“Can we just go ahead and call it a door?” Sammann asked.

“Okay. There is Geometer-writing stenciled around the door. Letters about an inch high.”

“Stenciled?” Sammann asked.

“Yeah.” Cord stretched the band of the lamp over her head and adjusted its angle, freeing her hands.

“Literally stenciled?”

“Yeah. In the sense that they took a piece of paper with letter-shaped cutouts and held it up to the metal and slapped paint on it.” I heard a series of metallic raps. Cord was touching a magnet to various places around the door. “None of this is ferrous.” Then a screeching noise. “I can’t scratch it with my steel knife blade. Maybe a high-temp stainless alloy.”

“Fascinating,” Orolo called. “Can you get it open?”

“I think that the stenciled messages are opening instructions,” she said. “It is the same message—the same stencil—repeated in four places around the door. In each case, there is a line painted from it—”

“An arrow?” someone called. Others, who were standing where they could see it better, were more certain. “Those are arrows!”

“They don’t look like our arrows,” Cord said, “but maybe the Geometers do them differently. Each of them is aimed at a panel about the size of my hand. These panels appear to be held in place with fasteners—flush-head machine bolts—four per panel—I don’t have the right tool to put into them but I can fake it with a daisy-head driver.” She frisked herself.

“How do we know they are fasteners at all?” someone called. “We know nothing of these aliens and their praxis!”

“It’s just obvious!” Cord called back. “I can see little burrs where some alien mechanic over-torqued them. The heads are knurled so aliens can turn ’em with their alien fingers when they are loose. The only question is: clockwise, or counterclockwise?”

She jammed a driver into place, whacked it once with the heel of her hand to seat it, and grunted as she applied torque. “Counterclockwise,” she announced. For some reason this caused a cheer to run through the crowd of avout. “The Geometers are right-handed!” someone called, and everyone laughed.

Cord pocketed the bolts as she got them out. The little panel fell off and clattered through the scaffolding to the stone plaza, where someone snatched it up and peered at it like a page from a holy book. “Behind the panel is a cavity containing a T-handle,” she announced. “But I’m going to remove the other three panels before I mess with it.”

“Why?” someone asked—typical argumentative avout, I thought.

Going to work on another panel, Cord answered patiently: “It’s like when you bolt the wheel onto your mobe, you take turns tightening the nuts to equalize the stress.”

“What if there is a pressure differential?” Orolo asked.

“Another good reason to take it slow,” Cord muttered. “We don’t want anyone to get smashed by a flying door. As a matter of fact—” She looked out at the crowd of avout below.

Yul took her meaning. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed: “MOVE BACK! Everyone get clear of the hatch. A hundred feet away. MOVE!” The voice was shockingly loud and authoritative. People moved, and opened up a corridor all the way to Gnel’s fetch.

More aerocraft, of two or three different types, approached while Cord was undoing the panels. We could hear them landing on the other side of the wall. Someone called down news that soldiers were getting out, down on the road by the souvenir shop.

A thought occurred to me. “Sammann,” I asked, “are you sending this out over the Reticulum?”

“Smile,” Sammann answered, “right now a billion people are laughing at you.”

I tried not to think about the soldiers and the billion people.

A hiss came from the probe. Cord jumped back and almost toppled from the scaffold. The hiss died away asymptotically over a few seconds. Cord laughed nervously. “One of the things that happens when you operate a T-handle,” she said, “is that a pressure-equalizing valve opens up.”

“Did air go in, or out?” Orolo asked.

“In.” Cord operated the other three T-handles. “Uh-oh,” she said, “here it comes!” And the door simply fell out and hit the ladder she was standing on. Yul got his arms up in time to steer it down to the ground. We all watched that. Then all looked to Cord, who was standing there, hands on hips, pelvis cocked to one side, aiming the beam of her headlamp into the probe.

“What’s in there?” someone finally asked.

“A dead girl,” she said, “with a box on her lap.”

“Human or—”

“Close,” Cord said, “but not from Arbre.”

Cord crouched as if to enter the capsule, but then started as the scaffolding torqued, rocked, and rebounded. It was Yul. He had vaulted up to join her. He wasn’t about to let his girl climb into an alien spaceship until he’d checked it for monsters. The scaffold had been about right for one, and had now reached maximum capacity; no one else was going up there as long as most of the space was claimed by an agitated Yulassetar Crade. Cord was mildly offended; she refused to move, so Yul had to drop to his knees and stick his head into the doorway down around the level of her thighs. It felt haphazard, hasty, and absolutely the wrong way to treat such priceless theorical evidence. If circumstances had been different, avout would have swarmed the ladders and restrained Yul, nothing would have been touched until all had been measured, phototyped, examined, analyzed. But the hovering and circling aerocraft, as well as other sound effects from above, had put everyone in a different frame of mind. “Yul!” Sammann shouted, and as soon as Yul turned around the Ita lobbed his jeejah up to the scaffold. Yul reached instinctively, snatched it out of the air, and thrust it into the capsule. It could see in the dark better than a human and so he ended up using its screen as a night vision device. That’s how he noticed the dark stains in the clothing of the dead Geometer.

“She’s wounded,” he announced, “she’s bleeding!” There were cries of alarm from some of the avout who assumed Yul must be talking of Cord, but soon it was clear that he was speaking of the Geometer in the capsule.

“Are you claiming he, she, is alive!?” Sammann asked.

“I don’t know!” Yul said, turning his head to look down at us.

As long as he was out of the way, Cord thrust a leg into the doorway and leaned her head and upper body through. We heard a muffled exclamation. Yul relayed it: “Cord says she’s still warm!”

All kinds of theorical questions were coming up in my mind—and probably the minds of all the others: how can you tell it’s female? How do you know they even have sexes? What makes you think they have blood like we do, and that that’s what is coming out of her? But, again, the stress and chaos relegated all such questions to a kind of intellectual quarantine.

Orolo pointed out, “If there is any possibility that she might be alive, we must do whatever we can to help her!”

That was all Yul needed to hear. He tossed the jeejah back to Sammann with one hand while giving Cord a knife with the other. “She’s strapped in pretty good,” he warned us. All we could see of Cord now was one leg, which twisted and pawed as she braced it against the scaffold. A minute passed. We stood, waiting, unable to help Cord, helpless to do anything about the banging, booming, and metallic screeching noises resounding from the gates and walls of the concent high above. Finally Cord gave a great heave and tumbled half out of the door. Yul reached in for the second heave. Like a rafting guide hauling a drowned customer from a river, he brought the Geometer out with the full power of both arms and legs, and ended up lying on his back with the alien sprawled full-length on top of him. Red liquid spilled down around his ribs and dripped through the rungs onto the ground. Twenty hands reached up to accept the weight of the Geometer as Yul rolled her sideways off his body. Three hands, one of them Orolo’s, converged on her head, cradling it, taking great care it did not loll. I glimpsed the face. From fifty feet, anyone would have taken her for a native of this planet. Close up, there was no doubt that she was, as Cord had put it, “not from Arbre.” There was no one thing about her face that would prove this. But the color and texture of her skin and hair, the bone structure, the sculpture of the outer ear, the shape of the teeth, were all just different enough.