I'm pretty sure now that Billy was worried that the caves up by the Institute we were going to open to the public had dragons in them somewhere, or were connected to caves that had dragons in them somewhere, or at least spooky gremlin noises in the dark. Although he's never said so. And part of that fear would be the suspicion he and Dad both had that we weren't going to go on stopping australiensis from going extinct for much longer, and what if the tiny little additional pressure of lopping off the tailest tail end of the Smokehill cave network was the tiny little additional pressure too far?

And somehow once the money started pouring in, the plans for the Institute caves changed. Only the first couple of caverns got opened to the public after all — and all the ways out of them have been very, very, very, very, very, very thoroughly sealed off although it's like having won the main issue, there was a kind of hands-washing-of, right okay, now go ahead and do your worst declaration and the pointy-head designer from Manhattan or Baltimore did, and those two caves, which are good big ones, are a kind of Madame Tussaud's of dragons with a little Disneyland thrown in. I can't bear the place myself but tourists cram in there in their gazillions.

But it makes me wonder what the Arkholas know that they still aren't telling us. There were always a lot more of them and only one of Old Pete — and he's the only one who wrote anything down, and while he couldn't be bothered most of the time talking about humans, he did often write about how he couldn't have done what he did without Arkhola help, and how much he admired them. What the Arkholas do instead of keeping journals is make songs. There's one I think I haven't told you about, about dragons flying. And the most interesting thing about it is that it's really old — long before Old Pete brought any dragons here. I'm so horrible at learning languages. But I'm going to have to try to learn Arkhola. Billy says Whiteoak would teach me. Uh-oh.

Anyway. We've got these fancy new premises pretty near Dragon Central — that's Bud's caves — which we call Farcamp. We had some trouble deciding where to put it. I didn't want the dragons to feel that we were harrying them by getting too close to where they lived, but as Dad and Billy pointed out, us feeble little humans can't actually commute very far in a day, and we need to be somewhere close enough to get there and back, especially in less-than-optimal weather (in bad weather you don't go anywhere) since except me nobody's ever been invited to stay, if you want to call what Gulp did inviting. I said that if the dragons wanted to talk to us, they could do the commuting. We finally compromised on a place near a biggish opening aboveground of a series of caves not too far for feeble humans, which are some kind of wing of Dragon Central, but not dead close to where the helicopter found me standing on Bud's head and screaming.

There was a lot of grumbling when the plans for Farcamp were presented because of all the tactical problems (see: no more roads and limited helicopter usage and they still haven't got anywhere with the pack ponies, but we've now got college kids and off-season athletes doing two-legged bearer stuff which is a hoot, like something out of an ancient Stewart Granger movie about Darkest Africa) and then when they get there, there still aren't any dragons??, but Dad and Billy and our ecoloony Friends had worked up some heavy environmental impact stuff that made it necessary not to be any closer to Dragon Central, and since we were now the hottest topic around nobody grumbled too loudly for fear of not getting clearance to visit.

But the dragons do come, to us, to the Farcamp caves. There's always at least a couple of members of the human liaison committee waiting for us politely at the cave entrance — which I call Nearcamp, another of my feeble human jokes. Although the whole business of working this out really made me want to go "neener neener and who says dragons aren't intelligent?" I also saw the caves before the dragons started using them a lot, and I've seen them now that they do use them a lot, and I can tell you that they've put in a latrine. And I can't actually swear to this, but I think the rock is getting blacker and redder and shinier and silver-threadier too. And the gremlin noises get more resonant.

But I'm the only human who's got in that far — to see the latrine, or listen to the gremlins in the corridors. This makes more of the white coats nuts, but they can't do anything about it. In the first place, most of them, the headaches make 'em so sick they have to flee back to Farcamp, in the second place, it's in the new dragon-contact rules (and guess who helped write them), and in the third place, who is going to get around a dragon lying across the entrance of his or her cave? Even if you had the nerve to tiptoe up to one and maybe pretend you didn't want to disturb it and would just creep past, the moment it turns that eye on you, and it will. . .

The human reception area at Dragon Nearcamp is still pretty minimal. This was my idea first, but not only my dad but also a few of the brighter ethologists and sociologists that the new, expanded Institute was already attracting were saying the same thing. When us humans want human stuff, we'd go back to Farcamp and decompress. But it's turned out to be totally practical as well as sensible because I'm still the only human so far who can hack the headaches for more than a few hours, although Dad and Martha are beginning to learn. Nobody but me has ever picked up a mental image they can use (although I wonder about Martha, with her empathy, which seems to me almost telepathic, but she says it never comes in anything you could call pictures), but they sure do get the headaches. Real howlers, sometimes, and with visual disturbances, sometimes really graphic hallucinations, and a good bit of vertigo and nausea thrown in.

I don't know if I put up with the headaches better because I'm getting something out of them, or because they're not as bad as what everybody else gets or because I sort of grew into them. If it's that they're not as bad, I'm really sorry. Maybe we'll get over this eventually, or find a way around it. We've only just started after all. I figure we have the time. I hope we have the time. I'm worried that some ruthless impatient human is going to decide that the only way — or the fastest way — would be to raise a dragonlet the way I raised Lois, which I can't believe any dragon mom would agree to. Would any human mom — ? Exactly. But there's still a little problem sometimes convincing the rest of the human world that dragons aren't still just animals.

I've also tried to find out — mostly from Bud — if trying to talk to humans, well, not if it gives them headaches, exactly, because I wouldn't expect it to be the same thing, but if there are any drawbacks to trying to talk to humans — anything that goes wrong with the dragon because of talking to humans. I can manage to get the idea of pain across — I think — and I'm pretty sure Bud is blowing me off. I'm such a master at being blown off. My impression, for what it's worth, which is probably nothing, is that there is some kind of recoil, for dragons, but physical pain isn't it. This worries me too. But it might explain why there aren't too many of the human liaison committee, and why the rest of them tend to stay out of our way.

We've just been so LUCKY in a lot of ways. Major Handley was maybe our first piece of brilliant luck — at that black bleak moment when it looked like the Searles and their gang of crooked creeps were going to win. A career military guy capable of independent thought when his orders were to shoot first (as I found out, although not from him) and ask questions later. You don't get luckier than that. But a bright career military guy who obeys orders still had to stop and think about how to obey his order. I wasn't running away, you remember — I was running toward the big black scaly monster of all the Searles' bluster — and then Bud did his extension-ladder trick and the major looked at me standing on the top of Bud's head and waving and shouting and figured that while I looked pretty upset, I didn't look like it was the dragon that was upsetting me. At that moment, I think, is when our luck turned.