"Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there. Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we were there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I suddenly had to step back out of sight. I had to, Alan. A couple of my ghostly ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away from there."
"That would have made a nice tableau on TV."
Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-Sky saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I laugh, viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned blood—the blood that doesn't tame down—boiled up under those lights and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from them. It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and wrong for his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG spurted forward onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound. "Alan, I almost yanked you up and walked off with you under my arm. I didn't like you sitting there in the bath of electrical magic."
"Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously.
"Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window every time you'd like to?"
"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that there was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have been snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely that someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted over that till you're seeing assassins behind every chair."
"Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway, across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come.
Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored, today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a word he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab table. Alan and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the outline of a flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and several other sections of the interior.
"Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months and it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?"