Soldiers

He thought of measuring its height, but that required knowing its distance, and this was not the place to use his range finder. Use your map, and estimate, he decided. His computer made the worker's height twenty-eight inches at the withers. He couldn't get a figure for height to the top of the long skull; torso and neck were bent forward, eyes on its work.

"Not as big as I thought," he said, "and not horselike at all." Again reducing magnification for sca

Morgan stared. The machine, he realized, had disturbed a nest of Tagus's version of hornets. The operator's dance became extreme, then it fell, limbs thrashing. Quickly Morgan increased magnification till he could glimpse the hornets, big as his thumb joint, strafing the invader until its limbs went slack, and its head flopped sideways on the ground.

"Jesus!" Morgan murmured. He'd been stung a few times himself-twice just the day before; presumably he'd gotten too near a nest. It hurt like hell when they hit, but it hadn't laid him low like that. Of course, from what he could see, the alien had gotten stung a lot more than twice. But still…

He cut magnification, and sca

He continued sca

If I hike till deep dusk, and get an early start in the morning, I can get back to Robert and Co

It seemed very important.

Chapter 13

Language Lesson

David MacDonald heartily disliked the awkward commode they were expected to use. It was ill-suited for humans: a dry ceramic box perhaps sixteen inches high, and wide enough for two of the alien invaders to back up to at once. He sluiced it clean with the hose provided, then in lieu of paper, hosed his behind with a needle-spray setting. He wondered how the aliens managed to hose their rears. Probably they didn't, he decided. Their arms were too short. And horses got by without it, and dogs.

Fortunately, alien hygiene arrangements included soft soap in bowls, and he made use of it now. He didn't particularly like making a spectacle of himself for the multilens monitor that left no part of their cell unobserved. When they'd wakened on the shuttle that had brought them to this-station? ship?-they were naked. But of course their captors were naked too, except for equipment harness.

He looked at Yukiko, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room on a sort of futon. A

Ju-Li would have fought a squad of hyenas to protect her, so the others must be dead, he thought. Yukiko agreed. Probably De

David shook his head. He and Yukiko were together, and when they'd been put aboard the shuttle, A

"How's she doing?" he asked.

"Fine," Yukiko answered. Her attention remained on A

David didn't take his wife's words at face value. She'd said what she had at least partly to sooth A

A sound caught David's attention, and he turned. The door was sliding open, and two aliens looked in from the corridor, sidearms in hand, long reptilian jaws closed. The eyes were squarely in front, presumably providing binocular vision.

The weapons, David guessed, were stu

It's got no lips, David realized. The alien's eyes were on him, and for a moment David thought the creature wanted to know. But then it answered its own question. "I felt vetter."

Before he got it all out, the creature's gaze had moved to Yukiko. "How do you suffose I feel?" it said, then answered its own question. "Cratty." It looked from one human to the other, then made what might have been a smile, and touched its upright torso where its heart might might have been but almost certainly wasn't. "Qonits," it added. "Qonits!"

"Yukiko," Yukiko answered promptly, and touched her chest.

Ah-ha. It's begun, David thought. He remembered now: the first sentence had been what he'd asked Yukiko when she'd wakened-"How do you feel?"-and the follow-up had been her reply. "Cratty" was as close as their interrogator could come to "crappy." The aliens had been monitoring more than their movements. They'd recorded their words, run an audio analysis, then this one had practiced the Terran phonemes, words, and sentences. They wanted to learn the language.

The chain of realizations had been more rapid than speech; the oceanographer didn't miss a beat. "David," he said, touching his thatched chest.

It was indeed the begi