"It had a weapon," he commented, changing the subject.
Ptarra rumbled an assent. "I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can find in the probe."
She slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.
Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male, he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.
Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. "Maybe the creatures operated it," he suggested.
"What makes you think so?"
"I don't know. It just seems somehow—"
"Intuition!" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. "Yet I can't blame you this time. It does almost look that way. But it's logically impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!"
She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat on the ground.