“You sure?” Taourit asked. “Maybe they felt they’d learned as much about the ship and about us as they could.” He gestured around the room. “Just because everything’s in place doesn’t mean they mightn’t have taken the Seeker apart and put it back together again. I’d bet they could. Did you notice those upper hands, the ones they call truhands? They can do detail work finer than the best human artisan.

“So why couldn’t they also have engineered our escape? Not one of their people was harmed. That could be due to surprise—or complete lack of it I don’t think there’s any surveillance equipment on board. Our diagnostics would have found it by now and it could hardly report back over interstellar distances, anyway. But they’ve got a better recording instrument on board in this Ryo.”

“Farfetched. How could he get his information back home?”

“I don’t know, Captain. But then, there’s quite a lot we don’t know about these bugs. Sure, it’s farfetched—but not impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” she admitted.

“Maybe they were right,” Bonnie put in from across the control room.

“Right about what?” Taourit asked.

“About our racial paranoia. Our history supports them about as much as your current conversation.”

“It’s only a possibility that ought to be considered,” Sanchez argued. But she did not resume the discussion with the cocontroller. The implications of the detector’s words were unpleasant.

They were twelve hours out and a good distance from Hivehom, and Alexis Antonovich was exhausted. He had been glued to his drive monitors since they’d retaken the Seeker. The ship was performing beautifully. The repairs continued to hold and there wasn’t a hint of oscillation in the field. She shot through Space Plus snugly wrapped in her convoying envelope of mathematical distortion. Now the engineer just wanted to rest.

He stopped in front of the door to his compartment, touched the switch that slid it aside. Bleary-eyed, he moved to the wash basin. After cleaning his face he felt much better. A glance in the mirror showed a scraggly growth of beard that had accumulated on the bug world. Depilatory cream was one of many items they hadn’t had time to bring down from the orbiting Seeker.

Something else was reflected in the mirror: a pair of bulbous, gleaming, multicolored eyes stared at his reflection. Whirling, he was confronted by the sight of a five-foot-long arthropod lying on its left side on his bed. It held his pillow in one blue-green armored hand.

“Self-inspection,” it commented in whispery but quite understandable Terrangio. “That’s interesting.” It gestured with the pillow. “Perhaps you can explain the function of this soft device to me?”

“It’s called a pillow,” Alexis responded automatically to the polite question. “We rest our heads on it while we sleep.”