She’d been working on a smooth-surfaced attaché case stacked on a packing crate of rubberized metal. She put away the data unit, then paused as she considered what to do with the document she’d found in a drawer of pre-Hiatus logbooks.
“What’s that, ma’am?” Dorst asked, reaching forward as he spoke. “A piece of boot?”
“Don’t touch that!” Adele said, then frowned at herself. Though he had to learn to ask before he put his hands on things . . .
“That is,” she continued to the midshipman, ramrod straight though still on his knee, “that’s a diary of sorts from the initial settlement of the planet some fifteen hundred years ago. The writer was the only survivor of a wrecked starship who lived for nine years with the natives of South Land.”
Adele frowned again. “He says he did,” she added, because you could scarcely consider this unimpeachable evidence.
“That’s writing?” Dorst said, leaning far over to bring his eyes closer to the document. He clasped his hands behind his back to show that there was no danger of him touching the leather. “What language . . . ?”
Adele smiled. “It’s in Universal,” she said, “but the writer had a very crabbed hand and he wrote on both sides of the sheet. And—”
“These are holes in the paper!” Dorst said as his mind finally realized that he was seeing the attaché case, not pale gray ink against the dark brown leather. He looked up at Adele in amazement.
“Yes,” she said dryly. “The ink he used was mildly acidic. It ate through the leather from both sides in the course of a millennium and a half. This makes transcription more difficult than it usually would be.”
A document like this deserved care beyond anything available on Sexburga, but that couldn’t be Adele’s present priority. She opened the acetate folder she’d found it in and slipped one edge under the fragile wondrousness of the memoir. Closing the folder, she put the document back into the drawer where it had been.
It had survived there for decades or more. If matters worked out the way Adele hoped they would, she could return and preserve the account properly. If not, she didn’t suppose it mattered very much.
She gestured Dorst to the opening. “Let’s go,” she said crisply.
“Ma’am,” he said, rising to a stoop, “why don’t you go down and I’ll latch the trap behind us. It’ll be easier for me, I think.”
“Yes, all right,” Adele said, squeezing past the midshipman. He’d spoken as though he’d been watching her sway as she worked the stiff bolt to open the attic. Well, you didn’t have to be around Officer Mundy very long to imagine how clumsy she’d be on a ladder.
“Ma’am?” Dorst said, gripping her arm in a tactful but firm fashion. “If you turn so you face the ladder, you’ll be, ah, more comfortable.”
“Safer,” Adele said, supplying the correct word as she obediently turned and started down. Though falling fifteen feet onto her face—the Council Chamber was on this floor and the ceiling was high—would certainly be uncomfortable.
Dorst waited till she’d reached the hallway to follow. He slammed the trapdoor with no trouble: the sudden weight had almost swept Adele off the ladder when the bolt released it.
“I didn’t know there were natives on Sexburga, ma’am,” he said, dropping lightly onto the balls of his feet instead of climbing down the rungs.
He smiled in a hopeful, puppyish way. Adele realized that he was trying to change the unstated subject from her physical ineptitude. That was the sort of handicap that bothered people who didn’t trip over themselves more than it did Adele herself, but she found the impulse engaging.
“There aren’t any natives according to the printed data I’ve found,” Adele said, striding briskly down the hallway. “That’s what made this account so interesting. The writer says that he lived alone for months before they showed themselves to him. After that they fed him, and if I’ve followed the text correctly . . .”
Dorst glanced back at the tall step ladder, but Adele waved him on. The janitor had dragged the ladder out for her with bad grace despite the generous tip she’d given him; he could put it away or leave it in the middle of the corridor as he chose.