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She caught his look and evidently his thought, for she said, All right, so it sounds dead level to me, as if
it s all the same note well, anyway, the same few notes, close together, repeated in various sickening
combinations.
She stopped, shook-her beautiful blonde head, and said, I guess I m tense and afraid and need
something wild and clashy.
To Cemp, who could hear harmonies in the music that were beyond the reach of ordinary human ears,
her outburst was but a part of the severe emotional reactions to things that Silkies married to human
women had to become accustomed to. The wives of Silkies had a hard time making their peace with the
realities of the relationship.
As Joanne had put it more than once, There you are with this physically perfect, beautiful male. But all
the time you re thinking, This is not really a man. It s a monster that can change in a flash into either a
fishlike being or a creature of space. But of course, I wouldn t part with him for any-thing.
The music sign was soon behind them, and they walked on into the interior of the museum. Their
destination was the original laboratory, in which the first Silkie was supposed to have been produced.
The lab occupied the center of the building; it had been moved there from the West Indies a hundred and
ten years before, according to a date on a wall plaque at the entrance.
It had seemed to Baxter that a sharper study should be made of the artifacts of Silkie history. The entire
structure of that history was now being questioned for the very first time.
This task, of reevaluating the past data, had been assigned to Cemp and Joanne.
The lab was brightly lighted. It had only one visitor; a rather plain young woman with jet-black hair but
no makeup, wearing ill-fitting clothes, was standing at one of the tables beside the far doorway.
As Cemp came in, a thought not his own touched his mind. He started to turn to Joanne, taking it for
granted that she had communicated with him on that level. He took it for granted, that is, for several
seconds.
Belatedly, realization came that the thought had arrived on a magnetic carrier wave Silkie level.
Cemp swung around and stared at the black-haired woman. She smiled at him, somewhat tensely, he
noted, and then her thought came, unmistakably: Please don t give me away. I was stationed here to
convince any doubting Silkie.
She didn t have to explain what she meant. The thunder of it was pouring through Cemp s mind.
According to his knowledge, there had never been any female Silkies. All Silkies on Earth were males,
married to women of the Special People like Joanne.
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But this black-haired, farm-woman type was a female Silkie! That was what she was letting him know
by her presence. In effect, by being here, she was saying, Don t bother to search dusty old files. I m
living proof that Silkies were not produced in somebody s laboratory two hundred and thirty years ago.
Suddenly Cemp was confused. He was aware that Joanne had come up beside him, that she must have
caught his thought, that she was herself dismayed. The one glimpse he had of her face showed that she
had become very pale.
Nat! her voice came sharply. You ve got to capture her!
Cemp started forward, but it was a half-hearted move-ment. Yet in spite of the uncertainty in his actions,
he was already having logical thoughts.
Since only hours had gone by since the moment he first saw U-Brem, she must have been stationed here
in advance. She would therefore have had no contact with the others. And so she wouldn t know that to
a trained Silkie like him-self, she was as vulnerable as an unarmed civilian opposed by a soldier.
The black-haired woman must have suddenly had some doubt of her own. Abruptly she stepped
through the door near which she had been-standing and closed it after her.
Nat! Joanne s voice, high-pitched, sounded mere inches behind him. You can t let her get away!
Cemp, who had emerged from his brief stasis, projected a thought after the female Silkie. I m not going
to fight you, but I m going to stay close to you until I have all the infor-mation we want.
Too late! A magnetic carrier wave, human-Silkie level, brought her thought. You re already too late.
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