But she finished the song herself. That was about seventy hours later,
camped in the steeps where rangers dared not fare.
She and Sherrinford had not said much to the Irons family, after
refusing repeated pleas to leave the forbidden country alone. Nor had
they exchanged many remarks at first as they drove north. Slowly,
however, he began to draw her out about her own life. After a while
she almost forgot to mourn, in her remembering of home and old
neighbors. Somehow this led to discoveries=that he, beneath his
professional manner, was a gourmet and a lover of opera and
appreciated her femaleness; that she could still laugh and find beauty in
the wild land around her-and she realized, half guiltily, that life held
more hopes than even the recovery of the son Tim gave her.
“I’ve convinced myself he’s alive,” the detective said. He scowled.
“Frankly, it makes me regret having taken you along. I expected this
would be only a fact-gathering trip, but it’s turning out to be more. If
we’re dealing with real creatures who stole him, they can do real harm.
I ought to turn back to the nearest garth and call for a plane to fetch
you.” ‘
“Like bottommost hell you will, mister,” she said. “You need
somebody who knows outway conditions, and I’m a better shot than
average.”
“M-m-m . . . it would involve considerable delay too, wouldn’t it?
Besides the added distance, I can’t put a signal through to any airport
before this current burst of solar interference has calmed down.”
Next “night” he broke out his remaining equipment and set it up. She
recognized some of it, such as the thermal detector. Other items were
strange to her, copied to his order from the advanced apparatus of his
birthworld. fie would tell her little about them. “I’ve explained my
suspicion that the ones we’re after have telepathic capabilities,” he
said in apology.
Her eyes widened. “You mean it could be true, the Queen and her
people can read minds?”
“That’s part of the dread which surrounds their legend, isn’t it?
Actually there’s nothing spooky about the phenomenon. It was
studied and fairly well defined centuries ago, on Earth. I daresay the
facts are available in the scientific microfiles at Christmas Landing.
You Rolanders have simply had no occasion to seek them out, any
more than you’ve yet had occasion to look up how to build power
beamcasters or spacecraft.”
“Well, how does telepathy work, then?”
Sherrinford recognized that her query asked for comfort as much as it
did for facts and he spoke with deliberate dryness: “The organism
generates extremely long-wave radiation which can, in principle, be
modulated by the nervous system. In practice, the feebleness of the
signals and their low rate of information transmission make them
elusive, hard to detect and measure. Our prehuman ancestors went in
for more reliable senses, like vision and hearing. What telepathic
transceiving we do is marginal at best. But explorers have found
extraterrestrial species that got an evolutionary advantage from
developing the system further, in their particular environments. I
imagine such species could include one which gets comparatively little
direct sunlight-in fact, appears to hide from broad day. It could even
become so able in this regard that, at short range, it can pick up man’s
weak emissions and.make man’s primitive sensitivities resonate to its
own strong sendings.”
“That would account for a lot, wouldn’t it?” Barbro said faintly.
“I’ve now screened our car by a jamming field,” Sherrinford told her,
“but it reaches only a few meters past the chassis. Beyond, a
scout of theirs might get a warning from your thoughts, if you knew
precisely what I’m trying to do. I have a well-trained subconscious
which sees to it that I think about this in French when I’m outside.
Communication has to be structured to be intelligible, you see, and
that’s a different enough structure from English. But English is the
only human language on Roland, and surely the Old Folk have learned
it.”
She nodded. Ile had told her his general plan, which was too obvious to
conceal. The problem was to make contact with the aliens, if they