Little was said. Siewen shrilled a few lobster phrases to Whosits and the Director. Limila sat looking starkly ahead. Wbnee scuttled to her bunk and picked up a few items to tuck into her robe. Barton wondered whether the others were out of brains or merely out of ears. So he repeated himself, only louder.

It took a while, but eventually Barton herded every- one out of the Demu ship to talk to the home folks. He faced a General Parkhurst, a Presidential Assistant Tarleton of the Space Agency and a bevy of news-media types among the trailing retinue. Barton put thumbs- down on the newsies. "Get those bastards out of here,"

he said. "They never get anything right in their lives, the first time. This is too important to let them fuck it up.

Later, maybe, but not right now." But be was too late to stop them from taking pictures of the two Demu and the three pseudo-Demu. Not that it mattered all that much, probably, but it did bother him.

General Parkhurst was a small dapper man; his idea of efficiency was to do everything in a hurry. He took several reels of taped notes in the first hour. Then he departed abruptly while Barton was still trying to explain the dif- ference between the Demu and his other companions.

Barton shrugged and didn't miss him much.

The civilian, Tarleton, was a different bucket of clams, a big sloppy slow-talking bear of a roan. He asked and he listened and he observed, without trying to tell Barton what to do. Barton had all his passengers shuck then- robes and hoods to show themselves, whether they liked it or not.

The Director was apparently quite indifferent to being paraded before an alien species. Of course his upper limbs were still strapped into splint-harnesses, so there wasn't much he could have done about it.

The smaller Demu shrank timidly until Barton patted it on th head and said "Whnee" in a gentle, encouraging tone of voice. Then it displayed its chitmous protrusion- less exoskeleton in relative confidence. Barton had un-

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splinted its healed arm some time ago, and also Whosits*;

he still didn't care to trust the Director that far.

'These are the Demu, the race we're up against," he said. The big one ran the show at our zoo, as I said before, and it's the daddy or mother or something of the little one, if you can figure out how. She's his egg-child, anyway.

What that means I don't know; they haven't said."

"It might imply more than one method of reproduc- tion," Tarleton said mildly, talking around the stem of his unlighted pipe. "Now how about these others?"

'Two of them used to be human males," Barton began, 'The skinny one with nothing between his legs is a Doktor Siewen; they amputated his spirit too, I think. Whosits there won't talk anything but Demu, so I don't know his name; supposedly he's still male, but not much of one by the looks of him."

Tarletoa looked closely at the pertinent parts of Whos- its, something Barton preferred not to do. There was a sort of nubbin; it might still work, at that. Hardly seemed worth it, though.

"There's no fertility," Tarleton said, "or won't be for long. Apparently one gonad is left, tucked neatly back into the abdominal cavity. The Demu must not have realized that this would produce sterility and eventual impotence." Whosits' serrated Ups twitched but he said nothing.

"This is Limila," Barton said then. "She's a woman of a humanoid race much like ours: the Tilari."

"A woman?" Tarleton said slowly.

"Hell yes," Barton said. "Use your eyes; they didn't cut her butt off." He toned his voice down; he hadn't meant to shout. "Dammit, she was beautiful, Tarleton.

Different from us, several ways. An extra toe and finger she had, all around. Forty teeth. Breasts set down low like so"-he gestured-"forehead clear up here by the ears.

But beautiful. And mostly our kind of people.

"Why for Cfarissakes, Tarleton," he said, mind jarred back to the bloody death of the other Tilari woman, whose name he'd never known, "they're even interfertile with us." His jaw locked. "Don't ask me how I know. Not just yet."

Tarleton didn't ask. Unlike General Parkhurst, he seemed to seme that at the moment Barton was some- thing like a time bomb coming to term, needing careful,

50.

patient defusing. Barton was dimly thankful for the man's presence.

Tarleton motioned the five exhibits to resume their robes, and directed the laying out of food and drink he'd ordered earlier. Apparently he did not see any of the five as human; he hadn't addressed a word to them.

"Can the Demu eat our food?" he asked.

"Damned if I know," Barton answered. "All I ever saw them eat, and all they ever fed me, was liquids and several kinds of wet lumpy glop. If they can't eat our stuff there's plenty of theirs on the ship. Siewea can fetch it"

The Demu ate Earth food all right, chewing with their hard sawtooth lips. But the other three couldn't manage anything except liquids and "glop" foods; their lips looked lobsterlike but chewing was out of the question.

So Siewen was sent to the ship for Demu rations.

There was a hassle when the military guard, left by General Parkhurst, didn't want to admit Doktor Siewen.

Barton headed for the ship; before the guard could shoot him, Tarleton intervened.

"Get that sonofabitch away from my ship!" Barton ex- ploded. "Who the hell does Parkhurst think he is?"

"Easy now," Tarleton said mildly. "The General natu- rally tends to think in terms of security. The guard doesn't realize that you, of course, have free access." He motioned the guard away to one side, where he wouldn't bug Barton.

"Any more of this crap," Barton continued, "and Earth can go whistle. We'll see if maybe the Tilari, Limila's people, have a better idea of how to use a ship."

Limila cringed; he had no time to wonder why.

"It'll be all right now. Barton," Tarleton said. "Come on; have something to eat. Youll feel better."

And in truth Barton did. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed the smells, tastes and textures of his own planet's foods, all the years he'd spent in a Demu cage.

For the first time, he thought to ask how long it had been. The answer was a little less than eight years. Bar- ton repeated the current date. "What d'ya know?" he said. "I was forty a couple of weeks ago. Could have had a birthday party if I'd known." He grimaced.

"Yeah, sure. Some party!" But Tarleton was talking on a

51.

radiophone link to someone he addressed as "sir," and only nodded absently.

After lunch a lanky technician insisted on taking fingerprints. He didn't seem too put out that Demu fin- gers had no recognizable patterns, but was a little upset that no one except Barton had enough fingers to fill all the blanks on his forms. Barton tried to explain that Limila's prints couldnt possibly be on file; the man grinned, and drawled, "Orders, buddy." He was so phleg- matic about it that Barton merely shrugged. Tarleton relaxed visibly.

Whosits' prints were taken by main force while he protested shrilly in lobster language, but the Demu made no such complaints. The Director certainly didn't; Bar- ton had finally unstrapped his arms in honor of his first Earthly meal, and the Director was experiencing freedom of movement for the first time in a long while. Twinges and all, probably. Barton kept an eye on him at first;

then he got tired of the necessity and went into the ship.

He came out with a small device necessary to the opera- tion of the controls; even if the Director managed to sneak onto the ship, he couldn't get away with it. If the Director had had the sense to do the same thing at the far end of the ride. Barton thought, things could have been rough.

Tarleton was trying to explain what the problem was.

Bureaucrats and administrators with the habit of ex- plaining to Barton what the problem was bad helped him decide to drop physics and take up painting. But this man seemed like a sensible sort, so Barton decided he'd better listen.

"The problem is," Tarleton said, "that we need to study the ship, and quite near is the best facility for that purpose. Also we need to study the Demu and-er- the others, and a hospital on the East Coast is best for that. In Maryland, as it happens. But," he concluded, "the hell of it is that we need the Demu, the big one at least, on hand here for information about the ship."

"Yeh, and Siewen and Limila to interpret," Barton added.

"Precisely. Any ideas?"