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Updated: June 22, 2025
But the only fact known about the Plumie civilization came from the cairns and silicon-bronze inscribed tablets they'd left on oxygen-type worlds over a twelve-hundred-light-year range in space, and the only thing to be deduced about the Plumies themselves came from the decorative, formalized symbols like feathery plumes which were found on all their bronze tablets.
But he saw the starkly impossible. He pressed the navigation-room button. "Radar room reporting," he said urgently. "The Plumie ship is fast to us, in contact with our hull! Both ships are spinning together!" He was trying yet other scanners as he spoke, and now he said: "Got it! There are no lines connecting us to the Plumie, but it looks ... yes!
So Baird said very politely into the microphone to the navigation room: "Sir, Lieutenant Holt and myself would like to speak directly to you in the navigation room. May we?" "Why not?" growled the skipper. "You've noticed that the Plumie generator is giving the whole ship lights and services?" "Yes, sir," said Baird. "We'll be there right away."
Baird made it clear that the generator-room supplied electric current for the ship's normal lighting-system and services. The Plumie could grasp that idea. They examined the crew's quarters, and the mess room, and the Plumie walked confidently among the members of the human crew, who a little while since had tried so painstakingly to destroy his vessel. He made a good impression.
At 04 hours 10 minutes, ship time, the Niccola was well inside the Theta Gisol solar system. She had previously secured excellent evidence that this was not the home of the Plumie civilization. There was no tuned radiation.
He raised it, and it spurted flame very tiny blue-white sparks, each one indicating a pellet of metal flung away at high velocity. One of them struck the shining, retreating container. It exploded with a monstrous, soundless, violence. It had been a rocket's war head. There could have been only one reason for it to be introduced into a Plumie ship. Baird ceased to be shaky.
"Give us six months and a place to set up a wire-drawing mill and an insulator synthesizer, and we could rebuild it. But nothing less will be any good." The Plumie stared at the drive. He examined the shaft from every angle. He inspected the melted, and partly-melted, and merely burned-out sections of the drive coils.
Spinning deliberately, as the united ships did, sometimes the sun shone brightly into that valley, and sometimes it was filled with the blackness of the pit. While Diane looked, a round door revolved in the side of the Plumie ship. As Diane caught her breath, Baird reported crisply.
Fastened to his shoulder there was a tiny scanner and microphone, which would relay everything he saw and heard back to the radar room and to Diane. She watched tensely as he went inside the Plumie ship. Other screens relayed the image and his voice to other places on the Niccola. He was gone a long time. From the beginning, of course, there were surprises.
"Except the ship we're welded to! But you are doing very well. However, microphones say there is movement inside the Plumie." Diane beckoned for Baird's attention to a screen, which Baird had examined before. Now he stiffened and motioned for her to report. "We've a scanner, sir," said Diane, "which faces what looks like a port in the Plumie ship. There's a figure at the port.
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