The Mote in God's Eye

It was the ship’s gadgetry that held her attention. The Field itself, its properties intriguing and puzzling, its underlying principles a matter of guesswork. The Engineer was ready to spend the rest of her life trying. For one look at the generator she would have died. The big ship’s motive force was different from any fusion plant the Engineer had ever heard of; and its workings seemed to use the properties of that mysterious force envelope.

How to get aboard? How to get through that envelope? The intuition that came was rare for an Engineer. The small craft… was it trying to talk to her? It had come from the large craft. Then…

The small craft was a link to the larger ship, to the force envelope and its technology and the mystery of its sudden appearance.

She had forgotten danger. She had forgotten everything in the burning urge to know more about that field. The Engineer opened her air-lock door and waited to see what would happen.

“Mister Whitbread, your alien is trying to use probes on MacArthur,” Captain Blaine was saying, “Commander Cargill says he has them blocked. If that makes the alien suspicious, it can’t be helped. Has he tried any kind of probe on you?”

“No, sir.”

Rod frowned and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve been watching the instruments, sir.”

“That’s funny. You’re smaller, but you’re close. You’d think he—”

“The air lock!” Whitbread snapped. “Sir, the Motie’s opened his air lock.”

“I see it. A mouth opened in the hull. Is that what you mean?”

“Yessir. Nothing coming out. I can see the whole cabin through that opening. The Motie’s in his control cabin—permission to enter, sir?”

“Hmm. OK. Watch yourself. Stay in communication. And good luck, Whitbread.”

Jonathon sat a moment, nerving himself. He had half hoped the Captain would forbid it as too dangerous. But of course midshipmen are expendable… Whitbread braced himself in the open air lock. The alien ship was very close. With the entire ship watching him, he launched himself into space.

Part of the alien’s hull had stretched like skin, to open into a kind of funnel. A strange way to build an air lock, thought Whitbread. He used backpack jets to slow himself as he drifted straight into the funnel, straight toward the Motie, who stood waiting to receive him.

The alien wore only its soft brown fur and four thick pads of black hair, one in each armpit and one at the groin. “No sign of what’s holding the air in, but there’s got to be air in there,” Whitbread told the mike. A moment later he knew. He had run into invisible honey.

The air lock closed against his back.

He almost panicked. Caught like a fly in amber, no forward, no retreat. He was in a cell 130 cm high, the height of the alien. It stood before him on the other side of the invisible wall, blank-faced, looking him over.

The Motie. It was shorter than the other, the dead one in the probe. Its color was different: there were no white markings through the brown fur. There was another, subtler, more elusive difference… perhaps the difference between the quick and the dead, perhaps something else.

The Motie was not frightening. Its smooth fur was like one of the Doberman pinschers Whitbread’s mother used to raise, but there was nothing vicious or powerful looking about the alien. Whitbread would have liked to stroke its fur.

The face was no more than a sketch, without expression, except for a gentle upward curve of the lipless mouth, a sardonic half-smile. Small, flat-footed, smooth-furred, almost featureless— It looks like a cartoon, Whitbread thought. How could he be afraid of a cartoon?

But Jonathon Whitbread was crouched in a space much too small for him, and the alien was doing nothing about it.

The cabin was a crowded patchwork of panels and dark crevasses, and tiny faces peered at him from the shadows.

Vermin! The ship was infested with vermin. Rats? Foodsupply? The Motie did not seem disturbed as one flashed into the open, then another, more dancing from cover to cover, crowding close to see the intruder.