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gaped open, revealing the thin, corded column of her neck, shad-
owed within. Against the dimness of that shadow, something tiny
burned and glowed like a speck of living green fire.
Giles frankly stared. He had heard of the Police identispores,
but had never seen one before in his life. What he was looking at,
he knew, was a miniature bubble of crystalline transparency, in the
heart of which was buried a special spore, the cultivation of which
was one of the most jealously guarded secrets of the Police and the
Council. The bubble would be glued with a physiological glue to
the flesh of Biset's neck, and from the bubble itself a nearly invisi-
ble hair of a tube would be reaching down into a nearby blood
vessel. Up that tube, as up a capillary, some of Biset's blood would
reach and nourish the spore, which-as long as it was alive-
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would glow with its own, unique color, unlike the color of any of
its sister spores.
Removed from its connection with Biset's bloodstream, that
spore would die and its individual light would go out. Even if
placed immediately in contact with the bloodstream of any other
person, it would die. It had been cultured on Biset's individual
body chemistry, and any other body chemistry was poison to it.
"My ident card," Biset was saying.
Giles looked down and saw her holding a small white card,
also enclosed in a few millimeters of crystalline transparency-a
material that made tampering with it almost an impossibility. A
perfectly ordinary arbite identification card, except that one comer
of it was colored green. Giles took the card from her hand and
held it up so that the colored comer was only a fraction of an inch
from the minuscule living jewel at her throat. The colors matched.
53
"Yes," he said, letting his breath out in something that almost
became a sigh. "Thank you. I believe you now."
He handed back the card. She took it with one hand, resealed
the collar of her coveralls with the other.
"I can count on your help then. Honor, sir?9'
"Yes," he said, heavily, "you can count on it. Wait-" The
sudden sharp note in his voice arrested her as she started to turn
away.
"The Police serve the Council and the Council represent the
Melborn. I am the only Adelbom here. You'll do what I "dy-
and I say you'll take no steps to arrest or question anyone on this
ship without coming and getting my permission first. Youll do
nothing whatsoever in the line of Police duty without checking
with me first. Is that understood?"
Her face was unreadable. She hesitated for just a second, and
in that second, the Captain's voice spoke.
"Now.'" it exploded, in Albenareth, suddenly from the grille
of the console before Giles. Giles jerked into full alertness. He had
let his thoughts run away from him, while his attention was lulled
by his own lack of understanding of the purpose behind most of
the actions of the Engineer shown on the screen. Now he woke
suddenly to the fact that what he had taken for a continuing effort
of work on the part of the spacesuited figure had become a sort of
aimless pawing at the cover of the remaining motor, like the fum-
blings of a drunk man.
"Adelman!" said the Captain's voice. "Do you hear me? Now
you must act. Use your mechanical to take hold of the Engineer.
Gently, now-about the body ... gently ..."
Tensely, Giles maneuvered the rods and their finger studs.
The alien waldoes were like the equivalent machine of human
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design in that they were far more powerful than the flesh-and-
blood hands directing them; and Giles concentrated on using them
as lightly as possible to take hold of the Engineer around what in
human terms would have been his waist.
He was too gentle. He got a six-finger grip on the Engineer
and then lost it. The spacesuited body hobbled away, floating
54
above the hull of the lifeship, tethered only by its umbilical con-
nections. Giles made a grab for it-but instinctively used two
mechanical fingers in the human manner instead of the Albe-
narethian three, and the Engineer floated free again.
The voice of the Captain shouted something from the grille in
front of Giles, but Giles was concentrating too hard on his job at
hand to listen or translate what was said. He tried once more,
delicately, with all three fingers on each metal arm; and this time
he caught the Engineer firmly.
The grating sound rumbled through the hull of the lifeship. In
Giles' screen the images of the motors began to shrink as the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]