The Palach Moga paused before a closed door.
“If the Guardian will graciously wait here . . . I will see that the Assembly is prepared. . . . ”
Nile waited. After moments the door reopened and the Palach emerged. He carried something like a jeweled handbag slung by a long strap over one shoulder. Nile had the impression he was ill at ease.
“If the Guardian permits . . . There are Great Palachs beyond this door. They are unarmed. They would prefer it if the Guardian did not address them with a weapon at her hand.”
If she couldn’t convince them, Nile thought, she would die behind that door. But a Tuvela would not need to draw courage from a gun at this stage—and the UW by itself was not going to get her back past the clusters of guards in the passages behind them. She unclipped the holster from her belt, held it out. Moga placed it carefully in the bag and drew open the door. Nile went inside.
For a moment she had the impression of being in the anteroom to a great, dimly lit hall—too large a hall by far to be part of this structure in the floatwood. Then she knew that the whole opposite wall of the room was a viewscreen. There were upward of a dozen Great Palachs in the room with her, squatting along the wall to either side . . . creatures not much larger than Koll, in richly colored stiff robes and an assortment of equally colorful hats. The remainder of the Everliving, Palachs and Great Palachs of all degrees, were arranged in rows along the hall, which must be a section of the headquarters ship below the sea. Shallow water shifted and gleamed here and there among the rows. Motionless and silent, the massed amphibians stared up at her from the dimness.
Nile heard the door through which she had come close quietly at her back. And curiously, with the tiny click her uncertainties were gone. A cool light clarity seemed to settle on her mind, every thought and emotion falling into place. . . . She discovered she had moved forward and was standing in the center of the chamber, facing the big screen.
Selecting her words with chilled precision, the Tuvela began to speak.
Chapter 7
The outstanding feature of the big room in the blockhouse structure the Parahuans had assigned Ticos Cay as his working laboratory was its collection of living specimens. The floatwood island’s life forms lined three of the walls and filled long shelf stands in between. Neatly labeled and charted, they perched on or clung to their original chunks of floatwood, stood rooted in the pockets of forest mold or in victimized life forms in which they had been found, floated in lagoon water, clustered under transparent domes. They varied from the microscopic to inhis organisms with a thirty foot spread. For the most part, they were in biological stasis—metabolism retarded by a factor of several million, balance maintained by enzyme control and a variety of other checks. Proper handling would otherwise have been impossible.
The Guardian was able to find little fault with the progress Dr. Cay had made in his work projects. “In this respect you have not done badly,” she acknowledged, for the benefit of whatever ears might be listening. She tapped the charts he’d offered for her inspection and dropped them into the file he’d taken them from. “It’s disappointing, however, that it became necessary at last for me to intervene directly in a matter we had expected you to handle without our assistance.”
“Given more time, I might have done it!” Ticos remonstrated humbly. “I was opposed by a number of intractable beings, as you know.”
“I do know—having encountered one of those beings. But it was hardly a question of time. The issues were clear. If they had been presented with clarity, a rational majority of our uninvited guests would have drawn the correct conclusions and acted on them. We must count this a failure. You needn’t let it concern you unduly. The excellent thoroughness of your work on the basic assignment, under somewhat limiting conditions, will offset the failure, at least in part.”
Ticos mumbled his gratitude, went back with evident relief to additional explanations about his project. Nile checked her watch.
Forty-two minutes since she’d been escorted with careful courtesy from the assembly chamber to the lab and left there with Ticos. No word from the Everliving since then, and the Palach Moga hadn’t shown up with her gun. Good sign or bad? While she was talking to them, she’d almost been a Tuvela. She’d blasted them! She’d felt exalted. There’d been no questions. The Great Palachs closest to her in the chamber had edged farther back to the walls before she was done, stirred nervously again whenever she shifted a glance in their direction.
Afterward, brief sharp letdown. No Tuvela, no Guardian. Simply a scared human in a potentially very bad spot, with much too much at stake. If she’d fumbled this in any way, made the slightest slip—
Now she was somewhere between those states, back to normal, worried enough but again busily balancing possibilities, planning as much as could be planned here.
One of the factors she’d been considering was this room itself. It was long, wide, high, located somewhere near the top of the overall structure—she’d come up another level after leaving the chamber. It had a door at either end, probably locked now. The last could make no real difference since there was bound to be a gaggle of armed Oganoon outside each door to make sure the Guardian and her scientist didn’t walk out on the conference. From the door at the left a raised walkway led to a platform some four feet above the floor near the center of the room. The Palachs, Ticos had explained, customarily stood there when they’d come to have dealings with him. Lighting came from conductor rods in ceiling and walls, primitive but efficient. Ventilation arrangements, while equally simple, met the lab’s requirements perfectly. There was a large shadowy rectangle enclosed in a grid up on one of the walls just below the ceiling. Behind the grid was an unseen window, a rectangular opening in the wall. The salty-moist many-scented freshness of the floatwood forest swirled constantly about them. Enclosed without it, many of Ticos’ research specimens would have died in days. But the storm gusts which occasionally set the blockhouse structure quivering were damped out at the window, and almost no sound came through.
So the shadowy rectangle was a force screen. It would let out no light, and certainly it was impenetrable to solid objects such as a human body. The screen controls must be outside the room, or Ticos would have indicated them to her. But there was a knobby protrusion on either side of the grid which enclosed the rectangle. And beneath those protrusions were the screen generators. . . .
Which brought up the matter of tools, and weapons or items which could serve as weapons. Her UW would be hard to replace in either capacity. But one could make do. Ticos had left a small cutter-sealer on the central worktable back of them. A useful all-around gadget, and one that could turn into a factor here. Another potential factor was the instrument studded with closely packed rows of tiny push-buttons, which Ticos carried attached to his belt and through which he regulated various internal balances and individual environmental requirements of his specimens.
The only obvious weapons around were the guns in the hands of three Parahuan guards who squatted stolidly in two feet of water in the partitioned end of the room at the right. From the platform, Nile had looked in briefly across the dividing wall at them. Two were faced toward the wall; one was faced away toward a long table near the second exit. None of them moved while she studied them. But they looked ready to act instantly. The guns appeared to be heavy-duty short-range blasters, made to be used by hands four times larger than hers. On the table stood Ticos Cay’s communicator.
The guns weren’t factors, except as they could become negative ones. But with a Sotira racing sled moving within close-contact band reach, the communicator was a very large factor. The Everliving in their nervous ambivalence had decreed it should be available at a moment’s notice in case they were forced to open emergency negotiations with the Tuvelas through Dr. Cay. The guards were there to blast death into anybody who attempted to use it under any other circumstances.
Ticos Cay himself was, of course, an important factor. Physically he could become a heavy liability if matters didn’t develop well. He’d lost his wiry bounciness; be was a damaged old man. His face looked drawn tight even when he smiled. He’d been holding pain out of his awareness for weeks; but as an organism he’d been afflicted with almost intolerable strains and had begun to drift down towards death. Of course be knew it.