Gorbel shot a quick glance at the hunched back of Lt. Averdor, his adjutant and navigator. Averdor had managed to avoid saying so much as one word to Hoqqueah or any of the other pantropists from the beginning of the trip. Of course he wasn’t required to assume the diplomatic burdens involved those were Corbel’s crossesbut the strain of dodging even normal intercourse with the seal-men was beginning to tell on him.
Sooner or later, Averdor was going to explode. He would have nobody to blame for it but himself, but that wouldn’t prevent everybody on board from suffering from it.
Including Corbel, who would lose a first-class navigator and adjutant.
Yet it was certainly beyond Corbel’s authority to order Averdor to speak to an Adapted Man. He could only suggest that Averdor run through a few mechanical courtesies, for the good of the ship. The only response had been one of the stoniest stares Corbel had ever seen, even from Averdor, with whom the Captain had been shipping for over thirty Galactic years.
And the worst of it was that Corbel was, as a human being, wholly on Averdor’s side.
“After a certain number of years, conditions change on any planet,” Hoqqueah babbled solemnly, waving a flipper-like arm to include all the points of light outside the greenhouse.
He was working back to his primary obsession: the seeding program. “It’s only logical to insist that man be able to change with themor, if he can’t do that, he must establish himself somewhere else. Suppose he had colonized only the Earthlike planets? Not even those planets remain Earthlike forever, not in the biological sense.”