The Mote In God's Eye

They did, as it happened, but Whitbread had a string of bad luck. He lost nearly a full day's pay.

The game was ended by the return of the cutter. Cargill came immediately to the Captain's quarters to tell about the expedition. He had brought information, a pair of incomprehensible Motie mechanisms now being offloaded in hangar deck, and a torn sheet of gold-metallic stuff which he carried himself with thick gloves. Blaine thanked Renner and the middies for the game and they took the thinly veiled hint, although Whitbread would have liked to stay.

"I'm for my bunk," Potter announced. "Unless-"

"Yes?" Whitbread prompted.

"Would it nae be a bonny sight if Mr. Crawford were to see his stateroom now?" Potter asked mischievously.

A slow grin spread across Jonathon Whitbread's plump features. "It would indeed, Mr. Potter. It would indeed. Let's hurry!"

It was worth it. The midshipmen weren't alone in the debriefing rooms off hangar deck when a signal rating, prompted by Whitbread, tuned in the stateroom.

Crawford didn't disappoint them. He would have committed xenocide, the first such crime in human history, if he hadn't been restrained by his friends. He raved so much that the Captain heard about it, and as a result Crawford went directly from patrol to standing the next watch.

Buckman collected Potter and scurried to the astronomy lab, sure that the young middie had created chaos. He was pleasantly surprised at the work accomplished. He was also pleased with the coffee waiting for him. That flask was always full, and Buckman had come to expect it. He knew that it was somehow the work of Horace Bury.

Within half an hour of the cutter's arrival, Bury knew of the sheet of golden metal. Now that was something odd-and potentially quite valuable. The ancient-looking Motie machines might be equally so- If he could only get access to the cutter's computer! But Nabil's skills didn't include that one.

Ultimately there would be coffee and conversation with Buckman, but that could wait, that could wait. And tomorrow the Motie ship would arrive. No question about it, this was going to be a very valuable expedition-and the Navy thought they were punishing him by keeping him away from his business! True, there would be no growth without Bury to supervise it and drive his underlings on, but it wouldn't suffer much either; and now, with what he would learn here, Imperial Autonetics might become the most powerful firm in the Imperial Traders' Association. If the Navy thought the ITA made trouble for them now, wait until it was controlled by Horace Bury! He smiled slyly to himself. Nabil, seeing his master's smile, hunched nervously and tried to be inconspicuous.

Below in hangar deck Whitbread was put to work along with everyone else who had wandered there. Cargill had brought back a number of items from the Stone Beehive, and they had to be uncrated. Whitbread was ingenious enough to volunteer to assist Sally before Cargill gave him another job.

They unloaded skeletons and mummies for the anthropology lab. There were doll-sized miniatures, very fragile, that matched the live miniatures in the petty officers' lounge. Other skeletons, which Staley said were very numerous in the Beehive, matched the Motie miner now bunked in Crawford's stateroom.

"Hah!" cried Sally. They were unpacking still another mummy.

"Uh?" Whitbread asked.

"This one, Jonathon. It matches the one in the Motie probe. Or does it? The forehead slope is wrong... but of course they'd pick the most intelligent person they could find as emissary to New Caledonia. This is a first contact with aliens for them too."

There was a small, small-headed mummy, only a meter long, with large, fragile hands. The long fingers on all three hands were broken. There was a dry hand which Cargill had found floating free, different from anything yet found: the bones strong and straight and thick, the joints large. "Arthritis?" Sally wondered. They packed it carefully away and went on to the next box, the remains of a foot which had also been floating free. It had a small, sharp thorn on the heel, and the front of the foot was as hard as a horse's hoof, quite sharp and pointed, unlike the other Motie foot structures.

"Mutations?" Sally said. She turned to Midshipman Staley, who had also been drafted for striking the cargo below. "You say the radiation was all gone?"

"It was dead cold, uh-Sally," said Staley. "But it must have been a hell of radiation at one time."

Sally shivered. "I wonder just now much time we're talking about. Thousands of years? It would depend on how clean those bombs they used to propel the asteroid were."

"There was no way of telling," Staley answered. "But that place felt old, Sally. Old, old. The most ancient thing I can compare it to is the Great Pyramid on Earth. It felt older than that."

"Um," she said. "But that's no evidence, Horst."

"No. But that place was old. I know it."