The humans quickly found names for the individuals in the flock.
“That big one there with the bald keel looks like a condor,” remarked Rod. “While the other big one where the feathers on the keel are turning white looks like a bald eagle.”
“Those would be good names for them,” said Sandra. “The rukhs seem to be at the top of the food chain, so the names of raptors would be most appropriate. In fact, I think I’ll name the species
Rukh raptdsatumus. “
Soon a number of the rukhs in the flock had been named. Besides Condor and Eagle, there were Kestrel, Hawk, Falcon, Merlin, Buzzard, and Harrier, while the rukh they were riding on had been given the name Peregrine.
“What’s that long tubular thing coming out of the belly and trailing along behind Harrier?” asked Dan, as the most-recent visitor flew up and away. “It’s not a tail—there’s a long plume of feathers coming out the rear end for a tail.”
“Unlike the rest of the body, there aren’t any feathers on it,” said Chastity. “Looks like a penis to me.”
“Everything looks like a penis to you,” retorted Sandra. Just then a jet of liquid shot from the end of the tube they were watching and disappeared behind in the wind.
“I guess that answers my question,” said Dan. “At least it serves one function of a penis.”
“What’s going on now!” said Rod with alarm as the floor tilted underneath them. He lowered his gaze to his command console screen.
“Feels like we’re going into a shallow dive,” said Chastity as she quickly activated the pilot screen.
“They’re forming the cone arrangement they use for hunting,” Sandra said as she watched the formation take place in the distance. Their rukh was near the base of the cone.
“How do you know it’s a hunting formation?” asked Pete.
“Because that was the formation they were using when they hunted
us
down,” replied Sandra.
“Oh,” said Pete, somber for once. He had been in the meta plant during the attack and had missed seeing the flock on the hunt.
Dan had pulled down the science console biviewer on its pantograph and was using it to look at the individual rukhs in the kilometers-wide formation.
“Most of the rukhs have their top eye closed, while their lower eye is wide open and looking ahead and down,” he reported.
“The lower eye must stay awake during the day during the hunting dive, while the upper eye sleeps during the day and flies their joint body to altitude for the next day’s hunt,” suggested Sandra.
“Peregrine’s upper eye isn’t going to sleep,” said Chastity, peering upward out the holoviewport window. “In fact, it’s coming down closer to get a better look at us.” She activated the icon for the meta jets on the nose of the
Sexdent.
“If it doesn’t have to participate in the hunt, then it probably is giving up some of its sleep time to satisfy its curiosity,” suggested Pete.
“Well, if it’s curious, I’m curious too,” said Sandra. “I’m going to go out and see if I can find out how to talk to it.” She quickly clambered down the ladder to the airlock door below.
“I’m coming with you,” said Dan, following close behind.
“Make sure you wear safety lines and carry a meta torch!” yelled Rod behind them.
The eye bent down slowly toward the viewport window while carefully keeping its large foreclaws closed and tucked out of the way. Chastity kept her finger poised over the nose-jet icon, but held off.
“It
is
curious,” said Pete, intrigued.
The eye peered into the windows at the ends of each habitat, and then into the larger holoviewport windows. Pete backed away from the science holoviewport when the ten-meter-diameter eye drew close to him. Rod held his ground and just stared back when the eye shifted to the command holoviewport. Chastity waved when the eye appeared in her window, causing the eye to jerk back on its pneumatic neck. It returned slowly as Chastity waved again; then she turned around and got Pete to join her in the window.
“I’d give a pretty penny to know what is going on in that mind right now,” said Chastity with a chuckle.
~ * ~
Petra was puzzled when she finally realized what she was seeing. She had looked into the eyes of the conical creature trying to figure out if it was alive or dead. She found that what she thought were eyes were really pieces of skin that were so dense they reflected the sonar pulses that she had directed at them, yet so transparent that you could see through them to the inside of the creature. The inside of the creature was hollow, which didn’t surprise Petra much, since everything floating in the atmosphere of Air was hollow. What was surprising was to see that there were small four-legged vermin living inside the hollow portions. Although the inside vermin were the same size and had the same number of legs as the outside vermin, they had different skin color from the bright yellow-green outside vermin, and two small eyes and strange string-feathers on their heads instead of the single large eye and bald head of the outside vermin. The inside vermin must be very powerful vermin indeed if they had that much control of the conical being. Just then the mouth of the cone opened, and one of the brightly colored outside vermin stepped out on its hind feet.
~ * ~
Sandra stepped out onto the lowering airlock door in her neon bright fire-engine yellow-green saturnsuit, safety line firmly tied to her airpack harness. Dan, similarly garbed and carrying a meta torch, stood guard behind her. The opening of the door had put tension on one of the tiedown lines that ran from the rungs on the side of the
Sexdent
to the root of a nearby feather-tree quill. The waiting caterpillar with the large single eye went to the quill root and reached out a foreclaw toward the knot. Chastity gave the nose jet a short blast. The caterpillar eye quickly backed off and went into its foreclaws-closed position.
“The door is resting on the line to that root,” said Dan, looking over the side where the problem line passed under the platform. “It must be pulling on the quill root and hurting.”
“I made sure we had plenty of tie-down lines,” said Rod over the radio link. “You can cut that one loose if it’s causing problems.”
“Do it,” said Sandra. “We owe this creature a lot of favors.” With a flick of the meta torch, the macropolyhextube was burnt through and the feather tree above the quill root vibrated noticeably in response. The line, which had snapped back toward the quill root after being cut, now lay limp on the ground. The eye watched the nose jet carefully as it slowly reached a foreclaw toward the line.
“Let it have the line, Chass,” said Sandra. “Maybe we can move from punishment training to reward training. I wish we had some method of communicating with it other than the threat of a meta torch. Do you see anything that looks like ears, Dan?”
“I don’t see any obvious ears, but it certainly has an eye,” replied Dan. “A big eye ... the better to see you with. Why don’t you try sign language?” He stepped back into the airlock and came back out with a short length of coiled safety line. Sandra dropped the coil of line, then picked it up. She waved her right hand at the nearby eye, palm up, not knowing what other gesture to use. The caterpillar waved a foreclaw in imitation of Sandra, and keeping its eye focused on the nose jet, slowly bent down and retrieved the dropped piece of line.
“Not much of a gift,” said Dan. “One end is still tied to the quill root. Perhaps I’d better go down and cut it off.”
“You stay on that platform,” commanded Rod. “We can afford to lose our doctor, but we can’t afford to lose our plumber. Besides, I used a bowline loop lasso to encircle the quill. It should be real easy to pull off.”
Rod was right, it didn’t take long for the eye to figure out which line to pull to undo the lasso. Once the eye had the line in its grasp, it backed away and began examining the line, holding it up to its eye, running it through its claws, pulling on it to test its strength, picking at the bowline loop at one end, and attempting to coil it up like the line Sandra was holding. It was obvious that it had never handled anything like this before. It tried draping it around its head at the first segment joint. The attempt ended when the line fell off, so it finally settled on winding the line around its “neck” a few times like a long muffler, then tucking the loose end through the bowline loop and pulling it tight.
“A shoestring necktie!” exclaimed Pete.
Seemingly pleased with the result, the eye rose up on its neck and went off.
“Shucks,” said Sandra. “I guess it’s going off to get its sleep. I was hoping it would stay and talk so I could get to know it better.”
“What are you going to talk with?” Dan replied. “You certainly can’t carry on a conversation from inside that helmet. The only reason I can hear you talking is because we have a radio link. We’re going to have to devise a loudspeaker system. A bass one, considering the deep sounds we have heard coming from the creature.”
“We’ll need some kind of blackboard too, so I can draw pictures,” said Sandra as she followed Dan back into the airlock. The door rose shut behind them.
~ * ~
It was soon realized that Sandra’s “blackboard” would have to be a console screen, since there was nothing on
Sexdent
that could be used to write with, except catsup and mustard. Fortunately, the three main control deck consoles for the commander, pilot, and engineering positions were designed to be detached and hung above the acceleration couches during high-gee maneuvers. The high-data-rate fiber-optic cables that connected Jeeves with each console were the same cables as those used to send data up and down the Hoytether to the reactor, so Mouser delivered a long segment of fiber-optic cable from its repair reel. Soon the airlock had its own portable console for Sandra to use the next time the upper eye came for a visit. The fiber-optic connector for the portable console plugged into a data port in the outside airlock control panel so the airlock could be used by one member of the crew while another was outside using the console to converse with an eye. In the process of setting up the communications console, Rod lost his job, for it was obvious that if one of the three control deck consoles needed to be sacrificed for use in the alien communication system, the commander’s console was certainly less important than the pilot’s or engineer’s console.
Rod finished his second cup of coffee and looked around at the organized confusion. Sandra was in the airlock programming the portable console with simple large pictures. Chastity and Seichi were putting together a “woofer” speaker and checking it out with Seichi’s keyboard, while Dan and Pete were building an ultra-low-frequency sound detector using a large diaphragm of reflective Mylar with a laser beam readout. Seichi should have been asleep, but Rod knew there was no use trying to make him get some rest while there were so many interesting things to do.
Might as well get out of the way,
Rod said to himself. “Going out to get some exercise,” he announced to the crew. “Chass. You’re in charge.”
“Make sure you wear a safety line and take a meta torch,” replied Chastity, not looking up.
Sandra cycled Rod through the airlock and he stepped outside onto the platform door. The upper eye was nowhere in sight. The wind whistled across the feathertops and gusts billowed down into the clearing that the eye had made around the capsule. A strong gust of wind swirled through the airlock door and blew a forgotten sock out onto the platform. Rod stomped on the sock as it went by, picked it up, and returned it to its proper place in his locker. His first task was to check the tiedowns that held
Sexdent
to the back of their giant host. Some were loose, so he tightened them. Some were taut, the lines singing as he plucked them, so he loosened them slightly to take the pressure off their host’s quill roots.
“Might as well make myself a useful symbiote,” said Rod as he searched each quill root for inflated vermin. Once he had set the helmet’s image intensifier visor on infrared, the vermin were easy to find, their active bodies being much warmer than the passive quill roots. Each time he found one, he would first pierce its jet bladder with a short burst from his meta torch. With its bladder gone, the gigantic louse was then easily hauled up out of the quill follicle, its pneumatic-operated gripper claws no match for Rod’s bone-backed muscle-powered grip. Rod was thorough. Holding the squirming creature at arm’s length, he lit his meta torch again. After making sure the head portion was well toasted, he torched the egg sac to make sure no descendants of this particular louse would ever bother the rukh or its flock again. Once he had cleared the quill root lice from the area surrounding the capsule, he started hunting for more. Trailing a length of macropolyhextube line behind him, he would set off on a path leading directly away from the capsule, searching each quill root for lice. After clearing one radiant for some fifty meters, he would backtrack to the capsule, shift directions, and start off again.
On one of these “hunting trips” he was walking through a “clearing” where there was a break in the feather canopy above, letting some sunlight in. He saw a glint in front of him. The glint was caused by a fine transparent fiber, running nearly horizontally from feather to feather.
“Looks like a spider web,” he said to himself.
At the thought, he quickly lit his meta torch and looked carefully all around him. If the giant bird harbored giant lice, it might harbor giant spiders that would be more than a match for a mere human being—meta torch or no.