervals with new specimens for the boxes and had named them each time. He himself had not done a single thing in furtherance of his plan.
He had just relaxed with this realization firmly in mind when the native who had been doing most of the talking produced and lighted a cigarette.