Duke grunted. "Can you see what they're doing?"

"Uh uh-but they look awfully active." Duke didn't answer.

Larry laid down the binoculars. "Gotta take a leak too." And moved off in the direction of Shorty and Louis, dragging Duke's pack with him.

I stared, first at Larry, then at Duke. "Hey, what's-"

"Don't talk," said Duke. His attention was focused through the long black barrel of the Sony Magna-Sight. He was dialing windage and range corrections; there was a ballistics processor in the stock, linked to the Magna-Sight, and the rifle was anchored on a precision uni-pod.

I stretched over and grabbed the binoculars. Below, the little girl had stopped skipping; she was squatting now and making lines in the dirt. I shifted my attention to the distant trees. Something purple and red was moving through them. The binoculars were electronic, with automatic zoom, synchronized focusing, depth correction, and anti-vibration; but I wished we had a pair with all-weather, low-light image-amplification instead. They might have shown what was behind those trees.

Beside me, I could hear Duke fitting a new magazine into the rifle.

"Jim," he said.

I looked over at him.

He still hadn't taken his attention from the sight. His fingers worked smoothly on the controls as he locked in the numbers. The switches made satisfyingly solid clicks. "Doesn't your bladder need emptying too?"

"Huh? No, I went before we left-"

"Suit yourself." He shut up and squinted into his eyepiece. I looked through the binoculars again at the purple things in the shadows. Were those worms? I was disappointed that they were hidden by the woods. I'd never seen any Chtorrans in the flesh.

I covered the area, hoping to find one out in the open-no such luck. But I did see where they had started to dam the stream. Could they be amphibious too? I sucked in my breath and tried to focus on the forest again. Just one clear glimpse, that's all I wanted

The CRA-A-ACK! of the rifle startled me. I fumbled to refocus the binoculars-the creatures still moved undisturbed. Then what had Duke been firing at-? I slid my gaze across to the enclosure-where a small form lay bleeding in the dirt. Her arms twitched.

A second CRA-A-ACK! and her head blossomed in a flower of sudden red-

I jerked my eyes away, horrified. I stared at Duke. "What the hell are you doing?"

Duke was staring intently through the telescopic sight, waiting to see if she would move again. When she didn't, he raised his head from the sight and stared across the valley. At the hidden Chtorrans. A long time. His expression was . . . distant. For a moment I thought he was in a trance. Then he seemed to come alive again and slid off down the hill, down to where Shorty and Louis and Larry waited. Their expressions were strange too, and they wouldn't look at each other's eyes.

"Come on," said Duke, shoving the rifle at Shorty. "Let's get out of here."

I followed after them. I must have been mumbling. "He shot her-" I kept saying. "He shot her-"

Finally, Larry dropped back and took the binoculars out of my trembling hands. "Be glad you're not the man," he said. "Or you'd have had to do it."

TWO

I ENDED up in Dr. Obama's office. "Sit down, McCarthy."

"Yes, ma'am."

Her eyes were gentle, and I couldn't escape them. She reminded me of my grandmother; she had had that same trick of looking at you so sadly that you felt sorrier for her than for yourself. When she spoke, her voice was detached, almost deliberately flat. My grandmother had spoken like that too, when there was something on her mind and she had to work her way around to it.

"I hear you had a little trouble yesterday afternoon."

"Uh-yes, ma'am." I swallowed hard. "We-that is, Duke shot a little girl."

Dr. Obama said softly, "Yes, I read the report." She paused. "You didn't sign it with the others. Is there something you want to add?"

"Ma'am-" I said. "Didn't you hear me? We shot a little girl."

Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "I see. You're troubled by that."

"Troubled-? Yes, ma'am, I am."

Dr. Obama looked at her hands. They were folded politely on the desk in front of her, carefully manicured, and dark and wrinkled with age. "Nobody ever said it would be easy."

"You didn't say anything about shooting children either."

"I'd hoped we wouldn't have to."

"Dr. Obama, I don't know what the explanation is, but I can't condone-"

"It's not for you to condone!" Her face was suddenly hard. "Duke passed you the binoculars, didn't he?"

"Yes, ma'am. Several times."

"And what did you see?"

"The first time, I saw only the shelter and the enclosure. The second time I saw the little girl."

"And what did Duke do then?"

"Well, it looked like he was going to rescue her, but then he changed his mind and asked for the rifle instead."

"Do you know why he asked for the rifle?"

"Louis said he saw something."

"Mmm. Did you look through the binoculars again to check him?"

"Yes, ma'am-but I looked because I was curious. I'd never seen worms-"

She cut me off. "But when you looked, you saw them, didn't you?"

"I saw something . . ." I hesitated. "I couldn't be sure what it was."

"What did it look like?"

"It was big, and it was purple or red, it was hard to tell."

"The Chtorr have purple skin and varicolored fur. Depending on the light, it can look red, pink, magenta or orange. Was that what you saw?"

"I saw something purple. It was in the shadows, and it kept moving back and forth."

"Was it moving fast?"

I tried to remember. What was fast for a worm? "Kind of," I hedged.

"Then what you saw was a fully grown Chtorr in the active - and most dangerous-phase. Duke recognized it, so did Larry, Louis and Shorty. They signed the report."

"I wouldn't know-I've never seen a Chtorr before. That's why I'm here."

"If they said it was a Chtorr, you can be sure it was-but that's why they passed the binoculars, just to be sure; if Duke had been wrong, one of the others would have been sure to spot it."

"I'm not arguing about the identification-"

"Well, you should be," Dr. Obama said. "That's the only reason you could possibly have for not signing this report." She tapped the paper on her desk.

I eyed it warily. Dad had warned me about signing things I wasn't sure of-that's how he had married Mother. Or so he'd always claimed. I said, "It's that little girl we shot-I keep seeing her skipping around that pen. She wasn't in danger; there was no reason to shoot her-"

"Wrong," said Dr. Obama. "Wrong, twice over. You should know that."

"I shouldn't know anything!" I said, suddenly angry. "I've never been told anything. I was transferred up here from a reclamation unit because somebody found out I had two years of college-level biology. Somebody else gave me a uniform and a rule book-and that's the extent of my training."

Dr. Obama looked startled, resigned and frustrated, all at once. Almost to herself-but loud enough so I could hear it too-she said, "What the hell are they doing anyway? Sending me kids. . . ."

I was still burning. "Duke should have shot at the Chtorr!" I insisted.

"With what?" Dr. Obama snapped back. "Were you packing artillery?"

"We had a high-powered rifle-"

"And the range to the Chtorr was more than seven hundred meters on a windy day!"

I mumbled something about hydrostatic shock. "What was that?"

"Hydrostatic shock. It's what happens when a bullet hits flesh. It makes a shock wave. The cells are like little water balloons. They rupture. That's what kills you, not the hole."

Dr. Obama stopped, took a breath. I could see she was forcing herself to be patient. "I know about hydrostatic shock. It doesn't apply here. You're making the assumption that Chtorran flesh is like human flesh. It isn't. Even if Duke had been firing point blank, it wouldn't have done any good unless he was lucky enough to hit one of their eyes-or unless he had an exploding cartiidge, which he didn't. So he had no choice; he had to shoot what he could." Dr. Obama stopped. She lowered her voice. "Look, son, I'm sorry that you had to come up against the harsh realities of this war so quickly, but-" She raised her hands in an apologetic half-shrug, half-sigh, then dropped them again. "-Well, I'm sorry, that's all."