Released, the lesser worker scurried off to rejoin Minnie.
Bigboss realized only then that, during the entire rescue operation, he had neglected his defensive scanning procedure.
Restoring his upper section's quarterly rotational motion, he regarded Minnie warily. Was there any significance to the fact that she was facing him from the other side of the boulder, such that each time she elevated her head her field of vision swept over him?
Experimentally, he moved twenty meters to his right. Compensating, she skewed left, maintaining her visual advantage.
A calculated maneuver? Of course, it had to be. Perhaps her insolence should be dealt with summarily. But how could that be done without reducing the clan's over-all efficiency as a team dedicated to the compulsion of work, work, work?
At that moment Peter the Meter, busy scanning the sky with his battery of instruments, loosed a shrill eureka signal.
Bigboss thought for a moment that one of the latter's gamma ray spectrometers had been swamped. But, on monitoring Peter's telemetered stream, he discerned that the impulse was from an infrared photometer. A check of co-ordinates showed the source of disturbance to be skyward, with a dead zenith orientation.
He commandeered one of Sky Watcher's planetary telesensors and redirected it at the source of new emanation. Now there were additional data to throw light on the manifestation.
The disturbance was in the visual range; classification—material. A rapidly shifting parallax suggested either constant location and swift expansion, or steady size and brisk approach.