The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [97]
There was more activity aboard the cutter. Commander Sinclair had gone aboard and been immediately taken to the Motie ship. Three days passed before a Brown-and-white began following Sinclair around, and it was a peculiarly quiet Motie. It did seem interested in the cutter’s machinery, unlike the others who had assigned themselves to a human. Sinclair and his Fyunch(click) spent long hours aboard the alien ship, poking into corners, examining everything.
“The lad was right about the tool room,” Sinclair told Blaine during one of his daily reports. “It’s like the nonverbal intelligence tests BuPers worked up for new recruits. There are things wrong wi’ some o’ the tools, and ‘tis my task to put them right.”
“Wrong how?”
Sinclair chuckled, remembering. He had some difficulty explaining the joke to Blaine. The hammer with the big, flat head would hit a thumb every time. It needed to be trimmed. The laser heated too fast . . . and that was a tricky one. It had generated the wrong frequency of light. Sinclair fixed it by doubling the frequency—somehow. He also learned more about compact lasers than he’d ever known before. There were other tests like that. “They’re good, Captain. It took ingenuity to come up wi’ some of the testing gadgets wi’out giving away more than they did. But they canna keep me from learning about their ship... Captain, I already ken enough to redesign the ship’s boats to be more efficient. Or make millions o’ crowns designing miner ships.”
“Retiring when we go back, Sandy?” Rod asked; but he grinned widely to show he didn’t mean it.
In the second week, Rod Blaine also acquired a Fyunch(click).
He was both dismayed and flattered. The Motie looked like all the others: brown-and-white markings, a gentle smile in a lopsided face just high enough above the deck that Rod could have patted her on the head—if he’d ever seen the Motie face to face, which he never would.
Each time he called the cutter she was there, always eager to see Blaine and talk to him. Each time he called, her Anglic was better. They would exchange a few words, and that was that. He didn’t have time for a Fyunch(click), or a need for one either. Learning Motie language wasn’t his job—from the progress made, it wasn’t anyone’s job—and he only saw her through a phone link. What use was a guide he would never meet?
“They seem to think you’re important,” was Hardy’s dead-pan answer.
It was something to think about while he presided over his madhouse of a ship. And the alien didn’t complain at all.
The month’s flurry of activity hardly affected Horace Bury. He received no news at all from the cutter, and had nothing to contribute to the scientific work on the ship. Alert to rumors, which were always helpful, he waited for news to filter down through the grapevine; but not very much did. Communications with the cutter seemed to stop with the bridge, and he had no real friends among the scientists other than Buckman. Blaine had given up putting everything on the intercom. For the first time since he left New Chicago, Bury felt imprisoned.
It bothered him more than it should have, although he was introspective enough to know why. All his life he had tried to control his environment as far as he could reach: around a world, across light years of space and decades of time—or throughout a Navy battle cruiser. The crew treated him as a guest, but not as a master; and anywhere he was not master, he was a prisoner.
He was losing money, too. Somewhere in the restricted sections of MacArthur, beyond the reach of all but the highest-ranking scientists, physicists were studying the golden stuff from the Stone Beehive. It took weeks of effort to pick up the rumor that it was a superconductor of heat.
That would be priceless stuff, and he knew he must obtain a