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On the screen a sudden red streak of fire lanced out from the probe to the Earthly spaceship. A tiny
explosion of white and gold erupted from the ship s surface.
Sandy winced, even though he knew that it wasn t an attack but only the routine precaution of lasering a
little crater on the hull so that the watching Hakh hli could analyze its composition before they brought it
closer to the big ship itself. The glow darkened and died almost as soon as it flared. It left only a tiny pit
in the metal.
Then the probe began its cautious circling of the ship again, stem to stern and roundabout. As it shifted
views there were, from time to time, quick glimpses of stars, of part of the rusty disk of Mars far below,
even a glint of sunlight reflected from the Hakh hli interstellar ship itself, hovering many miles away. Sandy
saw the probe launch its magnetic grapple, the cable snaking behind as it attached itself to the hull of the
Earth derelict.
Then the screen went dark.
That s all? Tanya sniffed. We don t see the inside of the Earthie ship?
Not in this file, Obie said. There s another file, though. I can get it for you if you like, Sandy.
Sandy shook his head. Don t bother, he said. It wasn t the bother that he minded, it was having
people staring over his shoulder as he watched the recording of the ship being carefully examined and
disassembled by suited Hakh hli. The tape showed the spacesuited figures that were his parents being
handled like time-fused bombs. He did not enjoy that. True, it showed nothing of the people inside the
spacesuits; it showed them being carefully transported to the Genetics laboratories, where they would be
kept quarantined while investigations were made, but once those doors closed the file ended. He did not
care to have an audience as he watched that, and anyway the simulator had stopped moving and the
door was opening. Polly s through, he announced. Who s next?
But when Polly came out she was in no good mood, and the instructor didn t help it any. When you
launched from that magnetic grapple you were slow and not at all fast, he told her. This is waste of
energy, so you must do better and not worse.
It was fast enough, she grumbled. But if you think I am bad and not sufficiently good, let s try
someone else. Obie! You take next turn and show him what one bad pilot is really like!
Unfortunately for Obie, he performed almost as badly as Polly said. When he got out of the flight
simulator his tail was dragging. Very bad and not at all good, the instructor pronounced. You crashed
this ship. You do not at all bring credit to your cohort. And while Bottom, the next in turn, was getting
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into the still-warm kneeling seat and buckling himself in, Obie had to stand silently through a lengthy
criticism of the way he had failed to deploy his trash deflectors, missed his angle of approach over
Earth s pole, and decelerated too rapidly on landing.
As soon as it was over he growled to Sandy, Let s get out of here.
Sandy had no objection. Where?
Anywhere, Obie said sulkily. Listen. We re outside our quarters, aren t we?
Well, of course we are.
So why don t we do something about it? As long as we re out we can look around.
Look around where? Sandy asked eagerly, already convinced.
Anywhere we haven t been lately, Obie said, meaning anywhere they weren t authorized to be going.
I don t think we re supposed to do that, Sandy said thoughtfully. It wasn t an objection, just a matter
of putting all the evidence on the table, and Obie regarded it as such. He didn t answer. He just led the
way out of the simulator chamber, and they stood for a moment in the corridor, looking around.
Sandy proposed, We could go see some of the things they re making us to take to Earth.
No, wait a minute! Obie cried. Listen, we can do that later, but maybe they ve got some funny new
freaks in Genetics! Let s go see!
It wasn t what Sandy had had in mind. Genetics was a place of stews and stinks, and he didn t usually
like to go there for personal reasons. But when he tried to explain that to Obie they were already on the
way there, and anyway Obie was puzzled. Tell me again what you don t like, Sandy?
I told you. They ve got my mother there.
Oh, Sandy, Obie said sorrowfully, twitching his thumbs in disagreement. It isn t really your mother,
you know. And actually Sandy did know. What the Hakh hli had taken from his mother s body after her
death was no more than a few microorganisms and cell samples. If they kept them alive as cultures, that
was just science.
But Sandy couldn t see it that way. To him they weren t cultures, they were his mother not alive, but
not exactly dead, either. Really, Sandy. The samples they ve got in there aren ther. They re just
cultures. All the rest of her fed the titch hik long ago.
Sandy flinched. He disliked the thought of his mother s body being eaten even more than the thought of
parts of it being preserved. It wasn t that Hakh hli burial customs bothered him particularly. All his life he
had been aware that the ultimate fate of every living being on the ship was to be tossed into the tank of
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