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  “Wait a minute,” she muttered. “Am I hearing you correctly? Are you talking about me going to Jevlen, as well? Three days from now? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Hunt gestured to indicate the restaurant and the scene around them in general. “I said when I called you that I had news. All this isn’t just to tell you, sorry, I’m going away, I can’t help with the book.”

  Gina picked up her glass again and gulped from it unsteadily. She passed a hand over her brow and shook her head dazedly. Her voice choked when she finally managed to speak. “You… really are a guy for surprises. Or have I been living a sheltered life? You may not believe it, but this doesn’t happen every time I get asked out on a dinner date.”

  “It’s all Gregg’s fault. I told you he doesn’t mess around.”

  “I got that message.” She paused. “You are serious, I suppose?”

  “Of course. It’d make a pretty sick joke if it weren’t.” He watched her face for a few seconds. “So, do I take it that it’s okay? You don’t have a problem?”

  “No… I don’t think so.” She thought it over, then sat back in her chair and laughed, momentarily intoxicated by the acceptance that the offer was real. “It’s just that I still can’t really believe it.”

  Hunt raised his glass. “Great.”

  Gina joined him in the unspoken toast, then set her glass down and looked serious again. “So, what am I supposed to do? I mean, if we don’t want it to look as if I’m on an UNSA paycheck, I take it that I can’t very well travel with you.”

  Hunt nodded. “That’s right. If we happen to meet casually later, that’s another matter.”

  “But how do I get a seat on an alien starship that’s leaving in three days? Am I supposed to call a travel agent and ask to book a ticket?”

  “There’ll be a TWA shuttle going up from Vandenberg with some groups from the West Coast. That should give you enough time to get back to Seattle, pack a toothbrush, and sort out any notes and other stuff you need to bring along. I’ll bump into you after you join the Vishnu.”

  “All I have to do is book a flight with the shuttle?”

  “Right.”

  Gina still looked perplexed. “But-what about getting on board the Thurien ship? Won’t I need some kind of authorized pass or something? How do I fix that?”

  Hunt grinned. “You don’t have a feel for Ganymeans yet, do you?” he said. “Most people don’t. Ganymeans are the most informal beings, probably in the whole Galaxy. They have no concept of authorizations, passes, permits, ID checks, or any of the other hassles dreamed up by the makers of rules that we inflict on ourselves to make life difficult, or any clear notion why we imagine such things should be necessary.”

  “Oh, that life could be so simple,” Gina said with a wistful sigh. Hunt reached into his pocket and produced an envelope. “I just happen to have a number here at UNSA that can connect you through to the Vishnu’s administration center. In short, you just ask. Your story is that you’re a free-lancer working on a book, and you wonder if you can hitch a ride to Jevlen. There shouldn’t be a problem. But if you get stuck, call me.”

  “Ask?” Gina looked nonplussed. “That’s all? And they’ll take you?”

  “If they’ve got room. And there shouldn’t be any shortage of that-the Vishnu is twenty miles long.”

  “So why isn’t everyone doing it?”

  “Because they don’t know about it. They all assume nothing can be that simple-just like you did.”

  “What about when they find out? Won’t the Thuriens have to make some rules then?”

  “Who knows? Let’s wait and see. They don’t have much experience in dealing with people being unreasonable.”

  “But they couldn’t let just anyone who wants to go there just move in, surely. It would get out of control.”

  “Ah, you see,” Hunt said pointedly. “There you go, thinking like a Terran who assumes people have to be controlled. A Ganymean couldn’t conceive why you should want to keep anyone out.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Hunt was content to enjoy the food and give Gina time to take in what had been said. At last she looked up again and asked, “Who else will be going?”

  “Well, not too many on the short notice we’ve got,” Hunt replied. “We’re hoping to get a life-sciences specialist along, too, whom I’ve worked with before. His name’s Chris Danchekker.”

  “I’ve read about him. He went to Jupiter with you, right?”

  “That’s him. He probably understands Ganymean psychology better than anybody. We haven’t actually approached him about it yet, though. That’s on the agenda for tomorrow.”

  “He sounds fascinating. I’d like to meet him.”

  “Oh yes, you have to meet Chris.”

  “Do you think he’ll go?”

  “Hopefully. He’s been immersing himself in Jevlenese biology lately, and I imagine he’d jump at a chance of going there. It would complete the cover of the whole thing as a scientific mission, too. Then there’s my assistant from Goddard, a guy called Duncan Watt. And we’re hoping Danchekker can get one of his people along, as well.”

  By the time they got to their coffees and brandies, Hunt had forgotten business matters and again found himself admiring the sweep of raven hair that framed one side of Gina’s face, and trying to fathom the dancing, enigmatic light in her eye as she stared back over the rim of her glass. It was the kind of look in which it would have been possible to read anything one wanted to. But whether it was deliberately so or otherwise, he couldn’t tell.

  In the end, he decided that the situation had been given as much as a helping hand as was prudent, but he still wanted to think about it. He wondered if a Ganymean in a situation like this would simply ask.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On Jevlen there was a group of several large, tropical islands known as the Galithenes. Inland, they were mostly mountainous, but the wider valleys and the coastal plains supported dense canopies of rain forest that excluded all but a feeble twilight. And in the midday gloom of the two most northerly islands of the group, there lived a peculiar flying creature called the anquioc.

  About the size of a pigeon, it had strongly developed hind legs; modest, clawed forelegs with rudimentary grasping abilities, which it used, when at rest, to attach itself to vertical surfaces such as tree trunks; and black, scaly wings that glistened like wet asphalt. In its basic structure, it conformed to the general, bilaterally symmetric, triple-paired limb pattern of the Jevlenese animal classification corresponding roughly to terrestrial vertebrates.

  The anquiloc’s face had a narrow black snout that bulged at the end like the nose of a hammerhead shark, into an organ that luminesced in the infrared. Below its eyes were two large, forward-directed, concave areas, formed from a mixture of reflective and absorbent tissues that functioned both as variable-geometry focusing surfaces to produce a crudely directed beam that could be steered by moving the head, and as receivers tuned to the reflections. Thus, it navigated and hunted by means of its own system of self-contained, thermal radar.

  The anquioc’s main prey was a small, wasplike octopod known as the chiff. The chiff possessed IR-sensitive antennae that evolution had shaped to operate in the same general range as the anquiloc’s search frequencies, which gave rise to an unusual contest of ever-changing strategy and counterstrategy between the two species. The chiff’s first, simple response on detecting a search signal was to fold its wings and drop out of the beam. The anquiloc countered by learning to dip its approach in anticipation when it registered a chiff. The chiff reacted by skewing its escape to the left, and when the anquiloc followed, the chiff switched to the right; when the anquiloc became adept at checking in both directions, the chiff reacted by climbing out of the beam instead of falling; or of going left, or maybe right. Whichever was adopted, all the possible ensuing variations would unfold in some order or other and then maybe revert to an earlier form, producing an ever-changing pattern in which new behaviors constantly a
ppeared, lasted for as long as they were effective, and gave way to something else.

  But what made the anquiloc more than just “peculiar” was the way it came preprogrammed with the right maneuvers to deal with the latest to have appeared from the chiffs repertoire of routines for evading it. And it was not simply a statistical effect, where newborn anquilocs possessing all possible varieties of behavior appeared equally, and only the ones that happened to be “right” at the time survived.

  Newborn individuals exhibited the same response pattern as the latest that the parents had learned up to the time of conception. Since that pattern changed depending on the current mode of chiff behavior, the mechanism represented a clear case of inheriting a characteristic that had been acquired by the parent during life and not carried by the gene line-a flat contradiction of the principle determined by generations of researchers on Earth. Jevlenese and Ganymean scientists had long before settled the point by training anquilocs in certain tasks and testing their offspring for the ability after separating them at birth, and there was no doubt of it. Neither was it the only instance of the phenomenon that they had encountered in their probings of the nearby regions of the Galaxy.

  But for the biologists of Earth it was a revelation that went against all the rules, throwing some of their most precious tenets into as much disarray as their colleagues from the physical sciences were already having to come to terms with.

  Professor Christian Danchekker operated a tracker ball on the control panel of the molecular imager and peered at the foot-high hologram as it rotated in the viewing space in front of him. He tapped a command key to create a ghostly sphere of faint light, about the size of a cherry, and turned the tracker ball again to guide the sphere until it enclosed a selected part of the image. Then he spoke in a slightly raised voice toward a grille in the panel to one side.

  “Voice on. Magnify by ten.” The part of the image that had been inside the sphere expanded to fill the viewing space and resolved itself into finer detail. “Reduce by five…“ Danchekker rotated the image some more and repositioned the sphere slightly. “Magnify by ten, increase contrast ten percent… Voice off.”

  For a few moments he sat back and contemplated the result with satisfaction tinged by a dash of undisguised amazement. He was tall and sparse in build, with a balding head and antiquated, gold-rimmed spectacles perched precariously on a hollowed, toothy face. The assistant seated on another chair called a set of neural mapping charts, heavily annotated with symbols, onto one of the auxiliary display screens while she waited.

  “There it is, Sandy,” Danchekker murmured. “The base sequence has altered. Run a delta-sigma on the code and correlate it against the map. But I have no hesitation in predicting, now, that you’ll find it embedded there. This is how it transfers.”

  Sandy Holmes leaned forward and studied the enhanced section of the molecule’s structure now being presented. “It’s a cumulative progression from what we had before,” she commented.

  Danchekker nodded. “Which is what one would expect. As the learned routine is registered by the nervous system, the encoded representation impressed into the messenger increases. We’re actually looking at transferable memory in action.”

  They had taught some anquilocs, brought from Jevlen, to adapt to artificial patterns of IR return signals resembling chiff evasion responses. The changes written into the configuration of circulating electrical currents in the brain as a permanent imprint of the learned behavior could then be identified and mapped by the established techniques of neural psychotopography.

  But the molecule that they were studying represented a step far outside the bounds of familiar terrestrial biology. It was created in specialized cells of the anquioc’s nervous system and carried a chemical encodement of the changes recorded in regular memory. Acting as a messenger, it transported the code to the reproductive cells, where it was copied into the animal’s genetic control molecules as they replicated. Hence, it provided the equivalent of reprogrammable DNA.

  Danchekker went on, “The possibilities of further evolutionary refinement of such an ability are intriguing. For example, can you imagine-” The call-tone from the terminal on a table by the far wall interrupted him. “Damn. Go and see to the wretched thing, would you, Sandy?” he muttered.

  The girl got up, crossed the laboratory, and touched a key to accept the call. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, mid-fortyish, perhaps, with hair tied straight back in a matronly fashion that added to her years. She had a long, sober face with beady dark eyes, high cheeks, and a large nose, and stared out with a commanding sternness.

  “Is Professor Danchekker there, Ms. Holmes?” Her voice was shrill but firm, brooking no nonsense. “It is most imperative that I speak to him.”

  “Oh, God,” Danchekker groaned, over by the imager console. It was Ms. Mulling, the personal secretary who had come with his appointment as director of Alien Life Sciences, calling from her domain in his outer office on the top floor, from where she ruled the building. Danchekker shook his head and made frantic to-and-fro motions with a hand to indicate that he had spontaneously evaporated off the planet.

  But the movement in the background over Sandy’s shoulder only caught Ms. Mulling’s attention. “Ah! You are there, Professor. The budgetary review meeting is due to begin in M-6 in thirty minutes. I presumed that you would want reminding.” She rolled the rs and spoke with as much of a hint of disapproval in her voice as a personal secretary with a strict sense of propriety could permit.

  Danchekker rose from the console and advanced toward the terminal, stopping halfway across the floor as if wary of too close a proximity, even to an image. Sandy withdrew discreetly out of the viewing angle. “Can’t Yamumatsu deal with it?” Danchekker asked irritably. “He understands convertible assets, depreciation ratios, and other such intricacies-I am only a scientist. I spoke to him this morning, and he said he’d be happy to substitute.”

  “It is customary for the departmental director to chair the quarterly review,” Ms. Mulling replied in a tone as yielding as the hull armor of a battleship.

  “How can it be customary?” Danchekker challenged. “The department is new. The division itself is barely six months old.”

  “The precedent derives from UNSA Corporate standard procedures, which predate the new organizational structure and have not been changed.” Ms. Mulling’s eyes moved up and down to take in his full length. “What on earth are you doing in those?” she demanded before Danchekker could respond. Following her gaze, he looked down at his feet. To save time getting to a black-tie dinner that evening which he had been unable to evade, he was already wearing evening dress underneath his lab coat-except for his shoes, which were of white, rubber-soled canvas.

  “What do they look like?” he riposted. “They are popularly referred to, I believe, as sneakers.”

  “I know. But why are you wearing them with evening dress?”

  “Because they are comfortable, of course.”

  “You can hardly appear at the Republican Society dinner like that, Professor.”

  The light glinted off Danchekker’s spectacles and teeth. “Madam, I have no intention of doing so. I shall be changing them before I depart. Do you wish me to produce my patent leather pair from the closet and show them to you as proof?”

  “That won’t be necessary, thank you. But such a combination wouldn’t be appropriate for the review meeting, I’m afraid. After all, both the deputy financial comptroller and the executive vice-president of planning will be attending.”

  Danchekker stood before the screen, seeming to crouch in the attitude of some scrawny bird of prey, his lab coat hanging from his hunched shoulders like a vulture’s wings and his fingers curling by his sides like talons, as if he were about to pounce on the terminal and tear it to pieces.

  “Very well,” he granted, finally conceding. “Would you kindly arrange for the agenda, and whatever figures I might need, to be ready for me to collect?”

 
“I’ve already seen to it,” Ms. Mulling replied.

  Ten minutes later, Danchekker exploded through the door into Caldwell’s office high up on the far side of the complex. “You’ve got to do something!” he insisted. “The creature isn’t human. Can’t you transfer her to one of the Martian bases or a deep-space mission probe? I cannot continue with my work under these conditions.”

  “Well, maybe it doesn’t matter too much anymore,” Caldwell said over his interlaced fingers. “Something else has come up, and-”

  “Doesn’t matter!” Danchekker stormed. “I’d sooner be married to one of the Gorgons. The possibility of retaining any modicum of sanity at all is utterly out of the question.”

  “I talked to Vic yesterday afternoon. He’s probably been looking for you. There’s-”

  “The situation is preposterous. Now I’m even being subjected to dress inspections, for God’s sake. I am adamant: She has to go.”

  Caldwell sighed. “Look, transferring her wouldn’t be so simple. She was with Welland for thirteen years and came with his personal recommendation. He might be retired, but he still has a lot of pull through the old-buddy net. It could cause complications-especially at a time like this, when we’ve got all kinds of people looking for career opportunities and slices of the new action.”

  “I have no interest in the adolescent attention-seeking antics and Machiavellian inanities of other people. If this woman-”

  The door opened and Solomon Cail from the public-relations office appeared. “Oh… excuse me, Gregg. I didn’t realize. Mitzi thought you were alone.”

  “I was away for a couple of minutes,” Mitzi’s voice called from outside.

  “It’s all right, Sol,” Caldwell said. “Chris just stopped by. Is it something urgent?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was Chris that I wanted to talk about,” Cail said.