His eyes studied the girl in front of him as she cocked her head at him. Even in her tattered garments, through which the McCanahan caught disturbing glimpse of white, rounded flesh, the redhaired Flaith was a tantalizing morsel of womanhood. He put out a long arm and drew her in against him.
"Och, now what would I have been missing that you, with your cat's eyes, have seen?"
She shrugged elaborately. "If you haven't missed them, I won't tell—"
"Shades of Bridget na Gablach! Their women!"
"They have no women! No man of Senorech has ever seen a sfarran girl. Rumor says that they shelter them because of their loveliness. But if this a diorama of the sfarran planet, and there are no women, then—"
Kael grunted. "You and your crazy theories! Look, woman! See for yourself. There are women there. There must be women!"
But though they hunted along all that corridor, staring at the sfarran world and its divers shapes and colors, its desert storms and wind-tossed seas, its magnificent white cities that looked like milky jewels, they found no woman.
For two hours they hunted, until the McCanahan discovered that by moving a red lever he could make the scenes within the bubbles come to life. The tiny men moved, as if released from a frozen tomb. They walked and piloted their vessels, and went about their tasks. Yet even so, no woman appeared.
"It's some sort of televisic communicator," the McCanahan muttered, "that's spacecasting across a billion billion miles of space."
"They have no hospitals, either," said Flaith in a troubled voice.