Thin and remote, a two-toned whistle sounded. Sounded again. The converging flocks wheeled, fluttered and fell away, gliding off toward the jungle. Far below, the milling horde flung up a varied array of heads, and then began to move, a drift that became a surge, trotting and hopping away across the burn.
"Phew!" said someone behind Pritchard. "That girl really has an army."
McManus sat up, shaking his head and staring at the smooth shining hull of the Apollo swinging down to them. He felt his jaw and squinted up at Pritchard.
"Quarters for you," the tall saturnine man said softly.
Late that evening Pritchard was in the chart room talking with Captain Savage. The Apollo's ventilation system had been in operation for over thirty hours now and the blowers had sucked out the last vestige of mechanically purified air, with its taint of ozone, metal and oil. It was pleasant to rock gently in the gimbal chairs and sniff the lush night air of Thisbe II. Aloft, in the nose, the watch was idly working out a game of kru, that old Martian solitaire involving domino-like counters. The autoscanner hooked to the magnar was ready to clang at the first blip on the screens. Below, in the wardrooms, the cadet hunters were amusing themselves with a runoff of the day's cam-rec spool ("Get this line about the synthetabs!" ... guffaws of laughter). Midway down the curving tail section Tom McManus sulked in his quarters, fingering the bruise on his jaw.
"So we'll pick up in the morning, hey?" mused the captain. His was a squat, ape-like body, surmounted by a long, goat's face and a grizzled skull.
"Yes." Pritchard drained his tall glass. "I'm not going to bother with her. If she can send a whole army of her animals against us it's going to make hunting a little difficult. We could set down on the other side and maybe get in a bit of shooting, but she'd catch up with us. Even if we try hunting from the air with the jet cruisers...." He shook his head. "It's too dangerous. I've got to look out for these boys, after all. No, I don't want to get messed up with her in any way." He stared calmly at the wall, seeing once again that lithe body straining out of his grasp, and knew himself for a liar.
"Well...." The captain rubbed his nose, furtively eyeing the other man's profile. He knew when a man was lying. It was one of the things one developed long before one got to be a hundred and thirteen years of age. He lowered his wrinkled old eyelids and went on, "... she's hung on here for four years. Maybe she isn't too crazy at that. Of course, it's kind of too bad to leave a filly like her running around loose."
"We'll just hope we won't be too much criticized for not bringing her home," Pritchard cut in quickly. "Thank God, we shot all that cam-rec footage. It'll—"