He closed the door.
None of them had any preconceived idea of what they might see, nor could they have imagined the sight that met their eyes. The room was large and the walls were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, like a fantastic library.
It was the objects on those shelves that held their attention. Square glass jars, completely identical, filled the spaces, and in each jar was a reddish-brown organ exactly like that taken from the corpse aboard their ship by Jandro. A clear, transparent preservative liquid surrounded the specimens, and the containers were sealed.
But in a small space before them a table stood, and on it rested a single jar with a fresh-looking specimen. Instinctively, they knew it was the one they had seen excised that morning.
Terry expelled a lungful of air. "Well, this is something. A morgue for extinct livers, kept by an amateur surgeon who rides a bike to work. What the devil do you make of it?"
Illia was examining the specimens closely. "All of them weren't as good surgeons as Jandro. Most of these look as if they'd been out with a meat axe. Some of them look as if they've been here since the beginning of time."
"Some sort of ancestor worship," said Underwood. "The apologetics must be some form of social rite offered to the ancestors of a friend, all of it interesting but quite useless for our purposes at the moment."
"It's not that simple," said the semanticist. "Consider the fact that even though Jandro understands we are from another world, he believes us familiar with all of this. He therefore believes these things familiar to all humanoid beings. There could be a scientifically valid reason behind it."
"What?" said Underwood.