It somewhat startled Solo Morgan that his heart seemed beating faster as he stared at her and felt her resisting arms within his grip. An interest in the opposite sex had never been one of his failings. It was completely contrary to his theory that he travels fastest who travels alone.
But this somehow was different, startlingly different. "That's my story," he finished. "Now it's your turn."
Normally, Solo Morgan always had been alert, under all circumstances, to possible danger. But he was absorbed now. He hadn't noticed the faint sound of flapping wings behind him, nor noticed the weird-looking bird-shape which passed over his head, and vanished as it dropped down into a rock-clump a hundred feet away.
But Nada saw it. Her gaze, like the gaze of a trapped animal, was darting around the iridescent darkness. Her hearing, far keener than Morgan's, heard a faint cawing call, as though a parrot were chattering.
She tensed in Morgan's grip. "Stop it," he said. "You can't get away from me. What other name have you got besides Nada?"
"Nada Livingston. I was from Nairobi."
He stared. The name was vaguely familiar. "Dr. Carter Livingston?" he murmured.
"Yes. That was my father."
Morgan remembered now. He had been a boy of ten or eleven when the name of Dr. Carter Livingston had been notorious all over the world. He was a cracked old scientist living in East Africa. As Morgan remembered it, Carter Livingston had had some theory that the wild animals of earth should be protected from the cruelty of man. He wanted laws that no animals should be hunted. Then he had gone to Africa, with new theories that animals were only different forms of humans; undeveloped, untaught, but with a latent ability for learning which no human had yet recognized. Then there were rumors that in the African jungle, Carter Livingston and his young wife had established a trained-animal zoo. Wild tales. Parrots, with their pseudo-human vocal cords, not only chattering English words, but putting a childish but human intelligence into them. Apes that could mouth human words, and think human thoughts. Then Livingston's wife had died, leaving him an infant daughter. There had been some incidents of violence—Livingston's trained apes accused of raiding a nearby Masai village, and killing some of the black children whose fathers had been hunting wild animals in the neighborhood. Livingston had denied the thing as fantastic. But the British authorities had descended upon his animal-colony and cleaned it out. In a rage, Livingston, with his infant daughter, had disappeared.