"We've done it. You'll be happy to know that we gave them an official burial."
I could picture the little Mexican, standing beside the long mound, head bowed, with the Specter probably staring over his shoulder, going methodically through the complete Memorial Service, ending with: _And the whole galaxy is the sepulcher of illustrious men._
"It's not much of a place, but the sun is shining now. Expect us shortly."
I was propped on my elbows on the bunk in my cubicle, nursing the jangle in my leg. Maybe it was that--but I was as confused as a mouse in a psych maze.
"There wasn't much of that stuff in you," he said. "And I can't break it down. Too complex. You used the cobra venom analogy--Well, this makes that look as simple as mother's milk."
He held up the stained pieces of uniform. Moya had kept his wits about him.
"A combination of weather, soil, et cetera," the medic said. "Completely innocuous."
"About the toxin," I said. "Given time, could you work up an antivenin?"
"Probably. But I'd need plenty. Both time and toxin." He looked at me. "Oh, I see what you're getting at." He became professionally parochial.
The confusion persisted, so I allowed the medic to use a pressure hypo.
On the vid screen, the magnified surface of the insular mass seemed almost to beckon. _Sireni_, I thought.
Little remained of the weather front. Over the area of the plain and the rolling hills were meager wisps of clouds. Darkness again was creeping across the face of E-T.
"That storm didn't amount to much," Moya said.
"I know what I'd do," Moya continued. "I'd radiate and have done with it."
The medic dissented on clinical-curiosity grounds.
"I can't reconcile things yet," I said. "But let's assume that it was a tragedy of errors. Let's say that what hit me, killed them. But what was it? Where did it come from? And why? No, I'll have to go down again. It's my burden to find _all_ the answers."
Moya growled: "There's a time for stubbornness."
I caught the rest of the crew staring at me; their expressions were a motley.
Back at the same old stand, open for business, looking at the pitiful alteration, feeling lonely, feeling vulnerable, too, despite the bug suit, Moya's parting blast still burning in my mind.