He'd ferried me down to the hilltop in the long shadows of early morning. I'd had to order him to return to the star ship. I stood now beside the communal mound. Moya had said, pointing down the hill, anger making him illogical: "These are the people you sold out when you transferred to Interstel. They could have used your kind of brains. Post-mortems aren't going to help them, now."
Something on E-T was a killer: quick and deadly.
If it got any sort of clean shot at you--
Something visible. Something big enough to make a mark. And not static, like a thorn. A ground crawler? My pant's legs had been tucked securely into my boot tops. A flier? It would have to be strong enough to pierce a GS uniform and make an entrance into flesh. Or to leave a scratch from a glancing blow. And I hadn't seen anything.
And restricted to the area beyond the stream.
And terribly innocent. Innocent enough to be overlooked until it was too late.
I thought and came up with a brainful of nothing.
Strong enough to pierce two thicknesses of cloth--It must have gone entirely through, although the overzealousness of the crew had removed any possibility of proof.
Assume the plastic was protection enough--
Wouldn't the wearer notice a blow? Or hear something?
Moya and his helper had noticed nothing after--
A few meager drops of rain, sibilantly soaking into the eager soil of Epsilon-Terra.
Whoever first mouthed that bit about cursing being the audible manifestation of a mediocre mind completely missed the point.
There's something infinitely comforting in the crackle and sweep and roll of heartfelt invective.
I left the site of the common grave and made it back to the hillside and shuttler IV as fast as discretion and terrain and my game leg would allow.
"I _am_ thinking," Moya grumbled over the comm. "If these details are so important, why--?"
"Don't blame Interstel," I said. "The tapes were put together by GS headquarters."
"Well, whoever. They should have included more information."
"Sure, sure, I remember him. Big, awkward, slow-moving--always babbling about plants."
"But anything particular? Something that he wanted to extract something from."
"Well, let's see--He brought back lots of sample specimens, but there _was_ one that he played with all the way home. It was an insectivorous or carnivorous species, as I recall--"