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bulky protective suits and red-pamted emergency gear. A warning sign glowed on
the inner door of the airlock:
DANGER!
LANDING PIT WAIT FOR DECONTAMINATION
"It is safe," Gottling assured him. "The pit was de-conned months ago, before
the spaceling was brought In."
He pulled a lever. Motors groaned; the inner door, an . enormous lead-lined
mass of steel and fire-
brick, inched slowly aside.
Like a Viking in his radar horns, the colonel stalked into the landing pit.
Ryeland following.
The pit was an enormous circular cavern. Floodlights blazed on the blackened
concrete floor. Even the decon
47
crews, with all their foamants and air-blasting, had failed to remove the
black breath of the jets.
Ryeland recognized it at once. It was the pit of which he had caught a glimpse
the night before, with the Togetherness Girl. He lifted his eyes, looking for
the sky and a settling rocket instinctively; but the dark armored walls lifted
up into shadowy mystery. The cranes and the stages above were dark shapes in
the dimness. No light passed the enormous doors, hundreds of feet up, that
closed off the sky.
Gottling touched his arm and pointed.
Out in the black concrete stood a room-sized cage. Inside the cage was a pale
cloud of greenish light; and in the center of the cloud lying motionless on
the bare steel floor
"The spaceling," said Gottling proudly.
It had struggled.
At close range, Ryeland could see how frantically fierce that struggle had
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been. The steel bars of the cage were thicker than his wrist, but some of them
were bent. Red blood smeared them, and matted the spaceling's golden fur. It
lay gasping on the stainless steel floor.
"She's skulking now, but we'll put her through her paces," Gottling bragged.
Ryeland said: "Wait, Colonel! The thing's injured. In the name of heaven, you
can't "
"Can't?" blazed the colonel. "Can't?" His finger reached up and touched the
buttons of his radar-
field suggestively. Under the triggering radar horns, his skull-like face
glowered. "Don't tell me what I can't do, fool! Do you want me to expand my
field radius? One touch of this and there won't be enough of you left to
salvage!"
Ryeland swallowed. Involuntarily his hand reached toward the collar, with its
eighty grams of high explosive.
"That's better," grunted Gottling. He clapped his hands and called: "Sergeant,
get busy! Goose her!"
A Technicorps sergeant in red came trotting out of the shadows. He carried a
long pole tipped with a sharpened blade. Black wires led from it to a battery
box on his shoulder.
The spaceling rolled its battered head.
Its eyes opened large, dark, limpid eyes a seal's eyes; and they were
terrible, it seemed to
Ryeland, with suffering and fear. A shudder rippled along the creature's
smooth featureless flanks.
48
" "Goose her in the belly!" Gottling shouted. "Mr. Rye-
^
- land wants to see her do her tricks!" The spaceling screamed.
Its cry was thinly edged with terror, like the voice of a hysterical woman.
"Stop it," Ryeland gasped, shaken.
Colonel Gottling blared with laughter. Tears rolled out of his piglike eyes,
down the bony cheeks.
Finally he got control of himself. "Why, certainly," he gasped. "You're next,
as I said, eh? And if you believe you can tell us how the creature flies
without even seeing her do it " he Shrugged.
Writhing on the floor of the cage as though it had already felt the prod, the
spaceling screamed in fright again.
Ryeland said hoarsely: "Just make him take that prod away."
"As you wish," the colonel nodded urbanely. "Sergeant! Return to duty. And
you, Ryeland, I will leave you alone with your friend. Perhaps if I am not
here to eavesdrop, she will whisper her secret in your ear!" Bellowing with
laughter, Colonel Gottling shambled out of the pit.
After an hour, Ryeland began to appreciate the difficulties of the problem.
Back in the file room, he found a summary of the existing knowledge of the
spaceling; he took it to the landing pit and read through it, watching the
spaceling,
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20
Trilogy.txt (23 of 206) [12/28/2004 10:49:10 PM]
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/LoPL%20full%20...child%20(3
)/Starchild%2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20Trilogy.txt trying to allow it to
become accustomed to his presence.
, The creature hardly moved, except to follow Ryeland with its eyes.
; The notes on the spaceling showed a fruitless and pain-i ful
history. The spaceling had been captured by an ; exploring
Plan rocket retracing the steps of Lescure's ;v- Cristobal Colon. A
section of notes, showing how the ;?. capture had been effected, was
missing; the account took ^ up the story with the creature being brought
into the | hastily converted rocket pit. It had been chained at first, | SO
that the first investigators approached it with impunity. Then the chains had
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been taken off and, in quick order, I half a dozen investigators had been
bashed rather severely against the bars. The spaceling did not seem to have
attacked them; they simply were in the way of the thing's terrified attempts
at escape. However, after that the observations had been conducted
primarily from outside the cage. And mostly at least in the last two weeks,
since
49
Colonel Gottling had taken over charge of the specimen with the help of the
goad. Or worse.
There were reports of blood tests and tissue samples. Ryeland glanced at them,
frowned and put them aside; they meant nothing to him. There were X-ray
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