He melted back down onto the pallet.
"Good work, Johnny," Ellik said, stooping and starting his work.
Right away, Mhaw started to lose that Indigo color and get real light—lighter than the Azures, in fact. None of the blue of the race was actually in the pigmentation, Mike found out. Even the Azures suffered some degree of improper aeration of the blood.
"You going to call Lee Chon now?" I asked Mike. "You going to show him the tape we had running during the operation and all?"
"Not quite yet, Johnny," he said. "First I want to educate Mhaw a bit, up to the Azure level or better. That should convince Lee."
Mhaw learned fast, probably faster than the Azures, even. Almost the first thing he wanted was for us to stop calling him Mhaw and start using an Azure name, Aedo.
Once a day, Ellik left our hut to take some exercise—a walk along the alien esplanade, he called it. I used to stay with the doctored alien, now Aedo, but we finally learned we could trust him to follow our orders—which were to stay inside, away from the others, since we didn't know how they would take him. So I got to walking along with Ellik.
As dusk lengthened, we could see the spark that was our ship in its orbit along the retreating horizon.
Ellik twisted back his head and the side of his mouth. "Look at him up there—look!"
The spark burned brighter and danced in another direction.