Of Man And Manta - Ox Part 23

"This we have to look into," Tamme said. She moved toward the house.

A curtain of fog parted, showing a doorway and a figure in it. "Inhabited yet," Tamme murmured. Her hands did not move to her weapons, but Veg knew she was ready to use them instantly.

"Let's go ask directions," he suggested facetiously.

"Yes." And she moved forward.

"Hey, I didn't mean -- " But he knew that she had known what he meant since she could read his emotions. Awkwardly, he followed her.

Up close, there was another shock. The inhabitant of the house was a human female of middle age but well preserved -- with a prehensile nose.

Veg tried not to stare. The woman was so utterly typical of what he thought of as a frontier housewife -- except for that proboscis. It twined before her face like a baby elephant trunk. It made her more utterly alien than a battery of other nonhuman features might have -- because it occupied the very center of attention. It was repulsively fascinating.

Tamme seemed not to notice. "Do you understand my speech? she inquired sociably.

The woman's nose curled up in a living question mark.

Tamme tried a number of other languages, amazing Veg by her proficiency. Then she went into signs. Now the woman responded. "Hhungh!" she snorted, her nose pointing straight out for a moment.

"Projector," Tamme said. "Alternates." She shaped the projector with her hands.

The woman's nose scratched her forehead meditatively. "Hwemph?"

"Flex," Veg put in, holding out the hexaflexagon.

The woman's eyes lighted with comprehension. "Hflehx!" she repeated. And her nose pointed to the fog bank from which they had emerged, a little to the side.

"Hthankhs," Veg said, smiling.

The woman smiled back. "Hshugh."

Veg and Tamme turned back toward the fog. "Nice people," Veg remarked, not sure himself how he intended it.

"There have been others before us," Tamme said. "The woman had been instructed to play dumb, volunteering nothing. But we impressed her more favorably than did our predecessors, so she exceeded her authority and answered, after all."

"How do you know all that?" But as he spoke, he remembered. "You can read aliens, too! Because they have emotions, same as us."

"Yes. I was about to initiate hostile-witness procedures, but you obviated the need."

"Me and my flexagon!"

"You and your direct, naive, country-boy manner, lucking out again." She shook her head. "I must admit: Simplicity has its place. You are proving to be a surprising a.s.set."

"Shucks, 'taint nothin'," Veg said with an exaggerated drawl.

"Of course, our predecessors were the same: Tamme and Veg. That's why they obtained her cooperation."

"I noticed she wasn't surprised to see us. I guess our noses look amputated."

"Truncated. Yes."

He laughed. "Now she's punning. Truncated trunks!"

They were at the fog bank. "Stand here. I need another orientation point. The projector will be within a radius of twenty meters, or about sixty feet."

"You sure can read a lot from one nose-point!"

She plunged into the bank. The stuff was so thick that her pa.s.sage left a jagged hole, as if she had gone through a wall of foam. It bled into the air from the edges, gradually filling in behind her. "Talk," Tamme said from the interior. "The sound will help me orient on it, by the echo."

It figured. She didn't ask him to talk because of any interest in what he might have to say! "This place reminds me of Nacre in a way. That was all fog, too. But that was thinner, and it was everywhere, made by falling particles. The real plant life was high in the sky, the only place the sun shone; down below was nothing but fungus, and even the animals were really fungus, like the mantas. So it wasn't the same."

There was no response from the bank, so he continued. "You know, I read a story about a fog like this once. It was in an old science-fiction book, the kind they had in midcentury; I saw a replica printed on paper pages and everything. This thick fog came in wherever the sun didn't s.h.i.+ne -- they spelled it 'phog' -- and inside it was some kind of predator you never saw that ate people. It never left the fog -- but n.o.body dared go in the fog, either. All they heard was the scream when it caught somebody -- "

"YAAAGH!".

Veg's mouth gaped. "Oh, no!" He plunged into the fog, knife in hand.

A hand caught his wrist and hauled him back out. "Next time don't try to tease an agent," Tamme said, setting him down. "I found the projector."

"Sure thing," he said, chagrined. Still, it was the first clear evidence of humor he had seen in her.

"Crawl under," Tamme said.

They crawled under the fog, s.n.a.t.c.hing lungfuls of clear air from the thin layer on the ground. The projector was there.

"Not far from where we landed," Tamme said. "But the pattern is not consistent enough to be of much aid. We still have to search out the projector on each new world and figure out the mechanism for breaking out of loops. I don't like that."

Veg shrugged noncommittally. Except for Blizzard, he hadn't minded the searches. But of course if there were danger, they would not be able to afford much delay. "With the hexaflexagon, you can run through every face just by flexing the same diagonal as long as it will go. When it balks, you switch to the next. So maybe if we just keep going straight ahead, we'll get there, anyway."

Tamme sat up. She did not seem to be bothered by fog in her lungs. "We'll play it that way. If we get caught in a repeating loop, we'll look for something to change. Meanwhile, I want a concurring opinion."

"Another man-versus-tiger choice?"

She brought out a slip of paper. "Call off the order of your hexaflexagon faces."

Veg, hunched nose down to the ground to avoid the fog, was surprised at this request. Tamme knew the order that the faces appeared; she had flexed through them, and agents had eidetic recall. He could only confirm the obvious! But he brought out his toy and went through the whole pattern, calling off the numbers. "One. Five. Two. One. Three. Six. One. Three. Two. Four. Three. Two. One."

Tamme made a diagram of lines and numbers and little directional arrows. "This is triangular," she said. "A three-faced hexaflexagon would simply go around the central triangle. Your six-faced one adds on to the angles. Would you agree to the accuracy of this diagram?"

She showed him what she had drawn.

Veg traced around it, starting from the northwest face 1. "One, five, two, one, three -- yeah, that's the order. Makes sense of it finally!"

Tamme nodded. He could barely make out her gesture since her head was almost concealed by the fog. "As I make it, we actually started on Five, the City. That would make Two the Forest, One the Blizzard, Three the Orchestra, Six the Planes, and back to our first repeat, One/Blizzard. Then repeat Three/Orchestra. And repeat Two/Forest And now face Four/Fog."

"I guess so," Veg said, having trouble keeping up. "We're here now."

"Our next stop should be repeat Three/Orchestra -- this time twisted because it is on a separate loop. Then on to Two/Forest, One/Blizzard, and home to Five/City."