“You make an excellent, indirect case.”

“So there’s a wormhole mouth somewhere near or in our solar system, too. They came that way. They’re keeping it secret.”

“Plausible. It is their major asset, their bargaining chip.”

“We have to find out where it is.”

For a moment the amused pedantry dropped from his manner. “Well,” he said, “we’ll see,” which struck her in that moment as the grandest sentence that any language can own.

8.

She slept away most of the next day. Kane gave her a pleasure-jolt—waking her, feeding her, loving her to distraction, letting her doze off—and much later she arose fresh, awakened to the chimes of her call-alarm.

It was Prefect Masoul, summoning her to an enclosure room, so she hurried over. He sat at the middle and patted a seat next to him—the only two in the room. On the walls was a sharp display of—the aliens.

“They’re in their orbiting habitat sphere, all tested out. I thought I would relay the exobio team findings, discuss, as we watch. Match that with your idea of what their home world is—and where.”

“Ah, good,” was all she could manage, still a tad dreamy.

The viewpoint shifted as the alien Ythri flew in zero-g amid a leafy wealth of limbs, leaves, and sky. “The team re-created their planet’s vegetation, using what you turned up from that ancient flyover data. Got it done in those biotanks—in one day! This biosphere is four hundred meters across.”

“So they agree, that world is where they came from?”

“They do so acknowledge, though yield no more about it. They are closemouthed.”

“What are the diplomats—”

“No bureaucrat interference, not now. The Council has yielded to we scientists. The Ythri insisted. That’s why they’re orbiting over our heads right now.”

“Above the orbital spinner? I thought they—”

“Will descend, soon enough. They are coming here. It seems our conjecture was correct.”

“You mean our guesses—”

“Yours, mostly. Indeed, the Ythri know of you because their robo-probes witnessed the Jovian Solution. Though your name was not attached—Library policy, as always—they somehow interrogated our systems here and Earthside—and so discovered your name, Rachel.”

“I still don’t—”

“Nor do I. Still, we can watch their majestic flights while I regale you with the physio-bio insights we now know.”

He spoke as the creatures went by in an orderly, V-shaped flock. Rachel had a hard time keeping up. Details piled on interpretations stacked on guesswork galore. The combined visual and talk filled in as she watched, integrated—entranced. Real live aliens. Wowser!

The Ythris massed as high as thirty kilos. Yet they showed great lifting strength under the centrifugal gravs of the cylindrical ship they flew, at a lesser g, but still—they were marvelously strong. Hands? The original talons, modified for manipulating. Feet? Those hands on the ends of the wings—perhaps started as claws, a juvenile feature that had persisted and developed, just as man’s large head and sparse hair had derived from the juvenile or fetal ape. The forepart of the wing skeleton had a humerus, radius, and ulna, much as in Earthly birds—convergent evolution. These parts locked together in flight. Aground, when the wing was folded downward, they produced a “knee” joint. Bones grew from their base to make the claw-foot. Three fused digits, immensely lengthened, swept backward to brace the rest of that tremendous wing. That did, when desired, give additional support on the surface.