Hunt nodded. “That’s right. If we happen to meet casually later, that’s another matter.”
“But how do I get a seat on an alien starship that’s leaving in three days? Am I supposed to call a travel agent and ask to book a ticket?”
“There’ll be a TWA shuttle going up from Vandenberg with some groups from the West Coast. That should give you enough time to get back to Seattle, pack a toothbrush, and sort out any notes and other stuff you need to bring along. I’ll bump into you after you join the Vishnu.”
“All I have to do is book a flight with the shuttle?”
“Right.”
Gina still looked perplexed. “But-what about getting on board the Thurien ship? Won’t I need some kind of authorized pass or something? How do I fix that?”
Hunt grinned. “You don’t have a feel for Ganymeans yet, do you?” he said. “Most people don’t. Ganymeans are the most informal beings, probably in the whole Galaxy. They have no concept of authorizations, passes, permits, ID checks, or any of the other hassles dreamed up by the makers of rules that we inflict on ourselves to make life difficult, or any clear notion why we imagine such things should be necessary.”
“Oh, that life could be so simple,” Gina said with a wistful sigh. Hunt reached into his pocket and produced an envelope. “I just happen to have a number here at UNSA that can connect you through to the Vishnu’s administration center. In short, you just ask. Your story is that you’re a free-lancer working on a book, and you wonder if you can hitch a ride to Jevlen. There shouldn’t be a problem. But if you get stuck, call me.”
“Ask?” Gina looked nonplussed. “That’s all? And they’ll take you?”
“If they’ve got room. And there shouldn’t be any shortage of that-the Vishnu is twenty miles long.”
“So why isn’t everyone doing it?”
“Because they don’t know about it. They all assume nothing can be that simple-just like you did.”
“What about when they find out? Won’t the Thuriens have to make some rules then?”
“Who knows? Let’s wait and see. They don’t have much experience in dealing with people being unreasonable.”
“But they couldn’t let just anyone who wants to go there just move in, surely. It would get out of control.”
“Ah, you see,” Hunt said pointedly. “There you go, thinking like a Terran who assumes people have to be controlled. A Ganymean couldn’t conceive why you should want to keep anyone out.”
They ate in silence for a while. Hunt was content to enjoy the food and give Gina time to take in what had been said. At last she looked up again and asked, “Who else will be going?”
“Well, not too many on the short notice we’ve got,” Hunt replied. “We’re hoping to get a life-sciences specialist along, too, whom I’ve worked with before. His name’s Chris Danchekker.”
“I’ve read about him. He went to Jupiter with you, right?”
“That’s him. He probably understands Ganymean psychology better than anybody. We haven’t actually approached him about it yet, though. That’s on the agenda for tomorrow.”
“He sounds fascinating. I’d like to meet him.”
“Oh yes, you have to meet Chris.”
“Do you think he’ll go?”
“Hopefully. He’s been immersing himself in Jevlenese biology lately, and I imagine he’d jump at a chance of going there. It would complete the cover of the whole thing as a scientific mission, too. Then there’s my assistant from Goddard, a guy called Duncan Watt. And we’re hoping Danchekker can get one of his people along, as well.”
By the time they got to their coffees and brandies, Hunt had forgotten business matters and again found himself admiring the sweep of raven hair that framed one side of Gina’s face, and trying to fathom the dancing, enigmatic light in her eye as she stared back over the rim of her glass. It was the kind of look in which it would have been possible to read anything one wanted to. But whether it was deliberately so or otherwise, he couldn’t tell.
In the end, he decided that the situation had been given as much as a helping hand as was prudent, but he still wanted to think about it. He wondered if a Ganymean in a situation like this would simply ask.
CHAPTER NINE
On Jevlen there was a group of several large, tropical islands known as the Galithenes. Inland, they were mostly mountainous, but the wider valleys and the coastal plains supported dense canopies of rain forest that excluded all but a feeble twilight. And in the midday gloom of the two most northerly islands of the group, there lived a peculiar flying creature called the anquioc.
About the size of a pigeon, it had strongly developed hind legs; modest, clawed forelegs with rudimentary grasping abilities, which it used, when at rest, to attach itself to vertical surfaces such as tree trunks; and black, scaly wings that glistened like wet asphalt. In its basic structure, it conformed to the general, bilaterally symmetric, triple-paired limb pattern of the Jevlenese animal classification corresponding roughly to terrestrial vertebrates.
The anquiloc’s face had a narrow black snout that bulged at the end like the nose of a hammerhead shark, into an organ that luminesced in the infrared. Below its eyes were two large, forward-directed, concave areas, formed from a mixture of reflective and absorbent tissues that functioned both as variable-geometry focusing surfaces to produce a crudely directed beam that could be steered by moving the head, and as receivers tuned to the reflections. Thus, it navigated and hunted by means of its own system of self-contained, thermal radar.
The anquioc’s main prey was a small, wasplike octopod known as the chiff. The chiff possessed IR-sensitive antennae that evolution had shaped to operate in the same general range as the anquiloc’s search frequencies, which gave rise to an unusual contest of ever-changing strategy and counterstrategy between the two species. The chiff’s first, simple response on detecting a search signal was to fold its wings and drop out of the beam. The anquiloc countered by learning to dip its approach in anticipation when it registered a chiff. The chiff reacted by skewing its escape to the left, and when the anquiloc followed, the chiff switched to the right; when the anquiloc became adept at checking in both directions, the chiff reacted by climbing out of the beam instead of falling; or of going left, or maybe right. Whichever was adopted, all the possible ensuing variations would unfold in some order or other and then maybe revert to an earlier form, producing an ever-changing pattern in which new behaviors constantly appeared, lasted for as long as they were effective, and gave way to something else.
But what made the anquiloc more than just “peculiar” was the way it came preprogrammed with the right maneuvers to deal with the latest to have appeared from the chiffs repertoire of routines for evading it. And it was not simply a statistical effect, where newborn anquilocs possessing all possible varieties of behavior appeared equally, and only the ones that happened to be “right” at the time survived.
Newborn individuals exhibited the same response pattern as the latest that the parents had learned up to the time of conception. Since that pattern changed depending on the current mode of chiff behavior, the mechanism represented a clear case of inheriting a characteristic that had been acquired by the parent during life and not carried by the gene line-a flat contradiction of the principle determined by generations of researchers on Earth. Jevlenese and Ganymean scientists had long before settled the point by training anquilocs in certain tasks and testing their offspring for the ability after separating them at birth, and there was no doubt of it. Neither was it the only instance of the phenomenon that they had encountered in their probings of the nearby regions of the Galaxy.