Even with the ostrichsaur sitting on the ground, Richard had to help Nikki mount the animal. “Thank you, Boobah,” the girl said when she was comfortably nestled in the bowl.
‘The timing has been worked out very carefully,” Archie told Richard and Ellie while they were moving along the path through the forest. “We will arrive at the camp when all the troops are starting breakfast. That way everyone will see us.”
“How will we know precisely when to appear?” Richard asked.
“Some of the quadroids are being managed from the far northern fields. Soon after the first soldiers are awake and are moving around outside their tents, your avian friend Timmy, carrying a written announcement of our imminent arrival, will fly over their heads in the dark. Our message will indicate that we will be preceded by the fireflies and that we will be waving a white flag, as you suggested.”
Nikki noticed some strange eyes looking out at them from the dark of the forest. “Isn’t this fun?” she said to her mother. Ellie did not respond.
Archie stopped the ostrichsaur about a kilometer south of the human camp. The lanterns and other lights outside the distant tents in front of them looked like stars twinkling in
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the night. “Timmy should be dropping our message just about now,” Archie said.
They had been moving cautiously in the dark for several hours, not wanting to use the fireflies because of the possibility that they might be noticed too early. Nikki was sleeping peacefully, her head in her mother’s lap. Both Richard and Ellie were tense. “What are we going to do,” Richard had inquired before they stopped, “if the troops fire on us before we can say anything?”
“We’ll turn around and retreat as fast as we can,” Archie had replied.
“And what happens if they come after us with the helicopters and the searchlights?” Ellie had asked.
“At full speed it will take the ostrichsaur almost four wodens to reach the forest,” Archie had said.
Timmy returned to the group and reported, in a brief jabber and color conversation with Archie, that he had accomplished his mission. Richard and Timmy then said farewell to each other. The avian’s large eyes expressed an emotion Richard had not seen before as Richard rubbed his underbelly. A few moments later, as Timmy flew away in the direction of the Emerald City, a pair of fireflies ignited beside the path and then headed in the direction of the human camp. Richard led the procession, clutching the white flag in his right hand. The ostrichsaur followed about fifty meters behind carrying Ellie, Archie, and the sleeping child.
Richard could see the soldiers with his binoculars when their party was about four hundred meters away. The troops were standing around, looking in their general direction. Richard counted twenty-six of them altogether, including three with rifles poised and another pair scanning the darkness with binoculars.
As planned, Ellie, Nikki, and Archie dismounted when they were about two hundred meters from the camp. The ostrichsaur was sent back while the four of them w^alked toward the human soldiers. Nikki, who had not been ready to awaken, complained at first but became quiet when she
sensed the importance of her mother’s request to remain
silent.
Archie walked between the two adult humans. Nikki ; was holding her mother’s hand and scampering to keep up
with the pace. “Hello, there,” Richard shouted when he
thought he was within earshot. “This is Richard Wakefield.
We come in peace.” He waved the white flag vigorously. “I
am with my daughter Ellie, my granddaughter Nikki, and an
octospider representative.”
They must have been an amazing sight for the soldiers,
none of whom had ever seen an octospider before. With the
fireflies hovering over the heads of the troops, Richard and
his party emerged from the Raman dark.
One of the soldiers stepped forward. “I am Captain ; Enrico Pioggi,” he said, “the commanding officer of this £ camp. I accept your surrender on behalf of the armed forces f of New Eden.”
\
;; Because the announcement of their impending arrival
f had been delivered to the camp less than half an hour earlier,
. the New Eden chain of command had not had time to
| formulate a plan of what to do with the prisoners. As soon
; as he had confirmed that a party of a man, a woman, a child,
and an alien octospider were indeed approaching his camp,
Captain Pioggi had again radioed the front headquarters in
;, New York and requested instructions on how to proceed.
• The colonel in charge of the campaign told him to “secure
l the prisoners” and “stand by for further orders.”
Richard had anticipated that none of the officers would v be willing to take any definitive action until Nakamura I himself had been consulted. He had told Archie, during their f long ride on the ostrichsaur, that it would be important to use whatever time they might have with the soldiers in the > camp to start rebutting the propaganda that the New Eden government was spreading.
‘This creature,” Richard said in a loud voice after the prisoners had been searched and the curious troops were milling around them, “is what we call an octospider. All octospiders are very intelligent—in some ways more intel-
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ligent than we are—and about fifteen thousand of them live in the Southern HemicyUnder, which extends from here to the base of the south polar bowl. My family and I have been living in their realm for over a year—of our own choice, I might add—and we have found the octospiders to be moral and peace-loving. My daughter Ellie and I have come forward with this octospider representative, whom we call Archie, to try to find some way of stopping a military confrontation between our two species.”
“Aren’t you Dr. Robert Turner’s wife?” said one of the troops to Ellie. “The one who was kidnapped by the octospiders?”
“Yes, I am,” Ellie said in a clear voice. “Except that I wasn’t kidnapped in the truest sense of the word. The octospiders wanted to establish communications with us and had been unable to do so. I was taken because they believed that I had the capacity to learn their language.”
“That thing talks!” another soldier said with disbelief.
Until that moment Archie, as planned, had been silent. The troops all stared dumbfounded as colors began pouring out of the right side of his slit and circumnavigating his head. “Archie says greetings,” Ellie translated. “He asks each of you to understand that neither he nor any member of his species wishes you any harm. Archie also wants me to inform you that he can read lips and will be happy to answer any questions you might have.”
“Is this for real?” a soldier said.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Captain Pioggi was standing off to the side, providing an eyewitness account by radio to the colonel in New York. “Yes, sir,” he was saying, “colors on its head … all different colors, sir, red, blue, yellow . . . like rectangles, moving rectangles, they go around its head, and then more of them follow. . . . What’s that, sir? . . . The woman, the doctor’s wife, sir. . . . She apparently knows what the colors mean. . . . No, sir, there aren’t any colored letters, just the colored strips. …
“Right now, sir, the alien is talking to the soldiery . . . No, sir, they are not using colors. . . . According to the woman, sir, the octospider can read lips . . . like a hearing
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impaired person, sir … same technique I guess. . . . Anyway, it then answers in color and the doctor’s wife translates. . . .
“No weapons of any kind, sir. . . . Plenty of toys, clothes, weird-looking objects prisoner Wakefield says are electronic components. . . . Toys, sir, I said toys . . . the little girl had a lot of toys in her backpack. . . . No, we don’t have a scanner up here. . . . Right, sir. . . . Do you have any idea how long we might be waiting, sir?”
By the time Captain Pioggi finally received orders to send the prisoners to New York in one of the helicopters, Archie had thoroughly impressed all the soldiers at the camp. The octospider had begun the demonstration of his prodigious mental abilities by multiplying five- and six-place numbers in his head.
“Now, how do we know that the octospider thing is really coming up with the right answer?” one of the younger soldiers had asked. “All it does is show a string of colors.”
“My man,” Richard had replied with a laugh, “didn’t you just verify on the lieutenant’s calculator that the number my daughter gave was correct? Do you think she computed the product in her head?”