(See references:

EPI SIARCH-cl-82f49; ACCEPTOR-cl-82J 50) totally dependent instruments of their love of the hunt…"

Nice people, these Tandu, Gillian thought.

She put the flat reading plate down beside the tree where she sat. She had allotted herself an hour for reading this morning. It was almost over. She had covered another two hundred thousand words or so.

This entry on the Tandu had come over the cable from Streaker last night. Apparently the Niss machine was already accomplishing things with the mini-Library Tom had retrieved from the Thennanin wreck. This report read too clearly, and came to the point too directly to have come straight from the English translation software of Streaker's own pathetic little micro-branch.

Of course, Gillian already knew some things about the Tandu. All Terragens agents were taught about these secretive, brutal enemies of Mankind.

This report only reinforced her feeling that there was something terribly wrong with a universe that had such monsters in it. Gillian had once spent a summer reading ancient space-romances from pre-Contact days. How open and friendly those old-time fictional universes had seemed! Even the rare "pessimistic" ones hadn't come close to the closed, confined, dangerous reality.

Thinking about the Tandu put her in a melodramatic mind to carry around a dirk, and to exercise a woman's ancient last prerogative should those murderous creatures ever capture her.

The thick, organic smell of humus overwhelmed the metallic tang that permeated everywhere near the water. The aroma was fresh after last night's storm. Green fronds waved slowly under gentle buffeting from Kithrup's incessant tradewinds.

Tom must have found his island crucible by now, she thought, and begun preparing his experiment.

If he still lived.

This morning, for the first time, she felt uncertain about that. She had been so sure she would know it, if he died, wherever or whenever it happened. Yet now she felt confused. Her mind was muddied, and all she could tell for certain was that terrible things had happened last night.

First, around sunset, had come a crawling premonition that something had happened to Tom. She couldn't pin the feeling down, but it disturbed her.

Then, late last night, she had had a series of dreams.

There had been faces. Galactic faces, leathern and feathered and scaled, toothed and mandibled. They yammered and howled, but she, in spite of all her expensive training, couldn't understand a single word or sense-glyph. A few of the jumbled faces she had recognized in her sleep — a pair of Xappish spacemen, dying as their ship was torn apart — a Jophur, howling through smoke at the bleeding stump of its arm — a Synthian, listening to whale songs while she waited impatiently behind a vacuum-cold lump of stone.

In her sleep Gillian had been helpless to keep them out.

She had awakened suddenly, in the middle of the night, to a tremor that plucked her spine like a bowstring. Breathing heavily in the darkness, she sensed a kindred consciousness writhe in agony at the limit of her range. In spite of the distance, Gillian caught a mixed flavor in the fleeting psychic glyph. It felt too human to have been only a fin, too cetacean to have been merely a man.

Then it ceased. The psychic onslaught was over.

She didn't know what to make of any of it. What use was psi, if its messages were too opaque to be deciphered? Her genetically enhanced intuition now seemed a cruel deception. Worse than useless.

She had a few moments left to her hour. She spent them with her eyes closed, listening to the rise and fall of sound, as the breakers fought their endless battle with the western shoreline. Tree limbs brushed and swayed with the wind.

Interleaved with the creakings of trunk and branch, Gillian could hear the high chittering squeaks of the aboriginal pre-sentients — the Kiqui. From time to time, she made out the voice of Dennie Sudman, speaking into a machine that translated her words into the high-frequency Kiqui dialect.

Though she was working twelve hours a day, helping Dennie with the Kiqui, Gillian couldn't help feeling guiltily that she was taking a vacation. She reminded herself that the little natives were extremely important, and that she had just been spinning her wheels back at the ship.

But one of the faces from her dream had stuck with her all morning. Only a half-hour ago she had realized that it was her own subconscious rendering of what Herbie, the ancient cadaver which had caused all this trouble, must have looked like when he was alive.

In her dream, shortly before she had begun feeling premonitions of disaster, the long, vaguely humanoid face. of the ancient had smiled at her, and slowly winked.

"Gillian! Dr. Baskin? It's time!"

She opened her eyes. She lifted her arm and glanced at her watch. It might as well have been set by Toshio's voice. Trust a midshipman at his word, she remembered. Tell him to fetch you in one hour, and he'll time it down to the second. Early in the voyage she had had to threaten dire measures to get him to call her "sir" — or the anachronistic "ma'am" — only in every third sentence, rather than every other word.

"On my way, Toshio! Just a minute!" She rose to her feet and stretched. The rest break had been useful. Her mind had been in knots that only quiet could smooth.

She hoped to finish here and get back to Streaker within three days, about the time Creideiki had planned to move the ship. By then she and Dennie should have worked out the environmental needs of the Kiqui — how to take a small sample group with them back to the Center for Uplift on Earth. If Streaker got away, and if humanity first filed a client claim, it could save the Kiqui from a far worse fate.

On her way through the trees, Gillian caught a glimpse of the ocean through a northeast gap in the greenery.

Will I be able to feel it here, when Tom calls? The Niss said his signal should be detectable anywhere on the planet.

All the ETs will hear it, for sure.

She carefully kept all psychic energies low, as Tom had insisted she do. But she did form an old-fashioned prayer with her mouth, and cast it northward, over the waves.

"I'll bet this will please Dr. Dart," Toshio said. "Of course, the sensors might not be types he'd want. But the 'bot is still operational."

Gillian examined the small robot-link screen. She was no expert on robotics or planetology. But she understood the principles.

"I think you're right, Toshio. The X-ray spectrometer works. So do the laser zapper and the magnetometer. Can the robot still move?"

"Like a little rock lobster! The only thing it can't do is float back up. Its buoyancy tanks were ruptured when the piece of coral crashed down on it."

"Where is the robot now?"

"It's on a ledge about ninety meters down." Toshio tapped the tiny keyboard and brought a holo schematic into space in front of the screen. "It's given me a sonar map that deep. I've held off going any lower until I talk to Dr. Dart. We can only go down, one ledge at a time. Once the robot leaves a spot there's no going back."

The schematic showed a slightly tapered cylindrical cavity, descending into the metal-rich silicate rock of Kithrup's thin crust: The walls were studded with outcrops and ledges, like the one the crippled probe now rested on.

A solid shaft ran up the great cavity, tilted at a slight angle. It was the great drill-root Toshio and Dennie had blown apart a few days earlier. The upper end rested against one rim of its own underwater excavation. The shaft disappeared into unknown territory below the mapped area.

"I think you're right, Toshio," Gillian grinned and squeezed the boy's shoulder. "Charlie will be glad about this. It may help get him off Creideiki's back. Do you want to ring him up with the news?"