Sampson looked at him quizzically. “Thirty seconds. What are you doing, Lefavre?”
Some of the others caught on. “Move up here, Jacque,” Tania said. She was one of a half-dozen sitting closest to the crystal. “Just in case.”
“Oh. I see,” Sampson said. He started to count down from twenty. Jacque moved directly in front of the crystal and planted his feet in a wide solid stance. He had never played baseball or cricket, but he stared at the air over the crystal like a batter sizing up his strike zone.
“Zero—God!”
The probe was a squat black four-legged machine cluttered with instruments. Three severed tentacles clutched one side of it, pale white and writhing, spraying droplets of iridescent green fluid. Jacque half-swung and then stepped back.
The tentacles stopped squirming, relaxed, and dropped off. Tania broke the silence.
“I guess we do have a mission.”
Later that day they looked at the tapes from the probe. It hadn’t found a planet. It had come out of the LMT onto the hull of a L’vrai spaceship.
It sat on the long black hull undisturbed for days. Its holo camera revealed eight other L’vrai vessels, nearby, slowly orbiting Sirius. There might have been a thousand others, out of camera range.
Then a big spidery thing that could have been either a robot or an alien in a space suit-or just another L’vrai transmutation-scratched its way up the hull, captured the probe, and took it inside the ship through an iris in the hull.
It left the probe in an empty room, where it sat unmolested for hours. Then a L’vrai came in, shuffling awkwardly on four stiff legs: it had taken the form of the probe, perhaps to put the machine at its ease, perhaps for some less obvious motive.
The two machines regarded each other for some time. The probe’s instruments recorded no sound, no electromagnetic signal that might have been an attempt at communication. They just looked at each other for ninety-three minutes; then the bogus probe waddled out.
It was replaced immediately by several L’vrai, in what was probably their natural form (if indeed they had a natural form). It was a versatile shape, rather like an octopus with a flexible skeleton. They had six or eight-varying with the individual-large tentacles that could serve as feet or crude two-fingered hands. A tubular thorax broadened into a scalloped crest at the top, where it sported three eyes; one large fixed one and two smaller eyes on articulated stalks, which waved from the corners of the crest. Under the fixed eye was a slit that occasionally curled open to reveal parallel rows of black shark-like teeth set in foamy mucus.
Several small tentacles sprouted from under the crest, ending in various arrangements of fingers, hooks, and suckers. Some of them changed form as they watched.
Most of the body was a waxy, off-white color (the eyes were amber); the thorax was translucent, revealing dark pulsing shadows of organs. In the back were two slits that might have been excretory, genitals, or watch pockets.
They were too odd-looking to be disgusting or terrifying.
One of the L’vrai came in pushing a cart that hovered wheelless over the floor. It had two tiers of shiny metal instruments. He squatted down by the probe and the others watched as he fiddled with the machine.
Most of what he did was out of the camera’s range. But after a few minutes of what looked like a parody of “scalpel. . . sponge. . . retractors.. .” he managed to disconnect or short out the power source, and the picture went dark.
Sampson spun the tape ahead; there was nothing more to it.
“That’s it,” he said. “What would you like to see again?”
“Run it back to where they took the probe off the outside of the ship,” Tania said. “We’ll look at the whole thing again. And again. And get everybody who’s not on some vital duty to come study it.
“Jacque, Carol, you better go get some sleep. Get pills; sleep for a couple of days if you can.”
Carol nodded. “Ten-day jump?”
“We can’t take a chance on a shorter one, not on such a small target. So it’ll probably be ten days without sleep.”